Or so sez me at the skeptical Burnside Writers' Collective. You should read this. It's long, but I THINK it reads pretty well. Of course, if you don't buy its central premise -- that Christian hair metal has on occasion equaled good music -- that may be an insurmountable obstacle. Ah well -- here I stand, I can do no other, you know?
Choice jokey excerpts:
As I see it, hair metal deniers have two big problems. First, they dismiss an entire style of music from a distance, basing their criticisms solely on flippant stereotypes. Second, they’re all a bunch of sad, lonely cretins who live in their parents’ basements and call Prayer Chain records “profound”.
The narrator of Holy Soldier's “See No Evil” is an unborn baby who sings Verse 1 from Mom’s womb, Verse 2 from “a pail”. Over the guitar solo, a digitally-manipulated voice says, “Mom, can you hear me? Mommy, Mommy, I’m afraid.” It’s an exploitative pro-life statement, the worst possible thing you could play for a woman considering abortion. As a song, though, it wields a disturbing power. Plus, it totally rocks, which counts for plenty.
And that’s what Stryper did in 1990, with their “secular” album Against the Law: they made a whip of power chords and overturned some tables.
Casey Kasem provided a valuable customer service. When he introduced Extreme’s “More Than Words” as The Most Popular Song in the Land, he carefully pointed out that it sounded nothing like the rest of their album. He played a clip of “Get the Funk Out”, an aggressive stomper with the gang chorus, “If you DON’T LIKE! What you SEE HERE! Get the FUNK OUT!” Casey pronounced the key word “funk” and I believed him, but I also knew there was no way I’d be able to listen to Pornograffitti in the house. Especially since it opened with a song about “decadancing” — my parents had a strict policy against portmanteau words.
Pornograffitti works as Christian rock better than Stryper’s Against the Law, maybe even better than Holy Soldier, because its Christian-ness is (wait for it…) more than words. It’s sort of like a liturgy, in that it implicates us listeners in its story. We rock out to the songs about sex and money, and then Extreme point out that we’re rocking out to songs about sex and money. Then they point out that we, and they, are worldly tools for doing so. And just as we’re wondering whether there’s any escape from the worldly toolbox, they play a beautiful love song from God, or a hole-hearted plea to God, and BAM, there’s our Answer. It’s meta-metal that remembers to rock.
Ok, that's all you're getting here. But there's lots more jokes, analysis, personal reminiscences (not just from me!), interview quotes, a weird burny smell... you get the picture.
TobyMac is back on the wack rap attack, bangin’ out ya ‘Lac like… 2pac? Hahaha NO. Not even like Fannypack, despite the fact that he’s wearing a fannypack on the album cover. Toby’s snarl actually sounds a bit like Zack de la Rocha’s, only with a healthier love of syncopation and an unhealthy proclivity for saying things like “Chocolate citaaaay,” apropos of absolutely nothing. Tait and K-Max are mostly relegated to hook-singing duty, not the most fulfilling job. In a CCM interview at the time, Toby gushed, “Kevin and Mike have learned a lot about how to weave their singing in and out of the raps,” which at least gave them something else to do. Subsequent albums saw them singing more and more, on actual verses and stuff, until the mainstream press seemed unaware DCT had once been a rap group. This makes sense: if your group consists of three lead vocalists, you’d better let ‘em all vocalize or you risk breaking up the group. (As it turns out, even that strategy couldn’t work forever.)
And also:
We can therefore assume that Dr. James Dobson fully supports the tenets of Black Liberation Theology.
Or so I hector at the ever-lovin' Burnside Writers' Collective, in a review that reads only slightly like a crazy person on the train. Oh yeah, it's a review of Faith Hope Love.
Ice Cube's rapping is instantly recognizable. His voice's unique timbre probably played a big role in making him a huge success--even my wife likes his voice*, and she (wisely) takes much more offense at his lyrics than I do. But your instrument is only as good as you can play it, and he's a master at "playing" his voice. As he chomps off consonants and articulates every last vowel in his diphthongs, his words take on a physical presence that you can seemingly hold in your hands and study. However you feel about the sentiment, there's no denying the splendor of a couplet like:
Notice what makes that couplet so appealing--the rhyme is asymmetrical. That is, "ban the A.K." is said straight, beats 1-2-3; while "any fucking way" is syncopated, beats 1-2&-4. So he sets up an expected rhyme pattern, and then he delivers that rhyme, but differently than we expect. Perhaps this is to show that he is THE MACK. And at this point, the Flowtation Device would like to go out on a limb and say that this aspect of Ice Cube's flow--asymmetrical rhyming and the delayed delivery of syllables--is his most salient musical feature.
I don't know enough to say whether he pioneered this device, or if not, who he stole it from, so if my gentle reader(s) know of examples that predate 1990, please let me know in the comments. For now, suffice it to say that this device is all over his music, and all over this irresistible song.
Often Mr. Cube will simply delay the expected delivery of a syllable by half a beat. (Actually, the very first line of the song delays the very first "nigga" by a full beat, from its expected landing on beat 1 to beat 2. This is atypical.) For instance, here's the second couplet:
The rhyme is asymmetrical, although this time, the rhyme "m" lands half a beat earlier than its corresponding "him." But notice how Cube delays it from beat 3 to the "and" of beat 3. You expect to hear "NINE_DOUBleM.*.", and instead he gives you "NINE_DOUBle=m*."
I don't know about you, but whenever I think of Ice Cube's flow, this is the feature that sticks out. He does it again and again, starting with the next line:
You get the idea. Of course, he doesn't do it all the time. That'd get old pretty quickly. So for instance, in the middle of Verse 1 we get the (still) wonderful:
Mr. Cube could've easily delayed the second syllable of "Brougham" by half a beat. Go ahead, try it! "DROP.TOP.BROU_=gham"--it's fun! (I admit a propensity to sort of mutter these things to myself while wandering the neighborhood with my boy. Not the cussing, of course.) The problem with using such a device all the time is that overuse leads to diminished impact. It's like when a clear-voiced American Idol candidate discovers that she can growl out certain lines of songs. It's effective the first time, but by the third instance you wish she'd learn some new tricks. Ice Cube's delaying device doesn't lend itself to fatigue that quickly, but he's wise to maintain his straightforward, on-the-beat "DROP.TOP.BROU.GHAM."s at least half the time.
Ice Cube's car?
One more thing to add about Cube's "delay" device--it give him a more legato flow. On occasion he'll break before a delayed syllable, but usually he holds out the leading syllable a beat and a half before his next articulation. The clearest example of this is in Verse 2, around 1:30 or so, when we get another instance of the rare delay-by-a-whole-beat:
Listen to that "-ssssss" in the word "ass"! If my choir were singing an arrangement of this song, they'd be in trouble for that! (Actually, I'd be in WAY MORE trouble.) Ice Cube is allowed, though--I'm not eager to be ganked or shanked.
Now of course, the subject matter of this song is problematic at best, piggish and sexist and violent and prudishly anti-dancing at worst. Here at the Flowtation Device, a more-or-less strictly musical enterprise, we try not to judge, but sooner or later the strictly musical analysis must be brought to bear on a song's subject matter. Alas, we're not quite ready to do that today.
Let me just say this--this song is EXHILARATING. I say that as a comfortably middle-class white suburban dad, but I imagine it was no less true for young inner-city black Comptonites of the early '90s. Musically, the exhilaration comes from all the aspects of Ice Cube's flow discussed above, along with the incredibly funky Bomb Squad beat that, if dated, only sounds that way because no other production team has yet touched their sound. (It's ironic that Cube's so disparaging of black people who dance, considering he basically dances with his voice throughout this song.) Lyrically, it's exhilarating as a kind of "art of permission", in the same way that Where the Wild Things Are or The Daily Show are exhilarating. It gives voice to impulses and profanities that we necessarily suppress so that our society can function civilly and morally. But society DOESN'T always function civilly and morally--keep in mind that this song came out a year before Rodney King's beating and the riots that followed, and that Ice Cube was from the same town. I'm not excusing lines like "bitch killa, cap peela" as mere metaphors for his machismo or rapping skills--even if that's what they are, they're grisly and unfortunate metaphors. But there's no denying the exhilaration, musically AND lyrically, that comes from hearing Ice Cube land all these great lines. And to paraphrase the Rev. James Cone, those who decry revolutionary violence (um... if that's what this is--it's certainly what it WANTS to be) are typically those who want to stay in power, NOT those on the underside of society.
*After double-checking, I learn it's actually Ice-T's voice that she likes. My bad.
Unbeknownst to me, before I happily stumbled across the above Dio/Rainbow cover, there were TWO Holy Soldiers, albeit with some continuity in their personnel. Basically, they were High-Voiced Soldier and Low-Voiced Soldier. The High-Voiced Soldier I grew up with featured Steven Patrick on lead vocals. He had a great voice! He sang with a quivering tenor that gave every song an undertone of exquisite pain, sort of like Brad Delp of the band Boston. Patrick always sounded like he just couldn't get enough God. So when you hear a song like "Love Me," my favorite, you really feel that this guy's at his wit's end and NEEDS God in a way that only his voice can express:
Low-Voiced Soldier--remakers of Rainbow's "Gates of Babylon" and Larry Norman's "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus"--were fronted by Eric Wayne. I don't really know anything about him, aside from his hairy machismo. According to Lutheran theologian/CCM critic Mark Allan Powell, the Wayne-led album Promise Man is supposed to be really good. (But then he says they sound like "Crash Test Dummies doing Soundgarden songs," so I don't know WHAT to believe!) Me, I'll rep for the High-Voiced 1990 debut, Holy Soldier, and maybe the High-Voiced followup Last Train, which I listened to on the bus en route to a band contest once. It had a cover of "Gimme Shelter" and may have been beautiful. I can't promise anything beyond that, but it's gonna cost you, what?, a buck, so why not shell out and take a chance?
AS FAR AS THEIR TENUOUS RELATION TO BABYLON: Um, they covered Rainbow for this 1995 movie Raging Angels, an Alan Smithee film that featured Shelly Winters in a very special role as Grandma Ruth. Here's what one IMDB commenter has to say:
"The ending sees a rather over tanned Archangel take on the Devil in a rubbish sword fight, as well as some of the most rip off music.
"Buy this movie."
I think we can all imagine the depths of suck this movie would drag us through*. Nonetheless, it's worth noting that the idea of Babylon-as-hell is alive and well, even in the most dire B-movie universes. Also worth noting that although the song "Gates of Babylon" is narrated by the devil, there's nothing that says a Christian metal band can't cover it. It's sort of like The Screwtape Letters, or Petra's "Killing My Old Man" ("So I'll nail him to the wood..."). I'm admittedly out of the CCM loop, but it seems like Back Then was a more adventurous time. (sigh...) (Please prove me wrong...)
High-Voiced Soldier have one more Babylon reference, on their debut album. In the grimly eschatological "When the Reign Comes Down," Steven Patrick sings with trademark desperation about Babylon burning, the world stopping its turning, the sky raining fire, the flames rising higher, and--whoa baby, check out what's in store for rapists and killers:
"The scavenger of lost souls It feeds as they expire Licks the lips of the mouth of Hell And spews eternal fire"
Tell me again, why was I allowed to listen to these guys but not Slayer?
*The soundtrack featured another (High-Voiced) Soldier tune, "The Pain Inside of Me," along with Stryper's "To Hell With the Devil" (over the end credits) and lead actor Sean Patrick Flanery's--yes--"Come In My Mind." (Now THERE'S an invitation!) Plus Boston, Golden Earring, and Candlebox! Remember Candlebox?
