Musings: 2/14/09

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Hopefully you and your significant other are out on the town today, frolicking and having a good time, looking lustfully into each other’s eyes as you eat lunch at a ritzy city café. In fact, if you’re reading this on Saturday, February 14, you have no soul and will probably be consigned to hell for not having anyone to share this day with.

Kidding! Who am I to talk; I’m writing the fucking thing! Anyway, I have some opinions I wanted to get off my chest and I took in a documentary in the wee hours of last night that I didn’t necessarily want to write a full review on, so I decided to mash them together in the seldom seen “Musings” column.

Item #1: Steroids in baseball (and, more specifically, in A-Rod’s ass)

Like most people who follow baseball, I was a little disheartened by last week’s reports that Alex Rodriguez, the purple-lipped and mocha-faced Yankee, used steroids during his time as a Texas Ranger between 2001 and 2003. I wasn’t surprised at all, and I wasn’t shocked, and I guess I wasn’t even saddened. This is the way baseball has become, and no name that comes out from here on would surprise me one bit, even if one of my vaunted Boston Red Sox was to be outed.

I have much more of a problem with the sports media for losing their collective minds about the entire affair. Columnists from all over the country are already lobbying for A-Rod’s numbers to be stricken from the record book. One moron in New York City even advocated for the Yankees to eat the remainder of A-Rod’s 10 yr/$977 billion contract out of principle. Have these people lost their fucking minds?

I don’t remember when it became cool to act morally offended about everything, especially in something as trivial and, realistically, stupid, as professional sports. Every day there’s a new fiasco, and the “steroids in baseball” saga has created more furrowed brows and heart palpitations among reporters and uninformed fans alike than anything else that has happened in sports for the last few decades. It reminds me of something Jim Norton said on Opie and Anthony a few years ago. Reading a New York newspaper headline that equated a Yankee loss with war and murder, he succinctly pointed out the ridiculousness of it all: “One group of millionaires with sticks hit more balls over the big blue fence than another group of millionaires with sticks”. I love sports, and I especially love baseball, but will people chill out already?

I know, I know. It’s “America’s pastime”. It sends a bad message to the youth of America, those high school kids looking for that extra 50 pounds of muscle to put them over the top. I’ve heard all the arguments. And I can see where some of this is coming from. I certainly don’t think taking steroids is the right thing to do, and it does create an unfair advantage, no question.

But it seems like everyone was doing them! When you look at the Mitchell Report, and Nook Logan appears on the list (a utility-bozo extraordinaire whose best season was hitting .258 with one home run and 17 RBI’s for the 2005 Tigers), it makes you think, who wasn’t taking these things? And like the great questions of the Universe, the answer of course, is “we’ll never know”. We really will never know the extent of steroids in baseball and all of the players that used them. We just won’t. That, of course, won’t stop Johnny Newspaperseed and the ill-informed populace from nailing certain players to the wall just because they hit a lot of home runs during that time period and looked muscular. Hear that, Frank Thomas and David Ortiz? Even though we have no reason to think you’ve done anything wrong, you’re cheaters because you’re both big and hit home runs! Isn’t that just as unfair as cheating in the first place?

This argument has been made as well, but it’s a fair one. Baseball turned a blind eye to players like Mark McGwire, Ken Caminiti, Sammy Sosa and others becoming the size of rhinoceroses and shattering records. It was all fun and games then. Come to the ballpark and see this freakishly large cartoon character hit a ball 700 feet! Where was the testing then? Who was asking the questions? The baseball brass couldn’t have been that naïve. Baseball made their bed, and now they have to lie in it. They dropped the ball, and allowed all of this to happen. It’s not fair to go back now and drag certain players through the mud to show that they're “doing something about it”.

I think everyone that has the numbers should get into the hall of fame, no exceptions. If they feel the need to include a caveat that the time period was rife with steroid use, that’s fine. For certain players that tested positive, go ahead and put an asterisk on their plaques. But Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens (as much as I hate him), Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and now Alex Rodriguez all belong in Cooperstown. They dominated an era in which steroids were the norm. Since we have no way of proving which pitchers were on steroids and which pitchers weren’t, and since popular opinion is telling us that all home run hitting mashers from that era were on steroids, it’s only fair to assume all pitchers were on steroids, too. You can’t have it both ways.

All baseball can do is realize their mistakes and clean the game up moving forward, which is seems they’re doing. Don’t keep people out of the hall of fame, don’t reverse or take away any records, and don’t do anything stupid. They had their chance to nip the steroid problem in the bud and opted not to. That’s the way it goes.

Item #2: Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2005). Directed by Sam Dunn and Scott McFadyen

I was up until the wee hours last night, unable to sleep, and flipping through the channels. There were the usual infomercials, crappy movies, and sports highlights on, and I wasn’t in the mood for any of those things. I continued flipping and found this documentary, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, on one of the VH1 channels and I decided to take it in.

I had heard a lot about this documentary from fellow writer Matt Steele, who is an encyclopedia on all things metal. I had some interest of my own, as well. I used to listen to metal quite a bit in middle school and the beginning of high school. For whatever reason, I slowly found myself being less and less interested in the musical genre, and looking to other places for music that really spoke to me (much to Matt’s dismay). I’ve always been fascinated with metal music, however, and even though I don’t listen to it anymore, I still have an interest in it. I ask Matt about what my old favorite metal bands are currently up to and I constantly browse Wikipedia for information on some of the more ridiculous and brutal Scandinavian bands. Since this documentary promised to cover pretty much all things metal, I was hyped up for it.

Dunn, the director, interviewer, and focal point of the film, is an affable guy and a true metalhead. His goal for the film, stated at the beginning and repeatedly all the way through, is to find out why people like metal music and to look at the heavy metal culture. You see, Dunn was an anthropologist in college, and he’s also a lifelong metal fan, so put the two together and voila! You have this documentary.

As a snapshot of metal music at large or as a primer on the history of metal for someone just getting into it, this film is a godsend. It at least glosses over every genre and subgenre of metal and talks with the major players in each one. The film also looks at various metal traits and characteristics; the clothing, the sexuality of the music, etc. Dunn is entertaining enough and the bands and musicians he talks to are often colorful and insightful as well.

The film misses the mark on a few things. I don’t believe Dunn achieves his goal of finding out what draws people to metal. He simply looks at different aspects of heavy metal fans and heavy metal music, but he doesn’t really tie them all together. We get clips of metal dignitaries talking about how after a tough day, the music was always there for them, man, to which I say, “Wilco’s always there for me, too. What’s so unique about that?”

Of course, we need to talk to Dee Snider as well, and about the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center), which sought to put heavy metal on trial. First, the PMRC is a complete joke that knew nothing about music, and I think that’s well understood by anyone with any familiarity to the proceedings. Any committee that wants to discuss KISS and Twisted Sister songs is probably a waste of money. They’re fucking hair bands, for God’s sake! Does anyone really take them seriously?

Secondly, Dee Snider might be the biggest blowhard on the face of the earth. I don’t exactly seek his interviews out, and yet I’ve probably heard him talk about his hearing with the PMRC in ten different interviews. We get it, Dee. You came to a stuffy board meeting with teased up hair and skin tight jeans on, and to their surprise, you were coherent and articulate! Thank you for saving metal.

Discussions of the PMRC lead to a look at various suicides and violence that look place and the attempt to pin those actions on heavy metal music. Of course, this line of thinking is complete horseshit, and if you’re killing yourself because Ozzy Osbourne told you to, maybe the problem isn’t with Ozzy. But I think the film misses an opportunity here to discuss something interesting. Though anyone who commits suicide or violence against someone else has serious issues, regardless of what music they listen to, why is it that a lot of these victims listened to metal? What about it speaks to disaffected youths? Is it because it’s loud, or do they actually like the music?

And finally, we get a segment about women in metal. We hear about how metal has been a boy’s club since its inception (true), and then we go into discussions about all-female metal bands like Girlschool, Vixen and Lita Ford. Of course, the film talks about these bands and what they did for women’s rights as if they’re all modern day Rosa Parks. No one was oppressing women in metal; there just weren’t any female bands for a while. And then the bands that came along really sucked. So who gives a fuck?!?

Dunn does a good job going over the history of heavy metal music and hitting the main talking points, but he does fall into the aforementioned traps that almost every metal doc falls into. It would have worked a lot better and would have been a lot more interesting if he succeeded in really showing us the metal culture and why people are drawn to it.

To reiterate, no one cares about Dee Snider and no one cares about Lita Ford.

C+

John Lacey