“We wear leather, we wear spikes, we rule the night!” Ernest Hilbert is Now a Curator at Ryberg Video
by Ernie on 13/07/09 at 11:40 am
I’ve been recruited to curate videos for the fantastic new website Ryberg. I’ve decided (surprise, surprise) to start with a series of essays on awful (but so fun) heavy metal videos from the 1980s. We start with “Gloves of Metal” by the incomparable Manowar. Click here, or on the Kings of Metal below, to read and view my first entry.
Ernie
Jul 14th, 2009
An E-Verser writes in: “Okay, read your article…. Lovely writing, as usual. But must say that my first reaction to that picture of Manofwar [sic] was—why are four grown men standing there in leather diapers? This is more than adolescent fantasy… it is the feed-me, shit-me realm of two-year-olds. I get your point about spectacle and fear of death (hence freeze-frame in fantasy), but punk had the same attention to stagecraft—hey there John Lydon… and at least it, occasionally, had decent lyrics and some attention to the world around it (sorry, I am and will always be a language nerd). Metal seems, to me, to be a sustained effort to pretend the world does not exist. And that is my two bits.”
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