brain and body are like jelly
I’ve put off blogging this while changing hosts, but it’s time to clear out some open tabs. Wow, The New York Times Magazine has a long profile about doom-rockers Sunn o)). If you’re unfamilar with the band, Sunn o)) plays a deep droning metal that Jaeger once mistaked for mp3s played at the wrong bitrate. They’ve been written up in national publications before, but I’m surprised to see the somewhat stodgy Magazine devote that much space to a fairly obscure art-metal band.
I’m not much of a metal fan, but Sunn o)) is exactly my cup of tea. I enjoy their dark, rumbling songs that take the core of metal and distill it to its essence. The NYTimes story acknowledges that many Sunn o)) fans are not metal fans, but come to the band through indie rock and experimental music. The author John Wray describes the audience at a recent Knitting Factory show thusly:
On closer inspection, you would have noticed that surprisingly few people in the room had the look of genuine metal heads; big hair was in notably short supply, and the ratio of button-downs to heavy metal T-shirts was approximately one to one.
While he acknowledges the disparity between Sunn o)) fans and stereotypical metal fans, I wonder if he elides issues of cultural capital between the audiences. Indie rock fans might place Sunn in the context of drone bands like Spacement 3 or noise artists like Merzbow, while metal fans might get pure visceral enjoyment out of low-frequency tones. Sunn o)) is certainly a connoisseur’s music, but you don’t need to be a connoisseur to enjoy it. Wray complicates the indie-snob/metalhead dichotomy by outlining the history of doom metal, noting how there are issues of connoisseurship within the doom metal community. I’m a little too scattered to really articulate what I’m thinking, but I think what makes Sunn o)) worthy of note in the Magazine is the fact that the band takes a low-brow music (metal) and makes it interesting to art audiences. And Sunn o)) is awesome.
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