Anthrax (the band, not the virus), heavy metal and September 11

I’ve been a sub-editor, journalist and magazine editor for just over five years so I tend to remain un-phased when I come across sensationalised new stories. If I’m going to ‘feel’ outraged about something then it’s usually because of the cynical way in which the lowest common denominator media portrays it, rather than what happened in the actual ‘story’.

So hopefully you’ll forgive me if I sound a bit dramatic when I say that the recent eleventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the associated embassy violence are sad reminders of how the world has become that much more darker and fearful.

Just as those belonging to the western generation before us remember where they were on the day Kennedy was assassinated, so too does almost everyone from this generation recall where they were on September 11, 2001. For me, it was a quiet evening when mum called me to the lounge room, where we watched the horror unfold on TV. Both aircraft had hit by the time we tuned in. And then the towers collapsed, one after another…

Understandably, this singular event threw the public into a fit of fear, but just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, along came those anthrax spore-coated postal letters. Five people died after envelopes containing anthrax-infused powder were mailed to American politicians and media outlets, and while most people don’t remember the names of the victims, everyone knows Democrat senator Tom Daschle — who is still alive — was one of the targets.

 Anthrax the virus. I made the mistake of searching for “Anthrax virus”

images on Google. Don’t do this if you’re at work or have a weak stomach.

The first of these deadly letters arrived a mere week after the September 11 attacks and the subsequent national attention it commanded pushed the fear-meter into over-drive. The pervasive mood of paranoia that followed was unprecedented, and for newspapers, magazines and television stations this could only mean one thing: gold rush!

From the murder of innocent people who just happened to look vaguely Arabic, to a massive drop in the value of the share market, to an unprecedented crack-down on privacy and civil liberties, no moral panic was exempt — and the media made damn sure you knew all about it (well, except maybe the civil liberties bit).

While news outlets did their utmost to ensure that the prospect of opening your mail was almost as terrifying as boarding a plane, a hell of a lot of people started searching for “anthrax” on the internet as news of more postal attacks came to light. This inevitably led them to www.anthrax.com — the website for the American metal band that was founded in, and had been using the name ‘Anthrax’ since, 1981.

Predictably, accusations of tastelessness and insensitivity started flying, and a band that had never enjoyed so much as a smidgen of support from commercial radio stations was suddenly inundated with interview requests from the biggest media outlets in the country.

Anthrax’s guitarist Scott Ian reminisced on this absurd turn of events in a recent interview while promoting the new Anthrax album, Worship Music.

“The fact was that all this very, very mainstream media — I'm talking from CNN to the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, the biggest mainstream media in the world — are suddenly calling our publicist trying to get interviews with us,” he is quoted as telling the Georgia Straight (no, I hadn’t heard of that publication either).

“And my attitude right from the start was, ‘Well, these guys, they didn't want anything to do with us when our record came out not that long ago,’ you know. And now they want to talk to us because they need to fill space because this is the story of the week — which is gonna disappear in the next two months. And of course it did,” he said.

I remember hearing about this on a community radio metal show back then. The band put out a media release that scathingly said they were going to change their name to ‘Basket Full Of Puppies’ before promptly stating that, actually, under no circumstances would Anthrax change their name.

The band finally put an end to the media-manufactured rumours of a name change at a 9/11 benefit concert, when each of the five members came on stage in white overalls that spelt out the words “WE’RE NOT CHANGING OUR NAME”.

NOT changing their name. See what I did there?

It was a fitting and necessarily dramatic end to one of the more obscure (and certainly one of the silliest) legacies of the September 11 attacks. The media attention surrounding the ‘controversy’ vanished as quickly as it appeared, and Anthrax are thankfully still around today, still going by their original name and still kicking ass. In fact, I’m very much looking forward to seeing them at the Soundwave festival. Thank goodness this whole dumb saga was an isolated moment of fear-induced frenzy that…

Oh wait. That’s right, shortly after the attacks the largest owner of radio stations in America issued a directive to all its 1200+ radio stations. It was basically a list of ‘questionable’ tracks that included all songs by Rage Against The Machine as well as such riot-inducing works like Walk Like An Egyptian by The Bangles, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven and What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. In hindsight it seems that the direcetive wasn’t quite the black list it was thought to be (it was more of a suggested black list). However, the fact that someone not only bothered to come up with a list in the first place but actually turned it into some kind of official policy says so much about how fantastically warped public perception had become.

Oh, and spare a thought for hip hop group The Coup, whose new album at the time, Party Music, was all set to go and be released in mid-September 2001. In one of those “you couldn’t make this shit up even if you tried” coincidences, the cover depicted two members of the group standing in front of the twin towers, detonator in hand, the buildings exploding into flames behind them.

Woops.

Astonishingly, the album was hastily recalled before it hit shops, whereupon it was re-issued with less ‘questionable’ artwork…

“That probably deserves some kind of public service award…”

I’m a big fan of legitimate free music downloads, if only because I’m probably one of four people in the whole southern hemisphere who hasn’t used a torrent or P2P service for the last seven years.

It’s not what almost everybody else I know does (and I’ll confess that over the years I’ve spent a tear-inducing amount of money on music that may not always have been up to scratch), but like almost everyone else I also still have my shame pile of unlistened to music. That's because I occasionally go through spates of looking for new music by hunting for free downloads provided by bands, which means I end up with a pile of MP3s in a forgotten folder on my desktop.

One such small collection of tunes that my computer tells me has been on my desktop since January 6, 2012, consists of three free tracks from American electronic goths The Crüxshadows. Founded in 1993, they’re not a band I know much about and I guess they play what would pass for the equivalent of modern darkwave.

 Serious business.

To start, I only owned three tracks from various compilations so when they released three free Christmas tracks (go HERE and download them from the right hand column) it doubled the length of my Crüxshadows playlist.

It got me thinking about this band, and made me realise that there are a couple of things I really like about them, even though I don’t know their music anywhere near well enough to consider myself a fan.

First, from what little I know, they seem to have some variety going for them. Yes, it’s that electronically driven synthy darkwave sound that has been done a trillion times before, but they also seem to make use of some cool sounds. They use ‘real’ violins during their recordings and main (male) vocalist Rogue seems to have a fantastic, almost operatically clean voice. The track Citadel (from a Fiend Magazine sampler) is a good example in my view of a track that uses what could be an old-school synth, or at least a modern one that sounds pretty retro.

Secondly, I like that they have dancers. This makes sense in the live setting given that a major component of the music is electronic (it’s hard to jump around on stage holding a big synth), and for all the pretentiousness — be it the umlaut, the main-man’s pseudonym, or the fact that they’re successful goths — I’d like to think this adds something to their shows, in the same way that The Prodigy’s human stage presence was basically made by two guys who couldn’t sing.

The fact that they’re not-at-all-unpleasant-to-look-at dancers certainly helps, as does the fact that they thankfully seem to have a sense of humour (below).

The above video from an Ayria show (another superb electronic artist who is very underrated, plus she’s from Canada so that has to make her 50% better to start) has the dancers bust out of nowhere and do a full routine.
Check out their mad moving skillz.

The third and by far my most favourite thing I love about this band which, as I said, I really don’t know very much else about, is the fact that once upon a time, back in the United States of America in 2006, for one very brief moment in time they did the unthinkable and managed a number one Billboard single with the track Sophia.

I own the (radio edit version) of this track and I really didn’t think that much of it. Yet that's merely a matter or personal taste and I throw my hat in the air for these guys — an independent band that was virtually unknown by the standards of the commercial music industry — for managing to outdo corporate-backed mega artists.

Never mind the fact that it was a short-lived blip, or that it didn’t break their career and propel The Crüxshadows into mega stardom… for one fleeting moment back then and now forever frozen in time, a song by a bunch of mopey-looking people with funny hair wearing corsets and fishnets was officially at number one — and in September 2006 this meant it outranked P. Diddy.

Take that P Diddy.

To quote Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson, when the Bring Your Daughter… To The Slaughter single did much the same after sitting for one week (and one week only) on top of the UK singles charts, where it consequently knocked Cliff Richard off his perch: “That probably deserves some kind of public service award.”