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.

Riffs are not Enough: Understanding Riff Ambiguity

I like a great riff. Here's one:





Pretty ripping, right?

More than any one riff in Heavy Metal, I like instead a wonderful riff that is followed by another wonderful riff. Here's an example of that:


Two minutes in. The malignant majesty of the two parts that would seem to never need end.

I never studied composition formally, but I know what I like, right? We can all be idiots with a cliche. We all know what we all like. But do we know what we love?

Once I started appreciating small sequences in riffs, I could never be satisfied with a band that just finds one good riff and hammers on it per song (or sometimes per record). It felt dumb, to me, one-sided. This is the process of one's taste being refined.

The one-two sequence that Cirith Ungol milk on the song above is not multi-sided in a conventional sense, it's not soft/loud like a post-grunge pop song, it's not minor/major like a Simon & Garfunkel tune and it sure as hell is not switching it up emotionally, opening up with some contrast in lyrics, singing style or orchestration like a proper composer would.

So it's marginally less dumb that one riff, but yet effective. Effective in a way that I haven't yet described, and I couldn't know how to describe for many years.

I like a riff, but I prefer a small sequence of riffs, oscillating back and forth. What I found I loved even more is a larger sequence of riffs and passages that created a larger structure that seemed to support itself and reach for something higher. The one song that explains this best, for me, as a huge Fates Warning appreciator, is The Apparition. Have a listen if you're not that familiar with the song:





Much can - and should - be written about the beauty of this song, but I don't want to wax poetic about Fates Warning right now. Just pay attention to the structure of this song. It has its verse-chorus structure, although with an extended intro, but it does settle in a 'rock song' format for some time. Then it has an adventurous middle section where the music, spurred by the culmination of the lyrical theme, takes over in a series of less riff-based and more movement-based sequences. Then, once the point is made, the original form of verse/chorus is reprised for the ending.

This is a very common rock songwriting formula, but no rock subgenre loved it more than Heavy Metal. Though I first took notice of it with Fates Warning, it is by much more well-known and celebrated bands that it was established. Case in point:


(though here, without a reprise of the main themes at the end)




(here completely - and perfectly - reprised)


God, I have such a hard-on right now. I am expending sizable effort not to veer this article right off of the Judas-Priest-Are-Better-Than-You cliff. I'm trying to make a point. Let me just calm down a little bit.



Black Sabbath and Judas Priest are what Fates Warning are made out of, nobody would disagree.

Most of Heavy Metal is made out of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest.

This is made out of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest too:





Led Zeppelin also did this shtick all the time. Rip off an old blues song, stick a weird part in the middle.

I like a riff. I like a couple of riffs. But I love a weird middle part. But why? What is it about a weird middle part that strengthens the whole?

I have my theories, and by following their natural conclusions to their logical endpoints, I came full-circle in re-understanding the dumb building block of all of this, the singular riff as well.

This is where this gets a bit complicated.

Heavy Metal is misunderstood, by outsiders but by its proponents as well. It wants to present itself as if it has figured itself out. It wants to be masculine, linear, to just pummel listeners with riff after riff. And it has achieved its desire to be viewed in this simple-minded fashion. This is, now, the popular conception of extreme metal. Just an endless circle of blast beats, ripping solos, machine-gun riffs and growly manbears.

But Heavy Metal is confused and in its confusion lies its power. I've written a lot on this blog about how Heavy Metal is weird and how the weirdness shows more in the 70s to 90s than in does in the last two decades, be it because of inexperience, lack of funds, silly recording techniques, but also sometimes due to clarity of vision.

Mercyful Fate didn't have a lot of money and their first record does sound underproduced. But nobody held a gun to King Diamond's head to get out like this.

The weirdness in Heavy Metal is close to its soul. Don't trust Heavy Metal that isn't weird. Though its pretending to be tough, masculine, old, hell, beyond old, eternal. It's also a weird lonely teenager trying to figure shit out.

When you pick up a guitar and you're a weird kid, you're going to play some weird shit. You're going to play some nice shit as well (hopefully), but you're bound to come up with off-the-wall noises that other people, pretending to be normal, wanting to fit in normal society, would quickly discard and hone on the material that does sound good in any context.

The Heavy Metal music I like thrived on collecting the weird material and juxtaposing it with more normal riffs and sequences, because although it didn't have a direct, academic language for it, what it was really trying to do was to create ambiguous moral spaces where ugly and beauty could meet, a dim-lit mindspace where such a dialogue could happen and there is no light, no god and no parent that can step in and say it's wrong.

That 'symphonic' quality of middle sections of Heavy Metal music that I extolled above with the Priest and Helloween and other examples is not symphonic in a classical music sense and it's such a tragedy to let whatever half-baked neoclassical aspirations the Heavy Metal mutants might have had obfuscate a much more useful reading of what was going on. Instead what's attempted - I not only theorize but practice myself in my own music - is a creation of compositional ambiguity and in turn a space for internal, ontological and moral exploration.

Great Heavy Metal takes off in the sense that it 'goes inside'. The journey appears to take lift, but instead ingresses. Voivod would play weird shit not just because it sounded weird, but because it created a space were their own weirdness could be considered alright, not even just that, but good. Needed. Wanted.

In the same sense, the weird middle part in Heavy Metal I feel upsets the concise masculine roleplay of the rock song, it creates a discussion between its phallogocentric rigidity and much less clear-cut concepts. The balance of these elements ends up not just describing the long structure of a song (verse, chorus, weird shit in the middle, verse, chorus) but also - and here's the kicker - the relationship of the inner parts of a good riff with themselves.

Go back and listen to the very first riff on display, here, Death's Crystal Mountain. Have you ever wondered why the composer of that riff doesn't just repeat the first bars of it over and over, but instead provides a second coda to the very same riff, bouncing them off of each other, A-B-A-B? That riff has its own 'weird middle part' written inside of it. And it's quite fruity, if you don't mind me saying. Surely the first bars of the riff are more punishing on their own..... aaaaand endlessly they've been reproduced, on their own, by other bands that are trying to fool you by saying that's what metal is.

So look at it from micro to macro, as a fractalized desire to set and then upset an expectation. This is what I find the most beautiful in Heavy Metal, and it accurately describes which albums and songs I enjoy and the reason I usually do not enjoy the other albums and songs out there that are still categorized as some sort of Heavy Metal music. I either haven't come to find and appreciate how they upset their own set-up, from every micro-riff element up to the overall construct of the song, or they simply do not do this at all and there's nothing there for me to find.

If a song is making a single statement (let's go with "THIS IS EXTREME"), then this is a declaration. A declaration is short and violent, and if it's drawn out it just becomes normalized, it fights itself, a loud continuous noise eventually fades into the background.

If, instead, a song is having a conversation with itself and the composer is on that sweet spot where they don't really know what they're doing in a traditional sense but they've fashioned their own makeshift musical language in order to have this conversation, what you're left is with a mainstream statement, and various points of compositional derivation, dissension and discourse all encapsulated from building block (riff) to structure (song).

This is difficult to do and exactly because it's not done perfectly, it's vague. The vagueness is a feature. Much like listening to the neighbours having a spirited quarrel through an apartment wall that may or may not end up with reconciliation sex, you can't make up every single statement and how it follows the others, you can only get tone of voice, a few words here and there, silences. It's so alluring that we end up filling the blanks, and creating a narrative to make it all make sense.







As an exercise, link me to metal music that has this internal ambiguity, especially if it's created by set-upset not only of riffs in themselves but by larger compositional choices.

Let's Try to Understand Progressive Metal, Part 26.5

Hello! I have less time these days so let's get to it right fast.

Listen to this a few times.


Lemur voice were a progressive metal band from the Netherlands, quite late to a very uncomfortable, girls over there/boys over here and nobody's dancing party. They released their debut in 1996, well after Dream Theater had already achieved massive success with their sophomore effort "Images and Words" and instructed the B-list of how to play modern prog. Another influence here is Psychotic Waltz, yet it will not be obvious unless you're very familiar and I put it into your head that some of their stuff is in here, deep inside. Possibly, Watchtower's density might also be an inspiration, but that could be cycled through Dream Theater for all I know. Let's not get into history and genealogy too much. Instead, we will look at the form of this music and what it's attempting to achieve.

Before we even get to the lyric, we are treated with an instrumental section that wants to communicate a few things to the listener. Try to put yourself in a 1996 mood, here, if you were alive and sentient at the time. Or even if not, can you imagine a time before you were alive? Have you ever felt nostalgia towards events that never occurred?

We open with keyboards, and not just a synth wash, but the main melodic phrase of the song. A lot of people would tune off at exactly this point, because Heavy Metal and Keyboards, you know. Those that do stay, have been self-selected as progressive metal listeners of some stripe. This is important, because back in 1996 people believed in progressive metal, and there was such a thing as the progressive metal snob that thought other forms of metal were outmoded and this is the vital voice now, a busy keyboard salvo in your face meant you were part of the club. There is very little accommodation for a death metal or thrash listener, here. Perhaps (and that's a big 'perhaps') an unsteady bridge exists between this music and what was called "atmospheric metal" by the euro press at the time. I leave this door open because that's how I went through the other way around (from power and progressive towards extreme metal) so, surely going the right way through a door would also work?

Anyway, you're in the progressive metal ponytail club now. What's this place about? Well, complications.

Literally, it's about being complex. Right after the keyboards, we get slashing distorted guitars and drums in unison, in a syncopated pattern. The keyboard part is in 7, and the slashes are on the up-beat, down-beat, up-beat, they do their little cadence into the song proper. What does this mean?

Again, this means you are not listening to thrash (or even techno-thrash) anymore. This guitar technique comes from there (playing a lead theme and then having the rhythm cut through towards the verse) but it's mutated, it's altered, it's at once softened by lead keyboards and it's made even more complicated because that's compensation for the aggression of thrash that's lost. Progressive metal can be seen as an enduring effort to tell a different story using macho heavy metal methods, and at the same time trying to retain its aggressive, macho essence by introducing even more density and virtuosity on top. There's tension here.

The intro rhythm slash would take 2 bars in an Exodus song, here it takes double because... compensation. You might have expected the verse part to be double-time (if you're thinking in 1996 terms and you're coming off of thrash and death metal) but instead you get harmonic chords and omitted rhythm in between, at a leisurely pace. This sounds like - you guessed it (or did you?) - Rush. And therefore like Dream Theater of the same era.

Another staple of the time is that this is trying, somehow, to groove. This is another masculine compensation introduced by Dream Theater on their second record, by way of incorporating half-thrash riffs a lá Pantera. Nearly all of the contemporaneous progressive metal scene listened. They started stripping down the more aggressive thrash riffs into half-thrash grooves because 1. this allowed the music to breathe so you can put more keyboards and vocal melodies on top and 2. it retained some sense of 'metallicness', but not too much, friends, can't headbang with glasses on.

Speaking of vocal melodies, this is where Gregoor van der Loo, makes his entrance. Let's examine the first verse and chorus.


Gusts of color, senses of energy enter the realm of intuition. 
The question of validity is rhetorical in presence of Nature's purity 
A child's honesty, strength through vulnerability 
Yet feel the overwhelming beauty of intuition 

By concentrating on positive energy flows 
That emerge in your aura 
Stop confining yourself, open up 
Stop confining yourself, open up


The delivery is not at all aggressive, nor is it attempting some high lyrical drama. It's actually a bit flat, emotionless, though technically sound for the most part. The vocal lines are quirky, they're unexpected, off the wall. That's the Psychotic Waltz influence, I theorize. Keeping yourself in a 1996 frame of mind, consider that the first three words this record has uttered to you have been "Gusts of color". Can you remember any Heavy Metal before 1995 or so opening up like this?

The New Age vibe continues. "The question of validity is rhetorical in presence of Nature's purity" takes a bit of decoding, as a philosophical statement. If it is a moral issue, as in, valid means morally correct, then Lemur Voice are making a naturalist assertion that there is no right and wrong when we look at (and presumably follow) natural order. This natural order is further described as spiritual, not biodeterministic. It's useful to note that although this New Age thing is new to metal at the time, it is still a conservative position, politically. When people make claims of self-evidency of knowledge (or "common sense"), of a return to an imagined state of purity and Nature, they're still well within the right-hand of the political realm. This is in keeping with the history of Heavy Metal where even Rush (a very occasionally metallic band, really) were ardent objectivists and individualists in their message, never socialist.

The symbol of a child being powerless but having oneness, the overwhelming beauty of intuition. This is what this song is about. Not thinking but instead, being. The second verse is about meditation, opening up. Again, keep in a 1996 presence of mind. You just bought a compact disk from some foreign mail-order service, that looks like this:

The structure may be ruined, but here come the well-dressed progressive metal brigades to renovate!

Whose group photo is this:

The singer's beauty fits his performance. Formal, distant, serene.

And they're talking to you about meditation over Pantera riffs.

The important thing here is what they're doing, musically, while they're talking about mediation. This cerebral, very orchestrated and complex interplay is happening between every instrument on almost every bar, and yet the singer, in a dispassionate, floating voice, is talking to you about opening up your energy.

Is the music off-message? Is this contrast destructive, or constructive for this sort of music? Is the libidinal tension between the remnants of thrash in the music, the masculine performance of virtuosity (any virtuosity, really) and the conceit of spirituality adding or subtracting from this? In your answer to this question, you know where you stand towards progressive metal. The choices of reply to this challenge can be the following:

• You understand the tensions and welcome them. Again, keep in a 1996 frame of mind. You think this is the future of the form and finally Heavy Metal has something new to offer (in a modernist sense), and hopefully to a larger section of people than angsty teenagers. Perhaps stale musings on meditation come first, and then something more radical? You are a tragic figure because you were in the tiniest minority of listeners, and history proved you wrong.

• You understand the tensions, but you are willingly choosing to frame how you listen to this music in an old-Heavy Metal way, by focusing on the density and technicality and the masculinity that's left in there and overcompensated for, so as to pretend this is, like, ripping, man. LISTEN TO THAT SOLO, DUDE! You see the higher conceit as yet another bullet-point of superiority for progressive metal, but you don't access what it means. You are a poser, and you're also in the majority of progressive metal fans, both in 1996 and today.

• You misunderstand the music and do as above, yet not willingly, just because you lack the tools to access what's going on.You are not a poser, you just listen to progressive metal for half of what it is because that's as far as you can get with it. Possibly because you were there when this stuff was happening and that's what was new and you were in the scene. Your interest will be passing. Even if you loudly proclaim your interest is still all there, you are instead performing it to keep in touch with your 1996 self.

• You doing like any of this emasculating energy and aura talk one bit. Back to anti-modernism, dragons and visions of the holocaust for you.

A revealing point in the music, and actually the most beautiful thing in this song for me is in the chorus, when Lemur Voice say "feel the overwhelming beauty of intuition", there's a series of major chords that end on a dramatic minor when "intuition" is uttered. By some conspiracy of the unrelated fact that this band is not natively singing in English, they pronounce the word as "intrusion" instead. The effect is very noticeable because intrusion fits the musical cadence better (3 syllables). Think about "(happy)The overwhelming beauty of (sinister) Intrusion" for a moment. That little Freudian slip perfectly encapsulates the accidental strength of progressive metal (especially in the many B-lister bands from all around the world that were inspired by Fates Warning, Queensryche and Dream Theater) in that they were trying to serve a high concept they were ill-equipped to tackle and possibly misunderstood themselves. Beautiful ambiguity and un-comfort results. That is the legacy of progressive metal and that's where it historically is indeed tied into the grander heavy metal scheme. Anything beautiful that happened in this genre happened in a moment of Icarus-like hybris. Someone a bit stupid or ill-informed tried to write a grand symphony with drums, guitar, bass and now obviously very 90's sounding synths. The scenes have long since disintegrated, but the art remains eternally.

Note that on the reprise of the major -> minor chorus, what falls in place of intuition/intrusion is instead the lyric of "open up", and there is no minor shift, instead there is a playful scale by the vocalist, which is on-message for what opening up would entail for a metalhead. I can see the furious leather and denim clad hordes saying ".........nope" right there, I love it.

So,

True appreciation of faith
Openness without fear
Devotion  from the heart
And crystal clear consciousness

Can you dig it? In the mid 90's, that's what we were looking at as the future of Heavy Metal, all the while, the raging maelstrom of machismo, anti-modern, nationalist, neo-romantic alienation of black metal was exploding sensuously over yellowed newspaper front-pages. Could you guess in 1996 which role would be assigned to heavy metal for the next 15 years or so? Would it be talk of auras and openness, or would it be the Sturm und Drang of an imagined third world war? Hmmm....

What's Heavy Metal still around for?

Retro-thrash, True Death Metal,  NWOBHM worship, so much god-darned black metal. For every record that you ever loved, that ever sounded vital and important to you there are now 20 clone bands that will play the same thing, dress it up in the same way and perform and produce it better. To match your expectations, no, to match your inflated recollection of how it sounded at the time. Yet, curiously empty a feeling when the music is actually played.

I finally get it. The reason these bands exist is not to cynically make money or to be famous or to get respect by their peers or anything like that (well, not primarily, at least). The reason these bands exist is because they're trying to protect metal music. They're trying to protect a tender part inside of them that resonates to it. A youthful, teen-aged part of themselves. From Watain to Municipal Waste, there's no more perfect way to explain why they're here. It's not to overcome the past or to take a tangential path outside of it for its own sake. They're here to protect a memory.

The access point of memory is in performance. To be more exact, if memory is an internal process - the reminiscing or recollecting of something - the externalization of the forces that are triggered by that memory must be a gesture, a movement, a symbolic action, in order to awaken a similar memory in others. Heavy Metal people lack the tools to make this performance radical and it is only due to their youth and the cultural zeitgeist that they ever did anything radical back in the '80s and '90s. This is clear, aside from the experience with the thing-in-itself, also from countless interviews where famed metal musicians exhibit a startling intellectual and spiritual vacuousness. Were these people really the ones making these amazing records? No. It was the time and place conspiring just as much as any one person's talent that made these records.

Ingrained in the tradition of Heavy Metal as we understand it now are none of the political or philosophical tools required to overcome the power of history itself, as nobody put them in there. The era is passed and without it the necessary analytical tools to re-contextualize the inherent pathos and rebellion of Heavy Metal are gone. Heavy Metal is now ingrained in culture as something eternal. Isn't that what we always wanted? Well... eternity's getting pretty old, you know? Olddd. It has a lawn and a mortgage.

It's a bitter thing that progressive metal, the closest we ever got to iconoclasm, is now normalized as just one more evolutionary path in the great benevolent tree of Heavy Metal where all genres like each other and the savvy metalhead picks their favorite fruit from any equal branch.

So, a performance to protect something tender inside the soul of a lonely person. The way to protect is by shielding the perimeter. Take a music that is inherently contradictory, sometimes ambiguous, vague, sometimes outright nonsensical and surgically remove all these aspects to its form and content, leave only the strong, the firm, the muscular tone, the terror of its texture. I dare you: nearly every record you love from the classic Heavy Metal pantheon has something to it that you would get embarrassed about. Tinny production. Off-key vocals. Bad drumming. Nasty solos. Idiotic cover. Questionable lyrics. Awful outfits.

New Heavy Metal music has been made robust, it has been made something to be proud of only in retrospect, only via retconning. The masculine performance that we desired our teenage years to have been, now magically is here. We can pretend that's how it always was. It's Kenn Nardi overcompressing the hell out of a weird record that was of a place and time. Of course that's how it always was, otherwise we must have been confused teenagers lost in ourselves, clutching at something, anything in the darkness sharp enough to carve a hole in our chest.

Romance is a black stone. It sits at the bottom of the mirror pool. A lying reflection of the moon that many a beautiful (and some not so much) youth followed to their drowned end. Strike the stone and blood will pour out, a river of blood that streams forever. That red mistress demands one thing of youth: "Destroy yourself, so that you may live forever".


Tall order! We can't do that! We hear the call. We're not 30, 40, 50 years old. We remember the call. But we can't do that. So we will hide this wound that will not close, we will build walls just as endless, dams infinitely big to hold the blood within. Nobody will get to our hearts if these walls are just perfect.

So, here's to occult black metal. Here's  to Incantation-clones up the wazoo. Here's to a million thrash bands playing the Exodus riff. Here's to more tenor power metal that any stomach could stomach. Here's to a million doom bands playing the same morose pentatonic riff. No weirdness. No nonsense. No ambiguity. No answer to the unanswerable question. No hubris. No exit. No point.

Modern Heavy Metal is here to make us feel better.

Masculinty, Inhumanity

I've noticed over the years of participation in the Heavy Metal subculture that there is an implicit consensus by fans on bands that may been once considered Heavy Metal but have over the years lost this status. They're usually relegated to the bargain bin of 'rock history', whatever that may mean, and though the more historically minded proponents of the scene may pay them lip service as forefathers (choice of term very intentional), it's understood that a modern metalhead would not think of them as hard or heavy enough to qualify as metal.

Of course there are those who wholeheartedly embrace the 'weak' Heavy Metal of yesteryear because they do not only like it for what it is but also enjoy being contrary to the mainstream assumption of metalness. If there's one thing that the Heavy Metal mistress demands - aside from a metaphysical holocaust or two - it is that potential suitors be petulant teenagers at the perpetual cusp of a rebellion that is not just without-a-cause but without-an-effect as well. No other rebellious symbol would best do the job that debating the is-it-or-is-it-not of metal itself. Useless.

But for the sake of clarity, let's not discuss this contrarian obligation of metalheads now. It's a subject for a different article altogether. Let's instead assume that the internal debate over the metalness of the rock bands of the past is a surface activity that has different goals than to actually ascertain such metalness; Let's take it for granted that all sides of the ongoing debate really in the end know and agree that these old rock bands are indeed no longer metal bands in the eyes of the new. They just like to disagree.

Case in point: Rush.

Rush are an interesting band because they were late to both the Heavy Metal party and the Progressive Rock party and though they straddle an uncomfortable place in the middle, they're wholly an entity into themselves (or so became in time, at least). People that love Rush might not love Heavy Metal. Or they might not love Progressive Rock. But they must certainly love one of the two. In this way, Rush are a bridge between two strands of rock music that share certain aesthetic assumptions but are divorced by very real ones as well.

Our particular interest in Rush here is this: from the vantage of a mid-'70s metalhead, Rush would very much be considered a Heavy Metal band. For the modern metalhead, Rush cannot anymore be considered such.

The argument that is often made on this subject is that the standards have shifted in sound production & design, so anything that doesn't have enough distortion, double bass, screaming, wild solos or whatever else is no longer metal. This argument rests on an erroneous assumption that dead-ends the discourse: that these shifts in standards come about naturally, as if Heavy Metal is an organism that evolves towards a best state for survival in its environment and that's that.

This is not only false within the normative boundaries metalheads like to discuss their culture and music (see the vapid Metal: A Headbanger's Journey for more of this anthropology-for-idiots approach - or don't) but it is, more importantly, specifically designed an approach so as to not touch on the forces that actually do shape culture.

I will posit here that the prime activator of movement in what is considered heavy and metal enough is the heteronormative concept of masculinity. Let's consider again, Rush in this light.

Rush have very high, falsetto vocals with a very rapid vibrato. Geddy Lee looked up to Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin, whom also often sang in a high fashion. Robert Plant was considered a very masculine rock n' roll icon and enjoyed great success with female fans. However in the '70s rock and glam context, a degree of androgyny was manufactured as a further staple of male sexual prowess. Latent homoeroticism (and not necessarily homosexuality) was seen as a further boundary of exploration of the male libido. Surely, a 'rock god' would embody Otherness, would shapeshift according to desire. Desire, in the '70s was a inner and outer cosmic exploration, after all.

For Geddy Lee, I am certain Robert Plant was a sexual God in the same way that it was for any of their hundred thousand female, heterosexual groupies. I do not think for a second that Geddy Lee thought "gosh, Robert's singing pretty high in this, I would tone it down if I were him, I wouldn't want to be considered a fag or anything".

Yet, Robert Plant vis a vis Geddy Lee becomes a different thing. The rapid falsetto gives him an edge of hysteria, his vocal phrasing and - of course - the libertarian lyrics he was to sing, as penned by drummer Neil Pert, gave him a decidedly non-sexual tint. Not even that, Rush sounds decidedly hostile to sexuality. Robert Plant would coo and moan his way through your back door whereas Geddy Lee would be the guy with the clipboard politely but insistently knocking on your front door because he just had to let you know.

The audience of Rush mirrors this psychodynamic archetype. Lonely nerds as much into D&D and sci-fi as they were wary of girls. They would be into Heavy Metal exactly because of the homoerotic tension therein that subliminally conveyed that the dignity and strength required to go on an ingressive journey must necessarily be gathered by sublimating the libido. Robert Plant would writhe around his microphone, semi-erect in his tight pants and occasionally touch the godhead due to natural grace - but his raison d'etre was always to capture the attention of female fans. For Rush, there was nothing natural about Rush. No grace and no groupies. There was only effort, concentration, structure. They did not want to catch a sideways glimpse of the divine by fortuitous accident, engrossed in the dionysian splendour of rock n' roll excess. No. They wanted to build a bridge there. A Tower.

You can traverse a bridge and you can climb a tower, if you're strong enough. And the tower will not collapse. The bridge will hold you as long as you believe it can hold you. The carnival of rock n' roll excess provides no such stability.

Rush are nerdy like a Heavy Metal band. Rush are strong like a Heavy Metal band. Rush are lonely. Just like you.




But Rush are no longer considered a Heavy Metal band. Why? Vocals too high. Not enough distortion. Not enough riffs. Look at a solution an ironic fan came up with, it's very illuminating:





Rush slowed down, pitched down. Everything slower, harder, more masculine. Now, Rush can be a Heavy Metal band again. through this revisionist lens.

Why did this happen, and for what reason? Before we continue, I ask you to listen to the real Working Man if you haven't. The contrast is very startling. Can you take '70s Rush seriously, just this second, just this very moment right after you've heard the grown-up Rush, with hairs on their balls and the swagger required to take their time?

I believe this current concept of what Heavy Metal must be comes from the cultural shift from the '70s to the '80s and beyond and is very much connected with that Heavy Metal survived shifts in trends in the music industry exactly by fantasizing about its own metalness and fashioning a guide for it to remain inalienable. And I believe that the "Heavy Metal guidebook" is very much concerned with heternormative masculinity.

In a previous article I briefly explored sexism in Heavy Metal, exclaiming some suspicion as to why a culture built on individuality and rebellion towards authority would buy into the heteronormative concept of masculinity and femininity so completely wholesale. How could music that proclaimed it was all about providing and celebrating the tools for any one human being to find their own way through the epistemological haze by pure willpower would append to that glorious premise in tiny print "if you're a guy and no homo, though...".

Looking at the culture shift in the mid'80s in Heavy Metal for the answer. The Grand Narrative that metaldom devised can be found in the moment (or series of moments) where glam metal and thrash metal were trying to find market footing as dialectic entities in the Regan/Thatcher era. At the moment where metalhead would look upon another metalhead (a mirror to themselves) to see if there were any chips on their armor, if they enjoyed any of these power ballads, if they thought girly makeup would get them girls, then they weren't true enough.

There is no truth or false in an aesthetic concept. So 'true' in Heavy Metal terms must not be about aesthetics in themselves, it must be about an ethical axiom that the aesthetics either support or betray. I posit that any concept of 'true metal', is inquiring as to its affirmation of a gendered stereotype of masculinity. Either you are a man, strong, determined and alone, or you're a woman, weak, dependent on a group and willing to follow orders. There's good and there's evil, and there's no in-between. Heavy Metal is conservative in values and that's the only throughline that goes from the '70s to today. It could be said that it's why it survived the '80s at all and why it had such a difficult time in the '90s.

The conservative metal '80s built on this foundation of masculinity in metal. Every year metal must now become harder, deeper, more machine-like, more blatant and more direct to be understood as 'true'. In this constant push-pull of structure, a band might become overtechnical and then be considered false because they're no longer direct enough. Or they may become too clean-sounding and considered false for not being savage and filthy enough. Or they may become so fast and hard they're no longer considered coherent enough. As with any concept of masculinity, it's a tall order that nobody can adhere to for long. Every band that is trying to prove their trueness is therefore destined to fail - because the fantasy of masculinity is built on the very real failure to be masculine. Heavy Metal bands that are considering themselves as this in the modern context will either have to stop being Heavy Metal bands to do any self-examination on the issue of masculinity, or they will embark on this priapic journey of being ever-more-true every time they play, record or release anything, with always diminishing returns.

What is the end-game, here? Well, this can be seen, historically, that it is death. The outmost request of the mistress is, after all, holocaust. Mars, the god of war, masturbating in rage cuts off his own penis and testicles and bleeds a long river of decay. Beautiful flowers bloom in the carnage, irony irony, such is life, oh well. Heavy Metal reached every peak of masculine terror it could, with all its various shapes of brutal death metal, cavernous cacophonies of black metal and such. And now the godhead has hardened into a gigantic fossil for all its progeny to look up to and feel inferior to its inches. New bands are putting on their museum of natural history freakshows, reprising past glories or incestuously mixing and matching and pretending they're making something 'new'.

As long as Heavy Metal holds inside it a certain stereotype of strength, based on whiteness, heterosexuality and right-wing, libertarian politics, it will never create anything 'new'. 'New' cannot even be a concept within that stagnant epistemology. There is no history, there is no change, all there is is power. Borrowed power, look up to your elders with respect. Pitch them down and slow them down if you have to, because now you're grown up and your own tenor matches that of your father, so what is there to elevate them as patriarchs? If there is nothing, we must surely invent something. Can we put double-bass under Rush's Working Man? Can we put a more screaming solo? Perhaps some death growls? Let's do that in 2020 and commend ourselves for keeping Heavy Metal alive and well.


In that bleak picture let me daub aimlessly with the garish brush of hope, if you don't mind. I do mind, I loathe it, but I must say that throughout the late '80s, all of the '90s' and some of the '00s, artists in the genre were trying to find a way out of this conundrum, even if they didn't actively think of it in the terms I am presenting here. They were trying to break out of the masculine stereotype, so to speak. The types of music they created were canonically weird and because they were confused they often sent mixed messages about it all. Look at Norwegian black metal, with its vague ambiguous musical landscapes, its reverberating witchy vocals in full hysteria - this cannot be said to be the masculine path that death metal took. Yet, very much invested in being considered Heavy Metal studs, the artists in that scene overcompensated for the queerness of their music by making loud statements in the press about their sexual prowess, about their hatred of women and so on.

Better fared certain artists of the progressive metal genre whom retained vestigial characteristics of masculine metal in their instrumentation and approach but consciously tried to tackle modernist topics in their lyrics and with a vocal approach altogether divorced from the usual rigidness. But in total '90s fashion, this ambiguity could not a tower hold, so the best of these artists escaped the Heavy Metal trajectory completely, only recently returning with their tired reunions and live shows showcasing a record they made when they were 19 in its entirety, for goodness' sake.

Of course these outliers will in the future be considered not-metal-enough, if they're not already. Do Mayfair register at all as a Heavy Metal band to listeners in 2013? Do Dornenreich count as a viable solution outside of 'trueness'? Or have we constructed enough language as metalheads to pretend that the grand evolutionary tree of Heavy Metal has branches that are alive and ones that are dead and the selection that chooses which is which is natural and faceless and not subject to market and culture forces?

English as a Second Language, Heavy Metal as the First

This is an article in defense of the often awkward language used in lyrics by a great number of Heavy Metal bands that were not native speakers.

Does such a defense need to exist? Yes for two reasons: one is apparent. Heavy Metal is often assaulted on grounds of aesthetic or lyrical frivolity. People say that metal bands sing about escapist bullshit, dragons and rainbows and whatever, and they don't even do a good job of it because those topics have been covered eloquently in romantic and gothic tradition for hundreds of years. Parts of that statement are correct.

The other reason such a defense is needed is because when people try to deflect the above criticism, they do it by providing examples of Heavy Metal lyrics that they think would stand up as poetry. The results are often hilarious because in most cases they do not and the only one that can't see this is is the metalhead that hasn't really read much poetry. Such congratulatory self-defeat ("I am bleeding, making me the victor") is endemic in Heavy Metal circles, so here's a different way to approach the subject.

Bad Heavy Metal lyric and good Heavy Metal lyric best are both approached through Heavy Metal, not outside of it. This might seem like an obtuse statement, so let's illuminate it a little with a few examples of great lyrics by foreigners, speaking through Heavy Metal as their first language:

The buildings are made of gold
The sun shines bright
Out of a blue, a clear blue sky

The streets are clean
The people laugh
The animal are free

No hate - noone cries
No industry polluts the water
The sea is filled with movement and life

No more distrust
No more disgust
And no more war

Peace forevermore
The goverments scrap all the useless weapons
They are not bribable any longer

Everyone is happy
No more pain

But suddenly it's fading away
I wake up it's 12 o'clock
And I realize: NOTHING HAS CHANGED!


This is literally the writing level of a five year old. Protector were German. What they're communicating here is not something a five year old would try to communicate. They're not a punk band, they're not very smart about what they want to say but they said it anyway.

What is achieved? I ask that we look at the cover of the record, the name of it, and listen to the song while we read these lyrics. On the cover we have some insane looking monstrosity clawing its way through a painting or graph of a skeleton. It's as if the image is violently animated, a concept is made flesh in the shadows. The actual expression of the being is somehow humourous, to me, all wide-eyed with shock. The being, possibly the titular "Urm" in this light, seems fitting to the concept and execution of the above lyric.

Remnants of Protector's rote satanic Heavy Metal past remain on their logo, what with the red pentagram. Protector have nothing satanic to offer on this song (and record, if memory serves). Confused ideology, again is fitting to what they're singing about above.

And finally to the performance itself, Protector's music is so alienating for anyone expecting any type of 'fun' in their thrash metal. The guitar tone is singularly ugly, the composition completely dry, the vocal execution cavernous and very simple, a recitation of words. No flow, no emotion.

And this is exactly why this is such a spectacular success as a song and as a message. Because every aspect of its form supports its content. The content itself is really bereft of a political message, there is absolutely no attempt to contextualize who these 'goverments' are that scrap their weapons are, and whatnot. This is an expression of existential angst in its purest form with the added revolutionary quality that somehow Heavy Metal allows for: there is no resolution to this angst, this angst is all we have. Nothing will ever change.

The context can easily be researched. Protector were German, operating circa 1986 to 1989 (When this particular record came out). The Cold War tensions inherent in that setup are evident, yet there is no retelling in this particular song. Would there be, if Protector could actually articulate themselves in a second language? Probably (check a great many sociopolitical German thrash bands of the time, with Sieges Even being the absolutely most notable on their song "David" off of "Life Cycles"). But that speculation is moot as what we have at hand is exactly this, no less no more.

Those that want to make a case for erudite Heavy Metal lyrics can turn to Sabbat and early Fates Warning and they can attempt to explain how these songs aren't *really* about dragons and escapism. I can do that and might in the future, but for right now, what we need is a defense of Urm the Mad, Urm the Five Year Old, Urm the Child that doesn't understand why the world around them functions on regurgitation of past trauma. Not great poetry? Sure. Great art.


Another example, much better known:

All together now:

Obscured by the sun
Apocalyptic clash
Cities fall in ruin
Why must we die?

Obliteration of mankind
Under a pale grey sky
We shall arise

I did nothing, saw nothing
Terrorist confrontation
Waiting for the end
Wartime conspiracy

I see the world - old
I see the world - dead

Victims of war, 
Seeking some salvation
Last wish, fatality
I've no land, I'm from nowhere
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust

Face the enemy
Manic thoughts
Religious intervention
Problems remain


This faux haiku delivery of the notoriously English-impaired Brazilian thrash/death behemoth, Sepultura, defined the early '90s in what Heavy Metal is, so pay attention. This videoclip is to blame for many of us here thinking Brazil is some post-apocalyptic wasteland in our teenager years. Here in Greece, Sepultura were decidedly the landmark band that shaped what our own country was doing in extreme metal and you could find three-or-less word condemnations of politics and environmental paeans in every second thrash metal demo. Their message survives through language barriers by sheer force of will.

And how can you not love this delivery? OBSCURED BY THE SUN! APOCALYPTIC CLASH! RELIGIOUS INTERVENTION! PROBLEMS REMAIN! This is pretty much life defined. The resolute power of this song would be nowhere near as impactful were the lyrics written by a native speaker. And we have proof of this in "Stronger than Hate", a Sepultura cut from their prior record "Beneath the Remains" with lyrics by Kelly Shaeffer from Atheist.

I shall redeem myself from the clutches
That grasp at my inner self
No tomorrow will ease my oppression
My streak of hate leads my way

Look at me
My feelings turn
Stronger than hate
I can't decide on which way to turn
My choices are few and far between
A lifetime of remorse

There's no place that I've ever been
I stand above their remains
My vengeance I have regained

I don't know what lies on the floor
I won't be locked up anymore
Standing here I've lost all faith
I have no social equality

To live again would be a lie
My life is not worth the pain


Much, much worse, if you ask me. Bring back the Apocalyptic Clash. And you know what the above lyrics by Shaeffer remind me most of? The type of lyrics people bring up when they want to defend how great 'the right' metal lyrics are. Heavy Metal is at its best not when it's underperforming poetry, but when it's elevating its stupidity to the profound. This happens through musical and extra-musical means, this happens with record covers, and band photos, and interviews, and liner notes, and it comes from concentrated listening and the awe brought upon the listener when they do the deed in solitude and outside of normality. When people are looking for great Heavy Metal poetry to defend their hobby to outsiders, they're ripping out a surface text from an experience that is multi-faceted and most importantly, unapologetically unwieldy and crude.

Of course there is smart Heavy Metal, and there's smart Heavy Metal lyric. The aforementioned Sabbat often employ clever wordplay and have a healthy message amongst all the thrashing carnage. And there are also native speakers writing in Heavy Metal bands, after all the world's most important HM bands are American and British. But I think I'm hitting on some truth when I say that we need to recontextualize the 'bad Heavy Metal lyric' and see what it achieves from within that context where it is necessarily for it to be bad. Not a problem to be fixed. It is I believe an error to cherry-pick the few examples of craftsmanship in our genre and fashion a critical shield with them. Instead, demand that the critic experience the context of the dumb lyric to see that they're not really missing out on some profound message that only the initiated can grasp. Heavy Metal is truly often as stupid as it seems. But it is also powerful for it, because that dumb song some Germans over the Iron Curtain came up with? There was tremendous personal sacrifice for them to be able to put it on vinyl in 1989.

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.

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.

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?