A few years ago I was in a bookstore perusing the music magazines, when I came across the latest issue of Chips & Beer. I picked it up and flipped through its newsprint pages. Assholes, I thought to myself as I put it back. I started walking away, but quickly turned around and hid the issue behind a glossy Revolver. After two seconds of smug self-satisfaction, another thought crossed my mind.
Just what in the hell am I doing? I had played right into their hands.
The masterminds behind the orneriest print magazine in metal had been after me for years making fun of anything I wrote, the choices in bands I wrote about, to the point where the mere mention of these dudes, or their new print mag, triggered anger. These guys were unrelenting, going back to when they ran the Left Hand Path website. Whether it was attacking what I thought was a fair review of Metallica’s Death Magnetic or printing a line-for-line parody of a Wolves in the Throne Room review I did, I petulantly felt unfairly targeted. Hell, they even put several of my peers and I on the cover of Chips & Beer number one, for crying out loud.
It took that moment of clarity in the bookstore to make me realize that perhaps there was some truth to their criticism. If anything, it was a lesson that criticism, whether direct, subtle, or in these guys’ case savagely satirical, isn’t necessarily a fight. If a writer dishes out criticism, they had better have the maturity to not only listen to what people are telling them, but even learn a little. It was a small turning point for me, where I started to sharpen up my own writing, develop a thicker skin, actually dialogue with my critics, and admit I can get better. Even more, I bought that issue of Chips & Beer, and was wowed.
Crude, brash, and endlessly obnoxious, in a way Chips & Beer is to the metal scene as what Charlie Hebdo is to French politics and culture, in that nothing, no one, is off-limits from satire, good taste be damned. They will say what people in metal don’t dare say, they will cover bands no one in metal covers, and if they see writing or hear music that strikes them as doing a disservice to what heavy metal stands for, the knives will come out. And a fella named Beaver, the mag’s own Cabu, will do so in the form of a wicked, savage cartoon that will always, to paraphrase Mel Brooks, rise below vulgarity.
For all the bluster, dig deeper and you’ll find some very perceptive music writing. Their dissection of Thin Lizzy’s “For Those Who Love to Live” was the best piece of music criticism I saw in 2015. Album reviews are transformed into surreal, gonzo art pieces, but when a band needs to be chastised, it is swift, unforgiving, and often hilarious. Meanwhile, the thorough monthly special sections, devoted to everything from Italian heavy metal to the 1980s “Satanic panic”, are worth the price alone. And admittedly, they’re trend-setters. They were the first contemporary metal magazine to devote serious attention to a lot of metal bands magazines would not dare touch, including Thin Lizzy, Twisted Sister, and early Scorpions. Hell, Blue Oyster Cult, a band often referenced by writers (sorry, Ghost does not sound like BOC), features prominently in the next issue, If all that isn’t enough, when you thumb through an issue of Chips & Beer, your ink-stained fingers are a little reminder that heavy metal does get dirty sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with a little filth in your life.
Whether compiling hilariously accurate lists of music criticism clichés – I believe I’ve used about three quarters of them, and still use a handful – or singling out specific writers in their “Worst Internet Metal Writing of 2015” blog posts, it’s all an effort to keep this craft sharp, and as someone who was one of their biggest targets from day one, it’s a harsh but extremely valuable reminder that there’s always room for improvement, and a lesson that it’s a very good thing to learn to laugh at yourself, too.
The next issue of Chips & Beer comes out very soon. I caught up with founders/proud pariahs Copper Green and Todd DePalma for a rare interview about the magazine, classic metal versus new, and one of their favorite subjects, the state of metal writing in 2015. Even the almighty Beaver pops in for a comment or two.
In your opinion what was missing from metal writing and criticism when you decided to start Chips & Beer?
Todd DePalma: Intelligence, wit, passion, humor, and bluntness. Something that didn’t rely heavily on irony or tedious intellectualism. There was nothing we could relate to on the newsstands and we decided something was wrong with that. We wanted a magazine that was clean and readable but at the same time retains a fanzine vibe. That was a void to fill. We also wanted something we could use to rep new, relatively unknown bands. That was what we had done with the Left Hand Path website though most people just remember us slagging the mob favorites (Watain, Nachtmystium, Sunn etc.). Another crucial part of the mindset was presenting works by hard rock and heavy metal’s forefathers in different ways. Blizzard-era Ozzy. ‘70s-era Scorpions. Or Bon Scott-era AC/DC. These things, as Copper would say, are beyond import. They are fucking bedrock. I believe that has rippled out in the four years since we went to print. Already after our third issue, the New York Metal special, Timeout ran an article with a similar theme. Outside of Classic Rock magazine, Thin Lizzy was a band that you only saw referenced when reading about Iron Maiden. It’s not that no one was listening to them, but no one in metal was writing about them anymore. That’s changed.
How did working on the Left Hand Path site help prepare you for the transition from web to print?
Copper Green: The Left Hand Path was a breeze. DePalma and I really had no idea how difficult a print mag could be. And even though Beaver and I have done considerable time in the print “industry,” this was like caving without a headlamp. None of us live in the same state; there’s no C&B office. Everything is communicated via e-mail, and put together in Google docs. I don’t even own a computer of my own, for chrissakes. Publisher Iron Heel’s loaner MacBook has been my warhorse since #2, and has even “died” three times. We still have occasional issues with the actual printing of the mag, but for the most part the process has become automatic.
DePalma: With the website, there was a collaboration but between three-four people at most and with a limited scope. Putting together the zine, everything is read and discussed between like six or seven people before it’s printed. And from that not just the original piece, whether it’s an interview, essay or review or layout, is strengthened, but also the next idea that builds on that or is commenting on something else inside the mag in a way that you wouldn’t have if it was just one editor and a staff of writers simply handing in their work. There’s a continuity and a vibration with the text and images that’s only possible within the format, and that happened gradually as we expanded the type of things we wrote about—from music to movies, baseball, knives, comic books, hot dogs–and included it all in the mag. So I think the first issue, like The Left Hand Path, kind of sucks compared to what it is now.
Copper Green: This is really it. This idea of “a continuity and a vibration with the text and images,” is what C&B is built on, and it only comes about from months of obsessive conversation. I’ve been mostly on the outside looking in for the past two years, but I can always tell when the vibe is there, because there’s like 250 emails to go through, and you can’t really begin to discern copy from illos that arose from that conversation. Shit almost seems self-caused sometimes. In the parlance of Repo Man: big fuckin’ plate o’ shrimp, baby.
In Chips & Beer I see a combination of maturity and immaturity. Authoritative reportage and that high school notebook aesthetic. We all doodled like that in the margins. How important is that balance in heavy metal, and upholding that tradition?
DePalma: Can you scan your doodle of Thin Lizzy playing the cage in Road House for me, Adrien? Haha. I think a lot more than that of the drawings Pat Delaney and Hutch Bannister do for the magazine, too. But as far as tradition…tradition says you need to put the band’s publicity shot on the magazine cover. Tradition says every album must be graded according to a certain number of stars or numbers. Tradition is keeping ‘70s rock and death metal as far away from each other as you can. Tradition is edit down the interview. None of which Chips & Beer adheres to. To me, doing your research and trying to make an entertaining product is just the basic requirement of putting out any magazine. Whatever we think is funny, is just that. If we were that concerned about following the heavy metal tradition, we’d be putting together some 1980s style Kerrang clone filled with mediocre retro bands that should’ve stayed vinyl collectors.
Lots of factors go into making heavy metal what it is. One is having fun with tastelessness. In today’s more socially conscious, more sensitive times, how badly has that side of metal been lost? How has political correctness affected heavy metal?
Copper Green: Metal is a closed system! That’s why the goofy blogger angles are so hilarious. You can’t bring your contemporary agendas, biases, and presuppositions to this music, nor should you want to. And this is where the irony lies. Most of these goofballs are allegedly writing from a leftist, secular, anti-religion purview, but they are only espousing their own quasi-moral bromides in relation to a music that has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. I don’t know that you can call this “political correctness;” I would just call it self-absorption. Reading these things into metal doesn’t affect it; it affects the cultural mindset of how to interact with it. Thankfully, my copy of Haunting the Chapel still sounds the same to me.
At the same time, in your opinion how far is too far?
Copper Green: Is Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” too far? How about Voltaire’s Candide? I don’t think it’s useful to consider satire in terms of social or moral measure. It’s a particular genre, and if you don’t understand the rules it plays by (i.e. NONE), then you are going to have problems processing it. Again, this is not an issue with the music, or the music writing; it’s an issue for folks who don’t have the wherewithal to engage it on its own terms.
DePalma: Originally the mag was going to be called Mein Kampf.
Copper Green: True story.
Metal publications have taken it upon themselves to lambaste anything offensive, but strangely racism in metal, a substantial problem, seems to be quietly swept under the rug. Why do you think that hypocrisy is happening?
DePalma: I’m not sure how much racism specifically is being ignored now compared to like, ten years ago, when the main critique of an Arghoslent record in Metal Maniacs was “annoying vocalist” and nothing to do with their lyrics. That’s something nobody would write about today without having to detail some deep personal crisis beforehand, even though they could just put on a Running Wild record instead if they wanted. In the press, I think it’s tolerated and occasionally even rewarded rather than ignored when some scandal or controversial figure is loudly exploited for clicks or a cover story but then quietly forgotten a little while after. There’s no blackout on coverage like when Katherine Ludwig was editor of Metal Maniacs. That’s the other extreme.
Instead, whenever an article goes up confronting racism, misogyny, or anti-Semitism in Metal, the writer or pub tries to have it both ways. One week Terrorizer publishes a piece on homophobia in metal, the next week they’re cheering Emperor with Bard Eithun at Bloodstock. The excuse was, “Hey, we have a gay pride flag on our tent.” It can also be very selective. You have that recent Dragonforce shitshow, for example. The author is writing a hit piece on the band members as racists and anti-gay and at that moment the same author is posing in a Demonic Christ shirt on her social media profiles. So you’re trying to be all righteous and at the same time it appears you’re cool with advertising the band of a woman who said, “I would get rid of all the niggers and spics – to make this world a prettier and happier place” and still qualifies those remarks these days by saying all she meant was “people of low class.” Slippery slope.
There was one time we weren’t sure if a band in the mag was into National Socialism or just Australian, and I expressed that to our publisher, who identifies as Jewish, who said that he’d be more curious to know than anything and wouldn’t it be awesome if we ran a review and then they found out after the fact it’s published by a Jew and it bothered them. But they denied it, and it wouldn’t have determined if we thought the music was any good or not.
A more direct question: what’s wrong with metal writing today?
Copper Green: We can chalk up a lot of what’s wrong with it to inexperience, to ignorance about the music’s history, to “coming of age” under the reign of Internet writing. But, when you get down to it, the approach is just horribly wrong. These folks are looking at a window and telling you what kind it is, what style it is, where it was made, what it is made out of, etc., and we are using the window for what it is, and looking through it, and past it. What do you see through this window? Why do you see what you see through this window, etc.? There’s no understanding of how interpretation actually works, and what honest interpretive work can do, not only to delineate, but also to properly edify the music. I don’t want to hear about so-and-so “hailing from,” and “killing it,” and that they are the most “unfuckwithable” example of “cross-fit doom” you’ve never heard. Get inside the form and look beyond it. Say something, and try to say it without using the goofy blogger copy-and-paste patois.
Beaver: Everyone is running for office. Musical taste is an easy way to break ice with the constituents where the review is a little campaign poster not for the band or the album but the career friendmaker who can’t spell, can’t conjure up much in type that goes beyond the clichés and diarrhea not far removed from the mundane patterns and content of their speaking voice, doesn’t care to read over the thing twice before hitting SEND, and calls itself a writer.
DePalma: The tone has changed from speaking to fans to non-fans, or very new fans who weren’t fans yesterday but recently heard about black metal. Everyone covering metal like they’re trying to convince their mom, brother, sister, or best friend – people who normally wouldn’t like it in the first place, and so probably shouldn’t listen to it. Rule number one is: No matter who you’re writing about, you have to write about them like the reader has never heard of them before, and it results in uncreatively rehashing their biography while apologizing for the music at the same time. That’s now become the norm for most publications. It’s like, can anyone talk about Manowar without the smugness or feelings of self-loathing? You also have a large readership who are content with this. Who just wants someone to tell them where they should start with X band? So you’ve got people who started writing about or listening to metal after lurking around the Invisible Oranges site for a few months that think memorizing release dates, mining Wikipedia, and plugging metal-archives stats into their reviews, occasionally name-dropping obscure bands, gives them credibility. At the same time, they’re usually backhandedly talking about how “hilarious” or “silly” the music is.
You guys publicly questioned my writing many times in the past. How important is it that weak metal writing be called out for what it is?
DePalma: “Likes” and “favorites” have replaced criticism. It’s all about networking. If you don’t like what someone wrote and say so, you’re a ”hater.” You’re “bringing metal down.” Someone wrote that after we pointed out dumb shit that was written to be read by other people. “Bringing metal down.” What kind of ridiculously out of proportion sense of self-importance must someone have to even say or agree with that? These people are out there collecting bylines with pieces that read like auto-generated text. And with more exposure, it’s just being imitated by others who fill the echo chamber. So I have a personal stake in that. We printed a list of 100 clichés we’d like to never read again in music journalism. I’ve used some of them before, absolutely. But if you see everyone else is using the same approach, the same vocabulary, then I think, as a writer, you should be trying to distance yourself from that to improve and set yourself apart. Otherwise, you end up playing the metal Mad-Libs game. But mostly we instigate this kinda stuff outside of the mag. It’s definitely not more important to us than trying to fit in 12 pages of conversation with Brocas Helm, or an alternative history of Motley Crue as werewolves, or a bestiary of Chinese monsters. And we’ve been called out constantly since we started this. For being “pretentious,” for our own “terrible writing,” for having drawings of “men with boobs,” for not actually being “a metal mag” as some define it. We laugh about it. For us, the worst thing ¬someone can do is say “Nothing personal, but…” So why the hell would anyone care? You’ve got something to say about the work I’ve spent hours and days and months working on, at least have the balls to make it personal, motherfucker!
How crucial is it that readers know just how incestuous certain circles of the metal scene have become, how the line between journalism and PR is blurrier now than even a rag like Hit Parader was 30 years ago?
DePalma: The worst of the worst. How convenient the only other work you’re cut out for to support your dream of being a writer is to work in PR. Fuck you forever. You’ve written for more of these magazines than I have, Adrien, so you may have more insight on that side of things as far as just how common it is, but I also think if you’re trying to make a career out of writing about metal for other publications that don’t focus specifically on the genre, it’s going to sound like PR anyway because that’s the kind of writing that is paid for. It’s standard. And if it’s not handed in that way, again, the editor will often change it to fit that mold. We have confronted people publicly we knew to be running/writing reviews for bands without disclosing that the writer also handled their PR and the response was something like, “I was a fan of these bands before I was being paid by their label.”
Is metal past its prime in your opinion? If the ’70s and ’80s were so great (and they were) should we even bother focusing so much on the present?
Copper Green: I don’t bother with it. Why would I? What’s considered “innovation” nowadays is guys with haircuts “transcending their appropriate subgenre,” and then wrapping it up in a pink sheet with a trapezoid painted on it. I’m old! I saw Metallica with Cliff, and Slayer at the Civic Center on the RIB Tour. The metal records I listen to are the same ones I bought when I was an adolescent and teenager at Turtles and Record Bar and Wax n Facts. So, no, I have no interest in what some website is heralding as the saviors of Metal this week. Even the stuff that is worth listening to gets body-snatched by their second record (see Morbus Chron, Swallowed, etc).
Beaver: Can’t see the same bands play the same arenas anymore, can’t walk on my hands nowadays either, and Matchbox cars look like shit now. Imitation metal is good enough for enough people, and preferable for the writers who don’t really like metal anyway. Just looking for another dramatic turn in their own narrative.
What happened to escapism? Why is metal all about bad cut-up poetry and feelings? Whither storytelling? Fantasy?
Copper Green: Escapism never left. Embracing the contrivance is not a problem, so long as you don’t understand it as “ridiculous.” Contrivance was/is not an inherently bad thing. It’s only come to mean that over time. Originally it meant something created with skill to meet a certain end. Well, that’s KISS and Manowar. There’s nothing artificial here. It’s just an exaggeration of their raw material. And I certainly don’t need to denigrate these bands to love them. This new “self-deprecating” notion of trotting out your “guilty pleasure” is just nonsensical to me. Why would I feel guilty for loving Rock and Roll Over? Why would I feel compelled to strip KISS of all the trappings that make them so great and powerful? Let the lion keep its teeth, for chrissakes.
Nowadays “metal” is about feelings and not “Dr. Love” because it’s grown in a zip code separate galaxies away from its true origin. Maybe if folks read more fiction, or went on night hikes, or got drunk in a graveyard, or huffed paint in a basement and listened to side two of Black Flag’s My War, they’d be less interested in themselves and more interested in something that’s wholly beyond them. You see a lot of young Scandinavian bands doing these sorts of things, but by the time they get embraced by the American Illuminati, that’s all she wrote.
To this day after 30 years I crave finding new ideas in metal. At the same time though, traditions must be upheld. A command of history is essential if you’re going to write about this music, and respect of history is crucial if you want to create this music. Are we losing touch with that on both sides? What must be done?
Copper Green: I don’t think anything can be done. Folks take themselves far too seriously. Music is being written about pseudo-scientifically. You’ve got bloggers in lab coats spinning out 1,500 words on parsing subgenres, and doing Heavy Metal anthropologies on beards, burgers, and ear gauges. And, to that end, we’re seeing the millennials actively trying to lay claim to their own “Golden Years,” which, like, consists of stuff that’s not truly Metal in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, I know this makes me “out of touch,” or whatever, but I have no interest in being that person who actively searches for “new ideas in metal.” I’ve seen and listened to what folks think “new ideas in metal” consist in for the last decade, and I’m done. The ideas that Van Halen, Thin Lizzy, Priest, Maiden, Twisted Sister, AC/DC, and Slayer drew upon are those that are most interesting to me, and they are compelling enough to keep me occupied for the rest of my time here.
DePalma: I’m gonna have some nachos, is what I’m gonna do. Then start thinking about the next issue.
Copper Green: Yep.
Blabbermouth Headline of the Week
You Can Attend SEBASTIAN BACH’s ‘Rock N’ Roll Wedding Extravaganza’ For $300 http://t.co/DKwBudKypH pic.twitter.com/59kLJQ6ccd
— BLABBERMOUTH.NET (@BLABBERMOUTHNET) July 14, 2015
Horns Up: Jackie Fuchs, Amanda Daniels.
Horns Down: Jeff Lohrber, the late, vile Kim Fowley.
The new album reviews will return next week!
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Follow Blood & Thunder’s rolling 2015 metal tracks playlist on Spotify