The Kids Are Allright #1: Ghostemane
Wherein your author appreciates Youth and holds a candle for Rock N' Roll
(The purpose of The Kids Are Allright is to highlight modern sounds I have found and enjoyed—take what you can and leave the rest.)
Aging brings two dangers: mildness and inflexibility. Both are dangerous, corrosive forces; I keep sentinel over my heart, watchful for the decay. It’s up to you to decide which is worse.
Mildness is the tempering of passion, the smoothing of the fierce and rough edges, year after year of 800 grit across your desires. It’s the oldest automotive tale of sorrow: Old man fondly remembers the hotrod he sold after the birth of his first child, the car he courted his wife in, before the minivans, before the mortgage, before the worries about resume, the roof, the public schools, the relentless, strafing anxiety about maintaining a foothold in a shrinking middle class. Check out the pickup line at a local school—crossover after crossover, anodyne jellybeans cued up in a faceless sea of sameness. In my mind I’m there in line in a big-block Chevelle, cam chopping, twenty degrees of eye-watering overlap spewing unburnt fuel and hydrocarbons into the air, “Nightrain” blasting from the stereo, “BRN2LSE” license plate, and a pack of smokes on the dash. But that’s an easy fantasy, a luxury of the childless to think they would be unchanged by the awesome responsibility of raising a life.
Inflexibility is the calcification of both the mind and the heart; the inability to accept new ideas. Even worse, it’s turning this hardening of the heart into a virtue. It’s pride in intransigence; planting a flag on a hill of bones. Think of the old guys at car shows who act as if electronic fuel injection never happened, who All Hail the Holley Double Pumper, those that proudly stand out of time, their wives silent and ensconced in their folding lawn chairs, bottle of water and pop-up canopy for shade.
I feel the subtle drag of both of these forces: Sell this ridiculous car! whispers a voice. Jesus, man, turn it down, I can’t even think! says another. I fight both of these with my ears, by listening to music, by greedily combing through unfamiliar sounds, looking for something real. All this has been a long-winded way to say: Let’s listen to some tunes, shall we?
I first heard about Ghostemane in a music rag interview, where I first saw the utterly ridiculous image posted at the beginning of this piece. What fresh Hell is this? I thought. I scanned the article and learned that he got his start as a Florida SoundCloud rapper (Jesus) and listed as inspiration the nu-metal movement of the late 90’s (Fucking Christ). I opened Spotify and steeled myself for this auditory abomination.
Now I need to make a detour, but trust me, we’ll get to where we’re going.
I grew up in the early 90’s, in the last flowering of rock n roll. The years 1991 to 1994 saw the releases of Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut, Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish, Pearl Jam’s Ten, U2’s Achtung Baby, Alice in Chains’ “Dirt”, two exceptional Soundgarden albums, and of course, Nirvana’s “Nevermind”, which seemingly overnight destroyed the careers of countless long-haired spandex-clad rockers, whose dreams of stardom and debauchery on the road were replaced with shitty day jobs at small music stores—legions of fretboard pyromaniacs left to practice scales in the spare room of their mom’s house. (Rome fell quickly. Poison’s “Unskinny Bop” was a top ten hit; less than eighteen months later “Smells Like Teen Spirit” incinerated dozens of similar bands, a rare matter/antimatter reaction not seen since.)
Each of these albums left their own imprint on the rock n roll formula: Rage wedded political lyricism with groove and sci-fi guitar freak-outs; Smashing Pumpkins married psychedelia and Sabbath thunder to loud-soft dynamics; Eddie Vedder lent an earnest idealism to Pearl Jam while lead guitarist Mike McCready paid homage to Jimi Hendrix; Alice in Chains brought a suffocating, leaden gloom to rock, lead singer Layne Staley writing about addiction and self-loathing.
And what came after this Last Renaissance of Rock?
Absolute dreck. Nu-metal. Asymptotic levels of mediocrity. Limp Bizkit. Disturbed. Godsmack. Increasingly aerobic forms of metal, technical mastery devoid of soul; air-tight productions that strangled every ounce of feeling from the music. Popular rock became a cartoon, clowns wearing masks, a braying masculinity. The attitude hews closely to the “boys will be boys” attitude of glam metal, except the nu-metal dudes were content to not get laid, EVER, to have an audience full of young men shouting “I stand alone”. The Ed Hardy ethos is baked into the recipe, a long way from the Golden God Robert Plant, the latest incarnation of rock singer looking like a guy who would drive a lifted truck, tailgate aggressively, wear a baseball cap backwards, spot you on the bench press at the gym or give you unsolicited tips on your form in the squat rack, maybe try to sign you up for Herbalife after inviting you over for the latest UFC pay-per-view; one meaty finger poking you in the chest, “Now, I’m not trying to tell you what to do, bro, but you fucking owe it to yourself to get ripped.”
Mundane. Is these guys in a band, or are they here to fix the drywall? Ziggy played guitar, but these current fools do what, play online poker?
So you see the situation is dire. I’m desperate for any rock musician to make me feel anything, even disgust.
So imagine my surprise upon listening to “ANTI-ICON”, Ghostemane’s latest release. Here we have the Angry Young Man, full of self-loathing and the usual abandonment issues. I’ve heard it before, but this time, I believed him. Here is genuine pain, a genuine torment seeking release.
The rap influence is mostly Southern trap, skittering 808’s and rapid-fire triplet verse, but the main stylistic cues borrow heavily from The Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. I never thought I would have to contend with Manson as an influence, but here we are. (Manson’s musical output in the past ten years is far more interesting than his earlier, more successful records.) Ghostemane adopts the theatricalism of Manson and welds it to the sonic landscape made familiar by Trent Reznor. “Hydrochloride” lifts the rhythmic grind of NIN’s “Closer”, but misses the reptilian sensuality, while “Sacrilege” could be an early NIN cast-off. The music feels cold and mechanical, the songs oddly structured, lurching from riff to riff. At his best he transcends this stilted lethargy, as in the palpable rage of “AI” (“when you die ain’t nobody gonna remember you”) or the narcotic weariness of “Fed Up”: “fed up with the drugs/fed up with the fake love”.
It’s not all good news. The guitar tones are atrocious, the consequence of the rise of headphones and a laptop as the principal tools of making music. It’s clear from listening that Ghostemane has no idea about how guitars should sound, because he likely has never been in a band or reckoned with sound moving through space. Second, he too often confuses noise with fury, heaping on layers of digital noise to make a point that would be better served by some measure of restraint. Finally, can anyone write a bridge anymore? Many of the songs lack structure and feel like little more than a pastiche of ideas, demos in need of an editor.
My own mistakes have brought some measure of hard-won wisdom. If Ghostemane was my guest, I’d serve him some delicious cookies and offer him this advice: You can scream your lungs out until you are hoarse, but the world and all its attendant suffering will still be there when you’re done. The trick is to make sure that you’re still there too.
Essential Tracks:
“AI”
“Fed Up”
“Bonesaw”