Guest Blog: R.A. Riekki’s Top 10 (Metal) Albums 1989-1990
[This is a first here on Smartass Radio - a guest blog. This is by author R.A. Riekki who is America's first real metal novelist. His debut novel, U.P.,is available from Ghost Road Press.The book is an insane romp through Michigan's Upper Peninsula. If you're sick of Chuck Palahniuk, or if you like metal, rap or punk, or if you have cerebral palsy, or if you grew up in the shitty part of town, or if you just like to read really good, original novels, this is probably the book you've been waiting a long time for. Go buy it. Now. - DJ]
In 2008, Ghost Road released my debut novel U.P., which has three characters who are music addicts. One loves rap, one punk, and one metal. It’s been the metal character (Craig) that I seem to get the most comments about in reviews and when I’ve done readings. Especially his two lists that he makes in the novel. One being his top ten metal list of all-time. You’ll have to read the book to find out what Craig puts as the best metal albums, which he claims is Thee Definitive, Unarguable List. That list, by the way, was easy to do, because I was writing for a character, trying to create what I thought he would listen to. But now DJ is asking me to write my faves. Immediately I found myself going beyond 1989, branching into 1990, creating a top ten instead of a top five, not finding myself able to contain myself to one year, only five CDs. Since the novel is set in 1989 and 1990, I feel it’s OK to cover both years. So here’s my list. In order, building to my best CD of those two years. And to Mustaine fans, sorry, but Rust didn’t make the list. And Matt Davis, head of Ghost Road Press, won’t be pleased that I have no Maiden (as his fave metal album of all-time is Number), but it’s my list. Hopefully DJ will ask Matt to make his as well.
10. Cherry Pie. Just kidding. OK, here’s the real #10: The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. I did not discover Ministry until about a decade after this CD came out. This is the only CD on the list that I never actually bought. I’m still ambivalent about Ministry. I have to be in a very specific mood to get into them and that mood tends to be when others put it on, like at a party. Then I love it. I think to listen to Ministry I want others around me. It’s communal music. And The Mind is a solid CD. I love the sound experimentation. That’s a strong step number one for me to like a band, a need to push beyond what’s already been done. The vocals are brilliant, almost drowning, a real urgency that’s at the center of metal. It’s ten on the list though, because I’ve never considered myself a Ministry fan; I feel like an outsider looking in. Ministry fans though that I’ve known seem cool as hell, they seem to give off an aura of intrigue, the way I feel when I’m in a coffee shop and see someone with a Kathy Acker novel in their hands–I want to get to know them, talk to them until 4:48 a.m. when it’s foggy out and they’re smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke away from your face to be polite and you can’t tell the difference between the smoke or the fog; it all blends into this blanket that represents how you feel. I like those kind of people. As a matter of fact, if you like Ministry, I hope you get my novel. I’d love to hear what a Ministry fan thinks of U.P.
9. Pretty Hate Machine. I remember the first time I saw this video. I was in my bedroom in my parents’ basement watching my little TV. We were a Nielsen rating family one month and I remember just putting MTV on all day and leaving it on and listening that, just to show how much I loved MTV (at the time when it played music videos). I loved music videos. Rikki Rachman. I loved that his name was Rikki. Riekki Rachman. We shared the same name. Sort of. I’d watch the show, sometimes just have it on in the background, but then Nine Inch Nail‘s “Head Like a Hole” came on, that tribal, unique, pre-colonial, uncanny black and white opening where I felt like I was seeing something I’d never seen before, where you feel like you’re watching something/someone who’s about to explode onto the cultural scene, like the first time I saw Marilyn Manson‘s “Sweet Dreams (are made of this).” You could feel a step outside of the pack, something new. Same with “Smells like Teen Spirit” when it first came out–a sound all its own. I really don’t like cookie-cutter music, the stuff that plagues corporate radio today. But, to be honest, I rushed out to buy the tape (not CD, tape) and the rest of the album fell flat to me. I’d play “Head Like a Hole,” rewind, and play it again, occasionally listening to “Terrible Lie.” For me, it was a one song album, but a one song album that truly held promise that metal was going to find a new niche, a new voice. And it did. Reznor went on to do “Hurt,” “March of the Pigs,” the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, tons of other great stuff. But Pretty Hate Machine was a strong start.
8. Flesh & Blood. “Unskinny Bop” is one of my all-time worst songs in metal history. But the rest of this CD is pretty damn good. I know, I know, I know. A lot of people can’t stand Poison; they’ve had an incredible backlash. But “Ride the Wind” is one of my all-time favorite metal songs. Not top ten, but probably top 25. It just jams. It reminds me of riding on the back of my uncle’s Harley through the mountains of Colorado, him showing me around Boulder and me understanding for the first time the addiction of the biker lifestyle. And “Something to Believe In” is the only song I ever learned how to play guitar and sing the entire way through. I can remember some really nice, sad, alone moments where I’d pick up my guitar and play that song to myself and I’d feel better, not knowing why, just better. That’s another of my loves about music. It’s just there for you, when you’re at your lowest. It’s there, present. Always.
6. Seasons in the Abyss. This is kind of funny, but I was taking a class in Screenwriting at Boston University with one of my all-time favorite professors–Stephen Geller, who wrote the screenplay version of Slaughterhouse Five, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes. He was intensely optimistic and encouraging and demanding and made me fall in love with screenwriting. In class one day he asked everyone, “Who is the best drummer in the world?” There was a lull, so I spoke up and said the correct answer: “Dave Lombardo.” People in the class laughed. I don’t think any of them knew I was talking about the guy who does the flawless double-bass on “Angel.” As a matter of fact, I think some of ‘em thought I was talking about Guy Lombardo, some big band guy. I said Lombardo‘s name confidently, because, well, seriously, who’s better than Dave? I can’t think of anybody. There’s never been a band where I key in on the drumming the way that he makes me. He just understands drums. Period. Well, my prof looked at me, and said, and I’m still not sure who he said, but something like Tito Fuentes. ? I just googled that name and he was some second baseman for the SF Giants, so that can’t be right, but anyway, then me and the screenwriter of Slaughterhouse Five got in an argument in front of the class about whether or not the best drummer in the world was Slayer‘s drummer or I guess some San Francisco Giants baseball player. I felt like I was Billy Pilgrim, pure surrealism. Sometimes life is a Vonnegut novel. By the way, one of the biggest honors I’ve had so far with my novel was when John Casey wrote a blurb where he said that Kurt Vonnegut would love my novel. (Casey was friends with Vonnegut, which made the comment that much more meaningful.)
5. Pump. I can’t listen to this CD. “What It Takes” hurts too much. It reminds me of an ex-girlfriend who I keep thinking about. The funny thing is that her brother was haunted by this song when I was dating her. Then we broke up, and now that song hurts me in ways I can’t describe. This CD makes me wish someone could invent a time machine so I could go back and do my life all over again, have it turn out where we were still together . . . One of the things I’ve always liked about metal as a musical form is the different forms it can take. Hip-hop and punk are like this too. They branch out in so many angles and one of the things that metal has managed to do astoundingly well is craft amazing love songs. And “What It Takes” is probably one of the best ever. Sheer longing and loss. If you own a heart, if you feel, you know what I’m talking about. I love those moments where you’re at a metal concert and the lighters come out, things slow down, and you look around, see a thousand people in black T-shirts, you know, earrings on as many of the males as the females, and you get this sense of unity, girlfriends leaning into boyfriends’ arms. I love those moments.
3. Skid Row. Catch me on a different day and this CD could be a lot higher on the list. In fact, the next three CDs tend to be interchangeable depending on my mood. I’ll be honest with you–in 1989, I’m pretty much alone a lot of the time. I’m in the military then. And I think lyrics have a special intensity when you’re alone, just you and the insert, reading along on your bed to the printed lyrics, thinking, and the first time I heard this CD, it was like Sebastian Bach was saying, “Riekki was a young boy, he had a heart of stone, lived nine to five and he worked his fingers to the bone, just barely out of school.” I was like, It’s me! He’s frickin’ talking about me! “Walked the streets a soldier.” Here I am fresh out of high school, in the military, Riekki, totally lost, not knowing where I was, what I was doing, and this CD comes out, and he’s saying Ricky in the song, but Riekki in my mind. Man, I’d wail along to that song. Probably the most personal I ever felt about a lyric in my life up until that point in time. This CD, probably more than any other CD on this list is in start to finish flawless. “Best I Can,” “Unskinny Bop,” and a good half of Pretty Hate Machine are all stuff on this list that I’m not exactly a fan of. But “Youth Gone Wild,” “18 and Life,” “Big Guns“–being in some rusty car with a bunch of your buddies heading to a party or a movie or even nowhere, just driving, and having those songs on–man, when you come from a small town with little to do, that’s about as good as it gets at times. Especially the memory of my cousin Todd, who had hair down to his mid-back, head-banging so that his head looked like a banshee, a chaos of hair, that was comical and metal and just visually cool as could be. That’s what I remember when I think back to Skid Row–Todd headbanging with the windows down and a 65 mile per hour breeze in Michigan.
2. Empire. I have a love-hate relationship with this CD. My character in the novel is like this with Queensryche as well; he fights over where they should be on his metal list. I’m the same way here. But for today, right now, I’m putting it at just shy of number one. I deeply appreciate the intelligence of Queensryche. (And sorry that I don’t have the umlaut–the character Craig would be furious at me that I didn’t include the umlaut.) In 1990, when this CD came out, I was quickly growing tired of metal’s lyrics (one of the reasons I had become a big Stryper fan at the time, the relief from the drag-you-down devil lyricism that just seemed childish, a lack of effort). Geoff Tate was attempting something big with this album: social commentary. I just gave a reading at a Books-A-Million and one of the people in the audience during the Q&A asked me how I could include Operation: mindcrime in a top ten metal list. I should have explained that it wasn’t my all-time list, but the character’s. My all-time metal album would probably be Evil Empire. Well, Tate was doing “People of the Sun” before Rage Against the Machine was Rage Against the Machine. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that Rage started a year after Empire. Rage fans should pick up this CD along with mindcrime and a copy of Orwell‘s 1984–that’s a start to help clean the palette from eight years of Bush foreign policy.
1. Dr. Feelgood. When this CD came out, I cranked it. “Dr. Feelgood” just jams. And I wasn’t a Crue fan at all up to this point. “Girls, Girls, Girls” is paint-by-number sex lyrics and “Shout at the Devil” felt like more of the same old boring cliche hell lyrics that exhaust me and make me put in a different CD and even Theater of Pain felt too over-produced, no heart. I overdosed on “Home Sweet Home,” which was played way too much on Q107 for my personal taste. But Dr. Feelgood I got. I felt the Crue‘s musicianship was at its peak. Just doing it for so long, they were there, tight. I loved the Beatles‘ tribute that is the end of “Slice of your Pie.” “Kickstart My Heart” got the blood pumping. This was an album. Not a single and ten other songs, but a CD that I could drive around with and ca-rank from song to song. If I’m at the gym about to start lifting, the song I want coming on the crappy gym stereo system is “Kickstart.” The Crue disbanded shortly after this CD’s release, around ’92, and I remembered thinking why now? Why right when it was all coming together? But that’s always been the history of bands. Right when things are at their best–entropy. And I think it’s that entropy that we all (we, being fans of metal) tap into. We get it.
The big winner.
We’ve been in love with someone, thought we’d marry them, and then all of a sudden they’re gone and you’re left with this incredible hole, a godlessness, a vacuity, and “What It Takes” reminds you that you’re not alone, that this is part of the human condition, loss, incredible painful tormenting loss, and Empire expands that vacuity out to include the social system as a whole, the hegemony that metal recognizes and calls out, questions, and then Mike Patton‘s music, as the very best metal can do, goes beyond human alienation, goes beyond social alienation, to the metaphysical. I mean, when Patton is at his most brilliant, at his peak, tapped into the great beyond, he’ll have someone in the crowd after one of his songs, as I saw watching one of his youtube live concert performances, saying, “What the fuck?” That “what the fuck” is Rudolph Otto‘s The Idea of the Holy; that’s the numinous, that’s awe. And awe that comes from aaaaaaaggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (the sound we’ve heard on a million metal albums), a sound that we all feel internally, because it’s primal, it’s pre-human, it’s us.
