In the long and ill-considered term where old internet got subsumed into the grotesque corporatist conglomeration of 'web 2.0' services and when all the little useless homes of personal chronicle like this blog felt truly outmoded, people of our subculture struggled to recreate and retain their spaces with variable degrees of success on the new attention economy platforms.
One such small community is 'Midnight Lighting Steel.', a facebook group of 100-150-odd people, lovers of old metal, weird metal and unique metal all the same that I was part of founding.
In this space over the last few years many topics were brought on for discussion and many an obscure metal gem was dusted off for re-appreciation. Interesting thoughts came out of seeing disparate individuals appreciate forms of metal and particular cuts that I thought were truly passé for the constitution of the modern heavy metal listener, but that's a story for another time. Suffice to say that even in this crippled state the promise of internet connectivity still inspired something new for me and others.
Web 2.0 being the cretinous machine that it is, however, it soon became apparent that even the groups internal oral history was getting lost in the obscurity of the near yesterday, as the search functions and, generally, the archival functions of the platform are pointedly inoperable, discouraging any sort of conglomeration of fact in lieu of an endless re-discussion. That's attention economy, isn't it?
My mind rebels to that idea, especially when it comes to matters of passion and fetish; Surely we have talked about Secrecy before, right? Surely we have all listened to Last Crack by now, no? We can build upon an edifice, but how? How do we know what is worth bringing up and what's been enshrined in the certitude of fact?
The idea that new members come and go and old members forget and we can't simply fish out our own discussion out of a deaf-dumb archive set me to ponder on the kinds of ways we propagated metal wisdom in the older world, the nascently connected but not yet overconnected world. What is an attractive package, even for a very small audience, even better, exactly for a very small audience to remember and remind itself of its oral history?
In the world of tomorrow no-one should seek to talk to the many, the many are deaf to the world of tomorrow. One should seek to talk to the few because the few can become a community that imagines freely what will come to pass.
In this sense, for Midnight Lighting Steel I sought to do a little bit of a pirate radio show. I do not want to be a 'content creator' for youtube, I don't especially want to have my face or voice on the internet at all to be honest, but I thought it a decent challenge to contain my generally extremely verbose brain on all things metal down to the radio show format, and to hearken back to a different standard of how we package and convey information on this style of art to each other all the same.
Furthermore I sought to be a living example of how 'we listen to music', in ways that to people of similar background and idiom to my own will seem obvious but to a generation of listeners fed by spotify and listening to music on a phone that mutes their song with a ding about a video ad will be a challenge. Offline hard drive of meticulous collection, record cover and lyric, year and country, genre and ambition, the lives of little humans given with such passion and steel dedication to a purely useless thing. The inspiration is to never forget them, so we as well may never be forgotten. To listen to music with love and to comment with wit, it is a simple thing to the loving and curious but fewer and fewer of us remain...
Ultimately, and this is no shame it is in fact the biggest ambition of them all, these are meant to be videos you put in the background that deal with something you dearly love with passion and mature understanding, to keep you company and give you a feeling of comradery while you have to work a stupid fucking dayjob or take a long car ride or just assuage the loneliness of a long night, here and there. Steel has always been there for us and I am paying it forward.
The videos were unlisted, they were meant to be seen by 10, 15 people tops. They were meant to incite small discussions and more than anything they were meant to do that one magic thing where when, say, Secrecy would come to mind for one of the viewers/listeners, the memory would also conjure up a comment, a bit of wisdom, something mentioned or something sparked in relation. A metal brother has already given years of life to thinκ of this, we learn from each other.
To assuage this catalogue fixation, the rateyourmusic wound of endless scroll and no papyrus of what the metal chronicle has become we need to get a little post-apocalyptic. A small human's story, an interesting anecdote and not too much more, an overarching theme and concept to this subcultural endeavor of metal, all of it dancing madly on a stolen radio-wave, hijacking a service meant for gross self-exploitation -- pirates of the underground, lightning, the speed of sound we will prevail
I did a few of these inward-looking radio shows for the group and then I thought since they're unlisted and they still fall in a hole of facebook groups backlog not easily fished out, I might as well give them a final resting place here, where all my other thoughts are, where my heart always rests, in the ethereal tomb of Poetry of Subculture: my most useless and in some ways my most cherished creation - and trust me, I've indulged in so much uselessness over the decades - satisfying the double credo of maximum effort and for no apparent credit. Levitating between the anonymity of the unlisted internet of yore and the data aggregative totality of the future, we soar the liquid seas of imagination.
As these videos are not meant for general use keep in mind they need not be circulated, nothing has to be made out of them, and I don't particularly want to think of them as media to account for in any other way than a measured discussion in this old world comment space. If you've found yourself here there is surely a reason and they're meant for you, instead. You understand this distinction and you know what to do with such information.
As always I remain your faithful correspondent, beyond time and space, amidst world-ending chaos and uncertainty. We met a long, long time ago and before this is all over we may truly never die.
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Pirates of the Underground
Monday, February 24, 2025
The experience of listening to music consists of two seemingly incompatible challenges. If you watch a film without trying to retain the image of the past, that is to say, what happened so far in the plot all the while focusing on taking in what's happening right now in some sort of dreamlike stupor, it could be argued you're missing out, you're being lazy, you are in one way or another engaging with this artform wrong. Let us not dwell on the exceptions to this logic and observe the general rule, for now.
Similarly with reading a book. How often have your eyes glazed over as you read a sentence and you've realized you have lost focus and you have to go back and re-read the whole page to pick up the track. So to say, there is some sort of track, you are on the scent towards some ultimate revelation, such is the power of prose. Even a poem can bewilder the mind in such ways that it sends one back, back, back again, start from the beginning, hold in your heart this immensity.
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress
The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.
Music is the one art form (aside from perhaps more abstract types of video art, which also usually most often employ the guiles of music) that welcomes your letting go of the past, asks you to forget everything about just a moment ago and carry on with the ever-unfolding present. I suggest that it also goes further than that: by form and function (the richness of this ongoing ever-present moment) it actually resists your nostalgia for the past. There is simply no time for it, and if a record makes you yearn for the song before as the current song sucks then it cannot be said to be a complete offering, can it? The most beautiful music wants to enthrall you with such an impossible promise: oh, you liked that? Well get ready for this. And soon after, all this will be developed further into that. Truly in music does the soul feel drunk with the whole of possibility. The drunk mind often returns in circles, in little spirals, projecting a weightless vector filled with sanguine humour, a morning of regret and then...
The dialectic completes itself in time. If a song, or album, or movement is truly beautiful we do not listen to it only once. The experience on the whole delivers us in a state beyond nostalgia, it makes one feel the deepest sense of melancholia instead. Oh, how I long to listen to this song again and again not because this gave way into that but because the experience on the whole was blissful. It lifted up the chains of time from my soul, the excitement was so complete, it was as if nothing bad had ever happened for a short spell.
When we listen to a song - or an album, or a symphony - again and again no matter how much the jubilance of the ever-present moment resists our plotting, we do chart, if not a course, a place. A geography. We create a map. In our 'anticipation of perception' we are longing and looking forward to beautiful musical events experienced before, and in our retraced present we are connecting our herewithin with what will come again. Music makes us long for a future on repeat. Music has very little to do with the past. Dionysus, drunk with wine and ready to fuck, as he has done a thousand nights before is longing for this experience that will inexorably lead to that one, he's not thinking of the experience of yesterday. What is the broader story that coheres as we levitate upwards from this orgy of lust in particular to hold in our eye this entire city?
No other artform is so 'repeatable' as an experience. Not prose, not poetry, not even painting (its closest relative in the realm of longing). Only music is engaging our ever-present now with a future we anticipate in full knowledge of its goodness and of its potential for perpetual revelation. Our past is just the totality of life spent seeking.
A deep love of music, not just of listening to songs but somehow charting their potential spaces through a deeper connection, through a ritual of repetition, through this annihilation of the past is a high sign of innocence, that something in the heart is intact no matter how they cut at you. The monad is love.
Finding oneself listening less and less attentively, not for signs of the past but for how this moment connects to future moments, moments well forecasted but never fully and completely described (as the potential of the future is limitless) is a sign that cynicism now rests at the throne of want. A heart made of clay, hollow to the touch, reverberation empty.
Take out an album, do nothing, truly do nothing but listen to it, read the lyrics, memorize the moments that are to come, touch the future potential. No spotify, no cat videos, no other distraction to your excitement for this present moment reaching to the beauty of the next. Well forecasted, you know the movement of the seasons in this realm, even though you can never predict what new will be stirred in the subconscious by the inchoate and dreamlike motions of the clouds.
Similarly with reading a book. How often have your eyes glazed over as you read a sentence and you've realized you have lost focus and you have to go back and re-read the whole page to pick up the track. So to say, there is some sort of track, you are on the scent towards some ultimate revelation, such is the power of prose. Even a poem can bewilder the mind in such ways that it sends one back, back, back again, start from the beginning, hold in your heart this immensity.
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress
The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.
Music is the one art form (aside from perhaps more abstract types of video art, which also usually most often employ the guiles of music) that welcomes your letting go of the past, asks you to forget everything about just a moment ago and carry on with the ever-unfolding present. I suggest that it also goes further than that: by form and function (the richness of this ongoing ever-present moment) it actually resists your nostalgia for the past. There is simply no time for it, and if a record makes you yearn for the song before as the current song sucks then it cannot be said to be a complete offering, can it? The most beautiful music wants to enthrall you with such an impossible promise: oh, you liked that? Well get ready for this. And soon after, all this will be developed further into that. Truly in music does the soul feel drunk with the whole of possibility. The drunk mind often returns in circles, in little spirals, projecting a weightless vector filled with sanguine humour, a morning of regret and then...
The dialectic completes itself in time. If a song, or album, or movement is truly beautiful we do not listen to it only once. The experience on the whole delivers us in a state beyond nostalgia, it makes one feel the deepest sense of melancholia instead. Oh, how I long to listen to this song again and again not because this gave way into that but because the experience on the whole was blissful. It lifted up the chains of time from my soul, the excitement was so complete, it was as if nothing bad had ever happened for a short spell.
When we listen to a song - or an album, or a symphony - again and again no matter how much the jubilance of the ever-present moment resists our plotting, we do chart, if not a course, a place. A geography. We create a map. In our 'anticipation of perception' we are longing and looking forward to beautiful musical events experienced before, and in our retraced present we are connecting our herewithin with what will come again. Music makes us long for a future on repeat. Music has very little to do with the past. Dionysus, drunk with wine and ready to fuck, as he has done a thousand nights before is longing for this experience that will inexorably lead to that one, he's not thinking of the experience of yesterday. What is the broader story that coheres as we levitate upwards from this orgy of lust in particular to hold in our eye this entire city?
No other artform is so 'repeatable' as an experience. Not prose, not poetry, not even painting (its closest relative in the realm of longing). Only music is engaging our ever-present now with a future we anticipate in full knowledge of its goodness and of its potential for perpetual revelation. Our past is just the totality of life spent seeking.
A deep love of music, not just of listening to songs but somehow charting their potential spaces through a deeper connection, through a ritual of repetition, through this annihilation of the past is a high sign of innocence, that something in the heart is intact no matter how they cut at you. The monad is love.
Finding oneself listening less and less attentively, not for signs of the past but for how this moment connects to future moments, moments well forecasted but never fully and completely described (as the potential of the future is limitless) is a sign that cynicism now rests at the throne of want. A heart made of clay, hollow to the touch, reverberation empty.
Take out an album, do nothing, truly do nothing but listen to it, read the lyrics, memorize the moments that are to come, touch the future potential. No spotify, no cat videos, no other distraction to your excitement for this present moment reaching to the beauty of the next. Well forecasted, you know the movement of the seasons in this realm, even though you can never predict what new will be stirred in the subconscious by the inchoate and dreamlike motions of the clouds.
Sunday, July 31, 2022
The Final Hour
Heavy Metal told me we are nearing some sort of end, a long time ago. You heard it too, the tolling of the funeral bell.
We had a a little bit of fun with it, huh? Sad fun, but fulfilling. Sometimes I read some of my past words, but what kills me are the comments.
I don't know if you know, but in Greece, deadly terrain and cruel waters often get nicknamed with fairly positive sounding names. This simple dialectic irony is more ancient than any other human thought because it is driven by the most ancient feeling we have.
An edge of a cliff where women and childfolk were driven to suicide rather than be captured by invaders may be named 'the hill of the beautiful daughters'. A sea path that crushed the ship of many an Odysseus might be curiously dubbed 'the fair chance passage'. You get the drift, but do hold on as it gets treacherous...
Heavy Metal is like that, but in reverse. It pretends to be about terrible things, but it Negates the thesis. Ostensibly we were inspired by the darkness and horror packaged within a safe aesthetic experience because it was a containable darkness and horror. We glanced, sideways, inside the wound of existence and we headbanged. I have no regrets on that front, I think we did well, friend.
However a realization is dawning upon humanity now that cannot be assuaged through crayon blood ablation and tough guy leather biker poses on the back of the jewel case. An end to what we perceive as our world seems to be emanating its premonition with an undeniable, existential certitude.
The end is demanding recognition, and the only way a demand for recognition plays out is, ultimately, with a master impressing their truth on the servant. We won't headbang our way out of a climate apocalypse but I am sure we will try.
I'm not going to presage the disaster to come with the classical fetish of the hobbyist writer (purple prose, I'm talking about purple prose) there's enough warning & admonition in any of yours, mine, our favorite arts to cover the issue a thousand times over. Perhaps I may be allowed to use my own poetry, only once, I hope you will forgive me - but otherwise, yes, there will not be a 'top 10 heavy metal songs about the apocalypse' running in the background while we discuss.
If anything, I want us to look upon ourselves, curious and full of wonder, and to notice the phantom scars of a myriad of 'false endings' we have headbanged our way through, full of dark exuberance. I want us to contrast that to this oncoming demand of recognition of the true end of things. It feels different, doesn't it? As meaning falls apart, there is bitter and there is sweet, but one is fleeting and it's the other that we'll have to hold.
Or, perhaps I have nothing to really say, I just wanted to write a little bit, a little bit of unstructured poetry about how it feels to recognize this dynamic, myself, but not alone... I want to turn to my subculture - perhaps that's all that this was ever about, a child Helm, feeling lonely on top of the head of a 40 year old man.
I wanted to tell you that I am thinking about meanings. I am sensing the end of the road for the human experiment, I am contemplating the thing no human was ever equipped to shoulder... but yet, collectively our total function is to shoulder... this, right? We wanted to be free. This is our meaning.
You'll help me one last time to work this out a little bit, why not? It's just me and you in this room, at this point.
Since it's just us, I'll tell you this: I am certain you feel it too, I don't have to explain it too much to you. You heard the funeral toll a long time ago and your heart was filled to the brim with that emptiness. A power from nothing, a freezing flame, a rotten seed of undead vitality. You headbanged the head away until only steel remained.
We told ourselves that meditation on the toll of the funeral bell will make us strong, and make us prepared. The black metal nazi wizards are still on this vain and futile kick, invoking belial and tiamat and psyduck and begging for dark power to destroy... no Goddess will help a creature so pitiful that it masturbates to the stench of dying children.
But the nazis aside, the ones we will meet in the street, again, and have our turgid passion play out once again... we, on the other side, we were just eaters of culture in a world in moral cryostasis after world wars and holocausts and massacred godheads... we leave behind our defiant freedom from everything but ourselves.
The rest will happen as it happens and we will do what we will do, in a way that cannot be stopped or changed.
As the tension waxes and our meanings fall, I recognize you and make no demands, I hope you will remember me, also
Sunday, July 29, 2018
In memory of Mark Shelton
This is a post about fathers, in a sense. It's also a post about metaphysics. A physical father can die. A metaphysical father lives forever. Mark Shelton, guitarist, singer and mainman of long-standing underground metal legends Manilla Road has passed away. Manilla Road are however, eternal.
I'll have to walk the long way home with you on this, dear reader.
My father got me a (tiny) classical guitar and signed me up for lessons when I was just 5 years old. Isn't it a cute mental image? In reality, the memory is sad. I was a sad child because there was a lot of family sadness on the family table and I wasn't allowed to leave and go to my room until I had eaten my daily, it felt, portion of family sadness. So, guitar was just more to do on a full stomach.
I learned the most basic music theory (which is what I still use, the rest are personal inventions), a little bit of sight reading and my basic chromatic exercises before I even had any sort of musical taste. If I remember correctly, I got the first couple of classical guitar degrees at my music school, before we had to move again, you know how it goes.
Classical guitar just meant more homework for child Helm. A series of generally disinterested guitar teachers didn't help ignite any sort of fire, because they were thinking about their abject fantasies of being guitar heroes while they were looking down on a tiny confused child that didn't know why it was frettin' them frets at all. It's easy to feel disgust even at children when they stand as impeding symbols to your own actualization.
Few years down the line, around ten years old, I think - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood consists of kaleidoscopic floating shards, inchoate in some sort of dim mist. Is it the same for you, reader? - I asked my father to stop bringing in the guitar teacher, because I didn't like him, the work, or the guitar much. He had in his mind that he owes it to the children to provide some avenues of culture and expression so he fought me on this, he fought a tiny ten-year-old that wasn't learning Sagreras compositions, it's kind of funny to think about. Anyway, he did a smart thing around the same time that helped us meet halfway on the matter.
At age 10, 11, 12 - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood is like looking through venetian blinds onto the scene of a minor but perpetual accident - I developed a fascination with heavy metal music. My father was skeptical about the morbid themes but allowed it because at least he could see some fire in his youngest child's eyes, and also, we were an atheist household so a little bit of satan here and there wasn't considered anathema.
This fascination coupled with a classical guitar lying around and basic motor skills to operate it meant that now little teenager Helm was about to cross a particular threshold, from the childlike solipsism where one does something because they've been instructed to do it to one doing something because they've set personal goals. This sounds fun and good and as a kind of progress, but it is also a very destabilizing process as I remember it, because what teenager me wanted to express was mitigated through the demonstration of other, adult and accomplished musicians.
I wanted to play fairly complex music to express fairly complex (and very teenager-dramatic) emotions and ideas, but I was just a little kid and I had just got my first electric guitar and it didn't sound like that, you know? It didn't sound like my rapidly emerging pantheon of heavy metal heroes for sure. I won't bore you with hilarious details of my first 'guitar rig', though, truly I can attest that a whole host of aesthetic sensibility was established for me just out of these early limitations, so it's worth getting into that at in the future, perhaps.
The point is, gear concerns aside, on some level, also, I knew from this young age that I never would truly sound like my heroes. It was a weird sort of prescience, from a weird little child with big ideas but also a sense of self-reflection that described these limitations, I could see my own limitations in certain ways. Nobody will ever tell this to a child, or a teenager: there's certain things you will probably never accomplish because you will not have the willpower, the mental fortitude, the peace of mind to dedicate enough to achieve. Heavy Metal goes on and on about how death is real, and I'm not so sure, honestly. Death happens, I guess. That's not so heavy metal a motto, is it? Sadness is real, however. It's real and ongoing and it describes limitations. If you're sad, you're going to have to be smart about how you get things done for the rest of your life because just turning the willpower knob to eleven won't work for you.
Parents certainly would never tell this to their children, because they are the instigators of various and frequent emotionally distressing events that contribute to such sadness. So one is left to cope and understand themselves and try to work with what they've got.
In this teenager state of mind, as I was going through that, I was looking for allies, for inspirations, for some sort of guidepost that encouraged me on my way. Amazing guitar players with their fluid legato and impossible sweeps were more like gods to me, I couldn't see myself in them at all.
But heavy metal is a beautiful genre. In its vast and ambiguous spaces live and thrive not just Apollonian guitar gods but also mutants, troglodytes, outcasts and weirdos. One could say that so they do in the punk and dark wave scenes and there even moreso and I would agree but the magic thing for me was that all these heavy metal mutants were trying to do what the Apollonian guitar gods were also doing: they wanted, with their limited means and weird talents, to build something, to construct an almost architectural monument to the same gods of romance and horror. A weird punk band, regardless of how much I might like their songs, always felt more like an ephemeral and scene-related exercise. You play in a punk band because you started a punk band, you go to squats, you are in the broad anarchist space, you try to meet people, you play gigs for them, you sell some t-shirts, perhaps you put out an album eventually, sure you express beautiful and worthwhile emotions but it's all too human.
This wasn't my child fantasy of heavy metal (and there is no other fantasy of heavy metal worth a damn). No, I got into heavy metal because I wanted to do something at once bigger but also more personal. Interfacing with the genre in these terms is not a social exercise, it is instead a moral one. You build your own backbone one riff at the time and it doesn't matter who likes it or even gets to hear it. You hear it. When your steel is true and real, virtue is its own reward.
Ask any metalhead that you think has a bit of virtue to them and they will all get to that point of description, regardless of their divergent paths: when they listen to the best this genre has to offer they are not thinking about the world-as-it-is. They aren't thinking about a cool squat gig or a great party or a person that they dated. They are thinking about power. About darkness. About grandeur. Malice, eternity, nothingness, God, the devil and themselves in eternal dialectic relation. All these nodes of immense and overwhelming force are directly connected to a single recipient. It's direct and immediate and absolutely exhausting, it inspires a thousand things and they aren't all beautifull as that song goes. Let's connect one more thing from another song, another book, another something, because eventually you'll have to learn this if you don't already: "For the sorcerer exhaustion is ecstasy." and there aren't any happy sorcerers, alright?
This is the mindset and I've been trying to elucidate but honestly, I think over the years (and we've been doing this for some years now, friends) it becomes more and more clear: if you don't understand this mindset, you will never understand how heavy metal feels. If you have actualized this mindset from other experience and culture then you can map it onto the ridiculous grandeur of metal music and appreciate it even if it wasn't there in your childhood. But that achievement of experiencing art on the metaphysical plane cannot be gifted. Open your eye, yeah? Do it, you know how. Do the work and then all this nonsense will achieve some shape and grace.
Well, for inadvertent reasons I did the work early. My hands couldn't play shit, but I knew what I was seeking. And there we enter Manilla Road.
Boy, are Manilla Road a weird band! Not to me, to me they sound complete and correct. But to outsiders they sound off in so many ways. This is why, as a dear friend of mine has remarked, this shit, Cirith Ungol, Brocas Helm, Manilla Road, this shit is called "underground metal" to outsiders. But for me, and for him, for us few, it's just HEAVY METAL. The weird little mutants mean more to us than their mainstream inversion. See? In my mind, Iron Maiden or whatever is the inversion of Manilla Road. Manilla Road are more important to me. If you listen to their music, now, as an adult, you probably would not understand why.
Yes, Mark Shelton's voice was nasal, and the production on their arguable best effort, "Crystal Logic" is garage sub-basement. There's no virtuosity on display, there's barely any bells and whistles to this, it's actually quite punk rock in a way. The material has no uniformity, the record cover looks like this:
But the ideas! The lyrics! The moods! Listen to "The Veils of Negative Existence", by God if you do one thing today, listen to this song and read the lyrics and open your eye.
I'll have to walk the long way home with you on this, dear reader.
My father got me a (tiny) classical guitar and signed me up for lessons when I was just 5 years old. Isn't it a cute mental image? In reality, the memory is sad. I was a sad child because there was a lot of family sadness on the family table and I wasn't allowed to leave and go to my room until I had eaten my daily, it felt, portion of family sadness. So, guitar was just more to do on a full stomach.
I learned the most basic music theory (which is what I still use, the rest are personal inventions), a little bit of sight reading and my basic chromatic exercises before I even had any sort of musical taste. If I remember correctly, I got the first couple of classical guitar degrees at my music school, before we had to move again, you know how it goes.
Classical guitar just meant more homework for child Helm. A series of generally disinterested guitar teachers didn't help ignite any sort of fire, because they were thinking about their abject fantasies of being guitar heroes while they were looking down on a tiny confused child that didn't know why it was frettin' them frets at all. It's easy to feel disgust even at children when they stand as impeding symbols to your own actualization.
Few years down the line, around ten years old, I think - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood consists of kaleidoscopic floating shards, inchoate in some sort of dim mist. Is it the same for you, reader? - I asked my father to stop bringing in the guitar teacher, because I didn't like him, the work, or the guitar much. He had in his mind that he owes it to the children to provide some avenues of culture and expression so he fought me on this, he fought a tiny ten-year-old that wasn't learning Sagreras compositions, it's kind of funny to think about. Anyway, he did a smart thing around the same time that helped us meet halfway on the matter.
At age 10, 11, 12 - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood is like looking through venetian blinds onto the scene of a minor but perpetual accident - I developed a fascination with heavy metal music. My father was skeptical about the morbid themes but allowed it because at least he could see some fire in his youngest child's eyes, and also, we were an atheist household so a little bit of satan here and there wasn't considered anathema.
This fascination coupled with a classical guitar lying around and basic motor skills to operate it meant that now little teenager Helm was about to cross a particular threshold, from the childlike solipsism where one does something because they've been instructed to do it to one doing something because they've set personal goals. This sounds fun and good and as a kind of progress, but it is also a very destabilizing process as I remember it, because what teenager me wanted to express was mitigated through the demonstration of other, adult and accomplished musicians.
I wanted to play fairly complex music to express fairly complex (and very teenager-dramatic) emotions and ideas, but I was just a little kid and I had just got my first electric guitar and it didn't sound like that, you know? It didn't sound like my rapidly emerging pantheon of heavy metal heroes for sure. I won't bore you with hilarious details of my first 'guitar rig', though, truly I can attest that a whole host of aesthetic sensibility was established for me just out of these early limitations, so it's worth getting into that at in the future, perhaps.
The point is, gear concerns aside, on some level, also, I knew from this young age that I never would truly sound like my heroes. It was a weird sort of prescience, from a weird little child with big ideas but also a sense of self-reflection that described these limitations, I could see my own limitations in certain ways. Nobody will ever tell this to a child, or a teenager: there's certain things you will probably never accomplish because you will not have the willpower, the mental fortitude, the peace of mind to dedicate enough to achieve. Heavy Metal goes on and on about how death is real, and I'm not so sure, honestly. Death happens, I guess. That's not so heavy metal a motto, is it? Sadness is real, however. It's real and ongoing and it describes limitations. If you're sad, you're going to have to be smart about how you get things done for the rest of your life because just turning the willpower knob to eleven won't work for you.
Parents certainly would never tell this to their children, because they are the instigators of various and frequent emotionally distressing events that contribute to such sadness. So one is left to cope and understand themselves and try to work with what they've got.
In this teenager state of mind, as I was going through that, I was looking for allies, for inspirations, for some sort of guidepost that encouraged me on my way. Amazing guitar players with their fluid legato and impossible sweeps were more like gods to me, I couldn't see myself in them at all.
But heavy metal is a beautiful genre. In its vast and ambiguous spaces live and thrive not just Apollonian guitar gods but also mutants, troglodytes, outcasts and weirdos. One could say that so they do in the punk and dark wave scenes and there even moreso and I would agree but the magic thing for me was that all these heavy metal mutants were trying to do what the Apollonian guitar gods were also doing: they wanted, with their limited means and weird talents, to build something, to construct an almost architectural monument to the same gods of romance and horror. A weird punk band, regardless of how much I might like their songs, always felt more like an ephemeral and scene-related exercise. You play in a punk band because you started a punk band, you go to squats, you are in the broad anarchist space, you try to meet people, you play gigs for them, you sell some t-shirts, perhaps you put out an album eventually, sure you express beautiful and worthwhile emotions but it's all too human.
This wasn't my child fantasy of heavy metal (and there is no other fantasy of heavy metal worth a damn). No, I got into heavy metal because I wanted to do something at once bigger but also more personal. Interfacing with the genre in these terms is not a social exercise, it is instead a moral one. You build your own backbone one riff at the time and it doesn't matter who likes it or even gets to hear it. You hear it. When your steel is true and real, virtue is its own reward.
Ask any metalhead that you think has a bit of virtue to them and they will all get to that point of description, regardless of their divergent paths: when they listen to the best this genre has to offer they are not thinking about the world-as-it-is. They aren't thinking about a cool squat gig or a great party or a person that they dated. They are thinking about power. About darkness. About grandeur. Malice, eternity, nothingness, God, the devil and themselves in eternal dialectic relation. All these nodes of immense and overwhelming force are directly connected to a single recipient. It's direct and immediate and absolutely exhausting, it inspires a thousand things and they aren't all beautifull as that song goes. Let's connect one more thing from another song, another book, another something, because eventually you'll have to learn this if you don't already: "For the sorcerer exhaustion is ecstasy." and there aren't any happy sorcerers, alright?
This is the mindset and I've been trying to elucidate but honestly, I think over the years (and we've been doing this for some years now, friends) it becomes more and more clear: if you don't understand this mindset, you will never understand how heavy metal feels. If you have actualized this mindset from other experience and culture then you can map it onto the ridiculous grandeur of metal music and appreciate it even if it wasn't there in your childhood. But that achievement of experiencing art on the metaphysical plane cannot be gifted. Open your eye, yeah? Do it, you know how. Do the work and then all this nonsense will achieve some shape and grace.
Well, for inadvertent reasons I did the work early. My hands couldn't play shit, but I knew what I was seeking. And there we enter Manilla Road.
Boy, are Manilla Road a weird band! Not to me, to me they sound complete and correct. But to outsiders they sound off in so many ways. This is why, as a dear friend of mine has remarked, this shit, Cirith Ungol, Brocas Helm, Manilla Road, this shit is called "underground metal" to outsiders. But for me, and for him, for us few, it's just HEAVY METAL. The weird little mutants mean more to us than their mainstream inversion. See? In my mind, Iron Maiden or whatever is the inversion of Manilla Road. Manilla Road are more important to me. If you listen to their music, now, as an adult, you probably would not understand why.
Yes, Mark Shelton's voice was nasal, and the production on their arguable best effort, "Crystal Logic" is garage sub-basement. There's no virtuosity on display, there's barely any bells and whistles to this, it's actually quite punk rock in a way. The material has no uniformity, the record cover looks like this:
But the ideas! The lyrics! The moods! Listen to "The Veils of Negative Existence", by God if you do one thing today, listen to this song and read the lyrics and open your eye.
I sail the seas of negativity
To banish evil from this place
I fight with sword of fire and lightning
I am the guardian come this day
I will never put my sword down
I will never run away
In The Veils of Negative Existence
I am the master here to stay
My crystal shield will never fail me
It can withstand the devils rain
And with the Lords of Light to guide me
I bring forth vengeance in their name
I will never put my sword down
I will never run away
In The Veils of Negative Existence
I know it's not my mind at play
Upon the Island of Damnation
The Horde of Hades screams and wails
The blood of life and execution
Has put back light into the Veils
I will never put my sword down
I will never run away
In The Veils of Negative Existence
I am the master here to stay
Inside of the darkness
Between the planes
A tesseract dimension
Few know its name
On Prydwen, my long-ship
Of silver sails
Excalibur at my side
We shall not fail
Yeah, this isn't any old bullshit about the Lonelyness of the Long-Distance Runner or whatever. This, for teenager Helm was a revelation, not because I hadn't understood what heavy metal is before this point (even my entry to metal with Metallica has the core essence of metal right there, no worries) but it was the first time I felt like I could do this. I can play weird shit too. Manilla didn't sound off to me, I could sense that in the weird outsider choices that had led them to this place, I could replicate not their choices, but that ethos. Mark Shelton was the ethos of heavy metal, for me, and he still remains. The first song I learned to play along to was "Riddle Master", off of the same record, Crystal Logic. It's a simple song with an alluring atmosphere. And it allowed for me to come inside it and seek both riddle and master for myself. Every time I play that riff and wait for the cymbal accent on the two of the beat, we're all in there together. Manilla Road knew how to be their real selves but also allow listeners to step in their world with them. That's love, if you ask me. Love for their most tender and true self, in their heart, and also total openness and access for those that seek.
Mark Shelton was old, not old enough for his passing to not be untimely and therefore tragic, but older than heavy metal. He was a hippie. Metalheads hate the hippies, usually. Mark managed to synthesize the ground-floor 'love is all you need' of hippiedom and slotted in '...but arm yourself with four feet of cruel steel while you're at it". On Crystal Logic is this lyric that I keep thinking about, all my life:
"There's Good and there's Evil and there's no in-between
We shall slay evil with logic, Crystal Logic".
I wrestled with this idea for years, through my most post-modern and moral relativist sojourns, even when I disagreed with the word of this, the spirit burned right through me. Now I am 34 years old and I agree 100% with the text as written. I don't know if I'll ever have the courage and power to slay evil with crystal logic, Helm is too sad, but I can surely know and say that this is right and just.
There's as many Manilla Road stories for me as there's Manilla Road songs, almost. It's no joke when I'm telling you that I've seen Manilla Road live twice and when they played "Death by the Hammer" it felt like I was getting crushed by metal like never before or since. Absolute exhaustion and ecstasy, because as Manilla Road are crushing you with their hammer, they also actually love you. Witness:
Mark served this ethos through thick and thin, he served heavy metal in its purest distillation for 40 years. I had the pleasure to meet the man briefly and can attest to the continuity between his higher self (the spirit of this band) and his actual meatspace personality. Pure class. I'll always remember him fondly as one of my few and sacred, really, Heavy Metal Father Figures. He wasn't instrumental just to my journey through heavy metal creativity, Manilla Road's work has touched hundreds of thousands of little metal mutants, and through them, many more millions. He's touched the musicians that speak to the broader public in ways that Manilla Road never were equipped to do so. Their moral seed germinated in a myriad more successful bands that have the money, the opportunities, the mainstream talent and the determination to go further than the underground. In a way, Manilla Road are the metalhead's metalhead icon. There's a reason, though rife with misgivings and acrimony, that this shit is called 'true metal'.
In the world of aesthetics, there's nothing that is true and false, there's only impressions and arguments to make. But in moral terms, verity lives. It is on that plateau that Manilla Road's steel was true and real. Though they would never ask or need for accolades and respect, as virtue is its own reward, I am sure that love would always be welcome in their hearts.
I've loved Manilla Road for 20-odd years. I'll die before I stop.
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Xerxes - Myth and Poetry
My love,
It has been years since we've last corresponded.
I still see you in my dreams.
The first dream was of a spectral, pale vision of your former self. Three months ago. You moved closer to me in the darkness and I felt the cold aura of a white ghost. You told me 'perhaps I have died'.
I awoke screaming, in the middle of the night. My room, a room I had taken great pains to sanctify and protect from the reach of sinister forces, it now felt empty of air, my walls freezing to the touch. Evil was in my room, I could feel it. The promise of your death had robbed me of my vitality and precious wisdom. I lay shivering in my bed like a child, lost to the world and lost to your light.
I pulled out every cantrip and minor miracle I had learned in my 33 years, I prayed to the Goddess and chanted evocations, I called to Athena to destroy your enemies, I prodded the eldest serpent in the bottom of your ocean fault to shift, to move, to disperse these aspersions of your sanctity. You are the Goddess. You are the priestess. Can the priestess die?
I triangulated the source of my numerous infections, in this weak moment startlingly clear to me and their bodies towered over me in my small London room, suffocating me with their mad cry of nihil. If you are dead then so am I. Perhaps I have never existed.
A bad moon, an ugly moon I thought I would never again have to think of again towered in the sky. It's been a hundred years, it's been a thousand years, my love. The mistress made her perennial demand: holocaust. I can not shoulder this burden as I once thought I could and this is why I first reached out to you, after this first dream, for answers or even just a word.
I wrote to you with a plea of re-connection and a secret desire of re-cognition. If I have spoken ill of you, I apologize. If I evangelized your death, I apologize a thousand times. If I made love to a corpse of a memory while I pretended to simply dissect it, for this hypocrisy and hubris I will apologize forever. Forever.
Please believe me.
Months later, you came to me in a second dream.
Your presence was foretold and I didn't believe it. The priestess will arrive, you just have to be patient, I was told by other wandering shadows. I knew the place and I knew the time and still I didn't believe. I am so sorry, I feel so small. A small thing that nonetheless, exists. You have your mercy.
A small thing looks up to you and at once, now, sees you, as you did come. Your eyes were silver with prescience, your face, a face I hadn't been able to re-collect for 7 years was more beautiful than my heart can bear and... I was ashamed.
I looked aside, like a bumbling teenager, I had no words, I pretended to be one of the other wandering shadows, to bask indirectly in your light like a tired serpent on a stone. I was nothing in that moment, but it only lasted a lifetime. My ossified corpse still remembered training, and wisdom and truth: truth is always liquid, liquid re-sanguinated this corpse. I simply couldn't stand still, I had to turn to you, again, my love. This training you imparted, and this wisdom I conquered in this and other lives.
I turned my head, again, to you, all my little courage to look into the wound.
You ran to me and embraced me.
You kissed me on my lips.
You whispered to me two things:
"I am alive, you big dummy" and then,
"Hold me tighter".
I am so sorry. I repent for everything. My love for you is eternal, and so you will never die. Your myth is mine, and so, my poetry is yours. I know you don't belong to me, anymore, if you ever did. I know that every living being feels the same love for you that I do. I know the Creator of this world, even he in his madness and cruelty, he writes his poetry to you. God's own erotic poetry, it is everywhere around me. We all bend our knee to you with gratitude and longing. The dreams that we dreamed of, awake, alone and silent in the dark.
I woke up from this second dream to my little, warm room in London, with renewed, crystal remembrance of what love is and what obligation is. My freedom is found in your servitude. I turned on a computer and checked an e-mail account and you had written back to me. I was a fool but I am a fool no longer.
Xerxes were a 90's progressive metal band. They put out two records and disappeared. They sound like nobody else and near-nobody cares about them now or even remembers them. Nobody? NOBODY?
Archives have weight and all that, I have been crushed under the weight of my own archive - we've been over this. But poetry is not an archive, it is an act of love. Poetry on the page is weightless, it is levitating, it is like the butterflies that flutter in the hollow inside of a human body, as it is probed by the silver string of pathos.
This is the solution to our particular conundrum. The name of the blog solves itself. I'm not afraid to write to you about an old Swiss band that means this much to me.
Xerxes have a little bit of Watchtower in them, a little bit of Psychotic Waltz, perhaps, yada yada yada. They don't have a domineering vocalist and that's probably why they vanished into obscurity, or perhaps people confused their innocence for lightness. Heavy metal has to be heavy, right? Regardless of whatever lack it was that damned Xerxes into obscurity, what they do have is heart and a message and absolutely no fucking distance between them. Can you say the same for your creative pursuits, dear reader? Have you dissolved all the distance between the bleeding stone inside you, from which flow a thousand secret streams of romance, and the bullshit that comes out of your mouth? I didn't think so.
It's alright, hey, neither have I! But Xerxes achieved this, and so they must never be forgotten. Let me help you help me help Xerxes never be forgotten, not through an addendum to a self-important archive, but through poetry and myth.
Let's do this in this way. Chances are you haven't heard this shit before, so here you go, the internet provides, or at least NOW it does, not 20 years ago when self-important little metalheads had to write to Hellion mailorder to get cds and vinyl in the mail and then carry big boxes home as if they were treasures the extracted from a horde of a dragon - aren't all these old-metalhead nostalgic ballads disgusting? This is a better world. Just click on a youtube link to listen to the first of the two offerings by Xerxes:
Read while you listen, then perhaps listen without reading, you know what to do. I trust you, regardless of your first impressions with this music, to never forget Xerxes.
Here's why many people do not even recognize this as metal music, though it definitely is, and instead call it prog-rock of some sort. There's not even a little bit of what Xerxes do (especially in their debut that you're listening to now) that is not borne out of a pure desire to capture and portray beauty. There's no evil and no violence to these songs, there's only absolute, otherworldly, ethereal motion and playful, expressionist movement. It's hard to listen to 'Beyond Your Imagination' and not imagine a wandering through field and forest of pastoral, resonant calm. There's stories to these songs, fairy-tales, moral paradigms, but it is the setting that is the star of the show.
Where is any other metal music that proudly exclaims to be beyond usual imaginations of metal boundaries and themes? Where is any other metal music not trapped within a suffocating box of its own nihilist masculinity? Where is any other metal music that transports the mind in an a-temporal realm of pure wanting?
It's impossible to feel nostalgia of a tangible, bygone moment in one's life, when listening to Xerxes. The point of this music, the pure quintessential distillation of it is that it evokes a desire to return to a fantastic place that we've never visited, but yet exists.
This is the poetry I want to write about Xerxes, this is my obligation to you, this is the thing that has changed in the long trek through this subcultural examination and all my scattered musings lead to it, in-advertently, in-exorably: that place exists. It exists Beyond Our Imagination as we stand now, but it exists and our imagination can lead us there, if we try. It is a disservice to our love and our freedom-in-servitude to be the solipsist, the rationalist, the relativist and chalk up this feeling that you feel as you listen to Xerxes, perhaps for the first time (oh, how I envy you, how I love you for it) to an invocation of a nostalgia of a place that doesn't exist and then return to a reality that does exist. If you have gone Beyond Your (once capped) Imagination, why would you choose to forget where you went and return to a basest stricture?
Our lives are not floating in a meaningless void, we are anchored by a commonality of hope and desire. I know your hopes and desires, you know mine. You always knew. Xerxes provide a sketch, to the best of their ability, with disarming earnestness, of that place we all know but because of life being so hard, we often choose to forget. A levitating castle in the sky, a forest in the mists, a river that runs down the mountain, through the fields and up the same mountain, again. Eternal. Contemplate eternity!
In the heart of this realm is the same old stone, we all know it, its bleeding horror and thousand inspirations. They are not all beautifull, but they're real, as real as your dumb computer screen shooting electrons in your eyeballs.
As such, in that place, this real place, we will never die.
The music of Xerxes is filled with playful twists and turns, democratically partitioned between two guitar players and a host of keyboard orchestrations that have symphonic ambitions. The historical lineage of NWOBHM to techno-thrash riffery to proto-progressive to the realized conclusion of metal-band-as-orchestra can be traced by those with a kink for metal history. We've talked about this stuff before, right? You know all of this. You can understand Xerxes just fine.
And you can be kind to a vocalist of limited means and big ambitions. Did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to listen to actual orchestras, conducted by actual geniuses, so far away from you they might as well be alien beings visiting this world? Or did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to hear what simple people like you and I, of limited means and talent, can do when they devote their soul to this big ambition of describing in poetry and song, That Place?
Good answer.
The first album by Xerxes ends in this declaration, in all its English-as-a-Second-Language-Heavy-Metal-as-the-First beauty:
"All you poets of this world, you have been honored by the Grace.
Writing in the manner you wish, gliding out of this Earthly realm.
Raise your voice again and again. They should announce us as messengers.
Catch the world of phantasm and bring it over here, with which we want to align.
Our desire is to defeat the bluntness, to save the highest aim.
We do not want to comply any longer with this interminable, senseless game.
Raise your voices again and again and create new poems, fairy-tales and songs.
All you poets of this world."
It's okay to cry.
The first album did nothing, it made no splash, nobody bought it or listened to it besides a few prog metal nerds, and here we are. But it's fair to understand why Xerxes themselves might have been wounded that their pure-heart offering did not receive an enthusiastic welcome by the '90s metal scene.
What would you do, friend? You would disband, of course. Or you'd start playing Pantera power groove with keyboard solos on top like Dream Theater. You'd have become bitter and cynical. You'd have chased musical competencies that are recognized by the wider professional world. Whatever.
What did Xerxes do? They self-funded and self-released an even better, more ambitious, more multifaceted, more carefully constructed, more beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful offering to the same feeling, That Same Place, they didn't give up and they didn't believe your lies that you didn't recognize what they're singing about. They looked at you straight in the eyes, from the darkness their obscurity had damned them to, and they smiled kindly.
And perhaps a bit wickedly, as their second offering is darker.
After crossing the threshold with "Beyond Your Imagination", Xerxes were wounded in the battle with infamy, and they emerge on "Falling Leaves" (consider the autumnal theme) as warrior-poets, not just bards. This record is devoutly metal, the minstrel folk of the debut has been minimized. Here the melancholy of a bygone reality reigns paramount. This is the dark middle chapter of a trilogy that wasn't to be and it's a tragedy that it wasn't, as far as I'm concerned. There's no red "split up" in metal-archives that saddens me as much as the one in Xerxes's entry. It's sad because it was we that were pushing Xerxes into the darkness.
"Wait! Wait. I have so much more to tell you." calls the warrior poet in the cerulean mists.
I stress this, friend. Where Xerxes are taking us is a reality. Not fantasy. Reality. The Place is real and you must also do your best to eradicate your distance. We've talked about what tools to use and we've talked about what art is on this blog for a long time. Help me help you help Xerxes. Don't be a jerk.
The twists and turns of the material are no longer playful and innocent. They are dramatic in full consideration, and the sharpness of the violence of nihility rears its head, as it is to be battled. The devil must visit all of us in the desert.
"Nowhere in this world
I can find a refuge
Silent and dark is my love
Doesn't make any sense
Or is it too late?"
But Xerxes will remind you of the terror as they reminded you of the hope of sentience. The blood flows from the stone in the heart of the kingdom. Pretend you don't understand, pretend until you drown in your own cynical abjection and wordly rationality. Pretend that you can make it through this life without love and freedom. Xerxes will have none of it, they cannot bear to tell a lie.
Xerxes will never tell you any lies.
Fall under their spell and never forget them. This is art borne from kindness and its minor cruelties are because kindness has to be a cruelty sometimes, if it is to spark remembrance. They did this for the betterment of all humanity. They made zero money for it, they have no peer accolades to show for it. A hundred people across the globe listened and loved them and remembered. I am one of them. It was by chance but it wasn't an accident.
Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing for you if you loved and remembered them too?
If you found them naive on their debut that naivete is of the Fool on the start of his Tarot journey. Xerxes reflected on this, and "Falling Leaves" finds the Hanged Man in mid-stride, levitating, upside-down. He will take on all colours if he is to reach The World. All the hyperbolic death-obsessed death and black metal that you use as a poison salve for a misunderstood wound, Xerxes are aware, awake and in full knowledge that the wound is beautiful and they will guide you through it, for 37 minutes, once 37 minutes, twice, to lead to, well... you know where.
Pay attention to the track "Sam Hain". In whispers and premonitions it is the key. The debut failed (insofar that a masterpiece can be called a failure) because it did not acknowledge their own shadow, perhaps. All of the beautiful heritage of Fates Warning, Watchtower, Psychotic Waltz, all of the technology this strange of music developed in its multifaceted ambitions, it is all employed for a singular concern here: Meet your Shadow Self. Step right through your Shadow Form. Come out the other side. You are reminded of something right now, and your memory does not steer you wrong. Many people have tried to tell you the same thing in different ways. They weren't lying. Xerxes will tell you no lies.
Sam Hain in the middle has no lyrics. It has instrumental force that goes through a lot of contrasting motion. Keep your focus. You can use your mind to see the images. Step through the shadow. Nobody said it would be easy. In the middle you may feel that the World seems to be dead. That all color sadly dissipates. That for all your faith, you are left in the night sea, drifting.
But in the distance you will see a bridge,
floating
It has been years since we've last corresponded.
I still see you in my dreams.
The first dream was of a spectral, pale vision of your former self. Three months ago. You moved closer to me in the darkness and I felt the cold aura of a white ghost. You told me 'perhaps I have died'.
I awoke screaming, in the middle of the night. My room, a room I had taken great pains to sanctify and protect from the reach of sinister forces, it now felt empty of air, my walls freezing to the touch. Evil was in my room, I could feel it. The promise of your death had robbed me of my vitality and precious wisdom. I lay shivering in my bed like a child, lost to the world and lost to your light.
I pulled out every cantrip and minor miracle I had learned in my 33 years, I prayed to the Goddess and chanted evocations, I called to Athena to destroy your enemies, I prodded the eldest serpent in the bottom of your ocean fault to shift, to move, to disperse these aspersions of your sanctity. You are the Goddess. You are the priestess. Can the priestess die?
I triangulated the source of my numerous infections, in this weak moment startlingly clear to me and their bodies towered over me in my small London room, suffocating me with their mad cry of nihil. If you are dead then so am I. Perhaps I have never existed.
A bad moon, an ugly moon I thought I would never again have to think of again towered in the sky. It's been a hundred years, it's been a thousand years, my love. The mistress made her perennial demand: holocaust. I can not shoulder this burden as I once thought I could and this is why I first reached out to you, after this first dream, for answers or even just a word.
I wrote to you with a plea of re-connection and a secret desire of re-cognition. If I have spoken ill of you, I apologize. If I evangelized your death, I apologize a thousand times. If I made love to a corpse of a memory while I pretended to simply dissect it, for this hypocrisy and hubris I will apologize forever. Forever.
Please believe me.
Months later, you came to me in a second dream.
Your presence was foretold and I didn't believe it. The priestess will arrive, you just have to be patient, I was told by other wandering shadows. I knew the place and I knew the time and still I didn't believe. I am so sorry, I feel so small. A small thing that nonetheless, exists. You have your mercy.
A small thing looks up to you and at once, now, sees you, as you did come. Your eyes were silver with prescience, your face, a face I hadn't been able to re-collect for 7 years was more beautiful than my heart can bear and... I was ashamed.
I looked aside, like a bumbling teenager, I had no words, I pretended to be one of the other wandering shadows, to bask indirectly in your light like a tired serpent on a stone. I was nothing in that moment, but it only lasted a lifetime. My ossified corpse still remembered training, and wisdom and truth: truth is always liquid, liquid re-sanguinated this corpse. I simply couldn't stand still, I had to turn to you, again, my love. This training you imparted, and this wisdom I conquered in this and other lives.
I turned my head, again, to you, all my little courage to look into the wound.
You ran to me and embraced me.
You kissed me on my lips.
You whispered to me two things:
"I am alive, you big dummy" and then,
"Hold me tighter".
I am so sorry. I repent for everything. My love for you is eternal, and so you will never die. Your myth is mine, and so, my poetry is yours. I know you don't belong to me, anymore, if you ever did. I know that every living being feels the same love for you that I do. I know the Creator of this world, even he in his madness and cruelty, he writes his poetry to you. God's own erotic poetry, it is everywhere around me. We all bend our knee to you with gratitude and longing. The dreams that we dreamed of, awake, alone and silent in the dark.
I woke up from this second dream to my little, warm room in London, with renewed, crystal remembrance of what love is and what obligation is. My freedom is found in your servitude. I turned on a computer and checked an e-mail account and you had written back to me. I was a fool but I am a fool no longer.
Xerxes were a 90's progressive metal band. They put out two records and disappeared. They sound like nobody else and near-nobody cares about them now or even remembers them. Nobody? NOBODY?
Archives have weight and all that, I have been crushed under the weight of my own archive - we've been over this. But poetry is not an archive, it is an act of love. Poetry on the page is weightless, it is levitating, it is like the butterflies that flutter in the hollow inside of a human body, as it is probed by the silver string of pathos.
This is the solution to our particular conundrum. The name of the blog solves itself. I'm not afraid to write to you about an old Swiss band that means this much to me.
Xerxes have a little bit of Watchtower in them, a little bit of Psychotic Waltz, perhaps, yada yada yada. They don't have a domineering vocalist and that's probably why they vanished into obscurity, or perhaps people confused their innocence for lightness. Heavy metal has to be heavy, right? Regardless of whatever lack it was that damned Xerxes into obscurity, what they do have is heart and a message and absolutely no fucking distance between them. Can you say the same for your creative pursuits, dear reader? Have you dissolved all the distance between the bleeding stone inside you, from which flow a thousand secret streams of romance, and the bullshit that comes out of your mouth? I didn't think so.
It's alright, hey, neither have I! But Xerxes achieved this, and so they must never be forgotten. Let me help you help me help Xerxes never be forgotten, not through an addendum to a self-important archive, but through poetry and myth.
Let's do this in this way. Chances are you haven't heard this shit before, so here you go, the internet provides, or at least NOW it does, not 20 years ago when self-important little metalheads had to write to Hellion mailorder to get cds and vinyl in the mail and then carry big boxes home as if they were treasures the extracted from a horde of a dragon - aren't all these old-metalhead nostalgic ballads disgusting? This is a better world. Just click on a youtube link to listen to the first of the two offerings by Xerxes:
Read while you listen, then perhaps listen without reading, you know what to do. I trust you, regardless of your first impressions with this music, to never forget Xerxes.
Here's why many people do not even recognize this as metal music, though it definitely is, and instead call it prog-rock of some sort. There's not even a little bit of what Xerxes do (especially in their debut that you're listening to now) that is not borne out of a pure desire to capture and portray beauty. There's no evil and no violence to these songs, there's only absolute, otherworldly, ethereal motion and playful, expressionist movement. It's hard to listen to 'Beyond Your Imagination' and not imagine a wandering through field and forest of pastoral, resonant calm. There's stories to these songs, fairy-tales, moral paradigms, but it is the setting that is the star of the show.
Where is any other metal music that proudly exclaims to be beyond usual imaginations of metal boundaries and themes? Where is any other metal music not trapped within a suffocating box of its own nihilist masculinity? Where is any other metal music that transports the mind in an a-temporal realm of pure wanting?
It's impossible to feel nostalgia of a tangible, bygone moment in one's life, when listening to Xerxes. The point of this music, the pure quintessential distillation of it is that it evokes a desire to return to a fantastic place that we've never visited, but yet exists.
This is the poetry I want to write about Xerxes, this is my obligation to you, this is the thing that has changed in the long trek through this subcultural examination and all my scattered musings lead to it, in-advertently, in-exorably: that place exists. It exists Beyond Our Imagination as we stand now, but it exists and our imagination can lead us there, if we try. It is a disservice to our love and our freedom-in-servitude to be the solipsist, the rationalist, the relativist and chalk up this feeling that you feel as you listen to Xerxes, perhaps for the first time (oh, how I envy you, how I love you for it) to an invocation of a nostalgia of a place that doesn't exist and then return to a reality that does exist. If you have gone Beyond Your (once capped) Imagination, why would you choose to forget where you went and return to a basest stricture?
Our lives are not floating in a meaningless void, we are anchored by a commonality of hope and desire. I know your hopes and desires, you know mine. You always knew. Xerxes provide a sketch, to the best of their ability, with disarming earnestness, of that place we all know but because of life being so hard, we often choose to forget. A levitating castle in the sky, a forest in the mists, a river that runs down the mountain, through the fields and up the same mountain, again. Eternal. Contemplate eternity!
In the heart of this realm is the same old stone, we all know it, its bleeding horror and thousand inspirations. They are not all beautifull, but they're real, as real as your dumb computer screen shooting electrons in your eyeballs.
As such, in that place, this real place, we will never die.
The music of Xerxes is filled with playful twists and turns, democratically partitioned between two guitar players and a host of keyboard orchestrations that have symphonic ambitions. The historical lineage of NWOBHM to techno-thrash riffery to proto-progressive to the realized conclusion of metal-band-as-orchestra can be traced by those with a kink for metal history. We've talked about this stuff before, right? You know all of this. You can understand Xerxes just fine.
And you can be kind to a vocalist of limited means and big ambitions. Did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to listen to actual orchestras, conducted by actual geniuses, so far away from you they might as well be alien beings visiting this world? Or did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to hear what simple people like you and I, of limited means and talent, can do when they devote their soul to this big ambition of describing in poetry and song, That Place?
Good answer.
The first album by Xerxes ends in this declaration, in all its English-as-a-Second-Language-Heavy-Metal-as-the-First beauty:
"All you poets of this world, you have been honored by the Grace.
Writing in the manner you wish, gliding out of this Earthly realm.
Raise your voice again and again. They should announce us as messengers.
Catch the world of phantasm and bring it over here, with which we want to align.
Our desire is to defeat the bluntness, to save the highest aim.
We do not want to comply any longer with this interminable, senseless game.
Raise your voices again and again and create new poems, fairy-tales and songs.
All you poets of this world."
It's okay to cry.
The first album did nothing, it made no splash, nobody bought it or listened to it besides a few prog metal nerds, and here we are. But it's fair to understand why Xerxes themselves might have been wounded that their pure-heart offering did not receive an enthusiastic welcome by the '90s metal scene.
What would you do, friend? You would disband, of course. Or you'd start playing Pantera power groove with keyboard solos on top like Dream Theater. You'd have become bitter and cynical. You'd have chased musical competencies that are recognized by the wider professional world. Whatever.
What did Xerxes do? They self-funded and self-released an even better, more ambitious, more multifaceted, more carefully constructed, more beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful offering to the same feeling, That Same Place, they didn't give up and they didn't believe your lies that you didn't recognize what they're singing about. They looked at you straight in the eyes, from the darkness their obscurity had damned them to, and they smiled kindly.
And perhaps a bit wickedly, as their second offering is darker.
After crossing the threshold with "Beyond Your Imagination", Xerxes were wounded in the battle with infamy, and they emerge on "Falling Leaves" (consider the autumnal theme) as warrior-poets, not just bards. This record is devoutly metal, the minstrel folk of the debut has been minimized. Here the melancholy of a bygone reality reigns paramount. This is the dark middle chapter of a trilogy that wasn't to be and it's a tragedy that it wasn't, as far as I'm concerned. There's no red "split up" in metal-archives that saddens me as much as the one in Xerxes's entry. It's sad because it was we that were pushing Xerxes into the darkness.
"Wait! Wait. I have so much more to tell you." calls the warrior poet in the cerulean mists.
I stress this, friend. Where Xerxes are taking us is a reality. Not fantasy. Reality. The Place is real and you must also do your best to eradicate your distance. We've talked about what tools to use and we've talked about what art is on this blog for a long time. Help me help you help Xerxes. Don't be a jerk.
The twists and turns of the material are no longer playful and innocent. They are dramatic in full consideration, and the sharpness of the violence of nihility rears its head, as it is to be battled. The devil must visit all of us in the desert.
"Nowhere in this world
I can find a refuge
Silent and dark is my love
Doesn't make any sense
Or is it too late?"
But Xerxes will remind you of the terror as they reminded you of the hope of sentience. The blood flows from the stone in the heart of the kingdom. Pretend you don't understand, pretend until you drown in your own cynical abjection and wordly rationality. Pretend that you can make it through this life without love and freedom. Xerxes will have none of it, they cannot bear to tell a lie.
Xerxes will never tell you any lies.
Fall under their spell and never forget them. This is art borne from kindness and its minor cruelties are because kindness has to be a cruelty sometimes, if it is to spark remembrance. They did this for the betterment of all humanity. They made zero money for it, they have no peer accolades to show for it. A hundred people across the globe listened and loved them and remembered. I am one of them. It was by chance but it wasn't an accident.
Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing for you if you loved and remembered them too?
If you found them naive on their debut that naivete is of the Fool on the start of his Tarot journey. Xerxes reflected on this, and "Falling Leaves" finds the Hanged Man in mid-stride, levitating, upside-down. He will take on all colours if he is to reach The World. All the hyperbolic death-obsessed death and black metal that you use as a poison salve for a misunderstood wound, Xerxes are aware, awake and in full knowledge that the wound is beautiful and they will guide you through it, for 37 minutes, once 37 minutes, twice, to lead to, well... you know where.
Pay attention to the track "Sam Hain". In whispers and premonitions it is the key. The debut failed (insofar that a masterpiece can be called a failure) because it did not acknowledge their own shadow, perhaps. All of the beautiful heritage of Fates Warning, Watchtower, Psychotic Waltz, all of the technology this strange of music developed in its multifaceted ambitions, it is all employed for a singular concern here: Meet your Shadow Self. Step right through your Shadow Form. Come out the other side. You are reminded of something right now, and your memory does not steer you wrong. Many people have tried to tell you the same thing in different ways. They weren't lying. Xerxes will tell you no lies.
Sam Hain in the middle has no lyrics. It has instrumental force that goes through a lot of contrasting motion. Keep your focus. You can use your mind to see the images. Step through the shadow. Nobody said it would be easy. In the middle you may feel that the World seems to be dead. That all color sadly dissipates. That for all your faith, you are left in the night sea, drifting.
But in the distance you will see a bridge,
floating
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
Heavy Metal Means a Long Memory, part 2
In the first instalment of these series we began to establish the actual extent of fascism's creep in the heavy metal subculture and we connected out and proud neo-nazi black metal with lesser over but still sympathetic reactionary proponents of the scene that hide underneath less objectionable language like that of 'heritage' or 'national pride'. I wholeheartedly recommend reading the first part before continuing onward.
My grander aim with this series concerns the issue of memory. The first order of business is getting a grasp over the actual nitty-gritty of it all. We have to remember what we are as metalheads and how we came to be (on the face of it) a reactionary force in social politics. There is, however, a second order of business, a gambit in which I am invested in. I think if we take care of the first order of memory, the nitty-gritty as I said above, then the solution to our problem with right-wing extremism in our midst will appear, whole and congruous as if it always blatantly existed, screaming at us though we would not listen.
Metalheads have long but very selective, fragmented memories. That makes their memory a vice. If we can get metalheads to have longer and comprehensive and more structured memory (and therefore a sense of history and ultimately a sense of community structured around said history), then memory can become a virtue. On virtuous ground you can found a community. To vice there's no community, there's only a market that caters to it. That's what's happened to metal music: no community, only market. No long and arduous memory, only trivia.
My hope is that we can sublimate that desire to collect metal trivia into a knowledge of a deeper and more interconnected metal-mental map, one which includes the shaping influence of the outside world and one which understands and tempers its own romance, myth and poetry with modernist structure. One where if one has an question like, say, "hold on, why did metal become filled with neo-nazis and other right wing reactionaries?" their understanding of metal history can actually hope to provide an answer, instead of a cynical shrug and a "who knows?".
We are at such a low point in terms of how we understand ourselves as metalheads that such a question would be considered by most in our midst an impossible one to tackle. They wouldn't even know where to start and many of them would be hostile to whether such a question even deserves an answer from an insider point of view. We'd get lost in the mists of mythos and poetry before we even can pinpoint a single political agent that set this trend in motion. Murder and church burnings, something something. Teenage, twisted hearts igniting. The past is alive. Death product for you to buy, market market market. That's all we can do.
For such a long time we've left the scrutiny of metalhead culture to people on the outside of it: academics, pop-culture writers and social critics. It's easy to hate the outside world and how its critical of us when we have relinquished the tools to understand ourselves in our own community.
Why is memory usually a vice to the metalhead? It's a memory of metal trivia that they insufferably inflict on each other and outsiders alike, it's often a contest of envy and confused masculinity and in other times it's a neurotic compulsion to excitedly share functional minutia and other catalogued data as if by sharing them we are substantiating our own identity. Do you know who the first drummer for Motörhead was? If not, you are a false, do not entry. Or, oh my god oh my god let me tell you all about how Rebellion in Dreamland's guitars were recorded it's so cool.
If we can have a clearer command of the historical narrative that brought us to this point then by the force of history itself, playtime is over and we cannot hide behind convenient lies anymore: everyone will have to shoulder the weight of their choices and untenable positions such as 'I like music, bro, I don't care about politics, if you don't like it don't buy and if you like it and it's made by nazis then just listen to it on youtube and don't send them money' will be seen for what they are. But first, once again, all together and with feeling: for us to remember first we have to understand.
Q. But metal is supposed to deal with ugly subject matter! Are you saying that every band that spins a gory tale of a middle ages pagan taking the knife to the Christian invader are nazis? Where does this terrible political correctness stop?
Our core understanding of what heavy metal stands for (and therefore, what is allowed to happen within it, lyrically, aesthetically, politically, metaphysically) is a complex one and in order to answer the above query honestly we'd have to go a very long way around. Much of the Poetry of Subculture corpus is attempting to tackle this from various vantages, not always successful, which conveys the frustration with the difficulty of the original question.
Yes, heavy metal deals with 'heavy' themes, but that doesn't mean it should do so in exclusively in an exploitative manner. However, it often does. Don't forget, Black Sabbath took their name from a horror movie, not some occult ritual. Indeed, I posit that the greatest heavy metal music is borne through a distillation of exploitative 'shock rock' tropes into a quintessential, deeper embodiment and acceptance of horror and awe. This is why metal music isn't just another type of rock n' roll, it achieved a singular thing. The way metal music usually does this is not with words, it is with morphology, instrumentation and composition choices. It is usually so overwhelming and dense and hyperbolic it elevates schlocky ideas to some divergent level. Heavy metal does this in its special way, but heavy metal can do this in the first place not because it's a special sort of art unlike all others. It can do this because it carries within it, consciously or unconsciously, Romantic ideas. Granted, these ideas were not direct transplants: they were and are the product of regurgitation through the meat-grinder of culture-at-large and as such they're often found in metal music in a confused or contradictory state.
I think for every hundred metal bands that have made music that others then described as 'Nietzschean', there probably is one or two metal musicians that has actually read Nietzsche and probably near none that understood him as he would want to be understood. This is not a bug, this is a feature! It is, in fact, the life-saving feature of 'low' culture, that it is vague and ambiguous and confused about its own dramatic onset. Heavy metal came to be through sympathetic alchemy. That's fine.
But that shit happened in 1980 and we now have tools to understand ourselves.
So, the first tool that will help us answer the question above is exactly being able to discern between a deeper and profound use of 'heavy' themes versus their surface exploitation; The latter use doesn't necessarily make for bad music (a lot of exploitation cinema is very enjoyable, just like how riffs and solos and double-bass is enjoyable, animated music to listen to) but it places upon us, the listeners the weight of a necessary moral choice: It is we that have to shift through and decide what has a deeper level and what is pure exploitation. It's not copping out. It's actually the most heavy metal thing to do: take responsibility for one's own choices. We have to discern on a case-by-case basis and then make a grander assessment of the culture field. Is heavy metal music dealing with the horror of reality in a predominantly surface way?
I posit that it is not. I think heavy metal is dramatically suited to a deeper simulation and scrutiny of fringe experience, predominantly of a dark variety as suits its morphology. Death (always death), nihilism, violence and destruction are valuable simulated spaces to explore through metal music. However, when it comes to dealing with historical reference or even quasi-historical metaphor as the vessel for these explorations, metal music at large becomes quickly extremely exploitative. Much like a horror film about Dracula might hand-wave historical accuracy and just go "one night, in deep Carpathian forests..." so does heavy metal, but for a different reason. Some of this is due to ignorance of the subject matter (not many metal musicians are also amateur or professional historians or academics, though some are) but most of it is intentional in its malignancy.
The motivator for, say, Marduk writing music about the Second World War is not a healthy interest in understanding world history and spreading salient critique so as to hopefully avoid such atrocity again. The motivator is hateful glee. They get off on imagining gas chambers and panzer tanks crushing humans under their threads. Marduk (or any such other band) will try to hide behind false pretenses and tell you that one cannot judge them for their hateful glee without judging metal on the whole for dealing with dark subject matter but you shouldn't buy it. Death, nihilism, violence and destruction are indeed core themes of metal music.
But is hatred one of them?
To answer that we must look at Romanticism closely. The core of a Romantic understanding of the world is the imagination. Not logic or reason or science, but mad, daring and dark imagination. Through a history of human terror and atrocity that would bend and warp any mind that truly aims to comprehend it, its revolt is existentially life-affirming: it occurs and recurs periodically when our rational tools of discourse and science fail to paint the whole picture. Romanticism is not a prison of thought, it is not meant to replace reason and science and all our analytical tools, it is instead a deeper memory of further reaches of cognizance, ancient and from-the-future, all at once. Terror and awe and the impossibly profound qualia of experience that we simply cannot talk about and pin down on a map but must instead express in sideways means and lust and long for. This sideways, kerning quality of myth and fantasy describes heavy metal as well.
Anyone can slip in a romantic mindset even if they don't live there all the time. Try it. Look outside your window and hopefully there will be a tree. Look at that tree not as a codified species of natural organism as described by the science you either know or half-know. Look at it instead as a fissure of alien consciousness, some eldritch impossibility that lives eternally in its connection to its brothers, deep, under the ground. Think of where its roots reach, unknown and unsearchable to us on the surface. Imagine what tree-being is like, how it must differ from our human temporal existence. Did you know there's still trees around from the last Ice Age, 9,000 years ago? That puts some perspective to our empires as they come and go, doesn't it? Strain your imagination to the point where your body feels a thing. Not your mind, but instead somewhere in your heart, that is the ache of that old stone, Romance.
Can you feel, further in your heart, that ambiguous twilight, in which there can exist All Forms? Can you connect to your anger that isn't borne of the evil of this material world at large but just of the trauma of sentience? Can you spook your own self out by imagining meeting a withered old woman in a dark forest? What is she doing out here? Can you push yourself to imagine a world where the sun will no longer rise and all communication is done in hushed song under the light of the moon?
And what of hate? Of course we must acknowledge it. It is there. We all hate. But do we really hate the Other? Social sciences say that we do, we absolutely do. But, remain in that Romantic mindset, instead. Be truthful and virtuous: For the Romantic, is there really any lasting hate for other humans, as caste and religion and historical origin? There is certainly hate for the self. And there is hatred for God. And other people disappoint, sure, but it's only in their projections of the self and God that we hate them. Can you really find it in you to hate other humans for who they are, as if they're all the same? What a failure of imagination is it to take other humans, beings of pure imagination as well, in Romantic terms, and say 'they are all the same'. Is this failure a solution, and to what? How will it assuage the terror of sentience? how will it help? Can you feel how, in the romantic context, the solution of 'oh, yes, we are beings of pure imagination but we are white and they have brown skin so they're not beings of pure imagination' is purely bankrupt exactly in terms of imagination first?
Yet, obviously there's a lot of deeply hateful and bigoted romantic art (not just metal). It would take the further tide of history to shape that from just an undercurrent to a full force. As Romanticism is a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it is in the interconnection with national identity through an invented mythical past that we finally find the key for this sort of bigoted hatred.
The Romantic longs for some long-lost time of purity and natural beauty, before the modern world became so corrupt and decrepit. From invention of that long-lost antique perfection to the insistence that it was a real, historical era, and one to which we should return to we can finally come to a useful conclusion: This pretense that an invented past that's better than the modern world was a historical reality is a tragic failure of imagination and the racial detritus that necessarily follows such a failure is inherent. If you imagine a glorious past where white men can think and feel on a higher plane than whichever invented other you hate, then you have trapped yourself in an imaginative dead end.
Romanticism is all about imagination being the utmost human quality. And by historicizing our imaginative inventions of a 'better past', by crystallizing our nostalgia into hatred, we fail Romance, and we fail ourselves.
This is the answer to this question and it has nothing to do with self-censorship and the right-wing rhetorical invention of 'political correctness'. If you listen to heavy metal that is filled with hate (and national pride is certainly the other side of a hateful coin) then you are listening to Romantic music that has failed itself and it has failed you as well. Your imagination stands to gain nothing from regurgitation of white nationalist bullet-points, again and again and again. From all the things the we can imagine, what a disgusting state of affairs is it that we're imagining what our racist grandpa out in the country thought was true.
I don't posit that it just is a nice thing to do to avoid easy hatred and easy targets and invented national histories in our metal music. I posit that it is a very heavy metal thing to do to be distrustful of any one failure of imagination.
I don't care if you're nice. I want you to take responsibility.
The further question is, hold on, Helm, are you calling all that old pre-World Wars romantic art a failure as well? Because there's a loada hatred in there, too!
Yes, but then the World Wars did happen. And we saw what hatred made manifest. And we can never again be blind to what we already know to be true. That wouldn't be very heavy metal of us, would it? What does it say for a human that acknowledges the power of the imagination, and in 2017 turns theirs to imagining more ovens and more millions dead? This is exactly the reason why white nationalists behave in such an inconsistent way on the subject of Holocaust denial: Some neo-nazis say it happened and are gleeful about it, others say it didn't at all but it should have and yet more say that it did but the actual death count is blown out of proportion, but that doesn't mean they don't condone it. They say that even if it's true that millions of Jews were exterminated systematically, then they deserved it. But it wasn't really that bad. But they would deserve it, if it were. Perhaps in the future . . .
That's the trick to get around a very real historical and ideological problem for the furthering of their neo-nazi cause. They see the Holocaust at once as a crowning achievement of the Third Reich, but they also wish to downplay the number of dead so as to not shoulder the actual burden of what the Holocaust signifies: the death knell of their bankrupt ideology. They're putting it as an exciting eventuality of the future that perhaps then, when the Final Solution 2.0 is actually implemented, then we can see what this world truly would be like without the demonic Other we are predestined to hate. And as such, until 2.0 comes into effect, their imagination hasn't yet failed.
But it has. And we must remember.
Q. So if metal music that's hateful is historicizing an invented past, where did it pick up this propensity and who brought it to metal? Furthermore, what is the actual cultural source of this mode of thinking in the grander sense and how does it connect to modern neo-nazism?
Join me next time when we inevitably come to connect a certain kind of 80s post-punk/industrial fascination with nazi exploitation to the types of Julius Evola and Oswald Spengler and all that to Varg Vikernes and ultimately the birth of the internet, anus.com and other such failures of imagination.
My grander aim with this series concerns the issue of memory. The first order of business is getting a grasp over the actual nitty-gritty of it all. We have to remember what we are as metalheads and how we came to be (on the face of it) a reactionary force in social politics. There is, however, a second order of business, a gambit in which I am invested in. I think if we take care of the first order of memory, the nitty-gritty as I said above, then the solution to our problem with right-wing extremism in our midst will appear, whole and congruous as if it always blatantly existed, screaming at us though we would not listen.
Metalheads have long but very selective, fragmented memories. That makes their memory a vice. If we can get metalheads to have longer and comprehensive and more structured memory (and therefore a sense of history and ultimately a sense of community structured around said history), then memory can become a virtue. On virtuous ground you can found a community. To vice there's no community, there's only a market that caters to it. That's what's happened to metal music: no community, only market. No long and arduous memory, only trivia.
My hope is that we can sublimate that desire to collect metal trivia into a knowledge of a deeper and more interconnected metal-mental map, one which includes the shaping influence of the outside world and one which understands and tempers its own romance, myth and poetry with modernist structure. One where if one has an question like, say, "hold on, why did metal become filled with neo-nazis and other right wing reactionaries?" their understanding of metal history can actually hope to provide an answer, instead of a cynical shrug and a "who knows?".
We are at such a low point in terms of how we understand ourselves as metalheads that such a question would be considered by most in our midst an impossible one to tackle. They wouldn't even know where to start and many of them would be hostile to whether such a question even deserves an answer from an insider point of view. We'd get lost in the mists of mythos and poetry before we even can pinpoint a single political agent that set this trend in motion. Murder and church burnings, something something. Teenage, twisted hearts igniting. The past is alive. Death product for you to buy, market market market. That's all we can do.
For such a long time we've left the scrutiny of metalhead culture to people on the outside of it: academics, pop-culture writers and social critics. It's easy to hate the outside world and how its critical of us when we have relinquished the tools to understand ourselves in our own community.
Why is memory usually a vice to the metalhead? It's a memory of metal trivia that they insufferably inflict on each other and outsiders alike, it's often a contest of envy and confused masculinity and in other times it's a neurotic compulsion to excitedly share functional minutia and other catalogued data as if by sharing them we are substantiating our own identity. Do you know who the first drummer for Motörhead was? If not, you are a false, do not entry. Or, oh my god oh my god let me tell you all about how Rebellion in Dreamland's guitars were recorded it's so cool.
If we can have a clearer command of the historical narrative that brought us to this point then by the force of history itself, playtime is over and we cannot hide behind convenient lies anymore: everyone will have to shoulder the weight of their choices and untenable positions such as 'I like music, bro, I don't care about politics, if you don't like it don't buy and if you like it and it's made by nazis then just listen to it on youtube and don't send them money' will be seen for what they are. But first, once again, all together and with feeling: for us to remember first we have to understand.
Q. But metal is supposed to deal with ugly subject matter! Are you saying that every band that spins a gory tale of a middle ages pagan taking the knife to the Christian invader are nazis? Where does this terrible political correctness stop?
Our core understanding of what heavy metal stands for (and therefore, what is allowed to happen within it, lyrically, aesthetically, politically, metaphysically) is a complex one and in order to answer the above query honestly we'd have to go a very long way around. Much of the Poetry of Subculture corpus is attempting to tackle this from various vantages, not always successful, which conveys the frustration with the difficulty of the original question.
Yes, heavy metal deals with 'heavy' themes, but that doesn't mean it should do so in exclusively in an exploitative manner. However, it often does. Don't forget, Black Sabbath took their name from a horror movie, not some occult ritual. Indeed, I posit that the greatest heavy metal music is borne through a distillation of exploitative 'shock rock' tropes into a quintessential, deeper embodiment and acceptance of horror and awe. This is why metal music isn't just another type of rock n' roll, it achieved a singular thing. The way metal music usually does this is not with words, it is with morphology, instrumentation and composition choices. It is usually so overwhelming and dense and hyperbolic it elevates schlocky ideas to some divergent level. Heavy metal does this in its special way, but heavy metal can do this in the first place not because it's a special sort of art unlike all others. It can do this because it carries within it, consciously or unconsciously, Romantic ideas. Granted, these ideas were not direct transplants: they were and are the product of regurgitation through the meat-grinder of culture-at-large and as such they're often found in metal music in a confused or contradictory state.
I think for every hundred metal bands that have made music that others then described as 'Nietzschean', there probably is one or two metal musicians that has actually read Nietzsche and probably near none that understood him as he would want to be understood. This is not a bug, this is a feature! It is, in fact, the life-saving feature of 'low' culture, that it is vague and ambiguous and confused about its own dramatic onset. Heavy metal came to be through sympathetic alchemy. That's fine.
But that shit happened in 1980 and we now have tools to understand ourselves.
So, the first tool that will help us answer the question above is exactly being able to discern between a deeper and profound use of 'heavy' themes versus their surface exploitation; The latter use doesn't necessarily make for bad music (a lot of exploitation cinema is very enjoyable, just like how riffs and solos and double-bass is enjoyable, animated music to listen to) but it places upon us, the listeners the weight of a necessary moral choice: It is we that have to shift through and decide what has a deeper level and what is pure exploitation. It's not copping out. It's actually the most heavy metal thing to do: take responsibility for one's own choices. We have to discern on a case-by-case basis and then make a grander assessment of the culture field. Is heavy metal music dealing with the horror of reality in a predominantly surface way?
I posit that it is not. I think heavy metal is dramatically suited to a deeper simulation and scrutiny of fringe experience, predominantly of a dark variety as suits its morphology. Death (always death), nihilism, violence and destruction are valuable simulated spaces to explore through metal music. However, when it comes to dealing with historical reference or even quasi-historical metaphor as the vessel for these explorations, metal music at large becomes quickly extremely exploitative. Much like a horror film about Dracula might hand-wave historical accuracy and just go "one night, in deep Carpathian forests..." so does heavy metal, but for a different reason. Some of this is due to ignorance of the subject matter (not many metal musicians are also amateur or professional historians or academics, though some are) but most of it is intentional in its malignancy.
The motivator for, say, Marduk writing music about the Second World War is not a healthy interest in understanding world history and spreading salient critique so as to hopefully avoid such atrocity again. The motivator is hateful glee. They get off on imagining gas chambers and panzer tanks crushing humans under their threads. Marduk (or any such other band) will try to hide behind false pretenses and tell you that one cannot judge them for their hateful glee without judging metal on the whole for dealing with dark subject matter but you shouldn't buy it. Death, nihilism, violence and destruction are indeed core themes of metal music.
But is hatred one of them?
To answer that we must look at Romanticism closely. The core of a Romantic understanding of the world is the imagination. Not logic or reason or science, but mad, daring and dark imagination. Through a history of human terror and atrocity that would bend and warp any mind that truly aims to comprehend it, its revolt is existentially life-affirming: it occurs and recurs periodically when our rational tools of discourse and science fail to paint the whole picture. Romanticism is not a prison of thought, it is not meant to replace reason and science and all our analytical tools, it is instead a deeper memory of further reaches of cognizance, ancient and from-the-future, all at once. Terror and awe and the impossibly profound qualia of experience that we simply cannot talk about and pin down on a map but must instead express in sideways means and lust and long for. This sideways, kerning quality of myth and fantasy describes heavy metal as well.
Anyone can slip in a romantic mindset even if they don't live there all the time. Try it. Look outside your window and hopefully there will be a tree. Look at that tree not as a codified species of natural organism as described by the science you either know or half-know. Look at it instead as a fissure of alien consciousness, some eldritch impossibility that lives eternally in its connection to its brothers, deep, under the ground. Think of where its roots reach, unknown and unsearchable to us on the surface. Imagine what tree-being is like, how it must differ from our human temporal existence. Did you know there's still trees around from the last Ice Age, 9,000 years ago? That puts some perspective to our empires as they come and go, doesn't it? Strain your imagination to the point where your body feels a thing. Not your mind, but instead somewhere in your heart, that is the ache of that old stone, Romance.
Can you feel, further in your heart, that ambiguous twilight, in which there can exist All Forms? Can you connect to your anger that isn't borne of the evil of this material world at large but just of the trauma of sentience? Can you spook your own self out by imagining meeting a withered old woman in a dark forest? What is she doing out here? Can you push yourself to imagine a world where the sun will no longer rise and all communication is done in hushed song under the light of the moon?
And what of hate? Of course we must acknowledge it. It is there. We all hate. But do we really hate the Other? Social sciences say that we do, we absolutely do. But, remain in that Romantic mindset, instead. Be truthful and virtuous: For the Romantic, is there really any lasting hate for other humans, as caste and religion and historical origin? There is certainly hate for the self. And there is hatred for God. And other people disappoint, sure, but it's only in their projections of the self and God that we hate them. Can you really find it in you to hate other humans for who they are, as if they're all the same? What a failure of imagination is it to take other humans, beings of pure imagination as well, in Romantic terms, and say 'they are all the same'. Is this failure a solution, and to what? How will it assuage the terror of sentience? how will it help? Can you feel how, in the romantic context, the solution of 'oh, yes, we are beings of pure imagination but we are white and they have brown skin so they're not beings of pure imagination' is purely bankrupt exactly in terms of imagination first?
Yet, obviously there's a lot of deeply hateful and bigoted romantic art (not just metal). It would take the further tide of history to shape that from just an undercurrent to a full force. As Romanticism is a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it is in the interconnection with national identity through an invented mythical past that we finally find the key for this sort of bigoted hatred.
The Romantic longs for some long-lost time of purity and natural beauty, before the modern world became so corrupt and decrepit. From invention of that long-lost antique perfection to the insistence that it was a real, historical era, and one to which we should return to we can finally come to a useful conclusion: This pretense that an invented past that's better than the modern world was a historical reality is a tragic failure of imagination and the racial detritus that necessarily follows such a failure is inherent. If you imagine a glorious past where white men can think and feel on a higher plane than whichever invented other you hate, then you have trapped yourself in an imaginative dead end.
Romanticism is all about imagination being the utmost human quality. And by historicizing our imaginative inventions of a 'better past', by crystallizing our nostalgia into hatred, we fail Romance, and we fail ourselves.
This is the answer to this question and it has nothing to do with self-censorship and the right-wing rhetorical invention of 'political correctness'. If you listen to heavy metal that is filled with hate (and national pride is certainly the other side of a hateful coin) then you are listening to Romantic music that has failed itself and it has failed you as well. Your imagination stands to gain nothing from regurgitation of white nationalist bullet-points, again and again and again. From all the things the we can imagine, what a disgusting state of affairs is it that we're imagining what our racist grandpa out in the country thought was true.
I don't posit that it just is a nice thing to do to avoid easy hatred and easy targets and invented national histories in our metal music. I posit that it is a very heavy metal thing to do to be distrustful of any one failure of imagination.
I don't care if you're nice. I want you to take responsibility.
The further question is, hold on, Helm, are you calling all that old pre-World Wars romantic art a failure as well? Because there's a loada hatred in there, too!
Yes, but then the World Wars did happen. And we saw what hatred made manifest. And we can never again be blind to what we already know to be true. That wouldn't be very heavy metal of us, would it? What does it say for a human that acknowledges the power of the imagination, and in 2017 turns theirs to imagining more ovens and more millions dead? This is exactly the reason why white nationalists behave in such an inconsistent way on the subject of Holocaust denial: Some neo-nazis say it happened and are gleeful about it, others say it didn't at all but it should have and yet more say that it did but the actual death count is blown out of proportion, but that doesn't mean they don't condone it. They say that even if it's true that millions of Jews were exterminated systematically, then they deserved it. But it wasn't really that bad. But they would deserve it, if it were. Perhaps in the future . . .
That's the trick to get around a very real historical and ideological problem for the furthering of their neo-nazi cause. They see the Holocaust at once as a crowning achievement of the Third Reich, but they also wish to downplay the number of dead so as to not shoulder the actual burden of what the Holocaust signifies: the death knell of their bankrupt ideology. They're putting it as an exciting eventuality of the future that perhaps then, when the Final Solution 2.0 is actually implemented, then we can see what this world truly would be like without the demonic Other we are predestined to hate. And as such, until 2.0 comes into effect, their imagination hasn't yet failed.
But it has. And we must remember.
Q. So if metal music that's hateful is historicizing an invented past, where did it pick up this propensity and who brought it to metal? Furthermore, what is the actual cultural source of this mode of thinking in the grander sense and how does it connect to modern neo-nazism?
Join me next time when we inevitably come to connect a certain kind of 80s post-punk/industrial fascination with nazi exploitation to the types of Julius Evola and Oswald Spengler and all that to Varg Vikernes and ultimately the birth of the internet, anus.com and other such failures of imagination.
Monday, November 27, 2017
Heavy Metal Means a Long Memory, part 1
The title of this series of articles is an answer to a question.
The question is "what do we do with all the neo-nazis in our heavy metal subculture?"
Usually the way I write is kind of capricious and strange. I'm going to try to keep this as simple and direct as possible because I want this many-part planned article to be a useful resource for the future.
We're starting with the assumption that the swelling tide of the fascist creep is a terrible and terrifying thing and we all must do what we can to fight back. The rise of fascism is predicated on this asymmetry of attack. It's not always going to be black-and-red and easy to discern who the nazis are, but they're all, together, some consciously some less so, contributing to the return to power of the worst elements of western political history. We must do all we can to stop this.
If you're of the opposite persuasion, if you yourself identify as a metalhead of any sort of nationalist bent, if you're for "racial purity" for any reason, if you're against immigrants for any reason then you should know you are my enemy and I want you out of the heavy metal scene for good.
If you're heavy metal enough to read and understand the argumentation of your opposition, you can prove it to yourself by sticking around, mulling on the consequences of these arguments and following through in the way that to you seems virtuous. The only way you'll have anything but my contempt and pure desire to push you out is if you can change. Change is metal. And I will remember, and anyone who's heavy metal at heart will remember that you had the capacity for change. But if you're a shit that sticks to their shitty guns, I'll remember that, instead. Heavy metal means a long memory.
A long memory means I remember when Dimmu Borgir said this about whether metal music is for whites only, for example, yet now they're in the covers of every metal mainstream publication.
A long memory means I remember when George Fischer of Cannibal Corpse went on a bigoted, homophobic rant vis a vis his World of Warcraft addiction. Yet Cannibal Corpse are just goofy horror movie gore, right?
We must know what we are. Ignorance is no excuse. But first,
1. For us to remember first we have to understand
The issues we have to understand and come to a social agreement on are many, and so I will frame them as questions and answers. Some of the concerns we'll touch upon I have commented on in past articles, years ago, and although my condemnations were always strong, my historical understanding of this problem was weaker than it should be. I didn't foresee what was to come in the last 5 years and that's a big reason why I must do this now. To change, to mutate, is a very heavy metal quality. And to remember what you've done and take responsibility for it, is, as you will hear again and again in this series of articles, the most heavy metal quality of all.
Q. There's only very few actual nazis in the metal world, right? It can't be such a big problem?
If we use metal-archives and their ever-handy database searching tool we will find 524 bands whose lyrical and aesthetic themes hinge on National Socialism. Of them, 232 are listed as active. That's just the out and proud neo-nazis, though. The ones with pictures of Holocaust executions and samples of Hitler giving speeches on their terrible black metal cd-rs. And that's, also what Metal Archives has so far included, it's not an exhaustive, factual list. Many bands are smarter about hiding their ideology, and many bands aren't on Metal Archives at the moment at all.
Keep in mind that sites like the Metal Archives are not an academic institution in the least, they are supported by fans for their content and as such they're always positively biased towards the artists that are included. The person that takes time out of their life to update on whether Mr. Archon Grimdork of NSBM outfit "It's Only A Sunwheel" is still alive or dead probably likes Mr. Archon Grimdork, is their friend or would like to be their friend in their fantasies. As such, the coverage of the lyrical themes of these bands is always a little bit couched in this positive bias.
So, 500 or so artistic entities, half of them active. Neo-nazis. A band is 2-3 people in the black metal idiom on average. That's a few thousand people, their peers and friend circle, sympathetic labels that organize and put out their material and most importantly the unknown thousands of listeners that consume their media and endorse, to smaller or larger degrees, their worldview.
Would that be a problem? Is it a problem for you to know that there's thousands of active entities in the global metal world imagining and longing for total war, racial segregation and a holocaust for Jews, people of color, LGBTQI+ folks, communists, activists and so on?
The answer to that question probably tells you a lot about yourself. Also, that we usually come to the quick conclusion that there's probably not that many actual nazis in metal without actually doing the (turns out, very simple) research that disproves that notion tells us something about ourselves. It speaks of our desire to pretend this problem doesn't exist because its implications are uncomfortable. And it gets worse.
Inside the language of identification on metal archives we will find 'terms of affinity' that also warrant investigation. It's not just outright tags of 'National Socialism' that matter for this argument. Let's see what other tags feature right next to that in the archives.
War
Fascism
Antihuman
Holocaust
Heathenism
Paganism
Aryanism
Wotanism
Antisemitism
Anti-Zionism
Odinism
New World Order
War Propaganda
Roman Tradition
Native Land
Nationalism
White Pride
Heritage
Loyalty
Misanthropy
Hatred
Xenophobia
World War II
Esoterica
Occultism
Mythology
Genocide
Militarism
Elitism
Third Reich Mythology
Mysticism
Europe
European Unity
Conspiracy Theories
I could go on and on, it's really exhausting to read this list. The point here is that all these terms coexist, again and again, with our 'National Socialism' as the UR-source of this disease and as such are not easy to divorce from them. So you may have a smarter band that doesn't have swastikas on their cover but goes on and on about their 'proud ancestors fighting the Christians back when they were invaded'. Because Metal Archives, as we established before, is run by sympathetic fans, they will dutifully list them as 'Heritage', or at the very worst 'Nationalism' but not as 'National Socialism'. This is correct by the letter of the law but by spirit it's obviously sketchy.
Quasi-nazis hiding their identity under the broader category of 'sketchy dudes' is the prime tool of how they got to have this much reach and influence. Half improvised, but also half organized under the auspice of meta-political, Third-Way fascist ideologues, as we will examine later.
So, the fans of folk metal and rowdy viking beer-drinking metal are listening to music that has historical ties to the neo-nazi subculture in metal music, even if they don't want to believe it or are ignorant to it. This is established, again and again, by the degree of separation game. If a band just appears to be 'about mythology and heritage, bro', then why were they, once, on a record label that also puts out National Socialist Black Metal? Why have they played in more outright NS bands in the past? Why have they given interviews where they're sandwiched by other NS bands, even if they themselves do not outright endorse genocide, for the moment?
Let's return to the concept of the 'fascist creep' that I linked to above. We have to understand this: Fascism is not a mono-bloc political entity, all dressed in Waffen SS uniforms, marching in formation in the streets, trying to topple governments and install their genocidal regime. That sort of neo-nazi exists and is a real concern in the modern world as well, but we also have to account for the superficially milder breeds of the fascist creep and their diversionary methods. They use their ambiguous "are they or aren't they? Let's hear them out, at least" state to infiltrate further into the culture than out-and-proud neo-nazis can. And they have been remarkably successful in our subculture.
It is a really demoralizing thought to go through Metal-Archives and search for how many bands are tagged for lyric themes of not National Socialism, but just 'Heritage', or 'Elitism'. I will leave this adventure to you, suffice to say that the broader spectrum of ultra right-wing, conservative beliefs in metal includes thousands and thousands of active bands and tens of thousands of fans and sympathizers.
To your theoretical statement, then: there's a lot of actual neo-nazis in metal, but there's even more potential ones in the periphery of those beliefs and they are softening the ground for gradual radicalization. You yourself, probably have met them, conversed with them online and offline if you go to shows and participate in the scene, you've had to hear 'soft' positions about 'The New World Order' (which is just a cipher for 'The Jews') just as much as you've probably had to deal with the same people saying that women or people of color just... don't seem to feature in metal circles as much as you'd expect. I wonder why.
So, there are a LOT of nazis and a lot of friends-to-nazis in metal. Not just the panda-faced black metal specters in overexposed xerox copies of photos in the woods. In our community. Drinking beer at a Amon Amarth show with their friends. With your friends. Now that we understand this, we must remember it. Forgetting such a thing wouldn't be very heavy metal of us, would it?
Q. But metal is supposed to deal with ugly subject matter! Are you saying that every band that spins a gory tale of a middle ages pagan taking the knife to the Christian invader are nazis? Where does this terrible political correctness stop?
You're right, theoretical reader, here's where things get more complicated and here's where we need to develop new political reflexes and analytical tools, because our old ones have certainly failed us. But let's do this on the next installment of this series.
The question is "what do we do with all the neo-nazis in our heavy metal subculture?"
Usually the way I write is kind of capricious and strange. I'm going to try to keep this as simple and direct as possible because I want this many-part planned article to be a useful resource for the future.
We're starting with the assumption that the swelling tide of the fascist creep is a terrible and terrifying thing and we all must do what we can to fight back. The rise of fascism is predicated on this asymmetry of attack. It's not always going to be black-and-red and easy to discern who the nazis are, but they're all, together, some consciously some less so, contributing to the return to power of the worst elements of western political history. We must do all we can to stop this.
If you're of the opposite persuasion, if you yourself identify as a metalhead of any sort of nationalist bent, if you're for "racial purity" for any reason, if you're against immigrants for any reason then you should know you are my enemy and I want you out of the heavy metal scene for good.
If you're heavy metal enough to read and understand the argumentation of your opposition, you can prove it to yourself by sticking around, mulling on the consequences of these arguments and following through in the way that to you seems virtuous. The only way you'll have anything but my contempt and pure desire to push you out is if you can change. Change is metal. And I will remember, and anyone who's heavy metal at heart will remember that you had the capacity for change. But if you're a shit that sticks to their shitty guns, I'll remember that, instead. Heavy metal means a long memory.
A long memory means I remember when Dimmu Borgir said this about whether metal music is for whites only, for example, yet now they're in the covers of every metal mainstream publication.
A long memory means I remember when George Fischer of Cannibal Corpse went on a bigoted, homophobic rant vis a vis his World of Warcraft addiction. Yet Cannibal Corpse are just goofy horror movie gore, right?
We must know what we are. Ignorance is no excuse. But first,
1. For us to remember first we have to understand
The issues we have to understand and come to a social agreement on are many, and so I will frame them as questions and answers. Some of the concerns we'll touch upon I have commented on in past articles, years ago, and although my condemnations were always strong, my historical understanding of this problem was weaker than it should be. I didn't foresee what was to come in the last 5 years and that's a big reason why I must do this now. To change, to mutate, is a very heavy metal quality. And to remember what you've done and take responsibility for it, is, as you will hear again and again in this series of articles, the most heavy metal quality of all.
Q. There's only very few actual nazis in the metal world, right? It can't be such a big problem?
If we use metal-archives and their ever-handy database searching tool we will find 524 bands whose lyrical and aesthetic themes hinge on National Socialism. Of them, 232 are listed as active. That's just the out and proud neo-nazis, though. The ones with pictures of Holocaust executions and samples of Hitler giving speeches on their terrible black metal cd-rs. And that's, also what Metal Archives has so far included, it's not an exhaustive, factual list. Many bands are smarter about hiding their ideology, and many bands aren't on Metal Archives at the moment at all.
Keep in mind that sites like the Metal Archives are not an academic institution in the least, they are supported by fans for their content and as such they're always positively biased towards the artists that are included. The person that takes time out of their life to update on whether Mr. Archon Grimdork of NSBM outfit "It's Only A Sunwheel" is still alive or dead probably likes Mr. Archon Grimdork, is their friend or would like to be their friend in their fantasies. As such, the coverage of the lyrical themes of these bands is always a little bit couched in this positive bias.
So, 500 or so artistic entities, half of them active. Neo-nazis. A band is 2-3 people in the black metal idiom on average. That's a few thousand people, their peers and friend circle, sympathetic labels that organize and put out their material and most importantly the unknown thousands of listeners that consume their media and endorse, to smaller or larger degrees, their worldview.
Would that be a problem? Is it a problem for you to know that there's thousands of active entities in the global metal world imagining and longing for total war, racial segregation and a holocaust for Jews, people of color, LGBTQI+ folks, communists, activists and so on?
The answer to that question probably tells you a lot about yourself. Also, that we usually come to the quick conclusion that there's probably not that many actual nazis in metal without actually doing the (turns out, very simple) research that disproves that notion tells us something about ourselves. It speaks of our desire to pretend this problem doesn't exist because its implications are uncomfortable. And it gets worse.
Inside the language of identification on metal archives we will find 'terms of affinity' that also warrant investigation. It's not just outright tags of 'National Socialism' that matter for this argument. Let's see what other tags feature right next to that in the archives.
War
Fascism
Antihuman
Holocaust
Heathenism
Paganism
Aryanism
Wotanism
Antisemitism
Anti-Zionism
Odinism
New World Order
War Propaganda
Roman Tradition
Native Land
Nationalism
White Pride
Heritage
Loyalty
Misanthropy
Hatred
Xenophobia
World War II
Esoterica
Occultism
Mythology
Genocide
Militarism
Elitism
Third Reich Mythology
Mysticism
Europe
European Unity
Conspiracy Theories
I could go on and on, it's really exhausting to read this list. The point here is that all these terms coexist, again and again, with our 'National Socialism' as the UR-source of this disease and as such are not easy to divorce from them. So you may have a smarter band that doesn't have swastikas on their cover but goes on and on about their 'proud ancestors fighting the Christians back when they were invaded'. Because Metal Archives, as we established before, is run by sympathetic fans, they will dutifully list them as 'Heritage', or at the very worst 'Nationalism' but not as 'National Socialism'. This is correct by the letter of the law but by spirit it's obviously sketchy.
Quasi-nazis hiding their identity under the broader category of 'sketchy dudes' is the prime tool of how they got to have this much reach and influence. Half improvised, but also half organized under the auspice of meta-political, Third-Way fascist ideologues, as we will examine later.
So, the fans of folk metal and rowdy viking beer-drinking metal are listening to music that has historical ties to the neo-nazi subculture in metal music, even if they don't want to believe it or are ignorant to it. This is established, again and again, by the degree of separation game. If a band just appears to be 'about mythology and heritage, bro', then why were they, once, on a record label that also puts out National Socialist Black Metal? Why have they played in more outright NS bands in the past? Why have they given interviews where they're sandwiched by other NS bands, even if they themselves do not outright endorse genocide, for the moment?
Let's return to the concept of the 'fascist creep' that I linked to above. We have to understand this: Fascism is not a mono-bloc political entity, all dressed in Waffen SS uniforms, marching in formation in the streets, trying to topple governments and install their genocidal regime. That sort of neo-nazi exists and is a real concern in the modern world as well, but we also have to account for the superficially milder breeds of the fascist creep and their diversionary methods. They use their ambiguous "are they or aren't they? Let's hear them out, at least" state to infiltrate further into the culture than out-and-proud neo-nazis can. And they have been remarkably successful in our subculture.
It is a really demoralizing thought to go through Metal-Archives and search for how many bands are tagged for lyric themes of not National Socialism, but just 'Heritage', or 'Elitism'. I will leave this adventure to you, suffice to say that the broader spectrum of ultra right-wing, conservative beliefs in metal includes thousands and thousands of active bands and tens of thousands of fans and sympathizers.
To your theoretical statement, then: there's a lot of actual neo-nazis in metal, but there's even more potential ones in the periphery of those beliefs and they are softening the ground for gradual radicalization. You yourself, probably have met them, conversed with them online and offline if you go to shows and participate in the scene, you've had to hear 'soft' positions about 'The New World Order' (which is just a cipher for 'The Jews') just as much as you've probably had to deal with the same people saying that women or people of color just... don't seem to feature in metal circles as much as you'd expect. I wonder why.
So, there are a LOT of nazis and a lot of friends-to-nazis in metal. Not just the panda-faced black metal specters in overexposed xerox copies of photos in the woods. In our community. Drinking beer at a Amon Amarth show with their friends. With your friends. Now that we understand this, we must remember it. Forgetting such a thing wouldn't be very heavy metal of us, would it?
Q. But metal is supposed to deal with ugly subject matter! Are you saying that every band that spins a gory tale of a middle ages pagan taking the knife to the Christian invader are nazis? Where does this terrible political correctness stop?
You're right, theoretical reader, here's where things get more complicated and here's where we need to develop new political reflexes and analytical tools, because our old ones have certainly failed us. But let's do this on the next installment of this series.
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