METAL BAND INTO SCAT & MEAT BOYCOTTS deemed grown-up

Daily newspaper arts & entertainment sections are nuts for stories on music that's good for you. Their upper middle class editors fancy themselves intellectual gourmands winnowing the wheat from the chaff.

But it's the other way around.

If you start picking pop music to offer your readers on the basis of its worth as chicken soup for the soul it guarantees the selection of chaff and mold spores, of crap, from the unspoiled grain.

Favorite memes on this during the past year have been metal for brainy people articles, much ridiculed in P. T. Barnum Metal. For the calendar period 2005-2006, the New York Times owns the book on the cliche, with a little help from Slate.

So the Associated Press checked in with it's variation, called "Metal is growing up, speaking out," by Justin M. Norton. Since it's AP, it has the potential to be reprinted all over and, indeed, the Los Angeles Times ran it deep inside its Calendar section today.

I'm going to dispense with the theory on class warfare and get right to the dogshit for purposes of comedy.

Start up with the sensitive twentysomething in the metal band, Six Feet Under. It sets up a perfect lead for milksops and pantywaists who, might somehow think at this late juncture, an anti-war-in-Iraq song in any genre of music is remarkable.

Heavy metal singer Chris Barnes didn't know what people would think of his anti-war song [title deleted] he wrote after his cousin deployed to Iraq in 2003.

He heard a number of complaints -- but also received supportive e-mails . . .

The man's against the war. Some people like the idea, some don't. Utterly scintillating.

But the biggest errors in the AP metal artice are ones of omission. That is, the journalist doesn't tell the reader what a band is REALLY LIKE because that would spoil the thesis of the article.

The article shifts to a marginal thrash metal act from San Diego, Cattle Decapitation. Members are vegetarians. And they loudly protest the eating of meat and the slaughter of animals by the corporate food machine. Great! Tofu! Don't wear leather.

"Cattle Decapitation . . . [mixes] charging guitars and an animal rights message in drawing a diverse crowd that includes activists . . . " writes Associated Press.

If your lips aren't curled in a sneer yet, consider the album covers and song titles of Cattle Decapitation, the likes of which AP can't send and didn't send out on the newspaper line. (Now don't write an angry letter. I love animals. I have four cats.)

Since I have no such restrictions at Dick Destiny blog, dig this Cattle Decap title: "Cloacula: The Anthropophagic Copromantik." Now there's a message tune. Or also from the same album, "Polyps." Had a sigmoidoscopy lately?

Cattle Decapitation is preoccupied with anuses and what comes out of them. Surely this shows a band that is an example of "Metal --- growing up, speaking out."

Or how 'bout these titles from the educationally entitled "Human Jerky" CD: "Parasitic Infestation (Extracted Pus, Mistaken for Yogurt and Gargled)," "Constipation Camp" and "Colon-Blo"? The AP writer mentions "Veal and the Cult of Torture" from this album, but somehow misses the above as well as "Unclogged and Ready for Spewage."

Dick Destiny blog wouldn't have characterized Cattle Decapitation as heavy metal with a thoughtful message, unless your idea of thoughtful is a series of incomprehensible tirades about meat, excrement and the digestive system. I would characterize them as into vegetarianism but with the weird psychoneurosis of linking everything to scat.

Naturally, an article with a title like "SCAT BAND CATTLE DECAPITATION: Weird ninnies who want you to change your diet so you don't get colon cancer" would never fly at a daily newspaper like the Los Angeles Times. So the story must be classified as either a stupid trick, disguising Cattle Decapitation as an animal rights band without all the other really screwed-up stuff that they're about, or the work of people who are just witlessly casting around for not-true-but-good-sounding-rubbish to fill out the day's section.

Next, dig up the experts, the chocolate jimmies on top of the cupcake of the this-music-is-good-brain-food story, for quotes.

"Metal is expanding and evolving and becoming more diverse," said Canadian anthropologist and filmmaker Sam Dunn . . . 'Metal artists have responded to the culture and politics of the day,' said Donna Gaines, a sociologist and author of 'Teenage Wasteland,' a study of working class New Jersey metal heads."

Yes, while "Constipation Camp" is not an issue I deal with when considering the culture and politics of the day, Dick Destiny blog recognizes it could be one for other readers.

Another band Associated Press mentioned as a progenitor of the "Metal growing up, speaking out" movement was Nuclear Assault. Nuclear Assault was a marginal 80's act I endured on undercards at the Airport Music Hall while working as a writer for the Morning Call newspaper's features section.

Nuclear Assault were jokey but mostly unlistenable. Their small number of fans did, however, get a thrill out of two songs. One was entitled "Buttfuck:" "We thought [Vince Neil of Motley Cure] should've gone to prison and got anally raped like most young men do when they're put in U.S. prisons. We made the whole thing funny," said one member to a heavy metal fan site. Quite logically, you can't print "Buttfuck" in a daily newspaper.

The other top tune was called "Hang the Pope."

Of course, the other big fault with newspaper stories of this type: They have no sense of humor.

Pop music, including heavy metal, begs for light treatment. Indeed, one could write a very entertaining story about a band like Cattle Decapitation.

Wait! I did just that. Last year, in reviewing the Japanese heavy metal band, Bathtub Shitter.

It begins:

Americans believe constipation to be a fearful evil. The superstition is dressed up in evening TV ads for psyllium that treat it as religion. Purges make one wholesome, and there can be nothing better in life than to be a laxative addict.

It was a belief while growing up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, too, and what the stiff-necked Pennsy Germans feared they wished upon others. As a consequence, shit jokes—specifically, those in which inferiors suffered the revenge of laxatives or brown-stained toilet paper pasted to the shoe—were a source of glee. Indeed, one of the favored local artists was a "Professor Schnitzel," who recorded 45s of comedy routines sprinkled with such tales.

Read the rest of "Dump-Trucking Japanese Turdcore Act here at the Village Voice if you wish. It's not mandatory. There is no social worth to it or the music. If you think so, you are mistaken. But I liked the sound of the Bathtub Shitter CD a little.