The Darkest, Most Brutal Gift of All!

          When we talk about the performing arts, the discussion of awareness is always soon to follow. The more aware you are about a certain thing, or the things around you, the more in control you are of your personal contribution to others, or the situation. In short, you can't dance a tango if you don't know your partner's moves, know what birthday gift to buy for someone you don't know, or have sex if you don't know your boyfriend's sensitive spots. Well...I guess you can, but you know.
         When you leave the specific examples of intimate situations like dancing or music making, you can potentially get as broad as you like. I suppose being completely up to date on things like national and world politics counts as awareness, but with all of the mud-slinging and wasted money I see in it, I tend not to care. I find it interesting that we're still hearing about Christine O'Donnell's witch dabbling, though, because that deals with a culture seen as unacceptable by our conservative friends, and where there's culture, there's music.
         When I think of witches, vampires, and the like in a musical sense, I can't help but to think of a genre of music that I (shamefully) am not very versed in - Metal. I'm slowly becoming more aware of more artists in Metal, and I can see how it can be scary or intimidating for some old blue-haired ladies, but the topics of blood, death, destruction, vengeance, and darkness are all pretty interesting (and relevant) in my opinion.
         You won't find tons of Metal in my iTunes playlist, but there is some! A few years ago I was introduced to Adult Swim's "Metalocolypse", a show about a Death Metal band called Dethklok. I think the point of the show is to poke a little fun at the culture of metal, but the band has put out some songs that aren't completely ridiculous in content, if not delivery. I mentioned the buying of a birthday gift earlier, parallel to that topic, I have to say that  my personal favorite Dethklok track is "Birthday Dethday". To celebrate the birthday of Dethklok bass player, Murderface, the members perform a song describing how he's "running out of life" and that he should "RSVP...for [his] death". I get that the creators are trying to be funny in being overly hardcore about a birthday, but they're not completely off the mark! We're so bombarded with love songs, break-up songs, and songs about sex - what's wrong with singing out death?
         At work yesterday someone mentioned Jada Pinkett-Smith's group, Wicked Wisdom, which I had no idea about. I'm still trying to listen to more of their music, but right now my personal fave is "Bleed All Over Me". No one can deny that we've entered a new found curiosity of the vampire culture, with things like True Blood and Twilght, so maybe that's why I think this is a good song. In 50 years I think people will go back in say "What was it about blood sucking that the people of the early 21st century loves so much?", but they'll be talking, none the less. It says something about our culture - a culture that we need to be aware of!
         I'll continue to get into Metal music as much as I can, but I don't think I could completely adopt the culture. I mean, if someone wanted to sing to me in a screaming hair slinging rage on my birthday, I'd accept it, but the gift Murderface was given, in the words of the lyrics of the song, was "a bunch of fucking nothing", because it's "the darkest, most brutal gift of all". As deep and thought provoking as that may be, I'd prefer a gift card. None the less, it's music and a culture about our time, and I'm aware of it. So the next time you're at a birthday party and someone gets an empty box, you'll understand the signifigance of it, because you're more aware.
          ...my birthday isn't coming up or anything, by the way.

Listening to: Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle