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4.16 AVERAGE
4.16 AVERAGE
As it does often in his songs as the Mountain Goats, empathy just flows off from John Darnielle's words in waves. What he accomplishes here is quite impressive technically: he creates a plausible voice for the sort of sad, misfit teen whose frustrated parents end up knowing nothing else to do with him but send him to a mental institution - but while that voice seems genuine, in its broad-brush strokes and teenage exaggeration, it's also clear that Roger Painter, his narrator, is in some ways an exceptional and perceptive person. It's there in some of Roger's descriptions of the way Black Sabbath makes him feel: he'll dig into the music or the sound or impressions Ozzy Osbourne gives him, or he'll come up with an astonishingly apt yet plainspoken phrase - yet Darnielle never overplays his hand here: Roger isn't some genius, just a pretty smart kid whose circumstances have never let him find a real way to express it, or even to know it.
The other technically impressive feat Darnielle accomplishes here is creating a second voice: Roger, the same narrator, but ten years older, barely hanging on as a restaurant manager, living in a crappy building after having broken up with his girlfriend. Even though ten years of maturing, and a bit more education, differentiate the voice of older Roger from younger Roger, it is quite clearly the same person speaking to us.
The two halves of the book, then, consist entirely of diary entries and letters ostensibly addressed to Gary, the social worker in charge of Roger at the institution he's confined to as a teen (the older Roger finds a box of his old stuff and decides to write to Gary).
Darnielle is brilliant at demonstrating how important music can be, especially to a fucked-up teen who sees no future at all, and how music that seems to be all darkness and negativity can feel, to such a person, like the only thing that makes any sense in the world. (He also correctly points out that a lot of Black Sabbath lyrics are actually as strictly moral-minded as any of the unwitting social critics, who'd ban such music given half a chance, could hope for.) Darnielle also allows just enough air in so that we can, at times, see the absurdity of some of Roger's ideas - but we're never laughing AT Roger so much as, perhaps, offering a glimpse of recognition at our own teen foibles.
More than anything, Darnielle shows how much music can mean to teens - and how wrongheaded attempts to keep teens from this music can be, especially deeply troubled teens. Darnielle implies that the infamous media frenzy over "heavy metal suicides" was woefully misdirected: far from causing suicides or suicide attempts, the way dark, heavy music speaks to such teens was probably the last thing keeping them from killing themselves.
Along with the character-based novella, Darnielle also neatly tucks the more typical brief of a 33 1/3 book: through Roger's attempts to explain to Gary why 'Master of Reality' means so much to him, Darnielle provides descriptions of each of the album's songs.
But you absolutely do not need to be familiar with, or even interested in, the Black Sabbath album in order for this book to be powerfully moving. You only need to be willing to open your heart and recognize - or remember - just how desperately important it is for teens (and not just teens) to grab hold of something that helps them make sense of a world that seem hostile, chaotic, and utterly inhospitable.
The other technically impressive feat Darnielle accomplishes here is creating a second voice: Roger, the same narrator, but ten years older, barely hanging on as a restaurant manager, living in a crappy building after having broken up with his girlfriend. Even though ten years of maturing, and a bit more education, differentiate the voice of older Roger from younger Roger, it is quite clearly the same person speaking to us.
The two halves of the book, then, consist entirely of diary entries and letters ostensibly addressed to Gary, the social worker in charge of Roger at the institution he's confined to as a teen (the older Roger finds a box of his old stuff and decides to write to Gary).
Darnielle is brilliant at demonstrating how important music can be, especially to a fucked-up teen who sees no future at all, and how music that seems to be all darkness and negativity can feel, to such a person, like the only thing that makes any sense in the world. (He also correctly points out that a lot of Black Sabbath lyrics are actually as strictly moral-minded as any of the unwitting social critics, who'd ban such music given half a chance, could hope for.) Darnielle also allows just enough air in so that we can, at times, see the absurdity of some of Roger's ideas - but we're never laughing AT Roger so much as, perhaps, offering a glimpse of recognition at our own teen foibles.
More than anything, Darnielle shows how much music can mean to teens - and how wrongheaded attempts to keep teens from this music can be, especially deeply troubled teens. Darnielle implies that the infamous media frenzy over "heavy metal suicides" was woefully misdirected: far from causing suicides or suicide attempts, the way dark, heavy music speaks to such teens was probably the last thing keeping them from killing themselves.
Along with the character-based novella, Darnielle also neatly tucks the more typical brief of a 33 1/3 book: through Roger's attempts to explain to Gary why 'Master of Reality' means so much to him, Darnielle provides descriptions of each of the album's songs.
But you absolutely do not need to be familiar with, or even interested in, the Black Sabbath album in order for this book to be powerfully moving. You only need to be willing to open your heart and recognize - or remember - just how desperately important it is for teens (and not just teens) to grab hold of something that helps them make sense of a world that seem hostile, chaotic, and utterly inhospitable.
Oh my lord. Read this book. I have maintained for years that John Darnielle is a genius and it turns out I was right.
This book is totally righteous! John Darnielle nailed it--one of the very best in the massive series!
I haven't written a review here before, but I felt the need to state that this is probably my favorite book about records and what they can do to you. Not my favorite book about music. Not my favorite book about an individual album. Nor is it my favorite book that attempts to analyze what makes a record important or worthy of a book. But this is probably what I would give to someone who would whip out the old saw that writing about music is like dancing about architecture: this book creates a completely convincing portrait of a person both living and not living with an album that has meant something to them, and trying to convey what that experience is like to another person. And through conveying to them this experience, they end up conveying the entirety of a 26 year old life. Darnielle is an amazing writer, clearly understands music and has written something really beautiful.
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
really only has one thing to say but says it very well
Probably the most off-topic and most enjoyable 33&1/3rd book in the entire collection.
a novella devoted to explaining the enduring art and majesty of Master of Reality by Black Sabbath, written by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. Basically what it says on the package. Esp recommended if you or anyone close to you has ever had a mental health issue, or if you work as a mental health provider. Or if you like Sabbath or the Mountain Goats or both. If you can tick off all of those, then go buy this right now.
Some filets:
"it was like the whole point was 'everything was a bummer, even your fantasies are a bummer.'"
"I did the best I could to explain how this music was a part of me. Maybe you didn't have a part of yourself that compared to this part in me, so maybe that's why you couldn't understand. But I was operating on blind faith: I trusted you to see this piece of me, this wasted broken part, and recognize it, the way one country recognizes another."
Some filets:
"it was like the whole point was 'everything was a bummer, even your fantasies are a bummer.'"
"I did the best I could to explain how this music was a part of me. Maybe you didn't have a part of yourself that compared to this part in me, so maybe that's why you couldn't understand. But I was operating on blind faith: I trusted you to see this piece of me, this wasted broken part, and recognize it, the way one country recognizes another."
‘It was like a S.W.A.T. team kicking out windows inside my head.’
We all have that one album we knew intimately in our teenage years. The one album you knew every word, wrestled with every lyric. The one album you could hear even the notes deep in the mix inside your mind when you thought of it in silence. For me that album was Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, an album that sent me on a lifelong journey of guitar playing and harmonica blowing, but for teenage Roger locked away from all he loves in a mental health facility in 1985, that album was Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. Who is the master of your reality musician John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats asks in his novella, Master of Reality. Who controls what you think and do? Who decides what is real? Raging against the nurses and doctors and feeling hopeless without access to his tape collection, Robert pens his thoughts on his treatment and favorite music in the journal he is made to keep. Darnielle creates an nuanced and layered story that is part music criticism and part introspective mourning for a lost adolescence and spins it out in a way that really speaks to the sore spots inside us all. The magic of this story is the way it focuses on the way the music makes Roger feel, being more a catalog of emotional resonance even when band biography comes up. It’s about what Black Sabbath meant to him. Swinging hard, yet peppered with humor and infused with a deep empathy for those who struggle through this world, Master of Reality is an engaging novella that fans and even complete strangers to the band—such as myself—will find to be a moving meditation on the power of music to heal and give hope.
Black Sabbath
While I’ve never been a music biography reader, I’ve always been curious about the 33 ⅓ book series where the submission call was to write about your favorite album in a literary way. I was thrilled to finally read one when this became our bookclub read for December, even more so as I am a big fan of John Darnielle’s band, The Mountain Goats. I’ve seen them several times and their lyrics often speak to me. I’ve avoided his novels, worried if I didn’t like them enough it would spoil that magical spell his songwriting has had over me, but I was pleased to say this only made me appreciate him more. As a former nurse on a psychiatric wing in a hospital, Darnielle writes from the heart and dedicates this book ‘to all the children to who I ever provided care, in the earnest hope that your later lives have brought you the joy, love, and freedom that was always yours by right.’ It makes me pause and consider that the Gary (‘fucking Gary’) to whom Roger is writing—and raging against—may in fact be party Darnielle himself, conflicted over having been a player in a mental health system he critiques. Either way, the emotions feel authentic and hit hard here.
‘I don’t do sports, but with Ozzy I feel like I understand the concept of the home team crowd.’
For Roger, Black Sabbath and Ozzy speak to him in a way where ‘it’s like, I know that dude,’ and because ‘only Black Sabbath sounds like exactly what my friends and I might have done if we’d had the equipment.’ Darnielle certainly empathizes, having recorded his early tapes after his shift, mostly solo, wanting the equipment for a full band and fuller sound. But this also approaches the way musical idols in our youths are often people we want to be like, or feel like they would hang out with us. He acknowledges that even Ozzy wasn’t the character he played on record and stage, and considers ‘how important it can be to really be free to pretend.’ He sees Ozzy as someone like him, troubled but wanting so badly to keep going and make something of himself. ‘That’s why Black Sabbath are special. They aren’t rags to riches. They are just rags. All they have is themselves, but that’s turned out to be enough.’ We all hope that we can be enough.
What works so well is they way the story focuses on the feelings bestowed by music, the experience of it all. Darnielle captures his own message that ‘it’s not emotions but the aftereffects of them, or a memory of them, or imagining what it might be like to really let them out.’ Interestingly, at one point he pairs the phrase that Roger ‘lost control’ with his outburst being a way to ‘assert some kind of control,’ and in a way this reflects the loud, chaotic music: it is a highly choreographed chaos of sounds and letting out the emotions is how the musicians and listeners find a way to feel in control of them. I enjoy how he doesn’t put the music all on a pedestal, criticizing Ozzy’s voice at times, admitting his lyrics ‘sounds like he’s saying his piece before he really thought it through,’ and even admitting he dislikes 3 songs on the album. It’s all really heartfelt and honest, and it really works and is infectiously in awe of the band. I’ve never been a fan, and even appreciating these songs in a new light won’t make it enter frequent rotation of listening, but even so this book really took hold of me.
‘The real message the hidden message is that we are the ones who are making better days.’
The hospital is written as a threatening place that is more about restraint than aid. Roger knows his music helps him. The music ‘pulled me gently out of real life and transported me somewhere else, which was what I felt like I needed most in the world.’ Without it, he spirals. The second half of the novella, written 10 years later in diary entries sent to Gary again (‘fuck you, Gary’ reflects on the irony that his music was looked down upon because of the dark themes and imagery. The hospital pushed religious overtones in everything and Roger writes incredulously ‘Ozzy was one of you guys! He was on your side the whole time, but you wouldn’t even listen to him to find out!’ It’s a rather beautiful dive into the lyrics, which he sees as redemption, giving oneself to Jesus, finding hope in the darkness:
It is a tragic tale, one where the punished come to only find purpose through punishment, only feeling alive through pain when they so badly want to feel joy. There is a solidarity with people who feel that way here, all set against the backdrop of 1980s State Institutions that seem to swallow young souls up forever in a maw of darkness kept hidden from the world. ‘So I felt sad for you,’ Roger writes to Gary, ‘because you haven’t ever stood in the shadow of a volcano and lived to tell about it.’ His hardships have made him stronger and able to appreciate the life he has left to live, bearing scars that show the harsh journey to be where he is in the second half writing in 1995.
‘I’m 26, but I’m not ready for m 16-year-old self to be dead.’
The aspects of grief and mourning in this novel are gripping. Roger mourns the lost years of adolescence, stuck inside a State Institution until he finally turns 18 and is thrown out to fend for himself without many resources. By reading his old diary and listening to music, he is trying to recapture that 16 year old emotion but finds it eludes him. ‘Maybe that younger person died when he became this older person, and now when I’m feeling his emotions and sharing his rage, I’m really just mourning his death.’ Music is a shortcut to dredging up old memories and feelings. With some songs I can taste the air and weather of the day it first meant something to me. It is a eulogy to time now gone, and Darnielle captures this in introspective tragedy through Roger laying his past self to rest, buried inside him with a funeral dirge of metal guitars fuzzing alongside the hard rhythm of a drum.
‘So we look up to Black Sabbath—to what we remember of them, in my case. Even after we’re grown up, we do. Always.’
Short but powerful, John Darnielle’s Black Sabbath excels at capturing the feeling of a favorite band. Wedding music criticism to a harrowing story of surviving your own mental health and a system that doesn’t seem to be helping, this is a stirring novella that will have you getting out your headphones and revisiting the songs that speak loudest to you. Music can heal and comfort, it can excite you and make you dream big, and often I find it is the closest thing to a magic spell we get in this world. Darnielle understands this, and his depiction of it will rock the stadium of your heart.
3.75/5
We all have that one album we knew intimately in our teenage years. The one album you knew every word, wrestled with every lyric. The one album you could hear even the notes deep in the mix inside your mind when you thought of it in silence. For me that album was Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, an album that sent me on a lifelong journey of guitar playing and harmonica blowing, but for teenage Roger locked away from all he loves in a mental health facility in 1985, that album was Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. Who is the master of your reality musician John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats asks in his novella, Master of Reality. Who controls what you think and do? Who decides what is real? Raging against the nurses and doctors and feeling hopeless without access to his tape collection, Robert pens his thoughts on his treatment and favorite music in the journal he is made to keep. Darnielle creates an nuanced and layered story that is part music criticism and part introspective mourning for a lost adolescence and spins it out in a way that really speaks to the sore spots inside us all. The magic of this story is the way it focuses on the way the music makes Roger feel, being more a catalog of emotional resonance even when band biography comes up. It’s about what Black Sabbath meant to him. Swinging hard, yet peppered with humor and infused with a deep empathy for those who struggle through this world, Master of Reality is an engaging novella that fans and even complete strangers to the band—such as myself—will find to be a moving meditation on the power of music to heal and give hope.
Black Sabbath
While I’ve never been a music biography reader, I’ve always been curious about the 33 ⅓ book series where the submission call was to write about your favorite album in a literary way. I was thrilled to finally read one when this became our bookclub read for December, even more so as I am a big fan of John Darnielle’s band, The Mountain Goats. I’ve seen them several times and their lyrics often speak to me. I’ve avoided his novels, worried if I didn’t like them enough it would spoil that magical spell his songwriting has had over me, but I was pleased to say this only made me appreciate him more. As a former nurse on a psychiatric wing in a hospital, Darnielle writes from the heart and dedicates this book ‘to all the children to who I ever provided care, in the earnest hope that your later lives have brought you the joy, love, and freedom that was always yours by right.’ It makes me pause and consider that the Gary (‘fucking Gary’) to whom Roger is writing—and raging against—may in fact be party Darnielle himself, conflicted over having been a player in a mental health system he critiques. Either way, the emotions feel authentic and hit hard here.
‘I don’t do sports, but with Ozzy I feel like I understand the concept of the home team crowd.’
For Roger, Black Sabbath and Ozzy speak to him in a way where ‘it’s like, I know that dude,’ and because ‘only Black Sabbath sounds like exactly what my friends and I might have done if we’d had the equipment.’ Darnielle certainly empathizes, having recorded his early tapes after his shift, mostly solo, wanting the equipment for a full band and fuller sound. But this also approaches the way musical idols in our youths are often people we want to be like, or feel like they would hang out with us. He acknowledges that even Ozzy wasn’t the character he played on record and stage, and considers ‘how important it can be to really be free to pretend.’ He sees Ozzy as someone like him, troubled but wanting so badly to keep going and make something of himself. ‘That’s why Black Sabbath are special. They aren’t rags to riches. They are just rags. All they have is themselves, but that’s turned out to be enough.’ We all hope that we can be enough.
What works so well is they way the story focuses on the feelings bestowed by music, the experience of it all. Darnielle captures his own message that ‘it’s not emotions but the aftereffects of them, or a memory of them, or imagining what it might be like to really let them out.’ Interestingly, at one point he pairs the phrase that Roger ‘lost control’ with his outburst being a way to ‘assert some kind of control,’ and in a way this reflects the loud, chaotic music: it is a highly choreographed chaos of sounds and letting out the emotions is how the musicians and listeners find a way to feel in control of them. I enjoy how he doesn’t put the music all on a pedestal, criticizing Ozzy’s voice at times, admitting his lyrics ‘sounds like he’s saying his piece before he really thought it through,’ and even admitting he dislikes 3 songs on the album. It’s all really heartfelt and honest, and it really works and is infectiously in awe of the band. I’ve never been a fan, and even appreciating these songs in a new light won’t make it enter frequent rotation of listening, but even so this book really took hold of me.
‘The real message the hidden message is that we are the ones who are making better days.’
The hospital is written as a threatening place that is more about restraint than aid. Roger knows his music helps him. The music ‘pulled me gently out of real life and transported me somewhere else, which was what I felt like I needed most in the world.’ Without it, he spirals. The second half of the novella, written 10 years later in diary entries sent to Gary again (‘fuck you, Gary’ reflects on the irony that his music was looked down upon because of the dark themes and imagery. The hospital pushed religious overtones in everything and Roger writes incredulously ‘Ozzy was one of you guys! He was on your side the whole time, but you wouldn’t even listen to him to find out!’ It’s a rather beautiful dive into the lyrics, which he sees as redemption, giving oneself to Jesus, finding hope in the darkness:
‘Peace, peace, peace, happiness, happiness, happiness. That was the message that Master of Reality came to spread….But some of us who are desperate to find this message end up finding it in places where the tones are really dark and the images are explosive and scary, and when we say that we found the secret of love in some sticky lightless place, we get punished. Which ends up happening a lot of times, because we keep digging around in the places where we know love is…we learn not to mind getting punished if we can just keep what we found on the way to the punishment.’
It is a tragic tale, one where the punished come to only find purpose through punishment, only feeling alive through pain when they so badly want to feel joy. There is a solidarity with people who feel that way here, all set against the backdrop of 1980s State Institutions that seem to swallow young souls up forever in a maw of darkness kept hidden from the world. ‘So I felt sad for you,’ Roger writes to Gary, ‘because you haven’t ever stood in the shadow of a volcano and lived to tell about it.’ His hardships have made him stronger and able to appreciate the life he has left to live, bearing scars that show the harsh journey to be where he is in the second half writing in 1995.
‘I’m 26, but I’m not ready for m 16-year-old self to be dead.’
The aspects of grief and mourning in this novel are gripping. Roger mourns the lost years of adolescence, stuck inside a State Institution until he finally turns 18 and is thrown out to fend for himself without many resources. By reading his old diary and listening to music, he is trying to recapture that 16 year old emotion but finds it eludes him. ‘Maybe that younger person died when he became this older person, and now when I’m feeling his emotions and sharing his rage, I’m really just mourning his death.’ Music is a shortcut to dredging up old memories and feelings. With some songs I can taste the air and weather of the day it first meant something to me. It is a eulogy to time now gone, and Darnielle captures this in introspective tragedy through Roger laying his past self to rest, buried inside him with a funeral dirge of metal guitars fuzzing alongside the hard rhythm of a drum.
‘So we look up to Black Sabbath—to what we remember of them, in my case. Even after we’re grown up, we do. Always.’
Short but powerful, John Darnielle’s Black Sabbath excels at capturing the feeling of a favorite band. Wedding music criticism to a harrowing story of surviving your own mental health and a system that doesn’t seem to be helping, this is a stirring novella that will have you getting out your headphones and revisiting the songs that speak loudest to you. Music can heal and comfort, it can excite you and make you dream big, and often I find it is the closest thing to a magic spell we get in this world. Darnielle understands this, and his depiction of it will rock the stadium of your heart.
3.75/5