Metal Future - The Future of Heavy Metal Music

Over time metalheads gain enough experience and insight to realize that, with a few exceptions, the metal genre is unthinking slobs slashing out three chord rock and pretending that somehow it is more "profound" than other rock music. This has reached its peak in black metal, where the crowd who believe that socialization is more important than music content now impress each other with new aesthetic recombinations of the same old, same old.

At this point the question arises, what is the future of metal? My answer is simple: what it always has been, including its hidden influences, but something "new" in that for popular music it will be a level of expression that is unprecedented in its scope. In short, metal will finally make good on the promise of its dark and brooding aesthetic and will transcend popular music.

I. Hardcore

The roots of metal music and hardcore punk are so inextricably tangled that it is pointless to separate them. Black Sabbath picked up the same influences that early punk bands did, and in turn influenced (with Led Zeppelin) the first official generation of punk and, after that, punk's only real artistic contribution separate from rock music, punk hardcore (or "hardcore," if you can say that without confusing it with gabber techno).

Amebix, Discharge and the Exploited essentially wrote the book on riffing and dramatic presentation of song structure that succeeded Black Sabbath, and they inspired the more intelligent of the speed metal bands, who in turn inspired black and death metal rising in the nascent works of Bathory, Celtic Frost and Sodom.

Hardcore broke outside of the tradition of rock, which was to dumb down music to the point that only the "color notes," as many call them, were used; these notes approximate the pentatonic minor scale with the diminished fifth. Early musicians adopted this scale not because they were trained, but because through fooling around they could find notes that worked in any scale and could be sung with little technical training.

Later, well-meaning academics noted this was a minor pentatonic scale with a diminshed fifth, christened it "the blues scale" and forgot that these notes make up the basis of crowd-pleasing music in Europe, Asia, Africa and the new world simply for their utility. It's like picking the "flavor words" that advertising uses: fresh, new, shocking, etc. When hardcore music broke into chromatic playing and whole scales, it was refreshing because it ended the domination of this form of tonal construction, which gave music the same consistency as junk food: a lot of sweet, a lot of salt, and a lot of fat.

New emotions came into the day-to-day lexicon of popular music, as did the idea of breaking outside of key and scale as rigid forms, something that free jazz (led by Ornette Coleman, who also loved chromatic scales) and experimental music had attempted before it. Hardcore popularized it. Reducing music to rhythm alone, it rapidly branched into use of melody no matter how simple to give varied meanings to composition.

Despite this innovation, hardcore was doomed by the very factor of its success: it was basic, musically, and untrained, which led to a style of composition in which drums, guitar, bass and vocals emphasized the same melodic construction at once. This, and the need of untrained musicians to quickly find riffs when composing, led to a limited range of harmony and length of melody, causing a rise in "door chimes" music, known for its similarity to the simple jingles used by phone ringtones, doorbells and television commercials.

Hardcore also experienced the first extremely visible instance of popularization: as the genre became popular, rising from an underground into mainstream view, emulators appeared. These people had no idea why the music was formed, or what the ideas were behind it, thus they adopted the aesthetic and technique and began making rock music in that format. From this, "punk rock" and "stadium heavy metal" were born.

II. Melody

Hardcore's gift to the metal community went mostly unnoticed except by the best of the next generation. By 1985, hardcore had run its course and been absorbed by the crowd-pleasing sounds of punk rock and later, emo. This music was like rock musicians attempting to play punk music, hoping to both gain popularity and keep the "sound" that made punk formidable. However, as they learned, "sound" alone means nothing without the composition that reflects the ideas behind genres; this is how genres differentiate themselves from the mass of crowd-pleasing, transient music.

Of the early death metal bands, perhaps Morbid Angel and Deicide most emphasize the transition toward melody that was about to occur, although it's worth noting that at the same time Quorthon of Bathory was creating vast epics like "Blood, Fire, Death" that periodically overcame their heavy metal rock background and reached for new heights. These bands were inspired, like speed metal before them, by classic progressive rock. You can hear this most clearly in Metallica's "Orion" and Morbid Angel's "Blessed Are the Sick" as well as Deicide's "Holy Deception."

When death metal waned, it was mainly because the horde of imitators had seen chromatic scales, violent rhythm, monotone vocals and distortion and decided they could imitate it. By the time Cannibal Corpse rolled around as a popular phenomenon, death metal was dead, having become rock music composed using chromatic scales. It's interesting to note how many melodic figures and licks from classic rock music can be spotted in the works of Cannibal Corpse, Broken Hope, Carcass (during their post-grindcore days) or other fin-de-ciecle death metal bands.

Because death metal had such promise, and failed so hard toward its end, a group of musicians went back to the point where punk's influence was most prevalent in metal and resurrected the work of Sodom, Bathory and Celtic Frost. While these bands had a great deal of influence from heavy metal morons Venom, they had equal or greater influence from the hardcore bands of the era, from whom Venom also borrowed their style of riffing (note similarities between "Countess Bathory" and "Guilty of Being White" by Minor Threat for example).

What they had, thanks to Bathory, was a sense of melody, and thanks to Celtic Frost/Hellhammer, a sense of songs written around an "operatic" or "poetic" or "narrative" premise: isntead of favoring the verse-chorus loop with a bridge thrown on top to end the song, as found in the "blues form" and the "radio pop" format, these bands wrote songs with multiple riffs arranged in "motifs," or clusters related to a central idea, that moved the song through moods as if going through "scenes." A perfect example of this is Hellhammer's "Triumph of Death" or Bathory's "A Fine Day to Die" (including introduction, which pairs to album fadeout).

This sense of melody with narrative motif-based construction became most fully developed in black metal, sensu Scandinavia, from 1990-1994. Immortal's "Pure Holocaust" destroyed the use of drums by making them a constant background rumble, which freed guitar playing up to change tempo and phrasing dynamically over the ambient background noise. Burzum, moving from "My Journey to the Stars" through "Det Som Engang Var" (song, not album), extensively used motif-based construction that broke from violent basic rhythm into melodic riffing secured by melody. And Enslaved, with their masterpiece "Vikinglgr Veldi," showed how motifs could be contrasted to repeated riff cycles in the form of ambient electronic music.

More than the church burnings, or firm stance against the Christian occupation of Europe which was responsible for the genocide of Pagans and burning of all pre-Christian learning that it could get its hands on, what made black metal huge among more than just metal fans was the sense of wonder and breathtaking beauty conveyed by melody amidst savage noise. It was a metaphor for life itself: in the midst of the chaos, disorder, failure, loss and horror, there was a rising assertion of beauty and a Will which would erect it upon earth. No metal or punk genre had yet reached this height.

Of course, the crowd surged in again and began making emulator music, which followed the three-chord verse-chorus pattern of rock music, mostly because the kind of people who emulate cannot achieve what the originals did: they lack the level of biological intelligence and personal integrity required to pursue art. We are speaking here of Black Witchery, Ulver, Cradle of Filth, Grand Belial's Key, Children of Bodom and others who, lacking any soul of their own, are trying to make rock bands succeed in the black metal genre.

III. Arrangement

One major reason that such takeovers were possible was the simple nature of the music. Drums, bass, and guitars essentially followed the phrase with emphasis where needed, playing the same notes in synchronization. This technique achieves a "solid" sound and a gratingly monolithic effect, which is sometimes desirable in almost all music, but also causes artificial tightening of composition to be limited to a single voice. This appeals to the crowd, because in their state of low self-confidence (awareness of intellectual limitations) they desire the simplest possible music.

Interestingly, the bands that inspired speed metal and black metal were rebelling against this same tradition in rock. Speed metal was inspired by progressive rock bands, who were different from the jazz-and-blues-influenced jam bands of the day in that their music was structured, much like speed and death metal are; unstructed music, such as jazz or blues, consists of improvisation over a fixed chord progression in a fixed structure. (The most challenging improvisation, that found in classical music including classical guitar, requires improvisation to occur throughout changing motifs at different tempos with different moods, and is beyond most jazz, rock and metal musicians.)

Black metal was inspired a great deal by the German cosmic electronic music of the 1970s, most notably Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Both used multiple voices in song, especially keyboards and noise, and were notorious for using minimal percussion tracks if one was used at all. Classically trained musicians staffed each band, but they brought to their work a fusion of the best in pop music, up to and including rock, with German traditional folk music and classical music. Interestingly, later output by the significant black metal musicians tended toward this category; Neptune Towers (Darkthrone) is in sound a tribute to Tangerine Dream, while Beherit and Burzum made music similar to early Kraftwerk (post-Beherit project Suuri Shamaani produced a work called Mysteerien Maailma, which was as much a tribute to Tangerine Dream as post-Godflesh work Final seems to be).

These bands did separate bass from guitar and voice, and de-emphasized drumming using a method similar to that Immortal employed on "Pure Holocaust." This enabled them to keep the structured motif-based narrative method of composition found in common in classical music and metal, but to allow it to be more complex than the solidified arrangements of hardcore and death metal. In this was the basis of what, for example, Enslaved did on "Vikinglr Veldi," or what Burzum did with the keyboard epic "Hlidskjalf." For musicians who had reached a level of proficiency, and fans who had come to appreciate more, it was the perfect synthesis.

However, no one has figured out yet how to introduce the aesthetic side of metal into this form of music, except perhaps Enslaved, and their sound relied heavily on acoustic instruments which had to be over-amplified to compete with distorted guitars and drums. The answer to this question came surprisingly from rock music, and one genre from what is left of hardcore.

IV. Aesthetic

During the early 1990s, as production values increased and pop and rock sagged into redundancy, prompting the rise of rap/hip-hop as a mainstream commodity, a small group of musicians mainly on the island of sodomy and crumpets (England) began producing something known as noisepop. This was rock/pop music in which the searing distortion was echoed to the point where it did not have the bassy, blasting nature of metal distortion, but instead performed like washing skeins of exploded tone. Much as has occurred before (notably in metal with the use of Sunlight Studios electro-blistering distortion), the invention of the aesthetic influenced composition.

Noisepop bands, such as My Bloody Valentine or Ride or Medicine, tended to write dreamy, wafting harmonic center-based songs in minor keys, using slower beats influenced by techno and electronica to be both minimal and inobtrusive. Multiple layers of guitar, usually recorded in analog, drifted on top of one another and produced an effect like the shifting of warmer layers of water in deep blue seas. It was both pacific, and ear-tinglingly abrasive.

Much of what these bands contributed stayed in the 1990s, as with the new millennium popular music in the world's market leader America tended toward the simple and direct (Eminem), but their legacy lived on through others who experimented with their sound. Many of these were in the ruins of hardcore music. Devastated by the emotionally indulgent aspects of Emo, which invited personal drama to take precedence over musical merit or ideological growth, hardcore had become a joke, driven by novelty (this band uses a flute and mariachi beats) and social pressures.

Its politics, influenced by the same social pressures, had become the voice of the crowd: humanism and a focus on the individual, drama encouraged, as being more important than any form of values above personal preference, emotional confusion, and desire for products. This ideology pervaded all areas of hardcore, and the genre itself seemed to have heaved a sigh and declared that it was more important that every fan have a band than that any of them were good. Thus mediocrity seemed to close its chapter in music history.

However, among those who poked through the remnants of crustcore (Discharge, Amebix) were the brave Swedes who, natively understanding as all Swedes do that the root of music is melody, began writing melodic music in the style of Discharge. These clone bands were often better than the individual, although the drug-and-anger-fueled lifestyles of their members usually precluded any consistency in quality of musical output. With the connection between Sunlight Studios' blistering, reverb-heavy distortion and the natural tremelo effect it produced, and this music, a new series of genres were born: drone, ambient punk and noisecore.

This author is ignorant to most of noisecore; like hardcore, most of it is for musically numb, philosophically ignorant, existentially dead people. Useful as an exemplar of style and not necessarily content, the band Cult of Luna is chosen here to demonstrate how noisecore unifies the techniques of death and black metal, including the harmonic wash upstrum used by bands like Burzum, with crustcore and a foundation of noisepop. Musically, it's not distinct from My Bloody Valentine, but its arrangements introduce some of the two-hit counterpoint composition found in hardcore music.

While the noisepop influence shows some promise, the genre is dragged down by its inclusion of hardcore elements. Cult of Luna in particular sounds like a cross between L.A.'s medicine and late-model Neurosis, a crustcore band which favored similar rigid, percussive styles whose emphasis on expectation of beat or offbeat made them tiresome and predictable. An an example of technique it shows a possible direction for metal music, were said metal music to drop the uniformity of drums, guitar and bass (something that afflicts Cult of Luna in crippling ways).

Considered in abstraction, if this technique were used with twin guitars in the style of Kraftwerk's interplay of keyboards (or even the harmonizing guitars of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden), it would free up bass to take a more dominant role playing an independent melody that doubles as a rhythm track, much as it does in Kraftwerk. As in Burzum and Immortal, melodic motif-based narrative composition could dominate through the guitars, and as in Kraftwerk or even more precisely Tangerine Dream, percussion could be reduced to a fragment of a beat or a background noise sequence.

This would give metal the optimum forum for using melody to illustrate narrative composition, and would allow it to keep its Romantic nature, formed of melancholic but assertive and masculine music. Further, it would free the genre from the unnecessary simplicity of uniform bass/drums/guitar composition, and give composers room to create longer, more complex songs more likely to approach classical music.

In turn, this would make it much harder to emulate, especially by the crowd of three-chord morons who clog its arteries at the current time.

V. Leaders

A small list of metal bands who have implemented the forerunner of this style:

VI. What is rock music?

The history of rock music has been one in which people who did not represent the dominant group in society imitated the music of that group. First the popular music of Europe was emulated by American Indian, African-American and "non-white" (Irish/Scottish) indentured servants, forming the basis for the blues, which owes more to Celtic music and German polka than anything else. Next, the popular music of a few leading acts was imitated by the menial workers of the cities, producing rock music. Finally, rock music was emulated in simpler form by the alienated children of the postwar generation, producing punk music.

Counterculture ideals were contrarian to traditional Indo-European social concepts. In tradition, there exists a hierarchy designed to encourage excellence, and the excellent are encouraged to produce art. Egalitarian ideals prevail in counterculture ideology, and this encourages every person to produce music, thus requiring that it be progressively simpler, and relies more on aesthetic than musical content (e.g. melodic composition) since that is a less accessible attribute.

American society, and with it world pop music, changed when the counterculture gained dominance in the United States in the 1960s, an event of political importance to the US as the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 was to Russia. When such events take a generalized population and empower it over ruling castes, what would seem to occur would be a switch in control; instead, what occurs is an averaging between the two, whether by dogmatic communism or industrial capitalism. Uniqueness, and with it the ability to exceed, is replaced by a norming of the population, causing them to gain equality in ability but lose excellence.

Rock music thus distilled the ideas of classical music, and traditional folk forms like Celtic stringed instrument pieces and German waltzes and polkas, into a new form which was available for all citizens, and was correspondingly quite simple. Naturally, after two generations it had exhausted most of the combinations available to such artificially basic music, and thus a rebellion against this occurred in punk hardcore, and this combined with the nascent proto-metal of Black Sabbath formed the basis for metal music.

Although speed metal and death metal rebelled against what they saw as a conformist mass crushing the individual spirit, they did not rebel against the egalitarian mindset that empowered such an idea, and thus were by their own ideals dragged down into it. Black metal was a first in popular music in that it explicitly rejected egalitarian concerns, preferring an excellent few over a participatory and mediocre crowd. Its own prophecies were fulfilled when the crowd surged into the void left by a few formative bands, swamping the genre with music closer to 1970s rock than to 1990s black metal.

If metal is to survive, it must continue reversing this trend, as the high cost of allowing everyone to participate is that the music and concepts involved must be distilled to a lowest common denominator, which by its very nature does not include excellence and complexity. If you take a crowd of people from the dumbest to the smartest, and require that they share an ideal, that ideal will be limited by the weakest links in the chain, and thus will have the nature of the "beer, music collecting, drugs and fun parties that look like concerts" which has suffocated black metal in the current era.

Indo-European art has gone through many phases, but perhaps the most important concept concerning them is that there is no "progress" or "advancement"; all of the techniques of music are known and have been since before the classical era, although the classical music of Europe is the best extant record we have of this exploration. When one stops looking for the next big thing, and starts focusing on using the obvious techniques of music to convey an idea or experience, art once again takes precedence over novelty.

VII. Beliefs

Any future metal genre must continue up the evolutionary ladder of beliefs; this is not progress, as all forms of belief are known, but a selection of higher belief over lower belief. Lower belief praises the crowd and a social reality that supplants natural reality, but higher belief affirms the inequality of people and praises excellence. It also praises the heroic, the faithful, the selective and other thought-attributes likely only to be found in people of higher character, strength and intellect. This is anathema to the crowd, who will do their best in every case to destroy it.

It is unlikely that future metal will take a dogmatic attitude as past forms have. As seen by both Satanic metal and National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM), simply espousing a dogma encourages imitators to translate that dogma into their own lexicon. Satanism loses its metaphorical significance and becomes the basis for songs in mindless praise of evil or killing everyone (equally), and National Socialism becomes translated into thuggery and bigotry (which it was not, as is clear by the Indian and Muslim regiments of the SS and the failure of the Nazis to conduct a single race-based execution during their occupation of North Africa).

As a result, the stance toward Christianity will probably bypass the issue of whether or not Christianity must be destroyed, and instead focus on what type of spirituality will replace it - or assimilate it. As with the German cosmic bands, this spirituality tends to be non-dualistic and naturalistic, although not nature-worship: it affirms the will of the higher individual in shaping the world, but eschews mindless destruction like overpopulation and pollution.

One aspect that will inevitably be present is rejection of the lowest common denominator, or control by the crowd, at least if metal is to survive. If it does not take this path, it will include people who will continually meld it into the same old, same old as exemplified by rock music and punk rock. This form of lowest common denominator belief is called "humanism" in philosophy, in that it espouses the value of the individual human and its desires over all else, including nature; it does not presume to assess those desires or reserve the right to achieve the kind of social consensus that can stop mass pollution or lack of values.

VIII. Appendix

Aesthetic - dealing with the level of appearance of a music, meaning its style of drumming or guitar playing, production values, type of vocals, etc. The content of the music is its phrasing, which usually takes the form of melody and harmony, and many aspects of arrangement, but the most superficial aspects of arrangement and improvisation are part of the aesthetic.

Structure - the progression of change in any given piece of music is its structure; part phrasing/melody and part arrangement, structure can be expressed in various forms, including verse-chorus-bridge or the motif-based, narrative melodic composition favored by metal.

Melody - the connection of notes in sequence to produce a unique sonic phrase. "Phrasing" includes both melody and rhythm, but melody is the composition itself. Most Indo-European music is based in melody but uses harmony and rhythm extensively to provide a changeable context to that melody, allowed repeated figures to be revisited in a contrast to a new environment, showing change in the realization of composer and listener.

Harmony - where melody is linear development, harmony is depth, and relates to the effects derived when collections of notes are played at once, or that playing at once is implied. Black metal uses a melodic-harmonic approach on many of its works, such as those of Burzum, where a harmonic pattern is strummed in sequence on top of a melodic progression, meaning the notes are not played at the same time but overlap, creating an ambiguous but filling harmonic background.

Blues scale - A minor pentatonic scale with an additional dimished fifth, making a six-note scale. In relation to the major scale, the notes of the blues scale are 1 - b3 - 4 - b5 - 5 - b7 - 1. The b3, b5 and b7 notes of the scale are the so-called "blue notes" which allow it great flexibility in transposition as well as natural ease of human vocalization. The C blues scale: C - Eb - F - Gb - G - Bb - C.