Throwing Fish into Space #1

As god as my witness

I didn’t know Mr. Sulu was gay.

Is this really neccessary?

Do I really need to rebuild my VoiVod collection? Is it only at three in the morning, twelve hours into a sixteen hour shift, surfing the internet for…anything to keep me from writing a paper for my Human Diversity class, and at the end of four hours of Adult Swim that I ask myself this question?

I hadn’t thought of VoiVod in several years. I recall with the sepia mists of nostalgia discovering an ad for their most successful U.S. album “Nothingface” in some heavy metal magazine. It was 1989 or maybe the early months of 1990. I was working third shift (strange how many third shift jobs I’ve had) in a convenience store so I had plenty of time to read all the comics I wanted and all of the heavy metal magazines I wanted (and by the end of the month I was usually digging into the magazines I didn’t want). There at the back of this one magazine was an the ad for Nothingface. In addition to a copy of the album art there were these smaller images next to the title of each song and a one sentence description of the song. The description’s were…cryptic, to say the least. “The logic dripping into a cuboid (cubic) upside-down cell.” “The frustration of a character trying to find his way out of a synchro freeze state.”

To be honest, I think I found the whole thing a little disturbing. In particular the idea of a cuboid (cubic) upside-down cell. I was fascinated and very curious. I turned the phrases around in my mind. I found them poetic and evocative, mysterious and beguiling. They seemed so precise, so definite, as if the meaning were self evident. But it wasn’t. On one level I felt like I should know what they were talking about, but at the same time I knew they were deliberately weird and undecipherable, meant to shock and annoying and obscure. And I loved it. However, there was this horrific and monstrous aspect to it all. At this point in my life, I wasn’t comfortable with the that.

I might have forgotten the whole thing once that issue of Metal Whateritwas was gone from the shelf if someone hadn’t bought a copy of the tape (In those days, you bought tapes). I’m not sure what it was that drew Eric to the tape. The artwork was certainly iconic, reminiscent of Heavy Metal magazine and Ralph Bakshi films, Wizards in particular. The song titles would probably been alluring to him. He loved music that explored inner turmoil and existential angst (though he would probably never use those words), not to mention sci-fi themes. I guess he thought it was worth the gamble of $9 (I think that’s what we spent it those days, maybe as much as $12). He hated the tape and it quickly came into my possession.

The music was more prog rock and punk than metal, a sort of cyber punk version of Pink Floyd meets Fates Warning (or maybe Tool). Listening to the songs gave no greater understanding to their meaning. I was pulled by the promise of profound weighty, truths into this dark labyrinth of otherworldy sounds and nightmarish imagery. Plus it rocked.

I began to identify with the band in the same way that I had discovered The Wall the previous year. It was a statement of my oddness and cleverness. The more misunderstood the album was the more I adored it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the music. It was quite good and I don’t know that I would have taken to it if it were merely mediocre or banal. However, the mythology that grew around the album was as much of the attraction as the music. As I mentioned, the album had some success in the U.S. in the prog rock/metal scene and snippets about the band began to appear in all the metal magazines, and the more I read the more fascinated I became.

The album Nothingface was a narrative (though this does not necessarily reveal itself in listening to the album or reading the lyrics) about the VoiVod, a strange greater and other than human. The character had appeared in the previous albums, all of which worked to form a meta narrative about the apocalypse via technological destruction, a super being of some sort, the VoiVod, and his ascension to a god like state, etc. etc.

I was hooked. A cyber punk mythology about super beings told through a collection of concept albums. It was the sort of thing I wished I had thought of myself. I began to seek out the previous albums to have “the whole experience”. I managed to get my hands on two of the albums and was…not as thrilled as I was with Nothingface. They were more thrash and speed metal, but that wasn’t without its own charms. I even got the album that followed Nothingface, Angel Rat, on CD (by this time the whole world had graduated to CDs) but I could never tell if was meant to be a continuation fo the VoiVod “story” or “just an album.” It was softer than the previous albums, less atonal and syncopated. VoiVod selling out?

I finally sold the CD when I needed cash as I could never recall listening to the it in its entirety. I kept Nothingface on cassette. I recall attempted to explain to my wife’s rolling eyes why I wouldn’t get rid of it, but I don’t think i kept the other tapes.

I see that there were several albums after Angel Rat, and that Jason Newsted has joined the group. Of course the myth surrounding the albums has grown for me. It now includes the chilly winter nights thumbing through metal magazines at three a.m. in a convenience store in Columbia KY, riding around in my best friend’s car listening to metal and rock and dissecting the abstruse ruminations that only a teenage boy can reveal. It involves my own meta narrative of apocalyptic via self destruction, a super being of some sort, ascension to a godlike state, etc. etc. It is the logic dripping into the cubic (cuboid) upside-down cell that was late adolescence in the early 90’s. It is the frustration of a character trying to find his way out of synchro-freeze.

But do I need to rebuild my VoiVod collection to have these things? What would I say to my wife’s rolling eyes as I attempt to sneak VoiVod albums into our already over stuffed cabinet? Will it mean anything to her when I say “I’m trying to reach the unknown in an endless struggle?”

Idol Time

Billy Corrigan isn’t there. When I think back on what his music meant to me, how I blistered and peeled under it’s purple white hot hands, how it touched me and moved me…it’s on the same level of history as Bowie. But, I know nothing about Billy Corrigan, who he was, what he said. With the others, with the Beatles, and Bowie, and Elvis, I can tell you things they said, things that electrified and changed us as much as their music. They seemed to be in important places saying important things, and making a glorious spectacle of themselves. But when I think of Billy Corrigan, he isn’t there. It’s just the music. You’d think that’d be ideal, the art for it’s own sake, personal, private, untouched by the contradictions and frustrations of the living hand behind it, and it is nice, but..there’s still something missing.

We want them to be idols. (We being people like me, I guess, and there are a lot of us about). We want golden gods and dark avatars and drunken cowboys. We made them into these things. And they stopped doing it. We stopped making them. I guess. I see now, more than ever, how hurt “we” all become when it didn’t work. When they failed to be myths for us. It’s highly romanticized, the “martyr rock star”, but don’t we (we being people like me) love it?

Aren’t we just sad little pandas now it’s gone?