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.

Secret Devotional

  

Heavy Metal, my father
Sophia, my mother
In an ocean of terror and sadness
I bent my knee only for you

 




In boundless distances I searched for
The black star in the sky
Eternal beauty
Your Godly Will the sign of Power

Ήβη on my sill of frost

Mistress, I know of your demand
I never once forgot

And so again I jump into your fire

And if I forget my promise - I'll repent
And if I thought to die - I'll return
As spectral spirt
No power or sadness can stop me

I'm not done yet.

In the couple of years that I've left our Poetry to lie languid and dormant I've put my efforts not in the business of telling but in the business of doing. My very own heavy metal band, of which I never speak on this blog and also kind of inwardly-narcissistically very seldom speak of in general put out a debut album after a long period of gestation. Long as in 15 years long.

You can find your way to that record if you really want to, it doesn't matter to me, or to be frank it only matters to me if you really want to. I have become no less cruel or arrogant with the passage of time (I am now 33, Jesus Christ did his best work at 33) and most importantly I've only become more and more tired.

I was tired of this project when I stopped it 2 years ago and it wasn't just because I had said what I thought I needed to say (such a thing is inconclusive after all - did I need to say anything at all to begin with? And if so, how do I know the need is done?) . It was - as I think I explained in some post or another - the gravity of this artificial Archive that I had built about the history and meaning of heavy metal that was weighing on me. Not because it is false, I am very proud of my false archive, to be sure. We are here right now, communicating again because I googled something I thought Castaneda had said and Unholy used as a lyric, but it turns out if you google it you come here. I completed my own circle, and so Old Helm read some of what Young Helm had to say and the Helms agreed and it was good. Jesus probably reads the bible in heaven some times too and he's like "... I'm pretty cool".

I think an archive has no erotic weight to it unless it is false in that particular, subtle, personal way that any such existentialist history project has to be. I am not a real historian, I am, you should recognize this as well, not a real anything, honestly. And that's not just an ok state of affairs, it is, as I said, a passionate, erotic state of being, for arrogance and ignorance to be such fuel to build an awkward, lopsided edifice, a glorification of something or another, such as the Poetry of Subculture, right?

I wasn't tired because this archive is false, too personal, finished or unnecessary. I was tired because this thing has weight. You write it and then you have to live with it. Even when I forgot what I had written, I still lived with it because I agreed with it. It became a subconscious truth. That's how magic works, and this is a ritual if nothing else. Who knew that writing about heavy metal would be heavy, huh? You, you in particular, dear reader, you could have warned me but I wouldn't have listened. For the sorcerer exhaustion is ecstasy. Google it.



I think it's time to talk about heavy metal again, friends. The world has taken an ugly turn in the in-between time and although I try with my own music to bring a subtler kind of light to this darkness, we will need all our tools and all our dirty tricks to turn the tide, this time. My dirty tricks are bad epistemology, bad history, half-spoken truths and a smile in the darkness. A surreptitious heaven will answer our call. Tell your friends.


Once a reader of some repute, a musician himself of some capability and renown, told me in e-mail correspondence on subject of my older, more private music that I should give up: he thought my music amateurish and my guitar playing a joke and he insisted that I should stick to writing about metal instead of making metal because that's what, he thought, I was good at.

The funny thing is that I never thought of myself as much of a writer, I am wrestling with every fucking sentence in a second language and it's not necessarily fun, but it might be necessary anyway. So, amateurish guitar playing and music, and amateurish writing. I'll use all my tools and dirty tricks, friends. I'll convince you of something you already always suspected.

Why? Because of the neo-nazis, to be honest.

In the interim of our silence here we have had a right-wing turn of global discourse. We have Trump in power and his alt-right internet meme magicians cackling like the toads they are. Internet heavy metal culture played a special role in this turn of events, one I didn't in all my quasi-wisdom predict. It seems an opposing and older Archive of What Heavy Metal Is, that of anus.com, as designed by Spinoza Ray Prozak at the dawn of the internet has won the day: though what's left of that site now, under different name and management,  is in complete decline, the actual ideological framework of heavy metal as proposed and reiterated by a million anus drones over the last two decades have left their mark and they propagated through the broader 'internet culture' as designed by 4chan and other such 'edgy' subcultures online: heavy metal has been almost totally usurped by 'alt-right' third-way apolitaeic neo-nazis, occult fascists and other Julius Evola spawn. Especially the field of black metal (and a lot of the more dark and cavernous death metal) is well beyond the realm of 'sketchy'. New memes abound to describe this new historical circumstance, for example "It's only a sunwheel". This meme describes the diversionary tactics of our new breed of heavy metal fascists, whom when confronted with, uh, that there's swastikas or black suns or SS runes on their record covers, they reply with how no no you've got it all wrong, these ancient symbols pre-date the Third Reich and are used in a more esoteric and traditional way.

We don't hate other cultures. We just love Europa and want to see it return to its prior glory.

Somehow.

This isn't a new narrative, but it has had a new function in the current political climate. Where once the political climate in the metal subculture was such that these clowns were powerless and easy to ignore (as unwise as that was) now, where all of the western world is bent on a rightwards trajectory, every single idiot with a palingenetic ultra-nationalist agenda is actually helping along a very tangible 'fascist creep' with these Third-Way diversionary tactics. So, when near-fascists are in power we have to re-examine our own burden in our own subculture. We should do this now, before fascists-fascists are in power.

Fascists infiltrated black metal and heavy metal at large over a long period of time, right under our noses and we are ill-equipped to spot them, exclude them from our subculture and mend the damage they have done because we're still thinking in 1999 terms, where Capitalism 'won' and history 'was finished' and grand narratives 'were dead' and it was just a consumerist paradise for atomized people going on with their atomized lives. Heavy metal has always been a conservative cultural force, and people fall for 'it's only a sunwheel!' every day. Even people that don't fall for it and can spot the dark humour of such memetic propagation find it hard to divorce themselves from the problematic elements of our subculture, because the problematic has overtaken the non-problematic. Anywhere you turn and go 'I like THIS band in particular, they seem nice!' it will turn out later that they're neo-nazis, or nationalists, or their best mates are neo-nazis, or they've worked with a neo-nazi label or they're just simpler and they just hate the gays or whatnot. It's a disaster, and 'the other side' as it where is politically not equipped to make its voice heard. Because metalheads are either -consciously or unconsciously - on the right or apolitical. And this has to change, because in this political climate, being apolitical is being on the right.

So, at the face of this new Trump reality that emboldens cretins worldwide to be more vocal with their hatred, we have to fight back in any way possible. Does this mean that Poetry of Subculture will now be the equivalent of  Who Makes The Nazis but not for neo-folk, industrial and post-punk but for Heavy Metal? As much as I wish I had the mental fortitude to attempt that, sadly not, but perhaps that void will be filled by other nodes on the internet soon. I'm not enough of a historian, not enough of a Marxist and probably not enough of a human to tackle something like that on my own.

No, we will fight back against the forces of darkness by strengthening our own Archive, our own lopsided edifice to something or another. That's all I can do and I'll do it pretty much the same way I started. I'll talk about the records, I'll talk about the historical circumstances that brought us here, I'll talk about pathos, eternal beauty and the will of the gods (that has great, great power) and I will listen to you. So, make yourselves heard.

In this way we will imagine a different use for heavy metal than that of a foil for nationalistic identity politics at best and outright propaganda for Evolean fascism at worst. Because heavy metal is Chaos, like mother Tiamat writhing in the bottom of the deepest ocean fault. But Chaos is not evil. It can be - and has been - used for evil, but Chaos is just Chaos, it means anything and everything. Even idiots, even amateur, tired musicians with no achievements to recommend them can touch that chaos core, and they can be mutated into some imaginary shape or another.

Of all the shapes we can imagine,  we can do better than the shape of a racist, homophobic neo-nazi. Not only can we, but we must.

For all these words, you know what's up and you know what we're going to do. We're going to listen to the muuuusic, think about for a long time and then write some words about it. That's what humans do, they use culture to understand themselves. And we must understand what Heavy Metal has done to us. Let's strike the black old stone a second time with childlike hope and irreverent intent: let the blood of romance flow from the stone, forever.