Respawn Entertainment: Days of Glory

Chapter 993 Metal and Rock

Following Mr. Turtle was the Big Wind Band, who rarely get to perform at domestic music festivals. This time, thanks to the support of the local authorities, the rising popularity of Rolling Stone Records, and the Big Wind Band's restrained song selection, they were able to finally take the stage at the music festival.

Although heavy metal is a niche genre, it has a large and loyal fanbase. So, over the years, the number of fans of the band Da Feng hasn't increased much, but it hasn't decreased either. Today, at least a thousand people are here specifically to see Da Feng.

Compared to other bands' performances, the number of fans gathered in the audience for the Big Wind Band was significantly smaller. However, the big names like Bian Lang remained firmly in the audience, as did Liu Yao and Guo Sichu's friends.

After honing their skills in Europe, the Big Wind Band's live performances are becoming increasingly stable.

The first song's interlude started with headbanging, getting the fans into a fun activity. After the first song, Da Feng even laid down three rules for the fans: "No wall-banging, no wild punches, and no hooligans!"

Fu Yiran asked Bian Lang about metal with great curiosity: "Aren't they all rock? Why do I feel like these music fans want to separate metal into a distinct category?"

Bian Lang understands this question perfectly: "This kind of feeling is very common among music fans who have been exposed to metal music for a while but not for a very long time, and who have a certain understanding of metal music but not a particularly deep one. On the contrary, many long-time metal fans don't think about this kind of issue at all..."

I think it's time for Chinese music fans, especially those in niche genres, to consider this question: Is the content and meaning encompassed by the term "rock music," and the culture it embodies, static and unchanging?

This was clearly a question Fu Yiran couldn't answer, but he genuinely admired Bian Lang for asking it: "No wonder you've managed to break out of the Chinese rock scene and reach world-class levels..."

"Since it's a compliment from the movie star, I'll accept it without hesitation!" After saying this, Bian Lang pondered to himself.

Rock and roll was born in the 1940s and 50s, experienced great development in the classic rock and roll era of the 1960s, and flourished with various genres and subgenres from the 1970s to the 1990s. The scope of this term continues to expand to this day.

As long as rock music hasn't completely disappeared from human civilization and become a collective memory of humanity, Bian Lang believes it won't be definitively concluded. In fact, it doesn't even require a long timeline or a massive amount of work to verify this. Just look at the differences between the old rock musicians from China who are still releasing new songs and their earlier work; that alone is enough to prove the truth of this statement.

If we look at the issue from a static perspective, then the discussion about what rock and roll is will become very narrow, and may even lead to the illusion and fallacy that Elvis Presley and The Beatles are not rock and roll. This is actually treating rock and roll as a musical style that only exists in a specific context.

In fact, any music fan with a clear head should know that rock music has gone through the exploration of generations of musicians, and what it carries is no longer just a musical style, but a human culture that has lasted for more than half a century and is still changing and developing today.

If we compare music to movies, and rock music to science fiction, it becomes even more intuitive.

Is there a unified, widely accepted standard definition for science fiction films? The answer is no.

From French director Méliès's "A Trip to the Moon" to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that has swept the global big screen, science fiction films are like a skyscraper that people are slowly building brick by brick, and it is still not finished.

However, no matter how many genres of science fiction films have emerged in the course of their development, whether it is a deep space thriller like Alien or a space western like Serenity, no matter how alternative, unique and niche these genres may be, we always know that they are still science fiction films, because we know that science fiction films are not a certain type of film or even a single film, but a collection of film genres, cultures and phenomena.

If we compare metal music to deep space thrillers, since most metalheads like H.R. Gige, the father of Alien, then we can see that when human culture is subdivided into genres, the audience of the relevant culture will use a more rigorous, specific and detailed perspective to define and examine the culture itself.

We believe that deep space thrillers must first meet the definition of deep space, and then use extraterrestrial life, dark human nature, or indescribable Cthulhu-like existence to achieve a thrilling effect.

But in reality, this phenomenon of narrowing perspectives exists not only in music and film, but in all subtypes of human culture.

Therefore, the crux of the problem lies in the contradiction between the inherent pluralistic attributes of a particular culture for its own development and the fundamentalist tendencies of its own type or subtype cultures.

This contradiction is particularly prominent in music. At its root, music relies primarily on auditory perception, making it unlike film, which is visually direct. Therefore, it's understandable that metal fans with a limited understanding of its fundamental nature might have the thoughts described in the title.

In fact, when examining metal music and dividing it into two major camps, heavy metal and extreme metal, from the broadest perspective, we find that heavy metal originated from classic rock music of the 1960s. After removing blues elements and improving instrumentation, timbre, and techniques, it formed an independent genre.

Heavy metal is actually the genre most closely related to its 1960s counterpart among all rock music genres since the 1970s, and it is the most persistent in adhering to tradition.

In contrast, punk and later independent alternative genres brought about a more revolutionary and fundamental shift, because they shared a major common matrix in the 1960s: garage rock, which itself was the most detached from traditional roots in that classic period.

As for extreme metal, it is generally a fusion of heavy metal and hardcore punk, and from any perspective, it has not deviated from the macro framework of rock music.

If metal can exist independently of rock, then all genres that attempt to reform or even subvert the traditions of classic 1960s rock can even more readily claim independence. Metal has simply become increasingly heavy in its sound as it has evolved, while those lighter, more indie genres have merely taken the opposite path. Their adherence to the traditions of classic 1960s rock is far less than that of metal, which also explains why genres like Stone Man, which are categorized as metal but are closer to tradition, only began to flourish in the second decade of the 21st century.

Rock music has evolved from its original specific style into a collection of cultural phenomena, becoming much larger in scale and capable of carrying a wider range of content.

However, if we look at it more seriously and analyze it from a purely academic perspective, it might be a different story.

As early as the early 90s, some media scholars abroad began to realize that the reason why extreme metal music such as Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth could frequently top the pop music charts probably meant that the core spirit of rock music was undergoing some kind of profound change.

They borrowed the terminology used by music fans and called it "true rock experience".

Extreme metal introduced a new aesthetic paradigm to rock music. At the time, all music fans, whether they liked this noisy and dark music or not, had to admit that this stuff was just damn awesome.

But where does this awesome feeling of "true rock experience" come from? The "true rock experience" that music fans get from metal genres such as thrash, sleaze, and death is fundamentally different from the spiritual pleasure that people naturally feel when they hear rock music in the early days.

These musical pieces are often associated with surreal imagery that has apocalyptic implications, and their themes are highly abstract expressions of certain unknown things. These unknown things can be death, extreme yet vague spiritual anguish, killing, pagan experiences, and other impure or dark desires and feelings that are difficult to experience in reality.

This gives metal music a tendency toward affectation on the basis of "narrative". This "affectation" is manifested in band members seeing themselves as objects of aesthetic appreciation, using music and media to create a series of biographical stories, and endowing these stories with a certain surreal personality connotation, which is often anti-traditional, anti-moral, and dirty.

Because metal music offers a narrative means worth exploring for portraying unknown concepts, and this means has the potential to become popular, it makes this kind of art activity, which takes surreal personality connotations as its aesthetic object, possible.

In this trend of affectation, anti-affectation is the only way out. The "realism" of surreal personalities has become a crucial standard for measuring the value of artistic activities. In other words, the more "real" and less affected the personality constructed in music and media, the more impressive and hardcore the artist is considered. This is fundamentally different from the aesthetic of idols in the popular entertainment industry, where artists are created with a concrete, realistically grounded personality.

Some metal musicians, however, attempt to cultivate their personas into symbols that transcend reality. Therefore, the "realism" of entertainment idols merely means doing what real people would do. But the "realism" of a metal musician means being able to perform actions that people in reality would almost never do, according to the essence of their fictional personality.

Therefore, bands like Poison, which only talk the talk but don't actually walk the walk, are starting to be abandoned by hardcore fans. The concept of true metal has replaced true rock, and many band members are trying to practice acts of cruelty or Satanic beliefs, all in an effort to give their fictional personas a higher aesthetic value through such activities.

Although this aesthetic value is not accepted by the mainstream, and even by most music fans within the metal music scene, it has indeed played a leading role.

However, there is also another anti-sentimental trend, which is probably the most widespread mainstream aesthetic in metal music today. That is, to use metal music merely as a tool, to use its ability to narrate abstract concepts to express those mysterious, romantic, magnificent, and supernatural unknown images, to obtain the pleasure of pure imagination, without paying attention to any personality hidden in the creative process.

Thus, in the late 90s, mainstream metal music, after nu-metal, entered a period of explosive growth in thematic imagination. Almost any fantasy subculture theme could be quickly combined with metal music, to the point that a Swedish company that made "magical" historical strategy games, whose name started with P, used metal music for its game soundtrack.

Leaving aside the inheritance of musical techniques and creative modes, let's focus on the evolution of musical aesthetic paradigms. Metal music can be seen as a huge expansion of the aesthetic space of rock music.

While most rock music focuses on the mental state of people in modern life, metal music leads its fans into a surreal imaginative space. Through the sense of closure and intense awakening created by the wall of guitar sound, it takes them to immerse themselves in concepts that transcend daily life, such as death, killing, paganism, folklore, the universe, apocalypse, magic, wasteland, mythology, and history.

These experiences are so different from mainstream rock music. After listening to them for a while, you have to distinguish between the two. And when we want to listen to something softer, we don't consider "rock" in the general sense, but instead listen to industrial electronic, darkwave ethereal, neoclassical, doom folk, and other music genres that, like metal, can easily take us away from reality.

From the two aspects mentioned above, metal really is not the same as rock.

But this is not important to ordinary Chinese music fans. In their hearts, release and catharsis are the hidden motivations that drive their love for rock music.

Just like the Best Actor award winner here, who was asking questions and saying he didn't understand earlier, is now shaking his head along with everyone else. When he stopped, he even shouted to Bian Lang, "This really should be made into a documentary; it has a good chance of winning awards!"

Bian Lang disagreed with this: "The three major European rock and roll clubs only want to see our backwardness and barbarity, so that they, in their superiority, can judge and redeem us... Rock and roll was something they created, and now that we understand it, we have to tell them stories. This subject matter is fundamentally not to their taste."

Upon hearing this, Fu Yiran stopped bobbing along when the next metal drum beat came on, looking at Bian Lang as if he were a monster, and said, "No, Bian Lang, with your level of awareness, it's a waste that you're not a director..."

Bian Lang just smiled dismissively. Anyone who has read one or two Qidian entertainment novels knows what the judges' political correctness is all about.

"It would be a waste for me to become a director, but I do have a rock-themed movie that's going to start filming overseas after the new year. If you're interested, you can contact Camel and come to the set to give us some pointers..."

(End of this chapter)