Frøkedal on misfits and heavy metal

Every now and then, if you are lucky, listening to a particularly wonderful piece of music will evoke feelings that are not easily put into words. An insight you could never really grasp that you can suddenly recognise, or a new but oddly familiar state of mind. It may expose sides to yourself that may have been partly hidden to you. Through music almost everything – even you – can make sense, in an emotional, non-logical way. In the end I think that is what it is mostly about for me. I want to feel that my spirit connects with something.

When listening experiences like these occur you naturally want other people to feel the same, so you try sharing your new revelation with a friend. You want him or her to take in the genius of the lyrics, you point out the drum fill that makes your heart sink and explain which chord change fills you with ecstasy or sadness each time.

Then what if your friend absolutely hates it? What if they all do? Or even worse, meet you with a blank face, a gentle nod pretending to like it too, but you understand that they don’t get it even if they want to. What if the musical highlight of your life turns out to be indigestible to the people you want to connect with?

I grew up in a small village on the west coast of Norway, the part of the country where the green hills and steep mountains enclose the fjords. Being kids we took the scenery for granted, as we chased around in the forest and swam in the fjord during those everlasting summer holidays. We knew the name, house and history of everyone we met. And everyone knew us.

There are around 4000 inhabitants in the whole municipality and our small elementary school housed a total of 30 pupils. I could see the schoolhouse from the kitchen window of our house. My world was tiny and safe.

One thing the picturesque surroundings couldn’t offer, though, was diversity, which it didn’t take long to find out. From early on your football skills alone would more or less decide your social status. So there would be 30 of us running around chasing a ball in the breaks. Then later on, the option of weekend activities would be split between drinking orange soda mixed with whatever liquor you could get hold of (and making out at the discotheque) – or become a member of the Christian youth group.

Being faced with the choice between folding my hands in prayer or dancing clumsily to the latest Scooter hit, I soaked up heavy metal and glam metal quicker than you’d expect for a 7-8 year old. My eccentric uncle listened to bands like W.A.S.P., Mötley Crüe, Testament and Poison, and he sent me home with mixtapes of some of my favourites (usually the more androgynous bands) and some of the darker acts he thought I should pay more attention to. I was drawn to the skulls, the makeup, the singalong-friendly choruses and the torn outfits. And it clashed with everything else in my life. I was still wearing cute pink clothes when I bought my first cassette – Mötley Crüe’s “Shout at the Devil“ from a puzzled clerk at the combined book and music shop in the nearest town.

If my friends didn’t get disgusted when I tried to enrich their life with this cassette, they would give nothing more than a blank stare. I remember them walking arm-in-arm in the schoolyard shouting “We Want New Kids On The Block” in my direction and me covering my ears. It was not so much that I hated NKOTB, but that I knew why they were loudly proclaiming their love: My music was considered horrible, possibly satanic and dangerous.

At the school carnival I dressed up as Jerry Dixon, the bass player in Warrant, whom I thought I might bear a certain resemblance to. I did mute, extrovert playback shows in my room behind locked doors – and I tried understanding the often grotesque or sexually charged lyrics, who to me seemed to hold the key to the meaning of life. After seeing my mother’s furious face when asking her what the phrase “You’re the only hell your mama ever raised” really meant, I stopped seeking advice from the outside world, realising those cassettes would soon be long gone if I didn’t keep my mouth shut. Instead I did my best to decipher those otherworldly lyrics with what little English I knew, while impatiently waiting to grow older and start a real life – a life where I would no longer be secretly looking in from the outside.

And then one day you realise that the future has begun. And you may stop to think if you found what you were looking for way back then. The people, the concerts, the bands, the filthy rehearsal spaces with stale coffee and the long awaited conversations about albums and songs? I did – and still do. And thinking about it now, I realise that any dream that girl might have had buying her first Mötley Crüe album, has probably been fulfilled.

But it is still her that I write about. Her and the other freaks that we all are sometimes. My new album is is densely populated by those who don’t really fit in. Their outbursts, heartaches, passions, anger and ego boosts are sometimes too much to handle – if not to the world, then to themselves. I learned a lot about that when I grew up. It made me stubborn and it made me long to feel connected. And to do so you only need a song in your life, that extrovert sparkly hair metal hit, the mild humming of Vashti Bunyan or the droning viola of John Cale.