Genre:
Metal
Music
Popular
music was recorded and marketed as a Counterculture which
opposed the normal, functional, and unexciting Culture
that was dominant in society; by being outside of that
which was in power, Counterculturalists argued, they were
able to see what was "real" and to implement
a "progressive" worldview in which moral correctness
brought us gradually closer to a utopian state.
This
marketing mirrored the process of adolescents, the main
audience for popular music, who first reject the world
of their parents, then once independent re-assess their
own values, and finally, rejoin society on the terms of
these recreated values. This determines "reality"
as they will act to create it, based upon their values
system.
While
dominant Culture sought what was pragmatic, and Counterculture
pursued the moral, metal music became its own movement
because it could not agree with either of those approaches,
preferring instead to try to seek what was "real,"
or meaningful and "heavy" (in the LSD-influenced
vernacular of the time). Their approach did not aim at
correctness, but assertion of subjective meaning.
jeff
hanneman, a founding member of slayer, described their
music as a mix between old british heavy metal and melodic
hardcore punkEarly metal bands, in emulation of popular
music as a whole, hoped to discover what was real by finding
out first what was not. This attitude, over the course
of four generations of music, took metal beyond the grounds
of "good" versus "evil" into nihilism,
where nothing had inherent value or classification, but
could be described in terms of experience.
Nihilism
is a frightening belief system for those in societies
organized by dualistic (heaven versus earth) and liberal
(individualistic, egalitarian) societies, as it denies
that our values systems are more real than events in natural
reality. To a nihilist, truth is a way we describe some
things in reality, but there is no eternal life nor eternal
truth which exists separate from immortality. Nihilism
means accepting mortality, and experience as what we have
in place of a religious or moral truth.
These
ideas exceed limits of social acceptability, which in
a capitalist liberal democracy threatens the self-marketing
which individuals use to gain business partners, social
groups and mates. As a result, metal was forced to wholly
transcend the artificial consensual reality shared by
Culture and Counterculture, and to create its own value
system including its nihilism.
Seeking
the real, and not the moral, this value system in turn
surpassed its own nihilism by moving from a negative logical
viewpoint to an assertive one, looking not for something
objectively determined to be "eternal" but for
that which will be true in any age past or present, discovering
through personal experience and acceptance of nihilism
(a symbolic analogue for mortality) that which society
will not recognize, completing the process of adolescence
in a state of actual outsidership.
Metal
music began as the work of the youth born after the superpower
age began, during a highly developmental period for Western
civilization in which it, having defeated fascism and
nationalism and other old-world evolution-based systems
of government, considered itself highly evolved in a humanistic
state of liberal democracy which benefitted the individual
more than any system previously on record. During this
era, society served citizens in their quest for the most
convenient lifestyle possible, and any questions or goals
outside of this worldview were not considered: it was
considered a "progressive" continuation of human
development from a primitive evolutionary "red in
tooth and claw" state to one in which social concepts
of justice and morality defined the life of the individual.
The individual has triumphed over the natural world, and
faces none of the uncertainty of mortal existence brought
about by physical competition and predation.
Politically
(the global quest for egalitarian society) and socially
(the empowerment of new groups and loss of consensus)
humanity viewed itself as getting ahead and being superior
to other forms of civilization, including the equally
egalitarian but totalitarian Communist empires of the
Soviet Union and China, but as the thermonuclear age dawned
in the 1950s, this dichotomy came to define the "free
West" as much as its enemies.
Iwo
Jima dawned a new age of moral supremacy in the postwar
superpower USAThe first generation after WWII created
early proto-metal in a time when all older knowledge and
social order was being overturned in the wake of an impulse
to redesign the world to avoid the "evils" of
the previous generation. The people of this age, and coming
ages, were new in that they could not recall a time of
direct experience of nature as necessary; the grocery
stores, modern medicine and industrial economies of their
time took care of all of their needs, and no unbroken
natural world could any longer be found except on specialty
tours. Their civilization had become exclusively introspective
and was losing contact with the (natural) world beyond
its self-defined boundaries.
During
this time, a "peace" movement which embraced
pacifism and egalitarian individualism was gaining popularity
at the forefront of the counterculture, a phenomenon which
had existed since in the 1950s smart marketers (namely
Allen Freed) had promoted rock music as an alternative
to the staid, traditional, monogamous and sober lives
of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon Americans. With WWII polarizing
the world against first German and later Russian "enemies,"
and Viet Nam revealing the moral bankruptcy of benevolent
superpowers motivated by their economies, society was
becoming more dependent upon the ideological tradition
building over the last 2,000 years: focus on the individual,
or individualism, as politically expressed in egalitarianism
and liberal democracy. This was expressed in both culture
and counterculture.
In
contrast, metal music emphasized morbidity and glorified
ancient civilizations as well as heroic struggles, merging
the gothic attitudes of art rock with the broad scope
of progressive rock, but most of all, its sound emphasized
heavy: a literal reality that cut through all of our words
and symbols and grand theories, to remind us that we are
mortal and not ultimately able to control our lifespan
or the inherent abilities we have. This clashed drastically
with both the pacifist hippie movement and the religious
and industrial sentiments of the broader society surrounding
it.
Philosophy
This
was a confrontation with the "abyss" as first
described by existentialist F.W Nietzsche: the awareness
that life is finite and of functional, transactional maintenance;
that we are both predator and prey, and that we have no
control over our lives or death. To Nietzsche, and thinkers
such as Arthur Schopenhauer before him, to realize this
was an "undergoing," or embracing of nihilism:
the belief that there is no value other than the inherent,
physical interaction of the natural world. To a nihilist,
there is no inherent morality or value, thus there is
no reason to view social status and financial success
as ultimate goals, only as methods to a path ranked by
subjectively-derived importance. This view threatens the
beliefs and punishments used to hold Western society together
since roughly AD 1000.
Regardless
of benevolent social objectives, Nietzsche argued, religion
and society were cults that banished death through the
"revenge" that morality offered in giving the
individual a vector by which to be "better"
than the world itself, and by being "equal"
to all others, immune to comparison (a symbolic form of
predation triggered by Charles Darwin's arguments on "survival
of the fittest). In essence, Nietzsche saw social behavior
itself as an enemy of reality recognition in the individual
and thus, like morality, an ingrained influence that would
prompt rebellion and instability within a society that
would know no other recourse than moral norming.
Heavy
metal, as the music most visibly fascinated with death
and suffering (and most likely to mention Nietzsche),
addresses the sublimated issue of Nietzsche's abyss in
Western society, which has based its founding principles
and individual social and mystical values upon the polarity
of "good" and "evil," is an identification
with the enemy. In the Judeo-Christian view, death and
suffering are an enemy which is banished with "good"
behavior in the hopes of heavenly (and earthly) reward.
In secular form, egalitarian capitalist liberal democracy
"empowers" the individual and gives him or her
the moral "freedom" to act without regard for
the natural world, thus being immune to predation and
any form of assessment outside of the social and fiscal.
When one embraces the breadth of history (outside of the
current civilization), the nihilistic lack of eternal
presence of value, the predominance of death and predation,
and the logic of feral impulse, one has directly challenged
both modern capitalist liberal democracy and the extensive
religious (Judeo-Christian) and secular (liberalism) heritage
upon which it is built.
8,000
years before Christ there was a religion in Northern India
which addressed these issues in a sense without dualism;
it believed that life is known to humans through sensual
(eyes, ears, taste, smell, touch) perception of a reality
composed of ideas which was similar in structure to both
nature and the process of thought itself. In this religion
the Faustian spirit was clearly present, as while a heroic
deed was more important than survival, personal mortality
was clearly affirmed. Thus there was both meaning and
death, and no absolute God or Heaven to reconcile the
two. This required the individual to declare values worthy
of filling a life, and worth dying for, and from this
origin the ancient heroic civilizations were spawned.
Metal's belief system is closer to this than to any modern
equivalent, thus it is sensible to posit a closure of
the cycle and its renewal in the ideas gestured by heavy
metal music.
Heavy
Metal Music
Art
does not exist in a vacuum within the minds of its creators.
If a concept is applied to music, there is a corresponding
concept in structure and the worldview of the artist that
creates the frame of mind in which the artist creates
music which sounds like its desired value system. Art
is too complex to be created without any prior thought
as to what it expresses; this concept is common in literature
and visual art, but ignored in popular music (perhaps
because in most popular music, the concept - and the music
- reflect crass materialism and futile neurosis and not
much else).
At
the end of an age of moral symbolism and technological
norming, metal is recreating the language of music to
reflect heroic values, formulated from the nihilistic
mandate of "now that you believe in nothing, find
something worth believing in." The ease of social
and political identification found in rock music is eschewed,
as are aesthetics which endorse the myopic neurosis of
first world lifestyles. And while metal has evolved over
several generations, several musical facets remain the
same, suggesting a corresponding shared conceptual underpinning.
This
"design form" of metal differs from popular
music in one simple way, but from this arise any number
of techniques and attributes which allow composers to
create in this method. Its primary distinguishing characteristic
is that metal embraces structure more than any other form
of popular music; while rock is notorious for its verse-chorus-verse
structure and jazz emphasizes a looser version of the
same allowing unfetter improvisation, metal emphasizes
a motivic, melodic narrative structure in the same way
that classical and baroque music do. Each piece may utilize
other techniques, but what holds it together is a melodic
progression between ideas that do not fit into simple
verse-chorus descriptors. Even in 1960s proto-heavy metal,
use of motives not repeated as part of the verse-chorus
cycle and transitional riffing suggested a poetic form
of music in which song structure was derived from what
needed to be communicated.
Synthesis
of HeavyMetal
Arthur
Schopenhauer, one of the few humans with any cognitive
abilityIn this structuralism, metal music asserts a concern
for the underlying mechanism of the universe as a whole,
instead of limiting its focus to human social concerns.
This degrades the public image fascination begun in the
West with absolutist morality; in its use of power chords,
the most harmonically flexible chord shape, and a tendency
toward melodic composition, metal music emphasizes an
experience, where rock can articulate at best a moment
and then put it into a repeating loop. While rock uses
more open chords and aesthetic variation, its outlook
is ultimately a utopic form of the counterculture: progressive
trends leading to some ultimate state of an absolute,
such as "freedom" or "joy" or "popularity."
By
way of contrast, metal music is a portrait of the post-humanist
mindset: concerned more about natural reality than social
symbolism, addressing experience instead of moral conclusion,
and, when it seeks a context of meaning, oriented toward
the subjective experience than an "objectivity"
derived from shared societal concept. It is aware that
leaving behind the comforting alternate reality of social
assessment returns to a natural state in which the individual
is ranked among others according to ability, much as predation
did years ago, and is forced to accept mortality and limits
of personal control. This thought demonstrates the modern
era of Western civilization facing the ideas of the ancients
while eschewing the consensual social reality of industrial
capitalist liberal democracies, and, as said societies
collapse from lack of consensus, a potential future direction
for Indo-European culture.
Music
- (Proto-metal)
Since
1950s rock had been such whitebread wholesomeness, centered
mainly around puppy love and going to the beach or the
sock hop, the revenge of those who had been left out focused
angrily on dissident and alienated themes, but expressed
them to some degree in the civility of the day, leading
to forms that in our current time of literal and material
thought are tame, but in their time were offensive by
the nature of their existence. These came in three forms,
one crude, one arty, and one technique-oriented.
iggy
pop and the stooges renovated rock to be stripped down,
dead of harmony and ruthlessly nihilisticThe first was
the advent of loud, distorted blues, which was pioneered
by a mess of a band called Blue Cheer, who made braying,
droning, grinding blues rock with the aid of deformed
amplifiers and a passion for crudity. They were the vanguard
of a range of electric blues bands from Cream to Jimi
Hendrix to ZZ Top, and inspired much of the loud rock
which followed, including proto-punk-rockers the Kinks
and the Who. Much can be said about these bands, but what
is most important is that they took the traditions of
folk and blues improvisation and turned them into something
technically on par with the jazz and big band acts of
the day, adding guitar fireworks and lengthy songs to
a genre that was otherwise strictly radio-play ditties.
The
second tine of the fork was progressive rock, which in
1968 found its most extreme act in King Crimson, but which
truly flowered during the early middle 1970s. Arguably,
this genre was given impetus by a band overmentioned in
any history of popular music because they were among the
first to leave standard rock format, overcoming its novelty,
namely, the Beatles. Their work was one of many that allowed
bands to mix classical and jazz training into their rock,
resulting in longer song structures, many of which were
narrative or neo-operatic (Camel, Genesis, Yes) and the
use of distortion and dissonance in artful ways. While
these bands ultimately choked on their own "virtuosity,"
being nestled in a genre that could barely appreciate
them but not reaching the level of complexity of classical
works (in part because of a need to service the unending
drumbeats and syncopated rhythms common to rock), they
lived on in contributions to other genres.
Finally,
there was a tradition of bands who grew from the surf
and garage rock traditions into a technique-oriented neo-proto-punk-rock
format, beginning with half-American Indian guitarist
Link Wray and leading through surf guitar champion Dick
Dale, both of whom were users of distortion. Psychedelic
bands such as the 13th Floor Elevators and semi-punkers
like Love and The Trees are worth mentioning here, but
these bands had a foot as well in inspiration from the
first dark rock band to exist, the Doors. Where other
rock bands had focused on love or peace, the Doors brought
a Nietzsche-inspired morbid subconscious psychedelia to
rock music, and were the origins of much of the neo-Romanticism
which later bloomed into metal, as well as many of the
more inspired moments of progressive and punk rock.
By
1969, the influence of these artists had saturated the
forms of public consciousness which were focused on rock
music as a developing artform, and contributed to the
explosion of hard rock (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple) and
proto-metal (Black Sabbath), both of which occurred simultaneously
to the development of distorted, power-chord based technical
music from King Crimson. This year was thus the watershed
for loud forms of rock, as it started three threads which
would run concurrently during the 1970s and hybridize
in the next decade.
robert
fripp in king crimson and as a solo artist contributed
much of the theory to metal before 1969In many ways taking
up where the Doors left off, Black Sabbath were originally
a British electric blues band named Earth, but after guitarist
Toni Iommi had a stint in progressive rock band Jethro
Tull (and not coincidentally, members of Led Zeppelin
and Black Sabbath participated in each other's projects),
the quartet surged foward with a new sound, inspired by
horror movies and the same morbid, neo-Gothic animal nihilism
that had made the Doors strikingly out of place. Using
perhaps the most extreme distortion heard so far, and
reducing the flowery instrumentalism of the time to the
basics, Black Sabbath combined progressive rock with electric
blues and created something that differed from its contemporaries
in several ways: it almost exclusively used power chords;
it used bassier distortion; it had narrative song structures
like a progressive band, but relied on gut-simple riffs
for the majority of its air time; it was morbid, occult
and negative in its lyrical outlook. For all of the political
change fomented by 1960s rock, Black Sabbath were a shock
-- but even more surprising was their consequent success
on radio and in record stores. They had tuned into something
their worldwide audience found relevant, if not appealing.
Legend
relates that the members of Black Sabbath, looking for
a new "angle" (trend) in rock music, drove past
a marquee for the horror movie titled Black Sabbath in
English speaking countries. H.P. Lovecraft, arguably the
founder of that genre, once stated that in life he had
not observed good or evil, but an abundance of horror
- meaning that there was no moral classification for the
"bad" things that happened, but that the experience
would be horrific. Black Sabbath as a band, in adopting
their new image, sought to express the experience of horror
and truth, eschewing for a moment the rigid morality of
rock bands around them.
if
you keep your hippies dry, they smell betterIt is important
to note that most of this occurred with notice - by the
members of Black Sabbath. They wanted to be musicians
and fit in somewhere between power blues and progressive
rock, and despite drug use, psychological mishaps and
basic personal instability, they created a "sound"
that was ahead of its time - and ahead of its musicians.
Much less articulated than Led Zeppelin (and farther from
the rock norm of the time), they launched themselves ahead
of the crowd and then had to look back and gather some
sense of direction, causing the band to collapse artistically
by 1978. At that point, however, the formula for 1970s
heavy metal was established: a smidgen of the King Crimson
esoteric weirdness, the dark Gothic haunting cavernous
sound of Black Sabbath, the guitar wizardry of Deep Purple
and Led Zeppelin, the physical thunder and brash insane
hedonism of Blue Cheer. At this point in history, "heavy
metal" (a term borrowed from beat writer William
S. Burroughs' 1962 novel, The Soft Machine) was viewed
as somewhere between prog rock and psychedelia, but already
its content was starting to differentiate itself.
Primarily,
mainstream radio music will always follow the same song
format that was the basis of the English drinking songs
and Scots hymns that inspired the blues, including some
degree of instrumental vocal shadowing ("call and
response"), repetitive verse chorus form, and a bridge
taking the song to a brief melodic counterpoint and then
resolution. The more intricate Black Sabbath songs were
thus mostly lost to radio, encouraging any artists wishing
to develop those concepts to do so elsewhere. Further,
the morality of the time and the counterculture was offended
by the occultism Black Sabbath had chosen as an aesthetic
image, yet had found it loomed larger than life (aided
by the semi-serious occultism of Led Zeppelin's Jimi Page).
Occult beliefs are distinguished from "normal"
(Christian, Jewish) religions by the occult's tendency
to accept good and evil as forcing balancing the universe,
both being necessary, as in the gnostic tradition. This
doesn't sit well with church elders nor with Counterculture
members trying to come up with a universal, absolute reason
why change and empowerment of the less-fortunate must
occur. Years later, even highly political punkers were
often skeptical and repulsed by the amorphous, indefinite
stance of heavy metal, as if they fear the reaction of
an occult mystic to their rule-based logic.
Metal
- (Speed Metal / Thrash)
Metal
aged and so did the generation that produced the hippies,
drifting into commercialdom and then self-hatred for losing
sight of basic goals. Having lost both of their fundamental
systems of iconography (traditional + hippie "revolution"
and New Left) within a decade while most of the population
remained ignorant to both, the youth of the 1960s and
1970s were more cynical and materialist as they aged than
any previous group. This awakened a scavenger coming to
carcass in the 1980s which rolled into glorious rehash
of the commercial ambition of the 1950s, leading to a
wave of denial and an ever-present conformity in face
of new fears: drugs, technological warfare, disease.
A
desperate paranoid climate emerged underneath the murmuring
denial neurosis of commercial social doctrine. Ideology
in popular music became an intense moral crusade of horror
at the history of humanity to that point, hearkening back
to WWI-era dissent. In this environment, metal updated
itself with the aggression and simplicity of hardcore,
and came back for the attack in at first two hybrid genres:
speed metal and thrash.
tipper
gore led a crusade against profanity and lewdness in heavy
metal and rap throughout the 1980s only to hide it during
the 1996 electionsSpeed metal took the classically-influenced
structures of neoclassical progressive heavy metal from
the 1970s and merged them with the palm-muted, choppy
strum of violent British hardcore, as well as the whipping
speed-strum of the more fluid crustcore genre. An example
of the first influence can be found in violently alienated
bands like The Exploited and Black Flag, where the latter
originated in Amebix and Discharge, who twisted three
chords into a song where the guitar playing was fast but
the drumming and vocal delivery slower, creating like
ambient music a disorientation of pace and thus of activity.
Thrash was crossover music based more in hardcore, so
unlike speed metal, which added hardcore riff stylings
to metal song forms, it added metal riff stylings to hardcore
song forms.
Classic
speed metal bands were Metallica, Megadeth, Testament,
Slayer, Anthrax and Prong, but these were the largest
and most commercial and many others existed concurrently.
Thrash remained underground and lasted for less than a
decade, thus it retained its primal trio of Cryptic Slaughter,
the Dirty Rotten Imbeciles and Corrosion of Conformity,
although it is academically interestin to mention offshoots
like Suicidal Tendencies and Fearless Iranians From Hell,
both of which were more punk rock and rock'n'roll than
the core of the thrash genre. Although toward the end
of the 1980s people began referring to bands like Destruction
and Kreator as "thrash metal," it makes more
sense to identify them as essentially speed metal bands
which borrowed attributes from thrash and nascent death
metal bands.
cliff
burton taught many members of metallica music theory At
one point praised by Robert Fripp for remaining apart
from mainstream culture, these bands faced a growing divide
in the music industry, namely the availability of cheaper
recording technology (thanks to advances in digital and
manufacturing ability) as well as, for the first time,
the ability to press records and CDs in small runs, giving
rise to a horde of smaller labels. While hardcore punk
bands had maintained the DIY aspect for years, they were
unwilling and unable to make any money doing so, but in
the 1980s the ease of access to these technologies meant
that small, independent ("indie") labels could
both publish ecclectic rarities and not go bankrupt in
the process.
For
youth growing up during this time period, life was an
uncertain and duty-bound prospect, threatened on one side
by ICBMs which could arrive in a matter of minutes and
vaporize cities, and on another by a tide of reactionary
politics and social conformity which forced people into
norms to avoid the risk of standing out and being tacitly
avoided by employers and potential social contacts alike.
Speed metal and thrash bands, who were in the crux of
generational exchange, experienced both worlds: the public
image and the private reality, including political dissidence.
angel
witch were a vanguard of new wave of british heavy metal
structuralismTheir hardcoresque anthems of social and
political dissent are leftist but even more so, "rejectivist."
The world is pushed back and its mechanisms declared incompetent.
Many began the slow spiral into fatalism, where either
through belief in religious mechanisms behind historical
growth or a lack of ability to apply their passion, lapsing
into a hedonism of self-destructive principle. The hedonistic
attitudes and hail-satan paeans to deviant creativity
evaporated as a politicized theory of what ought to be
done, inherited both from hardcore punk and the surrounding
public culture, seized metal. Songs were written about
the evils of drugs, the mistreatment of American Indians,
the oppression of minorities by a WASP majority, the desire
for individualist independence from the conformist horde,
and the abuse of our natural environment.
At
its inception a genre of palm-muted, Morse-codish riffs
and epic song structures the speed metal of the 1980s
held out until the 1990s before being absorbed. Speed
metal and "social consciousness" dimmed many
fantasies; it had become as moralistic as both the conservative
society and self-righteous countermovement against which
1969 metal had rebelled. This caused dissent among those
who felt that both commercialism and this moralistic trend
were absorbing the "free spirit" they had admired
in the music previously, and that it was becoming predictable
and self-destructive in its tendency to sound like everything
else. In contrast, electronic music was exploring increasingly
existential themes and broader questions of intent, eschewing
the moralistic humanism which overran speed metal and
thrash.
This
conflict led to change in the form of the rise of metal's
dual underground genres, which by 1987 had established
themselves in nascent form as a handful of ideas and techniques
each. These would await another generation to be brought
into much focus, as the transitional time of the end of
the 1980s and the dominant liberalism of the early 1990s
caused further ideological confusion in metal (and essentially
eliminated punk hardcore as an artform, since it drowned
in the same ideological conformity). At first, these two
genres were the same musical formation, but over time
differences in scope and belief separated them.
the
original group hellhammer who brought a new aesthetic
and conceptual focus to the genreEarly bands which explored
this new territory fused the melodic, elemental speedy
hardcore of Discharge or The Exploited with the more architectural
song forms, as developed initially by bands like Judas
Priest and Angel Witch, and added to them an emphasis
on chromatic intervals, both for their simplicity and
the dead sound they gave to any melodic temperment to
the song as a whole. After Discharge's "See Nothing,
Hear Nothing, Say Nothing" came out in 1982, metal
responded the following year, with new bands Bathory,
Sodom and Hellhammer developing morbid Goth-Romantic versions
of the new style, embracing death and evil and nothingness,
as if channeling the apocalyptic thermonuclear fears of
the previous generation of metal into a certainty of existential
doom. Their essential thesis seemed to be thus: the world
had become obsessed with its own power and political-moral
attitudes, but had forgotten the finity of human life
and thus the need to pick things that were important and
eternal, such as nature and strong emotions, which had
been obscured by the need to avoid threats and defend
against philosophical enemies.
In
the mainstream, Slayer produced their own version of this
style in 1983, but did not differentiate much beyond a
fusion of Judas Priest, Angel Witch and Discharge until
their album of 1987, "Raining Blood." By that
time, Celtic Frost had emerged from Hellhammer with a
mock operatic drama of searching for value in T.S. Eliot's
wasteland, Bathory had unleashed a Viking rock spectacular
which identified strongly with the heroic values of ancient
societies, and Sodom had gone from praising Satan to warning
of environmental holocaust and dicatorship. Further bands
had joined the fray, most notably Sepultura, Possessed
and Massacra, each of whom added a degree of interpretation
of a style coming to be known as death metal. Of note
also were Necrovore and Morbid Angel who created similar
styles of acerbic, abstract death metal.
Metal
- (Death Metal)
"Certain
individuals I like, but people as a whole suck!
Nothing but talking monkeys with car keys." - Kam
Lee, Massacre
Death
metal existed without a name for many years, being influenced
by both the extremes of speed metal (Destruction) and
Thrash (Cryptic Slaughter), as well as carrying forward
influences from hardcore (The Exploited) and Gothic influences
to original heavy metal and industrial. In fact, like
a genetic profile, the genre is not identifiable by a
single trait alone, but by a collection of traits and
the common ideas that allow them to be organized as such.
Riffs from The Exploited, for example, could be transplanted
into modern death metal without being out of place (especially
from their "Let's have a war..." album); similarly,
distortion and song structures from Destruction can be
played "in style" by death metal bands without
seeming out of place. However, what unified these concepts,
and gave the genre its name, was its literal morbidity:
it did not praise death, nor warn of it, but explored
it in a strange obsession designed to reinforce the existence
of "ultimate reality": the physical, natural,
objective world in which we live, and in which we die.
In fact, the early death metal especially can be explained
almost exclusively by the Hellhammer slogan, "Only
death is real."
This
outlook, a primitive denial of all that asserted the existence
of society on a level above or more important than natural
reality, was not explicitly political, nor was it identifiable
with any social movement except perhaps fragments of existentialism,
nihilism and naturalism; it was certaintly not studied
to that degree by the majority of death metal bands and
fans. However, by taking this route, death metal avoided
the increasing politicization of post-hardcore music which
was occurring around it, and the consequent "internalization"
of dialogue to the point where a genre only existed by
the barest of aesthetic commonality: it used the same
instrumentation and distorted, but shared no culture or
musical direction or belief system. Over the next two
decades, this litmus test for a genre would be reinforced
time and again, with genres that could not maintain shared
direction collapsing into commerce.
nuclear
explosion blasting the hell out of some test site whose
irradiated inhabitants are long forgotten by people magazine,
the hollywood gossip columnists and the sierra clubMany
bands applied the styles -- chromatic progressions, fast
strumming, ambient rhythms -- into different incarnations
of a new genre, death metal. The mainstream-moral/underground-nihilist
dichotomy was illustrated in the songwriting of older
metal bands, which followed too much of the friendly rock
music format and allowed itself to anticipate the conditioned
desires of the listener, as contrasted to the new music
which emphasized structural change (narrative) over finding
a convenient harmony and riff and sticking with it. The
innovations of Discharge, allowing chromatic riffing to
be used in the context of melodic songwriting, and of
Bathory, in building song structure around the shape of
its riffing, were applied in the works of bands obsessed
with death, mortality, and the obscurist predictions of
mythology. Apocalypticism, which in speed metal bands
had been a dire warning, was here a foundational assumption.
As part rebel and part insurgent structuralist, metal
broke the scale into broad tonal leaps and chromatic rhythm
playing where the structure was the message, not the root
note to which it was harmonized or the conventions of
such construction followed; key is used carelessly if
at all at focal points of intersecting themes in motif
development, eschewing the cyclic silhouette of rock form.
This
was most clearly defined in the second generation of the
new style, which began with Sepultura, Massacra, Possessed,
Necrovore and Morbid Angel, whose music was both a radical
primitivism and a futurist adaptation of classical theory.
Although many elements of metal and hard rock remained,
what was emerging that made the genre distinct from all
others was a way of taking a "riff salad" and
shaping it into a changing pattern which eventually revealed
a conclusion. Much as Mozart's music would dance through
motivic change for most of its duration, finally uncovering
its central theme, a gentle melody, in death metal a thunderous
barrage of chromatic riffs prepared the listener for certain
expectations in tone and phrase shape, then brought out
the conclusion, like the last stanza of a poem: that which
explained the journey and why its conclusion was apt.
This style was most reminiscent of past centuries of Romantic
and Naturalistic European poetry, art and music, but was
missed by all but a few death metal fans - not, however,
by the innovators creating music in the genre.
Aesthetically,
death metal was abrupt and disturbing to most because
of the vocals, which were organically distorted by pitching
the voice either lower or higher than normal and forcing
it to volumes not normally invoked except in an open-throat
shout. It was a guttural growl, like that of a defensive
animal, and it matched the often-downtowned guitars and
layers of thick distortion which as often as not cut out
the middle ranges of sound in favor of low-end and high-end.
Drums used an extreme form of syncopation known as double
bass, in which two bass drums were played alternatingly
at high speed, destroying the syncopatic effect in the
context of the song but providing a buffetting, urgent
constant rhythm. In this genre, power chords exclusively
were used, and new forms were incorporated including dissonance.
Further, rhythmically the genre operated more as ambient
bands do, with percussion framing the music but not leading
it on, avoiding the expectation-based "funky"
rhythms of rock, bluess and jazz. The result was that
even without analyzing the music most listeners identified
it with something unearthly, morbid, malevolent and antisocial.
From
here the genre bloomed, splitting into several different
styles. Massacra was representative of the flowing, liquid,
high-speed strumming style that rapidly included bands
like Incantation, Hypocrisy, Vader, and later, the heavy-tremolo
and electric blistering distortion-clad bands from Sweden,
including Dismember and Entombed; Morpheus (later Morpheus
Descends to avoid legal conflicts with the hard rock band
from Sweden) established the percussive speed-metal-influenced
style of choppy, muted riffs and precise drum patterning,
a subgroup that included Sinister, Suffocation, Suffer
and Cryptopsy; Possessed created a style somewhere in
the middle that eventually included bands like Therion,
Demigod, Monstrosity, Deicide and Unleashed. Sepultura
reverted to being a speed metal band before getting in
touch with their punk and world music roots, and Celtic
Frost veered into glam rock before calling it a day. Sodom
remained consistent, but gained instrumental prowess,
making their new music unrecognizable to older fans. For
each of these styles, diversification occurred, sometimes
with interesting results.
Some
blended jazz with death metal, as did Atheist and Cynic;
others mixed in grindcore for an aggressive but often
blockheaded style called "deathgrind." Some
tried to work ambient into the mix, as did Kong, and a
few worked on hybrids with past versions of metal and
rock, most of which were absorbed by their rock half and
thus were unpalatable to metal fans, and equally unrecognizable
to rock fans, causing the bands to either shift fully
to rock music or to give up entirely. Some found a balance
between the faster and mid-paced styles of death metal,
to which they added simple but spectacularly effective
melodic composition; good examples here would be Amorphis
and Demilich. In summary, this was the genre of metal
so far which created the greatest room for variation,
in part because it was unified by a belief system more
than a lifestyle choice, and in part as a result of its
broad range of musical applications and few "rules"
or genre conventions, despite having a clear musical identity
in its nearly-keyless, atonal-and-dissonant friendly melodic
structural form of composition.
Death
metal had taken the style underground, but also generated
a flood of "angry" mainstream imitators and
sellouts. Bands like Pantera, Cannibal Corpse, and Tool
made use of death metal imagery or technique in the format
of complacent suburban music designed to fill lives with
distraction. For many, death metal died with the explosion
of the Swedish scene and lyrics like those to the first
Therion album - selfconscious, moral, and pious while
being anti-religious and "metal," in a conflict
that while not touching the music defined the decomposition
of focus in the genre. Morality was "safe."
So were rock hybrids like Entombed's "Clandestine."
Flamboyant useless stylings of rock music and stadium
heavy metal crept in alongside a dearth of ideas and repetition
of known formulae. It seemed as if growth had made the
genre too self-conscious, and as a result, it had abandoned
itself to the methods of its antagonists.
Worth
mentioning in the context of death metal is the rise of
a similar genre, grindcore, which grew from punk and thrash
melded by convenience, to which the guttural vocals and
detuned guitars of death metal were added. While the earliest
bands such as Master and Carcass achieved some success,
they eventually felt pressure to diversify and found themselves
constrained by the emphasis on constant slamming rhythms,
like rock based around expectation and not continuity
as death metal was, as well as the need to be "extreme"
(interestingly, Carcass spawned Napalm Death which in
turn spawned Godflesh, leaving a trail behind its creators
in search of a flexible but aggressive yet musical artform).
Lyrics from Carcass were baffling to most as they consisted
of humorous descriptions of illness soaked in the language
of medical doctors, with latinate words falling into the
gurgling voice like a radio broadcast from the land of
the dead. Bolt Thrower, from England like Carcass, adopted
a more "epic" style, describing conflict in
both ancient and modern times, and Blood, from Germany,
who took on a mythological-occultist view, added to a
genre that was otherwise strikingly literal like punk
bands; Napalm Death and Terrorizer provide examples of
this general direction.
In
its own way, this music was both deconstructive and constructive.
Its nihilism and alienation escaped the rules of society
entirely and exceeded the limits of religion and conventional
morality; it was born to be offensive and thus marked
itself as not only not belonging to society but happy
in that alienated view, preferring a separate truth to
a compromise with something it saw as false and in denial
of mortality, thus unable to seek any meaningful values
(when life is infinite, and the self is the limits of
perception, is there any reason to care about anything
but gratification?). Unlike most genres of the time, however,
its deconstruction was predicated on the notion that if
enough of society were removed, a truth could be seen
which was less constricting and less without value. This
was years later a fulfillment of the Jim Morrison summary
of William Blake's basic theory that if humankind could
remove its perceptive confusion, it would see the world
as it is - infinite.
Metal
- (Black Metal)
The
black metal genre however, dormant since the burst of
creativity that brought Celtic Frost, Sodom and Bathory
together in roughly the same year, roared into life with
a modernization that encompassed all of what death metal
had done in a compositional framework unified by melody,
creating music requiring a longer attention span but delivering
a greater sensibility. Darkthrone, Immortal, Emperor,
Burzum, Enslaved, Havohej, Gorgoroth and Graveland created
more than an imposing sound in music: they used the rough
textures of alienated music to create structural music
that, unlike the rhythmic and mostly chromatic composition
of death metal, used a range of intervals and harmonies
to render melodic structure. It continued the tradition
of using motivic, narrative construction, but added to
it the complexity of uniting a song in tone as well as
rhythmic shape. The result was some of the most majestic
metal with sonorous aesthetic and deepening feeling for
the listener, almost all of it emerging from Scandinavia
between 1991-1994.
venom
the british blackmetal sensation explode forth in blasphemyArtistically,
black metal sought to exceed the narrow direction of reaction
to mainstream events that the increasing trend toward
morality in death metal brought. Resentment over "jogging
suit death metal," which reduced lyrical focus to
politically acceptable social sentiments, boiled through
black metal. Its original concept revolved around "evil"
and occult mysticism, from which it got the name "black"
(as in "black magic"), but this rapidly gave
way to its Romantic and Naturalistic side, which soon
united several concepts around a general idea: the natural
world is more important than a society which has no values
except money and not offending anyone, and meaning is
discovered when one accepts death (a form of occultism
in itself) and is willing to look outside the boundaries
of the self. Vast, metaphorical songs with epic titles
("I am the black wizards" and "My journey
to the stars" come to mind) resembled small classical
pieces more than popular music, with multiple themes converging
over the course of poetic movements, and the values espoused
in aesthetic and interview hearkened back to Pagan Europe
and in some cases, to the Vedantic religion of Indo-Europeans
before that.
Ignored
were moral concerns over the survival and political rights
of the whole of humanity, supplanted by a concern for
the natural environment and pre-Christian tradition, as
well as an appeal to the "eternal" - that which
existed outside of a "progressive" society and
its politicized march toward individualistic utopia. While
these musicians were strongly independent, they distrusted
illusions such as total autonomy of the individual, immortality
and universal absolutes such as "freedom" and
"justice." Theirs was the world of the wolf,
the blizzard, and the indefinable idealism of those who
exist alone in nature. Ideology and causes of intellectual
desire drowned out the hedonism and lack of discipline
of previous eras. Black metal was responsible to nothing
but itself, and the fantasy combined with reality to ferment
a neo-terrorist movement.
black
metal bands burned churchesMuch has been said about the
burning of churches and killing of people that occurred
in Norway and Sweden, but one thing is clear: where previous
metal bands performed stunts to draw attention to themselves,
the church burnings and killings were originally not intended
for public consumption; they were private acts intended
as ideological statements, not promotions for the personalities
or bands behind them. That indictment and capture eventually
occurred is more a product of the youth and inexperience
of teenagers regarding crime than a "me, me, look
at me!" approach to publicity. Whatever the intention,
as soon as news stories broke that over 70 churches had
been burned, and at least five people killed, public attention
took to black metal as it never had before. What kept
the stories from being something other than human interest
novelties was the music: unlike any form of metal or popular
music previous, it was epic and spoke grandly of emotional
values of a nature not limited to the 15 minutes of fame
accorded modern acts.
As
black metal grew, from roughly 1991 to 1996, its impetus
toward majestic music forced its lyricists and inspirational
minds to devise new concepts for creation, spawning a
range of sub-styles which each polarized around an ideology:
self over all, destroy all, or the variance of ideas within
pagan or naturalistic/fascist directions. These each took
a different approach to aesthetics, coloring the raw sensation
of whole perception of their work in the textures and
constructions of different needs. Over time the fire of
black metal spent itself, as most of these can only state
their apocalypticism once. Astute historians might note
that the insistence of black metal bands upon paradox
in music and idea produced a massively different aesthetic
for the time but spent it instantly once others cloned
it with nonsense content in stylistic imitation, as hardcore
had fallen.
Where
initially many including the creators of black metal viewed
its artistic content as being polemic for occult war against
Christianity, over time divergences appeared within the
same general areas of mysticism, philosophy or politics.
As is traditional, Romantic music in any culture tends
toward a worship of nature and appreciation for the whole
of the past, including Pagan tradition; because of its
adulation for natural diversity, it also tends to be nationalistic,
or believing that countries should not be "nation-states"
composed of political boundaries but should be "nations"
composed of unified ethnicities and cultures, as that
is how one maintains the different points of view that
constitute diversity. However, when one explores dangerous
and forbidden ideas, with it come the symbols and concepts
which are demonized by a multicultural, liberal democratic
society.
hellhammer
and Bathory invented much of black metal from oi punk
and melodic heavy metalNSBM, or National Socialist Black
Metal, became a phenomenon after Norway unloaded a surprise
dawn attack and swept the genre, but the extremist tradition
in thought had been present for far longer than that.
Where Iggy Pop's guitarists may have worn Nazi emblems
out of pure provocation, or Slayer displayed emblems of
both Satan and Hitler for an antisocial reaction, the
new bands stated what many in the community had been thinking
for years and further, invited it into their thought process
to influence their music through am embrace of pan-European
and Greco-Roman classicist ideals. They affirmed their
need to exist as national populations, and condemned the
invasion of Judeo-Christian belief and non-native peoples
into Europe, as well as praised forbidden figures such
as Adolf Hitler, Ted Kaczynski and Pentti Linkola. Fascism
and eco-fascism were endorsed as an alternative to the
weakness of individualism, which in the eyes of these
bands had with Christian thought led to a separation of
modern humanity from nature, tradition and honor.
The
romantic streak of metal recurred with many destructive
acts, and then amazingly fast black metal sold out in
1995 and death metal returned as longstanding artists
improved technicality and specialized artistically. To
say "sold out" in this context means to reveal
the fundamental principles of an effort to be motivated
by short term human desires, most commonly monetary greed
or public image. Making extreme music is a fine line between
art and "entertainment," where in the latter
media pander to the anticipations, weaknesses, lowest
common drives and energies of the general population.
As black metal's indulgences went from obscure opera to
dinnertime comedy circus (Dimmu Borgir, Cradle of Filth,
Dark Funeral), the faith of the public in the genre began
to wane, and a new range of fans began to replace the
old.
As
it collapsed black metal reverted to a surefire crowd-pleaser:
1970s style heavy metal and simpler forms of fixed harmony
music. As the older bands who were "true" to
what had once powered their works, after years of band
and social interaction as a result of their art, became
repetitive or commercialized, the playing field was equal
for any entertainer. This egalitarian style of black metal
pandered to the crowd and became the most popular genre
of any "underground" metal, ever. The results
of the first wave of "entertainment black metal"
became mixed with underground styles, and the genre was
inundated by simians imitating media icons and classics
toward which a morality of "true"ness exists.
By 1997, the consumer could buy black metal in the flavor
of his or her caprice: underground, melodic, punkish,
electronic. Content no longer mattered. Novelty in style
dominated with the exception of a few dedicated souls.
Heavy
Metal Summary
The
metal movement migrated from a position among the Counterculture
as a rebel to one of denying everything the Counterculture
stood for, prefer to eschew the intermediate tradition
and hail what occurred thousands of years before the modern
world. The domain of rugged individuals, it went from
hedonism to rejecting the individual-over-all preference
so that it might find meaning in the process of life itself.
And finally, it grew from a position of denying all value
to inventing value where society has publically declared
that none exists. What brought about this extraordinary
journey?
christian
morality and behind it the learning of judaism had become
secularized to serve the new left Since its genesis, metal
music has been "outsider art," looking inside
society from the basic position of "I don't like
what I see." In a time of absolutes and universals,
it looked for the ultimate answer, the truth that laid
waste to all else, in part to reconcile its members to
their position outside of society but in part in a desperate
search for something to hold on to, and in which to find
meaning. Over the course of several generations it distilled
this value system and found its connections to knowledge
outside of the realm of popular music.
Oddly
enough, it has done this by embracing the lack of meaning
in a nihilistic deconstruction that presupposed significance
existed elsewhere, since that which had public meaning
made no sense to someone who could recognize the importance
of the morbid end awaiting each of us. Its outsidership,
unlike the political and lifestyle alternativs others
chose, was based in feeling and not tangible elements
or ideas within society. This brought it full cycle from
a rebellious adolescence to a warlike but life-affirming
adulthood.
In
this transition there is hope, as for every adolescent
who takes one look at the adult world and says, "Take
it back - it's broken!" there is this path of learning.
While for now metal music has lost its impetus and been
assimilated, this path isn't unique to metal, and in many
ways, metal can be considered one vector of re-introducing
this truth to a forgetful (15 minutes, Orwellian memory
hole) modern industrial society based on the convenience
and wealth of individuals. One can hope for the future
in following this transition, and as an epitaph to metal,
organize the ideas with which any future generations would
start:
#
Nihilism - from Vedic and European transcendental idealism,
the idea that nothing has any significance or value inherently,
only by the valuation of a human mind.
# Ethnic pride - from Latin America to the Nordics to
the American Indians to Malaysians to Chinese to Hispanics
worldwide, metallions recognize natural ethnicities as
the only vehicle for their unique national culture.
# Environmentalism - a great horror of humanity is the
destruction of earth and anti-corporatism and environmentalism
are part of this.
# Melodic poesy - the sense of melody and layering of
the same as central to any complexity in composition,
developed further toward a language in which uniqueness
is appreciated over novelty of form.
# Anti-moralism - a fear and resentment of morality as
a construct at all, preferring nihilistic and deontological
moralities.
# Heroism - personal pride and passion for honor in existence
will be seen as more important than social approbation.
Any
future movement that hopes to transcend the ills of this
era must heed well to what metal has discovered: one cannot
use external force (carrot and stick) to force things
to fit into a framework or worldview; the force must come
from within. Without a culture emerging to support a consensus
of values, one is left with yammering monkeys using authority
to beat on each other for the gratification of their own
sense of self-importance. This is "absolutism,"
and it is represented in things ranging from money to
morality to the war on drugs to the crusade against "racists"
and "terrorists." Metal discovered by exploring
experience that this absolutist, universal, mechanistic
viewpoint was illusion, and that what was real was the
life that all along we as modern humans have hidden past
layers of interpretation and religious dogma derived from
dualism.
ralph
waldo emerson an american transcendentalist philosopher
who inspired many including f.w. nietzscheSchopenhauer
wrote the philosophy of the "will," urging awake
a force to life in each person that aims toward a refinement
of the human being and a focusing of ambition toward life
and desire for existence. Nietzsche's "Will to Power"
is a technical restatement of this to clarify that while
the will is indeed all, presupposing a lack of external
world that may resist your will is ignorant. Nietzsche
rightfully brushes aside the trivial question of "Is
reality real?" by suggesting that a system of consistent
reactions and structure will always be "real"
in that it has effected us, and our interaction with it
affects our survival which in turn is important to the
system. He rails against contentment and moral dogma,
and suggests the evolution of humans to übermensch
status - people fully accepting the nihilism of life and
moving forward to embrace what design, evolution and passion
have to offer.
This
cuts aside much of the guilt and ineffective action of
the world voting public. Someone told to save the planet
will join an organization for saving baby seals that mails
stamps around the world to collect donations, but will
not be able to tell you a single action except "drastic
change" that would actually solve the problem. A
postmoral person will correctly respond that most sufferings
are tied to a few central problems, and that the largest
is general disregard for the environment. The übermensch
that Nietzsche wrote of could arise, but by the suffocating
nature of a media-fed democracy will be an extremist;
after that, the next generation is to be a lone wolf for
forms of radical change through thought.
