In which Ing overanalyzes the kick-ass-ness of some music
Posted By Ing on February 10, 2010
This just in: Queensryche’s Operation Mindcrime is still probably the best rock album ever produced. Ever. EVER.
Pink Floyd? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles? The Who? They had some good ones. But I’ll tell you who’s better and who’s best. Not those guys. These guys.
Yeah, you’ll catch the sound of mid-80s metal in there — along with stellar musicianship that blurs genre boundaries and a story that involves big themes like religion, power, lust, love, death, hate, and the misuse of all of them and the redemptive power of some of them. Obsolescence is in the nature of rock music (as with most forms of pop culture), but Mindcrime is one of a very few albums that both captures the spirit of its time and transforms it into something nearly timeless.
Either the musicianship or the story would make it more than ordinary, but neither of them — separately or together — really qualify any album as a masterpiece. What raises Operation Mindcrime above the standard hair-metal schlock and separates it from the inchoate musings of most progressive rock is that the music and the story both express the experience of two believable protagonists: the big themes are made relevant and timeless because they come to us through the eyes and emotions of individual people who (however different they may be from us) we can identify with.
I think there’s a parallel to Shakespeare here. No, I’m not saying Queensryche is the second coming of the Bard. I am saying, however, that I think they’ve tapped into just a little bit of the same magic that made Shakespeare the greatest writer the world has ever seen. The thing about Shakespeare is that he didn’t transcend his time in the way your high school English teacher probably wanted you to think: he was a product of his time, as we all are, and you can’t really understand what he was doing unless you understand a little bit about Elizabethan England. Shakespeare’s transcending genius wasn’t in somehow becoming as “modern” as us in his head. His genius was that he didn’t personify abstractions and social mores in his plays; instead, his plays contain characters whose words and actions show that we — individual people — both act out and invent the abstractions that dominate our minds (and then there are those inescapable biological urges…). He created modern. We’re acting out what he invented for us. (If you want to know how much of our humanity we owe to this one guy, read Harold Bloom’s brilliant Shakespeare: Invention of the Human.)
But I’m getting off course. My point is that a big part of what makes Operation Mindcrime so brilliant is not the presence of big themes and stark social commentary, but the fact that, unlike the characters in most prog-metal concept albums, the characters are not merely conventions or excuses to carry a theme; they’re believable people whose experience brings up some disturbing issues.
Now I’m REALLY off course. Because this is rock ‘n roll, after all. More than that, it’s metal.
And it kicks ass. Which in the end is all that really matters.
Woohoo! Long live Queensryche! Actually, maybe they should have stopped after Promised Land . . .
Or maybe even before Promised Land. Operation Mindcrime is beautiful though. Rock on. R.
I used to think Promised Land was pretty much the end of Queensryche — at least the end of the band as I once knew them. In a way I was right, because they’re not the same anymore, but then what band would be after 25 years of playing together?
(Answer: AC/DC.)
QR had a couple of albums in the 1999-2003 period that I’m not fond of, and I still haven’t bought or fully heard the Mindcrime II album they did about 3 years back, but American Soldier, their latest one, is pretty darn good. I’d put it in similar territory to Empire, Q2K, and Promised Land. It’s not Mindcrime by any stretch, but they’ve got a story (well, stories) to tell, and their songs are tight, economical, and effective. They seem re-energized.
And it doesn’t hurt that when I saw them play live a couple months back they were in fine form. It was a small venue, about 1100 capacity, general admission, a far cry from 10,000 seat arenas they used to play in hair-metal’s final flowering back in the early ’90s, and they adapted their show to the venue, making everything a lot more personal and conversational, rocking the hell out of old and new songs alike. They’re as good a live band as there’s ever been, if you ask me.
But that’s just me. :)