Heavy metal kayfabe
posted on 30 Oct 2014 under category History
From Wikipedia:
In professional wrestling, kayfabe is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as “real” or “true,” specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or pre-determined nature. Kayfabe has also evolved to become a code word of sorts for maintaining this “reality” within the realm of the general public.
When I was a kid I spent every Monday night from 8-10 PM glued to the USA Network, watching Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby “The Brain” Heenan trade verbal barbs and comment over hours and hours of athletic showmanship. “Fake” in the sense that nobody was really beating the crap out of each other and the guys were all good friends or at least cordial co-workers, but you really can’t fake being a 200+ pound guy who can jump six feet into the air, turn horizontally, and perfectly time a kick to what looks like a guy’s face without actually hurting him, or yourself. The outlandish costumes, the stage/ring names, rivalries and alliances, gimmicks like cage matches or special events like Battle Royales…
It’s really no wonder I got into the 90’s-era resurgence of Black Metal. What’s really the wonder is that I never made this connection before. It’s all kayfabe.
Hell, even before I delved into the Norse resurgence and the crude, lo-fi underground, way back in high school when I was still a fan of professional wrestling, I also became a big fan of Venom. The completely outlandish covers, over-the-top song titles and lyrics, and most of all the sinister stage names they took, was something I took to immediately. Even on the very first ‘Rampage demo’, which is really just a boombox in the corner of my bedroom capturing me, Paul, and Ben jamming and making up songs on the spot, we adopted pseudonyms. Granted, “Crakk Smakk” isn’t exactly in the same ballpark (or hemisphere) as “Cronos” when it comes to the Coolness-of-Pseudonym scale, but it did clearly announce my aspirations - I wanted whatever I did with music to have a bit more to it than just music. After all, if it were just Terry Bollea and Andre Roussimoff doing some elaborately-arranged fight choreography in front of 93,000+ fans, even if it were exactly the same moves, culminating in a 310-pound guy picking up a 500+ pound guy for a bodyslam, it just doesn’t have as much of a dramatic impact as it does when you add in the characters “Hulk Hogan”, “Andre the Giant”, and the big months-long feud that led up to said bodyslam. That context, even if it’s fictional, is what gives you the emotional hook into the story, or song, or whatever it is that is being contextualized by the kayfabe.
My time in my first bands was more serious, and we really didn’t present anything other than the minimal ‘metal’ look - long hair, dark clothes, band logo t-shirts and such, and edgy-looking instruments. However, in both Early Warning and in Skiptoe, we had our fuck-around bands - you know, where everyone switches to everyone else’s instruments and you rip out pisstake covers or the occasional joke-laden original song just for fun. Well, in those bands, we did do a bit more of the kayfabe routine, complete with fake band names and stage names. If you’ve read my song history you know that a few of the songs and lyrics from early Rampage releases go back to “Slaughterhouse”, the fuck-around band for Skiptoe in 1995-1996, but my own monicker “Vic”, originally “MC Vic”, goes back to 1991 when Early Warning, during our second or third practice, formed “The Guys Who Wear Black Too Much”. It was only natural that I would carry the kayfabe idea forward when I put together Rampage again in 1996.
Reinforcing this was a particular partner in crime, Jason Christie of Gortician. He was one of the first guys I met in online metal newsgroups, and seeing the outlandish tales of Bob Arctor, Timothy Archer, and the eternally-revolving list of JC’s screen-names (“David Lee Abazagoroth” is the only one I remember, but they were all funny mash-ups like that) inspired me to ramp-up the fiction around Rampage I was building - going so far as to solicit pictures and even thanks lists from various other online friends I asked to use as ‘Band Members’. I saw precedent in other bands, from Bathory’s more fanciful tales to the deliberate exaggerations of Mayhem to the fanciful imaginations of Immortal to the outright real-life acting-out of unsavory things by Burzum, Dissection, and others. The mode and forms were completely different, but the method and effect were the same - by deliberately creating a context for the music by other not-specifically-musical acts, you can heighten the impact of the music you create. It becomes much more of an experience to immerse yourself into, a shield or wall you build to isolate everything else outside, so that you can focus more intensely on the fictional narrative you are witnessing.
I used to be elaborately and obsessively protective about maintaining the kayfabe of my bands and of Unsung Heroes Records, which is strange considering I was also set on making the various narratives so outlandish that you were supposed to know it was all bullshit anyway. It’s like I wanted everyone to really believe that Lance Boyle was some strung-out basspounder with a disgusting bent to his music, but I also wanted kudos for creating such a reprobate. And most everyone who follows anything I do knows it’s all bullshit anyway - so why keep it up? I guess for the same reason that WWE is still a thing - for those who like it, it’s fun.
Which is all just a really long preface to the mention that I finally found the original version of that old “Cancer of the Psuedonym” post, as well as the post with my pseudonymous obituaries, in which I first came clean about all of this stuff a few years ago. I’ll get them both reposted soon, perhaps with some extra commentary about the hows and whys of my virtual metal musician menagerie. Just remember, while they all had terminal cancer, they’re all kinda still alive, and maybe even working.
No, really, I am… I mean, ‘We Are’. *wink*