Andrew Parker drew my attention to more hologram action - in this case Ronnie James Dio's widow's work in keeping her husband's legend alive after death
There had been a hologram that featured as part of tour by Dio's Disciples, comprised of former members of Dio's band.
But future plans are on hold, says Wendy Dio, because it's all a bit shonky as far as she's concerned.
"I just think that the fans would prefer to see Ronnie as being really Ronnie instead of a hologram."
So instead there's a new project "incorporating archival footage of her late husband into a concert setting... I'm working on some special effects of stuff with Ronnie. It's a film, of Ronnie, not a hologram..."
This sent me on a little journey with Ronnie, whose eminence in the metal canon somewhat mystifies me (the mystifyingly titled Holy Diver is considered Top 20 G.O.A.T apparently) (I have actually seen Dio live, when given the short-straw assignment of reviewing Castle Donington in '87).
During this brief research foray, I came across this too-good-to-be-true story - especially given that before fronting Rainbow and Sabbath, Dio had fronted the group Elf:
"In September 2003, he accidentally severed his thumb during a gardening accident when a heavy garden gnome fell onto it. Dio was concerned he would no longer be able to do his signature metal horns hand gesture, but a doctor managed to re-attach it."
The blog Hate Meditations, dedicated to musings on extreme metal, has been doing a series of posts called Metal's Retromania. Looks pretty probing, although I confess to being an inadequate reader, since my grip on the doings and goings of extreme metal (or any metal) has been pretty tenuous for nigh on thirty years (nor really was it untenuous before that to be honest, although there was more active curiosity). But should you be familiar with the zone and up for tangling with an argument, this looks to be a fascinating read.
I invite the metal-informed to assess what is convincing and unconvincing in Hate's argumentations here.
The subject of retro-ism within metal has cropped up before on this blog, or actually it was Blissblog now I think of it - including the question of what differentiates doom metal from retro doom metal, given that doom metal is already looking back, more or less a Sabbath reenactment society.
From my slenderly-informed perspective, I should imagine retro-revival currents within metal, a folding back on its own extensive history that parallels what has happened to almost every other genre that's a bit long in the tooth - this must get tangled up interestingly with the tendencies within extreme metal to reject modernity: to cast back, oftentimes more than a tad dubiously, to the primordial, the pagan, the Medieval etc etc.
Tangentially this has reminded me of my favorite TV show of the moment - the Norwegian series Beforeigners, a wonderfully witty satire of the modern day struggle between multiculturalism versus nativism, the fraught politics of immigration, refugees and asylum seekers, etc etc. It uses a simple science-fiction premise that - if you go with it, let it be unexplained - yields plentiful amusement.
Timeholes have sprung up in the sea off the coast of Norway through which people from earlier eras of the country are popping out, bedraggled, half-drowned and utterly disoriented. Three epochs specifically: Stone Age, Norse (people from both sides of the Vikings versus early Christians conflict - which is why I was reminded of this in the context of extreme metal, church-burning black metal singers etc), and 19th Century.
As Norwegian society struggles to cope with the influx and help these timigrants, these beforeigners, to assimilate... well, you can imagine the satiric possibilities. Graffiti slogans like "Norway for Nowadaypeople". Mixed-temporal marriages. And (I'll stop here because I don't want to do too many spoilers) there is also the phenomenon of transtemporalism - people who realise that although they were born in the late 20th or early 21st Century, inside, they are Viking / paleolithic / Ibsen-era.
Rather than metal, though, the Vikings in this series seem to prefer EDM / hardstyle when they are letting off steam and throwing back many horn-fulls of mead
Keith Kahn-Harris with a piece at Souciant that detects retromaniacal tendencies in metal
Caused by the same syndromes of glut, hyper-access, over-abundance etc as with other zones of music in the post-broadband era:
"... We’re
witnessing a significant transformation in the nature of music. Scenes act as
incubators for identifiable styles and genres, for distinctive ways of being.
The slow pace at which they used to be ‘discovered’ by the outside world meant
that they had time to develop with a relative degree of isolation. It’s no
accident that some of the most distinctive metal styles were initially
developed in tightly knit local scenes: Bay Area thrash, Tampa death metal,
Norwegian black metal..."
"Today’s
‘always on’ digital world, in which the gap between action and reaction has
closed almost to nothing, has radically altered our relationship to time.
Narrative history has collapsed into an eternal present, in which we’re flooded
by media, sensations and events. Ironically, one of the characteristics of this
present is increasing nostalgia and obsession with the past....
"The half-life of cultural production
extends indefinitely, as nothing goes truly out of style, and artists linger
well past their sell-by date....
"It is not just that nostalgia has become
prevalent – although we can certainly see that in the case of metal, for example,
with the continuous stream of re-releases and reunions from even the most
insignificant 1980s bands....
"There
are still forms of metal that are being developed primarily by and for young
people, particularly emo, screamo and djent. But their context is crucially different. Teenage
metal in 2013 may offer a new kind of assemblage of metal and non-metal
elements. However, it does not provide substantially new sounds. The
accumulated weight of over 40 years of metal history looms over new entrants to
metal. As nothing in metal history is completely discredited, there is no sense
that a new generation can displace the old "
[Djent ? !? ]
"One possibly ‘game-changing’
development in the evolution of metal is the gradual retirement of metal’s
biggest-selling acts.... None of this would matter if new generations of
bands were taking their place as metal legends and stadium-filling
platinum-selling acts, but few bands from the 1990s onwards have the same
status and reach..... it may be that without the unifying effect of mythic
acts, metal may dissipate and fragment further.
"Whatever the future holds,
innovation is still possible in metal. Yet this innovation has been atomised
among hundreds of different artists that do not cohere into an overwhelming new
direction. We are unlikely to see in metal again the kind of ‘mass extinction event’
that occurred in the early 1990s, that rendered entire genres all but obsolete."
Not really surprising that these syndromes are music-culture-wide - Keiths' atomisation of innovation is a really handy concept, sounds very applicable to a lot of bloggy-world musics....
