Pondering Abigail Williams

A little foreword. . . .

I started this blog as a forum for long form geeky discussion a couple of years ago, and I sorta abandoned it, in part because my online social life got sucked into Facebook. I recently have felt the urge to engage in more geeky long form discussion and get to get the hell out of talking to people on interactive threads, and so I'm resurrecting this thing.

Looking back through this thing, you can see the stuff I was obsessed with a couple of years ago (Drive by Truckers, Mastodon, Takashi Miiike), and as I try to post again (I'll go for a couple every week), you can see, to some degree, how my tastes have evolved. I'm not a radically different guy (I still love the DBT, Mastodon, and Takashi Miike), but I've lived in the midwest for a lot longer now, and I've gotten a lot more involved in the local metal scene (as a fan).

Also my patience with Hollywood has more or less run out. The guy I was two years ago would not have responded to the upcoming Batman movie with the eye rolling and snarking that the guy I am now does. You know how they make foie gras? They stuff corn down a gooses neck. That's more or less how I think about the pervasive fanboy culture that tentpole hollywood has become, and while the movies might be okay (although the most self serious of them- Nolan Batman, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, etc. are so overrated that I'd rather just not see them anymore) , I'm just not able to stop being resentful at it. So that's different. I might post something defending my crotchety old man-ness or my insufferable elitism or whatever you want to call it soon.

But on with the topic. . . .

The other way my tastes as a pop culture geek have changed is that I'm way more into extreme metal, even the derivative stuff. The guy I was two years ago was into extreme metal (for sure), but mostly just the cream of the crop and the stuff that in some way "transcended" being metal, either because it was fresh and different or some way, or because it was so good that it overcame being generic: "I got two death metal albums and some Slayer, so that's enough thrashy American metal, and Emporer, Gorgoroth, and early Satyricon are the only European black metal that's worth the time . . ."

The guy I am now is a bit more insatiable and listens to generic underground black metal online pretty much every day. The guy I am now appreciates Burzum for the music itself an not just for its influence. So, you know, I'm a geek now. Some of that is that free music has become so easy to get and so ubiquitous that its really easy to spend an evening listening to, say, goregrind bands or to black metal demos from the 80s.

Where I'm going is that, and I am going somewhere, is to say that the guy I was two years ago would not have understood, much less written a blog post about, "the Abigail Williams problem." What is the "Abigail Williams problem"? It is the "authenticity question" as it applies to extreme metal.

Abigail Williams is an American extreme metal band who has serious credibility problems. They are a musically adept band who has made three good records, and they deliver onstage. I saw them open for Mayhem recently, and they sounded really good. I met one of them dudes outside the venue (I think I got a light from him), and he was a perfectly sincere little metal geek. The idea that they should be regarded as less than credible seems a little odd to anybody outside of the metal world. They work hard, tour a lot, and make good records.

Their problems are threefold:

1. They have switched styles on each record. They haven't, like, progressed through different styles in an organic way or responded to different trends by appropriated some aspects of contemporary music into what they are doing. They've just up and switched what they sound like each time.

2. They started out with a metalcore-influced mainstream style and moved toward playing underground metal. This makes them look like posers in a way that it wouldn't had the reverse been true. Their first album was the mainstream American metal sounding thing with some black metal. Their second album was symphonic black metal a la Dimmu Borgir. That was strange enough in an of itself. That choice was more eyebrow raising for some since not many American bands do that, and when they do it seems like they have to worry about the credibility thing, since it seems like they are just ripping off popular European metal from a few years back. Their new record sounds like underground American black metal, particularly the northwestern stuff like Wolves in the Throne Room and Agalloch.



(Is it my imagination, or did they actually slightly redesign their logo to look all "forestly" like Wolves in the Throne Room as well? Come on guys, don't be so obvious.)




3. They aren't scary or weird and they don't have anything occult of controversial to say. They look like ordinary dudes (although hairier and more pierced), and they seem perfectly chill.

Essentially, the problem is that they are very clearly a musically gifted young band trying to find an identity as a rock and roll band in a genre that values authenticity above craft. It's a very strange problem, as black metal is extremely theatrical and contrived. The most "authentic" black metal bands, mind you, are the ones who wear scary costumes onstage, use elaborate theatrical tricks, take inspiration from fantasy literature, and perform under creepy pseudonyms. Check out Gorgoroth, one of the most credibility-heavy bands in the genre:



This is a band whose name comes from Tokien and whose stage show comes from horror movies and KISS videos. They get an authenticity pass because 1. they are very extreme, both sonically and lyrically, 2. band members have committed actual serious crimes, and 3. they are serious occultists- at least in public.

One some level, the "Abigail Williams problem" is stupid. If Gorgorth, the band who coined the phrase "True Norwegian Black Metal," is clearly "fake" in every way that really matters (except for their participation in assaults and other unsavory bullshit), this whole issue is stupid.

But then again. . .

Their new album, which is also their best by a wide margin, sounds a whole lot like bandwagoneering. The atmospheric, folk influenced music they are making these days sounds very much like music that has been bouncing around the American underground for a few years now and is just now becoming trendy. Wolves in the Throne Room are nowhere near the mainstream, but during the past year or so they have gotten noticed by outlets like NPR, Salon, and the NYT. The new Abigail Williams also sound nothing like the music they've made up until now. This is fishy.

Underground music seems special, in part, because it represents various alternative approaches to engaging popular culture. This music is, in part, about ideas. To some degree, it's about tribal loyalty (which is why well executed death metal that is proudly derivative of music made in 1991 will always be okay with pretty much everybody who listens to metal), but it's also about staking out some slightly new space as a gesture of resistance to mainstream pop culture. Wolves in the Throne Room is awesome because it's wonderfully composed and viciously performed metal that offers similar rock and roll kicks as, say, Napalm Death, but it's also awesome because it represents (in the regular sense of the word, but in the semiotic sense) a difference from other pop music. In the case of ecologically oriented Northwestern black metal like WITTR (or Agallock, for that matter) this sense of difference is a big part of why fans cling so tightly to this music. For a band to come along and treat their accomplishment as a new "style" for musicians looking to claw their way toward the top of the bill as they tour mid-level rock clubs is a little bit unsettling.

Of course, this isn't particularly Abigail Williams fault. They are learning in public and going through different phases, dropping and adding band members and switching allegiances withing their genre, just as most young bands do. Nirvana was a Melvins knock off, then a Jesus Lizardy noise band, and then a spiffy little punk pop band before they hired a drummer that tied all those tangents together and helped them figure out how to be "Nirvana." I'm glad to see Abigail Williams evolve; or to go through punctuated equilibrium. Although I do hope they stick with this and evolve a bit more organically in their ongoing quest to figure out what they are. It's hard to advocate for a band that doesn't have much of an identity.

Their are really two ways of looking at this. One way is to take the Foucault book off the shelf and look up "author function." Foucault argued that the "author" that we as readers deal with is no the human who wrote a text, but a constructed effort at a coherent figure that we can use to organize our interpretation of a text. We look at a "body of work" by excluding some things that seem inconsistent, and we use literary biography to construct a story that helps us with our task. This is a process that is initiated by the artist (in some cases self consciously, and in some cases not) and carried further by editors, marketers, and critics.

The fact that Abigail Williams doesn't really "work" as an author doesn't mean their records aren't good. If you just changed the name of the band for each or their three records, it wouldn't matter: "There's this new atmospheric black metal band that has some of the dudes form Abigail Williams in it!" If Abigail Williams got more consistent, their music might become more interesting because you could meaningfully compare their records with each other as a way of understanding them. So, pretensions of authenticity aside, there is a real loss when a good band fails to find a strong voice, but it's nothing to get upset about.

A rock band is, in some ways, the ultimate demonstration of the "author function." The "Rolling Stones" contain a lot of stuff that was not produced by anybody who was ever a member of the band, and the members of the band have changed a lot. Chuck Leavell has been, more or less, a member of the Rolling Stones for over a decade. He doesn't write much material, but neither does Ron Wood. There is plenty of what is essentially solo material on Rolling Stones records also. It's a brand. So were the Fugs, and so is Wolves in the Throne Room. It's more than a brand though, as it provides a mechanism for comparing and categorizing their music. It's a part of their art. What's more interesting: the journey of a band through several decades of different efforts as defining themselves, or a massively inconsistent collection of rootsy rock and roll.

The other way to look at this is to argue that the specific kind of music that Abigail Williams has switched to on their new record is politicized music that has a strong spiritual dimension (eco-whathaveyou), and to simply appropriate it as a way to find new compositional material is gross because it undermines the seriousness with which their fore-bearers took the task of innovating within a form so that pop music could respond to the world. (Of course, plenty of people dislike American black metal bands because they are not pure and misanthropic and have therefore undermined the intentions of people like Varg Vikernes. I love his music, but let's all say it together: "fuck Varg Vikernes.")

I personally don't have a strong opinion about how I "should" feel about Abigail Williams, but the mild controversy that surrounds them is interesting. For me they are a promising band that I can't quite engage with that strongly because they haven't established who they are. This a band who is working to figure themselves out from within underground metal, and this is a band that is building an audience the old fashioned way- the tour bus. In my mind their are a perfectly legitimate young band that is in a weird position because they got a record deal, and presumably some measure of tour support, before they were fully formed. I don't have any sort of emotional attachment to them, but they are a perfectly good band.

If they were switching styles as a way to cash in on some underground style that had been discovered in a serious way by the mainstream, and if their music were just empty stylish gestures, I'd hate them no matter how well they played. It'd be like Bush, the worst of the Nirvanabes and an absolute disgrace. Bush was all style. Well executed, but empty, incoherent flash that was held together with production tricks and guitar hooks. (Their least terrible songs tended to be their loudest.) Dreadful. Incidentally, Stone Temple Pilots were a much better band in my mind not only because they wrote actual songs, but also because they moved away from being grunge-lite as quickly as they could. Except for their first album, which sounds like an arena rock band impersonating Alice and Chains, they had an actual sonic identity. This issue sure did come up a lot in the 90s, by the way. My point, and here it is, settle down, is that Abigail Williams isn't like Bush. Even if they don't have an identity as a band, their songs do "work" as more than just impressions of other songs, and their music is getting more sophisticated and subtle all the time. If they headlined a show in Des Moines, I'd be in the front row, even though this is not a band I'd go to the mat with somebody over. (Goatwhore, a very derivative band who are basically an Americanized version of the war-oriented black black metal- they sound like they sound like Marduk with a metalcore singer- IS coming soon and I most certainly be in the front row. I am not hung up on this authenticity stuff.)

All this is to say that the "Abigail Williams problem" is interesting not so much because of what it says about Abigail Williams, but because of the way it lays bare a lot of the contrivances that keep us attached to our various pop culture tribes. I like having pop culture tribes, but boy, do they start to seem illusory when somebody comes along who acts like they just might be in show business.

If I cared very much about indie rock this would be the "Lana Del Ray problem," but I don't.