DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-095

Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil

hardrockingroad@yahoo.com.br

Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Paraná, Brazil

contani@sercomtel.com.br

mcontani@gmail.com

Abstract

The festive meeting (i.e. at which food and drink are served) arranged for amusement and the reaffirmation of religious, civic or social positions is close to one of the most important –and primordial – forms of human culture: the banquet. Offering a banquet is much more than a simple social function since it involves complex questions of human behavior. Our research objective is to analyze images and illustrations of banqueting found on contemporary illustrations of CD covers and other materials of hard rock and heavy metal bands. The Reading of the visual material involves association with ancient murals, Renaissance paintings, historical narrative, photographs and films, the elements from which these visuals are inspired. The analyses are primarily based on and developed according to Jean Baudrillard’s and Umberto Eco’s work on the concept of hyper-reality, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalization and laugh, which was catalogued, developed and analyzed by Georges Minois in Histoire du rire et de la derision. The interpretation of the iconography of hard rock and heavy metal LP and CD cover art indicates, semiotically, how all these meanings can be transformed into definitive expressions.

1. Introduction

The act of reveling or spree bingeing and its representation is associated with almost every activity of mankind and the focus on the banquet is due to the fact that, in this universe, principles are found that carry with them the positive hyperbolism of a triumphal jubilance, although they can also contain a solemn, mournful tone. They can, moreover, express situations of magnitude with demonstrations of force, superiority and power. The link between a show of importance – or of authority – and the festive consumption of food and drink is present throughout History and among all peoples.

Bakhtinian carnivalization deals exhaustively with questions of laughter (and its multiple manifestations and categories), the vocabulary of the public squares (“marketplaces” or heavy metal open air festivals) and freedom of speech, forms of the popular festival, grotesque aspects of the human complexion, lower body functions (“material bodily lower stratum”), hyperbolization/hyperbolism. Bakhtin introduces us to both the joyful, orgiastic and winner aspects of the banquet image (retrieved from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, mainly from the works of François Rabelais) as intimate relations between food and drink with funereal rites (the death theme) and the somber underworld of the unknown.

The iconographic universe of the hard rock and heavy metal musical genres are very close to that of the carnivalization, thanks to the great inter-cognitive affinity between their symbolic representations. The object of this study deals, primarily, with the reading (or contemplation) of images related to a banquet in CDs, LPs and VHSs illustrations from the so-called heavy rock, whose analysis gains more “weight” when compared to classic art.

Food and drink symbolism has survived throughout the centuries, dispersed in a number of meanings such as the considerable mystic value of fixation or the uncontrollable desire to return to a certain place, social and family ties, cultural identification and hierarchical segregation. However, the meaning with greater relevance to this research is that of the display of strength and power which, not only for those who carries it out but also for those who are submitted to it, is intimately connected to the complex of impotence that haunts mortal man before his unmerciful fate.

Eco and Baudrillard demonstrate how hyper-reality constructs the “absolute fraud” that is propagated worldwide by “the industry of the absolute fake”, which is a grand farce, a copy or reproduction that naturally ends up being accepted by the masses in place of what is real. Minois writes a detailed history on the natural phenomenon of laughter since the period of the legendary Homer. Human laughter is one of the main pieces of carnivalization, but, according to the French historian, has arrived to current times not very different from what it was long time ago, i.e., with very little evolution. Ironically, this same laughter is needed for the maintenance of our emotional balance, responsible for the scientific and technological progress, working as an outlet for the inconsolable fear death. Finally, Flusser corroborates with the idea of the man’s creation principle, motivated by laughter and by a “new reality” that can be fabricated by placing it against the stagnant immutability of some religions. Metaphorically, he uses the figure of the Devil in many positive aspects as the Prometheus of the Modern Era that transports the fire of freedom of thinking (reflection) and action (creativity) to humanity, denominated the Flusserian diabolical straightforward progress.

The theoretical underpinnings of this work come from an adjustment between the above mentioned contemporary semiotic systems and the main elements of Bakhtinian carnivalization. As for the methodological approach, it is developed through an interpretative-semiotic analysis (readings) of classic paintings images, murals, book drawings and encyclopedias compared to modern illustrations of record covers, with a line of thinking based on adopted theoretical precepts.

The objective of the study is to reveal that the universal practice of the banquet image as an ostensive mean of force and power is as a matter of fact deeply associated with the human attempt to cover its mortal fragility before existential problems, and, therefore, is almost always connected to laughter and its libertarian aspect. Incidentally, it is the most used collective outlet in the world, adaptable to any event or situation. It presupposes that hard rock designers- aware of man’s natural tendency to fatalism – try to highlight, in their illustrations, the figure of a happy, orgiastic and victorious banquet.

2. The Banquet Image

The festivities are associated with the time of their realizations. They are connected to periods of crisis and disorder in the nature’s life as well as in the life of society and men. In the Middle Ages, the character of the feasts is inseparably adjusted to higher human existence purposes. Concepts and ideas, such as those of death, resurrection, alternation, the grotesque, games and renovation, constitute everlasting and outstanding aspects of the feast (Bakhtin, 1999, 1984, p. 8). The banquet image allows everything and the hyperbolism generated may manifest itself positively or negatively, and its appeasing function between the human and the divine is also remarkable.

The legendary origin of the Trojan War occurred during a banquet. During the feast in honor of Thetis and Peleus marriage (parents of the hero Achilles), the major Gods gather amidst delicious glasses of nectar and plates and bowls of ambrosia while Eris, the goddess of discord, unexpectedly poses a challenge. She throws on the table (fig. 1) a pomme, a golden apple, announcing that it is a gift to the most beautiful of the goddesses and disappears. Juno (Hera), Pallas Athena (Minerva) and Venus (Aphrodite) falls into the tattletale’s trap. They ask a Trojan pastor to be the judge. They choose Prince Paris who selects Venus as the winner of the contest of celestial beauty. From this imprudent deadly judgment, he condemns Trojan to the epic raid carried out by the Greek states-cities confederation and magnificently narrated by the blind poet Homer.

The Iliad, therefore, started in response to a provocation during a banquet. The story of the so-called Trojan War only came to an end thanks to a type of banquet, an offering. All of this took place when Agamemnon insulted the apollonian priest, Crises, thus infuriating the god. “Phoebus descends from the Olympus (fig.2). Terrible was the buzzing of his silver bow. First he attacked the animals then he threw his arrows against men, and they all hit the target. For nine days, the god’s arrows fell on the campsite (Iliad, Book I, p. 12).” A magnificent offer – a banquet – with fat cuts of bulls, lambs or goats basted with barley placates the wrath of Apollo, ending the killing among the Greeks and leading to the events of the Trojan War.

The banquet is one of the central pieces of the carnivalization universe. Bakhtin includes it among his three great categories (or expression forms) of popular culture: rites and spectacles (carnival festivities, comic works represented in public places, etc.); verbal comic works (including parodies) of oral and written nature, in Latin or in vulgar language; and the several forms and genres of familiar and rude vocabulary (insults, swears, popular blazonries, etc.) (Bakhtin,1984, p. 5).

2.1. Hyperbolism, ostentantion, victory, laughter

Assurnasirpal II (883-859 a.C.), and Assyrian ruler, sponsors the greatest feast of all times, in which sixty-nine thousand and five-hundred subjects are invited to devour, for 10 days, unbelievable amounts of beef, lamb, poultry and fish plus huge quantities of beer and wine. According to Bakhtin’s carnivalized understanding, the image of the banquet and the gluttony is strongly connected to man’s fight against his surrounding habitat, culminating with the victory of the first. The last victory of work ends up in a huge demonstration of gluttony. This image encompasses a positive hyperbolism of a triumphal and happy tone.

[...] Man’s encounter with the world in the act of eating is joyful, triumphant; he triumphs over the world, devours it without being devoured himself. The limits between man and the world are erased, to man’s advantage. [...] Collective food as the conclusion of labor’s collective process was a social event” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 281).

Splendid meals, however, are not limited to honor collective efforts and conquests but, in many situations, are associated with the purest and banal exhibitionism of the social hierarchical character. It is the classic example of the Banquet of Trimalchio described by Petronius in Satyricon. In Satyricon by Gaius Petronius Arbiter (c. 27- 66 AD) two incorrigible crooks, Encolpius and his fellow student Asciltus start enjoying life falling out over their mutual lust for the young Giton, exhaustively and lasciviously between one feast and another. The objective is to live at fullest in sprees and binges and in all orgies, the Banquet of Trimalchio, an ex- slave, being the most well-known. Extremely wealthy and powerful, Trimalchio begins to show off his new social condition by offering pantagruelic banquets to many guests. During the long festive period, the guests are involved in grotesque and extravagant entertainment situation. This way Trimalchio intends to present himself as a “nouveau riche” by throwing banquets filled with pomposity and power.

Ancient festive representations of Etruscan (fig.3) and Roman (fig.4) banquets can be included in the same medieval modality – ludic ambiance - which appears in the incipient bourgeois literature. These pantagruelic and hyperbolic events are offered by the wealthy to groups of selected guests, or to the “little people”, as a confirmation of their superiority due to their social status. Up until III b.C., before Rome became a great Italian center, the Etruscans were famous for representing Elysian scenes of banquets on their funeral urns and sarcophagus, since, according to them, the deceased goes to a good and happy place despite the somber characteristic of the interior of the Earth, i.e, in Hades.

Let us again stress, in conclusion, that banquet images in the popular-festive tradition (and in Rabelais) differ sharply from the images of private eating or private gluttony and drunkenness in bourgeois literature. The latter express the contentment and satiety of the selfish individual, his personal enjoyment, and not the triumph of the people as a whole. Such imagery is torn away from the process of labor and struggle; it is removed from the market place and is confined to the housed and the private chamber (abundance in the home); it is no longer the ‘banquet for the whole world’, in which all take part, but an intimate feast with hungry beggars at the door. If this picture of eating and drinking is hyperbolic, it is a picture of gluttony, not an expression of social justice. It is a static way of private life, deprived of any symbolic openings and universal meaning, no matter whether it is represented as satire that is, as purely negative, or as a positive state of well-being. (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 301).

Laughter has innumerable functions, including serving as a means to approximate people or to attenuate conflicts in tense moments. “According to Aristotle, laughter is the first human nature, and stupidity is the second!” (Minois, 2003, p.178).

In the illustrations above, consistent with the record covers (fig.5 to 8), the well-deserved moment of relaxation with a meal served with drinks (fig.9) is understood as the pleasure of human victory over material and spiritual adversities. In fact, this rule applies both to the Middle Ages as well as to current times. The explosion of festive happiness, the exaggeration of the grotesque, the metamorphosis (disguise) and the subversive confrontation is clear in fig. 7. The respect for spiritual or religious questions are represented ambiguously by the table in fig. 8, where components considered “reactionary” such as the American flag and the traditional family, coexist with the occult mask of the non-conformism and atheism of the rock. The contrast (ambivalence) is also seen in the photograph of a black metal style dilettante (fig.9) – considered one of the most radical in the world of heavy metal - when he calmly sits on the ground with a beer mug in an area reserved for the Wacken Open Air German Festival, in 2006, to savor some commercialized food. All these illustrations are submitted to the positive force of the banquet images. They create a free atmosphere and exaggerations, though they are put to a satirical use.

Two moments of contrast: on the front cover, the image of life within the standards, with the musician in his childhood during a picnic with his father, mother and sister (fig. 10). On the back cover, as an adult, the “good boy” image degenerates into a feast transformed in a binge with orgy aspects, together with his musician friends and dedicated fans (fig. 11).

In addition, illustrations on the cover (front and back) with the picnic scene that brings out strong allusions to the universal triumph of life over death (or happiness over sadness), promoted by the banquet’s abundance, mainly by the public feast. The inebriating feeling caused by the food and drink depicts, momentarily, the utopic character of the banquet, which satisfies men, helping them forget their actual maladies, interdictions, fears and giving them hope for future fortunes. Libido is set free, configuring a rupture of inhibitions, repressions and frustrations, creating situations of orgy. It is what the illustration on the cover (fig. 12-13 hard rock group) of the American hard rock group West, Bruce and Laing shows.

[...] The banquet had the power of liberating the world from the shackles of piousness and fear of God. Everything became open to play and merriment. [...] “The Treatise of Garcia of Toledo”, is typical in this respect [...] The description of this continuous feast, of the gluttony of the Pope and of the other prelates, is full gross exaggeration and long speeches of praise and abuse. [...] Banquet images, like all popular-festive forms, are ambivalent. [...] They create a free atmosphere. (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 288; 291).

Comparatively, it can be said that, the comic and vulgar banquet moments depicted, in great part, on hard rock records covers, have inherited the disposition of ancient Etruscans for enjoying life in the carpe diem style. This is highly plausible considering that most bands come from industrialized countries of the “First World”, where moral and hierarchical social pressure suffocates collectivity on a daily basis.

Humor is always at the heels of the doubt. It appears whenever human sciences show their weakness and the complexity of the human being [...] Modern laughter is uncertain since it does not know where to fix itself. It is neither affirmation nor negation but interrogation, fluctuating over the abyss in which certainties have drowned [...] Modern laughter exists to mask the loss of the senses [...]. This truth is unbearable, and only laughter can bear the unbearable, disguising it, mocking it and playing with it. Laughter is indispensable since, more than never, we are facing the Empty [...] Without humor, how will the ten billion people living in this world in 2050, falling over their dejects and being suffocated by pollution, survive? (Minois, 2003, p. 632).

To Flusser, the climate of absolute calm and happiness human beings can achieve – at some improbable time in their history – it is a mere product of a hopeful illusion, a terribly sinister peace, rationally faced with an “ironic smile” (FLUSSER, 2006, p. 201).

2.2. Strength, Power, Authority and Brutality

The image of the banquet is not always associated with questions of laughter, ostentation and popular victory. Cannibalism (fig. 15 and 16) explains the human instinct for destruction and absorption of the species through the mouth. Men eat other men’s flesh to incorporate more strength and power to arm themselves with their “sacred energy”. “The great Handbook of South Americans Indians describes a number of Indians tribes who, at least until recently, were cannibals and preserved the skulls of their enemies as memorials of their exploits (Henschen, 1966, p. 64).”

The banquet images can also express situations of brutality and authority, and the use of beef is associated with the demonstration of strength and power. Exceptionally gloomy is the end of times meal announced in Apocalypse (Jo 3, 17-18, Jerusalem Bible, p. 2163), when the Vengeful Angel sent by Jesus Christ summons all the birds that fly in the sky for the last supper: “Come, assemble for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of commanders and the flesh of mighty men and the flesh of horses and of those who sit on them and the flesh of all men, both free men and slaves, and small and great”.

“Phineus had been blinded by the gods for prophesying the future too accurately, and was also plagued by a pair of Harpies; who, at every meal, flew into the palace and snatched victuals from his table, befauling the rest, so that it stank and was inedible (Graves, 1996, p. 537).” The Harpies enforce punishments under the protection of gods, i.e., of those that, in fact, have the higher authority on humanity, using the most brutal means possible. Their extremely grotesque appearance is very different from that in the illustration on the cover of the Brazilian group record (fig. 14), however, what really matters is the idea of strength and power it depicts.

The aborigine “barbecue” from the Great Discoveries era and the “stew” shared by the cannibals and by the Exodus band musicians (fig. 15 and 16) are good examples of the use of meat in banquets as a demonstration of force and power. They denote a display of victory amplified by all the energy and power acquired through a process of total devouring (cannibalism) of the “other”.

3. Hyper-reality

Baudrillard understands that hyperreality refers to the virtual (or unreal) nature of contemporary culture in the mass communication era, where intense consumption is easily controlled by opinion polls, where the simulation is perfect; however, it is also where the ecstasy is provoked by a masked simulation of the reality.

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction [...] At the limit of this process of reproduction, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal. [...] The hyperreal transcends representation only because it is entirely in simulation. (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 146).

“Elsewhere the frantic desire for the Almost Real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories; the Absolute Fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth (Eco, 1995, p. 30).” However, it is clear that societies allow themselves to live in the world of fairy tales, accepting, meekly, anything that the mass communication means impose on them. The most shameless and unwarranted lies are “consumed” and accepted, since the present humanity – uniformly globalized – are not concerned with anything, leaving to the State ( or System, the updated term) the responsibility for caring and controlling everything. People, in general, are only satisfied with intense emotions (every time more technologically potent, brutal) offered by the entertainment industry. Everything is perfect and “calm” in the world, provided that everyone “is drowning in excessive consumption to avoid facing reality” (Flusser, 1998, p. 144). No wonder all the myths of modernity are Americans, warns Baudrillard (1986, p. 70).

3.1. Triumphal aspects and apocalyptical funereal

The mouth – an important grotesque image of the Backtinian carnival corpus – is the main human anatomic opening in which the frontiers between two bodies are crossed.  It reinforces the concept of union between the inner world (hell, death, the underground and occultism) and the outer world (life and current time). Through the mouth, a constant traffic between the mundane and the supernatural is installed.