METALLICA and LOU REED – Lulu (Part 2)

Did you know that sex and death are the only subjects seriously interesting to an adult? We have Yeats to thank for that insight. That’s right. Jenn Lao is talking fucking Yeats in this discussion of Loutallica’s Lulu. Other guest appearances include Franz Kafka, Lady Gaga, and I Heart Huckabees. Brandon even chimes in for an incredulous WTF? quick response. I promise you, the conversation derived from this album is about 100 times more interesting than the album, itself.

Loutallica – “The View” (far more interesting if you imagine it as a song about the daytime television show with Barbara Walters)

From: Jenn Lao
To: Brandon Hall

Brandon forgot to add that in the middle of that Thanksgiving scene, a 6-foot rat walks through the front door, picks up the half-eaten turkey that is sitting on the dining room table, dropkicks it across the living room, grabs a carton of eggs from the fridge, and then walks out the back door. I desperately want to end my review of Lulu here, but I know that if I did, it would only spawn a longer response from Brandon, introduce more questions, and provoke him to use the word “Camp” another 50 times. That is to say, I am terrified that if I don’t write a longer response, Brandon will begin to enjoy Lulu and my cardinal rule is that friends don’t let friends listen to Metallica. More so, friends who love music are obligated to shoot friends who love music before they get anywhere near Loutallica. So consider this my community service act for the month.

I had to look up a more simplified definition of Camp, which is a concept “that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value.” Oh, so it’s like society’s obsession with celebrities. To elaborate, some key points of this esoteric concept highlighted by Sontag:

1.     “It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.”

2.     “To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it.”

3.     And most importantly, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks.” (See? The concept does incorporate some logic.)

Some examples of “Camp” include Franz Kafka’s the Metamorphosis, Lady Gaga, the opera, the religious group Heaven’s Gate, those socks that have the individual toes sewn in them, and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” The movie I Heart Huckabees does a great job poking fun at the concepts such as “Camp,” which is represented as the philosophy of “Existentialism” in the movie. Staying true to the second key point of “Camp,” watch me now stop talking about it.

“bing”

As vaguely alluded to on Loutallica’s website, Metallica, is “the world’s best selling rock band (with well over 100 million albums sold)” so naturally their collaboration with Lou Reed was an obvious–and anticipated–one. This collaboration was ultimately born in the drugged out mind of Reed, and is based on two plays by the German playwright, Frank Wedekind. These plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, center around the protagonist, a femme fatale named Lulu who greets her death when she crosses paths with Jack the Ripper. Hence the line, “Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack I beseech you”, from the song “Pumping Blood.” (Disclaimer: Please take my word for it that these are the lyrics to the song and do not listen to the song yourself.  Otherwise, I will have to shoot you.)

Like a couple of virgin boys who are desperately grasping for tips to help them get laid, Loutallica decided that this album would be successful if they focused on two key topics, revealed by W.B. Yeats in the following quote, “Sex and death are the only subjects seriously interesting to an adult.” And all at once, those virgin boys took off running across the field, eager to test their newly acquired key to bliss out on the first unsuspecting girl. Sadly, none of them got laid. Ever.

Brandon, to back your claim that Loutallica was fully aware that they were creating something outlandish, Reed states, “We’ve tried over the years in certain instrumental pieces to get as far out there as possible, but nothing we’d ever done prepared us for where this went.” James Hetfield concedes by saying, “I thought: we need to just agree that this is awesome. What’s steering the ship at that point? The moment is. As soon as we let go of that fear of no control, we were in Heaven.” They all drank the Kool-Aid. What sucks about that is the Kool-Aid didn’t kill them. Worse, it made them think they are even cooler. I beseech you Kool-Aid.

“I AM THE TABLE. I AM. I AM. I AM. I AM.”
Jenn

From: Brandon Hall
To: Jenn Lao

Wait wait wait. How is the Metamorphosis camp? Sontag explicitly places Kafka within a sensibility defined as a “seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement” antagonistic to Camp.

And I Heart Huckabees? How do you mean? Their take on existentialism is campy? Or all existentialism is campy?

b

If you’re into masochism:
Insound Vinyl | eMusic | Amazon MP3 & CD