Winter - How Black Metal Must Change

To an observer of the recent black metal scene, it's tempting to get bitter. The newest style and trend appears to be "black hardcore," or bands putting together two three-note riffs in a standard song format in recombinant order, and even the most ambitious bands are succumbing to this influence. Reminiscent of when hardcore punk music bloated itself into entropy and collapsed because no one could tell any two bands apart, this is like gangrene creeping up the legs and finally into the bloodstream of the genre.

However, nature provides us a metaphor for what is happening, and ultimately, interpretation of this thought shows us where the genre needs to go, at least for those who can understand the task at hand. Much as the original modern black metal movement in Norway was in the hands of a few individuals, this may apply only to a handful of people who will forge forward while others are forgotten. The forgotten ones will be bitter, and harbor passive revenge, much as when black metal first emerged the has-beens could be heard loudly proclaiming their dislike for such "faggot music."

Spring begins with new growth; in summer, it overflows in abundance, culminating in the harvest season and heading into fall, when all things either die or prepare for a dormant winter. Winter - you may have heard this one before, from Ildjarns and Burzums and Immortals - is a time when the higher animals, given the ability to be mobile and to create their own shelter, must face their own mortality.

So it is also with black metal. Winter is upon us, or shortly will be, and those who are not ready for its demands, who cannot plan ahead and in advance do what is necessary to survive it, will be forgotten and buried under uniform snow. On the other hand, the bottlenecking enforced on a population by winter selects for the smartest and hardiest, because the smarter a creature is the farther it can plan ahead and act on that plan.

Winter in black metal will take on a peculiar form. While the publically-recognized "scene" (or "community") continues its self-aggrandizing empty praise and recombinant, boring music, the few who can grasp the concept move ahead unnoticed, making preparations for the vast cold. When this cold comes, that which is a trend, of short-term future planning, will fall in the harvest as that which has long-term value will endure.

Adolescence

For those of us who have been around for some time, it's hard to remember the generational nature of metal music (and indeed, most popular music). We tend to treat it solely as art, caring not for what age the participants are, but for the end product. Yet it is important to remember that with each generation there is a chance of re-assessment, creating hardy seeds for a new spring.

This shows us why it's important that a genre exists, and a fanbase, as it is necessary for new bands to show up and test their material on an audience, successively re-adjusting it until the vision in their heads can communicate with those to whom its content is potentially meaningful. This process becomes bloated when a single demo, or a single show, or a single radio play determines that a band has "arrived."

When the genre is healthiest, the winds of coming winter oppose all new bands with brutal hardship, so only the most determined make it to the stage of releasing an album. This encourages others who have talent and brains to take a stab. If a lone artist looks at a genre, and sees a thousand albums of which two are good, the conclusion will be that the genre is fattened and the fans thus unable to tell the difference between good music and bad.

If the genre seen has a handful of albums, most of which are excellent, it is instead a compelling argument for further exploration. This is how genres rise and fall, and is why hardcore punk and death metal both eventually fattened themselves into insignificance to the point that now, once you've heard one band, you've heard them all. So for the health of the genre, it's better that fewer albums of a higher quality are released.

My advice to upcoming bands is contrary to the trend today, which is to rush to release a demo, by computer if you have to. Take your time. Practice your songs, listen to them critically, and expose them to critical (mean) people. When you've done this for a length of time that to most people seems unbearable, if you've been diligent your songs will have undergone an evolution and become the best version possible of what you intended to do.

Then you should re-assess what you're doing; is it ambitious enough? Does it express something either transcendent or in some other way that no other medium ("art" is your medium) can say? If not, what are you doing - filling in the blanks on a form, making a competing product, following a trend? It's better to find out that making music is not for you than to disgrace yourself by releasing more recombinant crap.

All of this might sound curmudgeonly, or harsh, but think of it this way: adolescence is the same prospect. You're trying to find out how to adjust to your world, and what you can make of it. It's as likely as not that the first thing you do will not be what is ultimately most meaningful to you. For that reason, forcing yourself on some genre is a waste of your time.

Another concept, that perhaps will embitter some because of its practicality, is that of your personal landfill. What you produce on compact disc or vinyl or tape doesn't magically disappear. It ends up in the landfills, with all the other waste you produce, to rot in insignificance, slowly leeching poisons into the earth. You like being alive, right, or you'd be dead - why create more personal landfill if it won't achieve something you desire?

Art

Few words have been abused as much as "art." Someone I talked to once said her art was talking to people in coffeehouses. Others claim that feces on a canvas in abstract patterns is art about oppression, suffering, and the right of every person to express themselves. For better or worse, however, "art" is something real.

Music can exist in several forms. It can be propaganda. A variation on propaganda is "entertainment," or music designed as propaganda to convince you that doing nothing (except buying the album) constitutes a meaningful life. We are all familiar with Britney Spears and other bubblegum pop bands, but would it be clear that Pantera and Cannibal Corpse and Dimmu Borgir (post-1996) are from the same way of thinking?

It's like TV: here's something new new new! Sit back, enjoy, the show's about to begin. Take a load off, don't worry about your life; that isn't real. Being distracted is real. We have things you've never seen, "new" and "shocking" ideas, and plenty of slick production to keep you from seeing we're dressing up the most basic and obvious ideas as something important.

What distinguishes the greatest music, or books, or visual art (including some TV) is that it aims to be art instead of entertainment. The difference is that it hopes to communicate an experience, realizations, or transcendence (finding meaning beyond the immediate physical that makes enduring life worthwhile: an eternal goal). The music that made black metal stand out from all the other new subgenres in the early 1990s was its passion, its sweeping up of all attributes of life and putting them into a meaningful context, ...experience transmitted through art.

There was no reason to care about this genre unless it made the listener feel something. You can talk about an idea all day long, and write a million essays, but only art can make you feel what it would be like to have an idea in your head and live by it. To have separated mentally from a diseased Christian/industrial society, to find the beauty in nature even with its horrifying aspects like death and predation and disease, and to see life through an enlightened warrior's eyes -- this is what art transmits. Not all can receive.

The Progressive Society

Supposing for a moment that you haven't already concluded this essay is part of the great ranting incoherent Internet blog-culture or self-image-culture, and are still with me here, you might decide that art is for you. Now you run another gamut, one in which various people try to convince you of illusions. The foremost of these is borrowed from entertainment, and as usual emphasizes the trivial over that which is eternally significant.

This illusion can be stated simply as "form is more important than content," meaning that the style of what you create, or the "new" ways of playing music you produce, constitute what makes art meaningful. I doubt this very much. The greatest works of literature to this day make people feel what it was like to experience something, as do even older works of metal, but their style and technique haven't kept up. Content, defined as what the art communicates instead of *how* it communicates, is most important.

I'm not trying to defile musicianship here, or style and aesthetics. These are all important, when they serve the content, which is an expression of the learning and belief of the artist(s). When music is made the other way around, with content serving form, it is meaningless and should be packaged in plastic and sold to the least critical buyers so that it can, after a few weeks when they tire of it, join every other failed portion of humanity in the landfill.

Form is a vehicle for content, just like words are meaningless unless something meaningful is being said. This brings you into one of the most enduring philosophical problems of the modern time. Some would argue that modern society is "progress," and that we're moving slowly from days as grunting blockhead cavemen to an enlightened, utopian, moral future. We will have the best gadgets, and no one will be oppressed, they gush enthusiastically.

I remain suspicious of this worldview because it presupposes that external forces can shape our lives entirely. If you have the right toys, and the easiest shopping and entertainment, your life is "good," but if you're impoverished or live too far from Wal-Mart, the products of an industrial Christian society are not "convenient" for you. This is not only shallow, but it's a denial of all that makes us appreciate some people over the other. What defines you is what you are inside, what you believe in, what you choose to do with your time, and what ideals would make you fight even if death was a great possibility.

The Progressive Society would have you believe that someone with a giant house in a trendy area of town, a BMW and Sony VAIO computer, plenty of DVDs and a great entertainment system, is absolutely a success, as if Heaven-proclaimed. We don't know anything about this person, however. Would he stand up and fight to defend his family, or his tribe, or to make sure the last patch of forest doesn't become a mini-mall? If not, he's not worth a goddamn thing, when all the material goods and social trends are removed.

In contrast to the progressive society is the view of both distant (pre-Christian) past and hopefully not-so-distant future. It's a view that fits in any time, because the basics of being alive have not changed and never will change. Someone who stands up for what he or she believes in, and fights even if it means death, is always a hero; someone who stays home and watches TV is a zero, even if he is very comfortable and has lots of money.

This view, which I call the "eternist" view, is what motivated early modern black metal. You can hear it in bands like Enslaved, Burzum, Immortal and Emperor. It's a grandeur that is unique because it comes from the efforts of an inner force, changing the world. The idea of black metal being "evil" was a metaphor; if our society now is "good," what we are is evil, because we oppose it. This was the force of heroes against a horde of people going the opposite direction.

In the eternist view, what defines music is not how much it stays current with what the latest trends, styles and techniques are, as the "progressive" view would have you believe. Eternists recognize that music is intuitive, and therefore there is nothing new to discover, but music can be used as a voice to make great works. Technique exists on a scale from banging rocks against wildebeast skulls to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but what defines the music is its content, which at its best is eternal.

When one adopts this view, it is no longer important to compete with other artists for style points. Style serves content, and creating content of eternal importance becomes the goal. Few can do this, and this is why the crowd, most of whom cannot, will argue against this tooth and nail and will *always* prefer the "progressive" view, because it lets them slap out the same old wildebeast-skullbanging and call it "new" and "important."

Evolution

Taking up this view, assuming again that you haven't already thrown in the towel on this lengthy narrative and headed to your favorite porn site, we can see that art itself is a process of evolution. This is not evolution in the "progressive" sense, but in the sense in which winter favors the intelligent and determined: inner evolution. No matter what technology exists, or what style, the only thing that allows something to become lastingly important is its inner focus and the content that it has to communicate.

Black metal, for example, has produced a first generation of maybe 25 bands, of which ten or fifteen were truly great, and then succeeding generations of over 10,000 bands, of which one would be hard pressed to name more than a few which will matter to us in five years. When winter comes to black metal, only the bands which are great remain, because those who are attracted to the simplistic crap have the attention span of a sandwich.

They forget trends as soon as they are not "new," and generally have no influence among those who actually make things happen. But the great music lives on, much as when spring comes, the best of the new generation make their stand and begin the process of growth yet again. It seems harsh, but think of it this way: having more people doesn't mean you have better people, just more people watching TV, few of whom would stand up for anything heroic. This is "progressive" but it's not "evolution."

For a species in nature, evolution is a positive force for the whole even if many individuals are lost, much as having better bands is healthier for a genre even if it means some people cannot achieve their dream of being the next Euronymous or JFN. Humanity has relied on money for so long that we are bloated with useless people whose deaths would strengthen the species as a whole. Our music is in a similar situation.

In this light, what is happening to black metal now is "good"; everyone gets a chance to have a band and to re-live in their own minds the experience of Norsk black metal, 1991-1996. Yet evil prevails: only a few can evolve to the degree that they can understand what made black metal great and make music of a similar passion, and those who cannot will be soon forgotten. This is the beauty of winter.