A friend handed me a hard copy of The New York Times he found on the train this afternoon, something I hadn’t seen or read in awhile. The reporting in the Times is unbelievable crap, but every now and then they’ll throw in an off-beat human interest story worth reading. Like: “The Cult Music Documentary ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’ Turns Middle Age.” It’s about a cult film depiction of Judas Priest’s 1986 tour with Dokken, memorable to me because my friends went but I couldn’t, something I resent to this day.

I was struck by this passage if only because I’d been thinking about it before I’d read the article:

…the film’s feel-good ridiculousness risks obscuring the fact that Judas Priest had more depth than the Budweiser-chugging teens rocking out to party-and-rebellion anthems like “Living After Midnight” and “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” might have fully appreciated.

The author mentions “Electric Eye,” a very prescient song about mass surveillance, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. When you think cerebral rock bands, you might think of Pink Floyd, Rush, Yes, Tool, King Crimson, and the Talking Heads. Though not exactly cerebral,  maybe Rage Against the Machine belongs in the same group on grounds of raw political engagement. But Judas Priest strikes me as having been eerily prescient in ways these other bands (whatever their merits) haven’t been. 

Not everybody’s cup of tea, of course, but as far as the older stuff, go back and listen to the live versions of “Tyrant” or “Genocide.” “Tyrant” came out in 1976, but almost literally prefigures Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party Purge of 1979: “As you perish, each of you shall scream as you are sought…” is literally what happened there. It also nicely describes any other tyranny you please, including our own. (Though I somehow doubt this was intended, “the scream as you are sought” line also reminds me of the Athenian slaughter of the prisoners at Corcyra in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, IV.47-48). “Genocide” came out in 1977, but certain lines in it weirdly and eerily prefigure events in the Rwandan genocide two decades later.

Flashing senseless sabers
Cut us to the ground
Eager for the life blood
Of all who can be found

Which at some level fits any other genocide you please, Rwanda or not. 

The first time I personally lived through a military-style attack was the summer of 2016, when I was living in Abu Dis, Palestine. When the troops started shooting on our street, the song that immediately clicked into my head was Priest’s “Dissident Aggressor,” now done in a phenomenally good cover version by Halestorm. The song itself was written in 1977 about and in the presence of East Berlin (and the Berlin Wall), but it perfectly captures the experience of coming under Israeli military attack in one of the walled cities of Palestine. And to this day, I can’t hear it without feeling that I’m back in Abu Dis, surrounded by the apartheid walls, watching the IDF shoot up the town.  

When “Electric Eye” came out in 1982, it seemed like science fiction. With the advent of drones, it’s just fact. I remember being followed and tracked by drones–some as small as bumblebees (which they were designed to resemble)–a decade ago in Jerusalem and Abu Dis when I lived there. That experience has, I guess, now followed me home: just a few weeks ago, a protest I attended in Newark, New Jersey was surveilled for an hour by a drone. When I mentioned it to the organizer, he just chuckled and said, “Yeah, we’re used to it. They do that. ” We’re all living in a metal song, but not in a good way. 

The much-misunderstood “Metal Gods” (1980) is sort of the meta-soundtrack to it all, predicting the advent of AI (and some of its consequences) better than anything I ever encountered in academic philosophy ca. 1980:

We’ve taken too much for granted
And all the time it had grown
From techno-seeds we first planted
Evolved a mind of its own

Marching in the streets
Dragging iron feet
Laser beaming hearts
Ripping men apart

Try to find a better description than that of Lavender (or Gaza Solidarity Encampment) in Philosophy & Public Affairs ca. 1980. I don’t think you will. If you’d submitted a manuscript to them imagining such a thing, they’d probably have given your paper a desk rejection and sent you on your way.

If I had to pick one admittedly retro band that both captures the sociopathic ethos of our time, and has somehow helped me endure it, it’s Judas Priest. They’ve been a go-to for me for the last couple of years.  Not bad for a bunch of half-educated English guys with whips and chains. I wouldn’t have lasted a year of our current miasma without them.

In this world we’re living in
We’ve had our share of sorrow
The answer now is, don’t give in
Aim for a new tomorrow