The Blindboy Podcast - Dark Salad

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

How an Italian in 1913 predicted Heavy Metal music Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Break free from the devil's headlock, you velvet gurdiers. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast, what's the crack? Um, I had the first hint of a winter cold there yesterday. Little bit of the sniffles. I seem to be about 95% better today. But I definitely had the first sign of a winter head cold yesterday and you know what so traditionally what I've done if I get we'll say the hint of a cold or the hint of a sore throat traditionally what I've found is that if I fight against it and go for a

big long run that this sometimes dispels the cold and it's like the adrenaline tells the cold to fuck off and I almost did it yesterday and before I did it before I went for a run I tweeted I said I've got the hint of a cold

I'm going to go for a run and it's going to sort it out but luckily people on Twitter reminded me that last year i did the same fucking thing and went for a run when i had the threat of a cold and he ended i ended up getting a very a disastrous ear infection i don't know if you remember that period last year of about three fucking podcasts where i had an intense fucking ear infection. And I was supposed to be filming with the BBC.

And I couldn't film because my doctor wasn't allowing me on a plane. Because my earlobe would, or my eardrum would explode. So thank you to whoever reminded me on Twitter. That no blind boy, if you get the hint of a cold, you should not go for a fucking run, so instead what I did, is, I rested, and drank a load of tea, and went to bed, and woke up, and my sniffles were gone, so I now only have residual sniffles, and I'm feeling A-OK, so this week's podcast is going to be it's kind of art slash music

it's a hot take it's a hot take that I have and it's a hot take that I'm cautious and fearful around because I don't want to it's I want to touch on this issue because I feel it's much much broader and something

i want to explore further in other podcasts so i'm going to be touching on specific things and trying not to go too deep because otherwise i'll end up ruining a series of podcasts that i could do around these things so before before we continue hold on on, I'm going to take a sniff of my albis oil inhaler. Which you can form a strange addiction around. It's like, I don't know, like Tiger Bam or like Vicks. Mental shit that you shove up your fucking nose and it opens your nostrils. And it can become quite habit forming if you're not careful i don't know why i think it's because it doesn't really clear the nostrils but when i take a sniff of it

yeah i think it does that thing it does it does something to the inside of my nose that the same thing that chili peppers do to my tongue so i think i started to fetishize the pain so i'm gonna put down the albicile now so before we continue with this week's hot take um just a couple of plugs look uh live shows coming up what today what have i got the two big ones that i i'm contractually obligated to continually tell you about. The two Vicar Street gigs in November. For which there are possibly 10 tickets left for. Thank you very much for everyone purchasing those tickets.

But yeah, the 19th and the 24th of November I'm doing a live podcast in Vicar Street. Looking forward to those. Alright. And then my book of short stories, Boulevard Wren, is finally out in shops on November 1st, which is this Saturday, so please pop along to a shop, and buy my book of short stories, Boulevard Wren, I've already read you out two stories from it, I've already read you out two stories from it. You know, it's... I do talk a lot about... You know, being very cautious myself around... You know, I want to create...

If I create a piece of work, and this... Not just me, this goes for anyone who wants to do anything creative. You want to create something and really try and have your own internal evaluation over it if you're if you're to create art you want to make sure that you and you alone is happy with it and if other people like it that's just a benefit but to be very cautious of external praise negative or positive so it's something I have to be mindful of it's like I have to walk the line of

listening to what people are saying and at the same time not taking it on board and it's very very tough but what I will say is about 8 or 9 people have read the book Boulevard Ren and they'd be people who people whose opinions I respect Eight or nine people have read the book Boulevard Wren. And they'd be people whose opinions I respect.

People who fucking know their shit. And also if they are giving me critique. It's for the benefit of the work. Do you know what I'm saying? It's not like a review. And everyone has read it. What I can happily say is is the aims and goals that I had with this book they're definitely being reflected to me in the feedback that I'm getting as in what I wanted to like I do enjoy the first book I love it but at the same time I'm a bit more experienced now and i took more time to write boulevard rent than i did

the first book so it's just it's nice to hear back from people who i respect that the things that the aims that i had regarding the book that they're being reflected back to me so that's good so i'm i can't wait to fucking put the thing out mainly as well it's nice to have a piece of work fucking out there because then you can truly walk away from it I'm in this strange like I don't want to do any creative

works until 2020 until January, I'm chilling out now until fucking January, I'm just doing gigs and this podcast but when 2020 comes, I want to look at some new projects, but you kind of can't when your work isn't out, my BBC series as well actually, that's out, they won't give me an exact date, all right, but I'm 99% sure that my BBC series will be out mid to late November, okay,

will be out mid to late November, okay, I don't know, it was supposed to be out in August, like, but just, that's the nature of TV, it gets pushed back and pushed back, so I'm hoping mid-November, to be honest, I'd rather it come out fucking mid-November, than have it come out last August, because August is a shit time to put anything out and anyway that's called Blind Boy Undestries and it's a four part series where I work with a team of investigative journalists and it's kind of it's me with my hot takes and my thesis on an overall subject but

with the rigor of actual journalists putting a hell of amount of fucking real work in you know so i still get to have my hot takes but i tell you what it is it's subject matter that i'd be cautious about tackling on this podcast because with this podcast it's just me do you know it's just me researching and I'm not really a fucking expert so all I can really do half the time is to have my opinions but because of that I'm also quite cautious of what areas I step into if I'm uninformed because you don't want to be you don't want to be saying shit that fucking hurts people that might be affected so the topics that we're covering on this bbc series there's an episode on on modern slavery

which is quite fucking bleak um there's an episode on work you know on you know what has work become what is the definition of work in 2019 there's an episode on anxiety and i don't just mean not just panic attacks but the overall existential anxiety and the new way of living that we have today and there's an episode on chaos just the general hum of uncertainty that exists today I mean I mean chaos

I suppose what the chaos episode is is it's trying to understand what the fuck is going on right now it's trying to pin down what is today zeitgeist I like I think of things as as an artist so you know i look at the 20th century in terms of there was modernism you know from the late fucking 1890s up until about 1950 and then all of a sudden post-modernism came in and since the birth of the internet

you know by which i mean the widespread use of it we'll say late 90s a new ism has come in some people call it meta-modernism but we don't really know what it is so I suppose the chaos episode is trying to understand what is right now so these are the four they're four episodes that are going to be on BBC and I'm really looking forward to those coming out because it's the pilot I tell you

this the pilot that I made for it back on the Alba side lads the pilot that I made on housing that got long listed for a BAFTA award which I was not expecting at all so I'll be very happy when

these things are out if you're living in Britain you'll be able to access them quite easily on the BBC player and if you're not living in Britain, if you live in Ireland then you're going to have to find more creative ways to access BBC player

content aren't you em you could illegally download it I'm not saying you should, I'm just saying it's something I've heard people do that and also VPNs decent VPNs.

Decent VPNs you know. Will let you look at the BBC player. So that's the crack. So this week's podcast. It's musical. It's musical and it's also about. Art theory as such. And. If you're familiar with,

like I love doing the music podcasts, I love history of music in particular, I obsess about music, I'm obsessed with how music gets created, I'm particularly interested as you know, one thing that really excites and fascinates me is, interested as you know one thing that really excites and fascinates me is how new forms of music emerge particularly from uh the environment that they emerge from i really find that exciting you know if you you know last year we had the history of disco which was a three-part podcast where we traced the roots of discos from the gay rights movement of the 60s but then also crucially important the fact that you know you can trace discos to cities like detroit these industrial cities that you that

from from an industrial city of repetitive mechanization you end up with like a repetitive mechanized music such as house which you know disco became house so with this one I want to speak about another

form of music that's kind of arrived from industry but it's not electronic music even though it's not electronic in the sense that we think of it we think of electronic music as drum machines synthesizers but it's certainly an electronically assisted or electric music I want to talk about the birth of heavy metal that's what I want to talk about this week now heavy metal

first off I fucking adore heavy metal I've been a long time heavy metal fan I like pretty much all types of heavy metal some of it I actually know I don't like the more kind of corny heavy metal some of it I actually know I don't like the more kind of corny heavy metal there's like gamer metal I suppose you'd call it

I don't know there's a band called Dragon Force it's where metal gets a little bit nerdy and it focuses too much on the virtuosity of solos and the lyrical themes become about slaying dragons I just can't get down with that Gothic Metal is a band called Cradle of Filth

and they veer into that territory but they do it with a tongue in cheek humour that makes it okay but in general I fucking love metal music, I love all music to be honest it's quite difficult for me to find like if I come across any music and I

don't get it I work really hard on trying to get it and it's rare white boy ska I just can't fucking do it American ska music I just I can't I've tried real hard, I'm sorry. Also a lot of contemporary kind of indie music. Now that's not fair. Generally whatever kind of band are being played on BBC radio and it's just a bunch of normal four lads in college and they're making guitar music. normal four lads in college and they're making guitar music in general i i struggle to warm to a lot of the big names in that respect but there's gonna there's obviously notable exceptions but in general that that's one that i struggle with that i train that i don't warm to so i like kind of all music but I am I'm very passionate about metal um so to discuss the roots of metal now I'm not going to go into the entire roots of metal

okay because in order to do that I'd really you know you're I'd be taking it back about 100 years I'm not going to do that because I want to cover it in another podcast so instead I'm going to specifically focus on the period that it generally agreed to be when blues music or rock blues music turned into what

is called metal and the beauty of it is it can be traced to one specific moment, one specific band, one specific album, it really can, and whenever I see that, whenever, because I speak a lot about, um, you know, I compare music to genetics, specifically memetics, where we get the term meme, genetics, specifically memetics, where we get the term meme, but not memes as in internet memes,

a different type of memes. In 1979, the biologist Richard Dawkins, who's a bit of a prick, unfortunately, he's one of these fundamentalist, atheist fellas who's, I don't know, I just never warmed to him. I just, I find him to be a fundamentalist. I think he himself is quite religious, even though he's complete anti-religion.

So there's elements of Dawkins that I don't like. But however, Dawkins has a book from 79, I believe, called The Selfish Gene, where he looks at ideas and culture the same way that we would look at genes propagating within a system, within a structure, and the way genes work is, you know, animals, plants, whatever, fucking reproduce, genes are shared, an offspring is created, and every so often there's a mutation in the gene,

and this freak mutation every so often is highly beneficial and something very new is created and i'm always searching for the memetic the when you when you talk about ideas but use the structure of genetics we refer to it as a meme but i don't mean internet meme and and Dawkins meme are quite separate, so I'm talking about old school memes, selfish gene memes, so I'm always looking for the memetic mutation, in music,

when, when did something really fucking specific, with a very strong flavour happen in music, that completely, that created a new branch on the family tree and I love when you can find actual moments in musical history

where it's like boom there you go that changed some shit and when I find those moments I really obsess about the cultural conditions which led to that thing happening about the cultural conditions which led to that thing

happening because it's that's always the case that's why understanding culture and understanding the zeitgeist is so important art always reflects

the sociological, political, economical environment of where it comes from always, even if the artist themselves isn't consciously aware of it it's look politics, the society you're in

the culture you're from at that time your economic situation, whatever the fuck these things influence how you feel and if you are an artist often to create art means to try and understand these things around you but you're just expressing it with a means of expression that's other than just words do you know so I'm always looking for if I find a moment where it's like yeah shit

changed right there then I try and find out what was going on culturally for that to happen so I want to first take this back to Italy in 1909 and

I want to speak about an artistic movement called Futurism, okay? So Futurism is a bit of a, it's a weird one to talk about, and I'll get to that soon, but it's one of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century, right, without a fucking shadow of a doubt, but it's also quite a problematic one, futurism, it was born 1909 in Italy, there was a poet called Marinetti, right, and Marinetti, he obviously had a few quid, but he had a car, right? In 1909, he had a car. Now, cars had only, like motor cars had only been available, like, maybe five years in 1909? Ten years? So, he was one of the privileged few who had a car, and it was a Fiat.

So, one day, Marinetti was driving along in his Fiat, flying down the road. And coming towards him, all of a sudden were two lads on bicycles. And Marinetti had to swerve the car and nearly hit the two lads. His car, I believe, turned over. And the two lads flew into a ditch. His car, I believe, turned over and the two lads flew into a ditch. And they just started roaring and screaming at him, shaking their fists. And Marinetti kind of left the encounter.

But it had a deep kind of effect on his way of thinking. And it made him realise that as a car owner, as someone now who has this vehicle with a machine in it, that can drive, that isn't propelled by a horse or human energy, this fucking vehicle that runs on fuel, Marinetti realised that, almost like he should have violently rolled over the two cyclists, almost like he should have violently rolled over the two cyclists. He started to say that that encounter where those cyclists were nearly knocked over, that for him was proof that cyclists and horses just need to get off the road altogether, that these new fast machines, these cars, only they should be on the road. And anything to do with machinery or industry is clearly far better than anything in the past.

So machines must reign supreme, kind of even if it means the death of people who stand in the way. even if it means the death of people who stand in the way and that encounter led Marinetti to write the Futurist Manifesto in 1909 now the thing with futurism is it's it's pure modernism in that like it's it's the manifesto was an artistic an artistic movement it was like here it's it was like him and a group of other he was a poet and some other artists there was painters uh i think it was just painters and poets at the start they got together and wrote this manifesto which manifestos were a common enough thing within art movements from about the 1800s onwards where it's like a group of artists get together and they go here's what's wrong with what's happening now in art here's the new thing that

we believe needs to go be the way forward and we're going to subscribe to this so that was a manifesto but the futurist manifesto and what makes it so purely modernistic is that it was an artistic manifesto, but also it fully believed in changing the world. And that's a real tenet of modernism. You know, modernist art really believed of art's ability to change the world, you know. Postmodernism kind of gave up on that in the 1960s.

But to kind of encapsulate what futurism was as a movement in 1909, it was like, it was bad, right? It was toxic. There wasn't a lot of room of feelings, nature, compassion within futurism. It was the utter fetishization of industry and technology. of industry and technology and it's futurism is like it's like the worst person you can think of right the most violent arrogant person you know and it's it's their brain for the 10 seconds after they do a line of cocaine that's what futurism was, the manifesto, it was this really arrogant, masturbatory belief that technology and machinery, that man, because man has created technology and machinery, that therefore man is capable, everything man does is utter perfection. Because you have to view it as well in the context of, it's, like imagine fucking, you're talking 1909, right? So you're talking about people who all of a sudden bear witness to things like cars, right?

So you're talking about people who all of a sudden bear witness to things like cars, right? There's a thing with technology. Certain shit happened at the late industrial revolution whereby when the average human looks at a piece of technology, they can no longer understand what's going on and it starts to behave a bit more like magic. Like when someone invented a fucking, a new horse and cart, right? Even if it's revolutionary. Or if someone invented a ship with brilliant sails and it made the ship go really fast. The average human could still step back and look at this horse and cart and look at this ship.

And go, that's fucking amazing but i kind of know how it works isn't that clever but then with the advent of steam power and in particular then motor cars the average human can't really grasp what the fuck is going on you know what i mean you can kind of explain to someone in 1909 the theory of the combustion engine it's like there's this shit we get out of the ground that used to be dinosaurs and it makes cars go fast

and there's no horses or no one pulling it so most people are just like I don't get this it's like a type of magic you kind of see it now with, like we deal with it every day now with our apps and our phones. You know,

this fucking podcast, like Jesus, I'm in my room talking into a fucking sock and a million people are going to hear it in the morning. My brain can't understand how that works. It's effectively, it's a type of magic. So the futurists were they viewed

it's like technology slapped him into the face and but but it invigorated him with this arrogant certainty that the way forward had to be through technology and the reason I'm speaking about it in negative terms is yes the futurist manifesto is without question one of the most important artistic documents of the 20th century but the futurists also played a huge part in 20th century fascism and that's where it gets dodgy alongside the futurist manifesto of art must embrace technology art must reflect you know we must redefine beauty beauty is no longer nature

beauty is a speeding car with fucking exhaust fumes chugging out of it that's what they viewed beauty as but they also viewed war mechanized war as as an absolute thing of beauty they viewed because you're talking 1909 so that's a few years before world war one so things like uh you know early types of tanks and cannons machine guns these things are being developed so the futurists in 1909 start to really fetishize the idea of brutal fucking mechanized war i mean marionetti himself he said that like must become, the metalization of man, man must become metal,

man must merge with machines. And the Futurist Manifesto, it viewed war as a hygienic type of cleansing, that the greatest cleansing product on earth is mechanized war. So there's all this really problematic shit within the Futurist Manifesto. So there's all this really problematic shit within the Futurist Manifesto. However, in terms of what it did for art, it was so forward thinking. Like it wanted to destroy everything that happened before it. They wanted to destroy museums and basically just had this mad horn for machines, industry.

That's the way forward. It was one of the most radical artistic movements and from the utter radicalism of it quite a lot of forward thinking and important stuff happened um but again you've got that fucking shadow of italian fascism like the futurists were friends with mussolini before Mussolini became a dictator and that hangs over futurism as this this awful shadow however they made these paintings fucking theater and play pieces that are unlike anything anyone had ever seen like they tore up the fucking rule book and really pushed art forward um from futurism you get you know much more interesting and less fascistic fucking art

movements in particular dada you know i i don't i i view futurism as something that happened in 1909 that was quite important but I wouldn't put it up there with Dada like Dada is much much more interesting to me Dada Dada is like the birth of post-modernism it's proto-post-modernism and Dada

like whereas the futurists in 1909 were going war is the great cleanser of the world uh mechanized fucking war with cannons and machine guns is going to be amazing in 1909 the futurists or sorry the dada manifesto which came out in 1916 right that was much different because by 1916 the world had seen the first few fucking years of World War one so the Futurists were being these hipsters in 1909 going yeah war is gonna be class with all these guns whereas the Dada lads were going no

we've seen it now for a couple of years this is fucking insanity the idea that a machine gun one gun can kill a hundred people so dada was like instead of viewing uh machines and technology and industry as as the way forward dada viewed it as the ultimate expression of deep human irrationality so as a result their art became absurd and comedic and humorous and from that we get surrealism you know but with futurism

it's important because I do need to start with futurism to get what I'm trying to go to with explaining the birth of heavy metal music em it's important to like to get what I'm trying to go to with explaining the birth of heavy metal music. It's important to, like, the word futurism and futurists is still used today. It's a different context today.

If someone's a futurist today, that means they're like a scientist or a science fiction author who are involved in trying to predict the future. That's different to Italian futurism. Italian futurism, it's a specific movement of the early 20th century that embraced invention, modernity, speed, disruption, energy and combat. But unfortunately also really, really embraced fascism. It's important to separate the two. And ultimately, what makes futurism so fucking dodgy, and it's like anyone who's into 20th century art history, futurism is the one that pricks up,

and it's the Michael Jackson of art movements. It's like what are you going to fucking do it's a group of fucking terrible people with terrible ideas some of what they contributed was

hugely fucking important and can't be ignored and it's a real problem for anyone who's into 20th century art history because the most toxic ideas of italian futurism they played out to devastating effect when you look at the single-minded ideology of the nazis and what they put into practice. Like the Nazi war technique of Blitzkrieg, which was, you know, a lightning war, and deliberately called lightning war,

you know, again, fetishizing speed and industry and machines, which no doubt has its roots back in Italian fascism, which would have been 20, 30 years previous to it. which no doubt has its roots back in Italian fascism, which would have been 20, 30 years previous to it, but Blitzkrieg, which was basically carpet bombing area with the speed and sudden intensity of bombs and factory-created weaponry

and then roll your tanks in. This single-minded thing that the Nazis used to conquer huge fucking areas, you can see the roots of that thinking and ideology in Italian Futurism. The ideology of the Holocaust, this idea of war as something that quote-unquote cleanses. Some really, really fucking bad, destructive ideas are born in Italian futurism, and the single-minded...

Nationalism is really hardcore rooted in Italian futurism too, you know, but the single-minded idea of, like, we are the ones with the technology, we are the ones with the power, we are the ones with the factory we are the ones with the power, we are the ones with the factory, therefore, everything we do is right, and nature means fuck all,

because we've conquered nature, so we're going to have a, we're going to set a plan, and we're going to use technology to do it, and fuck anyone who gets in the way, that's futurism, so, it's a tough one to talk about,

but, what I want to, about but what I want to the one bit I want to speak about specifically this week is in the 1920s futurism started to become interested in music specifically and

the most important manifesto in futurism I think is a manifesto that was written in, was it 1919, I believe? 1913. A chap, an Italian chap who was an Italian futurist called Luigi Rosolo, wrote a manifesto called The Art of Noise. Festo called The Art of Noise and it's one of the most prophetic and important

documents of the fucking 20th century regarding music and and basically like there's there's a lot of podcasts that I

can do where I can trace different fucking music directly back to what this manifesto simply got right and not only what it got right and what it predicted but what i find so interesting is so the futurists they had this this arrogance where they would you know come out with these manifestos and say, this is how things need to be and this is why things need to be. But the Art of Noise manifesto from 1913 really got a lot of shit incredibly right about 20th century music, which I find phenomenal. phenomenal and any conversation about the birth of electronic or electric music kind of has to start with this 1913 manifesto it really does whether

the musicians were even fucking aware of it and Rissolo basically he'd attended so by 1913 like the futurists embraced all different types of art there was poetry there was even futurist cookbooks there was pottery but also music and there had been a futurist performance

orchestral performance in Rome and by a lad called Pretella and basically what it was is that this orchestral piece it didn't use any conventional instruments so it didn't use like violins or cellos or fucking trumpets or whatever the fuck right it was like this orchestra that was made from pots and pans and machines it was it wasn't beautiful sweet music it was grating loud mechanical noise and this inspired risolo to write the manifesto the art of noises okay and in this manifesto mainly what risolo is kind of fetishizing is noise the concept of not like just music but noise noise being this new

thing that only humans can make so risolo's manifesto that was kind of it was written frantically and he'd previously painting was his shtick he hadn't even been that interested in music but this performance his futurist music performance he saw was it enamored him so much that he wrote this manifesto so his theory kind of went that you know music that basically humans have only ever essentially lived in a world of silence right that if you look right back to the history of music which was you know thousands of years old music reflected essentially what you'd hear in nature birds Birdsong, waterfalls, and noise didn't exist in nature. Only in freak occurrences such as an earthquake or a thunderstorm, noise only existed as a very rare traumatic event.

But humans invented the concept of noise, according risolo in his manifesto basically with the he credited it with the invention of the steam engine in the 1800s and that as soon as humans created the steam engine then noise became a thing so you have to realize you have to look at this in the context so this is 1913 humans have been living in industrial cities for 80 years only and risolo is basically saying the concept of loud abrasive cacophony it's like he was the first one like the other futurists were looking at you know aren't cars brilliant go fast you know kill people with weapons with mechanized weapons Rosolo was looking at the impact that machines have on how we hear on how humans experience sound and decibels and loudness and he was fucking spot on the level of loudness that someone living in Rome in 1913 is dealing with is fucking far far more chaotic and stressful than someone who'd been living in

Rome 300 years previously that this was the first generation essentially. That is dealing with. Loud noise. Non-stop. And not only one noise. But several noises at once. You and I take it for granted. You stick your fucking head out the window. And you hear that hum of a city.

You hear the fucking strange. Low vibrating rumble. Of a thousand fucking cars. Moving moving at once like that's fucking insanity and if you're living at the heart of a fucking city in an industrial city with steam and moving parts and clanking sounds and loud engines it's this continual cacophony so risolo reckoned that music has to develop that human music must develop to

accommodate and reflect noise and that music has to move from the sweet melodies that reflect birdsong and waterfalls into a place of disturbing. Loud fucking noises.

And like I said. A lot of what the futurists were saying. At the time was insane. Because they were asking for. A complete redefinition of beauty. As Marinetti said. Beauty is a speeding car. And now fucking

Rosolo is saying beauty is the clank of a fucking hammer the rumble of a steam engine beauty is the confusing horrible abrasive attack of a giant metal foundry that this is what beauty is

and music must reflect it in 1913 he was saying this one particular passage from the manifesto that I find so fucking just prophetic is he says each sound carries with it a nucleus of foreknown and foregone sensations

predisposing the auditor to boredom in spite of all the efforts of innovating composers all of us have liked and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters for years. Beethoven and Wagner have deliciously shaken our hearts, but now we're fed up with them. This is why we get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles and loud crowds than listening once more for instance to the heroic or pastoral symphonies like that's fucking

unbelievable so what he's saying there is like you know it's it's it's like uh you know it's like trying to go back and playing a fucking video game from your childhood. You can't, like Super Mario was incredible when I was fucking eight, but you can't go back

and play Super Mario. You can't because you've been exposed to so much more that you just can't go back and do it. And what Rassolo

is saying there in the manifesto is symphonic beauty, the previous orchestral works of the great masters that reflected sweet beauty, they just, they can't work anymore. They can't compete with a human

whose ears are accustomed to loud cacophony all the time the person in 1913 who's living in a city is going to get bored of the fucking these symphonies because their their aural environment doesn't reflect it anymore and he was so fucking on the ball now the thing is it wasn't intended to be on the ball. I don't. Like Rosolo in the manifesto wasn't saying. I think music is going to be this way. It was a manifesto.

And it was a futurist manifesto. So he was saying. Music has to become this way. And get the fuck out of the way. If you want. So he dedicated. Many many years then then to trying to create an orchestra of just these weird fucking instruments that sound horrible they you

know they sound more like kind of like air raid sirens if you look it up if you look up Luigi Rossollo's instruments you'll find some examples of them just weird loud sounds that they're not very melodic at all but you can't like this is what he really really got a lot of things fucking right and that particular passage where he said humans who experience loud sound all the time industrial sound they get fucking bored and they're going to need music that reflects this cacophony and we saw it with like i'm sure i even possibly mentioned this Futurist Manifesto when I was talking about techno and house coming out of Detroit and Chicago, you know, even Motown music, Motown coming out of Detroit, Motown is inseparable, like Motown fucking singers, the Motown writers, they were soul and gospel singers who lived in detroit because there was a car industry there and they spent their sundays singing in church but monday to friday they were working in a fucking car factory with these mechanized machines non-stop clank clank clank and from that

you know you listen to diana ross and theremes the whole Motown sound is a very strong rhythmic clank with tambourines and shit so Motown reflected the automobile industry of Detroit fucking techno music comes out of Detroit house music comes out of Chicago these industrial cities where the people who are making the music the working class black people are also working in fucking factories every day so the music has to reflect it that's just what happens so this is where i'm going to this is the hot take i'm going to with metal so i'm going to move on now from the futurists uh about fucking 50 years into the future but before we do that we're going to have our little ocarina pause

no fuck it we'll have our futurist pause where I clank my vape against a a nail clippers right and we'll use my gas lighter as well so here's the a pause

that's dedicated to the the elements of futurism that were concerned only with art but not the fascistic ideological elements that were concerned with nationalism. is the most terrifying. 666 is the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real.

What's not real? Who said that? The First Omen, only in theaters April 5th. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together

and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. War. Fuck that part. But I'll take the art part, please. sunrisechallenge.ca My gas lighter is essentially a miniature blowtorch. And then the vape. Fucking hell.

Talk about futuristic. Here I am. Not even fags anymore. Vaporizing nicotine liquid. So that was the futurist metal cacophony. Pause. For a bullshit advert. Whatever the fuck they're selling this week. This podcast is supported by you the listener

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please do that that's what keeps the podcast going that's what gives me a source of income I really appreciate anyone who does it, also share the podcast, tell a friend about it write a review, subscribe to it, all that crack, so

moving on I left you with Italian Futurism 1913, what happened after that? a lot of bad shit, okay? A load of fucking bad shit. The good bits of Futurism, the incredible forward thinking in terms of art,

embracing science, embracing new, these modernist principles, they moved forward to go on to influence fucking Picasso the surrealists Dada they picked those bits and then the shitty bits of futurism

the ideological bits very much went on to influence Mussolini Franco possibly and the Nazis and we all know how that fucking ended. One city that was badly bombed by the Nazis, of course, the north of England, right, was bombed to shit, because cities like Coventry and Birmingham in the north of England these were the industrial centers

of the UK and you know Rizzolo in 1913 was living in Rome which would have been industrialized but his contemporaries were living in Birmingham like if, if you watch Peaky Blinders, you know, Peaky Blinders is set in 1913, 1914, and it's set in Birmingham. And sometimes when I watch Peaky Blinders, like, it's... One thing they really nail is the visual element of...

It's when they do the wide shots right. What makes Peaky Peaky Blinders so lovely is. You've got these lads in tweed jackets and flat caps. Who look like they belong in a fucking farm. But they're living in these inner city laneways in Birmingham. And then when the camera pulls out. You see that this little pub they walk out of. The camera pulls out you see that this you know this little pub they walk out of the camera pulls out

and the pub is fucking dwarfed by this huge factory above it and you look at it going fuck me this looks like a dystopia you've these massive metal foundries in Birmingham in like 1913 with

molten fucking metal firing up into the sky and the air thick with fucking smog and everyone walking around in paddy caps on horseback and Peaky Blinders really nails that feeling that feeling of people just being so small compared to this huge industrial boom and revolution that's happening in 1913 so a lot of uh the british fucking planes and tanks and all that shit were being made in barmingham and coventry because they were the industrial centers so blitzkrieg the nazi technique of carpet bombing an area and then attempting to put tanks in there, which, as I said, is ideologically influenced by the determination of futurism.

Blitzkrieg, fucking Blitzkrieg, Birmingham, it made shit of Birmingham, it blew it to shit. Birmingham, this massive industrial city, was cut to ribbons and left in rubble. this massive industrial city was cut to ribbons and left in rubble and the weird thing about Britain is like it took fucking years for that to to get fixed like it's why you know I've been to Birmingham you know and I've been some of my BBC series I shot a lot of it around Birmingham and it's mad when you go there, because you go down to the older fucking industrial areas, you know, and you're still left feeling overwhelmed

by these giant bridges and all this stuff, and it's incredible to see, and to see something so large, and to think that it's so old, like a hundred years old, but, Birmingham's also kind of ugly, because the old city is gone, and they had to kind of ugly because the old city is gone

and they had to kind of hastily build these disgusting modernist buildings that's the other irony actually

you know is like modernist architecture like the classic we'll say

the Ballymun flats look shit that went up in the 60s and 70s um brutalism is the actual the name of the architectural style this idea of perfect square fucking concrete blocks of tower blocks you know put people in these boxes and they'll be grand pure modernistic thinking you can trace that to an architectural and artistic school called the Bauhaus but again everything goes back to fucking futurism so it's ironic how futurism you know you've got Birmingham this industrial city

Blitzkrieg destroys it this ideology that can trace itself to futurism and what grows in its place you know, these fucking horrible modernist like the bullring in Birmingham is yucky, I'm sorry Birmingham but it's not nice it's 1960s very cheap looking architecture

but it's ironic that futurism thinking destroys Birmingham and then what props up from it are these horrible modernist buildings that similarly can trace themselves to that ideology but that was just a bit of a segue there that I found interesting but

so what am I doing in Birmingham why am I in Birmingham heavy metal comes from Birmingham alright heavy metal comes from Birmingham alright heavy metal was born in fucking Birmingham and I it's not

I don't see it as any coincidence I trace it directly back to what Rosolo was saying in that Futurist Manifesto now metal

like most of ye ok some of ye are going to be actual heavy metal fans like myself and the ones who aren't are at least aware of metal you know not everyone likes it but i think what we can all agree is metal is is noise like when I first started listening to metal as a teenager and I'd have been listening to like Slipknot which is and Sepultura which is really heavy shit but it's the classic your fucking da your ma comes in

and they're shocked and they're going what the fuck are you listening to that's not music that's noise and in a sense that's what metal is like it's metal and some like like, real hardcore techno, but metal in particular, it is fucking nice, yes, there's melody in there, now, it's undeniably beautiful, of course, it's beautiful, metal is very beautiful, otherwise, so many people wouldn't enjoy it, I find fucking great beauty in metal and what I find is that

metal is the it's the it's the realisation of Rosolo's words I shouldn't find metal beautiful yet I do it does something to me it makes fucking sense and it has to be

it's you know I'm from a fucking city I live with cacophony I live with noise so metal makes sense to me and it is the ultimate realisation of what Rosolo was saying in his manifesto but

metal is it's symphonic metal is today's orchestral music because it's that big it's symphonic metal is is today's orchestral music because it's that big it's it's epic and it's orchestral and it's battle-like and it's unlike other forms of music and i think metal like it fulfills the musical role that huge symphonic orchestral pieces would have fulfilled fucking 200 years ago. Metal fulfills that role. It's an epic energy and feeling that kind of breaks the rules of other music. But Birmingham is as important to metal

as Detroit is to techno as New York is to hip hop I think hip hop is the best analogy there because and I did my hip hop podcast last year hip hop comes from New York and hip hop was from one small area in the Bronx and now it's the biggest music in the world. Metal's the same.

You can trace metal to one little fucking area and band in Birmingham. So what I want to talk about is firstly the memetic mutation that caused the emergence of metal. And the environment and how and why it happened and why all of that is relevant to the Futurist Manifesto so I'm not going to get into

so if you want to trace metal you've got to go to the blues I'm not going to do that today because it's a separate podcast the blues is too fucking big, it's too huge, and you can't have a conversation about the blues unless you're willing to have a conversation about West African music fucking 200 years ago, so I'm not gonna get into the blues, let's just say a thing called the blues happened, the blues turned into a thing called rock and roll in the 1950s,

and rock and roll then started to get a little bit heavy around the 60s, in particular how guitars were used, alright? Again, this is something I'm only going to tip upon because it's a fucking separate podcast but distortion guitar fucking distortion right which is heavy guitar sounds it was again that's a kind of an accident if you want to trace you know where

does the first guitar distortion come from the Kinks a British band, the guitar player Dave Davies, he says straight up, he stuck razor blades into his amplifier, he doesn't know why he did it, and he played a fucking guitar chord

on a song called You Really Got Me, and that is the first example of guitar distortion, and it was the first time people really were like, fuck, this noise that the guitar is making i shouldn't like this it sounds kind of ugly but yet it's beautiful and right there that's what risolo was talking about the redefinition of beauty as nice as something that shouldn't be beautiful but yet it is because the ears that are listening are ears that are accustomed to cacophony.

To violent cacophony of just existing in a city. So from that you've obviously got Jimi Hendrix in the late 60s. Jimi Hendrix really used the guitar distortion. And then, now I'm glossing over this shit, like I said, I'm deliberately glossing over it, because I can't give it the attention it deserves, because that's another podcast,

so I'm going to go to a band called Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin, didn't invent metal, most people wouldn't say Led Zeppelin were the first metal band, but they were, if a genetic mutation occurs Led Zeppelin were definitely one of the parents do you get me?

like something some freak gene occurs and this creates a new branch well in order for this gene to occur two organisms need to have sex and one of those organisms was definitely Led Zeppelin.

I'll play a tiny little bit of Led Zeppelin now just to contextualise how this, very shortly afterwards, turns into metal. So this is a song called Black Dog. 1968, I believe. And what you're hearing here, this is essentially just the blues. It's because Led Zeppelin started off as a fucking blues band. You can trace half of them to a group called the Yardbirds, which were 60s fucking R&B.

Jimmy Page, the most important one in Led Zeppelin. I would say Jimmy Page and John Bannum, the fucking drummer, but Jimmy Page in particular, was a very adept blues guitarist, who just started to get just a little bit heavier, and more distorted by the end of the 60s, okay, so what you're hearing here is, it's blues, but it's just blues, it's just that little bit louder. Okay, 1968, Black Dog, Led Zeppelin. so yeah right with that you can hear um you can hear the guitar distortion that's being used there i mean it's it's that part of the guitar that sounds like a fart i don't know i'm trying to i have to be careful in describing these things because i'm

fucking playing instruments for years so i'm trying to remember back what it was like to have no context because some people don't have any context for instrumentation but basically what you're hearing there 1968 is that, that's just straight blues, but it's blues just, it's post-Hendrix blues that's done a little bit fucking heavier. But, it's still blues. It's still standard guitar tuning, Robert Plant singing, like that hasn't changed much from fucking robert johnson in the 1920s it's still blues but it's blues with a new shirt on and a new set of pants it's it's a louder blues nothing has fundamentally changed in the music when we start to see the fundamental change uh and the first ever example of what can be considered heavy metal and what most people

say this is the birth of fucking heavy metal this is the genetic mutation comes out of Birmingham 1970 Black Sabbath and Black Sabbath are fucking incredible

I prefer Black Sabbath to Led incredible, I prefer Black Sabbath to Led Zeppelin, I will happily listen like the first two or three albums of Black Sabbath I will listen to more than I listen to Led Zeppelin one of the issues with Black Sabbath we all know

Ozzy Osbourne, alright, everyone knows who fucking Ozzy Osbourne is we know him from reality TV in the 2000s we know Sharon Osborne most people when they think of Ozzy Osborne it's either reality TV or mad stories about him on drugs or biting the head off a bat and Ozzy's personality was so big that it often overshadows the importance and contribution of his band Black Sabbath who invented fucking heavy metal uh it starts with Black Sabbath not I wouldn't give the credit to I know that's that that's a bit unfair on Ozzy i would give most credit to the guitar player tony iomi right

so here's the crucial thing black sabbath come out of birmingham they're really kind of working class fucking birmingham right in they they're all born around the 1940s right so by 1970 they're all about 20 they grow up in a Birmingham whereby like I said Birmingham in the 1940s and 1950s is a city of rubble they grow up in the burnt out rubble

of a city that had been fucking bombed to bits and not only the burnt out rubble. But. People who died. The intense. Trauma of war. They were born into the trauma of post war Britain. In a city.

That had been bombed to bits. Where lives were lost. Where you can still smell the fucking smoke. Where. Even throughout the 40s and 50s there were air raid sirens every second week because they'd found an unexploded bomb in a church. So they grew up with collapsing fucking industry. They grew up with the failure of industry. But still, life continuing around them as an industrial city so they grew up knowing

nothing other than industry and incredible like this is what it kind of departs from from futurism so if you look at like the futurist viewed industry and industrial cities and machinery as the solution to all problems the pure modernist fucking this is incredible this is amazing this will solve everything but black sabbath as children growing up in the slums of birmingham surrounded by smoke and smog and burnt out fucking rubble buildings and the odd bit of industry still going they grew up with the failure of industry and moments like that there that's what makes something be post-modern do you get me because post-modernism is about the ironic rejection and failure of some of the ideals of modernism so i do view metal music as it's post-modern in in the way that hip-hop is in the way that fucking disco is it's

it doesn't come from modernism it's a response to it and world war ii is like world war ii is a response to modernism if you get the horn for fucking machinery and war so much that you try and have a lash at it and then you end up fucking losing millions and millions of people because of it

that's the failure of modernism right there so Black Sabbath grew up with the failure of the futurist vision of this perfect industrial future

of progress and instead grew up in its rubble but still you know are surrounded by this doom and fucking gloom the members of Black Sabbath themselves will stray

it up they'll talk about their childhoods as being intensely fucking unhappy they grew up in poverty surrounded by smoke and rubble and you know these people their grandparents would have been like the peaky blinders fucking generation they grew up with the the failure of like when black sabb Sabbath were teenagers the musical world that would have been around them it would have been late 60s fucking hippie bullshit

you know which in England was very much a middle class idealistic type of carry on and one of the parallels I see with metal as it came out of Birmingham and we'll say hip hop as it came out of Birmingham and we'll say hip-hop as it came out of New York

the early hip-hop artists they created hip-hop and rap as a response to disco having its head in the sand the early hip-hop artists will say if you look at disco music of the late 70s like Sheik for example no nothing against Nile Rodgers is a look at disco music of the late 70s, like Chic, for example. No, nothing against Nile Rodgers is a fucking genius. The music of Chic is incredible. But Chic songs are celebratory. You know, good times. These are some good times.

This was the music that was being played in New York to the African-American communities in the late 70s. These are some good times. But the people of the Bronx, living in the Bronx, were living in rubble. The Bronx was burning. You had Donald Trump and his da selling everything off. Landlords were burning buildings just to fucking, to rebuild them. So the Bronx was a real fucking slum in the late 70s.

And the early hip-hop artists straight up said, disco music had its head in the sand. Disco music was funky. It was fun to dance to. But nothing that disco music was doing said anything about the lives that we were living. Right? And if you listen to interviews with fucking Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath will say straight up, Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath will say straight up

we grew up in working class Birmingham with rubble and factories and unexploded bombs and no opportunities and coupled with the fact as well that by the 1970s when Black Sabbath formed as a band

the industrial dream of Britain was starting to disappear like the golden age of industry was starting to go. Like it was still 10 years before fucking Thatcher. But by the 70s, unions are falling apart. The north of England is, the future isn't as bright as it would have been previously. Do you know what I mean?

So the lads in Black Sabbath were quite unhappy and they felt that hippie music and prog rock, progressive rock in particular, was just this airy-fairy bullshit that wasn't speaking to them about their lives. And prog in particular, like, the lyrical content of a lot of prog rock, again, I do, like, some prog rock is fucking amazing, Pink Floyd, like, Jesus, it's unbelievable, it's class, I like Yes as well, I love Yes, ironically, Yes are a prog rock band, very, you know, virtuoso, nice to listen to, whatever, but very much lacking in soul and balls, you know. And a lot of prog rock lyrics were about fairies and kind of J.R.R. Tolkien type mythology,

very head in the clouds type stuff, very intellectual music. A lot of prog rock musicians were kind of middle class fucking kids in London who'd been classically trained since they were children you know and this didn't speak to ozzy osbourne and his friends in birmingham but ironically yes the band yes uh trevor horn who was in yes who would have gone to art college he ended up having a band called the art of noise in the 1980s which was directly named themselves after the futurist manifesto but what i'm getting at and what why i'm mentioning prog rock and its lyrical themes is because what one thing about early metal music british british metal music is before i start

speaking about the sound because that's what i want to focus on the lyrical content, if you listen to early Black Sabbath lyrics, it was almost like this really dark, mean response to prog rock lyrics. So if prog rock lyrics were about Tolkien-esque goblins and fairies, well, metal was about demons and ghosts and fucking, you know, Black Sabbath. demons and ghosts and fucking you know black sabbath that's a fucking black mass where you fucking conjure up the devil it was lyrically

very doomy gloomy dark stuff and very ugly but beautifully ugly you know great beauty in the ugliness so this is what I want to get to the ugliness So this is This is what I want to get to

Here's the genetic mutation This is the most important thing That happened In heavy metal music And what created heavy metal It all comes down To the guitar player Tony Iommi

Tony Iommi Grown up in Birmingham He was kind of Got to about 16 He was dossing off And his ma basically made him go and get a job in a factory, in a metal foundry

in Birmingham which I just think is so fucking beautiful not only because this is how, this is the genetic mutation that causes heavy metal to be born and how it so perfectly reflects the futurist manifesto of 1913 so Tony Iommi's working in this

metal foundry with these huge cacophonous clanks and bangs all around him and these explosions of fucking fire and molten fucking metal and he ends up using this machine, and he wasn't too experienced with it, to cut sheet metal. Now at this point, he'd already been a guitar player, so Tony Iommi, he was playing blues. He would have wanted to sound like Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin. So Tony Iommi, at 16, 17, would have been a handy enough electric guitar player, and wanted to play rhythm and blues. been a handy enough electric guitar player and wanted to play rhythm and blues he was already playing in rhythm and blues bands and would have been playing his guitar and music and it would have sounded similar to led zeppelin the yard birds okay and this is late 60s but when tony

iommi is using this metal machine he chops off fucking three of the fingers on his left hand. The tips of his fingers. So now he's like fuck. I'm a guitar player. How the fuck am I supposed to play guitar. If the tops of my left fingers are gone. Because you need to have your fucking left fingers. If you'll be playing guitar.

So Tony Iommi doesn't give up. Because he loves electric guitar so much and someone had told him when he was really upset about fuck it, will I ever properly play guitar again my tips of my fingers are gone someone told him about there's a great guitarist

a gypsy guitarist called Django Reinhardt he ended up in a caravan fire and his hand was fused together anyway so Django Reinhardt is one of the most legendary guitar players of all time who had a disfigured hand and this inspired

Tony Iommi so what he did was he got a washing up liquid bottle and melted down the plastic and made himself little plastic fingertips for his finger right and he whips out his guitar and he starts playing and he's doing his best but he's feeling kind of depressed and shitty that

like without a doubt even with his new plastic fucking prosthetic fingers that he's made himself he can't play guitar the way he used to be able to play it he just can't do it so he starts to figure fuck this i'm not giving up right and this is here's where the fucking genetic mutation comes in so first off he goes for lighter strings on the guitar because because he's missing his fingers he can't put the force on the fretboard to make the cards right so he needs to change the guitar now to adjust to his new hand so he gets lighter strings but crucially he tunes the guitar down so that the way guitar strings work is they're they're tense right and in standard e tuning or even in in spanish tuning that maybe slide guitar blues would be done in the strings like

jimmy page's strings in led zeppelin at standard tuning they're going to be tense and in order to make those chords you need a certain amount of resistance so Tony Iommi because he was missing fingers could no longer do this so he decides if I tune the guitar down if I tune it lower what this does is it reduces tension on the strings and now he's still able to play guitar but his guitar is lower and then all of a sudden he goes well my fucking guitar is lower. So I need to compensate for these things that I now must do. So he starts turning up the bass on his amp. And this here is the genetic mutation that creates heavy metal music.

So Tony Iommi then he starts knocking around with Ozzy Osbourne and him and the lads formed this fucking group called Black Sabbath and the name came from the name that after a horror film they'd saw but they'll all say that the sound that Tony Iommi had gotten on his guitar because of his fucking fingertips that were chopped chopped off. In a sheet metal factory. In Birmingham. The sound of his guitar. Sounded so. Noisy. And depressing.

And so full of doom. And. Like. Because the blues is about sadness. Like the blues. Comes from. You know. The incredibly oppressed conditions. of fucking black people in

mississippi in america so the blues is always about sadness but metal which derives from the blues it's got an act it's got something else it's it's more than sadness it's it's a a depression it's a menace it's an anger it's doom it's war it's a drone that's what metal has but tony fucking iomi's guitar when he played it had this and when tony iomi was rehearsing whatever fucking the other thing too is that because he was missing the fingertips he had to make bar cards and power cards which means you're losing melody you can't make complex sweet shapes

you have to do these kind of what's the word for it they're more kind of beefy they're lacking in sweetness and melody and they're much more percussive do you know what I mean so his his hand essentially is

leading him towards this sound of doom and Ozzy hears it and Ozzy is just like well that's the most fucking depressing guitar sound I've ever heard now my lyrics need to also be this depressing and this terrifying and this scary

this horror sound and right there fucking metal is born that's how heavy metal is born and i'm gonna play for you now the first what most people would consider the first ever heavy metal song and this is the 1970 album black sabbath by black sabbath and the song is called black sabbath which is great so here's black sabbath by black sabbath from the album black sabbath but just when you contrast it to led zeppelin a year previously, it's... Do you know what it is too? It's fucking simplicity. Tony Iommi was... If you listen to Jimmy Page when he was doing Led Zeppelin,

it's very quick and it's very dexterous and there's a lot of notes. Tony Iommi couldn't go there. So he had to have an economy of notes. So you've got this dummy depressing sound with less notes, but more concentration on the riff and right here here is the genetic mutation

and a new genre is born right here at this moment Thank you. Right, so in a perfect world, I'd be playing you the full track for all of this, but I can't, obviously, because it might get pulled down off fucking iTunes or whatever. But that's Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath and what I mean that's just I love that to be able to say that like that's the first metal song like it's the first song off that album because it just what a fucking intro like it just and What a fucking intro. Like it just. And what I find so. Like I genuinely feel.

That the Black Sabbath's early music. And that early heavy metal. It's a way of processing trauma. It's children. People. Kids who grew up after. Like a lot of them may have even remembered the blitz when they were children they might have have memories of being in the cot when barman ham was being bombed from the fucking sky and that song sounds like i mean it opens with rain and the church bell this fucking english sound of the church bell and

then this massive drone of fucking doom comes in and to me it sounds like blitzkrieg that literally sounds like like an orchestral theatrical rendition of what it what it was like for the people of Birmingham in the 40s and late 30s to be at home in bed after spending the day working in the factory and then there's 500 fucking Luftwaffe bombers in the sky dropping bombs all around them and chaos and panic

and rubble and fire and it sounds like that to me I view early British heavy metal like that because barmanham has a tradition there's judas priest come out of barmanham you've got fucking napalm death another really they're from the 80s but a really important metal band out of barmanham too well don't know they're between barmanham and coventry two cities destroyed by fucking bombs but i i hear when i hear that it's i hear trauma being processed through orchestral anger that's what that is it's it's the it's the bombing of fucking barman Birmingham and what's also ironic is so that's 1970 and Black

Sabbath are just, they didn't know they were making heavy metal they just knew we have this fucking anger inside us Tony Iommi's after fucking up his fingers and we have this thing that we're doing and it just feels right they didn't know they were inventing a new fucking genre

but you can clearly hear that is very different to Led Zeppelin two years beforehand it's totally different it's a whole new thing it's a new energy and when Black Sabbath then and this is what I find interesting and why I take it back to the war thing and the war trauma and why i find it so interesting why i hear that as as a processing of trauma from bombing is when black sabbath started to play in america about three years later they started to do small gigs in america it would have been at the very end stages of the Vietnam War and lyrically a lot of that first album like there's a song called War Pigs when Black Sabbath were playing America in like 72 it was the ending stage of the Vietnam War and at that point too, in America, people were very angry about Vietnam because of the draft. There were riots.

And there was an interview with Black Sabbath where they were talking about their first gigs in America. And they hadn't a clue. Like, again, they're just lads from Birmingham. They start doing gigs. And what they notice is the front rows of all their gigs, it's just young men in wheelchairs. is the front rows of all their gigs it's just young men in wheelchairs and these men were lads who'd just come

young men who'd just come back from fucking Vietnam who'd been blown to bits and what Black Sabbath noticed in particular with the song War Pigs off that album Black Sabbath when they'd play that song the soldiers' friends the the veterans friends these young veterans would would pick the lads up out of their wheelchairs and help them to stand so the veterans

who'd had their legs blown off a year previously would stand to the song war pigs and ozzy and tony iomi were talking about it saying they didn't understand it but these Vietnam veterans somehow were processing their trauma of Vietnam through whatever the fuck Black Sabbath's music was doing whatever it is whatever symphonic doom anger aggression that metal can do it was working for these veterans and yes it's coincidental but again i don't see these things as coincidence because like i say i'm always searching for how does music emerge from an environment and if Black Sabbath's music emerges from the rubble of fucking war

and industry and it's a product of that as a way of reprocessing trauma which of course it is because music is the expression of trying to understand your environment of course it's going to ring true with young lads halfway across the world who'd just seen bombings of course it's going to ring true with young lads halfway across the world who'd

just seen bombings of course it is because it's tapping at the same parts of the fucking unconscious where that music is speaking to and i just think it's why i started off this podcast talking about the futurist manifesto the art of noises that black sabbath song and heavy metal in general that's the full and ultimate realization of what luigi rosolo was talking about that right there is like the futurists were trying their best to have their symphonies of queer instruments and machines and talking about we must redefine beauty to accommodate noise

which in the 1920s people are going alright lads chill out you're playing a petrol engine up on stage this is yucky but Black Sabbath they realised that vision without being aware and this is what makes it class I doubt highly that black

sabbath were aware of the fucking futurist manifesto of 1913 the fucking prog rock musicians who had a bit more money and who would have gone to art school maybe they had the advantage of knowing about artistic manifestos, but Ozzy fucking didn't, neither did Tony Iommi, but yet, in the smoky, rubble, fucking, industrial, Birmingham, bombed out city, they managed to find the sound that realises

the goals and intentions of that manifesto, 50 years later, and I just find that phenomenal, I find it fucking fascinating so I'll wrap it up now because that's 90 minutes it's that wasn't a history of metal podcast

that was, it was a hot take about Italian futurism and trying to tie that bit specifically up with the birth of metal. And. Like I said. All I spoke about there really.

Was the moment metal was born. I didn't talk about. Metal's parents. I didn't talk about metal's grandparents. That's a different podcast. I'm going to be. Probably returning to fucking futururism again at some stage because I have

many fucking hot takes about other forms of music and how they relate to Futurism too so I hope you enjoyed that go listen to fucking Black Sabbath if you enjoy music

like I said the reason I'm saying that is because for some reason like Black Sabbath are respected amongst people who are really into their metal but I just think

the stories of Ozzy Osbourne and the reality TV and him being a drug fuelled mad bastard I think that shit just overshadowed the fact that and the reality TV, and him being a drug-fueled mad bastard, I think that shit just overshadowed the fact that the first few Black Sabbath albums are incredible. Really incredible. If you like heavy fucking rock music, they're amazing.

And it invented heavy metal. They fucking invented a genre, so fair play to them. Alright, yart. I'll talk to you next week. I have a science themed podcast next week fuck half Thank you. rock city you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First

Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.