By Chris DanzigPLAY Writer
On a miserable Midwestern evening in early May, teenage Fall Out Boy look-alikes and fat, angry-looking young men with large earrings and blond highlights pack the Chicago House of Blues. It’s a little after 6:30 p.m., and the opening band has almost finished screaming and pounding their guitars to a club full of enthusiastic fans. I have been standing above the main dance floor at the back of the room, craning my neck around a large pillar to catch a glimpse of the stage. When the band finishes their set, I shove my way through the thick congregation of black T-shirts toward the stage to see and hear the next act better.
MewithoutYou begins to play. The audience cheers loudly. Girls to my right start dancing, and to the left, two guys slip into rhythmic headbanging. At the first chorus, and during every chorus for the next several songs, hands rise above the crowd and clap in unison to each downbeat. The crowd seems interested; the people wearing emo glasses, the guys with hoodies and straight, black hair covering their eyes, and two non-conformists – one with blond surfer hair and another wearing a gray track jacket – all watch the band closely. If nothing else, mewithoutYou has captured the audience’s attention.
MewithoutYou doesn’t appear different from any other loud band. There’s a chubby, shirtless drummer and a bassist in a dark hooded sweatshirt. One guitarist with a ‘fro vaguely resembles Jimi Hendrix. The other’s hair is long and wing-like, and he sports a thrift-store-style sweater. As the first song begins, the singer, who looks like a pissed-off and unshaven Jason Lee, jumps and jerks his head back and forth. There’s a respectable crowd crush by the middle of the second song, and bursts of applause continue from the floor.
Christian rock is a booming business. Bands such as P.O.D., Lifehouse and Switchfoot have been cracking the Billboard charts for years. Wade Jessen, who manages the Billboard Christian charts, says it’s big enough to make a parallel music universe. Nielsen SoundScan, which conducts research for the Billboard charts, reports that out of approximately 618.9 million albums sold in the U.S. in 2005, 39.2 million were Christian, which, while significantly less than the 75 million rap albums and 120.7 million alternative albums sold, is more than the total sales of all classical and jazz albums combined.
It’s ironic that Christian rock has flourished with songs antithetical to the roots of rock ‘n’ roll, which, before it became shorthand for everything from the Beatles to Buckethead, was simply a slang term for sex. And evil is to heavy metal what sex is to rock, so it’s surprising that an energetic Christian subculture has attached itself to one of rock’s darkest and most sinister corners.
Heavy metal is the longtime home of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Megadeth, and more recently, the breeding ground for such joy-killing bands as Darkest Hour, The Black Dahlia Murder, Between the Buried and Me, and Hopesfall. Since metal’s inception, themes of mayhem and chaos have pervaded the genre. “There is no evidence here of 1960s-era flower power,” writes Deena Weinstein in Heavy Metal: The Music and It’s Culture. Using perverted religious imagery and stories from gothic culture, metal artists spread a uniquely death-centered message.
Consumers bought 64.4 million metal albums in 2005, and at the end of May, veteran metal band Tool’s new record was third on the Billboard 200. Albums by metal bands Godsmack, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Rob Zombie and Korn also appeared in the top 100 spots. Korn’s new album is platinum, and Guns N’ Roses’ Greatest Hits has been on the charts for two years and sold more than 3 million copies.
Secular metalheads created the motifs, imagery and clich
