Fairy Traps Metal
Art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Works of art are ascetic and shameless; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.
~ Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
2022 was a year of many fine albums - Aldous Harding's Warm Chris, Dave Graney and Clare Moore's In a MistLY, Jockstrap's I Love You Jennifer B, P.H.F.'s Purest Hell, Frog Power's Chicken Necks (for Rope) being those that I've particularly loved and appreciated, but to make an Album Of The Year post takes something even more special, an album that changes the way I hear music and the way I see life, and this is something that's only going to happen to me every 15 years or so.
It happened to me in 2022, and the album was Zheani's I Hate People on the Internet. Is this, 7 songs, including 4 previous single releases, coming in at a fraction over 20 minutes, an album, I mean officially? Sibelius' 7th Symphony is about 22 minutes long and counts as a symphony because it does everything a symphony should, albeit in one movement. Tim Hardin's first couple of LPs weren't much longer. I Hate People on the Internet does everything an album should.1 You can make it longer by sticking the preceding single, "Brave New World", onto it, and you do really need to hear that, it's an important introduction to the themes on IHPOTI, but its inclusion wouldn't make sense musically. What does make sense is its theme of internet hell and cancellation; in 2019, when Zheani accused Die Antwoord’s Ninja of sexual and spiritual abuse (on a trip to South Africa in 2013) in the rap metal diss track ‘The Question” (and also officially at a police station), Die Antwoord’s lawyers’ “cease and desist” orders panicked her then distributor Distrokid into removing her music from all streaming platforms (a cancellation as complete as that of Awake The Rapper, who shot and killed people 7 at a 4th July parade in Highland Park, Illinois in 2022), and Die Antwoord and their fans did all they could to destroy her online. What didn’t kill Zheani made her stronger, though I knew nothing of this context when I first played I Hate People on the Internet (on my own, after midnight, still a little high on LSD), having no idea who Zheani was beyond someone who'd done a sympathetic sad rap duet with Ängie on "Orgy of Enemies". I wasn't prepared at all for the barrage of joyous hatred that's the opener "Napalm". Did I really want to hear a woman shouting at me in Australian that "it's raining napalm!" as she dances on the bones of her enemies?
Normally I'd have run from anything pitched at my ears in that way, so why couldn't I stop listening? Maybe it was the loping funky rhythm, sort of Can-meets-the-Prodigy (it's taken me months to think of these old-school critic's comparisons, but I think they supply something, a connection to musical history, that algorithmic and genre links can't), maybe it was respect for the commitment involved in making something so abrasive, maybe it was my emerging awareness of the musical formula - the way a slow, powerful bass movement works under a chattering top end of rapid-fire multitracked vocals and drums, the way that the inner voices seem to be literally made from Zheani's lone voice autotuned into heavenly/demonic choirs or baroque/grotesque curlicues.
"Designer Sadness" continues this pattern and an important clue begins to appear in the specifically feminine world of the song, about the predatory appeal of online consumerism to the poor. There is nothing on I Hate People On The Internet, and not really all that much in the rest of Zheani's work, that makes concessions to the male listener. Her needling cartoon vocal here is like a feminized take on Eminem’s Slim Shady character, revisiting a strategy that got under her skin as a kid to create a voice for our time. At the end of "Designer Sadness" King Yosef’s drums are thrown up as loud as they'll go in the mix...
...and loud drumbeats introduce the next song, "Tarantulas". The previous songs were available as singles, "Tarantulas" is the first "album" track, and the album tracks here aren't an afterthought, they're the heart of the project. Over the crashing Led Zep drums, and a lumbering metal bass line reminiscent of classic Black Sabbath, there's only a subtle guitar, a spooky synth, and Zheani's many autotuned voices holding this song together, and it's a grand and thrilling performance, an exorcism of the forces evoked by the album's title, and the reanimation of first wave metal in a form so futuristic as to be unrecognizable.
The ambiguity in Zheani's use of occult imagery to illuminate her personal cosmic struggle separates her from her peers and reminds me - exactly - of T.S. Eliot on Baudelaire's Satanism - "as in no-one else, it is redeemed by meaning something else. He uses the same paraphenalia, but cannot limit its symbolism even to all that of which he is conscious".
The fire that burns she burns inside,
om krim kali a thousand knives
Give me the strength to burn these lies,
the weakness in my soul it dies.
You fan the flames, I’m burnt alive
then born anew baptised in fire.
A molten lake, a lying snake,
I’m turned to stone, standing alone.
The people moan, the people quake,
I feel at home burnt on the stake.
The title “Tarantulas” is a mondegreen of the song’s chorus, “I will tear at your webs till I’m dead”, a hint that much of what one hears at a first or second listen to these songs isn’t from the lyric sheet but a production of the subconscious, enabled by performance and production that more-or-less intentionally disrupts Zheani’s text, to provide what Colin Wilson called “the penumbra of meaning supplied by the depths of the mind”.
"You Saw", another "album" track, is another unforgettable performance, starting out in a rap metal style (nicely underpinned by a gnarly sawtooth bass synth) before breaking into surging rushes of "Raw Power" styled rock (sung with a rawness worthy of the Iggy comparison). Its story of cyberbullying and suicide reveals something important about the whole album - that within its attitude of joyful hatred, inner struggle and righteous anger there's an alchemy which transmutes suffering into compassion.
I accept my fate, sinking down to the bottom of the bay.
Dawn of a beautiful day.
“I am gone but everything's the same” she said, before she jumped.
If you had done more it could have been enough.
There's a maturity at play on I Hate People on the Internet that undercuts its punky attack to make its songs far more intense, less fake, and less thoughtless than they first seem.
"Fuck the Hollywood Cult" is another highlight, a tirade against Hollywood's exploitation of "the great beauties of our age", with autobiographical elements ("just a little girl, family wrecked by rock'n'roll") and the reworking of slurs thrown at Zheani on the internet into potent weapons ("just a dumb slut/ I've got a sharp sword"), with a central denunciatory section done in street-preacher style.2 Remember the Joyce Carol Oates quote I started with? "Fuck the Hollywood Cult" is the proper soundtrack to Blonde. And there's something in the motoric drive and pulse of this piece that reminds me of nothing so much as Snapper...
...a feeling which intensifies on the next track, "Skinwalker" - again addressed to a female opponent, accused of stealing one's suffering and wearing it as her own; here the inner voices rise to demonic winds that sweep the song from end to end. The album's production and instrumentation is by King Yosef - Zheani's been testing the potential of their collaboration on and off since 2018's "Darker Emptier Simpler" single, and here on I Hate People On The Internet it takes perfect form.
On the earlier "Powder Tuff" (from 2019's The Line) Zheani and King Yosef experimented with a hyperpop sound and this is developed further in the styling of the final cut, "We're All Going to Die", sung with an exuberance informing the message of acceptance, with another well-crafted lyric which draws on The Tibetan Book of the Dead with an honesty that makes the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" lyric seem complacent and jejune by comparison.
Other artists have made poetry from the mythology of death, but there’s no way I’m listening to Nick Cave on my deathbed, when I could be getting practical advice wrapped in music that’s as bright as a sunrise.
From the day of birth babe your death was awaited,
for certain and fated, so why do you hate it?
Remember the clear light, the nature of your mind, merge into the clear light, you’re home baby home.
Apart from the recognizable rap metal verses in "You Saw" I Hate People On The Internet is an impossible album to pigeonhole genre-wise; it combines genre sounds - sometimes the most thrilling aspects of the most despised genres - in unexpected ways to create a whole new design for making music. I’ve written about the way Chuck Berry combined latin, country, blues and jump jazz styles in the 1950s to create modern guitar rock - what I hear being done in I Hate People on the Internet is similarly inventive and innovative. Zheani's previous work (The Zheani Sparkes EP from 2020 is also essential listening and one of the great musical memoirs) has panned across genres and combined trap and metal into interesting structures, but I Hate People On The Internet accomplishes a grand synthesis, with trap metal, hyperpop, rap metal, punk, J-pop and witch house as some of its more obvious elements (though “obvious” is a relative term here, and this formula has taken me a year of sedulous study to unpick).
A woman, wronged by musicians, becomes a musician herself in her quest for therapy, exorcism, and revenge. In time she not only calls out her abuser, but shows herself to be the greater musical innovator, and the more influential arbiter of style. This is the modern feminist fairy tale made real (imagine if Hannah Gadsby had been harmed by Picasso himself, and had subsequently proven herself to be the greater artist). In a better world Zheani would be on the cover of Time and be named a Dame Commander of the Order of Elektra and Saint Joan in the Aussie New Years Honours list. But she won’t go about things according to Judeo-Christian morality or due process, and she won’t comport herself on social media according to the slippery standards of the culture industry; her presence there is decidedly not safe for work.
What we’ll hear next from Zheani is anyone's guess – a new mixtape The Spiritual Meat Grinder is set to be released on the 25th August (this post’s tomorrow if all goes according to plan). I doubt this eclectic artist, who has only been releasing music for five years, can be tied down to any one of her discoveries, even one as magical as the soundworld on I Hate People on the Internet – but I very much trust that her work will continue to be full of wonders.
Ba’algorithm - The Buttress, “Brutus”
Streaming platforms require that works be classified as album, EP or single, but the skeuomorph preferred by musicians themselves to describe an online collection of short songs these days is “mixtape”.
“Fuck The Hollywood Cult” develops the lyrical theme of “Hallowed Hills” from Zheani’s first mixtape Eight, while “You Saw” is a less solipsist expansion of the theme of “Angel Dust” from The Zheani Sparkes EP.