What did you listen to as the world ended?

On the sound of comfort

So it happened. And it hurts. All that mountain of anxiety has given way to...even more anxiety.

At times like these I look to music to save me, to throw me some kind of lifebelt. Music as balm for the soul and all that kind of thing.

A few days ago, I accidentally discovered the following, and it's soothed my furrowed brow as I've confronted Trumpian nightmare:

I don't really know what this is. It somehow made it into my YouTube feed. Nanowar of Steel are a comic power metal band from Italy with a taste for obscure in-jokes. 'Das Rote Pferd' ('Red Horse') is a cover of a schlager song by Markus Becker that is itself based on the tune for Edith Piaf's 'Milord'. I've used Google Translate but really I have no idea why Nanowar of Steel covered the song and what It all means.

I don't really care what it means. I care about the addictively jaunty tune with its metallic crunch, and I love the stupid dance. 'Das Rote Pferd' makes me smile. That is what I need right now.

In the last few years, silly stupid music has been a lifeline. It's been a tough time; not only has the political context been desperately fraught for years, there's been a pandemic and members of my family have faced difficult physical and mental health challenges. It's been rough and music has formed part of my coping mechanism.

And often it's been silly stupid metal, power metal in particular, that has filled this need.

There was a time when I scorned the cheesier end of the metal spectrum. I have spent a considerable chunk of my life since adolescence fascinated by difficult, 'extreme' metal. I pushed my listening to the limit, even to the point where extreme metal started to lose its power and I began to seek out noise, power electronics and that impossible space beyond music.

I still do push myself. And I still find difficult music rewarding and powerful. But sometimes it feels like a duty, even when I get something out of it. It's a struggle to motivate myself to expose myself to sonic harshness when the rest of life also seems so harsh. I end up searching for the risible, for those addictively dumb sonic treats.

Is any of that a problem? Professionally maybe a little; after all I do want to stay up to date with the extreme metal scene as it develops in ever more gnarly directions. But what gets me is that nagging sense that, if I'm not careful, the search for comfort will overwhelm me and I will end up simply anaesthetising myself from reality. Discomfort is sometimes a political and moral imperative. No one should find the world as it is comfortable.

Some of the most important writing and art in modern times was forged in the furnace of uncomfortable times. I think of World War One poets and writers. I think of Arendt, Adorno, Benjamin and all manner of exiled intellectuals. They didn't retreat into comedic power metal. When I read biographies of such individuals I am always impressed on their fevered contributions to discourse, their letters their tomes their intense engagement with difficult texts in difficult times.

Or maybe they didn't find comfort in silly art because seeking aesthetic comfort in this way is a much more contemporary invention. By that I obviously don't mean that comfortingly stupid art wasn't available earlier in the modern period (indeed, Adorno famously condemned it). But perhaps the instant availability of any and all kinds of art today (music in particular) has meant that it's all too easy to avoid the difficult and indulge in the easy. There was a time when, if you felt an urgent need for George Formby, you'd have to go out and buy a record - by which time the urge might have warned off. And even if you did manage to indulge yourself with a 78 disc of 'When I'm cleaning windows', it wouldn't necessarily lead to anything else. Today, playing Nanowar of Steel leads inexorably other algorithmically tempting treats.

I suspect that there is a history of 'comfort listening' to be written; the story of related concepts such as 'guilty pleasures' also remains unwritten. While intellectuals have often fretted over the balefully distracting impact of popular culture, we can't assume that distraction means the same thing today as it always has.

For now, though, I'm off to immerse myself in the hot bath of dumb fun. I will sign off with what is surely the most glorious moment in metal history: