Heavy Metal Music (Japan): BABYMETAL's Gimme Chocolate

BACKGROUND READ: BABYMETAL: Japan's Way of Redefining Heavy Metal Music

The genre of Heavy Metal music is not as familiar to the African ear as Hip Hop, which casual observers in the diaspora and elsewhere tend to find closer to Rock & Roll than Heavy Metal has been or is ever going to be.  Still, both do share roots -- ideologically contested/spliced roots, if you like -- in Western culture. We won't get into the debate as to the true (the one?) cultural-musical precursor(s) of Elvis Presley's guitar-'wielding' rock style here, though. More importantly, heavy metal is an unavoidable, an undeniable, landscape of today's musical universe  So when a new voice carries from that or whichever direction, the unencumbered ear -- the always open ear -- which never stops hearing, hears and even listens.

READ (1): The Pros and Cons of Hip Hop vs. Heavy Metal

READ (2): Comparison Essay -- Heavy Metal vs. Hip Hop

BABYMETAL is the source of such a voice, happy to say -- though I heard of it, then heard it, for the first time, as far as I can remember, only today (less than three hours ago), via a tweet (from @Japan_Info_ ).

A trio of young female singers from Japan, BABYMETAL is making intriguing heavy-metal waves in parts of the world. As a generic thing, heavy metal never ceases to intrigue, of course. It's so much a part of modernity's DNA, post the Stone Age. Both of which we own,

There's a soft side to BABYMETAL, is what I see in Gimme Chocolate. And I don't think the girls would like to be seen, to be read, as too hard -- hard as they're, p'raps, trying. Chocolate is dark, smooth and to be savored -- with a cool and deliberate and wait-a-minute demeanor. A spin-and-blend of metaphors, then.

So, what exactly do we have here, in Gimme Chocolate? Why is Yambo interested? Yambo is, of course, always interested in sound and doubly/trebly moving things. More? Simply this: The video starts with a very African flourish. I like that. And it's playful (that, too), which shouldn't faze any adults in the room (Loom?). The sounds are well-controlled. The lights. The colors. All rich, all good in their colorful Ness. All (en)chanting. I didn't want to say magical.

The crowd's fully engaged and having a gud, gud tyme. Here, somewhere, a little touch of Jimi Hendrix's inimitable stringplay. There, everywhere: good afternoon (ph)un. Night fun. Morning fun. All depending on your GMT longitude.

It all ends with a true, uplifting, crowd-sourced cheer! And so cheerio.

PS: Click here for a review and video of BABYMETAL's Road of Resistance 

Out of Africa: A Comment on Dr. Alice Roberts' "The Incredible Human Journey"

On December 28, 2010 (as part of my holiday fare), I watched for the first time, on BBC Knowledge (relayed by DSTV), Alice Roberts' documentary titled "The Incredible Human Journey".

This is not the first TV account of human migration out of Africa, based ultimately on qualitative evidence -- evidence gleaned, as in certain earlier accounts, in part from archaeology, anthropology and climatology; but mostly from DNA databases. And because it is not the first, it lacks that indelible "first teller's" aha moment that some of us have already been exposed to (and told and retold in lectures). Nevertheless, it remains an incredible rendition, in its own right, of our ancestors' drive, weed-like, at once single-minded and unintended, toward world "domination"; a drive to claim and take possession of an entire planet -- and beyond the planet, going "forth", who knows?

Her documentary adds refreshing twists (and certain images) to the broad, paradigm-shifting, technicolor script:

Such as the chain-reaction (or a sort of kalausi) of human movement -- up and down, east and west, round and round -- that went on for millennia within the African continent before the original "China Syndrome" moment was reached; and with it, the release.

Such as the journey through Turkey and up the Danube (wonder if they gave an ancient name to that river as they rowed and remarked upon its convenience) into greater Europa.

Such as sailing down the west coast of the Americas, after a long, but always driven, wandering through Siberia's permafrost -- into the northern badlands and, farther (across the equator once again), into the deep jungles of the South. [Or was it simply a hugging and not letting go of the coastline, rather than dedicated sailing, perhaps enticed by the sudden abundance of (sea) food, and discouraged by the rugged hilliness of Alaska? I ask this because I wonder: Where and when would necessity have prompted this branch of migrants (not being, I suppose, the ones who rowed up the Danube) to invent and develop sea-faring technology (hardware and software) during the thousands of years that they lived deep in Siberia?]

The documentary is in turn testament to the grandeur and connectedness of Ms. Roberts' own awe-inspiring, passionate, umbilical journey.

And I would like to share it with you (click here to see)

Postscript: Sorry, just found out that the video is no longer available on YouTube. Instead, a DVD version can be purchased online ~MY, April 28, 2012.

SEE SAMPLE OF THE BOOK HERE: Alice Roberts' (2009) The Incredible Human Journey: The Story of How We Colonised the Planet. London: Bloomsbury

The Three-Legged Stool of Antiquity

Heaven's the abode of Threeness, and of Threeness in Oneness. That is to say, of the Trinity

Geometry and culture mirror this threeness, in which they see, with an inner eye unconstrained by our actual experiences of physical Nature, a liberating logic of ascendant presence.

Hence the triangle as such -- from which arise so many constructs of the mind and habit -- but, above all, the three-legged stool of antiquity, which is in our cultural DNA. The three-dimensional, or triangulated, gaze is the conflation of geometry and perception without which there is neither depth nor wholesomeness, and no accuracy in the gauging of height or distance or circumstance.

It seems to me that Nature -- pure, two-legged and four-legged Nature -- finds threeness, in particular three-legged motion, ugly and unwarranted; ungainly in its inherent inefficiency. Contrary to its nature.

Culture, the true contrarian here, finds three-leggedness per se a necessary, periodic detour from Nature's settled purposes that so overwhelm the human gaze from day to day. A detour and even a destination. It, three-leggedness, is not just a stance (and standpoint) but a source of great stability and reassurance (as in the stool, and in second opinions). In marriage, the first child (together with all the children that may follow) is the family's third leg, the sign that the woman and even wife is become a mother -- even of the nation. So is the walking stick a third leg, for the elderly and the infirm. We encounter the three-leg motif in the cooking stones of the village fire and the hearth.

But, as in the love triangle, threeness is also an affirmation of ever-present chaos, and its potentialities.

As for the inherent expectation of motion where ever there are legs, culture offers a simple solution. It gives threeness wheels, in return for an absence of, or quasi-arthritic, limb motion.

Feast of The Immaculate Conception

Today, Catholics the world over celebrate the feast of The Immaculate Conception of Mary mother of Jesus. It is the 532nd such celebration, the first having been presided over by Pope Sixtus IV on December 8th 1476, so long ago. However, historical evidence suggests that the memetic roots of the Immaculate Conception trace back to ninth century England.

As a Catholic, who was once a Sacristan, I must confess that at some point I lost the distinction -- which I suppose we were once as catechists taught, taught when our English was still raw (which is not the same thing as the English in us) and when, perhaps, our attention was raging to be elsewhere -- between the immaculate conception of Mary herself and the virginal birth of her son, and God's son, Jesus Christ the Redeemer. The point being made to us was that she conceived and delivered Him when/while/though she was a virgin, but her own mother had not herself been a virgin.

Over the years I have fused the two notions, forgetting (and presently and belatedly surprised) that we were in our youth asked to believe that Mary herself was born without original sin, essentially taking the immaculate conception to be about the conditions of Jesus' own birth. I totally missed that fine point. No wonder I didn't become the priest my late father, a devout Catholic who must now be in heaven, had dreamt that I, his eldest, would be.

As it turns out, however, I was not alone in this. It is even possible that many and perhaps most Catholics, nowadays, wallow in that confusion. To re-frame Santayana's notion of chaos, that distinction is an "order of thought", a liturgical order, which brings confusion in our minds.

Though her conception was shorn of the "stain" of the original sin, which Adam and Eve committed somewhere here in Africa and perhaps East Africa (if the human-origin narrative of DNA experts is to be tagged to the biblical account of the Garden of Eden and the goings on at the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge), it was the product of sexual intercourse. In contrast, Jesus was conceived as a result of the Word, relayed to Mary by God's own angelic emissary, Gabriel. His was virginal conception, and just as endowed with grace.

When first mooted by Sixtus IV, the concept of the Immaculate Conception was not labelled a dogma of the Church; that is, as something which believers must believe. This left Catholics, who chose to, free to treat it as untrue, without the risk of excommunication on grounds of heresy. It was declared a dogma only in the 19th Century -- more precisely on December 8th, 1854 -- by Pope Pius IX.

That dogma was taught to my parents, both devout; and later to us, but perhaps only in passing. I think the confusion in our minds arose from the fact that we were being asked to believe two very ngumu ("hard"), very counter-intuitive, ideas rolled up essentially into one. A choice was made. And since Mary was not the Daughter of God, nobody went that far, it was easier to take away from her the more poetic and graceful notion of immaculate conception, which was indeed her's, and to attach it to Jesus -- whose own label of "virginal birth" somehow rang too mundane. Perhaps I am projecting a present thought-process into a past in which we thought rather more at face value, rather more intuitively. But perhaps the point here is that the two thought-processes meet at the very same standpoint.

I stop here, for I simply wanted somehow to link this day with a part of my youth, to toss up ideas which continue to puzzle. To learn more about all this, the reader must click here: A History of the Immaculate Conception.