Friday, February 10, 2006

Metal Discourse

It is well known that metal bands have a penchant for exploring the themes that haunt the male adolescent: medieval warfare, science fiction dystopia, black magic, getting laid, rocking harder than anyone else, etc. Also, the particular literary references in metal almost always point back to the books we read in high school:

Hemmingway - "For Whom The Bell Tolls" - Metallica
Coleridge - "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" - Iron Maiden
Huxley/Orwell - "Operation: mindcrime" - Queensrÿche
Tolkien - "Battle of Evermore" - Led Zepplein

I could go on.

Where are the mp3 links you ask? Why do I tease?

This post is about a stranger pattern. Heavy metal bands (two of them British!) singing heroic and epic songs about...Native Americans. Just to make it completely insane, two of these tracks are sung from the Native perspective, as in Freddie Mercury singing things like:

"White man White man
Our country was green and all our rivers wide
White man White man
You came with a gun and soon our children died"

Enjoy.

Manowar - Spirit Horse of the Cherokee
buy this!

Queen - White Man
buy this!

Iron Maiden - Run to the Hills
buy this!

1 Comments:

  • At 3:35 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    I can't believe you posted Manowar. That's awesome. I saw them in a club called "The Thirsty Whale" outside of Chicago in the late 1980s. They seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that they looked, acted and sounded (well, sorta) exactly like Spinal Tap. I wish I were still naive enough not to be aware of such things.

    As far as native American-themed metal songs go. Don't forget "Indians" by Anthrax. And I think that God-awful band Europe had one, too.

    Blow your speakers, man...

     

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