Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota

by Chuck Klosterman

  The significance of this new gimmick is substantial: Manson slowly realized that American society had grown to fear drugs more than the devil. We have so demonized narcotics that they now seem worse than actual demons. In the eyes of a lot of stupid parents and confused teachers, the concept of a kid experimenting with marijuana is more terrifying than a kid who is intrigued by worshiping the devil!

  Part of that evolution is due to the ill-conceived rantings of idiots like Nancy Reagan, but a larger factor was the decline of American spirituality throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Regardless of how many people still describe themselves as “Christian” in census surveys, we live in a primarily agnostic culture. Intellectually, agnosticism makes more sense. But the downside is that when people lose their convictions about the existence of God and Satan, they are less able to have personal perspectives on what’s right and what’s wrong. They are more open-minded about old taboos, but they’re also less able to see what’s obvious (and therefore susceptible to propaganda). It was easy for a vocal minority to turn drugs into the postmodern Lucifer, and savvy rappers like Cypress Hill and House of Pain picked up on that perception immediately. However, Marilyn Manson was the first metal guy smart enough to capitalize on a new era in spook rock: In the twenty-first century, Satan can be smoked, snorted, and shot.

  Of course, there is a problem with all that metaphorical social deconstruction: It’s all speculative. Rock ’n’ roll has followed the same path as politics, sports, film, and every other slice of the pop culture hodgepodge—they’ve all placed a greater reliance on mixed messages in order to cloak selfish motives. One obviously suspects Manson’s true quest is to parlay outrageousness into fame, and then sell that fame to consumers. His ultimate aspirations are almost stupidly transparent. However, his modus operandi is more sophisticated and non-linear—at least when compared to the guileless metal satanists from the ’80s.

  My friend Mr. Pancake lived in Nepal for three years; he somehow became involved with one of those wretched Peace Corps programs where we send bright American students to foreign wastelands so that they can stand in flooded ditches and watch people starve. Since he had no access to any American culture except Baywatch, I would periodically send him cassette tapes of new alternative music and classic rock standards. (And here’s a warning for anyone who ever has a buddy move to Nepal: The mail service over there sucks. I made Mr. Pancake at least sixteen tapes during his stay in Asia, and he received about seven of them. I heavily suspect the rest of my “American Rock and Roll Music” was stolen in customs and is still being used as barter in the Katmandu sex trade.) Every once in a while, I’d throw an Iron Maiden song into the mix, particularly stuff like “The Number of the Beast.” Since Pancake was never a metal fan, he always assumed I was just sending tracks off the soundtrack from This Is Spinal Tap. But not even Christopher Guest has the skill to write satire as deft as lyrics like, “666—the number of the beast! / 666—the one for you and me!” As far as I’m concerned, Iron Maiden was the funniest band in the entire metal genre. “Sex Farm” and “Big Bottom” are jocular, but I laugh even harder at “Bring Your Daughter … to the Slaughter!”

  The irony (or at least what I find ironic) is that Iron Maiden was often referred to as “metallectual rockers.” They had a very bizarre fan base—a lot of musicians, along with an army of loner outcasts who didn’t drink or smile or talk to anyone who was still alive. Maiden never sang about girls (except when they were slaughtering them), opting instead to do musical versions of poems like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which I actually convinced my senior English teacher to play during class. Iron Maiden was fond of “perspective” songs, a songwriting technique that later evolved into a cornerstone for death metal artists. They sang “Hallowed Be Thy Name” from the “perspective” of a man about to be executed; they sang “The Trooper” from the “perspective” of a kamikaze cavalier battling the Russians; they sang “Fear of the Dark” from the “perspective” of a paranoid man who felt he was being followed. This allowed bands to sing about virtually any subject imaginable without personal responsibility for what they said, which was especially important to groups who wanted to specifically address occultism in the first person. For five minutes, the singer became the equivalent of a character in a novel, and the audience was supposed to view his espoused subject matter with the same kind of aesthetic distance.

  By disassociating themselves from the content of their lyrics, Iron Maiden could sing about satanism with brazen disregard. The video for their best song, “Can I Play with Madness,” was filled with Celtic imagery and Gothic cloud formations; the video’s story followed a close-minded schoolteacher who was hunted by Druids after he harassed a young metalhead. It was pretty much the epitome of what made the occult enticing to teenagers: Iron Maiden’s music was painted as a conduit to a dark force that empowered the weak. In every interview I’ve ever seen with mixed-up teenagers who kill classmates after dabbling with the devil, they always (and I mean always) mention how they were drawn to the “power” of satanism. “Can I Play with Madness” took that figurative concept and made it literal: The “madness” they’re playing with is some kind of religious witchcraft, and the result (at least in the video) is an army of hooded pagans who will fuck with your teacher’s life, possibly by erecting a Stonehenge monument in his front yard.

  Part of the reason Maiden was tagged for being so intelligent was the guitar work of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith, two classically minded musicians who loved to go for baroque. As stated earlier, they appealed to a specific kind of metal fan—for those who took time to study the genre, Iron Maiden seemed more credible than most of their peers. Of course, they also had no pop sensibility whatsoever. For casual listeners, most of their catalog is boring and self-consciously complex, and the lyrics are more comedic than poetic. But the band was able to get a tremendous amount of mileage out of their unique iconography. Album covers, posters, and T-shirts almost never showed the group members; that role was filled by Eddie, a sinewy cartoon corpse who had (presumably) been inspired to rise from the dead by the awe-inspiring majesty of rock. Any time the PMRC wanted to illustrate the dangers of rock ’n’ roll, they would always show the cover art for Live After Death or The Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. It’s my suspicion that Eddie (or, more accurately, the concept of what a character like Eddie reflected) was the biggest reason Iron Maiden became an elite metal band. These guys were unattractive, they weren’t prototypically cool, and it was impossible to sing along with any of their songs—but Iron Maiden was a type of band. They were the type of band who embraced demonic geekiness, and they did it very, very well.

  Danzig was another group who fit this motif, although they were less literary. After fronting two musically inept devil bands who mostly sang about killing babies and raping children (the Misfits and Samhain), Glenn Danzig put together a legitimate group in 1988, named it after himself, and had Rick Rubin produce the music. From what I can tell, every song is about committing suicide and partying with Satan. Punkers who liked his early work will swear Mr. Danzig is being sly, but I’ve never seen anything to support that claim. Much like Iron Maiden, it sure seems like virtually all of his songs are absolute shit, but his diehard fans disagree with a passion that borders on the unfathomable—they don’t just think he’s good, they think he’s fucking brilliant.

  Danzig’s punk roots attracted a different kind of audience than most conventional metal bands (that heritage also allowed him to stealthily convert into the alternative scene during the early ’90s). Still, the group’s subterfuge was heavy metal satanism in its most traditional form; if you unfolded the liner notes to their second CD, it formed an upside-down cross. In the video from “Mother” (an artistic and consciously unmetal clip shot completely in letter box format), the same kind of upside-down cross is drawn in blood on the body of a nude woman.

  I suppose I might be missing the joke here (after all, Danzig’s second LP was titled Lucifuge, which must be a
synthesis of the word “Lucifer” with the word “fudge”), but if this was supposed to be funny, I don’t think his adolescent disciples got it either. Basically, Danzig sings about dying and going to hell; some people want that sentiment to be a joke, and some people want that sentiment to be serious. Taken either way, it’s mildly amusing but mostly boring.

  That leads us back to Ozzy Osbourne, who was rarely boring and usually hilarious. At various times in his career, Ozzy has behaved like a satanic pope. Though a lot of his devilish material from Black Sabbath seems trite today, he was the guy who made this into an artistic template. On the cover of Blizzard of Ozz, he brandishes a crucifix as a weapon; on Diary of a Madman, he inverts one on the wall. In fact, the Blizzard … cover even pictures Ozzy with a black cat (apparently, his art director must have been heavily influenced by Hansel and Gretel). But—somehow—Osbourne made these clichés seem clever and vaguely plausible. Alice Cooper was more creative, but Ozzy was more sincerely fucked up.

  Now, it’s important to realize that there is no question about whether or not Osbourne has any allegiances to the devil. He does not. In fact, he seems legitimately bothered that so many people associate him with the occult. Other rockers have denied allegiances to the devil, but none were ever as clear as Ozzy on the song “Rock and Roll Rebel.” He uses no metaphors and does not leave any room for interpretation: “I’m just a rock and roll rebel / I tell you no lies / They say I worship the devil / They must be stupid, all right.”

  I do not question Osbourne’s sincerity on this issue. I do, however, question the validity of his indignation. Even if you discount his participation in the Black Sab catalog, his efforts in the 1980s were not exactly gospel hymns. Like Jimmy Page, Osbourne found the work of Aleister Crowley fascinating, and he talks about that fascination in 1981’s “Mr. Crowley.” If you’re trying to convince people that you don’t worship the devil, this is not the way to do it. Personally, this kind of songwriting strikes me as very cool, and I can completely understand why Osbourne (or anyone) might find a mountain-climbing freak like Crowley interesting. But there’s no way you can express those ideas without justifying people’s suspicion that you’re a devil worshiper (and biting the heads off birds doesn’t help your case much either).

  What’s even crazier is the growing number of pro-Ozzy apologists who suddenly want to put a different spin on his message. In his book Running with the Devil, Robert Walser insists Ozzy is “mocking” Aleister with “Mr. Crowley.” Oh, of course. That makes sense: Osbourne is delivering “satire” about a dead man of whom 90 percent of Ozzy’s audience had never even heard of prior to the release of this particular song. There is no need to make excuses for Ozzy’s affinity for the occult. He’s not trying to teach people stuff; he’s trying to be cool. Ozzy Osbourne is a rock star—that’s his job!

  That’s not to say Osbourne is too stupid to understand sarcasm; I suspect he’s smarter than most hard rockers, and he’s definitely smarter than just about everyone else who dropped acid every single day for two years in the 1970s. There’s even a lyric in “Mr. Crowley” where Oz rhetorically asks Aleister if he sent his message “polemically,” which is not a word often used in metal songs. Walser’s argument also meshes with a song like “Miracle Man” off 1988’s No Rest for the Wicked, where Oz skewers PTL leader Jim Bakker (who is precisely the kind of self-righteous charlatan who would have wanted Osbourne’s music outlawed). Of course, in the video for “Miracle Man,” Osbourne pretends to sodomize a pig. That doesn’t negate his argument, but it certainly should remind everyone that all of this—and I mean absolutely all of this—is simple theatrics. If it wasn’t, rock ’n’ roll would be as boring as real life.

  Ultimately, that’s probably what made me so interested in devil rock: I was able to inject my reality with the kind of dark fiction that would have made my poor mother shiver. That’s the only explanation I can think of to explain why I slept beneath a pentagram from the age of fourteen to seventeen.

  Actually, it might be more accurate to say I slept beneath a Mötley Crüe bumper sticker, but the satanic bottom line was the same. My obviously cool brother-in-law had sent me the sticker through the mail, and since eighth-graders don’t have cars (and since my older sister balked at the opportunity to promote the Crüe on her ’73 Plymouth Scamp), it was affixed to the headboard of my bed.

  I keep trying to picture myself as a fourteen-year-old, nestled in my comforter (which featured raccoons participating in the Lake Placid Winter Olympics), sleeping blissfully beneath this menacing symbol of Satan. This paradox should be symbolic of something, and I’m pretty sure it probably is. But I honestly have no idea what that would be.

  You hear a lot about how TV and film can desensitize kids to sex and violence. The argument is that fictionalized bloodshed makes actual violence less disturbing; a modern teenager may see a real car wreck and understand that the people inside are really dead, but the event doesn’t affect him. Heavy metal desensitized me to devil worship in the same way.

  A popular trick in my junior high study hall was to steal a kid’s notebook and draw a bunch of satanic symbols on the cover (pentagrams, skulls, inverted crosses, the digits 666, and—if the prankster was artistically gifted—the head of a goat). The hope was that the kid’s mother would find this notebook and assume her son was going to don a hooded death robe and sacrifice the family beagle. We all found this unspeakably amusing.

  The 1980s were generally a good era for faux satanism, especially in the Midwest. At the beginning of all our social studies classes, we always started the hour with “current events,” which was a great way to kill time. Students would raise their hands and inform the class about whatever they perceived as a newsworthy “current event.” These events could be almost anything; it could be the Challenger explosion, or it could be information on prominent athletes from nearby towns who were arrested for open container. Very often, these “current events” would include a new rumor about which North Dakota community was currently shackled by satanism. Bismarck seemed to be the state’s most demonic city, because somebody supposedly found a bunch of bones and satanic scrawlings in a series of caves on the city’s outskirts. In Maury Terry’s book The Ultimate Evil, the “Son of Sam” killings can be traced back to cult activity in Minot. Even smaller North Dakota towns, like Oakes (pop. 1,300) and Langdon (pop. 2,000), were periodically mentioned as cultic hotbeds. In fact, parents in Langdon had to have an emergency meeting at the high school to address the risk of Ouija boards randomly possessing local teenagers.

  The reality of these rumors is irrelevant. As cloistered kids living somewhere else, we always assumed they were partially true. But we also assumed the tales were ridiculous overreactions. They had to be. There was just an understanding that all adults were confused about Satanism; they saw it as a one-way ticket to hell (and—in the meantime—prison). But we saw it as a cultural accessory. It was kind of scary (certainly scary enough to be cool), but it was never outside of our control. Satanism was weird, compelling, and—in extreme cases—deadly. But it could also be taken in doses. You could kind of “experiment” with the occult by buying certain albums. Groups like Damien and Armored Saint provided an opportunity to dabble with sacrilegious dynamite, and there really wasn’t any consequence. Here again, heavy metal was an aqueduct for vicarious, harmless evil. Even as an adolescent, I understood that the kind of kid who thought Bruce Dickinson was telling him to worship Satan was the same kind of kid who would have been corrupted by the hum of a refrigerator.

  Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the connection between metal and Satan didn’t have that much to do with the music itself. From a purely technical standpoint, “Shout at the Devil” isn’t any more clear about its intentions than Pearl Jam’s “Satan’s Bed,” but the latter would never be seen as occult.

  Of course, if Ozzy Osbourne sang those same lyrics, “Satan’s Bed” would almost certainly be seen as a song about lying down with Lucifer for carnal d
estruction. This stuff was always about the source. The specter of metal satanism is one genre of communication where the medium really is the message.

  October 15, 1988

  Heavy metal’s finest hour: The three best-selling records on the planet are Bon Jovi’s New Jersey, Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, and Def Leppard’s Hysteria.

  Every time I invite a hipster over to my house (and this happens far more often than I’d like to admit), I put myself in a precarious position.

  At some point in the evening, the visiting hipster is going to look at my CD collection—the single quickest way to assert any individual’s coolness quotient. I do the same thing anytime I’m in another person’s home. My problem is that (obviously) I am an ’80s metal fan, and that devastates my indie rock cred. Since I’m not a musician, I’m not sure why this should matter; it certainly seems ridiculous that private citizens should need indie rock cred. But it always seems important, especially if I’m trying to sleep with the aforementioned hipster. And CD collections don’t lie: No matter how many times you mention Matador Records, you cannot consistently explain why Poison is nestled between Pizzicato Five and Polara.

  Of course, this situation can be played to one’s advantage. You can out-hip a hipster by taking things to the next level—you can promote yourself as an Ironic Contrarian Hipster, the Jedi Knight among trendy rock fans. Being an Ironic Contrarian Hipster is rather complicated; it forces you to own over a thousand CDs, and you have to hate all of them. In fact, the only things you can openly advocate are artists like the Insane Clown Posse and Britney Spears.