Death to the Underground

Death to the Underground/Metal History X

People forget that times moves on, and with it things change. I'm not arguing here for some sense of history as Hegel or Marx saw it, where starting at the point at which humankind gained dominance over nature there has been an evolving course toward some "enlightenment," usually seen as liberal democracy in its various forms. That clearly is error: as time has gone on and we have distanced ourselves from nature, we have become more addicted to false symbolism and less in touch with the truth, which makes for a euphemistic existence: we are denying the negative aspects of life with polite social talking, and doing nothing to make those parts of life which are glorious, better (except for technology and money, of course, as these are the easiest forms of tangible power to comprehend).

Some background to metal, for those who don't want to read our history document, or do the research themselves. Rock music combined Celtic and African and Middle Eastern forms of music into a framework based around European popular music, including the instruments and arrangements developed in Germany and Spain. Rock, however, was the first form of music that did not originate in a specific culture but in the culture of money, and was marketed aggressively as something new although all of its elements existed previously. Because of this dichotomy, something needed to be created that would give rock a unique cachet and elite marketing power, and this was soon found: rebellion. Portrayed as the music of society's dispossessed, whose pains and Christlike suffering was more extreme than those of normal working people, and therefore more "real" because according to Christian dogma, those who suffer for something they believe in are better prophets, rock music soon dominated the airwaves because of the ease of its production and sales.

Let's look at this objectively. Classical music, or even polkas, required highly-trained musicians with expensive instruments to produce unique melodies and arrangements. Rock requires four people with cheap stringed instruments and drums to make recombinant variations on the three-chord popular music familiar to us all, and, more importantly, to find a new way of giving themselves a Christlike image as bearers of truth. They don't need to have much training, nor do they need to know much about anything other than basic musical skills and social image, with which they will achieve said prophetic status. When John Lennon said, "The Beatles are bigger than Jesus Christ," what he meant was "the Beatles are the newest Jesus in a long line of them since Europe converted to Christianity."

Rock continued on this evangelical course from the early 1950s to the 1960s, when it finally had "social issues" worth fighting over, namely the American desire to convert unchristianized Vietnamese into ideological servants of liberal democracy, capitalism and all other things that empower the individual as an agent separate from the process of nature (we'll get to the disastrous conclusions of liberal democracy later). This and a desire to lift up the suffering and weak and discriminated against, known as the "Civil Rights Struggle," obsessed Americans; few had any psychological and philosophical training, and thus almost no one noticed that these "hippies" and "beatniks" were demanding a more absolute, more extreme form of the Christian dogma that had influenced both European emigrant culture and the post-Renaissance style thinking that created liberal democracy in the United States.

Somewhere at the very height of this, dissident voices emerged. Both were so schooled in the dogma from which they were breaking away that they never achieved terminal velocity, and thus were absorbed, but that for which they aimed took a life of its own and continued (for a while) to differentiate itself. Both movements interestingly enough rose from the same origins, namely the desire of certain English rock bands to get more primal, more basic and less conventional, using as the philosophical key to these changes their own desire to tear down a society they saw as full of itself and in its pretense, overlooking basic paradoxes of its logic. These bands specialized in using loud power chords in groups of three or fewer per song accompanied by rage-induced neo-tribal percussion. Everything about these bands screamed a rejection of current values and a desire to return to the primitive, before belief and before socialization. While the bands in question never managed to leave the rock framework or even the ideologies that produced it, they did spawn two new movements in the late 1960s, punk rock and heavy metal.

Punk we'll return to later; heavy metal is the focus of this essay as it was the first truly apocalyptic sound perfected by mainstream musicians. In the history of the amplified instrument, few had thought to explore the properties of deliberately "broken" sound, nor had many looked into the idea of using long strings of power chords to direct songs toward a resonantly bass-intense, dark and foreboding conclusion. Black Sabbath arguably kicked off the metal movement, but they were aided by fellow neo-apocalypts Led Zeppelin, whose songs like those of Black Sabbath were heavily in the Romantic/Gothic tradition, focusing on the purity of the ancient, the mystical world including the occult (occult meaning "those spiritual systems which embrace both good and evil as necessary"), and of course, personal termination - death - and the doom which seemed to be awaiting society at every turn, especially as its newfound nuclear power turned into a stalemate between two great superpowers of varying degrees of absolutist liberalism.

Black Sabbath as people wavered in their beliefs, and never made a clear statement in language, but their music and its topics spoke for themselves. One excellent example is their hit song "War Pigs," which starts as a sloppy political indictment of the time, but ends with society being dragged into constant war and "Satan laughing spreads his wings" - the triumph of evil, the end of the world as we know it, and even more, self-destruction: our inability to outwit Satan leads to him laughing as we destroy ourselves by our own hands. Lacking exit velocity, Black Sabbath became absorbed into rock, and by the late 1970s were a laughable mimick of Led Zeppelin, whose superior instrumental skill outshined the Sabbath boys and made them outsell the other dark English band. To this day one has to admire the sophistication of Led Zeppelin, who, perhaps knowing they could not be fully apocalyptic, settled for merely being another loud British guitar band, except with an occult and doom-predictive message in some of their songs. Thus they avoided being typecast, and were able to maintain flexibility longer than Sabbath while refusing to retreat from the mainstream into true alienation, instead staying in touch with the ongoing reality and having less of an image to fulfill. (Black Sabbath instead chose to wash up on drugs and hard living, like Jim Morrison before them, in trying to be "extreme.")

Morrison followed the musical phenomenon of the Beatles and was an example of the tendency of rock music to explore more extreme areas, in part driven by the Christlike image of the rock'n'roll or blues singer as a person whose suffering gives them great insight and prophetic wisdom. When John Lennon and Paul McCartney started out, their goal was to become the largest pop band possible so that they could avoid the continuing near-poverty of lower middle-class existence in the United Kingdom at the time. After conquering that prospect, they were faced with a new kind of job, that of being a public icon and making the expected pronouncements including, of course, a certain neo-prophetic wisdom through exclusion, an "outsider art" perspective on society which assumes that, by suffering and not being a recipient of the positive aspects of a civilization, an outsider who has felt pain over its failings can more accurately talk about where society fails in the "deep" and "profound" ways, usually involving the commonality of human experience, a trait shared by both egalitarianism and morality. While rock musicians of the day attempted to be as immoral as possible, even flirting with the occult as did both Morrison and Led Zeppelin, or Eastern religions as did the Beatles, the main consequences of their excess and "unique" posturing was to centralize the strength of morality and other "poignant deep thoughts" as expressed by the entertainment industry and absorbed by millions of teenagers who, stranded in the lifeless utilitarianism of the suburbs, were desperate for any venue around the inevitable acceptance of society and therefore, their absorption by its value system. Where Jesus Christ was a hero for allowing himself to be killed to prove a point, Morrison was an anti-hero who proved a point by his own misery, killing himself slowly with overabundant chemical use as if to underscore the futility of resistance in his time; there were no new answers, so have a great personal experience, mainly by being wasted, and check out young, went the sum total of the philosophy he managed to express. While he, like the heavy metal bands who followed him, often cited Nietzsche and understood much of Nietzsche's thought, he did not come to understand how un-Nietzschean it was to become a public moral figure, even if by inverting those morals proving their rule (it's safer to be a sheep and not die young like Mr. Mojo Risin). When metal arose, it took this cult of armageddon and self-destruction under its wing, and nurtured it into something even more powerful.l

This cult of apocalyptic music, from the Doors to Link Wray to Dick Dale to the Who, often approximated a siren as its basic metaphor. Doom is approaching; create something disturbing in response, as if to light fires of action slumbering in each human being (it could be argued that the "each" part is their downfall). Not surprisingly, it evolved, quickly. After a brief period of hedonism and mainstream acceptance in the late 1970s, heavy metal grew up slightly when the remnants of progressive rock and hardcore were infused into the brainier heavy metal of the day, influenced by the British NWOBHM bands who were the literal spawn of both Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin (note that both these bands, and many metal bands today, use inversions for their names: a relatively normal or "good" object given a dark context), ploughed ahead and instead of going more radio-friendly, began to reject the entire context of music at the time. Thus in the early 1980s speed metal, or "thrash metal" as called by the ignorant, was born, and began to inch its way into the mainstream spectrum of rock music. It was musically similar to heavy metal but, having been schooled in the same progressive rock impulse that grasped both Led Zeppelin and later bands like Yes and Camel, it experimented with classical structures and influences, culminating in Metallica's epic song "Orion": mythological imagery, classical song structures and glimpses of diatonic composition and even more importantly, melodic composition. Where rock previously had emphasized harmony, and used melody as a means to return to harmony, in the newer metal harmony was a tool used to anchor melodic phrases played on guitar, to which the vocals were simply a rhythmic accompaniment. This was carried to an extreme in the speed metal bands, who existed without selling out until the late 1980s and then collapsed under their own weight.

These bands, like Black Sabbath, were mostly inarticulate in lyrics and public statements, but the imagery and topics of their songs spoke louder than their words. While embracing much of the liberal democratic rhetoric of the United States and United Kingdom as those two empires (or fallen empires, in the case of the latter) geared up for the final conflict with the Soviet Union, these bands also spoke out for the kind of individualism that a society based on individualism, or the morality of individual form over collective action, couldn't address: meaningless high schools geared toward the lowest common denominator, a society that would bend over backwards to pity its weakest but do nothing to make life interesting for its smarter members, and a suffocating cultural value placed on "safety" over "adventure." These bands churned out the Lovecraft-influenced occult mythos, dark apocalyptic tales and violent statements of personal individuation like no highschoolers since. They also welcomed a form of excess far greater than any previously achieved by rock bands, especially in the area of hard drugs including heroin and methamphetamine. Yet they were insufficient, because for all of their bluster and noise, they were similar to rock bands "under the skin" in as many ways as not, and this annoyed those who wanted something really "extreme." Thus around the year 1983, some of the Europeans who were closer to the site of the last war and what they felt would be the next (in the 1980s, most conflict scenarios for projected war with the Russians involved battles waged in Europe), set aside musical pretense and, like hardcore bands a decade earlier, began to generate music that was essentialist - stripped to its bare elements and presenting the most basic view but highest abstraction of its philosophy.

The newer artists - Sodom, Hellhammer, and Bathory - created a style that was neatly in between death and black metal yet developed into death metal because its simpler aspects were appreciated first. Their songs were simple in the style of hardcore, using little harmony and mostly "poor man's counterpoint," melodies of a multiple call-and-response format; these songs were unique in that they aspired to a neoclassical appearance, choosing chromatic and diatonic scales over pentatonic, and as followed the heavy metal wont, generally concluded their pairs of call-response fragments with concluding phrases that were "heavy" in the sense that both musically and aesthetically, they resolved the impetus formed of the earlier phrases in the work. This was closer to a medieval or classical style of composition than rock, which used repeated verse-chorus cycles and then a "bridge" to harmonically unite a single central key change which defined the "emotional change" in a song (this is the standard rock song format; not every rock song followed this format, but most and every band had at least one song in this format, unlike metal bands who sometimes had such formats but not consistently). Celtic Frost, the band that Hellhammer became after its musicians learned the basics of their trade, were committed to a unification between image, concept and music in the style of ancient Greek plays. Bathory became the first metal bands since some ludicrously overstated 1970s playactors to dabble in occult and Viking themes with a semblance of historical accuracy, eschewing the hedonistic "whisky and Harley-Davidson" aesthetic that had gripped previous metal generations. Sodom was interestingly both vibrantly political, like thrash bands in the style of DRI or Cryptic Slaughter, and rigidly occult, creating songs to both offend and invert the mainstream sense of morality that had grasped Europe like a deathvise for centuries.

What happened next is murky, but essentially, the Americans grabbed ahold of the new style of music and between Sepultura and Possessed and Necrovore, invented an aesthetic that took the hoarse vocals of punk bands such as the Exploited to an extreme, made the riffs more abrupt and more phrase-dependent than in any way harmony-dependent, and added a constant intensity of fast drumming and blistering distortion that exceeded anything done before. In this style, the idea of phrasal/melodic composition entered its adolescence in rock music, although little of the "melody" was evident when bands used mostly chromatic progressions and often failed to have the changes between riffs make sense except rhythmically. Rock had previously relied on harmonic structuring, where a song would consist of some chords strummed repeatedly in a progression over which a voice sung melody; now, the melody and change was entirely in the phrasing of guitar riffs, which used many more textures in rhythm and even more, were more articulate, moving more dramatically in tone and more dynamically in phrasal structure; often songs were written entirely in the same key, similarly to early medieval compositions. This was similar to hardcore, but far more advanced, and alien to rock listeners, thus the new metal bands started an "underground" in which, fully outside of mainstream musical systems, the story went, a new genre was developing which brought more messianic outsider truth to the pitiable youth trapped in the boring suburbs and domestic morality of the first world.

This mentality, of course, owed much to the Christian concept of Jesus as suffering "for others" in an entirely selfless capacity, despite the great selfishness of his grasp for power and having a religion named after him. At the time, however, metal was still in a phase of rejecting society, much like James Joyce referred to history as "a nightmare," throughout the ages, including the pre-Christian past. This was an embrace of the same historical belief that drove Hegel and later, Fukuyama, to state that Western society was evolving from a point of conflict with nature to a fully-developed, idealized form, namely liberal democracy. Most of these death metal bands still espoused liberal democracy and some form of morality, whether couched in Satanic terminology or not. From this an internal conflict arose over whether it was more correct to be isolated acts, or to form an underground in which others could participate, and eventually, the latter won out. A flood of death metal bands from the 1987-1992 era exploded into form, with the bands from the United States focusing primarily on rhythm in a style derived almost directly from mainstream speed metal, and the European bands staying closer to the ideal of Bathory and Hellhammer in which they produced epic songs which used melody and phrase together as their musical content. American bands tended to be more populist, as well, taking to the stage in tshirts and jeans, while their European counterparts were less afraid to put on period costumes, as Celtic Frost had done, or to have an elitist mentality toward certain behaviors. By the end of death metal's reign, it was clear that "higher, faster, better" was the mantra of European fans, while the American scene could be summarized as, "It's all good dude, just be metal!" The Europeans, being less socially mature than Americans, could not compete with the endless cycles of novelties - neo-progressive, neo-symphonic, deathcore and straight-edge, deathgrind and blues-oriented - that the Americans produced, and the Americans in the meantime focused more on the community of the underground than in developing any leadership positions in bands.

The result of this confusion was that European bands opted for new strategies, and starting in the late 1980s, changes occurred. Bands like At the Gates, who unabashedly used a violin player and indulged in technical and progressive playing and composition, and Atrocity, who created concept albums, as well as Cadaver, whose songs refused to conform to a single tempo or form factor, were leaders in a movement away from the simplistic smash 'n' bash of death metal, which had become purely rhythm oriented with the rise of guttural "chug" bands like Cannibal Corpse who, reprising the role Metallica had played seven years before, used muffled power chords to make a percussive and almost danceable style of metal that was easy to listen to and "extreme" in sound. As this movement became more popular and lost most of its original authenticity, European metalheads struck back, mainly by reaching into the past and emphasizing what made their music both different from other metal and similar to other musical movements throughout their history, albeit in a disguised form.

It's at this point in time that it makes sense to backtrack and to fill in our readers on the progress of loud music being made in a semi-underground context. Punk music broke into the world in the 1950s and 1960s when bands first started using simple rock songs made of powerchords and a constant beat to keep their audiences entranced. Its populist origins, or the artists who had major label funding behind them and thus appear in every book on the topic, are the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, but neither invented anything that had not been pioneered previously. In the middle to late 1970s, a movement to make punk lose its connections to rock emerged with the ultimately alienated form of music, hardcore. In hardcore there were no rules, and no theory was tolerated except a homebrew habit of stringing together two-finger power chords in heavily distorted, droning, militarily-cadenced songs. Some bands here that should be familiar to every listener are Discharge, the Exploited and Black Flag; when you've heard these, you're aware of the way the music is assembled. Other sources heap praise upon The Dead Kennedys and the Clash, but this author finds those bands to be watered-down, socially-acceptable versions of the more controversial hardcore. While the overall feeling of such music was a leftist, anarchist, individualist desire to throw off the yoke of authority and produce something new, ultimately the same negativity and resentment that was wielded in the leftist arena drew in both rightist politics and total nihilists who didn't believe in anything but themselves and/or their paychecks. When punk fizzled in the middle 1980s, taking hardcore with it, the underground response hybridized hardcore, thrash and early death metal to produce grindcore, notably found in bands like Carcass and Terrorizer and Carbonized. These bands made even more rigidly basic music than hardcore, and added blurring speed or dragging slowness, guttural vocals and abrupt songs to the mix. Much of this had been inherited from thrash, which was an early-1980s hybrid of speed metal and the more extreme hardcore of the day. Bands like DRI, COC, MDC, Suicidal Tendencies and Cryptic Slaughter made fast and aggressive songs that used metal riff styles in hardcore songs, retaining the bouncy, incessant droning throb of hardcore percussion and texture. Thrash songs were micro-songs; many clocked in at under thirty seconds. Hardcore had aspired to be a form of popular music, but with thrash, the agenda was getting away from anything tolerable by people conditioned to hear "normal" music. Ultimately, this attitude lives on with metal and some hardcore/metalcore to this day.

Black metal had previously existed as an aesthetic, although not a distinctive sound. A British heavy metal band called Venom had claimed to be black metal during the 1970s, but their music was closer to Motley Crue than it was to Sodom, so most listeners with any brains rejected them outright by the early 1990s. Other bands had experimented with dark-themed heavy metal, but none went anywhere, although Brazil's Sarcofago came closest with their release I.N.R.I., which was stripped down death metal with occult/political themes and periodic flashes of melodic insight. However, melody was an effect, not a structural principle, as it came to be in the coming tribe of European black metal. This movement grew almost exclusively from the Swedish melodic death metal movement, whose previous efforts such as At the Gates, Therion, Dismember and Entombed, had used blistering distortion to enact a massive sustain out of their guitars, producing a sound that, similar to Robert Fripp's use of the same technique (different method) in his "Frippertronics" projects with Brian Eno, leant itself to melodic composition in layers which created an incidental but effective harmony as a means of complementing melodic composition; previously, melody had been used as an effect within harmonic (rock) or rhythmic/chromatic (death metal) composition, but not as a structural effect. These bands were at first mocked as "not brutal enough" (brutal means "heavy, violent and disturbing") by their American counterparts, but as time went on it became clear their appeal was of a wider range as their songs were distinctive, where the rhythmic death metal bands from both America and Europe produced interchangeable, recombinant collections of thuds, grunts, and roars.

Most people will point to Mayhem as the origin of European black metal, but it is fairer to say that the community originated from several focus points, the most dramatic being members of Burzum, Immortal and Darkthrone. While Euronymous of Mayhem had been involved through his label Deathlike Silence for some time, his sense of the new musicality was limited, as is demonstrated through the releases previous to "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas," the band's masterpiece, which benefitted from the sequential compositional and aesthetic modifications of Dead, the band's celebrated vocalist, Vikernes of Burzum on bass and song structure changes, and Snorri of Thorns who contributed any number of gnarled and convoluted riffs. Vikernes and the two brothers who formed the core of the band Immortal had been jamming on Bathory-influenced material for some months before splitting into separate bands, and later became acquainted with members of the nascent Darkthrone, whose first album was of a progressive Swedish death metal sound tempered by more moderate pacing and a greater emphasis, in the style of Celtic Frost, on the presentation of several crucial changes in mood leading to a dramatic presentation where content and image merged, much in the style of operatic music. These young musicians were unified by a belief in more extreme metal, an appreciation of Romantic art and Nationalism, and most of all, of a total alienation from both society and the "extreme" art it had produced, resulting in a desire to make something that went even further into the abyss.

Like all movements previous to it, this metal movement got closer to something new but also kept a foot in the past. Long hair, leather jackets and a cultish ingroup of peers who spent their time buying rare vinyl and becoming intoxicated, in a form that was more advanced than but related to its death and speed metal counterparts, still existed. As did the basics of metal, namely loud guitars and urgent, violent drumming. However, when these bands found their mature releases, "Burzum" for Burzum, "Pure Holocaust" for Immortal and "Transylvanian Hunger" for Darkthrone, it was in the use of lead rhythm guitar playing to stagger melodic phrases in such a way that revelatory composition in the style of classical music could be achieved, including in the case of Burzum and Immortal intensely detailed, heuristic developments in music with massive variations in tempo, arrangement, key and texture, in unique song structures that were unheard of in rock music outside of progressive rock. As if taking the technical melodic metal landscapes of At the Gates to a further level, these pieces were both fierce and hauntingly vulnerable, emotion bleeding through the edges in contrast to the presentation of defiant anger as an absolute which obscured other emotions, as was the style of death metal at the time.

The drama of metal's history was played out in small form in black metal. First the music emerged, in three or more distinct styles, and then the hangers-on came out of the woodwork, disguising amongst their number some people of talent (Graveland, Ildjarn) who were by timing caught in the second wave. At first, the music was despised by all but a single percentage point of metal fans, because, as most pointed out, "it's not brutal," presumably whilst drinking cheap beer and watching cable television or voting Democratic. They saw it as elitist, hard to understand, and lacking in the crowd-pleasing thuds and blasts that had made simplicity festivals like Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death and Dying Fetus such dramatic bestsellers. Further, it espoused dangerous politics, including nationalism (and with it, subsets of this belief such as Greco-Romanism and National Socialism), as well as dangerous ideas of exterminating many people, killing those who are less fit, and smashing the society based on convenience and technology that now dominates in the West. If you - alert reader! - remember the opening words of this document, they are a caution that with the times the context of any event or process also changes. This is not to say that the author believes in "history," least of all history as seen through the liberal democratic filter of a secular Judeo-Christian society, but to say that whether we see history as cyclic or linear or entirely a figment of human imaginations, it is clear that the background events of any time influence its thought, culture and art, including, of course, its rock and/or metal.

When black metal was rising, events were coming to a head in America. The last of its conservative ideology was being bowled over and crushed by a weight of a new generation who, fueled as the 1960s generations were by a vast entertainment industry which urged them toward more self-centered and personally pretentious beliefs, began to demand further absolutes of individualism with no concern for the broader social or environmental consequences. Further, its conservatives, having taken numerous extremist points of view in defense of the American ideal, had come closer to the beliefs of their liberal colleagues than ever before. These politics influenced not only America, but the world, as, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, America and her system of liberal democracy were seen as both the world's leader and a model of its future. The sole superpower, she now reigned supreme with the most powerful media, biggest companies, richest natural resources and industry, and best technology sector in addition to a powerful military and banking system. America and black metal collided, at first in conflict over a popular music movement that actually had turned its back on the social values common to all rock music, and second in a move to assimilate it that would surprise and baffle its originators. In order to understand why this was important, we need to return to the foundations of black metal and its historical context.

When death metal first started, it was still in the days of the Cold War, when daily people wondered if their lives would be destroyed by the thousands of warheads pointed at each other by the two most dangerous and powerful countries on earth, whose ideologies - while slices of the same basic idea, that of Judeo-Christian individualism, interpreted in a need for liberal governments in which egalitarian principles and the sovreignty of the human form were more important than collective direction - were opposed to each other in the kind of fight to the death that often ended in mutual suicide. While technology was rocketing ahead, it had not yet reached its latest peak, which would come from developments in computers and the rise of the Internet, and so while the surface was a blithe, semi-conservative and functionalist time, underneath was a deep and rotten paranoia which manifested itself in excesses of intoxicants, violence, sex and authority.

Both superpowers, as it turns out, were rotting from within, but the Soviet state had hopelessly crippled its economy, and so it was only a matter of time before it would fall. Not knowing this, death metal pushed its apocalyptic ideologies to the farthest yet seen in a rock genre, eschewing political commentary in favor of artistic discussions about death, the methods of dying and decay, and coverage of disease, violence, suffering, and horror. It was a way to transcend the moralism of the time to focus on something less abstract and more immediate, but it backfired in that it was easily cloned by hordes of people who knew nothing about art but knew enough to create similar pattern-strips of recombinant power chord rhythm shuffling, and thus groaning under its own weight slipped into a kind of pervasive normalcy. It was the moment when an artistic impulse, transfigured through social situations, became centered around the damaged self-image of most teenage metal fans and thus transformed into self-pitying rants about suicide, bitter rejections of the ability to assert oneself, and endless paeans to gore and self-destruction as means of "solving" something (cryptic Nietzscheans will read in this: revenge), that haunted black metal musicians when they spoke disparagingly of "trends" and "jogging suit metal." They saw society as one giant game of follow-the-success and thus responsible for its own slavishness and lack of variation; in their view, independent art could provide a path away from that chokingly encompassing and cloyingly vapid but materially comfortable existence.

When black metal arose, then, its first obsession was to make powerful music involving death and mortality, as these were the forces that were beyond the grasp of this mainstream existence and its various (religious and otherwise) denials of death, but this philosophy brought other ideas out of the past. First came a sense of Romanticism, based around the post-Renaissance artforms of Europe which rejected the heavy political conditioning and worship of the human form of the Renaissance and instead of focusing on the universality of human experience, sought to explore the intensity of the experience of some individuals. Egalitarianism was pushed out of the picture in favor of a kind of elitism which said that only a few get to experience the truly rare, the truly powerful, and the amazing spiritual insights of being alive, and these were the few who rejected the social platitudes of the madding crowd and sought instead an equilibrium between their lighthearted joy and the morbid abyss at the base of their souls. Romanticism by its nature avoided the human-defined ways of thinking such as individualism, democracy, and other equalizers; it preferred that differences be preserved and exhalted, as they were in nature. Thus with Romanticism in literature, art and music comes a heavy coloring of Nationalism, or the pride of each population by heritage and culture in its own distinct way of doing things; nationalism has been taboo since 1945, when the Allies declared that their victory over National Socialist Germany was brought about by the greater freedoms and rewards of liberal democracy over "authoritarian" systems such as those of the NSDAP (and later, USSR). In that view, Nationalism, or the belief in the uniqueness of each population and its right to enforce that, conflicted with liberal-democratic views and thus "oppressed" its population. No musical movement or artistic movement had dared even touch the subject, excepting rare and fringe artists like Skrewdriver in Britain and Laibach in Yugoslavia, until the emergence of black metal. But this was not the whole of its belief.

In the background of that era, a terrorist who had threatened lives across America for years by mailing explosive packages to heads of industry, academics who supported industrial growth, and other people seen by this bomber as "anti-nature" was finally apprehended (in April, 1996). The Unabomber, as he was called the press and government, represented the newest range of dissidents who alleged that liberal democratic society was necessarily capitalistic and, by the virtue of its insistence on egalitarianism, was necessary anti-nature and therefore would consume nature for the profits of individuals without a second thought. He believed it must be stopped by any means necessary, and human casualties were incidental, since at the time nearly five billion people populated the globe - we could afford to lose a few. His beliefs cut across the traditional boundaries of left and right, which were, as he noted, different variants of the same liberal belief system originating in Renaissance restatements of Judeo-Christian ideology (which had only recently infiltrated Europe, plunging it into the dark ages). And while his case was soon banished from the media into the Orwellian memory of hole, it left profound marks on an America that, as the world's sudden leader, became paranoid and defensive and, fearing to oppress others because of the dogma of its own belief in individualism and egalitarianism, was forced to go the opposite direction and fully embrace the liberalism of Bill Clinton, who used a belief in the superiority of liberal democratic beliefs to justify a role as world policeman for the United States, furthering its cultural and economic influence in other countries. Black metal bands at this point had already taken their final step toward extremist condemnation of liberalism and Judeo-Christian belief, with Vikernes of Burzum of self-professed Nazi who had burned churches and Darkthrone condemning the Jewish behavior of their adversaries; already, black metal was well-known for its carbonization of almost 70 churches, many of them historic, in Europe. In America, Clinton started a program to fund any black churches burned by white nationalists or other extremists, but the program ran out of steam when it was discovered that most fires in black churches were incidental, designed to disguise theft or graft.

Ultimately this brought black metal more press than it could have imagined it would get, both glorifying it as the new bad boy of popular music and condemning it for crossing the final taboo line of this new era, which was to deny the fundamental principles of liberal democratic societies, including individualism and what we might call the supremacy of the form factor of the individual, egalitarianism. (In the view of its detractors, liberalism embraces egalitarianism because of its desire to equalize the differences between all humans, reducing them to an average so there are no more capable, or superior, people who can "oppress" others with their more developed skills and intellects. Philosophically, this arises from the absolutist beliefs of Judeo-Christianity, which binarily classify actions as "good" or "evil" and consequently must classify death/injury as "evil," which means that those who do such things, regardless of the positive outcomes of those events, are "evil." From this type of thinking naturally arises a self-congratulatory notion that by doing "good," one is superior to those who do "evil," even if they are smarter, better looking and/or more natural in their approach to life. For this reason, it is called an "absolutist" system of thought, in that it takes a single line of thinking and makes it the ultimate determiner of all things considered under its purview.) In other words, the context in which metal music and all popular music was being created had changed, and gone from a system in which it seemed plausible to talk about the liberal entertainment/art movement taking on an aging and decrepit system, and moving into one in which "the system" embraced the same values espoused by the liberal democratic revolution of the 1960s.

Because black metal was ultimately too cryptic, and not composed at all in the same way that rock music was, it could not be directly combatted with anything in popular music, so it was assimilated. First a few notably commercial bands were encouraged by labels to produce something in the black metal vein, and once they had found a formula for emulating the genre (based on The Abyss's 1996 template, "The Other Side") they began bashing out soundalike music. This allowed some insecure people, in need of a reason to make themselves feel important, to lash out at the "conservative" "true black metal" movement, and mocking it, to introduce music of lesser quality but more surface variation, such as elements from other already-well-known genres as well as aspects of rock and jazz, attempting to dilute the genre to the point where it resembled the music they already recognized and idealized. This allowed the same form of egalitarian spirit that had caused three metal genres to be reabsorbed by rock music as a generic category, under the guise that it was "opening minds" and allowing "diversity" in black metal. Even the most diehard fans of liberal democracy will admit, under pressure of reasoned argument, that the process of making different genres resemble each other is a form of norming, and thus is a loss of diversity not an augmentation of it. However, the young are inclined toward emotional absolutes and thus take easily to absolutist philosophies, and when told that their self-image is enhanced by being part of such a movement of change, those who by definition could not have created a genre then flock to it and inundate its ranks, producing a bloated carcass that resembles its days of life "in form" and "in appearance" but not in content or structure. After 1997, black metal produced only a handful of albums of any note, but was at its highest rate of output, with fivefold the number of bands as before and its first major 100,000 copy sales barriers per albums breached by warmed-over heavy metal bands such as Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth. (To these individuals, there is no compositional difference between Motley Crue and Burzum, thus black metal is just like heavy metal, except with screechy vocals and faster drums.)

An alert reader might draw a comparison between this mistaking of form for its contents as similar to the "false symbolism" mentioned in the first paragraph. Much as these are the same, the idea of imposing order on a community by form and not content is insane; you can't dress up regular rock music as black metal and have it be so, much as you can't export Nigerians to China and make them Chinese. However, the new generations of metal fans, including black metal fans, know only need and, once again, the context has shifted. Where the radio was once unfriendly to harshly distorted music, it now overflows with nu-metal, a hybrid of the commercial styles Metallica pioneered, death metal, and the violent and sexually degrading music of the inner city, "gangsta" hip-hop/rap. Metal is no longer exclusively loud, and while it stays underground, it does not evolve. Further, punk music has made a comeback, and in a new form of metal hybrid dominates the alternative airwaves with strident liberal politics and angry denunciations of mainstream society. All have made the same fatal error, and it is time for something new.

-=-

Two thoughts that come together are the fundamental sense of metal in being both inversion of its environment, and affirmation of its own law or dogma. Metal portrays itself in as many ways as it can, whether in secular or religious context, as Satan or a Satanic character in the Miltonian sense - one who feeling the sterility and conformity of heaven rejects it and is thus demonized, but has his self-respect. To paraphrase the attitude of Satan in Paradise Lost, "It is better to reign in hell, than serve on one's knees in heaven." Metal bands, with their apocalyptic predictions that go ignored by most of society, tend to see society as a form of sterile hell from which one escapes to define oneself. This is evident most intensely in the names, which, setting aside religious symbolism once again, use inversions of known concepts of purity in the opposite extreme. Black Sabbath. Judas Priest. Iron Maiden. Morbid Angel. Cryptic Slaughter. Malevolent Creation. Dying Fetus. As these examples show, the iconography of inversion has been applied heavily throughout time by the developing genre. This inversion is a form of dogma which approaches absolutes; in the metal community it was not uncommon, 1983-1998, to hear people speaking of "sell outs", "posers" and other forms of insincerity. To the metal community of the time, people who did not appreciate the dogma of metal were in it for reasons other than those of escaping society and achieving something greater and polar in its difference. "Selling out" was the verb form of poseur: it has always been easier, in the views of metalheads, to become a populist circus like Kiss, where one takes on the role of demon without belief that what one is doing is anything but entertainment. 1980s metalheads tended not be literal Satanists, but they weren't kidding when they invoked Occult and Nazi imagery in their music (excellent examples being Slayer and Metallica) as a way of placing themselves outside the current time. To a cynical observer now, it looks like people in the grips of guilt searching for an identity outside of that of the society they found culpable, hypocritical even for perverting its own principles.

Around 1998, these terms died out, mainly because of a mission change owing to a new form of audience. Because bands like Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth had managed to successfully market 1970s-style heavy metal rebranded as black metal with hissing vocals and fast drums, the genre lost its integrity and became another "flavor" instead of a distinct musical entity. The new fans, searching for a purity of experience, saluted Venom and Mercyful Fate as a musical ideal, and resumed making rock music in metal form. The innovation that bands like Burzum, Immortal, and Darkthrone had worked into the genre was forgotten in favor of the "same old thing." At this point, many of the original fans were hitting their late 20s and moving on to more serious obsessions, including houses, wives/girlfriends, families and careers (as no matter how alienated one is, one must find a way to survive), and thus there was a changing of the guard to a new and inexperienced tribe. Their primary concern was not inversion but achievement of a place within the hierarchy of popular music, to which black metal now clung and in which it had a part. For these new fans, black metal was not noticeably different from Marilyn Manson, only more extreme, and they wanted to show their extremity and be appreciated for serving that role in the social system. Where older black metal fans tended to be less social, the new fans socialized over every aspect of the music, setting up local "scenes" where very similar bands could perform and still get paid, and also established a giant network of Internet chat rooms, forums, and fanzines which praised the newer generations of black and death metal which, not surprisingly given their broad market focus, resembled heavy metal rock music dressed up as what was once legitimately "extreme," perhaps: that which escaped the musical conventions of mainstream music and sought its own meaning, where others sought popularity and the profit that comes from putting a new face on an old product.

The new fans are from a different generation than the early death/black metal fans; while the original generations grew up in a time that still clung to European-style values (in both America and Europe) the newer groups have never experienced a society that had culture, and have instead grown up completely in the media age. For them cable television and computers are just things that exist and we use; they did not see them slowly get developed to the point of having GUIs (graphical user interfaces), but accepted them as they were. Because these kids grew up in the media age, and had notably absentee parents, they learned their values from kids at school, who like the good monkeys they are repeat what they've seen on television as if it was something they themselves derived. Further, they've grown up in a time of media proliferation, where it's not unusual for indie bands to exist in a pseudo-underground much as metal had, so to them it is just another scene, and there is no ideological or artistic role that is separate from that of the general rock/punk genre which is most heavily marketed to teenagers. Because of this, their values are overwhelmingly liberal, and when a black metal band mixes its basic riffs with a skabeat and someone on kazoo, their guilt-based programming to praise this as "individual" and "unique," comes in, and they bring more undifferentiated rock music into the fold to be dressed up as something that passed before. This liberalism also comes into hilarious conflict with black metal's original naturalist view, which viewed nature "red in tooth and claw" as a positive and in fact, forward-moving direction for a humanity bloated with too many useless living carcasses. To the new fans, this is fine, as long as everyone is treated equally. From this ludicrous paradox of thought come two main lines one hears from the newer generations of fans - "Everyone on earth must be killed, especially those who love life" (e.g. work or have vision for anything better than negative self-pity) and "We are suicidal black metal, life is meaningless" - but both are in conflict with the original views of black metal, which in retrospect appear even more heartfelt in contrast to the inept teenage posing of the current time.

-=-

To get back to our topic, rock music has been outsider music since before it was given a name and marketed as something different. In many ways, its story illustrates a universal paradox of advertising: one must sell products based first on their ordinariness and functionality, and when that is achieved but isn't perhaps all that it could be, then must invent something else - a "grass is greener on the other side" scenario - which can be marketed as not the same old thing and somehow better. Since products don't get any better than functional, what must be marketed is the undefinable, what some call a "cachet," others call "cool," and still others identify as its self-image enhancing function. "You're not the kind of person who listenst to the same boring music as others. Be independent and choose plan B music!" While this is an extreme example, it is useful for the fact of its extremity, which makes the process behind its creation easily observable in a society that as a whole demands any idea first generate income and secondarily address any real-world, physical world issues (it is free to address metaphysical, social or religious issues however). The cult of the outsider exists for industry to have both sides of the issue, the "safe" side and the "out there" side, much as world politics are currently divided into conservative and liberal versions of liberal democratic dogma. In rock music, it has triumphed. Blues music, the fusion of European popular music and African rhythms, introduced nothing new to music except the aesthetic of a fixed form. Use the same scale, song structure and rhythmic approach to songwriting and you suddenly make it accessible to a range of people, including the "dispossessed" of a capitalist society who nonetheless have money for sound reproduction equipment. Therefore, while the blues was not an innovation, it has become the most celebrated change in music in history thanks to the vast industrial media behind it and the immense profits of the record industry that sprung up around it. With classical or traditional folk music, not that much product is output because it's not easy to make something unique, and because not that many songs are needed. With blues, and later rock, the industry found something that was brilliantly half-created: because it had promise, it was always interesting, but because its form held it back from any complex development, it was always unsatisfying and thus more had to be purchased. Today we can see the triumph of this industry in the ubiquitous tendency of teenagers to have posters, tshirts and CDs of their favorite bands, clustered around the individual in an attempt to build identity, while granting vast amounts of revenue to the publishers. Books don't sell this well, nor do school supplies, but with the invention of a new industry based around mediocre music, a great and longstanding profit was made, at least until the rise of MP3 files and peer to peer networking.

For some historical backfill, it is necessarily to analyze the history of pentatonic music in the world. Originating in Asia, possibly at the same time as in Egypt or the nascent West, pentatonic music takes several forms but is well known for its convenience in divided the scale into five emphatic tones that resemble the rising and falling of the human voice and thus are nearly never "wrong" when used in the right key context. It was well-known in Northern Africa during the time it was occupied by Arabs, who happened also to be the continent's most prolific slavers, but was also at that time present in the popular music of Ireland, England, Germany and Spain, where the modern forms of violin, guitar, cello, drumkit and bass were invented. Thus by the time America was formed, with its unique mix of cultures, not only was it well-imbued with a tradition of pentatonic music, but it was also well-experienced in creating it in several types of pentatonic scales, including the familiar one now known as the "blues scale." This scale, which emphasizes the I-IV-V progressions of the diatonic scale which resemble many of the familiar changes in vocal tone of human singing, has its origins in places as diverse as Scotland, Jerusalem and Wales. Further, syncopated rhythm had been used in these forms of European popular music, as had the standard two-guitars, bass and drums instrumentation. However, it had never been standardized, but existed as one form incident among many used in several types of related music. It was the invention of either African field hands or record producers, or both, to standardize the style and to thus produce the first music designed for industrial production in human history. With few theoretical barriers to understanding by even the simplest listeners, and an outsider image, this music was the perfect product. (The accusation of this author is that, having used Africans sold by their compatriots as convenient labor, the American industrial machine turned around and marketing their suffering in turn as being somehow Christlike and therefore more "authentic" and "unique" than the normal productive music of which their audience was not buying the excessive amounts required for true out of control profit. Much as today rap music is portrayed as outsider art with greater insight to society, back then blues was seen as the same thing despite having nothing new to offer, transferring money money to distant corporations and not the artists or their movement in any sizable amount.)

With the rise of MP3 files and their easy sharing, the music-buying audience is getting more cynical. Anyone with a few hours a week can soon explore all forms of extreme or not extreme music without having to physically locate it or someone who can offer a dub, thus sampling is unlimited and even the slower fans are realizing how similar most rock music is, including punk and heavy metal. Therefore the industry counteracts with new hybrids of the same old styles, producing metalcore (punk/metal) and nu-metal (rap/alternative/metal) as its new offerings, but even these bands are not experiencing the dramatic leaps in sales necessary to keep the industry afloat. It is clear that the competition has become even more intense and that something must change. It is most likely that industry will drop to a fallback position as a publisher that promotes nothing except for a few central acts with the widest populist appeal, allowing it to use its superior media power to shape the taste of the least discerning buyers while collecting a hefty fee on everything else, sans the traditional marketing expenses. However, something even more prominent has occurred in the levelling of this playing field: the need for bands to compete on a musical level, in addition to an aesthetic or appearance level, and to thus make themselves unique. In this context, the "underground" is destructive to metal, as it shields it from outside competition and thus promotes a stagnant, inbred novelty that masquerades as "innovation" but is in fact recycling of proven ideas from elsewhere, slowly eroding the genre from within and turning it into purely generic music with a slightly different "sound." The next level of competition, in which the terms "poseur" and "sell-out" may occur again, is one in which metal of the underground variety finds a way to compete in this new marketplace. Chances are those for whom the "underground" provides a convenient excuse for socialization and a place in which to have social power they will never wield in jobs or society at large, by the nature of their benefit involved in this project, will fall into conflict with anyone who attempts to make this music compete, on a musical level, with popular music at large. (This will hilariously resemble conflicts in the past between heavy metal kids and the new speed metal generation, and black metallers against the "brutal" death metal types who preceded them.)

Once again, context has changed, and thus the same old actions no longer have the significance that they did in other times. If metal music is to keep developing, it must reach greater heights of complexity, in which music becomes the language through which it expresses more content arranged in more communicative ways, or it will be absorbed by the great rock'n'roll machine that has absorbed punk, grindcore, rap and other new permutations of the same basic popular music forms that have been with us for centuries. Clearly its newer group of fans will resist this change, so it is most probable that it will continue as a great big party for them until one day, with a whimper and not a bang, people as a whole stop caring because after all, it's not that different from anything else but claims to be thus is a fake, and then change and deviation from the standard form can then again occur. Until that time however, metal will remain stranded in its past, unaware that context has shifted and it is now speaking anachronism to an audience accustomed to a faster pace of change.

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