Trump Should Have Booked This Trumpian Metal Band and Its Mummy Man-Cat
Iced Earth’s themes are selfish, paranoid, jingoistic — and plain weird
In the weeks preceding Pres. Donald Trump’s inaugural concert — a.k.a. the Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration — on Jan. 19, 2017, Trump’s transition to the presidency descended to new lows.
So it should have come as no surprise that many celebrities avoided or even boycotted the event. Even the Radio City Rockettes seemed reluctant to perform for Trump, but still ultimately took the stage, legs blazing, for the Liberty and Freedom Balls on Jan. 21.
The inaugural concert on the evening of Jan. 19 managed to book 3 Doors Down, Toby Keith, The Piano Guys, D.J. RaviDrums, Frontmen of Country and Lee Greenwood — a decent-enough roster, if a bit earnest.
Country-music stalwart Keith in particular stood out with a rousing set that included red-white-and-blue anthems such as “Made in America” and “American Soldier.”
But Trump really missed a golden booking opportunity — a chance to screw with the establishment one last time and maybe even reach a new constituency. Heavy metal fans.
If only the administration had booked Iced Earth, possibly the Trumpiest musical act in the world — and whose overarching project is about a mummified man-cat villain with supernatural powers.
The Tampa-based Iced Earth — Jon Schaffer, Stu Block, Luke Appleton, Brent Smedley and Jake Dreyer — formed in 1985. In 2004 Iced Earth released The Glorious Burden. With cover art that evoked the American Civil War, the two-disc album includes a dozen songs about patriots freezing to death in Valley Forge, Minutemen rising against the British, 9/11, U.S. Navy SEALS and … Attila the Hun.
It’s an unabashed nod to conservative American “values” and military history.
Disc two is a sprawling rock opera about the Battle of Gettysburg. In it, vocalist Tim “Ripper” Owens — who left the band in 2007 — recounts the savage turning point of the Civil War in three acts accompanied by a string section and some very epic licks from band-founder and guitarist Schaffer.
With “Gettysburg,” Iced Earth took its love for ‘Murica to a whole new level. This is why the band would have made a great, albeit somewhat contrarian, addition to the MAGA! Welcome Celebration. Killing it live in Washington, D.C. might also have appealed on a personal level to Schaffer, who’s an unabashed Trump supporter.
Because whatever the world thinks of Trump, an actual constituency did drive his mad dash to the White House. Explaining how this came to be in aggregate is extremely difficult. Look at how Schaffer created Iced Earth, a band he considers a vehicle for his songwriting, and we might make a little sense of Trumpland’s thinking.
During an interview with a Greek web channel on Dec. 11, 2016, Schaffer explained why he voted Republican in the previous month’s elections. “All of them — Obama, Clinton, the Bushes — they’re all puppets to the shadow government, and I don’t think Trump is, actually,” Schaffer said.
“If he is, then this is the most elaborate political theater I’ve ever seen in my life. And I don’t think so, because the Republicans hate him, the Democracts hate him, the media hates him, so I’m interested.”
“I’m, like, wait a minute! If all of these fuckheads hate this guy, then maybe he’s okay. You know what I mean? So that’s why I’m saying I’m cautiously optimistic.”
For sure, Trump’s supporters aren’t a monolith. They hold a multiplicity of beliefs, from an imagined kinship with Russia to an overwhelming distaste for “liberals,” and among these are fringe ideas that flourished during the Bush and Obama years.
It’s remarkable how Iced Earth, an indie band whose 11 albums involved 30 years of revolving-door line-ups, embrace the same mental fodder that resonated with Trump supporters in 2016.
The interesting part is Iced Earth wasn’t originally ideologically driven but over time, as the band’s popularity grew in North America, Europe and elsewhere, specific themes and topics reflecting Schaffer’s personal politics began to coalesce in the lyrics.
Culminating in that mummy man-cat. More on that in a bit.
All this isn’t to excoriate a hardworking musician, songwriter and producer. Schaffer’s long journey to rock stardom is, in all honesty, an inspiring one.
After running away from home in his teens, Schaffer spent his formative years learning guitar in a self-described “school of hard knocks.” A diet of AC/DC, KISS, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Deep Purple molded his tastes. Iced Earth honored its inspirations in the 2002 covers album Tribute to the Gods.
After Schaffer renamed his band Iced Earth in the late 1980s, they released their self-titled debut via a small label. It was the 1990s, after all, and the metal genre had run fallow. Sophomore album Night of the Stormrider — a fantastical collection of songs blending mythos, magic and mayhem that resonated with European metalheads — was Iced Earth’s breakthrough.
Never a chart-topper, Iced Earth flourished as an underground act with regular gigs at European music festivals. Fans dug Iced Earth’s blending of Iron Maiden and Metallica’s sensibilities with the soaring vocals of powerhouse singer Matt Barlow.
In the ’90s, the band released a concept record based on Todd McFarlane’s Spawn superhero. Two events at the turn of the century shook the band to its core — 9/11 and, in 2003, Barlow’s departure to become a cop. This is when Schaffer, now in full control of the band, took Iced Earth away from its usual comic fantasy fare to explore a new musical frontier.
Americana! And, later, feline zombie monsters.
While 2004’s The Glorious Burden was well-received for its scope and breadth, some fans took issue with its jingoism and corny lyrics. Schaffer was unrepentant about the album’s content. During a 2004 interview with David Perri of Canadian metal mag Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles, he even shared his unfiltered worldview.
The majority of the people here [in the United States] would rather — and I’m talking about the doers, not the people who want the hand-outs, or are the victims, or blame all their troubles on others — don’t want government in their lives dictating what they should do.
People like me who bust their asses to achieve something and a specific goal, we don’t want to be taxed to death. We want to be in control of our lives. And that’s the American way. If it’s too hard for you, well then leave it.
What else can you say? I’ve never said the United States is an easy place to live. But the reality is that you can come from absolutely nothing and accomplish anything. And that’s worth a lot.
The entire exchange almost became heated — and betrayed Schaffer’s nascent libertarianism, which would manifest in Iced Earth’s music in the years to come.
Under Schaffer’s direction, the band dialed things up a notch. 2008’s Framing Armageddon and The Crucible of Man from 2009 were released via a German record label and touted as blockbuster albums.
These albums mark the debut of Iced Earth’s signature narrative. Forget American military history. Iced Earth’s real obsession is a made-up terrestrial feline race that, in the band’s imagining, has manipulated world events from ancient times to the present.
The covers of Framing and Crucible hearken to the original Something Wicked This Way Comes album from 1998 that features a creature named Set Abominae — a mummified man-cat with supernatural powers.
For the record, the entire Something Wicked trilogy makes for pretty good listening.
So had Iced Earth aligned with the David Icke-Alex Jones axis? Let’s just leave this here —
When Iced Earth’s German label filed for bankruptcy in 2008, Schaffer began splitting his time between Iced Earth and a peculiar solo album under the name Sons of Liberty.
I had the thankless task of sampling the solo album, Brushfires of the Mind, in 2010. The effects of the Great Recession was still rippling across popular culture and it appears Schaffer was under the spell of Atlas Shrugged and The Creature From Jekyll Island when writing for Sons of Liberty.
As a collection of libertarian anthems, Brushfires is as hamfisted as it gets. Sure, it’s a nice rock album. But this doesn’t change the fact that it’s also a personal screed railing at imaginary enemies. I didn’t like it very much, to be honest — and I welcomed a proper comeback from Iced Earth.
Which was 2011’s Dystopia.
To summarize, Dystopia is full of songs about battling tyranny and has the cat-cum-mascot Set Abominae on the cover. Ditto the follow-up Plagues of Babylon, where Set Abominae is the villain behind an ancient conspiracy to release a zombie virus on mankind.
No kidding. This is the album’s title track —
Point is, during the last 20 years or so, Iced Earth has become increasingly wrapped up in an overarching science-fiction yarn that reflects Schaffer’s evolving beliefs. What began as a healthy passion for American history has morphed into a penchant for exposing secret societies and fear-mongering about psychic cat people.
“There’s no question that there are psyops that take place and that there are divisions of the government whose job is to spread disinformation and do that kind of stuff,” Schaffer said in 2013. “Again, it comes back to not being too willing to bite on any hook, but to use your common sense, your discernment and knowledge of history.
“I think that once you understand the mindset of the global elite, the shadow government … if you read their playbook, you know what they’re up to, and if you do that it’s pretty easy to see what the agenda is, and what their next move is going to be.”
Luckily for Iced Earth, writing songs against the “establishment” has kept the band moving forward. Iced Earth promises to release a new album in the spring of 2017.
While it isn’t apparent at first, the following suggest an explanation for Schaffer’s increasingly weird project and a rationale for the 62,979,879 Americans who chose Trump over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton —
- First, there’s a total belief the federal government is demonically evil and run by either a secret globalist cabal or Wall Street bankers. Maybe both. This line of reasoning is found in Brushfires of the Mind.
- Second, unseen “powers that be” or, in Schaffer’s own words, a “secret government” are out to exercise thought-control on the public. See Iced Earth’s last handful of albums.
- Third, freedom-loving Americans blessed with a libertarian heritage must bring down the corrupt government. Liberty or death!
- The above leads to a single recourse — choose the anti-establishment guy! Ergo, Trump. He might shake things up!
There you have it. Iced Earth is a bootstrapping and hardworking band whose members spent years building a reputation, one that has reached more countries than Trump’s branded buildings have done. A perfect fit for the Trump crowd.
This is why Iced Earth should’ve had a 25-minute set at the inaugural concert, opening with rockers such as “Declaration Day” and switching to ballads “Watching Over Me” and “Ghosts of Freedom” before blowing the roof off the Lincoln Memorial with a back-to-back encore of the instrumental “1776” and the soaring “Tragedy and Triumph.”
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