Great Pitchfork Festival this past weekend. One of many highlights for me was Lightning Bolt. I’d never seen them live before, and I knew it would be slightly different than most of their shows because they played onstage instead on the floor with the crowd. But the energy was awe-inspiring. This video is from that documentary on them from a few years back.
I’m fascinated by the imagery of a Lightning Bolt performance: the mask, the microphone in the mouth like a ball gag, the headphones, Brian Gibson barely moving while Brian Chippendale goes insane on the drums, the people crowded around and the sense of risk from having performers and audience so close together.
Talking to a few people at the Festival this weekend, I was trying to get at why Chippendale’s masks are so compelling to me. Plenty of bands have used this sort of theatricality, from Kiss to Slipnot on down, but somehow it works differently for me in this context. Part of it is that Lightning Bolt live signifies danger in a way that these other bands don’t: the stack of amps might fall over, Chippendale looks like he could hurt himself or someone else because his playing is so physical, in a moshing crowd, someone could be injured at any time. So the presence of a scary dude horror-movie mask in this content actually kind of seems “real,” somehow, like it fits in with something that is happening right now at this moment in this space, rather than just pointing to some external media that we’ve all internalized (Chainsaw Massacre, etc.)
There is also the specific construction of his masks. The fact that they are torn and pieces of fabric are flying around suggests that some a dangerously unstable person made it. You think of Hannibal Lecter in that protective mask in Silence of the Lambs, and the mask is precisely constructed and clinical to go along with his deeply crafted and deliberate sense of evil (not to mention that someone else put it on him). Michael Myers and Jason, their masks are off-the-rack things used for play (Halloween, hockey), which speaks to their damaged childhoods, maybe. A mask like Chippendale’s seems like the work of someone who wanted to make something more orderly and symmetrical but was too fucked up to pull it off. So he winds up with this ragged thing that he jerks over his head before doing his evil thing for reasons we can’t understand. This is probably a very personal interpretation that makes no sense at all.
Point being: Lightning Bolt rules.
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