CupCake Money

CupCake Money here – I want to thank White Chocolate CupCake for this heartfelt personal “history” chronicling the bridge connecting Led Zeppelin to Arch Enemy.   How serendipitous is receiving this just as I was finishing the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies piece.  It came to mind that Arch Enemy, with their music that is a combination of Death Metal and classical structures, melodies and nuances, would be the perfect soundtrack to Elizabeth Bennet breaking it off against the Zombie Horde in the upcoming doubtless monster lit classic Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Special to CupCake Money

By White Chocolate CupCake.

A Brief History of Rock and Roll:

Rock and Roll began when as a boy I dropped the phonograph needle of the Sears record player I called my “stereo” on “Communication Breakdown.”  Sure, there was that Beatles and Stones stuff that came before Led Zeppelin, mostly stuff for the girls to squeal to, but it was all only so much trees falling in the woods without my ears being around to hear it.  It wasn’t long before the First Celestial Hierarchy, the Pantheon of the True Church of Rock and Roll (a.k.a. “Hard Rock”) was established, beyond which no other messengers of the Word were needed:

Lord God Almighty:       Jimi Hendrix.

                        (Technically not Hard Rock, but Divine and Transcendent over all

                         music that came before and that will ever come after.)

The High Priests:            The Who.

                        (Hard Rockers when they cared to, but suspended in a special 

                         stratum between head-banging and high art because of the

                         genius of genuine poet and philosopher Pete Townshend –

                         and the holy madness of Keith Moon.)

The Greatest Band in the World:    Led Zeppelin.

                         (The absolute icons.  The sound. The look. The lyrics. The sex.

                          The love. The rebellion. The forever inchoate revolution. The

                          teen-manic soaring and crashing of ecstatic elation and

                          melancholic despair, the powerfulness and powerlessness of

                          youth, the dreams and fears in contemplation of a long life just

                          beginning to be lived.  They were “Rock and Roll.”)

The Two Other Greatest Bands of the Holy Trinity Not Quite as Great as Zeppelin but Still Greatly Beloved:      

                                             Deep Purple and Black Sabbath.

That’s pretty much it.  Music enough for a lifetime. There were the other well-fronted (Stooges, Alice Cooper, Queen) and super shredder-powered (Judas Priest, Mountain, Blue Oyster Cult, Motorhead) hard rock-qualified bands that were well-pleasing, but they were really needed only as palate cleansers between Zep-Purp-Sab binges.

And then came 1980, and the Darkness covered the land.  Reagan got elected.  Lennon got shot.  And Rock and Roll, mortally wounded by the passings of Keith Moon and John Bonham, finally died so that MTV could live.  There had been the brief rally-before-death in the noble ejaculatory tantrums of Punk (bless you, Pistols and Ramones), but the only Hard Rock-ish issue produced by the shotgun marriage of rebel Rock to corporate MTV was a clone army of derivative “Hair Bands,” engineered family-safe for TV and threatening only to Christians.  And so began a decade of Zeppelin-modeled knock-offs, imitators of the Greats who kinda got the sound, the look and the swagger down, but completely missed the point in their dash for cash and glory, rock having become just another career track instead of an act of generational defiance.

Hard Rock, having become “Metal”, was completely lost to me throughout the 90’s, for I had taken up cohabitation with a female significant other and, well, compromises had to be made.  But I heard constant murmurings of a continuing Metal evolution worldwide that made the Holy Trinity grandfathers sound like elevator Muzak.  However, the occasional Slayer or Cannibal Corpse CD surreptitiously slipped me always failed to slake my thirst for Metal.  It was all admirably fast, fierce, brutal stuff, but about as much fun as watching an autopsy.   Then, a few years ago, having been released back into the wild and free to indulge my guy-ness at will, I found myself at the music store, lost at sea in an ocean of Metal band CDs.  Sensing my cluelessness, a perky employee asked me “what type” of Metal I was looking for, to which I replied, “I like the whole Death Metal thing, the power, the fury, the anger, the defiance. But where’s the songwriting, the musicianship, the signature-voiced band-identifying front-man? And where, for Devil’s sake, is the melody?!  Has the Horned One banished all f-in’ melody from the music of his minions?”

“Oh,” said the CD-stocker, “so you want Melodic Death Metal.  You should check out Arch Enemy.”  I angrily exited the store, infuriated and humiliated that this fetus-aged punk would mock my obviously ridiculous insistence on wanting some melody mixed in with my metal.  A year went by.  And then Brian Posehn popped up in my drunken late-night channel-surfing, and being just the grizzled Metal prophet whose guidance I so desperately needed, he proceeded to introduce an Arch Enemy music video.  Oh, epiphany and bliss.  Finally I had found the sound, and the band, I had so long been searching for without even knowing it.  On return to the music store in search of Arch Enemy CDs, I discovered that there was in fact a “Melodic Death Metal” section.

Arch Enemy is a metal band made up of four svelte Swedish guys on the guitars and drums fronted by a hot blonde German female who sings like a mournful accusatory banshee forewarning the coming end of everything.  The masterful guitarists are brothers, Michael and Christopher Amott, whose savage washes of pitch-perfect metal chords and riffs are interspersed with haunting melody lines and even the occasional “samplings” of classical passages.  The engine room of the pulsating metal dynamo is powered by the thundering bass of Sharlee D’Angelo, who manages to somehow complement the twin guitar leads without overpowering them with his pounding support rhythms, and then there’s the astonishing double-foot-pedaling human drum machine that is Daniel Erlandsson, who has to be heard live to be believed.  Angela Gossow is the stunning German growler who prowls the stage like a ravenous vampire, half siren goddess and half rock ‘n’ roll beast.  The assaultive music of Arch Enemy is, like it’s emblematic front-woman, fierce, powerful, intimidating, and frighteningly beautiful.  Arch Enemy songs are cathartic evocations of human pain and despair in the shadow of war and nuclear annihilation, but laced with an undying hope for a saving revolutionary miracle to be unleashed from inside rebellious human hearts.  

Where once, in the depths of my daily miseries, I held fast to the soul-sustaining brain-embedded sounds of Page, Jones and Bonham, lest I lose my sanity or submit wholly to my boss-masters, I am now rescued, anchored and fortified in the thunder and lightning of Amott, D’Angelo and Erlandsson.  Where once, in the suffering heart of my mind’s eye, I held fast to the liberating vision of Robert Plant, bare-chested and lion-maned, screaming defiance at the gods, I am now rescued, comforted and revivified by the sacred-profane vision of Angela Gossow, sonic warrior-goddess, stalking the stage in search of a few worthy disciples. She knows my pain.  She entreats me in song to continue to fight on. And I obey.

That’s why Arch Enemy is the Greatest Band in the World.

 (Led Zeppelin, Greatest Band in the World 1968-1980, rest in peace.)

- White Chocolate CupCake