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Dopecentury

What would it look like if the aesthetics of heavy metal were brought to fiction?

For years I have been asking myself the question: if the band Motörhead were a novel, what would it be like?

This is not really so much a question of what it would literally be like if Lemmy from Motörhead had written a novel (though that would be interesting, and I'd like to read such a thing), but more a question of aesthetics: is it possible to capture the grittiness, the intensity, the volume of a seriously grimy heavy metal band in written form? I'm not limiting this to specifically Motörhead's aesthetic; really capturing the aesthetic of any gritty heavy metal band in written form would do.

Even though grittiness is a quality regularly seen in films and heard in music, I cannot think of an example of narrative fiction that captures the same feeling. (I sometimes suspect that the aesthetics of fiction are kind of stuck in a place that other genres have long since broken free from, but that's a subject to address somewhere else.) I've considered the paths to the creation of this written-heavy-metal aesthetic every which way and made many false starts trying to write something that gets close. It is a major underlying element of my novel By Sound Alone. But it is an underlying element. I want it to be front and center. I want to be able to regularly churn out a written aesthetic in which grittiness and volume is the distinguishing feature.

Maybe it simply isn't possible?

I don't know, but I want to find out. So after years of failing to just stumble across written grimy grittiness through the simple desire to do so, I created a more active plan to develop this aesthetic: I'm going to listen to Sleep's Dopesmoker one-hundred times and write for the full hour-and-three minute length of the track each time. With Sleep clear and present in my ears, I'm hoping that in that hundred hours I can pick out the aesthetic I'm looking for.

Why Dopesmoker?

First, I contend that it is the greatest piece of music ever written. The aesthetics are also perfect for what I'd like to achieve — maybe even better than Motörhead. (I'd like my writing to feel like struggling to slog through thigh-high muck!) Dopsmoker can recede to incidental background music when you want to pay attention to something else. And it can come right to the front any time you require inspiration just by briefly turning your attention to it. It is the right music for all situations. It is the right music for writing.

"100 times!" you might be saying. "That's crazy! Don't you know that Dopesmoker is super slow and more than an hour long?" Fear not for my sanity. During the pandemic, I listened to it every day for almost a year — I've already listened to it more than 300 times. One hundred more times will be a pure inspirational pleasure.

Guidelines

Not rules (rules are stupid), but guidelines for this project:

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