prince of darkness

I was driving today and flipping through the radio stations as I often do and came across a song that was oh so familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. I was tapping my toe and humming along and even doing that thing steering wheel drum solo thing that annoys me whenever I see other drivers in traffic doing it. Just then I remembered that through the wonders of modern technology, all I need to do is look at the text display on the navigation/radio system of my car to find out not only the name of the song, but the artist as well. With the possible exception of when I'm driving through a tunnel or obscure area in the hills, this is a pretty fail safe feature. It was Ozzy Osbourne. You thought I was going somewhere else with this, didn't you?

When I was 9 or 10 years old I was terrified of Ozzy. The guy just scared me. Not only were his lyrics allegedly glorifying devil worship and going to hell(hand basket not required) but he looked downright scary on his album covers often wearing fangs and having dripping blood running down his chin. The kicker, however, was the urban legend that told of him actually biting the head off of a bat. Some stories said the bat was alive and others still said that it bit him back and that he got rabies. It was the kind of wonderfully horrible tale that the mind of a 9 year old couldn't help but take for fact and lose sleep over.

Of course I lived next door to the craziest kid on the block and he seemed hell bent on becoming Ozzy and trying to convince me of how cool it was to be so destructive. His efforts were futile due to the fact that I was one of the scariest kids of all time. I was not the kid that would go into the haunted house and I definitely was not the one that would lock myself inside a dark room with a mirror and call upon somebody named Bloody Mary to come out and play. With all of this in mind, I found myself absolutely tickled that I was sitting there making my way through traffic and enjoying Ozzy's song. I attributed it to the fact that I didn't think I had ever actually realized that this was his song, but just one of those songs that somebody always had playing and that I'd managed to hear plenty of times. Don't forget that I grew up in the suburbs.

It also got me to thinking about not only that whole period of time but also the heavy metal/rock 'n roll genre. How did Metal and Rock become synonymous with the devil and hell and how did the imagery that usually accompanies the music, whether in their crazy costumes or the rather detailed artwork from the album covers, the face of the music? Did every one of the musicians that had a hand in producing the music pay homage to the prince of darkness and deliberately set out to represent such dark ideology with each thundering chord from their electric guitars and each lyric screamed from their mouths? Was this really the music that got all of the little demons and devils all riled up and ready to unleash their mayhem? What if they actually preferred something from Mozart or Bach?

Think about it. If going to the darkside is so heaped in ritual and tradition, wouldn't it be entirely possible that all of the noise and thrashing around that's often depicted would be distracting? Along that same line of thinking, wouldn't the wild hair and tiger skinned spandex pants be a little over the top as well. What if it turned out that The Grim Reaper didn't actually have that menacing look on his..er..uh..face..um...skull face...(whatever!) and was actually like a tired old factory worker that was moonlighting after his day job and actually preferred to stroll down the Styx listening to some Bill Evans tickling the ivories at a very elevator friendly decibel level? If so, then demons might actually ride on the backs of winged dragons to the tune of Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee.

I don't know where I get this stuff. It's just a shame that most of it never makes it off the proverbial cutting room floor. I always feel like some of the most interesting "thinks" that I think get lost in the shuffle before they ever have the chance to see the light of day and be developed as complete thoughts (see yesterday's post). I'm just glad that my seasoned ears can delight in the artistic merits of the music and not be discouraged by the shady associations that it had in years past.

Over and under in between the ups and downs
My mind's carpet magic ride goes round and round.