Metal Inclusivity

So, here I am, 29 years old, more than half of my life spent listening or creating Heavy Metal music, and I am now acutely aware that what what people say when they use the term 'metal' does not correspond to my Heavy Metal experience. I am not upset or annoyed at this, but it does make me think on how that happened.

This will not be a text about how Heavy Metal was better in the old days. I'm not interested in eulogizing a view of the past that is more than anything else coloured by nostalgia. Nostalgia is a treacherous emotion in that it's weight in a memory is arbitrary and unconnected to the value of the original experience. I am equally likely to feel nostalgia for when I first watched a seminal piece of cinema like, say, Blade Runner as I am for watching Superman IV: Quest for Peace.


There are those, I've found, that surrender to nostalgia wholesale. They will idolize any artifact of their past with equal fervor. This creates an obvious problem when discussing Ye Olde Heavy Metal, because those rose tinted glasses can strip away the awfulness of this music and just leave, say, that one good riff or nice solo to shine. This selective view of the past will not help us in a discussion of where exactly *my* Heavy Metal and metal at large became not just disparate, but antithetical entities.

The angle I'm interested in instead is to look at what is gained, socially, by metal inclusivity. What is gained in the modern pop culture dialogue over metal in erring on the side of including outsider bands in the increasingly broadening metal canon. Who benefits, and what exactly are the benefits?

The parties in this social structure, real and symbolic, are: 'metal music' as a genre, the bands that play the music, fans, journalists and finally, society at large.

So let's say there's this new, interesting band that seems to play vital, exciting music. Let' say they're called Pinkish Black. Let's say that they've come out with a new record, and it's ostensibly reviewed and talked about in metal circles, signifying that they're metal, at least to some extent. A cursory listen to them will reveal they're a formalist hybrid of many different genres of music, yet we are encountering them in the metal press, as a metal band. So let's see who benefits and how they benefit from the inclusion of this band in metal culture.

First, our conception of 'metal music' benefits from the inclusion of Pinkish Black in that we have now another reason to suggest that metal is alive and vital and still branching out and producing culture capital. It means metal is music to pay attention to, and most importantly it means it's music to pay attention to if you're slightly on the outside of it and you want to see if it now, with Pinkish Black (let's say) you are also a little bit more included.

Fans benefit from being inclusive in what they consider metal because in this way they appear open-minded and that they're supporting a growing type of music. For their bravado, metal fans have long carried a persecution complex (it could be said that that is the core of the metalhead social personality, really) and as long as a narrative is sold to them that they're being embraced by the mainstream on their own terms, they lap it up eagerly. Their own terms in this case basically means as long as there's an illusion that the mainstream is coming to them, they're not going to the mainstream. And that may not be as completely illusory as I at first expected.

The metal press benefits in that they're covering a wider scene, there's more articles to write, more bands to market, more shows to book, more culture product to spread. For the metal journalist there is nothing worse than the realization that their niche of culture is dead. It is better to invent a new metal than to accept that it is dead. Ironically, this large-scale inclusion policy in most metal sites have contributed to their unreadability. Too many album streams. To many live show write-ups. Too many interviews on what books band people read. To mask the lack of actual discussion of metal music for what it is and where it's heading.

Society at large benefits from metal being more inclusive because that means it'll be more watered down. For all its social uselessness, the scary ghost of Heavy Metal was indeed, that. Scary. For a while at least, culminating with church burnings and homicides. What can society do with that? It can feel the dark reverence towards death, of course, but it can't sell that shit if it gets so (un)real. Now, costumed clowns that play music that isn't so far removed from that of Limp Bizkit, sure! They can be the new metal.

The bands that are now branded as metal benefit because they're exposed to the metal audience. It may or may not be the case that other audiences they could reach for would not support them enough or support them as they would like to be supported. This is a really curious thing for people of my age that were into Heavy Metal in the mid '90s because back then (and for a long spell afterwards), actual metal bands were trying their hardest to distance themselves from metal and if you told, say, a stoner rock musician that they liked Iron Maiden, they would take great offence.


So, what changed? Why is now the metal audience a desirable one for outsiders? Has the Heavy Metal stigma been lifted?

I believe that the case is that metal music has resisted - for good or worse - marketing extinction campaign during the grunge era. Don't reach for your tinfoil hats here, people. I am not saying that The Man Hates our Truth or anything. I am just saying that the market recognised that if loud music is here to stay, can't we at least have a more palatable version we can sell, and to a wider audience? Hence the grunge fabrication (which was peddled on the backs of some fortunate and many more unfortunate american punk bands).

That metal has continued to sustain a core audience mainly due to word of mouth and grassroots communities online has proved to the mainstream that it's here to stay. The reason that it's here to stay is that metal music carries a Romanticist torch and though not everything it inspires is beautiful, enough of it is. Beautiful art that pretends to be about ageless natural truth and imagination apparently won't go out of style. New generations of metal listeners are introduced through the classics (Sabbath, Metallica, Maiden) in the same organic way that they enter puberty. Since the attempts to ameliorate the rough edges of Heavy Metal and sell it like hair metal or grunge fell through, in the first case because the saccharine coating was completely cynical and in the latter case because the depressive self-destructive tendencies were entirely too real - the only real way left for metal music to be integrated in broader culture was to be accepted. Somewhat.

So, metal music won. And that's why Heavy Metal has died. The antagonistic ambition of Heavy Metal (of Romance itself) is such that it cannot thrive without the adversarial role. Heavy Metal has a long history of inventing the enemy it needs to function (posers die, false metal, rap music, etc.) and never before has the war cry against something, anything, felt more hollow than in the last ten years or so. This acutely explains the rise of National Socialist Black Metal. If people won't believe that posers must die and those that are false must leave the hall, then all that is left is to say that our racial identity is under attack and the most enduring form of the Other is our enemy (the Jews).

Truthfully, there's nobody left to hate us. Most people enjoy at least some metal-influenced music, some sort of angry loud formalist take on what Judas Priest came up with. The collapse of Grand Narratives after the fall of the Soviet Union removed from the culture the aspect of 'mandatory ideological struggle' as a signifier of grreat art. This may have happened gradually and not without illness, but it happened. In a world where Capitalism won, was there really much difference left between those of 'true heart' and those that were 'false'?



I am not advocating for another fabrication of a comfortable enemy so that Heavy Metal again may live. It's ridiculous. Capitalism seems to be having enough trouble winning without an opponent that I am sure the Western World will again live enough tragedy and turmoil that angry, rebellion-based culture will find a real foothold again. I am not really looking forward to this either. I just wanted to add to the dialogue over 'what is considered metal' these analytical tools that explain that perhaps the real reason we're reaching out to outsiders to fill in for metal is that metal has been missing in action for a reason that is meta-cultural and larger than any 'us vs them' narrative would have us believe.

Sexism in Heavy Metal

We must be very skeptical when we see Heavy Metal express conformist ideological positions.

If language is the domain of domestication of experience - and by that I mean, if language is a tool for making faux-sense from non-sense - then what is Real is what is left unspoken; Therewithin lies the enduring necessity of art and especially music: in expressing the inexpressible, a sideways glance inside the wound of existence. Heavy Metal is a wordless scream. It is pointing at the horror of life. From blatant forms of death and decay and zombies to the more modernist depictions of middle-class ennui and urban alienation.

Heavy Metal tolls the funeral bells for 43 years now. Surely the danger it prophesies must have occurred by now, right? If not, then the danger is time itself, experience itself, the horror and awe of sentience.

Warning, Humans: The apocalypse is at hand, it has forever been at hand. There is no final count, no absolution, no yesterday and no tomorrow.

Romance is the tool of Heavy Metal, a modern sort of music with an ancient conceit. In that space, the nationalist tendencies of it can be best understood. In that space, men are Men, women don't really have souls and the world is there to conquer and forge anew with willpower. Imagine that Victorian dolt on the painting standing with his silly suit and cane on the top of the mountain gazing at the clouds. Actually, don't just imagine, here it is

Ahh... not a single woman or nigger in sight!

Heavy Metal subcultures are rife with racism, but have been making some progress. There is a political precedent that allows for some limited progress in that aspect and it comes via Rush: Ayn Rand-type Objectivism. Because that strain of thought persists and informs Heavy Metal, listeners are prepared to accept an individual of color as part of their tribes if they show a strong will and moral sense *akin to that of the white man*. In this way, people from other races are allowed in the clubhouse if they understand and can further the memetic ancestry of individualism, capitalism and Manichean ethics: If you believe in the Strong, if you believe in free commerce, if you believe in Good and Evil, you can be part of the metal hordes.

As problematic and colonialist as all this sounds, there can be a discussion and progress from such a basis (and there has been). Such a basis can be radicalized. What is needed is higher level discourse by the proponents of Heavy Metal subcultures to take it there. Now where these people are and why aren't they writing (or composing and performing) to that end is it's a whole different issue and article.

But even a staunch nationalistic and ancient-loving point of view in Heavy Metal is not a conformist point of view; It comes in contact with modern living and there is friction. From this friction, sparks of interest can arise. Heavy Metal doesn't need to be correct (or even very nice), it just needs to collide with preconceptions in a spectacular way so as to inspire individuals to seek their individual truths.

Anus.com, for example, a hornet's nest of neo-nazis and misanthropes if there ever were one, has had a brief positive influence on me not due to the letter of its content, but its counter-cultural spirit on the whole. In the outright lunacy of suggesting Heavy Metal carries the torch of classical composition and not blues-based rock n' roll (which is left to the loathsome blacks) I learned "well, if this person can re-contextualize the narrative of Heavy Metal in whatever way they like, then so can I. Who is going to stop me, Lemmy?".

That is the seed of radical thinking and self-definition that Heavy Metal trades in.


But when it comes to ingrained gender roles, Heavy Metal isn't even inspiringly over-identifying with a  bigoted point of view. It has no extreme message. It doesn't push anything.

Heavy Metal agrees with an American home-owner from the '30s on the role of Man and Woman in life. The man is the hunter out in the wild. The woman tends to the cubs inside the cave.

When Heavy Metal express conformist ideological positions, we must be very skeptical.

An over-identification that could have been useful would be for a Heavy Metal band to be defiantly pro-homosexual and call for the destruction of womankind on the whole. That's the sort of nonsense you can work with.

But this middle of the road misogyny just breeds lukewarm contempt from those of us that are anti-sexists and a lurid confirmation bias from those of us that have been traditionally sexist to begin with. This sort of sexism that Heavy Metal endorses is ass-patting the worst aspects of male listeners, it provides no challenge, it provides no restrictions and no transcendentalist goal; It just reiterates on the common old narrative that women are inferior, weak of spirit and desire and can only be sexually acted upon by Proud Mens. The only women it accepts are glorified sex objects and/or (be very careful with the 'or' proposition here, it is extremely potent psycho-dynamically) women that have taken upon them the role of men so as to survive. Imagine some boy looking up at his mother's thighs. Imagine her all decked out in chains and leather and spitting out a sickkkk guitar solo, imagine a boy's erection turning to a man's erection.

So either women as sex objects, or women as sex objects that double as male tyrants.

How can this base be radicalized? From the esoteric/occult aspect, I would expect Heavy Metal bands to posit a message of full abstinence from sexual activity of any kind. Heavy Metal tends to look at human beings as spirits first anyway, it would be very useful for a musical subculture to strip any gendered identifier from its fanbase and aggressively police a no-joy, no-fun, anti-human, anti-life approach. Of course this would be short lived and its results horrible in a whole different way, but from a point of view of cultural theory, all that fallout would be useful to work with and to push forward from, as a building base. 

Another approach would be to de-centralize the narrative of 'Man is Strong, Strength is everything, Will is everything, Willpower is therefore masculine' in Heavy Metal. A Romantic core can be separated from those 'might is right' nationalist conceits because the core of Romance is not strength. It is dread, terror, awe. It is the unmentionable, that which can only be glanced at sideways. If anything, the ablation of such horror and torment can only be the existential solution: I remain close to this terror, I remind myself of this terror, if I forget this terror, I have lost my way. There is no right and wrong, I must make of my existence what I can with full knowledge that life and death are the same thing.

Furthermore the most direct method would be to aggressively recount and attack gender stereotypes in Heavy Metal via pure fucking Modernist/Humanist holocaust. Do we still have any progressive metal worth its salt? Can they make a few concept albums about say, the journey of a transgendered individual through life? How about progressive metal about sexual dysfunction and alienation directly? Where's my prog metal opera on the debunking of biological determinism? Heavy Metal stands in proud opposition to teleological determinants describing sentience, after all. Life is horror, life is imagination, life is life, right? Can these tensions be either lessened or absurdly stressed to the point of deconstruction?


Before any such forward-thinking reconstruction of Heavy Metal can occur we sadly have to deal with a much more banal but pertinent issue. People love their comfort-food-art more than they love other human beings, even in the abstract.

This can be seen online every day, in social media. If pressed, people will prefer for Game of Thrones to continue existing than the whole gender of women.

If you criticize the culture they use as self-identification, you are criticizing their being itself. People are very quick to react to this in the worst ways.

The first thing we have to discuss, for a long time, until people understand it, is that you can both like -or even love- a type of art and at the same time have the necessary distance from it to see the ugliness in its inner workings. Be it music, video games, movies or tv shows, whatever you love is also hurting you. Too much distance is obscuring the vital connection we have with art. Too little distance makes the art we love so integral to our being that it takes hold of us and leaves us to the whims of market capitalists selling product. Believe it or not, critique of culture and an examination of media can contribute to radicalization but we first must understand our relationship to the media itself, regardless of the content of media. It is impossible to discuss the problem or sexism or racism in Heavy Metal before all parties agree that human beings are more important that Heavy Metal.

Four Reviews of a Tile

1

This tile makes me feel bad when I look at it. I don't know what it is about it but it's unsettling to look at for long. Thankfully I only had to look at it once to write my review. I don't like it when tiles make me feel bad things and I'll go as far as to say that the majority of other tiles I've looked at once made me feel better than this, I think... I am a human being with a capacity for emotion, but I want my tiles to make me feel good things. Bad emotions scare me and unsettle me.

2

This tile makes makes me feel bad when I look at it. I don't know what it is, perhaps it's too grey or the pattern is too ordered, but it's unsettling to look at for long. Perhaps what I am feeling is a sense of loneliness that I associate with bathrooms, we all go to the bathroom alone, usually, right? Is there really a tile that would make me feel not bad to look at? Certainly, I have the memory of better tiles than this, perhaps with a nice floral pattern? Or perhaps its the isolation of this tile from any other elements of its usual context that makes me feel lonely with it. In any case, as a being with a capacity for emotion, I will look at this tile twice to hone in on this particular emotion before I discount it as a negative one. I am a being with capacity for contradictory emotions and I am not afraid of a little loneliness.

3

This tile makes me feel bad when I look at it. I don't know what it is, perhaps it's too grey or the pattern is too ordered, but it's unsettling to look at for long. What I think makes it unsettling is the front-face flash photography lighting, which makes me think like I'm looking at the floor or a morgue or other sterile place. I'm thinking of the machinery involved in the production of this tile now and what functional fundamentals are involved in the necessities of this tile. The necessary modularity of the panels, the slight texture that is easy to miss when just glancing at the tile. Why do human beings need to make even the simplest, most functional mass produced item have a granular surface? I am now imagining a world in which every surface is of the same Platonic substance and texture, perhaps that of a grey egg. I am thinking of how perhaps this is sometimes how we compose images in your dreams. Now I'm back to thinking of a factory and a production line of these tiles. I think of the imperfect ones that the machinery creates and a human worker has to fish out and discard manually. I am now considering a human being defined by that characteristic, of their capacity to make aesthetic distinctions, and of where they would extend. Does the worker discard a tile with no functional blemish other than that the randomized texture it got from the machine is arranged in a way that displeases them?

And suddenly, from this train of thought it hits me and I know why this tile makes me feel sad. As a child I often looked at such manufactured surfaces and my eye would hang on faces I found in the texture, usually grotesque or comical faces. I would look away... and then look back and see if my mind could find the faces again. This was an insane little game. I remember doing this in hotels, in hospitals, in school. A restless mind in isolation. Children are often taught to sit and be patient and patience is a very difficult thing for me, I suspect as a child it was unbearable.

I am thinking now of a piece of glimmering mineral in some fractalized shape and how holding one in your hand and slowly rotating it would catch the light in different ways. I am thinking of a concept, an image, a gestalt image, and its inverted form. I am thinking of something Correct and something False. How you can turn something Correct completely around and it is now False. I am thinking of how much the Correct and the False thing would retain their contour, their outside shape in this way, how the polarity might be inverted but the function remains the same and equally opaque.

I am thinking of the tile, slowly rotating, instead. Not locked in a binary shift, instead kaleidoscopically rotating on a mad axis, light catching on its edges, shadows making grotesque caricatures dance, front face and back. I look away, and then I turn by head again.


4

2/10

Awe and the Grand Narrative

Heavy Metal has a romanticist conceit and a modernist tension inside it. The romance is ancient, or at least it pretends to be. It has a manufactured fantasy of an long-lost age of wisdom which post-temporally inspires and is inspired by it. In that ancient past, the Gods were all around us (and indeed, within us), nature was Beauty and Beauty was Truth. The horror, the awe of death is as beautiful as the bliss of birth. Not events to interpret, but symbols of inalienable Platonic ideals. That ancient, imagined script holds resonance for the listener of Heavy Metal. In a world without gods, the point of religion is access to Awe itself.

Heavy Metal is a modern type of music, it came to exist in the tail-end of the modern era and held, at least half-heartedly a conceit inside it that what it had to say was applicable to the modern world, even if in antagonism to it. It said 'this is the right way to live, or at least to imagine life, in this decrepit world'. And, of course, it faced the effects of deconstruction along with other forms of modern art (pop or not) in the decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

With the end of the Cold War and the victory of capitalism, western society entered into the era of endlessness, the death of history. Art, like everything else was shaped by commerce, the prime tool of capitalism.

According to where you live in the western world and your educational level, this process might have come early or later, be more transparent or opaque. For many readers it is quite possible you weren't even born before the change was complete and do not remember a world which still held Grand Narrative ideals at heart. To offer a brief description, this is to say we now live in a world where truth is relative, there is no universal goal for humanity to agree upon, there is no clear distinctive direction for progress of the world and everything that means something can only mean that in relation to something else and also in relation to whom it is supposed to mean that and other orbiting forces and pressures. 

The line drawn between modern and post-modern art is important for us that discuss Heavy Metal. It is important because it's very different from art that is self-defining as modernist and post-modernist. Just as we live in a post-modern world regardless of whether we ascribe to postmodernist philosophical points of view willingly. The post-modern state is non-negotiable. And art that retains a modernist (or even worse, romanticist) mindset in this context faces challenges that would be alien to same art in 1970 or 1980.

To understand why post-metal rings hollow in the ears of old-school metalheads, you have to look to post-metal as willingly post-modernist music. It uses the sonic tools of metal (distortion, double bass, screams, etc) to ends clearly not modernist and not romanticist. It has no truths to offer and no ancient paths to long for. It is instead highly personal, cryptic, avoidant of any solid stance or ideal. It is music which references no Grand Narrative, it has no secret inside of it, it doesn't promise a hidden glimpse towards something bigger, whole, all-encompassing, Beautiful.

This doesn't mean that it can't be beautiful, for it often is. But the beauty is in its form and not its message. It's like architecture of a space in which no humans are meant to live. Beauty in itself, but no wonder the fascination with such curiosities does not last.
And before we boo and hiss at post-metal, let's look at modern resurgences of old types of metal, like neo-thrash, new old-school epic metal and so on. That music is not post-modernist willingly. It is however, not like the old music. It's a copy of the old music, in a post-modern era. It rings hollow not because of false ideals but because the concept of 'true ideals' in a post-modern world is suspect in itself. As odd as Heavy Metal could look and sound in the '80s, it was taken at face value by listeners because that was the way to treat art at the time. Today, when a band puts on the denim and leather and patches, all these signifiers are very clearly a surface reconstruction of elements of a deconstructed past. Truth is not at stake here, instead aesthetics.

All of modern Heavy Metal, be it post-metal or the staunchest manowar-like epic metal, is concerned with aesthetics. It knows exactly what it's trying to reference and judges itself with how closely it can achieve that predefined aesthetic vision. 

For every one of your favorite '70s and '80s Heavy Metal records, there's today, and I guarantee it, a clone band's clone album that is twice as well-played and produced as that, but without any of the spirit.

And this spirit is not a metaphysical demand from me that's strictly relevant to Heavy Metal or whatever, it is the spirit of the whole of the twentieth century that has perished.  

This is the clearest way to explain why Heavy Metal is dead and we are simply toying with the corpse.

Does this mean there can no longer be any Heavy Metal with spirit, vitality and importance in 2013? I think there can be, but not for us. Perhaps for young people who somehow inexplicably emerge with a belief in a new Grand Narrative, however dumb. For us that have survived the death of the old Ideals, Heavy Metal can only function as a time-machine. 

And the young people for whom x New Wave of New Wave of British Heavy Metal is like, so awesome, give them ten years in capitalist society, that'll fix their view on truth, beauty and progress. They will realize their heroes lied.

Now, of course, the jack in the deck is capitalism itself. It's not doing too well, lately. If it could be said that the last 20-30 years in Europe were the promised capitalist dream where enlightened individuals (never groups) rise above their peers and achieve wealth and freedom while their lessers toil at the lower classes, then we are entering an age of the capitalist nightmare, where the most the enlightened individual can hope for is to have food and a place to stay, while nine out of then of their peers simply die in the streets, deemed permanently unemployable by conglomerate banks and other overarching systems.

Could there be a resurgence of the concept of history itself? Will 'progress' again mean something and if so, what would that be? 

There are many left-field activists and politically aware people who will say to what I write that for them history never died and that their Grand humanist Narrative was always an enduring truth. To those quasi-theoretical people I can only say "yes, perhaps... but when did you last go to the cinema? When did you last watch those downloaded tv-shows from America you so love? When did you last read a good book describing the valiant ascent of an enlightened individual to the top of society? How much did you enjoy these products of capitalism whose main function is to deconstruct your social identity?" I am, myself quite on the left end of the political spectrum, but I have a sense of humor about this because I am truly a product of capitalism first and foremost. I recognize my memories of the glorious past are fantasies, and my belief in Humanity at best schizophrenic. Fervent to endorse and fight for the rights of the downtrodden, of women, of homosexuals, of immigrants, and at once mad with rage against the majority of humans that obstruct this path of ideals. The Grand Narrative is in shambles inside of me, both alive and dead at the same time. I am toying with the corpse.

These tensions might or might not be resolved (or made clearer) in my lifetime. Greece (my home country) is in complete disarray right now. The crisis is pan-European. America's not doing too hot either. Will capitalism be salvaged, the banking systems reconfigured? If so, at what cost to the system and what to the populace? Or will the reign be pulled even tighter and throw parts of the western world into outright chaos and war? Will we, to the march of the war drum remember old, manufactured Gods and nature and worship self-evident symbols of truth because we need them, again like good old fascists, or will be regain our social identity and fight for worker rights and a humanist future like good old communists? And what of that sneaking, crawling suspicion inside me that both of these paths we can take at the same time because we can not fully believe in anything anymore and we will mix and match as it suits us with the post-modernist tool-set that we have been given by inheritance?

In art, nothing is as stupid as intelligence

So how stupid is Heavy Metal, really?

I've found that a key to understanding the perception of this genre of music rests on the public preconception of it as dumb or 'low' art. And to a degree the appropriation of Heavy Metal tropes by outsiders via 'post-metal' was an attempt to smarten up Heavy Metal so it can finally be appreciated by those who feel a magnetic pull to it but would rather not be seen in public with it.

(Oh, such malignant enjoyment I take from seeing them fumble about with instrumental post-shoegaze ambient black metal/indiecore to somehow reconcile their fascination with, say, Manowar.)

It took me this long to talk about this because, honestly, as an issue it has been invisible for me for the longest time. I grew up with Heavy Metal first and foremost, so aside from a few works of philosophy, I am exactly as smart/dumb as it is.

I've been confronted, over the years with variations of a piece of back-handed flattery I find especially tickling. I've been told that I am a metalhead 'unlike the others'. That though I do not try to distance myself from the perceptually lowest core of Heavy Metal (I proudly listen to Carnivore, say) I do not seem to fit the cliche of the vinyl-gatherer in arrested development they understand metalheads to be. I am kind and a good conversationalist (on other topics, even!) and seem centered. From the complement we can draw two conclusions.

1. Were a metalhead to be able to distance themselves from the idiocy in the core of Heavy Metal, they absolutely would. In effect they would stop being metalheads and become one of those ironic widowers who now listen to one of the various permutations of post-metal. Certainly, Heavy Metal has died, one has not to just remarry but also hastily bury the decomposing corpse.

2. That they do not do this is due to incapacity. Probably because of stupidity or some other sort of fundamental character flaw. It is impossible to take this music seriously without some defect fueling the interest.

I am not going to attempt to combat these assumptions as fervently as the reader might expect. I do believe - as I've written in the past - that Heavy Metal has died and we're just dressing up the corpse in cute ways, a little bit of neo-thrash, now an occult robe, oh how nice. Perhaps the corpse appears animated to a sixteen year old that just bought their first Municipal Waste album just yesterday. And I do think mine - or anyone else's - continued interest over decades betray a morbid fascination to say the least. You can do two things with a dead thing. One would be to cradle it nostalgically and mourn forever the crystallized past. The other is nekromantia - divination of the future in the innards of a gutted rat.

But the aspect of the above assumption I will challenge is that the defect that drives the metalhead is a lack of intelligence of some sort.

Heavy Metal is difficult to parse for many because it seems preoccupied with low drives. Death and butchery, hedonistic lust and driving motorcycles and/or dragons. Difficult topics to make a defense for. But then, why are people whose trajectory passed close to Heavy Metal still so compelled to even talk about it, even if it is in the most damning terms? There is something dark and strong in there and a surface read of dragons and motorcycles doesn't seem to diminish the allure.

The profundity in Heavy Metal lies in that it is dumb and smart at the same time. This happens in a startlingly simple way (and why it's difficult for us to come outside and look in to see it): take inherently sensitive and intelligent people and do not give them socially positive ways to express that intelligence. Supress them. Give them fifty pages from ten different philosophers, give them horror movies and dungeons and dragons and tell them that's their lot. The sort of intelligence they will develop will be somewhat dysfunctional and unrecognizable if held against the paradigm of intelligence as means of social success and upwards mobility. Heavy Metal is smart in the dumbest way possible, in the most useless way possible.

So the best Heavy Metal artifacts are monuments to that savant brilliance. Those that feel drawn to this but yet are disgusted by its low level are victims of an illusion that Heavy Metal willfully creates. They see before them an entity that burns darkly from inside, it has no outside activator. It did not go to college, it doesn't have many friends, it is mis-educated at best. Yet, somehow it can divine a future in the guts of a rat. It knows allll about you. The illusion is that Heavy Metal (and its people) seem to have been born this way, or if not, to have carved themselves in this image with pure willpower.

This is the great defense of Heavy Metal. How can a stupid record from the Czech Republic capture the ethos of Nietzschian thought without the people that made it having read any Nietzsche? And why does it still have a sacrificed goat on the cover? How can a stupid seven inch NWOBHM extrude an air of otherworldly dignity and strength when the title of the track is even misspelled? How can this black-clad longhair smile to me with such kindness? How can these people be everything I was told not to be and still function?

The illusion is that they function. Nobody functions, it is impossible to function in our modern world. But that's the spell that Heavy Metal casts, that's what metalheads gave their souls to buy, that disarming semblance of inner strength, conviction and drive.

Heavy Metal is dumb and yet ambitious. Never before have there been less equipped artists attempting more lofty artistic goals. Heavy Metal is uneducated and socially inept but with the very little that it knows it creates a world in itself. It is a self-sustaining system.

That is where it is dangerous. What Heavy Metal asks of you to give you this self-sustaining system is an impossible task: Destruction of the self, so that the self may live. The 'other' metalheads you know whom you find so easily dismissable and abhorrent, married to their leather jacket, who have a thousand words for riff but not one for pathos, they are the mutants of this chaos process. The 'almost got there's, they are the Renfields to Heavy Metal Dracula, eating vinyl insects to survive, wondering when their master will come to imbue in them eternal life.

And so Heavy Metal is dead. The Dying Bride has finally perished. The wedding dress is damp with old decay and red with rust. Why haven't these people (mutants all, successful or not) given up? Why do they still listen to a record from 1986 as if it's important? A corpse is a corpse and a corpse will not rise. The horrible craft left to us, those 'metalheads unlike the others' is just that of divination.

Morbid Angel - Blessed are the Sick

Released in 1991 by Earache records.

David Vincent - Vocals, Bass
Trey Azagthoth  - Guitars, Annoying Midi
Richard Brunelle - Guitars
Pete Sandoval - Drums

Do you think your life is fair? Do you think you deserve the hardships that befall you? Do you think your life will ultimately make sense as a narrative, and whose will be the authorial intent that dictates this narrative? Will it be God that kisses the boo boo and makes everything alright? Will you be rewarded with an afterlife of bliss for your service? Surely, for life to be so cruel there must be a reason. We can't be brought to this world of screams through coincidence and non-sense and we can't be just left to fend for ourselves. Surely, someone must be governing our rise and our fall. Someone must be keeping score.

What if there's no one? What if there's no God, or at least no God that is good, that cares about us and that is going to make everything plain and clear upon our reunion with Him after this world of lies goes up in flames? What if nobody understands anything? What is this world then, but a wound - an open wound that, were you to look directly inside it, you would grow mad from disgust and anguish?

The concept of the world as absurd. We toil for no master, to no end and then we die. The gods - if they even exist - extend at most a cruel laughter in our general direction. We can strive to do no good because there is nobody that can prescribe goodness. To toil eternally in an empty grave, to enduringly lament.

At the face of this realisation we must stand forever shocked. For those of you that think now "what a banal point to make" I dare you to revisit it from the vantage of yourselves as ten year olds, if you can connect to your past at that age. Try to hone in on the first memory of pure injustice, of unwarranted pain and loss you've experienced. Did your puppy die of cancer? Did your mother send you to live with your drunk father? Did your best friend get killed in an auto-mobile accident? Did you realize you were of one gender trapped in the body of another? Don't just reflect on that feeling, relieve it. And then loudly say, in your full grown-human voice "there is no reason why this has happened. It has served nothing and no one". I dare you to say this to that negative being in the room there with you, that shadow-self, that mirror into nothingness. Go on, tell them that your whole life's story, so gloriously pivoting around your personal narrative of sacrifice and loss is just pure nonsense. Smile to the darkness.


If we are to move away from this feeling, it we are to remove either part of this hellish equation, we are intellectually bankrupt. We can't unlearn what we already know, so if we know there is no God, we cannot invent one. If this world is absurd, we can't pretend it adheres to some system of morality. There is no good and evil. Whatever hope there is, it is inside us. The will to exist, the drive to live, it is the uroboros snake, it gives birth to itself and in the end it will consume itself.



All systems of belief and systems of ideology pretend to give a more comfortable answer to this question by avoiding either premise. All spiritual overbeings are variations of the Gnostic Demiurge. A flawed god, with human qualities, looking over us, for good or worse. An intermediate step of consciousness between us petty humans and the killing light of a true, uncaring God. Oh how we miss our daddy, all of us.

And the satanist? Oh, the satanist is their own daddy. Talk about a snake eating itself. Such a bright, burning flame will surely burn out fast. How many great records can a satanist make? Judging from Morbid Angel, at best, two.

Here we will look at their second, aptly named "Blessed are the Sick". There isn't much poetry that I will conjure, dear reader. We can instead look at the text-as-it-is:





Havahej

Another me, born to serve
To plague 
So many years 
My seed condemned
Now free to roam

Will is yours? 
So, creator
No intent could shadow
Shadow my disease 
And everlasting pain

World of sick
Blessed are we to taste
Life of sin

My touch inhumane
Nocturnal beast inside
Devoid of light
And empty shall remain


There is something very suspicious, here. Parts of the text seem to say that the prototypical "I" subject of the song is becoming something less than human through this Luciferian fall, but what is the full impression of the thing (especially if seen and heard in the accompanying video-clip) It is of Lucifer triumphant. To become less-than-human is to become a god. Morbid Angel here are eulogising the passing of human weakness, as they understand it. The empty shell that remains is an animal or, to state it carefully, a fantasy of an animal and animals are purer beings than humans.

The root of this approach to Nietzscheian thought is clear. To put it in a less useful but knowing way, this is "How to become a cat". Do you wonder why philosophers are so taken with our feline guests?

What is the human weakness, whose passing Morbid Angel so triumphantly extol? The answer to this question is found in the chorus: World of sick, blessed are we to taste life of sin. What they abhor is morality and ideology, the schizophrenic tools of self-negation that are so endemic in Nietzsche's slave mentality. Pure beings, beasts of darkness claim their killing power directly. Those of us that are weak and cowardly instead congregate under their tyranny and declare our weak bodies to be one, and in our death we triumph as martyrs. God listens to us. God will make this story cohere. God will reward us for our tragedy.

Hot wind burns me
Burning as I fall
Cast away speechless 
In the holy way
I survive the scourge 
And banishing
To scorching land
I am lord, I take command

Fall from Grace

Forgive me not
This knowledge 
Makes me strong
To resurrect
The cities of the damned
All the treasure of Sodom
Now belong to me 
Celebrate, fallen angels 
Take my hand

Whores long for my flesh
And my desire
Lust anointing me now
Consume my soul

I ride the flesh and the sinners of hell
I am Belial
I bend knee not before my selfish desire


Forgive the flowery prose, as the flowers of evil are want to be sickly sweet, after all. Morbid Angel are the best Heavy Metal has to offer in representation of malignant beauty. Their death metal is aeons apart from the crude, angst-driven odes to meat & death that most of their compatriots were concocting concurrently. It writhes wryly and so sensuously slithers that perhaps it even justifies a nipple ring or two in that video above. The answer that Morbid Angel have for the absurd world is "my might shall make the world right, but what is might if it is not beautiful". This is their contribution to our world, to make such twisted and odd-sounding music that still sounds beautifully constructed. Form justifies content. Underneath it all, Morbid Angel want to subvert the listener's preconception of beauty, they want to tell you what is good and what is evil. They want you to taste the forbidden fruit.

Gods transform me
The storm will cleanse me
Civilized I shall not be
By this holy strain of laws

For I'm no human now
I burn the ways conform
The gods are pleased with me
They speak my name in tongues

I am the seer
I know the texts divine
Thunder words
Demons race into my hands

Azazel
Lend me your wings of twelve
I shall fly into the storm
I, son of fire, in anger become
The lightning bolts that strike the earth


Like good LaVeyian satanists, their odes to self are fully founded only in how convincing they can be for pedestrians such as you and I. Most apocryphal esotericism desires an audience to whom it shall meter out secrets prudently. A Morbid Angel without a crowd to worship him is worthless. Why the hell did he ever leave God's side if not for humans to worship him? Consider for a moment a very attractive celebrity of your liking (for their power is esoteric to the highest degree). Think of them withered and old and lonely at age 80, incontinent, senile. Well, Morbid Angel suffered from an advanced case of progeria because it only took them a couple of years to turn from Dionysus to husk. The moment their audience stopped taking them so seriously (and that moment is very closely connected, I theorize, with the slaying of one black metal personality by another in far-away Norway) it is they stopped being Belial and just became a few dudes into alternative sexuality. According to your vantage point, objects may appear bigger than they are, after all. Or smaller.

But this record has survived the perspective shift. What is conjured in this offering is an entity altogether divorced from a David Vincent or a Trey Azagzoth, much to their chagrin  Isn't it ironic how their egos have fallen but this testament to their virility and prowess stands erect fully of its own volition? To this world absurd there is another answer, one that doesn't, like a pathetic satanist's, revolve around the negation of weakness thru deceleration of strength alone . It is to offer tributes to hope itself, outside the self. For what are these endless paeans to self-empowerment you've read if not paeans to hope of self-empowerment? After all, no member of Morbid Angel managed to pass through a solid wall (regardless of what rumours you might have heard). A smarter man than David Vincent would have, immediately after Blessed are the Sick either left the band, or have made a record that has a sense of humour about how much more powerful his music is than himself.

What is so different in believing in yourself-as-seen-through-a-metal-album-you-made and believing in a deity of any stripe? This knowingness that your conjuration of this entity is false and can only serves a finite end. That of coping. The absurd wound is there. You own it. You're looking inside the wound sideways through art that is inherently vague, a curved mirror. What is left of any enduring quality in the end of this process is not an ascended being, it is the beauty of the effort.

What Morbid Angel achieve on this record is difficult to appreciate by a modern Death Metal listener, jaded as they presumably are by constant shows of instrumental dexterity. But Morbid Angel were the first to play such wrong-sounding music with such precision and drive that they made me think "p-perhaps this is right, after all?". It's easy to juxtapose a loud part and a quiet part (a la "Smells Like Teen Spirit") to propel a pop song dynamically, but Morbid Angel achieve full thrust without ever really putting two disparate parts against each other (and when they do, it's not the main propulsion point). Instead they keep in one mode but they streamline their form and they play them thus that they are aerodynamic. Think of how a snake slithers seemingly effortlessly. This is no mean feat. in fact, almost all of the modern technical brutal death metal I've heard fails at this.

But to have dynamic song-writing wouldn't be enough for this record to retain such glamour after all these years. The master-stroke here is that, as unsatisfying as the satanist's guidebook presented therein ultimately is, its main thrust comes, well... timely. The mechanics of this music's morphology excite and the lyric (which Vincent, one of the best growlers then and ever, took great care to be audible and understandable) gives a direction for this excitement. Simply put, it is very hard for me to listen to this record and then not feel immediately more powerful and focused. Of course I strip out the "Altars of Madness" retreads and the indulgent midi keyboard instrumentals.

This group would never achieve anything like this, and without careful examination it's hard to see why. After all, the record just after this has many of the same graces. It's called "Covenant", which is kind of a bad name but at least had an apt cover. The record after that, however, is idiotically called "Domination". If you have achieved such in your first two records, you're only going to set yourself up for failure by naming your fourth record "We are the best". Even "Domination" has some bright spots, but what I've found goes wrong in most of the songs in those follow-ups are that the dynamics are not there or when they are they do not connect with a triumphant message. "World of Shit"? Seriously? I thought your lightning bold carved the mountains and drained the oceans. The best you could do is "World of Shit"?

Needless to say after that third record, the rest don't even ever try to portray any malignant beauty, settling for otherworldly chaos and malice instead. And there's some racism thrown in there because David Vincent hasn't misunderstood his own message circa "Blessed are the Sick" enough, it seemed. Anyway, the crawling chaos and darkness was best conjured by many other death metal (and ironically, black metal) bands instead. The band's main writer, guitarist Trey Azagzoth never had a strong aesthetic vision. The person responsible for the warped beauty here is David Vincent, but he also - like all the satanists, in the end - became overfed on his own prowess. They are back together in this band now but I doubt they'll be able to recapture the spirit of this material, even live. Too old, too complacent, too distanced from youthful arrogance (an altogether different thing from middle-aged arrogance). But it only takes one such masterpiece to elevate Morbid Angel to the pantheon, after all.

If you do listen to this for the first time, grab the remastered version. Listen to the whole thing and then experiment with listening to only from 'Intro' to 'Thy Kingdom Come' (excluding also "Doomsday Celebration") and then tell me I'm right.

Do you want Heavy Metal to survive?

There are possibly as many motives for music listeners to become interested in this type of music instead of that as there are human beings, but I am going to present a simpler structure here because it will be an illuminating tool.

Let's suppose that there are only two prime motivations for someone who enters a musical subculture. One of them is for them to become proponents of a scene. To feed that scene, to interact with it, to grow, socially, to extend their network, to belong to a family, to help it recruit others and to feed itself as an end in itself.

The other enters a scene in order to best scrutinize the thing of Beauty itself, to understand their own fascination with it through the warped mirrors that are other listeners, to ultimately absorb the core of the genre.

Let's now consider the possibility that any member of any sub-cultural music scene is either one or the other. Let's examine their actions as if their motivations either arise from a need to further cultivate an externality, or to understand and conquer an internal drive.

This is a good time to think of your own self in these terms and see where you stand.

The reason I write this is because after all this time I've realized something about myself by using this simple tool: Most Heavy Metal listeners seem very preoccupied with the continued existence of Heavy Metal. With the influx of new listeners. With whether the new listeners are listening to the 'right shit'. With whether Heavy Metal is taking a down or up turn. With whether the mainstream is paying more or less attention to 'us'. With the quality of releases this year versus last year.


I do not wish for Heavy Metal to survive. I could care less about new bands - or to put it in a clearer way, I am interested in new bands that are great in the same way that I am interested in old bands that are great; In fact, I often wait for new bands to become old bands before I actively listen to them. If they're great, they'll be great forever.

I clearly remember that this hasn't been always so. As a young listener I would prefer to listen to a record that just came out than a record from the '70s, even if the '70s one was historically more important. I would voraciously devour metal mags for info. I know who Heathen are and I never liked a single note by that band. Truly useless information to me - now. The shift has been gradual, I suspect it's something most people go through, that is, if they allow themselves to grow up. Now, almost 29, I actively avoid listening to new bands unless they come very highly recommended, and enduringly so. If people tell me to listen to Vektor for a couple of years (as they did) then I do so. Though there is some schizophrenic swaying back and forth on this (which I think shows in the content of my writing, too) I can say that for the last five years at least, I have not actively been interested in New Heavy Metal. I keep current because I am interested in the subculture instead. But that feeds in my interest in the swirling chaos core of the genre itself. New warped mirrors to the same centre  New bands are a shaking kaledroscope, for me. They're not furthering Heavy Metal, they're not giving it 'new life'. Heavy Metal is 1970-1995 or so, the rest, so far, have been kaledroscopic recombinations, post-modern exercises and earnest if meagre-in-spirit civil war re-enactments. Heavy Metal might be done, and that's fine with me. I am just not done with Heavy Metal.

I posit that proponents of a scene want to keep themselves (or a youthful part of themselves) alive forever. A vital, bristling scene with new blood doing new things that sound quasi-metallic-but-aren't-really means they get to be young for a few more years. If something sounds closer to the real thing (neo-thrash, for example, for as real as thrash ever was in any case) all the better! If not, drone will do, sure. Grunge revival? At least it has heavy guitars! They love to be in the centre of mainstream attention, be it as devils or angels. Is there really a difference between posers loving you and posers hating you?. In that sense, the recent upswing of pop media interest in Heavy Metal is a veritable renaissance, for them. The blood is the life.

This is why I found the recent neo-thrash boom so frustrating. Because the music itself isn't good. Even if the sounds sound good, if the riffs are good, if the playing is superhuman, if the cover is Repka-perfect, thrash happened at a specific point in time, it came from NWOBHM and punk, it moved into techno-thrash, then progressive metal and death metal. The path is beautiful because it is a path from a million births to a million deaths. There is weight there. There is, if not truth, the best prime material from which someone moulds A truth with their imagination and willpower.

Now we must be excited because Vektor are almost re-inventing the wheel (playing more than basic thrash riffs in a row and having a Voivod logo) because, hey, he haven't heard that in a while.

Only we have - I have. I listen to Voivod all the time. Voivod's guitarist, Piggy, is dead now. He was alive when I finally wrapped my head around Nothingface. Weight.

Those that are like me recognise the beauty in Heavy Metal growing old and eventually dying. They want to be able to imagine 'rest', to imagine 'telos'. Living forever is a cruel imagination. They want to understand what Heavy Metal does to them and as the words are expressed (be it in prose or music or whatever other method) the color will leave their faces with them and they can finally become a stone. They must give up their own soul, to read their own minds.

If this sounds tragic (or worse, melodramatic) I urge you to not worry. That I 'wish to die' means little in  practical terms or even less in existential, we all have a death drive. To realize how it functions and to what imaginative ends it urges us is, instead, a delight. It is a brave move forward for me to realize that I don't really want for Heavy Metal to symbolize my eternal youth.

And in a very roundabout way, here's a silver lining for the folks that are resolutely in the 'METAL FOR EVER' camp, whom I alienate to no end. If there is 'old person Heavy Metal' to be created - and we haven't yet seen it be done successfully, we do not know what it would be - it would have to be created by people that are no longer chasing to recapture that youthful zest that got them into this subculture to begin with. Perhaps the only New Heavy Metal that would interest me (and as a by-product those that aren't like me) would be made by people whose love affair with this music has been coloured by the experience of shock, anger, grief, acceptance and rest that comes with the dying bride finally becoming a rotting bride.



And you? Do you want Heavy Metal to survive, readers?