Archive-name: heavy-metal Posting-frequency: monthly Last-Modified: 23-January-09 Heavy Metal FAQ: Introduction to Metal Music and Culture Archive name: Frequently Answered Questions (FAQ) about Metal FAQ Name: Introduction to Metal Author: S.R. Prozak WWW: http://www.anus.com/metal/about/faq Version: 0.3 --- Newsgroups: Periodic posting alt.rock-n-roll.metal, alt.rock-n-roll.metal.heavy, alt.rock-n-roll.metal.death, alt.music.black-metal, alt.thrash, alt.rock-n-roll.progressive, alt.fan.metal, alt.music.slayer, alt.music.underground.metal.death, alt.music.underground.metal Infrequent Posting alt.fan.metal, alt.rock-n-roll.metal.black, alt.rock-n-roll.metal.doom, alt.music.alternative, alt.fan.metal.burzum, alt.fan.metal.graveland, alt.fan.metal.suffocation, alt.fan.metal.demilich Introduction: This periodically posted article introduces heavy metal music and the heavy metal genre, including the sub-genres of speed metal, death metal, black metal, thrash, doom metal, grindcore, and ambient metal. Summary: This FAQ explores the development of heavy metal as a musical movement through its place in a larger culture, and reflects upon the ideological and sociological circumstances that motivated that development. These circumstances are tracked through music theory, symbolism, and behavior. It also explores the subculture of heavy metal music and its members, known as "Hessians," who listen to the music and attempt to live by the values expressed in the music. It includes but is not limited to a history of metal music, the philosophy of heavy metal, the styles and sub-genres of heavy metal, etiquette in the heavy metal groups, where to find heavy metal t-shirts and CDs, and the cultural values of the Hessian subculture. Authorship: The Heavy Metal FAQ was written by metal radio presenter and writer S.R. Prozak for the Dark Legions Archive at www.anus.com/metal and features contributions from USENET metal experts 1993-1999. Archive: The current ASCII text copy of this article may be found online at http://www.anus.com/metal/about/faq ================================================================ CONTENTS :: Heavy Metal FAQ Introduction to Metal Music and Culture I. What is Heavy Metal? 1. Definition 2. History 3. Imagery 4. Impact 5. Miscellaneous II. Metal as Concept 1. Music Theory 2. Sub-Genres 3. Ideology 4. Culture 5. Technique III. Metal as Physical Manifestation 1. Concerts 2. Recording 3. Production 4. Gear/Merch 5. Journalism IV. Metal as Virtual Community 1. Web 2. Email 3. Experts 4. Newsgroups 5. About ================================================================ PART I :: What is Heavy Metal? 1. Definition 2. History 3. Imagery 4. Impact 5. Miscellaneous Summary: - Heavy metal originated as a counter-reaction to the hippie rock of the 1960s, and wanted to sound like a horror movie soundtrack - Heavy metal fused progressive rock, hard rock, and soundtrack styles using the power chord to make phrasal composition - Heavy metal culture resembles European literary Romanticism in its emphasis on the individual and nature, not social mores, dictating value in life - Heavy metal ideology could be an active form of nihilism, in which the individual believes in nothing because belief is not needed as much as a creative, intuitive, warlike principle of "vir" - The musical and cultural influences of heavy metal suggest this idea has been injected into the mainstream, but that a constant struggle exists to "norm" it to social mores 1.1 What is metal music? Defining heavy metal requires we look at its many aspects. First and foremost, it is a musical style with certain compositional tenets without which music cannot be said to be heavy metal; however, even more profoundly, it is also a set of ideas that shape its composition, and without those you can have something that "sounds like" metal but does not appear to be metal. From this juncture of idea and sound we can see that metal music is a mental outlook that influences how the sound is created and the corresponding outlook on reality that it suggests. 1.1.1 Heavy Metal Music Heavy metal can be described by the following: (a) Songs are written using forms of the power chord, or a fifth chord lacking a third, in a moveable form based normally on the low E chord. Since these chords lack a third, they are neither major or minor, and can be played in any position, which lends itself to writing longer, more dynamically melodic or lengthier phrasal riffs. (b) Having a musical aspect of heavy derived from a songwriting style that emphasizes a return to unison, above and beyond other harmonic objectives. The promenade-style riffs and theatrical conclusions of metal songs derive from this need. (c) Dark subject matter, and use of heavy distortion, vocal distortion, intensely fast or slow tempos, and other ways of converting the normally disused into a musical language, as if attempting to find beauty in darkness. (d) Familiarity with the past musical language of metal riffs and imagery, and ability to build on it, both musically and ideologically. (e) A preference for cadence where rock bands would use rhythmic expectation. Although metal beats are syncopated, this is often reduced to a constant which ends phrases on the downbeat. Emerging from the ruins of rock music, it contains the Celtic folk and blues basis of that genre, which has an international flair in that it uses Celtic song structures, European music theory, Semitic scales (the "blues scale" originates in the middle east), an Arab instrument converted by Spaniards and electrified by Americans, and timbral singing which is probably an Asiatic influence on Africa. However, these remnants were tapered by a tendency toward progressive rock song structures, which approximate those of European classical music; the rhythms of garage punk bands, which come from the first two music lessons of an aggressive teenager; and finally, the thematic tendencies of horror movie music, which is generally borrowed from modernist- and Romantic-era classical composers like Anton Bruckner, Camille Saint-Saens, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann and Ottorino Respighi. The traits of this modernist music -- mobile fifths, conclusions in unison, thematic repetition with inflected motifs, layered harmony and use of inversion -- takes music a step beyond its classical roots but also a step back toward the origins of that music, in that by playing fast and loose with harmonic identificative structures, it returns to the modal, melodically-structured, narrative compositional form originally pioneered by earlier civilizations like the ancient Greeks. When classical music emerged from the rigor of baroque styling, and went into the theoretical but passionate world of the Romantics as defined by Beethoven, it reached a height that demanded a further gesture to continue its artistic specialization. The final point of departure was to liberate melody from many of the intricate harmonic architectonic infrastructure of Romantic music, and in doing so, to make melody more than harmony the leading compositional tool, which resulted in music that tended toward a nearly chromatic base scale with motifs clustered around it in varied modalities imposed on contact points in that progression of tones. As it did so, it became more motif-driven, spurred on by the "leitmotifs" of Richard Wagner, and so in its Brucknerian climax approached a juncture of music, narrative, theatricism and architecture -- Bruckner famously referred to his works as "sonic cathedrals" -- in which it was one step of the screw away from becoming the rigorously correlated drama, ritual and music of the Greek theatre. Heavy metal inherited all of this through a modern form because of its desire to escape the cognitive dissonance reaction to modern life. In part, this impulse comes from the metalhead who realizes that he or she is basically powerless, except in a future time when predictions about the negative nature of modern society will come true. Of course, in the now, parents brush that aside and go shopping, stockpiling retirement funds so they can carelessly wish their children a good life before disappearing into managed care facilities with 24-hour cable movie channels. A more fundamental part of this dissident realism is creative. People who see most of society going into denial because they cannot handle their low social status, the dire future of human overpopulation and industrialization, and the negative motivations hiding beneath social pretense, aka "cognitive dissonance," will often mourn most for the opportunities lost when people value putting their heads in the sand more than finding beauty in life. It is the convergence of these ideas that creates the violent and masculine but sensitive, Romantic side to metal: it is a genre of finding beauty in darkness, order in chaos, wisdom in horror, and restoring humanity to a path of sanity -- by paying attention to the "heavy" things in life that, because they are socially denied, are left out of the discussion but continue to shape it through most people's desire to avoid mentioning them. This same principle underlies classic European and Greco-Roman art and music, the idea of an aggressive and warlike but wise and sensitive motivation that is both religious and scientific, peaceful and belligerent, because it understands a principle of order to the universe and asserts it because it is beautiful in that it is a "meta-good," or the harmonious result of darkness and light in conflict. For this reason, it is not moral in the sense of judging as good or evil, and neither fits into the hippie "peace, love and hedonism" approach nor the conservative, market- bound ignorance-is-bliss smoke and mirrors of mainstream music and bourgeois art. Unlike any other musical principle, the one thing that unites the varied borrowings from baroque, rock, jazz, blues, folk, country, classical and electronic music that form heavy metal is this Romantic principle of doing what is right not in a moral sense to the individual, but in a sense of the larger questions of human adaptation to the universe, the conceptual root of "heavy" in metal and what throughout history has been called by a simple syllable: "vir," the root of virtue in a sense older than a modern moral interpretation as chastity. Vir is doing what is right by the order of the universe discerned by asking the "heavy" questions, and speaks to an abstract structure of right as opposed to an aesthetic one, where the individual picks the non- threatening as an option to the threatening. "It's a concept album about what once was before the light took us and we rode into the castle of the dream. Into emptiness. It's something like; beware the Christian light, it will take you away into degeneracy and nothingness. What others call light I call darkness. Seek the darkness and hell and you will find nothing but evolution." - Varg Vikernes, http://www.burzum.com/ For these reasons, where rock has simpler unifying principles (tension between pentatonic and harmonic minor scale) and other forms of music have more clearly genrified technique, like funk, which supports a variation not musically much distinct from rock and jazz, metal is both a polyglot and a theory of its own, helped greatly by the flexibility which the power chord bestows. The ability to move chords rapidly without harmonic obstruction led to a desire to write more evocatively phrasal riffs, which led to riff domination, which in turn led to longer song structures using a modal sense to unite motifs in an otherwise disparate, chromatic context. This process evolved through the proliferation of sub-genres that marks the development of metal since 1970. Heavy metal music, as a genre, encloses sub-genres which implement the above list with varying degrees of proficiency, leaving behind rock conventions as they do so for a uniquely metal musical language. While much of this change occurred within speed metal, it was enhanced during death metal and perfected with black metal, and can be seen as an ongoing stratum of concept developed with the first proto-metal album, and continuing in refinement toward a higher vision of itself. 1.2 Heavy Metal Music History Heavy metal adapts the format and instrumentation of popular music to a style of composition, narrative phrasal melodic structuralist songwriting, that emerges either from a healthier former age or from a better future, depending on your perspective. The first proto-metal emerged in 1970 when Black Sabbath released their self-titled debut in an attempt to make the musical equivalent of a horror movie, being both inspired by the soundtrack and topic matter. This occurred after vocalist Ozzy Osbourne observed that it was "strange that people spend so much money to see scary movies" (NY Rock, August, 2002). In contrast to the hippie culture, flower power, populist "love" sentiments and oblivious happy songs about romance that were the norm of the time, themselves being a reaction to the innocent but wholesome rock of the 1950s, the new proto-metal was a dirge of the insignificance of the individual: it was "heavy," slang for bringing the mood back to serious reality, and it wrote about a life beyond the individual and individual desires. Through this decision, they echoed an earlier divergence, where bands such as Link Wray, MC5, Blue Cheer and Iggy and the Stooges had stripped down rock into fast, distorted power chords as if to convey an urgency and dominating importance to their work. These bands throughout the middle 1960s defecated all over the peaceful oblivion and unrealistic pacifism of the hippies, which was promptly disproven by a brutal Cold War which held the world hostage to nuclear conflict for four decades. To those nascent influences were added the heavy blues of Cream, the folk-music of Led Zeppelin, and the acerbic progressive rock stylings of King Crimson and Jethro Tull (Black Sabbath guitarist did a stint in Jethro Tull, and came back claiming it had taught him a more rigorous work ethic). Underscoring that "prog rock" traditionalism was the influence of the apocalyptic poets of rock, LA's the Doors, who brought a literate Nietzschean sense of doom through the inaction of morality toward constructive ends, something echoed throughout early Black Sabbath lyrics in the fusion of decadent Judeo-Christian mystic symbolism with techno- industrial terminology and subjects. Through both the horror movie soundtracks that inspired its new sound, and the progressive rock desire to approximate the classics of generations past, Black Sabbath inherited a heavy classical influence. This influence eventually absorbed others because the type of chord used in heavy metal, the power chord, can be easily played with the same finger position in any part of the fret board. That ability lends itself to a technique of writing riffs with more development than rock riffs, which tend to bounce to a rhythm with a very basic harmony; metal riffs could and did move dynamically and approximate a melodic style of composing, and their dramatic horror movie underpinnings encouraged these riffs to imitate what they were portraying, giving them a neo-Wagnerian, operatic feel. This more complex style of distinctive riffing, and its "heavy" tendency to run through multiple motifs on its way toward a theatrical conclusion, was what above all else was to define heavy metal music. Heavy metal offended the cosmopolitan society of people who had been supporting the peace, love and profits of hippie rock music. From the earliest times, they looked askance at the classically- styled but gutter-minimalist, violent, gnarled and ugly heavy metal riff and classified it as the product of a lower-income mentality. While it is true that Black Sabbath members came from the working classes in England, it seems a fallacy to assume that all people of that background are primitive or regressive. More likely, it is the wounded pride of music critics, generic rock musicians, politicians and marketers that is retaliating against the upstart, which immediately sent shock waves through rock music. All those who distrusted the hippie-centric music of the time, or saw it as unrealistic (as history would prove it to be), as well as alienated kids from the boring outer suburbs where reality was deliberately kept in quarantine, thronged over the new music. The first Black Sabbath album reached number 8 on the UK charts and number 23 in the USA, making it a minor hit, and the followup _Paranoid_ made it into the top ten despite panning from critics, and produced a number one single, "Paranoid." The music establishment, in criticizing the financial establishment, was as much a force of calcified "conservative" thinking as was the factory and agriculture establishment before it. Black Sabbath threatened the order of the music industry by making the rock elites look as fat, stuffed-shirty and retrograde conservative as the suited bankers they hoped to replace. (One theory of civilization is that its economy cycles according to its stage of life, with new civilizations being agricultural, middle-aged civilizations being manufacturers, old civilizations being financial services economies, and death-bound civilizations sellers of media and services that do not directly generate income.) For this reason, heavy metal was born controversial and has remained so for the entirety of its life to date. Since its inception, it has split into several sub-genres, ranked according to time period: 1970-1974 Proto-Metal 1975-1980 Heavy Metal 1981-1987 Speed Metal 1983-1985 Thrash 1985-1993 Death Metal 1988-1992 Grindcore 1990-1995 Black Metal Each of these sub-genres continues to this day, but the dates designate its most formative period, in which the definitive form of the sub-genre was created. When proto-metal of the Black Sabbath variety was fused with the popular hard rock of Led Zeppelin, and influenced again by the dramatic flair and long song structures of prog-rock bands like King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Jade Warrior and Yes, it became the first "heavy metal." In this usage, heavy metal is a sub-genre of the genre "heavy metal," because it is musically separate from the metal to follow but generic enough that it also inherits that appellation. From 1970-1976, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple commanded the most attention, but after that, a new series of bands arose making both (a) stadium heavy metal, which was closer to the rock music of Led Zeppelin (but often without the virtuosity or interest) and (b) a more aggressive variant, culminating in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) which attempted to return to the power of Black Sabbath, generally by incorporating faster, punk-influenced tempos and the grander song arrangements of prog- rock bands. Much as heavy metal exploded into the public eye and then became a media product, and then counteracted its impulse, metal returned to its roots as oppositional, outsider art with speed metal. The pattern of popularity rising, creating "false" and "sold out" music, causing underground musicians to retaliate with a more extreme form, repeats throughout the history of heavy metal. In the case of speed metal, which made its formal appearance in 1982, the crucial influence was the punk hardcore bands who from 1978-1982 made aggressive, stripped down music that escaped rock conventions and the use of pentatonic scales, favoring chromatic music with impromptu melodies and abrupt tempo and melodic shifts. This type of punk hardcore culminated in 1982 with Discharge _Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing_, which used a unique new technique -- fast tremolo strumming of power chord melodies -- and sounded the death knell for punk hardcore by summarizing all that it had done, and adding to it the new dimension of melody and with it a new ideological theatricism, escaping the dramatics of musicians emphasizing their own personalities. Unlike pop music, punk hardcore was about "something," namely the condition of humanity and human thought. With this infusion of punk hardcore, as opposed to the somewhat pop punk that had influenced prior bands, heavy metal gained a serious outlook which never left it, and two fundamental techniques. The first was the tremolo strumming described above, which was faster and more agile than before, creating a type of sustained note that allowed simple music to escape the bouncy, expectation-driven syncopated rock sound; also, a counterpoint to this style was created in the use of muffled power chords, where the palm of the strumming hand lightly touches the strings as the chord is played, giving it a full percussive sound that grated on the ears of normal people. Speed metal used both of this, with a preference for the latter, as the bassy "chugging" sound was warlike and evocative of machines. Speeding up heavy metal, giving it a bass intensive sound, and re-directing it toward hardcore punk inspired topics like nuclear war, world politics and personal doom, speed metal was the most extreme thing to come out of metal and for a long time remained free from the compromise endemic to the experience of its more commercialized cousins. Speed metal suffered a fatal flaw in that, as extreme as it was, it was also rhythmically hookish like a pop song, and soon lesser bands had adopted the style and were making pop music within it. That in turn drove speed metal bands into the public light, and by 1988 it was apparent that the formative days of the genre were over and the long slow descent into selling out had begun. Luckily, some years prior, a flowering of heavy metal sub-genres had occurred in the underground of indie rock. When Discharge created their formative sound, they inspired others, most notably Slayer, Bathory, Hellhammer and Sodom. These bands created music that straddled genres, being called speed metal, black metal (the "black" designation means Satanic, as most of these bands had a joyful affiliation with the occult if not a sneering delight in blasphemy) and finally, death metal. During the years of 1983 through 1985 these bands formed a new sound, but in 1985, with Possessed, Master and Sepultura, a new form of music -- hybrid punk hardcore and speed metal -- came about, using metal riffs at punk tempos with punk technique and the elaborate song structures of speed metal. This new "death metal" was at first indistinguishable from "black metal," but it was soon agreed that the latter was the more melodic variant of this new style, but death metal took off before black metal could formulate a mission statement for itself. From 1988 to 1994, the death metal style raged across North America and Europe, creating many formative works before lesser musicians adopted its technique, began writing pop music, and turned it into a self-mocking, ironic hipster creation. Luckily, black metal had not been idle, since after 1990 it became apparent that death metal would follow speed metal in short order. Its emphasis on insistent rhythms won out over its most salient technique, which was a method of stringing together phrasal riffs so that they appeared random until heard together, at which point a developing sense of change, like the narrative of a story, emerged from the music. The outward attributes of death metal -- double bass drums played at a higher speed than the snare or cymbals, guttural vocals shouted in a gurgling antipathy to bourgeois aesthetics, and loud fast guitars using chromatic scales to launch modal assaults which were unified more by rhythm of phrase and melodic compatibility than any sense of harmony or verse-chorus song structure -- easily were cloned by a new generation that removed their unique attributes, simplified the music into verse-chorus structures, and then took it to new heights of silliness. At the same time these bands degraded death metal, acts like Death and Cannibal Corpse used their popularity and the similarity of their music to rock and heavy metal to convince more people to flood the genre. Soon the bassy, guttural, chugging sound of death metal was not hard to find, but at this point most musicians had moved on to its cousin, black metal, which used death metal technique more sparingly and united itself through consistent melodic playing where much of death metal was pure phrase composed of chromatic scales interrupted by whole intervals and occasional melodic ones. Black metal, born to uncertainty and neglected for nearly a decade, flowered in the early 1990s. Frustration with an increasingly liberal West that had become as oppressive as the conservative version, and a new global economy that seemed to be removing culture as fast as it attempted to make every corner of earth safe for business, as well as a Romantic desire for ancient times in which, it was perceived, meaning was more readily attained through tradition and struggle, drove black metal to become not only the most articulated form of metal yet, but the most popular to rise from the underground. After a dramatic series of church burnings, murders, conversions to National Socialism, blasphemous adulation of sodomy, and other crimes and taboos which affected all but a few of the original Norse, Greek and American black metal bands, the genre got captured by hipsters who re-mixed radio heavy metal with black metal vocals and keyboards, Satanobabble lyrics, and a new attitude of postmodern personal chaos, and from it made the virus that sold the genre out. Since 1996, little of note has happened in heavy metal except for a few established bands and a handful of newcomers who uphold the classic styles releasing albums that are a minority for their quality and coherence. Death metal and black metal hybridize languidly, and mainstream metal added funk and hip-hop influences to death metal to create a rock-based horror known as "nu-metal." Increasingly instability in the music industry has prompted first an onrush of new black metal and death metal, and now, a stagnation in which fans download much but because little of it is as powerful as the formative bands, listen in random order with no enduring favorites. Since 2007, quality has steadily rebounded as hipsters have lost interest, and the music has lost its more recent ironic qualities and is again becoming something other than a self- parody. It is likely that three factors -- the US election in 2008 bringing back trendy liberalism, the greed of corporate barons causing oil prices to rise before scarcity, and the collapse of the world economy -- will return enough angst to metal to propel forward. 1.3 Heavy Metal Imagery We define "imagery" to mean lyrics, symbolism and ideology. Metal music comes from a world-wide subculture which can be seen as rebellion against parental and social authority, or an attempt to create a different underlying value system to society, depending on how favorable the reader is disposed toward heavy metal. As a collective system of thought, metal both believes in the individual as the vector of judgment, and denies individual importance by writing music that is lyrically and musically "heavy" or suggestive of larger patterns and importances outside of the individual. This pattern appears also in European Romanticism in literature, art and music, and Romantic themes pepper the metal lexicon. Heavy metal expresses its value system through a number of meta-motifs, including: the redemptive power of struggle, the nihilistic callousness of warfare and disease, the lack of moral certainty, the certainty of death (and, as a corollary, the positive aspects of easeful death), the power of destruction, the intensity of creation, the transient nature of material and moral objects, the infectious descent of sensuality and hedonism, and the individual as struggling against social norms. The heavy metal value system could be a de-ontological decision tree, in that all motivations are driven by existential value in the context of the "heavy" patterns larger than the individual. It supposes that our inner and outer axes are reciprocals of an inverse relationship, so that when we choose absolutes inside of us, we lose the sense of the absolute outside, and it is this balance that obsesses heavy metal writers. Over three decades and four generations of world marketplace culture metal music - from heavy metal to the intermediate states of speed metal, early hardcore-deathmetal, and an early evolution of heavy-metal-based blackmetal, to the moderns, such as the abstract incarnations of death metal and black metal, ambient metal, and progressive chromatic death metal alongside ambient grindcore - metal music has held forth a philosophy of parallel human interpretations of reality which involves no authority or control for a variety of fundamental reasons: 1. No single rule fits all of us, as we are unequal in ability. 2. Authority is a human, not natural, construct. 3. Chaos is necessary to the universe, as are pain, death and war. 4. Stagnation dominates unless destruction through creation renews the abstract patterning of nature. 5. Humans create barriers to insulate themselves from the fear of making decisions in an uncertain world. 6. Nihilism, or accepting uncertainty and emptiness, demystifies decision-making into a logical system. 7. Metal as a culture attempts to find beauty in conflict, darkness, horror, distortion, chaos, mayhem, butchery, evil, sodomy and lust, in an attempt to show that positive and negative forces together create the ultimate good, which is reality itself -- a competing absolute to our false social mores. 8. The only way to realize feelings of Romantic longing for meaning in life is through violent positive creation, where the individual accepts meaninglessness and revels in it like an observer to an apocalypse, while summoning what beauty there is within to convert dark industrial sounds to sonorous structures if not sonorous textures. This outlook parallels the Romanticist fascination with the Roman concept of "vir," or virtue through self-negating struggle for what is right according to an abstract and inherent/immanent order to the universe. Metal is a genre of music which refuses to compromise the inherent lack of intervening personality in life; we could call this nihilism, because outside of human beings, there is no apparent supernatural order which delivers life in moral form. Good people who step on land mines die just like bad people who step on land mines. This nihilism, feared by those indoctrinated in social mores, is accepted by metalheads as a means of liberating themselves from illusion. This act, in that it results in existential inconvenience, is a philosophical heroism because it asserts a difficult truth over a convenient illusion. 1.4 Social Impact of Heavy Metal Whatever people thought of it, and many continue to take the popular attitude that it is anti-culture and not culture, heavy metal created a profound impact in culture and society, one equaled by few genres. In the age of ideas, any fundamental philosophical split and in the case of metal, a consistent one, becomes worth observing to see how it alters social perceptions of the ideas it finds most tantalizing. 1.4.1 Musically The influence of metal mainly spread to rock music, where its techniques and tones are being practiced in other packaging. 1.4.1.1 Power Chords The principles of detuning and using low E power chords have made it into mainstream music, a Black Sabbath innovation worn into mainstream culture by countless doom and speed metal bands. The rhythms and power chord geometries of metal have fascinated many experimental musicians who have used them to create extreme influences in varying genres. It is now common for rock bands, and mainstream product commercials, to drop in heavy metal riffs as a fast food styled leitmotif for "outside the norm." 1.4.1.2 Metal Riffing The sense of melody, and the breakdown of melody into technologically specialized pieces, is something shared between metal music and ambient/electronica, and psychedelic music shares with metal its epic structures and demanding melodic regimen. 1.4.1.3 Grunge The basic model patterns of grunge are based on the work of Black Sabbath in re-arranging the pentatonic scale for their own usage. 1.4.2 Aesthetically In the abstract, aesthetics have as a whole been influenced by the ideas in metal: distortion, dirt, ambiguity, nihilism. Other systems of people were at work on similar ideas as well, but this area is where metal, through its network of fans from whom the intelligent are often successful, distributed valuable information and ideas. 1.4.2.1 Degraded Aesthetic The abraded or washed-out textures of jeans in the 80s were a precursor to the higher-grade graphics of the next generation, where worn-out or grainy, gritty surfaces were part of the aesthetic that inverted the conditions of its own slick, context-less appearance. 1.4.2.2 Dynamism The dynamicism inherent in the presence of metal, and its structural coherence, demonstrate a stark or shocking aesthetic which also is at work with current designers of visual media. 1.4.2.3 Structuralism When an aesthetic seeks to outdo itself, it goes to the next level: intense structuralism, which such as the kind used in metal can be used to create a vaster depth of emotional connection through its literality and universality. Metal's structuralism has influenced radio rock in the 90s more than any other attribute of any other genre. 1.5.3 Philosophically Philosophically metal has been the only major underground movement to tackle a technical philosophy of existence and spirituality, and has contributed through its public image an association with hedonism and spirited off-the-cuff living. 1.5.3.1 Nihilism The cold-eyed stare with which metal reduces the negative or ambiguous in life to null or little value gives it the same epic power as the raw literality of its characters during a journey. Nihilism remains the major conflict of the 21st century as it was for the 20th. When we enter a time when we do not have traditional culture and gods imposed on us, how do we find direction? Do we try to prove it to ourselves with science, or do we turn to aesthetics, or to the immanent and holistic, in effect choosing the former world order as antecedent and response to industrial society? 1.5.3.2 Hedonism The excesses of metal players and fans are well known, spreading the virus of divisiveness between drug takers and others. 1.5.3.3 Romanticism Metal embraced all aspects of European Romanticist thought: an ambiguous relationship toward death, love of the ancient (and ancient ruins), a desire to get beyond Judeo-Christian morality, respect for our Greco-Roman ancestors, a non-politicized nationalism, worship of the natural including the horrifying, praise of tragedy and an occult, intuitive imagination that desires a return to the more honest (if less convenient) social orders of the past. "I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." -- William Wordsworth, English Romantic poet Artists of influence from the Romantic time period and Romantic movements in all genres include: William Blake, John Keats, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Lawrence Sterne. This Romantic thought has now influenced other genres which share allegiances with metal. 1.5.3.4 Politics Politically more people are electing to follow metal lifestyles, meaning that fewer moral and more logical decisions are going into politics. 1.5.3.5 Occult mysticism As the public forefront of popular culture's fascination with evil, metal music is almost an ikon for Satan himself. People often ask why metal is fascinated with evil and has been since its inception in Black Sabbath, who were formed partially to enable their occult beliefs a forum. The answers perhaps lie in the definitions of romanticism and nihilism coming together for a dark but empowering worldwide: as if inspired by Dionysos, the crafty god of wine of the Greek era, or by Fenris, the wolf of apocalypse of the Norse, metal bands have rejected order in favor of chaos and hedonism. The hedonism is explainable to the materialistic parametrics of nihilism combined with the passion and life-seeking sensuality of romanticism, and the chaos is the midnight tempest which buffets away the weak and encourages autonomy and independent direction in those who would survive. Humanity's path toward apocalypse has made even more trenchant these views, and consequently varying interpretations of evil exist in metal today. Some have even taken this farther, to associate the Bacchus/Dionysos spirit of mind with its Nietzschean metaphor of the brave, independent, and analytical yet impassioned artist struggling in a world of sleepers. I have said too much and will leave it there. "Watch as flowers decay On cryptic life that died The wisdom of the wizards Is only a neutered lie Black knights of Hell's domain Walk upon the dead Satanas sits upon The blood on which he feeds" -- Slayer, "Die by the Sword" (Show No Mercy) 1.5.4 Postmodernism Metal, like most Postmodern art, is an experience and not a medium. Hence there are several layers which must be removed from their compacted form, "decrypted" and served up to the reader by some part of the inner brain. This enables the music to survive longer before being aesthetically ripped off. 1.5.4.1 Experiential Conception of Art The lyrics, culture and music of heavy metal warriors is heavily encrypted within experiential reference and heavily technological language, but like many other genres from this period it does provide a literal level, and a meta-level, to all three facets of its art. 1.5.4.2 Existential Gateway to Darkness To decrypt it is to understand it and be open to virus Metal's virus comes wrapped in the appearance of death, meaning that where there is a weakness to death, it equalizes and penetrates. The morbidity, paranoia, passion and politics of metal over the years has shown a passage by which one accepts death, and the nihilistic chaos of material reality, and in doing so lays down the foundation for transcending it. To do that is to become a gleeful nihilist; a postmodern nihilist is a "post-nihilist" One would transcend material with nihilism, and then transcend nihilism with its natural self-reduction: a "post-nihilist" would be one who could nihilistically view human existence and see within it a space for creativity, joyful in the emptiness and impermanence of reality. Metal, by introducing structure and spirituality and Romanticist individualism and nihilism, issues to its listeners a challenge to explore it deeper and bond with what causes it to be, rather than what it "is." "Falsified spirits farther they fall Soon they will join us in Hell See the sky burning the gates are ablaze Satan waits eager to merge." -- Slayer, "Chemical Warfare" (Haunting the Chapel) 1.5 Miscellaneous Things which could not fit elsewhere. 1.5.1 Fear of Metal Many politicians and community leaders have expressed a fear of heavy metal on the basis that it causes crime and anti-social behavior. Since metal is opposed to mainstream society, it is hard to argue it should not be censored from their perspective, but it is not guilty of the physical crimes of which it is accused. 1.2.1 Black metal crimes What were the crimes in Norway and other states related to black metal and their extent? "Beginning with a small, ineffectual fire at Storetveit Church in the month preceding the Fantoft blaze, there have since been a total of at least 45 to 60 church fires, near-fires, and attempted arson attacks in Norway. Roughly a third have a documented connection to the Black Metal scene, according to Sjur Helseth, head of the Technical Department of the Directorate for Cultural Heritage." - Lords of Chaos, p 79 1.2.2 Suicide/metal lyrics? This is forthcoming as soon as someone can show us a definitive connection between lyrics/music and suicide; I believe there is an incidental connection in that teenagers especially use music to define "mood" that resonates with their socioemotional representation of life at that moment in time. Hence, sometimes the right soundtrack must be chosen and Slayer is a reasonable bet. However, it is useful to analyze the lyrics of Slayer to examine this supposed "suicide-inducing Satanism" of which media trumpets and social bores have made quite a celebration of resentment. For this purpose, the nihilism of Slayer's lyrics is reproduced here to demonstrate its logicality and statement of critique of modern society: "Fear runs wild in the veins of the world The hate turns the skies jet black Death is assured in future plans Why live if there's nothing there Specters of doom await the moment The mallet is sure and precise Cover the crypts of all mankind With cloven hoof begone Chorus: Sadistic Minds Delay the Death Of twisted life Malicious world The crippled youth try in dismay To sabotage the carcass earth All new life must perish below Existence now is futile ... Convulsions take the world in hand Paralysis destroys Nobody's out there to save us Brutal seizure now we die." - Slayer, Hardening Of The Arteries (Hell Awaits) 1.5.2 Metal Lore Questions about stories, errata and personalities in metal. 1.5.2.1 Emperor/Enslaved Split tracks Q: Can someone refresh me as to what the deal is with the Enslaved half of the "Hordanes Land" split? They only have three tracks, but seven are listed. Were they indexed incorrectly or are the last four just missing? I've got the red Century Media version, if that makes a difference. 5.Slaget I Skogen Bortenfor 6.Allfadr Odinn 7.Balfor The rest is just a [garbled] listing of the various 'parts' of the songs. - "Sybren," poster to alt.music.black-metal N.B.: Both the Century Media version (red/black) and the Candlelight version (black) of this album contain the error. 1.5.2.2 Metal Musicians in Jail At the time of this writing, here are the current jail totals for metal musicians: Varg Vikernes 21 years Bergen, NO He will be out in 2008 if all goes well. "Faust" 15 years Oslo, NO Out of jail for some years. "Samoth" 2 years Oslo, NO Out of jail for some years. 1.5.2.3 origin of name "heavy metal" Some say the name Heavy Metal had been used by Steppenwolf in the '60s in "Born to Be Wild": I like smoke and lightning Heavy Metal thunder Racing with wind And the feeling that I'm under - "A Heavy Metal FAQ," by granel@geocities.com The term "heavy metal" was used to describe mass technological destruction to the point of biological toxicity in William S Burrough's book "Nova Express," published in 1964. He may have also used it in a story written before "Naked Lunch" in 1959. It is difficult to trace the etymology of the term "heavy metal." Most likely, it arose simultaneously as inspired by the class of metals, including mercury, described by the same term: volatile, toxic, and disproportionately heavy both in physical weight and the responsibility of those who handle such dangerous substances. "The earliest citation in the OED relating to the musical sense of 'heavy metal' is from William Burroughs in 1964. Here is an earlier Burroughs usage I have found: 1962 William S. Burroughs _The Ticket That Exploded_ 39 The Other Half was only one aspect of Operation Rewrite-- Heavy Metal addicts picketed the Rewrite Office, exploding in protest." - Fred Shapiro, "Antedating of Heavy Metal," American Dialect Society lead (n.) "heavy metal," O.E. lead. Black lead was an old name for "graphite," hence lead pencil (1688) and the colloquial fig. phrase to have lead in one's pencil "be possessed of (esp. male sexual) vigor," first attested 1941 in Australian slang. Adjective form leaden is a relic of O.E. The fig. sense of "heavy, oppressive, dull" is first attested 1577. Lead balloon "a failure" is from 1960, Amer.Eng. slang. - Online Etymology Dictionary http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=lead ================================================================ PART II :: Metal as concept 2.1 Music Theory 2.2 Ideology 2.3 Culture 2.4 Technique Summary: - Metal is a form of composition rather than a specific music theory unique to metal, but its form of composition is found nowhere else but in classical music - Metal's ideology is based around the concept of _vir_, or doing right in a non-moral sense, which means acting as an individual but not individualist, and putting individuals second to the shared ultimate physical reality in which we live - Metal culture is not a counter-culture, but a reaction to it, but is also not an affirmation of the dominant culture, because it has esoteric aspects and seeks to modify rather than overthrow - Varied heavy metal techniques are summarized by metal musicians 2.1 Music Theory Heavy metal music uses at its core the same music theory that propels all music found in the West: the diatonic scale and its harmony, the same rhythmic divisions and calibration, and the same types of song structure. Like rock music, and the Celtic folk music that was its origin, metal is built on a verse-chorus format which originally favored I-IV-V progressions; metal, built on fifths, developed from this standard to have greater flexibility by using narrative, motif- based compositional structures, and as a result of that technique, increasingly varied song structures which return to a state of harmonic unison. What distinguishes metal is its use of motifs which negotiate a balance between oppositional states to synchronize starting and ending points; this technique allows the unification of diverse riffs that seem initially unrelated, but together form a narration that carves out a space for its conclusion. As a result, metal song structures vary more than those of any other popular genre and contort themselves to the unique needs of each song. However, since metal is still a popular music, this variation occurs as an addition to the dominant verse-chorus structure, much as metal is an addition to culture as opposed to a counter-reactive, revolutionary force. In this sense, heavy metal is the inheritor of the technique of Romantic, ecclesiastical modernists like Anton Bruckner, fused with the technique of hardcore punk musicians that stripped aside the preconceptions and scales of rock music to write in pure modal stripes of 3-4 notes within the context of a chromatic scale. It inherits its narrative song structure both from the progressive rock like King Crimson or Jethro Tull that was part of its founding inspiration, and from the horror movie soundtracks that were derived directly from modern classical and inspired it through the horror movies from which its iconography descends. Using the instrumentation of rock, metal is able to channel its more traditional heritage and, like its founders Black Sabbath, oppose the dominant illusions of a time where pleasant mental escapism pretends it is combating a dominant undercurrent of decay based in human evasion of reality. 2.1.1 The Sound of Heavy Metal Metal music may utilize any collection of aspects including but not limited to the selection below. Downtuned - quite often, lower or more dissonant tunings and fingerings are used for a physical presence to the music. Convergent rhythms - metal bands tend to use rhythmic structures which target themselves for reduction by deconstruction of similar patterns to dominant themes. Tone centric - as part of the directedness and rootedness that makes music "heavy" in one school of the idea, a coherent and direct identification of a root tone is present in music that often refuses to change keys in the rock sense, moving tones in a referentialism closer to "classical" music than popular tunes. Abstract - because its nature is tone-heavy its expression is an extremist structuralism, where the relevance of a sequence of melodies and polyrhythmic constructions defines part of an inner structure with relevance to an external meaning. Minimalist - as the industrial age expanded itself into a flattening, technological existence took over and prompted a simplicity expressed in rock n roll which attempts to remove paradox from the communication. Reactions many people have: angry, scary, depressing, violent, upsetting, disturbing, morbid, sadistic. 2.1.2 Theory Music "theory" is a language of describing the shared process of the communication that is art and how we as individuals are able to speak to the whole of intelligent beings by addressing the common interpretations we must make, as thinking machines, to inference our own existence in a chaotic world. In metal, there are numerous instances of theory, many of which are expressions of an underlying philosophical evolution. Technique --> Structure Technique, which normally serves to embellish, became under metal the science of structure, with any number of strumming and picking techniques developed by metal musicians. Heavy metal worked through the austerity of power chords and a jazzlike rhythm to a deeply chaotic and abstract blues. Speed metal used muted-palm picking to create a mechanical, grinding sound, where death metal bands began to use a flutterstrum which would turn a chord into a stream of undulating sound with a massive tremelo effect, building a powerful tool for ambient melody. Melody --> Harmony Harmony in metal is used to unify a number of melodies to a sequence of tone centers which represent the parts of the idea being manipulated by the song. The riffs which metal bands use are structuralistic in that they describe rather than categorize, by the nature of their wandering phrases which use structural similarity for coherence rather than tonal unison. Where harmony serves to preformat a range of emotions for rock bands, in metal, melody drives harmony, letting the composer take the music into whatever direction he/she desires by dynamically associating tone centers with contrapuntal arrangements, layering strips of reference to narrative and joining them with harmonies. Tonality --> Dynamicism The major element of metal's evolution is a progression in tonality from the blues-rock extrapolationist grab bag to the chromatic, dark and almost mystically nihilistic tone patterns of death and black metal. The ability to change from a fixed-tonal system to a system which, like the Doppler effect, is based on proximity and speed to establish a current point of reference, provides for a basis of composition which is more specialized for systemic expression than for linear expression. This is similar to the postmodern novels of James Joyce and William S Burroughs, where a series of divergent threads unified unspoken topics indicated by metaphorical assonance with consensual reality experience. Chaotic music Many will say metal is "chaotic" meaning "there's a lot of noise," but to others this indicates that its composition involves specialized structures for what the song is trying to express, instead of variants on working general-purpose structures (Verse/Chorus). Heisenbergian Chaos The discoveries of Heisenberg indicated that one could not observe a wave/particle interaction without influencing its outcome by presence as a chaotic attractor. This in turn indicates a systemic awareness, in that if moving elements closer together means they reflect an attraction, the grouping of items in life itself suggests a series of attractors extending beyond the organism to its environment. If there is a level at which we are contrainfluential, as Heisenberg suggests, then there is some level of abstraction in which every particle is connected to every other, and thus that the thing that is life works as a whole, as a large system of connected orders. Relativism --> Dynamicism In metal, relativism (or: the state of assessing relevance of events based on their current context and not an absolute) is used as a method of defining objectivism; it is a strategy of finding local relevances to compare in order to project a placement in a larger, complete order. As this translates into music it becomes a more ordered use of chaotic composition, in which notes are picked arbitrarily and used as the foundations of specialized melodic systems, custom-created to express the significance of the whole in what is only an example. Objectivism --> Melodic structure Where harmonic interplay is specific to the juncture of notes, melody allows a structuring first by leading the music through tonal changes and second by gesturing toward a larger structure that unifies the disparate changes in melody as narrative. Metal is more melodic in overall structure than any mainstream music, a tradition it inherited through speed metal's covert obsession with 70's prog rock bands and neoclassicism. In the era of death and black metal, this allowed bands to dynamically allocate needed musical structures for integration into a narrative suggested by a metacontextual interpretation of melody, removing the barriers for progressivism (romantic rationalism) and minimalism (nihilistic structuralism) to join. 2.2 Sub-Genres Heavy metal as a term reflects both a genre and a sub-genre within it, which is a testament to the musical diversity of metal's genres. In the four decades since its inception, metal has evolved along the lines of its original thematic material, advancing technique and ability to express it with each generation. 2.2.1 Proto-Metal Heavy metal arose from loud simple rock and is defined by its primary progenitors: Black Sabbath. Taking the rhythm of blues and jazz and using it to underlay minimalist epic power-chord riffs, Black Sabbath took the blues to the next step of insidious artful subversion and glorification of the anarchistic freedom of demonic lust. Alongside hard rock originators Led Zeppelin the blues raised its twisted and morally dubious head again in mainstream rock; where Led Zeppelin augmented rock's knowledge of harmonic structure Black Sabbath reinvented it altogether, being in the mind of one prominent critic "the second most important rock band to the Beatles." 2.2.2 Heavy Metal Some will doubt this distinction and classify Led Zeppelin and their family of blues-form hard rock as similarly heavy metal, but this makes no sense given the clear compositional direction within Black Sabbath's music: 1) more ambient beat structures focusing less on phrase than granular looping repetition, 2) dissonant elemental riffs with abrupt cycles, 3) bizarre song structures and experimental elements. During their reign Black Sabbath built the foundation for the harmonic essence of grunge, created a rhythmic synchronicity in punk and rock, and opened experi- mentation in noise music, ambient beat-music, and progressive minimalism. The period from 1969-1977 bore the most influence of their work, a morose conclusion to the hippie rock of the middle sixties. Other influential music from this period: The 13th Floor Elevators, MC5, Jimi Hendrix, Blue Cheer, the Doors, Dick Dale, The Rolling Stones, King Crimson. It is worth noting that a primary influence on Black Sabbath was the guitar work of Django Reinhart, a jazz player in the 1930s, who like Black Sabbath guitarist Toni Iommi had lost the practical use of several fingers, compensating through a reductivist attitude toward harmony. Heavy metal continues to this day as an artform, in practice by endlessly recombinant commercial bands and a series of artists who spend their time exploring new paths for a vitally organic, earthy and yet tech-aware genre. There are two or three major threads: "Black Metal" (I) Starting with British middle-fingered madmen VENOM in the late 1970s, this style of heavy metal used punk work ethic to make a simple but surprisingly dark and expressive form of anti-life art. At first humorous, it grew toward illustrating the obsession with negativity that is a hallmark of postmodern consciousness, paranoia, and drone existence in western nations. "Doom metal" Slow and painful, often gothic in its suicidal "desires", mournful music, much of which is based in the musicality of heavy metal, will deliver a grinding and also almost ecclesiastical experience of morbid anarchy. "Power metal" The marketing department came up with this tasty term for hopped-up heavy metal that is at musical essence a cross between speed metal and prog-ish heavy metal, with bouncy rhythms and jazz-inspired double-hit percussion. The music of power metal is based in the work of decent heavy metal musicians as well as atmospheric speed metal bands like Prong or Powermad. 2.2.3 Speed Metal As the seventies waned metal faded into a sad repetition of the image of its glory. Excess and a lack of musical innovation lead metal to still waters, where it drifted into either the hair-and-makeup wailing guitar tradition of stadium metal or the rising punk movement. Exceptions were Iron Maiden, who brought melody and narrative tempos to heavy metal, and Motorhead, whose proto-punk progressive metal grated against tradition and sensibilities with its biker graffiti narrative of nihilism in modern culture. These acts brought to a close the fading image of blues-oriented rock ("heavy metal") and the rise of the inherent progressive anti-aesthetic minimalism in bands such as Black Sabbath, spawning separate tendencies at once. In reciprocation to the decay, a furious tendency toward hardcore punk use of strumming rhythm over driving percussion simultaneously developed alongside the melodic and progressive intentions of the more advanced bands of previous generations. The counterpoint of punk -- whose violent rhythms and anti-consonant phrasing were vanguard of the new deconstruction of pessimism -- was the glitter-laden complexity of heavy metal, complete with classical melodies and rock virtuosity; the fusion of these two begat speed metal, racing tempo music using the muffled strum to form hard-edged and precision riffs with embedded melody, emphasizing _structure_ where traditional heavy metal used shorter phrasing to emphasize _placement_ and _tone_. Of these rising acts Metallica (1982), sister act Megadeth (1984), and northern cousins Exodus (1984) were the primary disseminators of groundbreaking material. Metallica, of special note for their use of open chords, complex harmonics and melodic composition, began their career in emulation of faster versions of older metal bands. Soon acquiring musical skills and theoretical counseling in the dual virtuoso team of Kirk Hammett (lead guitar) and Cliff Burton (bass), Metallica grew in renown and peaked in musical development with _Master of Puppets_, combining the complex composition of 1970s progressive rock bands with the thundering domination of violent hardcore. Burton died soon after in a tour bus accident and the band never recovered, but soon they had spawned 1) groups of emulators and innovators in the style of muffled-strum epileptic-tempo speed metal and 2) other groups interested in the possibilities of metal/hardcore fusion, so that by 1987 when they retired the metal scene had become more extreme and more erudite almost overnight. 2.2.4 Thrash Before the peak of speed metal had even begun Alief, TX, hardcore crossover band Dirty Rotten Imbeciles were busy inventing the Sabbathified hyper-punk fusion that would project their extreme views and emotions upon a fragile audience. Deliberately low-fi and abrasive, DRI's first two albums featured an unheard of brevity (18-25 second songs) and trenchant criticisms of modern society. This earned them fame in both metal and hardcore scenes as they injected needed energy into both genres. Also of note were micro-riffing shredthrashers Corrosion of Conformity, who blasted out several albums of curt songs destroying social control with metaphorically divisive structural deconstruction in a musical inheritance from hardcore and early death metal. Cryptic Slaughter and MDC (an acronym of varying significances) followed with even more acerbic anthems of distrust and anarchy; Cryptic Slaughter are especially interesting for their basic death metal on the latter side of 1985's _Convicted_. Despite innovation in both genres, speed metal was destined to collide with corporate megaculture and thrash was to burn out its intensity as audiences moved away from the extreme to the more commercial in both hardcore and metal genres. The fomenting anger of the metal scene, as well as the increasing destruction of the planet and world superpower fascism, prompted retaliation with the negation of speed metal's "heavy metal" vocabulary of consonance through the most nihilistic form of musical expression to date: DEATH METAL. 2.2.5 Death Metal When society seemed even more hopelessly fallen into acceptance and worship of its own collapse, the conventional tonality and "save the world" messages of speed metal and its ancestor, heavy metal, became too trite and ridiculous for the newest generations of alienated youth. Discarding harmony and nihilistically embracing the chromatic scale as law, early death metal bands espoused beliefs in the evil and orderless, the chaotic and the painful. Their rhythmic violence and insistence upon wildly-constructed and atonal guitar solos made them an instant target of both critique and shameless ripoff. The first wave of this technique, from Slayer (1982), had its roots in the old-style metal of Judas Priest evolved to become faster, ripping-strum styled metal that shifted with muscle over rigid, ambient repetitive beats. However the second wave -- Possessed (1985), Morbid Angel (1986), Deathstrike (1985), Rigor Mortis (1988) -- were more obscurely and bizarrely formed from raw innovation and chromatic scales. (It is worthy to note that Slayer's "Reign in Blood," of 1987, is an impressive musical definition of death metal that is often overlooked for its lack of "growly" vocals.) As the decade waned and humanity seemed further flung into the pit of materialism, death metal reached toward the progressive and explored the extremes of melody (At the Gates), ambience (Obituary), percussion (Suffocation), atonality (Deicide), and microtonal music (Atheist). Simultaneously however the bulk of death metal shifted toward a more percussive and chromatic style, composing their material visually from power chord forms along the bottom three strings of the guitar. By 1992 the peak had been reached, and afterwards soundalikeness pervaded all but the most individually-conceived bands. The overuse of death metal's nihilistic inventions -- chromatic open phrasing and chaotic soloing -- had made that genre, like hardcore punk a decade before, the anti-commercial musical breakdown that in the end made it easier for ripoffs to dress up rock n roll in new production values to create a new product flow to meet a genre-identified need. In addition, a horrible trendy underground had developed around the idea of righteousness and moral good; consequently, they bankrupted death metal's ideals by conforming to mainstream expectations, and their music led itself back toward the dogmatic, tendentious, and most of all judgmental system of scales and harmonies. Back into the blues, there was suddenly a clear peak -- significance and value -- arbitrarily imposed by scale structures that truncated the value of the music and made its ability for chaos limited to aesthetics only. A fatalism had invaded metal, once again; that which plays with the aesthetic of power must serve its time in the hell of that paradox. 2.2.6 Black Metal (II) As if to rectify this stagnation another form of metal arising through the same channels of heritage began to spread its wings and develop its raw essence -- ambience, melody, and stark nihilistic structuralism -- as it came closer to underground consciousness. The first of these bands were Hellhammer (1984) and Bathory (1985), with the former playing slower sensually rhythmic material while the latter banged out mutating riffs over strict simplistic ambient drum-machine percussion. Where death metal went for logical appeals black metal presupposed the end of the world and celebrated decadence, destruction, agony and morbid emotion as a means of exploiting the social climate to its own revelation. The melodramatic, overstaged and ludicrous "evil" presence of these figures drew attention to their mythological interpretation of the coming -- or perhaps ongoing -- apocalypse. 2.2.7 Grindcore An important genetic component of death metal, grindcore arose from the ashes of hardcore and thrash as the alienated punk-rockers and sociopathic metalheads of the world sought something more extreme, more evocative of the discompatibility they felt as a process of soul. With the rise of Napalm Death (1985) and Carcass (1987) in England the genre was well-founded as an alternatingly slower or faster version of punk, with bar chords colliding at high speed outside of the blasting furnace of rhythm. Deliberately dissynchronized timing, detuned instruments and guttural distorted howls of vocal brought this genre to the attention of death metal heads who appropriated vocal and tuning habits, and to the innovative mind of Napalm Death-founder Justin Broadrick who made "industrial grindcore" with 1988's _Streetcleaner_ and immediately created a detour for angry metalheads and industrialites and punkers to make crossover music that was as unfriendly as industrial sounds like it should be. In 1994, Napalm Death's "Fear, Emptiness, Despair" sounded almost the last note for grindcore as its course of innovation started to veer from the minimalistic to abrasively coarse and simple, death metal-like music with complex jazz-y rhythms. Grindcore, like hardcore, thrash, speed metal and early forms of death metal, continues to this day, but most innovation remains at the aesthetic level and the original thrust has been lost. 2.2.8 Ambient Metal Ambient metal is a category that spans genres, and addresses those artists who, in a desire to get closer to the classical ideal of phrase entirely dominating the changes in tempo and harmony of the piece, abstract drumming into a background timekeeping which is absurdly flexible so that rhythm guitars playing melodic constructions can be the lead instrument. 2.2.8.1 Question of Existence The question with ambient metal whether it is a style or a subgenre rests in the conclusion to the query: does the music employ a new form of composition? Technique is not entirely new, but in new places, and the new way of writing music is so desolate and empty yet beautiful for that same ultimate potential that one is inspired to say: yes, it is a differentiation of the form of art. 2.2.8.2 Members of Genre There is overlap with other genres but suggested acts to check out are: Gorguts, Burzum, Graveland, Immortal, Demilich, Slayer, Behemoth, Hellhammer, Darkthrone and Cadaver for an understanding of how this tradition manifests itself in metal. 2.2.8.3 Related Genres Electroacoustic/Noise - K.K. Null, Tangerine Dream Hardcore - Discharge, the Exploited, Black Flag Prog/Psychedelic - King Crimson, Camel, 13th Floor Elevators Classical/Neoclassical - Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner Jazz - Django Rheinart, Ornette Coleman 2.2.9 Styles and Crossovers These are metal-related and metal-hybrid styles. 2.2.9.1 Doom Metal "Doom metal" does not merit a separate genre because it is one of two things: 1) very slow heavy metal or 2) very slow death metal. Although its ideology is more gothic and its aesthetic morbid, no significant changes have been wrought from inventors Black Sabbath (1969) and the doom work on Morbid Angel's _Blessed Are the Sick_ 1991. Of note: St. Vitus, Winter, Cianide, Skepticism, early Cathedral. 2.2.9.2 Industrial "Industrial" as used in the record industry denotes a reliance on electronic beat equipment and often digital sounds. However, it does not govern the music underneath, which is almost always rock or heavy metal in essence. The exception being Godflesh, whose innovation prompted mainstream acts Ministry (1989) and Nine Inch Nails (1991) toward their more commercial rock-industrial terror dance music. 2.2.9.3 Black metal (I) "Black metal" as a term was invented by Venom, who with simpler but more violent and "evil" melodramatic versions of the heavy metal radio hits they heard, crafted an image which would be filled in the next generation with bands like Hellhammer, Bathory, Celtic Frost and Sepultura. 2.2.9.4 Power metal Heavy metal stadium rock dramatic extravagance coupled with the bouncier, violent rhythms of speed metal and especially speed/funk hybrids Suicidal Tendencies and the Infectious Grooves, together with a more testosterone attitude, makes a commercially viable genre: power metal. The Pantera variant described above is the main divergence from the pure hybrid, which is often in the form of technically-powerful and rhythmically precise heavy metal, in a style opened up perhaps by Helstar or Psychotic Waltz or Mekong Delta while most other bands were getting into the decon- structed aesthetic of death metal. 2.2.9.5 Speed Metal/Death crossover After the appearance in 1985 of Slayer's "Hell Awaits," Possessed's "Seven Churches," Sepultura's "Morbid Visions," Deathstrike's "Fuckin' Death" and the second round of Morbid Angel demos, death metal had established itself as the next most extreme translation of the metal idea. Simultaneously in Germany, a movement to combine speed metal ideals with a more abstract and logical, dark sequence of tones took hold in the form of bands such as Kreator and Destruction, who put together deathy speed metal, or intense hardcore-inspired extremists like Sodom who built three-chord high-speed songs to accustom an audience to enjoying a fast and violent melody. 2.3 Ideology Although not a vital component of the music itself, the ideology that propels metal reflects the range of spirit which enables one to create music that is both free and structural. An evolving history of ideas is presented briefly here. "I've never thought it an accident that Tolkien's works waited more than ten years to explode into popularity almost overnight. The Sixties were no fouler a decade than the Fifties -- they merely repead the Fifties' foul harvest -- but they were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly. In terms of passwords, the Sixties where the time when the word progress lost its ancient holiness, and escape stopped being comically obscene. The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there...[Tolkien] is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers -- thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams." - Peter S. Beagle, introduction to "The Hobbit," 1973 "According to the Romantic conception, the lost unity could not be restored by external means; it had rather to grow out of man's inner spiritual urge and then gradually to ripen. The romantics were firmly convinced that in the soul of the people the memory of that state of former perfection still slumbered. But that inner source had been choked and had first to be freed again before the silent intuition could once more become alive in the minds of men. So they searched for the hidden sources and lost themselves ever deeper in the mystic dusk of a past age whose strange magic had intoxicated their minds. The German medieval age with its colorful variety and its inexhaustible power of creation was for them a new revelation. They believed themselves to have found there that unity of life which humanity had lost. Now the old cities and the Gothic cathedrals spoke a special language and testified to that 'verlorene Heimat' (lost homeland) on which the longing of romanticism spent itself. The Rhine with its legend-rich castles, its cloisters and mountains, became Germany's sacred stream; all the past took on a new character, a glorified meaning." - http://flag.blackened.net/rocker/roman.htm 2.3.1 Ideals As all of us are, metallions are children of history who look to the past to explain the thinking behind the present. Here is a brief sampling of the identifiable movements metal's got into. 2.3.1.1 Romanticist As a philosophical movement romanticism predates existentialism in its desire to explain life to the individual, as if entertaining the theodicy of Milton as a Protestant necessity for personal self-actualization. It was about breaking free of social confinement and finding the transcendent self which could see the beauty in all things, an extension of the egalitarianism of the Deists who founded commercial America. Much of its focus included a dialogue with death, a morbidity, an insouciant desire to experience life as it occurs, a hedonism, a fascination with the ancient, a querying of self in vast universe, and a desire to achieve that which is unique for its precision expression of self. This movement empowered emotion to lead the human on wild adventures, while setting logic free in a world of its own to dream. Some say this is the last time people in Western society reported significant experience. A fragment from the OED defines romanticism as "tending towards or characterized by romance as a stylistic basis or principle of literature, art or music; designating to a movement or style during the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe marked by an emphasis on feeling, individuality and _passion_ rather than classical form and order, and preferring grandeur or picturesqueness to finish and proportion." This snippet defines both the style and content of romanticist works, at least as commonly known; investigating metal reveals their inspiration. The distinguishing characteristic of metal throughout its history has been its youth-culture rejection of the established world (youth reject their world for they can afford to; once they are educated to lose hope they find themselves in an easier existence) and declarations of autonomy from the surrounding world and its disease of bourgeois commercialism, sexual elitism, intellectual denial or spiritual cowardice, depending on what generation of metal is expounding. In this metal has affirmed the rejection of proportion/symmetry and the overthrow of external principles which would control \ such as morals and aesthetics (finish); the root of this tendency is the dependence on passion that takes over when one has accepted science (see Nihilism, 3.1). The romantic movement of literature in Europe (predominantly England and France) inspired poetry and existential literature such as Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_, the story of a creature brought to life finding his essence unfolding as he grows, only to realize the conditions of his life doom him to obscurity and isolation. These works are the ancestors of the seminal modernists James Joyce, William Faulkner, and W.S. Burroughs, as well as the genesis of genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The fascination with the eldritch and morbid, the biological and the destructive, as well as the unfolding question of humanity's place in a technological world, are hallmarks of this movement leading a clear trail through history to today's metal movements, especially black metal in which all logic is rejected in favor of total emotional hatred and nihilistic passion for the abstract. "A dream of another existence you wish to die a dream of another world you pray for death to release the soul. One must die to find peace inside, you must get eternal I am a mortal but am I human ? How beautiful life is now when my time has come A human destiny but nothing human inside What will be left of me when I'm dead, there was nothing when I lived" -- Mayhem, "Life Eternal" (De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas) 2.3.1.2 Existentialist Existentialism is the science of the evolving individual, and how to understand human development from a psychological, sociological and metaphysical view. "Existence before essence," as it has been summed in the past, depicts existentialism as the concept that without any inherent purpose, we "wake up" when we are born here and then must find some way to explain value into our lives. As we grow we become more of what we are, or wander in a personalityless materialism. "Mankind does not represent a development of the better or the stronger in the way that it is believed today. 'Progress' is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea. The European of today is of far less value than the European of the Renaissance; onward development is not by any means, by any necessity the same thing as elevation, advance, strengthening. In another sense there are cases of individual success constantly appearing in the most various parts of the earth and from the most various cultures in which a high type does manifest itself: something which in relation to collective mankind is a sort of superman. Such chance occurrences of great success have always been possible and perhaps always will be possible. And even entire races, tribes, nations can under certain circumstances represent such a lucky hit." - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ 2.3.1.3 Postmodernist The inversion of value so that its inside might be seen, postmodernism is about mirrors. A mirror of the self, so that it can be seen as the subjective in a world of objectives that it is; a mirror of the world and a mirror of that mirror, to keep consistent projections (time). What makes postmodernism most distinctive is its absorption of intensely "chaotic" theories such as quantum physics or non-linear mathematics, by virtue of its foundation in technology and looking past superstition, but also peering beyond the intellectual process of illusion to see how the universe functions as organism, with universal principles of growth. Founders such as James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, William S Burroughs, and Emperor make this movement valuable for what it is: a violent fist against the aesthetic remainder of rationalism, where an illusion of public good and intent is manipulated to justify vast thefts. Afflicted with knowledge, postmodernism tends to emphasize the "subtext" of each situation, where there is an acknowledged reality and an underlying larger picture which often has nothing to do with the material props at hand. As such, dreams of death and great journeys past the land of the dead are complex and intriguing material. "The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot thrown from a a high window." -William S Burroughs 2.3.1.4 Mysticism The basic belief of a mystic is that events and objects are interconnected in a structure that is larger than immediate material parameters and as such can be accessed if one is open to transcendence, or letting go of the visible for the abstract. The mystic finds significant experience in interpretation of everyday events. While we may believe our world - our reality to be that is - is but one manifestation of the essence Other planes lie beyond the reach of normal sense and common roads But they are no less real than what we see or touch or feel Denied by the blind church 'cause these are not the words of God the same God that burnt the knowing - Burzum, Lost Wisdom 2.3.1.5 Shamanism A shaman is a tribe's seer sent forth into the wilderness of his own personality in order to dig forth the answer to the question everyone is blinded from asking. A master of finding the obvious behind a whole structure of reality designed to hide it. 2.3.1.6 Nihilism Nihilism leaves a complex etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary: "Total rejection of current religious beliefs or moral principles, often involving a general sense of despair and the belief that life is devoid of meaning." This gives a historical sense of the word as something anti-religious, anti-moral, and anti-meaning, but does not explain the root of that: a belief in the lack of arbitrary values except the immanent and contextlessness function-value. Nihilism rejects conventional valuations and replaces them with the pragmatic assessments of science and atheism, allowing freedom of movement before considering precedent and normativity. In modern times nihilism is a dual entity, composed of emotional nihilism or the breakdown of all values or caring (closer to apathy) as well as the nihilism described above, which is merely a removal of arbitrary illusion as imposed by social conditioning. Metal has always espoused some form of nihilism, from its roots in god-rejection and social cynicism to its over-glorious heavy metal days when no excess was enough. Death metal took nihilism to new extremes of rational description of human irrationality, fragility, and doom, but black metal takes nihilism a step further and assumes it as a weapon against conventional moral and spiritual restrictions. "My name is Varg Vikernes and I play in Burzum. Burzum means either darkness or light, depending on how you see it really. If you're a Christian it probably means darkness." - Varg Vikernes, http://www.burzum.com/ 2.3.1.7 Organicism The tendency of mathematical systems to go from the linear, or vector measurement, to chaotic multidirectional entities is a measure of its organicism, or the point at which it moves from chartable projections to the zone decided only by theory. Organicism is a philosophy of information science which holds that in order for something to articulate itself independently, it must be of an unmeasurable state of chaotic motion. It's as if in escaping Heisenberg one becomes integrated into a system in which all measurements are variable in chaotic patterns, e.g. without linearly predictable jumps (a pattern with linear jumps suggests the order is evident within that pattern, where a pattern with chaotic jumps suggests an order behind the evident pattern) and therefore a science of fuzzy logic and organic decisions is needed. The sheer relentlessness of the fact that the human mind still so far outperforms our computers a comparison is ludicrous indicates that a more powerful and efficient logic than our stacks of decimal calculations will be needed. Hence an emergent organicism in many things, including metal, which approach problems in which binary solutions (those composed of yes or no, off or on, right or "wrong") lead to illusion, since the binary nature is a projection of the intelligences observing the situation and not emergent from the properties and methods of the system itself. "The essence of liberalism is individualism. The basis of its error is to mistake the notion of the person with that of the individual and to claim for the latter, unconditionally and according to egalitarian premises, some values that should rather be attributed solely to the former, and then only conditionally. Because of this transposition, these values are transformed into errors, or into something absurd and harmful. Let us begin with the egalitarian premise. It is necessary to state from the outset that the 'immortal principle' of equality is sheer nonsense. There is no need to comment on the inequality of human beings from a naturalistic point of view. And yet the champions of egalitarianism make equality a matter of principle, claiming that while human beings are not equal de facto, they are so de jure: they are unequal, and yet they should not be. Inequality is unfair; the merit and the superiority of the liberal idea allegedly consists of not taking it into account, overcoming it, and acknowledging the same dignity in every man. Democracy, too, shares the belief in the 'fundamental equality of anything that appears to be human.' I believe these are mere empty words. This is not a 'noble ideal' but something that, if taken absolutely, represents a logical absurdity; wherever this view becomes an established trend, it may usher in only regression and decadence." - Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins 2.3.1.8 Naturalism A belief in or intense study of nature, Naturalism is a fundamental component of metal's fascination with the natural and the dual appearance of natural order. In order to appreciate the beauty of a system including its most brutal and predatory moments, one must understand it as a whole to see the function which this tendency plays, and for what conceptual development to reality. The inexorable but chaotic order is studied through musical emulation and lyrical hyperbole in a genre partially dedicated to transcendence of natural boundaries, with an appreciation for the strength and continuity of nature. "Afraid of what lies after death Your screams are unheard to Him Resisting your wake of adorn Your pleading falls deaf on your lord 'Go #@&!% your god' will be my final words To die is just the concept of living To be forgiven, salvation blessed with pain Endeavored is the blame of creation Pathetic lives, every second someone dies Delightful is the sight of repention No destiny, just a certainty of death In pain inducing lies of salvation Never repent..." - Deicide, Repent to Die (Legion) 2.3.1.9 Individualism Strongly in favor of the independent evolution of individuals so to allow them space to grow without the persistent damage of scar tissue formed to avoid intervention by the arbitrary appearances of demands by others, the individualist genre metal has developed a subculture with focus on the development of the individual as a force of chaos and change in the otherwise patterned material/causal world. The reasons for individualist thought usually center around the idea that those who know what they want for personal fulfillment will not project that on to others for purposes of control. Individualism is a property of art and any other discipline which demands independence and focus; systemic and/or chaos thinkers understand it as a form of parallelism. "A fundamental, devastating error is [having a] political system based on desire. Society and life are been organized on basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for her...Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or humankind... In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging onto democracy and parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of humanity...In democratic countries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most...Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen." - Pentti Linkola, The Year 2017 Will Never Come 2.3.2 Influences In addition to having core tenets of belief, metal also has a long heritage of influences whose ideas or responses to the same have provided foundational, contextual material regarding the time and space of the genre's evolution (background). 2.3.2.1 Ideologies Ideologies are united by a belief in the human ability to better its existence, and an understated logicality in which some form of rationalism is needed for coherence with the collective. 2.3.2.1.1 Rationalism Can be summed up easily with the idea that a systematic process of logical thought will provide the germinal material for a practical solution or creative contribution even in a lawless and chaotic natural context. Looming out of the advancements in theory of Europe after the Renaissance, Rationalism was a restatement of a historically consistent theme in human thought which underscored the Scientific Method, which had recently be used by the same European empires to provide the basis for an industrial revolution. 2.3.2.1.2 Autonomism Anarchy, or the political state in which there is no leadership and the ideological state in which no leadership is wanted, decayed from its own politicism and the inherent materialist, power-control structure to politics. Fading at the same time as punk rock, anarchist culture produced believers in autonomism, a philosophy in which the independence of all beings is the highest goal, and each being is seeking a way out of a natural state of confusion into a self-definitional state after which comes greater freedom of intellect. 2.3.2.1.3 Existentialism A very alcoholic writer once summed up Existentialism with the simple switch, "Existence before Essence"; however, this provides a great place to start a context comparison between Existentialism and the prevailing flavor of Utilitarian logic prevailing at the time. Christianity and its forefather Judaism believed in an inherent and inexorable logic to a world controlled from another system of logic by an omnipotent "god", a situation in which one's moral "essence" would be connected to one's creation off-camera by an omnipresence. Existentialism freed the human to admit a developing consciousness, and thus to self-refine according to where one found joy. Existentialism was heavily influenced by transcendentalists who in turn had been inspired by the Romanticists before them, and carried with it the revolution of philosophy in the age of the twilit gods: a further science of spiritual insight so that a wide range of individuals could perceive and think dissimilarly but remain unified by abstract logical agreements. 2.3.2.1.4 Buddhism The evolution of eastern religion from a caste system into a peaceful, self-empowering religion, Buddhism is an example of intense "spiritual technology" from which participants find an increasing clarity in perception and valuation. Among its many core concepts are the ideas of meditative calm, enhanced perception, ego-reduction, self-abstraction and parallel views of reality. 2.3.2.1.5 Classicism Classicism is a study and belief in the older civilizations in the western world such as the Romans, Greeks, Scandinavians, Sumerians and Egyptians, all of whom had legal systems, some technology, learning, and a lack of morality in their belief structures. Their gods were personalities who represented recombinant elements in nature, combining in stories which displayed a patterning of the troubled souls of ancient peoples. These societies perished, some might say, from their own success: they got large without the ability to control that largeness, and so relapsed into anarchy and death. 2.3.2.1.6 Structuralism Structuralist philosophies have existed for some time but a recent resurgence came after the logical rejection in Dada and other collagist philosophies which sought to eliminate a meaning not inherent in life through a randomness calibrated to defeat intellectual analysis. Structuralism is an evolution of Rationalism to the next level, in a technological age where any problem is a design issue, to be solved by changing the structure of the object(s) or process(es) based on logical deductions and corresponding creative outpouring. 2.3.2.1.7 Transcendentalist Transcendentalist thought has been part of many philosophies and will hopefully never go away, because it's a positive and universal view of life. Such scientific mystics as Emerson who found a deeply personal connection to nature and a complex beauty in the larger system of life established Transcendentalism as an idea in art and philosophy, but transcendentalist ideals are also common to Buddhism, Romanticism and Existential thought. 2.3.2.2 Thinkers As influential as ideologies were and are, they often consist of choices made in thoughtful response to the ideas presented by any number of writers or thinkers or performers. Hence this listing. 2.3.2.2.1 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Born into a religious family, young Nietzsche showed a gift for scholarship and became successful enough that, by his early twenties, he held a professorship at a prestigious university teaching philology, or the study of the evolution of meaning through language, and ancient Greek tragedic theatre. Over the course of the next thirty years he bashed out multiple treatises on philosophy which were innovative, forceful, articulate, artistic and honest, granting them eventual approval with a worldwide audience. Nietzsche's philosophies centered around existential valuation, objectivism, and freedom from the mental weakness of morality as expressed in Judaism and Christianity. His works as a result promoted the predator over the prey, rejected pity and guilt, and affirmed a physical existential experience as a fundamental anchor of the self to world. To this day he is not widely understood, and his works are known for having inaugurated in the postmodern era, a humanity after facing the stark naked empty reality of its existence. 2.3.2.2.2 Immanuel Kant A strict and diligent philosopher, Kant was nonetheless marked by the inconsistency and often evasion of his thought; led by the developing ideas he had toward certain conclusions, he would equivocate where they conflicted with fundamental ideals of his Christianity, leading to some "hypothetical" conclusions used to wrap up the whole of his philosophy. That aside, Kant laid down the first epistemological view of modern philosophy and build a core structure of philosophical concepts and the boundaries of knowledge which remains useful today. His work in technical philosophy, especially moral philosophy, enabled him to clearly define the lines which would become battlefields in the future of 20th century philosophy. His importance to metal musicians comes mostly through his identification of the "perceptual filter," or a mask of association through memory which we as thinking beings use to reduce the complexity of external reality through tokenization. As metal journeys further into the postmodern, the model of strict consciousness which Kant developed becomes more and more useful in deconstructing reaction to limitless chaos. 2.3.2.2.3 J.R.R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a professor of the English language at Oxford during the first half of the twentieth century, infusing his fascination with Germanic themes of honor and ancient mythology into a fantasy series involving a "middle earth" where magic and science were one. His works, which emphasized the journey over the end result, and a sense of personal integrity over external morality, are the third most popular cause of Hessianism, after Dungeons & Dragons and marijuana. 2.3.2.2.4 Jim Morrison James Douglas Morrison was born to a father who was an Admiral in the U.S. Navy, served under a classicist society of the 1950s, and came into his own at film school in the early to middle 1960s in Los Angeles, California. His subsequent project, the Doors, became the first truly dark rock n roll/pop band and laid down many thematic and musical paradigms metal bands would later reference in their innovation. 2.3.2.2.6 William S. Burroughs The infamous writer of "Naked Lunch," William S. Burroughs, is known as much for his heroin addiction as for his contributions to literature, including what might be called the first truly postmodern novel in "Naked Lunch." However, his contributions were vast, starting with his "cut up" style of literature which would weave a complexity of connections between granular sections of text randomly recontextualized in a chronological narrative. The philosophies of individual freedom, control, darkness and politics contained within "Naked Lunch" and subsequent works ("The Nova Express","The Ticket that Exploded","Cities of the Red Night") provided an unfathomably universalist basis to metallion rejection of authority, conformity, and materialist aesthetics. 2.3.2.2.7 William Blake One of the first transcendental poets to articulate his ideas in a structured metaphorology designed to transcend the calcification of Christianity, Blake spoke of sensual and intellectual excess as salvation for the soul and invented a form of morality based in joy which used its romanticism as a basis for its respect and fascination with life. Blake's detailed exposures of human reason and fear at its most primal and yet most symbolologic delivered a scientific mysticism to those who came after him (including Jim Morrison and William S Burroughs!) a shadow in which motion was possible, a darkness which mostly concealed a limitless beauty of freedom. 2.3.2.2.8 Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft Writer of horror and other imaginative tales, the lurid and detail-oriented Poe captured complete control of the attention of his readers through shaped, articulated and very controlled words. Similarly, Lovecraft developed mythologies from simple brutality and built a spiritual structure of a phenomenology of evil from the myths of Ancient Sumeria combined with his perceptions of pre-religious darkness and fear. Together these writers contributed much of the basis of gore and horror and adventure in fantasy that pervades metal in the current time. 2.3.2.2.9 Ralph Waldo Emerson An American thinker and writer, R.W. Emerson remains most famous for his philosophies surrounding transcendentalism, or the belief that one can overcome limitations and error in life through enlightened, spiritual, meta-conscious thinking. He asserted that redemption could be found only in one's own soul and intuition, and encouraged those who were inspired by his words to turn back toward nature and introspection instead of relying on an increasingly externalized society. 2.3.2.2.A John Milton An English minister and poet, John Milton conceived and wrote the epic poem, "Paradise Lost," in which Satan is portrayed as a beautiful angel who rejects servitude in heaven and is exiled in flame, only to learn how to love the barren but self-decisional realm of Hell. 2.3.2.3 Counterculture Starting in the late 40s American society slowly began to fragment after the pragmatism of focus on supremacy that had been the war effort which made the country a superpower had worn itself down in the contradiction of positivity and planning for nuclear warfare. Partially because of the intense political polarization along lines of materialistic duality (capitalist/communist) the social structure had become fascist and so dissenters were alienated, dropout characters who had to write their own book of survival. 2.3.2.3.1 Hippie As Black Sabbath grew into what it would be the hippie movement was carrying through the aftermotions of flowering in order to fully sell out, having peaked at perhaps a 1967-68 frame in which it expressed its ideology and desires. Hippies were hedonistic, semi-naturalist, anti-material-value, open to dynamic or chaotic action and peaceful/stoned as a collective character trait. 2.3.3.1.5 Beat In the late 50s and early 60s as American culture ground itself further into commercial uniformity and categorical boundariededness another subculture grew up which addressed the existential loss of American culture with am embrace of the impermanent, the powerless, the divinely mundane, in an effort to spread the word of value in life. Their fascination with the distorted, macabre and placeless, drifting existence which metaphorizes the modern lack of groundedness expressed a subconscious fear of the times which would precipitate coming social unrest. 2.3.3.3.3 Biker As far as everyone can tell a universal culture, bikers are the gypsies of the industrial age with a nomadic existence outside of economic planning and therefore responsibility and reactivity. The party keeps rolling and the nihilism of the road is welcomed as it keeps all things from having meaning and a debt associated with their maintenance. 2.3.3.1.6 Punk Punk culture rebelled against the status quo with a total rejection of value and a nihilistic embrace of all that is worthless or destructive. It rejected materialism with a pragmatism of homelessness. A sense of romanticism founded a wandering nihilism, a violent pointlessness and a refusal to accept anything at face value. Since it had been taken to such extremes, it had become a characterizable appearance and sound which was soon cloned, promoted, budgeted, destroyed. 2.3.3.1.7 Horror Films The genre of horror films, despite on its commercial end having some of the stupidest material ever produced on celluloid calling it home, also communicates deeply with the unconscious mind through imagery of possession and entrapment by an unidentifiable but pervasive evil. Its description of evil, and its portrayal of human panic in reaction to it, won the horror film genre a place in the hearts of many Hessians. 2.3.3.1.8 Drugs No study of counterculture is complete without drug culture, which by its absence of any fundamental ideology guarantees its perpetuation through generations of thought and flesh, to illustrate how power and authority move through a simple model of supply and demand. We can blame W.S. Burroughs and Aldous Huxley for this. Once again, however, a metaphorology of connections between the physical and the mental. 2.3.3.1.9 Traditionalism This spiritualist hybrid became popular in the 1990s when people sought a word for an alternative to the fragmented modern world: traditionalism, or the belief in an inherent, holistic, immanent order in which each person had a role and morality was relative to this role, not the survival of the individual. Seemingly formed from equal parts Hindu- inspired occultism, deep ecology, latent fascism and Tolkien-esque love of past grandeur, traditionalism got radical in the 1990s as centuries of decay began to show the fruit of decomposition they had so patiently nurtured with the selfishness and fear of the individual. Seeing how individualism had previously been considered the salvation of humans lost in an industrial society, and egalitarianism became its watchword, traditionalism was a shocking violation of social taboo that somehow never got the praise that fisting a pink spraypainted seal while singing the national anthem offkey received amid enthusiastic applause. "The world may be explained in sociological terms. David Riesman describes three basic social personalities in _The Lonely Crowd_. 'Other-directed' people pattern their behavior on what their peers expect of them. Suburban America's men in gray-flannel suits are other-directed. 'Inner-directed' people are guided by what they have been trained to expect of themselves. [General Douglas] MacArthur was inner-directed. The third type, the 'tradition-directed,' has not been seen in the West since the Middle Ages. Tradition-directed people hardly think of themselves as individuals; their conduct is determined by folk rituals handed down from the past." - William Manchester, American Caesar 2.3.4 Methods What differentiates art from most normal forms of communication is that art is not a referential causality structure but a disconnected, purely abstract form of expression in which reality is left as interpretation and knowledge of the reader. It is a form of immortality not for the author but for the experiential language with which it expresses its time, place, and transcendence thereof. Some argue that art can possibly be dogmatic, but for that to occur, art loses its elegance as a metaphor and becomes a command, which inevitably boils it down to someone telling someone else "to be" something. Control. Art is anti-control. Throughout the ages it has led the evolution of society with visions of new ideas that appeal more to the subconscious mind than the constant flow of ideas from the articulative/conscious mind, allowing it to transcend time and place and circumstance to communicate an ideal. Pure aesthetics leads to almost instant boredom in that it has no placement beyond the immediacy and thus creates a void in time in which amusement was achieved, rather than a transfer of data; this is solipsistic to both parties and results in an expectation of null communication, a broken connection rather than some new idea/creation. "How do you account for the vision of the man possessed on stage, and the man sitting before me? We are quite the opposite to what is personified on stage. Every band has it's own way of dealing with shit and if they play this kind of music, or even just any extreme music, maybe they are like that full time, maybe not. Like we always say, people like Rick Astley are probably the biggest wankers in the world. They probably come off stage, and wanna kill kids. With us, its the contrary, on stage we are executing the whole other persona, in regular social conditions we are pretty straight forward." - Lemmy Kilmister, Motorhead As much as any other form of expression has a purpose, art does: to communicate that which is out of range for other forms of known interaction. In art the surreal can be real and the unstated the visually unavoidable, so there is a tendency to explore our minds with a rendering engine of mental projection. Metal uses this projection to communicate a bond to existence outside of social conditioning and materialism, creating an ideology of freedom and chaotic possibility which by accepting death instills more hope than those who deny darkness. After the industrial age, we in the information age look to the next age, when we've as a species had some time to play with our new toys. In the information age, the highly-trained are valued; in the post-information age, the highly intuitive and powerfully analytic at an organic level are intensely valued. When machines have handled the mundane, pure thought will reign, if humanity does not suicide first. 2.3.4.1 Metaphor Metaphor is the primary expression of abstract communication, by demanding that the user inference a commonality between two events and by that, to understand the "device" of the metaphor: how it functions as a truth for a wide variety of input or context, and can take on an ironic meaning the closer one comes to a full expression of understanding its "truths": where its implication of correspondence between two objects events methods is an abstract match and there is information created by knowledge of the similar workings of both entities. 2.3.4.1.1 Pattern Languages Metaphor expands a mundane thing into a much larger one, in many usages. Such a thing happens in metal, where some of the most mundane activities on earth - partying, mass slaughter - stand as metaphor for existential doubt and resurrection overside the void. These metaphors work both ways and so often in metal an ancient legend is a form of diagnosis for the current context of a work's reception. (Artists live two lives; before they are discovered, they are able to create and project, and, when they are known: when they address a waiting audience with an evolving concept of worldview and intellectual language.) 2.3.4.1.2 Subconscious communication Metaphor often "feels" right to individuals because what it expresses is beneath the level visible by their articulative mind, thus can be more complex than what ordinary language, visual information or sound can possess. The metaphorology of journeys, death, decay, apocalypse, winter, death, war, and genocide in metal are subconscious manipulations of our sense of reality and the future it holds. 2.3.4.1.3 Post-quantitative Symbology The Judeo-Christian revolution in western thought brought with it great power because its theology and worldview/theodicy supported the idea of quantitative symbology, which worked around ages-old prohibitions on division of existence. However, the tradition of morality and character from which Judeo-Christianity descended is fundamentally material, and so it is no surprise that this foundational religious theory of western thought after its invasion in 1100 AD has supported the largest expansion in material wealth and mechanical structure in history. As anything ages however it approaches the time in which its foundational principles need expansion and as such this age is approaching for material aesthetics (morality) as a philosophical doctrine, with whatever replaces it facing a need for coherence in chaos and post-dystopic society. Metaphor provides an insight to this kind of thinking by associating a matrix of ideas with a central narrative as a method of explaining options and situational function to anyone willing to accept an idea and manipulate it. 2.3.4.2 Metacognitive thinking The ideology and metaphorology of metal stresses a larger view of existence than the immediate and as such produces thinking about the nature of thinking as a means of interpreting the highly abstract. 2.3.4.2.1 Mythological fantasy Romanticism in metal stresses fantasies not of the sexual but mythological or mystical nature, an emphasis on creativity through a journey whose structure is known. A greater metaphor is seen for existence in which creativity and adventurousness are the traits which survive the filtering of reality's demands. 2.3.4.2.2 Structure Fundamentally based in melody rather than harmony as most rock music is and interpreting that idea through multiple metacognitive worldviews/metaphysics/generations allows metal to express structure 2.3.4.2.3 Autonomism Since a metaphor is abstract, it must be interpreted personally and in context, a case in which it will apply objectively as it always has through a translation of one's application of the idea to circumstance. GIGO. 2.3.4.2.4 Will To explore a metaphor, one must will to do so. It is not an accidental process. There are more metalbands with complex mythologies than one might expect; some highlights: Morbid Angel, Immortal, Darkthrone. 2.3.4.2.5 Inertia A martial art is the study of converting energy from an intended percussive move to a continuous kinetic move, deflecting violence while tiring the opponent while ready to strike. 2.3.4.3 Postmodernism A movement of reflection for society as it entered its twentieth century development phase of technological industrialism, a method of analysis known as postmodernism arose as a new style of modernism which reaffirmed traditional goals of rationalism, structuralism, and transcendental metaphysics but to this added the realizations of new interpretations in philosophy and physics (Nietzsche and Einstein) as a means of explaining the seeming isolation of being human when one is caught in a matrix of powerful information which is dead to the artificial arbitrary network of values society imposes for the sake of control. Postmodernism emphasizes an integration of many different ideas into one, articulation of the subjective persona behind authorship, an aesthetic which in order to keep itself pure inverts itself into the unmanageable, and an emphasis on structure behind events rather than events themselves. Metal manifests this to an absurd degree with its paranoid obsession with the occult and the fundamental alignment of different personalities of power. 2.3.4.3.1 Aesthetic The constant distortion, grittiness, and organic structures of death metal and black metal would appeal to many postmodernists, as would the comedic antics of exaggeratedly "evil" black metallers who are reflected back to their audience a mockery of evil to illustrate how the dichotomy is false, that there is only thought and chaos. Taming chaos is a mystical science, so mysticism is portrayed through minimalistic structures which shift dynamically to demonstrate a nihilistic yet existential worldview of exploration and growth (as patterns in the music modulate into structures of great spaciousness). 2.3.4.3.2 Structure Structural emphasis in metal reflects a design that is aware of chaos and how to channel it, indicating a larger awareness than categorical or fixed data structures which deliberately finds ways to articulate musical ideas at more abstract, nihilistic, and minimalistic levels. It removes metal from the recombinant world of rock, based around the scale of fixed intervals, and allows chromatic experimentation for true pantonality. 2.3.4.3.3 Artistry Usage of the techniques of art to new dimensions of nihilistic exploration, even addressing the relationship of art to viewer/hearer, postmodern works often experiment with gritty production values, strange or surreal tones, absurdist and extremist structuralism. All of these apply to metal from Slayer onwards; black metal and death metal owe their origin to this idea break, which moved metal from its classicist heartbroken nihilist motivations to a more scientific and abstract, dissonant response to the decay of human society into suicide. 2.3.4.3.4 Philosophy A pervasive doubt and feeling of human helplessness against the limits of perception permeated the atmosphere that birthed postmodernism, in which a morbid fascination with the conventionalized implications of Nietzsche had the bean-counting sheep of society in terror. He removed a structure they found reasonable, and as a result, the trauma resulted in much dramatics before postmodernists explained the more positive side of Nietzsche: if one understands him as a whole, not much has changed in his view of existence from the status quo, but a method of perceiving truth - a clearer one. His innovations, like those of the Buddhists, were primarily used to invent a spiritual technology for perceiving the nihilistic roots of a chaotic nature, avoiding superstition and seeking a mysticism rooted in the logic of existential value. Second-level interpretations of Nietzschean morality analysis, power ethics and the resulting desire for existential meaning can be found in such works as "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs, Ulysses by James Joyce (who is arguably a modern), The Sound and the Fury from William Faulkner and "Hell Awaits" by Slayer - and all metal afterwards. 2.3.4.3.5 Presence In much the same way as its invocation of the author removes a barrier imposed by a media society, postmodernism's presence as dogma (post-dogma? meta-dogma?) in the active lives of its adherents contributes to a trickle-down effect not only through the politics and personal choices of that individual, but through the lives of others who look up to that individual if that individual "succeeds" in some appreciable way. 2.3.4.4 Cultural individualism One theory of self-identity suggests that one's self identity should be relegated to those things literally which are pleasures of the earth and her diversity itself, but this leads to an unsettling suggestion of wholesome values unless you couple it with intense drug use. Especially in the last decade, intense culturalism has permeated metal, some of it celebrating the cultures now scorned for previous decades of nationalist activity. 2.3.4.4.1 Identity In a Hessian ideological state, identity is relegated to a simple statement of function that is unconnected to being. Most normals will say, "I am a fry cook," or whatever the occurrence of employment might be, but a Hessian would probably say, "I'm here... I was somewhere else, but now I'm here, and I'm thinking about..." in an encounter that might likely end up involving drug use. 2.3.4.4.2 Ideology The concept of ideology as a product of individual differentiation, e.g. according to most psychological models as a level of development of personality and intellect, is taken for granted in the Hessian community. Where in mainstream society to have political values other than "don't rock the boat" is as it has been through all of history taboo, Hessians carry a variety of extremisms, but any Hessian who has been thinking about the music for a while and letting it get into his/her blood will see the presence of ideological values in the discipline, compassion and personal relevance of such music. It's interpretive artistic spirituality as culture. 2.3.4.4.3 Politics Politics are the physical incarnation of one's metaphysical and/or ideological structure. So one acts out what one feels. Extremist politics in the postmodern society reject society, conventional values, morality, and ideas of punitivism, control, authority and hierarchy. Most Hessian are anti-capital, but most are also anti-communistic. They are pro-"A really new way of doing things" in a world that promises new innovation and delivers it under the same old terms. 2.3.4.4.4 Spiritualism Through its metaphorical and systemic qualities, metal is mystically inclined as much as it is by its romantic qualities, if not more. The connection is a pragmatic attitude to life as something that is beautiful not through mystery but experience, the evolving construct of information that is one's life. Such a metaphysical view often requires an address of spiritualism to explain its back-end significance, e.g. why such a discipline was conceived. In the age of the end of history, however, any source of hope is viewed suspiciously as spiritual, since spiritualism remains one of the few unquantified and hence vastly oversold commodities on the planet. 2.3.4.4.5 History With Black Sabbath, a postmodernist inversion was reified as the subtle contextual morbidity and paranoid fear of an increasingly technological society. The bomb - and then, computers - 1984? Terror in the minds of the people at this, as transmuted through music, became a powerful method of channeling alienation. The morbidity within was expressed without, allowing the within to leave what was external there and to move on its own, creating a space of inner peace in which ambition could foment. Henceforth there have been plenty of morbid metal bands, from Hellhammer to Morbid Angel to Darkthrone to Ildjarn. 2.3.5 Events These historical events influenced artists to make metal with an idea of finding expression for contemplations of these events. 2.3.5.1 Atomic bomb 2.3.5.1 In 1945, two atomic weapons were detonated over large Japanese cities, ending WWII in the pacific, setting the stage for the evolution of human power structures after the war ended. The next forty-five years were a precarious balance between two warriors nations who fought only through proxy, never quite willing to invoke their main means of defense, the nuclear weapon. True paranoia sunk into a populace too patriotic to admit it, giving the 1950s a quaint appearance to us now. 2.3.5.2 Viet Nam When Black Sabbath laid down the foundations for metal in 1969, not only was the world still at nuclear standoff but also, the war in Viet Nam was going badly for the Amerikans. Instability was present but not discussed as to do so was to undermine the war effort which had never ended. For some, the corporate thematics to the execution and bureaucratic nature of the war in Viet Nam raised the disturbing notion that underneath the "reasons why" for the war which people acknowledged at a surface level of social interaction, there was an insidious, materialistic truth. In 1972, Thomas Pynchon wrote a book called "Gravity's Rainbow" centered around this idea. 2.3.5.3 Reaganification A return to the righteousness of the 1950s, in which a justification of threat had been replaced by ultrasimplification of politics in which material ethics prevailed over ideology which was by its nature perverse, since it did not accept the bounty of material as its ideological goal. This was probably the most destructive period in American history: when she highjacked her own standards to push brutally forward in a political struggle with no clear outcome. However, the social changes brought about in this era were, like everything else in the 1980s, a trend and so they flitted through the viewfinder of history for several seconds before being replaced by the newest morph. 2.3.5.3 End of Cold War After the cold war ended, a great relief permeated the period of instability following the interruption of the balance of hegemony while inside itself, the politicized portion of western thought forgot about most foreign policy decisions. The warfront excess flooded society and soon social control turned inward during an increasing war on drugs and a paranoid age of technological integration of citizenship information. However, the main delineation for this period is the vast apathy. There is nothing left to prove, or do. We're out of the hot water but we're still insane. So the greatest tension here is the entropy of humanity slowing down for death. 2.3.5.4 Internet When the Internet connected the world, what we saw was that technology was making our lives remarkably similar in different parts of the world. The unification of information also gave one a greater view of the human behavioral spectrum as a whole, revealing some of the greatest insanity. Also, the Internet is living proof of the postmodern theory of subtext, since the faceplate always talks about customer service but the reality is that everyone wants to download porn discretely. 2.3.5.5 Millennium The coming of the millennial change has forced neurosis into apathy, creating a tension of unreality as the date hovers near. Mass destruction fear is our public terror, but our private fear is that it will not occur - thus dooming us to the same apathetic existence we have known in the presence of technology, where all basic problems are solved and the consequent need for further space has us feeding on ourselves. This illusionary cycle weighs heavily on our minds as the guilt of our lack of achievement weighs heavily at the second millennium marker. 4.1.5 Objective Communication This paragraph is written in a persona as interpretation of the metal subcultural ethos, in order to establish the strong polarity which is felt by most of those making the metal that matters, if not by all the imitators and clueless fans. Hence, while this inclination might seem ultra-subjective, one must consider that in an objective data reading from a physical system, what an individual will tell you subjectively may constitute in the abstract form a part of a heuristic tree of knowledge that provides for the differentiation of belief, .: beliefs originate in different methods of approaching a situation/object, and in differentiation open themselves to evolution, or selection of the superior strains of idea while allowing the weaker to lapse. 4.1.5.1 Scientific method Scientific method - the formation of hypotheses in response to testing as a means of testing accepted hypotheses as well as new, in an ever changing system of cross-indexed knowledge - is the basis of any kind of deconstruction, backward engineering, or analysis of how something previously unknown works. This is also the basis of communication, where as in digital protocols there is a handshaking phase of equalization of symbolic (quantitative) tokens, and where interpretation uses logical constraints to narrow a search to a reasonable set of answer data. When analyzing music, a similar set of requirements exists: that one use rigorously objectivist means of finding publically-referentiable data. So when objective terms are used to describe music or musical movements, it is structurally necessary for coherence that objective experiments and scientific theory underly such language. As it is, here, we attempt to document much of this from a thinking Hessian's view. Many people believe objectivism, or the science of a shared space which really is consistent despite our varied perceptions of it, is something a few of us would rather call subjectivism, or solipsism: the belief that the world is formed of one's perceptions. Objectivism however is the study of consistency. Of constantly verifying one's worldview with experiments in every possible area, to find consistencies in behavior and to use abstract principle to deduct structure from a number of these consistencies. It's science. The core of it. How we inference our way to technology as intelligent apes. It does not assert that all things are the same, or that we are controlled by an external force. No: only that there is an external reality which is consistent, and provable as such with repeated demonstration from any number of angles. This is how we have come from clothing ourselves with mud and boar carcass to having intercontinental ballistic missiles. Repeated provability = cornerstone of theory. What we in the outside-the-box school of objective analysis call, "the back end." The back end is what gives certainty of placement to any thought - a known truth at which to begin decoding the interaction of the unknown with the known. It's like plugging known data into weird math equations to try to figure out what's going on in the equation by how the numbers change. Inference, or inductive reasoning based on abstract similarity ("resonance") of patterns, without a back end to begin with is a form of "deep" or "mystic" inference, in that it rests upon a collection of basic principles interpreted in the deep abstract with tokens of the same in such a way that none of it is _provable_, only sensible. An example of such a theory would be Christianity: one is asked to presuppose a god-being, and take it on faith that it exists and is omnipotent and wants you to do what you are told through its book. Buddhism, as it claims to be, is not: all things are verifiable through its only "true" method, meditation. All else is "untrue" and therefore has no necessary logical value. Engine Some kind of work producer channeled through an output. Machine An object or idea which converts energy. Language A structure of tokens to have adaptive description as a function of their recombinant structure, so that they favor encapsulation in levels of abstraction. 4.1.5.2 Artistic relevance One asks, what is art?, because art seems different from other forms of media, or works of communication. It does not tell you what it is telling you to think; it tells you what it is thinking, and requires you meet it half way. It is the high abstract, and functions by metaphor: jarring as if through drunkenness windows of physical confinement to reveal similarity in event, object, and ideal. Understanding the related nature of structure brings an understanding of the function of nature, and in doing so, can address the pain and suffering and more importantly, the fear thereof that cripples before the disease hits, and bring a calm and peace to human existence. The varied reactions people have to art confirms this. Despite a storm of protest, the only coherent comments are usually those who originate from the people who have identified with the art - who find ideas in the art or metaphorically similar ideas in the art that are constructive to their own. Don't get us wrong - the tools of art are always abused. Advertising, as an industry of convincing people to give up their own free will, uses artistry to convey simple messages. Political propaganda does the same, wrapping a bundle of thoughts around a single spindle and firing them off wildly in an emotional reaction. But art does not stoop this low. And what is amazing? Metal fans at least can tell the difference. Consistently the albums that are pure cheese are popular for a few years, and fade, where the creations of the distinctive and bold and intelligent stand forth as classics for years. The ones that fade have a material significance: at that time they were new, and fulfilled a need for music with something plausible. And so the fan base with the widest variance, who are always looking for something new and different-looking to stand out from the rest, seize it as a commodity: something with consistent effect and function toward improvement of physical being. Others look back on a definition of a time through a cultural, metaphorical, metaphysical interpretation of how it was lived, and reference an oft-quoted list of "classics" with reasons why ranging from articulate philosophical appreciation to intoxicated nostalgia. Products work toward consistency; art works toward opening spaces. New ideas build space not by being "new," or previously unseen, but by developing an unknown method of executing the current objective through a development of its concept. A postmodernist might argue that "all history is but a struggle for a point of view to share," but quite often, the postmodernist might "be" right. Art functions by introducing new ideas for the listener to appreciate. It anticipates their... how does it do this? Through using the scientific method: the artist decodes world, and interpreting the universalism of its methods, builds a simple virus to speak its own contents. A language of characters which put together resemble views of the experience; a series of slices of crystal ball. Art is the science of understanding what it is to be intelligent, and in manipulating its symbology, expressing its relevance and structure as spiritual events rather than physical confrontations. The path of intelligent abstract reasoning has so far led humanity away from chaos and destruction into organization and reasonable living; is it possible that now it is in the hands of chaos again? Yes - in that with art we have a back-end inference, in that we are comparing its pieces as those who see them and have no knowledge of the background of their production. But based on the common intellectual properties of artist and viewer, the art is created to put into sight some very abstract and often emotional ideas; the viewer will then interpret these, especially as relevant to his or her own life. In short, art is different from "normal" communication in that it doesn't hope for change in the physical world, e.g. buy this tampon/car. It is about the transaction of ideas in a scientific sense: passing on the abstract so that others may test their own theories against it, and emerge with their own placement of its value. Call it client-server psychology. 4.1.5.3 What Does Art Address The amazing thing about art is its universality. The artist will make it; many will comment. The artist will speak. Usually many are disappointed, as their interpretations were insane, but quite a few are pleased in that their view is ratified by the artist's words. This is where human psychology comes into interpretation: "art" is both "subjective" and "objective": Objective A rehash from above: art manipulates life to speak an idea in the abstract so humans can place it, based on a reality we both can sense and test with the scientific method. Subjective Different people have different responses, but this doesn't mean that they're all "right". If I play a Darkthrone record to a random audience, and the Priest says, "it's the work of the devil," the Buddhist monk says "it seems to express the simplicity and loneliness of structure", the prescient junior high math whiz says it reminds him of matrices, the politician says he hears loose morals in the "dissonant chords and malevolent pauses", a limbless retarded midget quadriplegic leper might call it "drool pain sound car crash foofth gurshs", but the first is insane but correct, the second sane and correct on levels of both abstraction and literality (making him the only sane analyst of art here), the junior high math whiz is sane and correct in a way that even he can't yet understand, the politician does not care about his answer only the votes it generates so why do we listen, and the midget is only there for late night sexual abuse, is insane, and incorrect. Concepts on art: - Art has no teleological objective, or physical and conclusive end, but expresses an idea in a non-literal way. Why would it be non-literal? - Art is interpretive, and never forces itself upon the reader. Does this mean it has no effect? No - on the contrary, the reader comes back for more because it has an effect upon him or her. - Language, despite being quantitative, can cover almost any range of situations with its capability for fuzzy logic allowing abstract similarities between concepts to stand for physical scenarios. For example, we call a certain kind of grenade a "potato masher" because that is what the grenade resembles in shape. Art arranges quantitative elements in a way that they imply and manipulate a greater structure; therefore it is in the range of the metaphysical: the abstract interpretation of existence and the metaphysical. - "Art states what is invisible." In any everyday situation there are many truths evident in that people share a belief and therefore act in accordance and expectation of its fulfillment. Hence, art sometimes wakes people up about commonsense ideas. - Aesthetic or material valuation, the process of assigning value to objects in a subjective sense based on appearance or physical value, end thought processes when an action is complete, but art seems to deal with the moments before an action, or understanding that action later. - Art does not confuse value with relevance. Art manipulates its objects unkindly often, and does not hesitate to create imaginary worlds where doom may prevail. But these characters and objects, while imaginary, do have life: they are similar intelligences to human, and therefore can be identified with by the audience. - Art is beyond politics. Politics uses linear power structures; x = value and y = value and if x is good and y is bad then y is to blame for the continuing failure of human interaction. Art, by being interpretive, is meta-democractic: those who can understand can use these ideas and implement them, but those who can't can only see a confusing appearance. Art is self-filtering for the kind of symbolism that becomes dogmatism in Christianity, or National Socialism. Music, by those people who enjoy it enough that they wish to understand it after dissecting it musically and conceptually, is analyzed as art, and as art an expression of a level of some universality through its conceptualization of awareness. There are other stages of its appreciation, including: I. Aesthetic Fascination --- tangible II. Sentimental Self-Identification III. Technical Appreciation IV. Heuristic Comparison/Academicism V. Abstract Analysis ---- logical VI. Artistic Conception ---- mystical VII. Spiritual Immersion The three stages expressed on the left are also stages of the development of a human child; it first appreciates objects it can hold, and then learns to render/model them in its own head, so that it can compare situations and learn to interpret and react to its world. Eventually it becomes self-aware, and from that shock goes on to seek a meaning in existence, a study which leads one beyond the directly scientific to the mystical, a deep-end interpretation of tendencies in the universe as metaphysical suggestions toward the structure of its non-visible, abstract structural and original elements. What Separates Art from Non-Art? Art is interpretive. Anything that tells you what to do, or demonstrates something with obvious symbols of emotional manipulation, is probably propaganda and not art. Hint: One rarely finds metal bands singing "KILL FOR SATAN" but many metal bands use Satanic imagery. Is this the face of metaphor? Art is not accepted on faith. If it doesn't work for you, you abandon it. Propaganda only wishes your assent, however you justify it. Art allows you to develop for yourself, using art and other forms of perception as reference materials. Art has no material objective. It is about abstract communication and nothing more. Propaganda is always directing different interests in a linear path to a physical world accomplishment. Art is not entertainment or propaganda; both are neutralizers of the perceptive and inference faculties, as both aim at consistency and stability over-riding existential value in the unfolding paradox of being. Art is a science self-refining enough to tackle the spiritual realm, where strict discipline is necessary for the lack of direct back-end inferential centers to not prevent discovery. Where most political or religious endeavors require a "leap of faith" employing what to a highly-ordered thinker is meta-logical but in the average interpretation is a "blind" but dogmatically-justified inference, art is self-interpretive by the user and is only a continuing process as long as it is interactive. Art requires user interpretation constantly and, since it often builds layers of ideas on top of basic concepts, requires "correct" interpretation of the general idea of what the artist is addressing and trying to convey. "Correct" is however made loose by the layers of initial meaning, repetition, and other factors designed to let the user misinterpret most of the message but still understand on some level the ideas of art. Levels of Communication I. Aesthetic - What it "sounds like" or "looks like" tells you the mood and object of the piece. II. Structural - How it puts itself together musically posits and emotional and academic meaning. III. Meta-Structural - What type of theory for music as a whole via the interpretation of a "next generation" mind is suggested by the work. IV. Inferential - Deep interpretation of the presentation of ideas reveals a spiritual or philological interpretation of the ideas addressed, or a statement of ambiguity revealing the confusion of art or user. We are lucky that art generally does not have a material objective, except when it's sold out, of course (Yes, argue with me all day - to your loss. Metallica's first three albums have a quality what came after did _not_ in common observation: a passion from an emergent conception of existence and a fluidity of acceptance of its darkness). Art, functioning on the highly abstract level, can only utilize highly abstract concepts of learning and through that, initiate a heuristic tree of learning where similar ideas are filed, allowing the user to "understand" the material first and then to appreciate an internal decision on how to analyze it for relevance without the preaching of a dogmatic teleology to the work shadowing any interpretation with a disbelief in individual interpretation itself. As often happens, we resort to metaphor when talking about art itself. We could call it the science of metaphorical epistemology, e.g. how to give lyrical significance to a world by symbolizing interpretation on top of mundane description, but more likely we could simply borrow Count Grishnack's phrase, "to stimulate the fantasy of mortals." Role of the Postmodern in Art of the late 20th Century It's a ludicrous thing to attempt to communicate using a word as charged as "Postmodernism," since most of what that did mean, or could have meant, or might have meant, is enmeshed in the entropic chaos emerging from the polemic of the new freedom to do what looks like stripping all structure from reality. To explore postmodernism as an idea, it is best to return to its origins. After the rise of industry and the philosophy of Nietzsche, the world was a nihilistic place caught in the quandary of that philosopher's most famous statement "God is dead - and we have killed him." Aware of its lack of values but unable to divorce itself from a commercial path, the world was settling into a lifestyle of emptiness and commercial vapidity yet to come. And awaiting two world wars. Writers such as James Joyce and William Faulkner demonstrated a new method of thinking in their contorted and highly technical novels, showing the underlying human consciousness unexpressed in the socialized self-justifying "self" used to survive a brutal and often bitter world. With its intense power of analysis and metaphorical connection, postmodernist writers also tackled history, reinterpreting it as a study for worldview, as Joyce did in "Ulysses" with a technical re-articulation of language through the ages and its evolving meaning. Similarly Nietzsche, a renowned philologist (one who studies the interpretation of history through linguistic analysis), used words carefully to trace and revive meaning in otherwise placeless events or traditions, interpretations. Postmodernism's basically positive outlook carried an underlying shriek born of understanding the metaprinciples of several sciences: to murder the organic cycles of life by imposing an artificial and simplistic "order" of material consumption is an error indicating our refusal to accept the weight of making decisions in an increasingly overwhelmingly complex world. Joyce likened the everyday man to a great and mythologically complex hero Odysseus, whose ten year journey from a distant moronic war (an early Viet Nam style "police action" no doubt) back home is marked at every step by a cretinous evil opposing a natural ally through mutual respect. In a Joycean interpretation of the mundane, the external world has significance in its symbology of where we place our lives and expectations as a global organism, and if our communication decays from language into granular symbology (ikons) decisions will no longer carry any differentiating value to their varied outcomes, leading to an aimless nihilism and spiritual darkness. Further writers such as William S Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLilo confirmed a growing horizon of massed uncertainty: the age of information overload resulting in meaninglessness. It's as if Dada, in its "reaction" to Modernism, had created the babble that interpreted an unawareness of the same babble, and this was integrated into a logical system such as the structuralist nihilism and systemic analysis of the Postmoderns. Postmodernism is not an "answer" to modernism; it is a meta-modernism: an interpretation of modernist principles in a data structure spanning the highest abstract to the most granular, earthy detail. So now we consider the value that Postmodernism would have to progressive industrial rock, aka heavy metal and associated movements, in the time after hope? We can see in metal movements a mirror of the history of humanity, from the strict romanticism of Black Sabbath, to the modernist righteousness of a moral authority Metallica, to the darkness and existential nihilism of a fiery fury of hatred Slayer, and from this progression we can interpret the history of humanity "as we know it" as a global maturation of the human consciousness for artificial information and the need for abstract comprehension and most of all, coherent order, that comes with the communicative complexity of a modern age. Now in the spirit of both the Modern and the Postmodern, let us interpret the history of human philosophical systems until the present time as the struggle for worldview that they have been, and then project a series of futures and how metal music, as an evolving philosophy, addresses them. Classic history is all we've got so far that can give us a start, but the facts being in it's reasonable to say most of this stuff comes from a more innocent age and is mostly not forged - something we can rarely say about data from the twentieth century, when politicized media portrayals have functioned powerfully to bias our perception. In this view of social evolution, the first written legal code addressing societal issues was written by a king in the decayed remains of Sumeria after the Akkadians (Semites from the Arabian/Israeli area) invaded and absorbed what culture they did not destroy. Hammurabbi's code was a material interpretation of law. If you killed another man's wife by accident, you could "recompense" him by paying him a certain part of your income. If another injured you, you were "owed" an amount of money to justify the intrusion. The later evolution of "an eye for an eye" truisms was based in this idea, as, eventually, was the Christian protestant concept of divine grace, where those who did as the will of God was were rewarded materially. During the millennium following the age of Hammurabbi, Judaism became the primary religion of the Middle East to oppose the more Western thoughts of the Roman and Greek empires, as well as the evolving Indo-European civilization stretching from Scandinavia to Afghanistan. Its insistence upon divine "righteousness" or correctness to behavior made it a natural philosophical system for understanding the material tokens of a technological realm: money. In this age, money was at a low stage of evolution and so there were none of the resources for making and losing imaginary fortunes that there are today. And for most, it was a mundane concept - money was only useful to have things to live. But newer thinkers saw that putting together resources allowed technology to propagate, and, in doing so, generated its own consumer base. Various societies enduring varying periods of adaptation to this idea. When the peak of Judaism's influence rose, a counter-movement rose from its orthodoxy, in which a liberal interpretation might be taken at an abstract level in order to escape adaptations to the past. Jesus Christ, as a reasonably intelligent Hebrew prophet, sought to liberate the soul of his religion from form and in doing so, hoped to translate spirituality to an articulation not found in symbols but personal connection to the absolute. Interestingly, the extremity and quantitative nature of the conception behind what becomes a very organic proposition is based in the logical systems of the Roman and the conquered Greeks whose knowledge was absorbed, some through Macedonian and Arabian connections whose portrayal of Sumerian _gnostics_ brought ideas from the Quabbalah and other pagan spiritual technology into the mixture. Christianity, as the fusion of Greco-Roman culture and Judaism, has an interesting abstraction behind all of its technology, where the duality of mind and body is portrayed in a denial of self in favor of symbologic victory "for the next life." This removes the more organic reality of the Jews, whose pragmatic belief was for action in the current life, but whose abstract basis of comprehension still rested in an absolute God whose favor determined success or failure, Darwinistically. We imagine the past happened in black and white, or cave paintings. But more likely it was as flavorful as time is now, with humans with a similar if not comparable intelligence, trapped in the impotence of a pretechnological age but also free from the rigors of human neurosis in an age when symbols dominate. As scientists discover ancient cave paintings of great complexity (32,000 years ago) and American land dwellers of multiracial complexity (8,000-12,000 years ago), it becomes apparent that ages before our own existed in greatness and health. Indeed, in the western hemisphere we are used to this: the great Aztec, Maya (Toltec, Olmec), Inca, Cherokee, Sioux, Comanche and Apache once walked our shores. Most perished for the material value of their religious idols; it seems most of these societies banished personal materialism with a religion glorifying sacrifice of the absolute but meaningless to abstract gods. But these changes helped "finance" the discovery of a new world for resource exploitation as the religion behind its impetus justified it. Industry moved toward social domination during a time when poverty struck many parts of Europe, and so worker domination was not unheard of. Karl Marx (1818-1883) reflected on this a generation later, but the peak occurred as the last of the idle wealthy as a social class reflected in romantic poetry upon the beauty and potential of life. In the moralistic public conscience of Christian politics, the spreading of this wealth to all was the idea, and to do so in any way possible was the only path to righteousness. It was seen as following justice, mercy and compassion to be democratic, and to enforce equality where not possessive. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) addressed this tendency in his _The Genealogy of Morals_, which suggested that the quest for character and morality to life was an avoidance of the question as individuals of how we want to spent our time, and, behind that question, what it is that we value. Nietzsche's work suggested the most of social justification and stronger was, quite frankly, a scam which covered up the real agenda, or subtext, of profit-making and power-dealing as ways of denying mortality and doubt. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) stated his case in _On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection_, in which what was first interpreted as a rebuke to Christian theology but later assimilated as its pseudoscientific justification, an articulation of the process of evolution, made the backbone of a scientific description of the world's occurrence. After the hysteria, Christians and Jews alike began to accept the ideas - could these not be the mechanisms of an all-powerful deity? Indeed: if one backward-interprets Darwinian logic from the present time, any of one's successes or failures are judged to be "decisions" in an evolutionary tree of a perfected world. If reward for being one of God's allies comes in material form, would it not be fair to say that material favor constitutes success - _evolutionary_ success as part of the plan of God? With this morality entered its final stage of development where, with its basis in an actual process of "God" rendered incoherent, faith became an interpretation based in the evolutionary process as a perfection. Interpreted in a social pattern, as it was as soon as 95% of the working population were accustomed to hourly wages and an hour-value for their time, social Darwinism became an explanation for success or failure as external to human control: divine choice through earthly method. This assaulted the older ideal of Platonic separation between abstract and real, claiming that the abstract existed only in the significance of the real, where not totally inapplicable. Morality was inherent in what the result was, and not the intent or significance of the action. Hence even reprehensible criminality became accepted in a commercial society. This theory was in its nascent formation at the time of Nietzsche, and growing toward a dogma during the nihilistic shock of the age of Joyce and Faulkner. Since the time of these thinkers, society has become more technologically-empowered than ever before, and Judeo-Christianity remains the dominant philosophical justification behind the great empires of North America, Europe, and the Middle East. However, in America, the rate of dissenters has risen dramatically since the focused public intent reacting to the monolithic violence of imminent WWII. Our counterculture, or "sub-culture", reacted powerfully against the rising of an empire whose goals betrayed their justification. The degradation of the beatnik 1950s and the instability of a peacenik late 1960s are testimonies to the demographic influence of rebellion, but the question has always been, where to? A successful rebellion is not possible without either solving or finding an adaptation to the conditions suggesting impulse to rebel, and so far social rebellions have most commonly remained part of the same thought process of the mainstream society: a morality-based, modernist politicism based in the materialism of Judeo-Christianity as interpreted through socially accepted science. Many movements have decayed in their age into a parody of their former selves; having lost passion, their only option is the same materialism they once rebuked. Generation X, a maturing crop of technologically- savvy children, found the inversion of values in their parents to be a sickening symbol of the death of hope. Their parents, who were around in the late 1960s, survived the same instability that prompted a hyper-activism on the part of music: Black Sabbath invented a spiritual approach toward complex modern issues, and cloaked it in the machine-like sounds of logical structures shaped from basic chords and classically-influenced melody. Heavy metal was born from that fusion of future and past, expressing a new interpretation of an older order through the coming darkness of the current order's technology. Several generations later, metal remains strong, mostly through a rigorous ideology which dictates what is "true" and what is not; that which is "true" has a consistent belief structurally evident that the principles of nihilism, existentialism, and anarchism/Satanism are reconcilable with ancient concepts of honor and value, a tradition leading through both Judeo-Christianity and pagan (Asatru/Greco-Roman) interpretations of the Sumerian gnostic ideal. (Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" addresses the dualistic ideology of Zoroastrianism, a religion based on the material abstractions from Sumerian mythology, an the origin of the good/evil polarity as found in Judeo-Christian mythos.) We can "sort of" understand the current cultural abyss as "modern culture": it too has been subverted to feed the dominant paradigm of dogma, and as such holds only utilitarian and moral tokens, all of which can be seen in its products: mercy and compassion over all, with a strong underpinning of guilt and fear of natural environment, and a happiness that results from material value and "pleased" responses from others. The symbology of modern times is a holdover from the last renaissance mixed with a Darwinistic morality: there is a way out of the darkness through learning, science and technology, as long as it is used with _virtue_. Our virtue has, after the vast corruptions of the cold war unfurled, that no ideology had virtue and that inert and harmless behavior was therefore the only virtue. This kind of conditioning has been with us through the ages, and so far has assimilated every system of philosophy or ideology into some form of "product": a symbolic existence whose entire purpose has been subverted to reduction of individual will so that it may serve a "collective goal" of continuing power for an elite (there have been some exceptions, and many argue that Hitler was one). One removes the coat of choice and replaces it with morality, which could be interpreted to read "I'm with the good guys." Because God rewards the powerful, the good guys are _always_ the guys in control. Examining metal as a postmodern culture, we find great evidence of that ideological presence where logically coherent with the other beliefs of the genre. A gritty, distorted voice and constantly distorted instruments break the clarity of symbology; lyrics with metaphor of fantasy, journey, violence and might reinforce both an awareness of mortality and a desire to explore beyond it (what Nietzsche would call crossing the "abyss," or the spiritual darkness created by the doubt arising from the implications of external control in awareness of death). It is death-shaman music, like Jim Morrison's Doors were: bringing back hope from the world beyond death. Around us we see the usual decay of human ideals into a pragmatic obedience to doubt, the "might be" which conveys terror and coincidence of deadly action. It is, as many "ideals" have been through history, a call to throw down the difficult process of making decisions in exchange for obedience to a cult of power which rewards its disciples with tangible "idealizations" to substitute for the ambiguous, metaphysical reality behind the power of symbology and metaphor. Generation X-Y-Z-0 find themselves facing the difficult choice of producing an ideology to handle their world, if possible to improve it, and on the fly because although technology evolves toward a post-scarcity social system, there is a deficit in the damage done to the environment, and the corruption of our society to the point where they shoot each other in high schools. Postmodern thinking and its seeming nemesis, F.W. Nietzsche, together speak a language of avoidance of the "void" or "abyss" through creativity, an ethics rather than a moral standard, and intoxication. In this there is a place for metal: by embracing the taboo, that being the triad of hedonism, nihilism, and structuralist mysticism, metal becomes the foremost vanguard of a new form of existence which hopes to transcend the crisis of modern consciousness at an abstract level and thus, to free us from war with and sadistic torment of ourselves. 4.1.5.4 Language of Art Art speaks a consciousness of the world beyond the visible through a complex set of structures deployed as metaphor: the visual and intellectual familiarity of ideas overlaid to create a structural vision of overall similarity, cloaked in an aesthetic vision which unites its significance to the living being and its intricate emotional intelligence. Metaphor The use of extended simile - comparison of two objects, ideas, or entities - to create a comparison of worlds as a mirror of the encircling aspect of reality to a single consciousness, kept in contrast with a spiritual component of metaphor that constantly hints at an larger interconnection of consciousness itself. Subconscious Postmodern thought targets the subconscious mind with its often grandiloquent collages of juxtaposition of imagery and abstract; the belief, arising from the work of Sigmund Freud (based on the work of Nietzsche) and C.G. Jung, that the subconscious is the seat of the real interplay which decides our conscious decisions was assimilated early into artistic thought, which knew it easily as the language of dreams. Metachange Artistic intent does not involve direct change in a specific material situation but aims for an overall evolution of intellectual and emotional capacities of the human population as a whole, through those who appreciate art and those who create it. Art defines the cycle as the current method of survival, our "world view"; art defines the meta-cycle as the concept or change that will increase the complexity of the cycle by a level in order to allow its own transcendence: a recognition of its meaninglessness in the face of broader opportunity offered by change. Chaos In pre-Modern times, Chaos was the sign of a medieval daemon of mythological power: a regression to atavism and savagery. Modernism made it a raw force of no potential which could be trapped and destroyed by technology, which asserted a much more rigid and simplified order. Writers such as Thomas Pynchon and William S Burroughs suggest, along with Nietzsche, that a reduction in _natural_ complexity will lead to a failure of our will to live in, as Pynchon would call it, "entropy" of decisional capability. "Strife is evolution, peace is degeneration." - Varg Vikernes, http://www.burzum.com/ 2.4 Heavy Metal Culture Heavy metal can be seen as a subculture, or culture within a larger culture, as opposed to a counterculture, or oppositional culture within a larger culture. The reason for this distinction is that while heavy metal is rebellious it does not exclusively define itself as being the opposite of what exists, but sees itself as a modification (or "fork" to the brachitic hierarchy of revisions) to existing society, mainly because it operates on a level lower than that of institution -- it is a spiritual re-alignment through a re-arrangement of values, or maybe we should say, a re-evaluation of all values. In that light, it also makes sense to consider heavy metal to be a series of ethnocultures, because each nation produces music of a unique sound and attitude, often with a unique subset of the values and situations discussed in death metal. A fan can instantly tell the difference between South American black-death and Swedish death metal, or Japanese grindcore and American thrash. There are clear conventions to each that correspond to culture and ritual, which correspond to ethnicity and geographic area. Since heavy metal was created in response to the counter-culture, and was negative about the counter-culture but not enamored enough of the dominant order to be a reactionary counter-counter-culture, we consider it a subculture but refer to it generically as a "culture," because it has all aspects of culture: values, rituals, symbols, clothing, lifestyles and art. These are unique to each ethnicity that indulges in heavy metal but are in the most basic distinction shared across all heavy metal- tolerant cultures. The heavy metal subculture makes itself instantly recognizable through its heavily codified visual appearance: youth in black t-shirts with logos across the top and cover art below that, with long hair and possibly tattoos, gathered away from society at events involving metal music and places where metal is distributed. They resemble a small army in public, which has caused many a hipster or journalist to wax poetic about the lack of individualism in the culture. It seems instead that in coherence with the concept of "heavy," metal culture has placed itself zenlike beyond a simple division into individualist/conformist. It recognizes the need for unity in belief to make power. Within that, it allows for variation, as can be found in the proliferation of diverse tattoos and the variation in shirts that metalheads wear, with a type of caste and preference system formed by who appreciates what band, with those who like the brainier music being the unacknowledged elite. It has rituals -- concert behavior, meetings for listening to new music, record store power structures, friendship and courtship -- that borrow from their parent cultures, composed of both traditional culture and its modern adaptation, although they borrow more from the ancient remnants than the contemporary hybrid. This culture was so distinctive at American high schools in the 1970s during the first generation of heavy metal that it was branded with a variety of names: heshers, threshers, Hessians, headbangers, metalheads. In Europe, other names came about from similar impulses, including metallion, metaller and metalist, although these grated on American sensibilities and did not transfer. The name mutated into "thrasher" for those who listened to thrash, a type of music formed of the hybrid of hardcore punk and metal riffing, exemplified by D.R.I. and Cryptic Slaughter. For this reason, metal culture became known as "Hessian" or "thrasher" culture, with most people outside recognizing its members by site without much knowledge of the music or values behind their behavior. Much of the reason for this approach originates in the attitudes of mainstream society, somewhat correctly, toward standard teenager behavior: spoiled by an indulgent attitude toward parenting, yet forced into rigid behavior to compete for future jobs, teenagers rebel but very few do so in a way that both asserts childhood and adulthood as metalheads, generally ludic types, do. Metal culture, or Hessian culture, involves loud heavy metal music made in the postmodern interpretation of classical music and rock n roll arrangement, creating a disturbing noise and profound motion in its practice and social implications. Author Kurt Vonnegut likens the role of an artist to society as the role of the canaries miners brought into the coal tunnels to warn for the presence of gas: when the birdsong changes or stops, death is near. At the end of the twentieth century, as we suffocate in the meaninglessness of the social machine we have made, metal and punk music are striking alarms of misery and fear hidden beneath the commercially-viable good assurances which have more than once prompted the adage, "Talk is cheap." 2.4.1 Anti-Commercialism Metal culture is what keeps the music from becoming like everything else that's in the consumer market - products. Products want to do something so visibly, it is entirely distinctive, while not doing anything beyond the norm so there are no objections to purchase. Culture keeps spirit alive by serving as an interpretive landmark of existential questions, delivering to the interpreter a sense of combining the metaphor of the art with the catalogue of past experiences in life that might be relevant. In metal, our culture is not to make music for people who want entertainment; our culture is to make epic and powerful things out of the forces and remnants of destruction. There's a reason for everything we do. 2.4.2 Meaningful Post-Rebellion One function of metal culture is to provide some sense to post-rebellion use of consciousness as an interpretive guide to reality. To get into what we do, they must fall - from the Heaven of oblivious iconistic belief - and accept what will come next, which is the transition to nihilism. Crossing the void occurs not just in a philosophical sense, but in a proto-adulthood state also, where it is the question of what to do after the shaped existence of childhood is replaced with the patterned survival of an adult, all while the clock of mortality races through its orbit. In this sense, metal is a mirror of what the self faces and observes the self reacting to in a modern existence after the twilight of the kingpin of idols/ikons, "God." "That depends on how you see Utopia. In a sense, an ideal society would be a static society, and any such society is an evolutionary dead end. Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war." - William S Burroughs 2.4.2.1 Culture has caught up with rebellion Mainstream culture long ago appropriated rebellion as its source of "cool", by replacing the values of the previous generation with a new lessening of restriction. From James Dean to Jeff Spicoli, our heroes went from being people of action to coalescing into ultimate introverts who issue a complaint and then reject it all, but with no idea, fluster and collapse into the same morass of pessimistic conservatism which hides the fears of the rest of the herd. Metal is about a rebellion which comes from a disagreement, less of a complaint than a challenge and a rebuke, as it was when the metaphorical Satan looked toward God and rejected Heaven's law for a freedom he could not explain, but felt a thirst toward - an escape from the fixed behavior of holiness to the random and dynamic possibilities of an unformed land - Hell! "In his book-length essay The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank explores the ways in which Madison Avenue co-opted the language of youthful '60s rebellion. It is "the story," Frank writes, "of the bohemian cultural style's trajectory from adversarial to hegemonic; the story of hip's mutation from native language of the alienated to that of advertising." This appropriation had wide-ranging consequences that deeply transformed our culture--consequences that linger in the form of '90s "hip consumerism." (Think of Nike using the song "Revolution" to sell sneakers, or Coca-Cola using replicas of Ken Kesey's bus to peddle Fruitopia.) " - book review on amazon.com of Thomas Frank's "The Conquest of Cool : Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism" Metal does not wish to fall into the pit of becoming another "fad" which is hyped-up, sold out, and then worn into the ground as it is rehashed and overhyped. This is the way of the transient. Metal is about finding lasting value in nothingness and one's own creativity together - not in fads, meaningless indulgences, mindless "entertainment" or other forms of life-denial. 2.4.2.2 Inversion of values in media hipness Media hippies are public-identity characters that are composed from statistical reasoning to reach the broadest band of people who could project their insecurities into an avatar of that character and in that identification, become loyal consumers following the instructions in the ads that came with that show. Marilyn Manson, Korn, Pantera, "new" Metallica, Motley Crue, Ani DiFranco, Rage Against the Machine, Cannibal Corpse, Dimmu Borgir, Cradle of Filth, Dark Funeral and Marduk provide this same function - these are "sold out" bands who move their music not with an internal drive to express but with a desire for the material reward they get in exchange for experience, including the experience itself. Metal believes in an inversion of the inversion of values which constitutes the media hipness, meaning that values had to be taken to a greater complexity of abstraction, as they are in lyrics such as Slayer, Morbid Angel, Burzum, Gorguts or Death. 2.4.2.3 Metal rebels against the reason why there are things to rebel against Many genres feature bands which find something to rebel against and fight it, hard. Metal rebels against the need to rebel by taking a metaphorical look at the process of power, in a method similar to William S Burroughs' "Naked Lunch." The metaphors of killing, death, destruction, sodomy, infection, possession, suicide, hate, violence, and necrophagia/coprophagia found in the songs and imagery of metal music are not meant as literal objects but implications that they are everyday objects - denied objects - which confronts the listener with a more morbid fate than nightmare, reality as a neutralized dream. 2.4.2.4 And by understanding destruction, is aware of creation Destruction is the force that clears the way for creation, or opens opportunity, at least. A world that is cluttered, murmured the author, describes our world. There is too much: other people, requirements to society, debt to commerce (rent/health), excess information, marketing information, terrifying news. We wish to kill the waste and clear away the irrelevant - hence the enticing motifs of forest fire, battle, winter, genocide, and apocalypse. 2.4.2 Meta-Rebellion The rebellion against the parameters of power doesn't stop at the next generation of rebellion. As this facet of metal ideology is assembled of the roots of romanticism, it is best to see it as a celebration of the uniqueness of the individual. 2.4.2.1 De-ontological desire for unconstraint Metal expresses a desire for mental clarity and a limitless power for self-motion. The impulse is to have nothing interfering in motion so that there is no constant obsession with material intrusion. 2.4.2.2 To derive thought independently Individualism and its trademark, independent thought, are highly valued in metal culture and lyrics. 2.4.2.3 To exist in organic harmony with death and life A recognition of death and the forces of decay in metal prompts a revelation of its philosophy of integration, an embrace of the impermanent in life by recognizing the time to life for all things in a larger, naturalistic development. 2.4.3 Mythos Mythos is the science of placing together a sequence of metaphors in order to build a living structure, a story which is always in the process of evolution while maintaining its integral character. This mythos is the key of self-identification within a subculture, in that it allows one the space in which to create a character matching its own ideals. 2.4.3.1 Introduction In a subculture, beliefs have to work alongside a sequence of tenets which run contrary to the subcultural beliefs. Hence most mythos from this area focus on the individual, and how to develop that to freedom. 2.4.3.1.1 Mythos a method of expressing character A personality mythos carries with it the character of warrior or journeyman ethos: to be free, to work when that's needed and to play/pillage otherwise. The hedonistic modern Hessian descends from Vikings and Vandals of ages past. 2.4.3.1.2 Personal decisions political choices In the modern age, we realize that personal decisions imply a political value system, or at least filtering system. The Hessian cultural movement reaches out to network personal choices by knowledge rather than force. 2.4.3.1.3 Mythos defines a public personal ideal When one is able to speak the metaphorical language of a personal mythology, one is able to express a subtle but powerful reminder of who one is and why. There is not scorn in "We who are not as others" but a hope brought by enlightened choice. 2.4.3.1.4 Ubermensch The idea of overcoming, or surpassing fear and transcending limitation, to become a personal god or omnipowerful human being is rooted deeply in metal, a genre of people who work hard under adverse circumstances to do very complex things. 2.4.3.2 Metal Mythos The value of Hessian mythos can be seen in what it manifests: a gentle ideology based in a placement of self instead of a self image, a hopefulness for environment and humans alike. However, such a progressive view greatly clashes with contemporary social values. 2.4.3.2.1 Mythos of Job Job is the patient servant who waits dully for a task that will free him from worrying about his choice for another few hours. That is why in the Bible, when Job is tortured in a battle between "God" and Satan for Job's soul, his faith is so firm to him - he wishes to know nothing but to what he can adapt, since he has ascribed all his choice to divine power. Hessians dislike Jobs and avoid them at all costs. "No jobs!" - Demonaz Doom Occulta, Immortal 2.4.3.2.2 Mythos of selling many albums Similarly selling many albums is recognized as mythically important, at best. Most people consume without ever thinking about even the contents that they are able to digest and repeat. So selling more albums could even mean reaching fewer people, if society is a sliding scale from awareness to oblivion. 2.4.3.2.3 Mythos of sexual appeal Newer metals (speed and newer) do not use gender-related words, as they work toward the abstract. Once leather-clad metal warriors were sexual powerhouses. Now they are powerhouse warriors because they are almost asexual in their abstraction (yet earthy in their behavior). 2.4.3.2.4 Anti-convention Conventions are the calcification of a working process. The independent yeoman information farmer of the new frontier steers away from the known once it becomes obvious how redundant it is. 2.4.3.2.5 Anti-tonesome The self is envisioned as out of place, dissonant, by the nature of its recomposition and so nothing is whole, or perfect, ever; this is the essence of tonal degradation. 2.4.3.2.6 Subculture Participation in a subculture frees the ego and subconscious from explanation, or justification, in the same way drug addiction frees a madman from his dark and morbid destiny. 2.4.3.2.7 Lasting ethos of ideology Ideology is the essence of what is communicated as mythos: a series of abstractions based on character value which create a sense of uniqueness, or differentiation, for the Hessian population. As such, they hold to their ideology fiercely, as it is essential for both self-image and self-placement in a time where information filtering is the first line of defense. 2.4.3 Hedonism Hessians are both abstract thinkers and Hedonists. The latter means a fair amount of partying, e.g. social behavior involving the forbidden fruits of intoxication and/or sexuality, even while thinking (and vice versa). 2.4.3.1 Activities Hessians are known to smoke a lot of pot, drink beers, take ephedra, play loud music, form unlistenably distorted bands, destroy religious icons, play video games, watch horror movies, go to concerts and smoke a lot of pot as commonly accepted social interactions, while Hessians as individuals and more informal groups engage in wide varieties of probably weird and lurid behavior. 2.4.3.2 Intoxicants Hessians favor a wide range of intoxicants for differing reasons. The most common Hessian intoxicant is THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the major active ingredient in marijuana, hashish, bhang and kif) for the following reasons: - Ease of availability - Mild or no long term effects - Ease of consumption - Hallucinatory/Psychedelic properties - Non-capitalist distribution system - Social activity - Not an artificial "happy" reality Some Hessians drink, but recently more have been rejecting it in favor of a less corporate existence, as have many smokers. Many Hessians used to take speed, or methamphetamine, but more are taking the less-harmful ephedrine. Blood of illegitimate children of priests is also intoxicating and delicious. 2.4.3.3 Events Major events in the Hessian community include: concerts, radio shows, drug parties, demolitions, fires. 2.4.3.4 Dialogues One of the most important activities as a Hessian is communicating. Hessians as part of an intense structuralist desire articulate many different things, and are more than willing to share information, guaranteeing another at least temporary connection in the matrix of the subculture. 2.4.5 Language Hessian language is an abstract but organic rendition of English (or other native language) into an abstract and psychedelic descriptive field of structural importance. Hessians are often highly technical, and their language follows this model. 2.4.5.1 Relation to human animal One very postmodern trend in metal is to declare the dependence on a "human animal" and to speak of that duality, between abstract mind and human flesh, with familiarity. Its major function in the ideology of metal is to make individuals aware of their distinctiveness, or what they gave up when they let it go. 2.4.5.1.1 Gender pronouns Metal uses few gender pronouns, at least in recent genres, as a way of distancing from the flesh and the entire question of physicality of avatar. 2.4.5.1.2 Self-reference There is little self-reference in metal for the ostensible purposes of identification, but quite a bit in the description of personal experience (as in, of decay) or observations of physical occurrence to the self. 2.4.5.1.3 Abstract The most important aspect of metal's language is its reliance upon abstract, Latinate and Germanic structures as a method of describing something for recognition as if by antigen. From the dooming blast of old Slayer with its mythological lyrics to bands like Morbid Angel with their philosophical guide to post-Babylonian religion, death metal integrated a fundamental change to the way we view language in metal. 2.4.5.1.4 Satanism To discuss the topic as briefly as possible, several popular types of Satanists and their beliefs include: - LaVey Satanists: They use The_Satanic_Bible as an inspiration or basis for their belief system, which is closely related to humanism. They do not necessarily believe in the existence of supernatural figures, including god and Satan, and believe that worshipping these imaginary figures does no good and is degrading. A good reference on this Satanism is The_Satanic_Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey. - "Hollywood" Satanists: This group uses a combination of the name Satan, Satanic worship, Satanic rituals, and Satanic references to shock and offend those who buy into the "Satan is evil" that mainstream groups/cults have propagated. They often are poorly educated in the occult and more well studied occultists will reveal errors and lack of knowledge in their statements on Satanism. - Devil-worshippers: There are few, if any, of these groups in Satanism. Christians and Jews would like you to believe otherwise. You are advised to not take statements from their religious opposition as truth, when it is far more likely to be a "straw man" argument, where a biased mockup of your beliefs is created and then skewered for its artificial extremity. - Gnostic/Transcendental Satanists: These apply the principles of "evil" in a very distributed and analytical, abstract method, coming up with a peaceful but nihilistic philosophy that is terrifying to normal people but highly sensible. "It's a concept album about what once was before the light took us and we rode into the castle of the dream. Into emptiness. It's something like; beware the Christian light, it will take you away into degeneracy and nothingness. What others call light I call darkness. Seek the darkness and hell and you will find nothing but evolution." - Varg Vikernes, http://www.burzum.com/ "Cursed Black magic night We've been struck down Down in this Hell Spells surround me day and night Stricken by the force of evil light The force of evil light" - Slayer, "Black Magic" (Show No Mercy) 2.5 Technique Ways to make metal with your instrument(s). 2.5.1 Blast Beats Blast beats are the torrents of alternating snare and bass which increase the speed of death metal at the point of retribution. Some words on blast beats: Most drummers play blast beats as bass/snare/bass/snare etc. really fast, while hitting a hi-hat or a ride on the bass drum. From a blast beat "purist asshole" point of view it should be done with one foot. If your right foot isn't fast enough then keep practicing. Double bass should only be used when the bass is supposed to go twice as fast as the snare. If you are just alternating bass/snare bass/snare it should be with one foot. If you can master it with one foot it sounds way more brutal than with double bass (I don't know why, but it does). It's analogous to the way alternate-picking a 'chug' riff sounds way weaker than all-downstrokes. That's just the way metal is. - jmartin@zoomtel.com/m_c_vic@geocities.com The snare usually came down on 2 and 4 or on all the offbeats. I've read (I can't tell, it just feels different) Pete Sandoval sometimes blasts leading with the bass drum, but when he does it, the snare hits twice every beat. B = Bass S = Snare Dave Lombardo: 1 2 3 4 BBSBBBSBBBSBBBSB Pete Sandoval (I think he does this): 1 2 3 4 BSBSBSBSBSBSBSBS I'm pretty sure it's like this: 1 2 3 4 S S S S S S S S BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB Right. Most drummers blast on the downbeat. But sometimes it sounds like Pete Sandoval leads with the bass. - Lord Vic, m_c_vic@geocities.com 2.5.2 Fast Tremolo Strum This technique involving whipping your pick lightly across the bottom three strings of the guitar (mostly) for power chord tremelo action that, with the influence of the distortion, creates enough tremelo for an atmospheric/melodic effect. Fast strumming was a technique innovated first by Slayer and then perfected by Morbid Angel and others who made a sizzling tremelo technique out of what once was just playing faster. After a couple generations in the genre, the style is advanced enough that it can be used to carefully encode polyrhythmic data within a dominant rhythm, and is often used as foreshadowing by metal guitarists. Some ideas for how to do it: - use the wrist, and not the forearm - allow sparse motion in a whipping rhythm - dip the pick lightly against strings - move pick in circles for single-note strumming "Everything just kind of flows along. Sure, they used a lot of asymmetric time signatures (5/4, 7/4 etc.) but the note values don't vary so you can have 20 seconds of tremelo picked quarter- and half-notes at times." - RWTodd, rwtodd@aol.com 2.5.3 Double Bass Death metal percussionists often add a strict machinism to their work with the alternating full bass hits of oppositional kick drums, creating an undulating wall of sound that conditions listeners to act out the diabolical bidding of the bands and their master, Satan. "Actually louie bellson is credited with being the first drummer to put 2 basses together; his solo stuff is awesome but his stuff with big band and jazz artists is lame. And what I mean by that is him playing by himself no other instrument. Ginger Baker from cream also used dbl bass Nick Mason from Pink Floyd uses double bass, lots of old psychedelic bands used it. it's been around for quite a while." - Steven PATRICK 2.5.4 Harmonics Pitch harmonics - playing a note that is one of the integral harmonic properties of the string - create an eerie unfinished yet definitive sound, producing a disturbing morbidity to their use in death metal (see Immolation, Morbid Angel, Incantation, Gorguts). 2.5.5 Performance When you perform as a metal band, there are some antics to liven up the show. 2.5.5.1 Drinking blood When drinking blood, be sure to have it chilled, or else it will curdle (clump up and become nauseating). It is recommended that you verify the blood is from meat for human consumption (or, of course, DIY). 2.5.5.2 Fire-breathing The useful thing I can say here is that if you are breathing fire by blowing a highly flammable liquid over open flame, ready yourself NOT to inhale no matter what happens - get away from the flame first. Otherwise, you will fry your lungs and die in a brief paroxysm of intense pain followed by helpless suffocation. 2.5.5.3 Sodomy Sodomy is most commonly legally defined as any contact between the genitals of one person, and the mouth or anus of another. The word has its origins in Biblical Christianity. It is sometimes used to mean sexual deviation, though in legal contexts it is defined as above. Throughout history, "sodomites," mostly male homosexuals and bestialists, have been punished by a largely theocratically controlled government, in hopes of stamping out "ungodly practices" that might bring divine retribution against Judeo-Christian society - http://www.gai.com/ ================================================================ PART III :: Metal as Physical Manifestation 3.1 Concerts Concerts can be a rewarding experience of metallic sub-culture observation, if the experience is conducted properly. Beware the haphazard, as those are the fools who are full of excuses when someone gets stabbed or hurt. 3.1.1 Information Metal concerts are generally advertised in local circulars and weekly newspapers like the _LA Weekly_ or _Houston Press_. Promoters advertise in the backs of these publications, or in rare cases metal-specific magazines or papers, so fans can find concerts. When you locate a concert, call the venue, as often you can save some money buying tickets in advance or through a broker, but beware of "resale" outfits that are legal scalping agencies. 3.1.2 Attendance With some attention to logic, concert attendance is graceful and enjoyable. 3.1.2.1 Ear protection Amplified systems within clubs sometimes go over 120 dB in terms of effect on the listener, so it is wise to purchase intelligent ear plugs (either the silicon blobs or the compressible sponge probes). Anyone who scorns you for doing this is probably deaf already, so don't bother replying. 3.1.2.2 Social interaction If you walk with respect for self, others, and world, and do not interfere with the needs and spaces of others, you will almost universally be fine. You may witness violent cultures such as skinheads, cholos, or deranged Hessians on speed and the best way to handle it is gently. Provocative behavior usually will result in violence. Should your intelligence save you from destruction, you will wish to display prominently the t-shirt obtained by wearing it: (Preferred) As your sole garment except black pants all day on the following day. (Acceptable) Underneath your uniform of slavery the next working or school day, hopefully wearing some mark of violence/evil as well. (Degraded) As your sole garment all day for the next three days. 3.1.2.3 Rules of evidence It is wisest to keep all "evidence" (things that are likely to be confiscated) on one's person in soft objects, rather than cases. One is often frisked at the door and all strange hard objects explored to see if they are weapons; keeping the stuff on one's self reduces the task of one's car being impounded and sold by the cops. Moving joints into concerts has always been easy for me; I avoid socks, as they often frisk there, and prefer to either sling the baggie under the scrotum or in the wallet, where although it is flat, it will rarely be disturbed (but be careful whipping out your wallet!). Smoking joints is easy; you want no flame to be visible near the scent of marijuana, so you curl your hand around the joint and cup it to your mouth like you are holding your chin. Always pass it to partners below the line of sight, e.g. waist level, and blow smoke toward the floor. As far as I can tell, the only way to smuggle alcohol in to a show is to have a woman with you, as often they don't frisk those. 3.1.3 Merchandise Buying merchandise at concerts is often the only way to get it. 3.1.3.1 Shirts and prices T-shirts are usually sold in XL and other sizes and are $20 for short sleeves, $25 for longer sleeves, with the bigger shows charging even more. 3.1.3.2 CDs Usually bands will sell their CDs for $12-15 at concerts or clubs. Quite often more of the profit goes to the band instead of the distributor and possibly more than the label, so this author enjoys buying CD's before the encore. 3.1.3.3 Royalties breakdown When buying t-shirts and CDs from the bands themselves at this venue, one is directing a much larger chunk of profit toward the band than thru a record store or mail order from the label. Forget not that record stores buy major releases for $7, and then sell for $12-17; that extra money in the CD cost goes somewhere and when there's no store, label, or venue involved, it's the band. Order of preference for buying objects in terms of how much money is returned to the band: 1) Band 2) Band at show after official merch period is over 3) Label 4) Underground Mail Order 5) Specialty record stores 6) Chain record stores 3.2 Recordings Purchasing metal recordings can be very sensible and efficient if you know what you're looking for. 3.2.1 Audio Audio is any recorded sound, whether live (bootleg or live album) or studio (recorded with intent for release). 3.2.1.1 Live Live sound is either a live album released by one of the band's labels, or a bootleg recording which is released by a fan or scammer. 3.2.1.2 Studio Studio music is produced by agreement between band and label as pushed as the regular "product" containing the music of the band. 3.2.2 Video Video is any recorded motion picture imagery, whether live (bootleg or official concert performance) or studio (recorded with intent for release as a separate production). 3.3 Production Production is how technology is used to make something sound like the artist wishes it to, and includes a number of acoustic and electrical disciplines. 3.3.1 Techniques Methods of production that produce a consistent effect, as requested. 3.3.1.1 Swedish distortion The Swedish death metal of the early 1990s had a blistering electric guitar tone heard most prominently on "Clandestine" by Entombed and "Like an Ever-Flowing Stream" by Dismember. "I have always loved the Swede death metal guitar sound above all. Maxing the highs and lows on an old BOSS 'Heavy Metal' gets that heavy Entombed 'Left Hand Path' sound. Put the Level and Distortion each at half, then just adjust your EQ's in your amp accordingly. You are more likely to find a BOSS 'Heavy Metal' at a pawn shop or something of that sort, seeing as how BOSS discontinued them a couple years ago..." - Gary (Morgion) "i seem to remember somebody said they used a small Marshal 50W combo for that album. Also, last i bought a dist box, the recommended one was Boss distortion II (i _think_, anyway it's the orange one). But that could never beat a custom rebuilt marshal (rewire the preamp to get one distorted and one clean channel, need not be that expensive). Guitar mics are important too, i still admire the Duncan Seymore 'Invader' mics that someone persuaded me to buy (and with that cool a product name, how could they go wrong). Now these are oldish wisdoms, but if you go to the store and drop that kind of talk, they might at least tell you something useful besides the sales pitch... Check out the Meshuggah paper at http://www.notam.uio.no/~espenth/mesh/ under 'Sound' etc." - Rasmus (Comecon) General consensus seems to be that one should use two distortion pedals in sequence and EQ heavily; favor the mids instead of the bass. 3.3.1.2 Distortion mini-FAQ This section to be completed in the future. 3.3.1.3 Vocal effects This section to be completed in the future. 3.3.2 Studios Some classic studio names are mentioned often in the annals of metal history and so are worth knowing, for that bored day when you're wondering what the difference between Tampa Guttural American Death Metal production and Norsk Arisk Frozen Tempest production. 3.3.2.1 Morrisound http://www.morrisound.com/ Home to many famous productions, mostly from the Florida scene of Amerikan metal: Death, Malevolent Creation, Monstrosity, Deicide, Resurrection. 3.3.2.2 Grieghallen Home to many famous productions from the Norse scene, including Immortal, Enslaved, Burzum, and Gorgoroth. 3.3.2.3 Sunlight Studio sunlightstudio@telia.com Home to many famous productions from the Swedish death metal scene, including Carnage, Entombed, Dismember, Seance. 3.3.3 Producers These people are known for their various styles, some of which empowered musical advancements in metal to be heard by the masses. 3.3.3.1 Harris Johns Producer who engineered records for Kreator, Voi Vod, Coroner, Tankard and other bands during the middle to late 1980s, was a madman. 3.3.3.2 Tomas Skogsberg When the first school of Swedish death metal appeared, it utilized a new form of blisteringly destruction distortion, requiring a producer who could tame that sound into coherence. Sunlight Studios and Thomas Skogsberg forever will be remembered for that utilization. 3.3.3.3 Pytten Produces most of the Scandinavian school of blackmetal at Grieghallen. First name Eirik, unknown if he is related to the person by that name who played bass on the first Immortal LP. 3.3.3.4 Tom Morris The "Morrisound sound" can be either a curse or blessing, depending on your intended audience. Although it is mocked often for its consistency, the Morrisound folks were the first to figure out how to consistently preserve bass AND tone in metal music. Some say toward the end of the American death metal period, Morrisound was producing almost mechanical-sounding boosted recordings that destroyed the texture of sound. 3.3.3.5 Scott Burns Known mainly for being the guy in the "NO MOSH - NO CORE - NO FUN - NO TRENDS" circle on old mayhem records, Scott Burns cranked out an amazing number of death metal albums as producer and engineer. Some say his work sucks, and at least a lot of it sucks, but he's done some reasonably adept productions as well. Also, metal bands/grindcore bands are rarely working with matched sets of current equipment. Of late has worked predominantly out of Morrisound Studios. 3.4 Objects The various assorted physical objects one can get in addition to recordings can contribute to a sense of groundedness in the genre, but could also be a waste of time. T-shirts however serve the useful social function of spreading information; the band name and logo are shouted at every occasion by intense visuals. 3.4.1 Gear The soft goods of the metal scene. 3.4.1.1 Clothing T-shirts: should be $15 for short sleeves, $20-25 for long sleeves Hooded sweats: should be $25 3.4.1.2 Patches Generally $1-$5, these are band logos in (manly) embroidered patches. 3.4.1.3 Armor Many Hessians choose to make their own armor. However, many mailorder places will sell Armor and Weapons. 3.4.1.4 Weapons Many Hessians choose to make their own weapons, but these too are sold through the mail. Mostly this involves medievalism and other forms of classicism, but often there are Hessians making nuclear weapons for Satanic annihilation of life in the most normal neighborhoods. 3.4.2 Distribution Metal uses an internal network of underground distributors, activists, and content architects in order to ensure the distribution of ideas. It is a remarkably efficient chaotic machine. For a list of underground merchants, see the entries in our database of CD sellers, mailorder, venues and bootleg traders: http://www.anus.com/metal/about/heavy_metal_CDs 3.4.3 Person to Person Sales Net sales are common as they allow the seller to receive $6-12 for a CD otherwise returning $2-4 at a record store or $0.50-2 at a corporate music outlet. Most transactions occur through a posted ad in USENET and an email agreement, then check or cash or money order transfer followed by shipping. Yes, this runs on the honor system, but what doesn't? If you get ripped off by a merchant, you _could_ sue -- if you had ten thousand dollars and several years to wait. Remember that how you treat others influences the likelihood of how you will be treated. 3.4.3.1 Buying and Selling on the Net When selling, post a list of CD's, prices, and terms and conditions (postage, quality of merchandise, time required) with a Subject: line beginning with CDSALE: and you will get the most response by convention. When buying, ask conditions and consider asking for a bulk discount if purchasing many items. Always keep contact information for the seller, because if the package doesn't arrive, you want to ask before slinging accusations. However, if something goes wrong and the person with whom you're dealing does nothing for a couple of months, post a message to the metal groups explaining your experience and asking for advice. Usually the seller will either wake up and give you straight answers or the underground will boycott the person who has so dishonored themselves. At the Dark Legions Archive, there is a list of links to current cautions/"bad" trader list: - http://www.anus.com/metal/about/links/traders.html 3.4.3.2 Tape Trading Some consider tape trading "illegal" and "immoral," but such things make no difference to a busy metalhead, especially when tape trading is the background of diversity in metal. Finding new bands is difficult, especially with catalog descriptions like "Necro-fuck carnal excretory metal" and "Trollish folkloric sado-metal," so often people will spend time and effort making custom sampler tapes for friends in exchange for a similar offering. This allows metalheads worldwide to hear a much broader range of music than if they were confined to hearing only what they could afford, and spreads different kinds of music to the different groups of people who appreciate each kind. Not only does it benefit the fans and the bands, but by extension the labels, who in exchange for hosting the capital that funds each new release take most of the profits for their own satiation. For this reason, it is the opinion of this writer that it is best to keep tape trading as a metal institution. On the newsgroups or via IRC or via personal web pages you can make contact with other individuals wishing to tape trade, and then arrange for the trade in email or by phone. Most IRC clients will allow you to have a DCC file server from which you can dish out your "for sale/trade" list, as you can post it to USENET or other open forums. Spread everything you can, especially demo bands, who self produce their tapes and sell them through local or metal-specialty record stores. "Unauthorized duplication of this release is not only permitted but encouraged, make a tape of the shit and give it to a friend. This is the underground, support it. If we were in it for the money we would have quit long ago." - Skinless The Hessian Studies Center created a "dub trade label" for those who want tape or CD-R copies of out of print classics that would otherwise be lost: GAY CHRIST RECORDS http://www.hessian.org/sites/gaychristrecords/ 3.4.2.5 used sales Record stores often make more money on used CD's - for which they pay $2-$5 and sell for $6-$10 - than shrink-wrapped brand new versions. Hence most of them now have some form of used music display. Netwise buyers sell mostly used merchandise at often better prices, if you're chary enough to buy bulk, and transfer more of the money taken in toward buying more metal, on the whole. Support yourself and the underground with a person to person transaction. A newer breed of record stores exist which specialize in bulk resale, e.g. they have a ton of stock in a warehouse environment. These often will sell you two decades of metal for $25 or thereabouts. 3.5 Playing Part of the Hessian experience is to get involved in music making, which instigates a respect for the beauty things create in one's mind even when the things themselves are fully deconstructed. The "aesthetic barrier" is what restricts most people from understanding music; they understand it as a whole, usually based on its production values or choices of coloring within the pieces. To be a musician is to transcend the aesthetic barrier or to forever be a slave to the translation factor of pushing music through one's instrument. 3.5.1 Guitar http://www.anus.com/etc/music_theory/ Learning Guitar through Music Theory is an excellent resource. This link is a mirror; the original has gone offline. For a "metal" sound, it is recommended that you get a guitar with deep tone and if possible double humbucker pickups for extra crunch. Of all the picks commercially available, the "Tortex" last the longest compared to normal planned obsolescence plastic erases. Many metal musicians swear by thicker-than-normal strings, also. Most of the fast strumming techniques seem to be centered around holding the guitar at a radical angle nearly over the shoulder, and cutting diagonally across the bottom three strings often in a circular wrist motion. 3.5.2 Drums I have found some tricks that will allow great speed with minimal effort. On Monday I saw a recent edition of Modern Drummer has published a technical section by Virgil Donati who I consider to be the master of double bass drumming. I only got a quick glance but I know it goes through his concepts of playing doubles on each foot. This generally allows you greater speed and endurance than if you were just to play singles all the time. I used to listen to Virgil practice in a room just next to me as I was waiting for my drum lessons and the stuff he can do with his feet are amazing. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to develop the strength and accuracy of doubles on the left foot so that it matches the right foot. As I have continued to work on my left foot doubles, I have found that I can utilize the speed of my right foot to get to faster tempos without worrying the left foot too much. Instead of doing straight singles or doubles, I use a mixture of the two. Doubles on my right foot and singles on my left. This means I have groups of three notes happening on my feet faster than I can play them with normal singles. The way to practice this is simply to play them as triplets. Left-right-right-left-right-right- etc. With the quarter-notes in capitals it looks like this: L r r L r r L r r L r r L r r L r r L r r L r r Once you get to the stage where all notes sound even you can then make this stream of notes into anything. To play them as sixteenth notes your feet do this: L r r l R r l r R l r r L r r l R r l r R l r r This can feel a little weird at first because the pattern your feet are playing resolves after 1.5 or 3 bars but most music is in four bar phrasing so it sometimes can seem strange to get in and out of. Trust me though, once you practice this for a couple of days you should be gaining in speed immediately. I like to use this technique a bit but it is only a passing thing until I get to using doubles on both feet. -- Richard Beechey, richard_beechey@hotmail.com Well, I started out as a death metal drummer so here's my .308: 1. Don't sit low (preferably so that when you sit on your drum throne your arse is higher than your knees). I find it a lot easier to play doubles faster and for much longer periods of time when I sit a little higher 2. Buy a metronome, and a book with the basic drum rudiments 3. Practice the above with legs ,feet, both starting out slow and gradually increasing speed when you feel comfortable with the slower tempos. Also practice playing trip lets,quads,quintuplets etc. to a steady 4/4 rock beat and "four on the floor" 8th,16th and 32nd note rolls with hands,feet,combined,slowly at first and also learn the associated rests ie. This is all about learning to walk before learning to run. 4. I normally play a set with the snare and ride at more or less the same height (sitting down ,a little lower than elbow height) the hi hat a little higher.Toms placed a little higher than the snare at a small angle.Crashes and china at about shoulder height and the splashes halfway between the tom rims and crashes.This makes it easier to play fast and otherwise because the movement needed is basically minimal. 5. Listen and play along to Gene Hoglan,Sean Reinert,Tomas Haake,Tim Alexander,Pete Sandoval,Dean Castronovo,Vinnie Paul,Arcturus and Mayhem :) 6. Try your pedals at medium tension and the drumhead a little tighter. More rebound and a quicker response 7. Use ankle weights and practice rudiments with big ass drumsticks. ...A little help I suppose 8. When practicing don't tense up, when you feel like your arms are starting to tense up, slow down to a comfortable speed. 9. Stretch out before you start to play, pay attention to the hands. Warm up a little.Ignoring points 8 and 9 can lead to serious problems in the future ( I know).Stretch out after you finish playing. A little help I hope -Pyry, kaisa.lukkariniemi@inet.fi 3.5.3 Bass I use a lot of chords in my playing. I mostly play metal genres though which is a different situation than you are in. I think my use of chords (2,3, and 4 note) stems from my days playing in one-guitar groups where the need to fill things in during solo sections drove me to cover for the lack of a rhythm guitar. Now I play in a 5-piece with two guitars so there's not as much room but I still find places to let loose some excessive bass frequencies. - Brian (Ion Vein) For metal playing generally, look for a low action - a little fret buzz is okay - and a basic sound that has plenty of top and bottom. That it's generally a good bass with a good setup, that you're comfortable playing, is more important than the particular brand. - David Hodges 3.5.4 Vocals When performing death metal, grindcore, or black metal vocals, it is important to remember that believe it or not, one is still singing. The harsh sounds in the throat are produced by the aggravated resonance of the vocal cords, but the cords themselves will be damaged unless given amplification by a whole lot of wind from below. This brings in the diaphragm, a beltlike muscle around the base of the lungs which allows for external pressure to work the dual sacs as a billows. Contracting that muscle is as easy as deep breathing; once you've memorized that feeling enough to reproduce it, you can control this muscle to shove more air across your vocal cords and thus to pre-amplify your sound. "Gorgoroth is heavy, but not the heaviest. They play a lot in mid-tempo, and my main point of criticism is the vocals. The singer sounds like a duck being castrated." - Sybren Hettinga ================================================================ PART IV :: Metal as virtual community 1. Web 2. Email 3. Experts 4. Newsgroups 5. About 4.1 Web This author cannot speak comprehensively for the Net, and so issues general pointers to starting points for Net metal exploration: http://www.anus.com/metal/ The Dark Legions archive has reviews by this author as well as information and analysis of death metal, black metal, speed metal, heavy metal and grindcore bands; it is unique for its philosophical and sociological analysis of metal. http://web.telia.com/~u85305577/music/ Thomas Wolmer's massive site of meta lists and genre trees, worth visiting for its high content of underground information. http://www.kcuf.com All of the new, the old, the excellent and the scary in metal during this radio show for hardcore Hessians. http://www.hessian.org/ The Hessian Studies Center is a political action group for metalheads worldwide. There is a "link forest" maintained on ANUS.COM for the Dark Legions Archive which will be more current than the above: http://www.anus.com/metal/about/links 4.2 Email lists Currently, we have only one entry due to the declining popularity of email discussion lists: http://lists.anus.com/listinfo.cgi/metal-anus.com 4.3 Experts One way humans understand other cultures is to explore the personalities inside. 4.3.1 Who listens to metal? Many people ask, do "normal people" listen to metal, or do we all come from beyond the pits of hell? The answer is gratifyingly and surprisingly mundane: one of the greatest benefits of metal's lack of grounding in any automatic tradition is that those who become Hessians choose this culture and determine their own principles within it, so they are essentially normal people who have by choice elevated their consciousness to a metal method. So although we are "normal" on the outside, it takes something pretty rare to want to become a Hessian. "Generally, metal fans are human beings who have grown up in similar environments to most people in their areas of origin, with worldwide presence in a Poisson distribution." - unholy GOAT TERMS FOR METALHEADS WORLDWIDE ------------------------------ Albania: Metalist, Metalari Argentina: Metalero Belgium: Hard-rockeurs, Metal Heads Brasil: Metaleiros Canada: Freaks, dirties, metalheads Chile: Metaleros, Metalicos, rockeros Colombia: Metaleros Finland: Metallisti Greece: Metallades or, in early 1980s, Heavymetallades Hungary: Metalosok (pronounced "metaaloshock") Italy: Metallari, Metalloni Mexico: Metallista Poland: Metalowiec, pl. Metalowcy Portugal: Metalicos Puerto Rico: Metallicos Romania: Metalisti Russia: Metalist Slovenia: Metalci Spain: Heavies Sweden: Hårdrockare ("Hårdrock" means both heavy rock and metal) Ukraine: Metalist USA: Metal Heads, Thrashers, Heshers, Hessians, Headbangers UK: Metallians, Headbangers Venezuela: Rockeros Yugoslavia: Metalaci pronounced "metaalatzi" Croatia: Metalaci pronounced "metaalatzi" 4.3.2 How to find metal fans? Unsurprisingly, our best suggestion is to go to metal events, metal (virtual) communities or your local metalhead with a fat joint in your hand. Metalheads congregate around what they know as metal when they're thinking metal, and otherwise are normal people, except for long hair, t-shirts and some fundamental belief differences. 4.4 Bands It seems exaggerated the amount of confusing regarding bands and the treatment thereof that permeates certain sectors of the community, so this section addresses the subject with some quick pointers for the otherwise unalerted. 4.4.1 Listings Bands are listed in local newspapers, usually entertainment specific papers like the _L.A. Weekly_ or _Alternative Press_ or _Metropolitan Times._ 4.4.2 Approaching When approaching bands, walk with respect. Remember that no matter how "normal" these guys seem, they've taken big chunks of their life and time and put it into the project of their music, so on some level they are serious creators and deserve respect and compassion in understanding. Also, many of them smoke marijuana or drink beer, so bringing those is always a touching way to make a karmic-deductible donation to the cause of human futures. 4.4 Newsgroups and IRC USENET provides the easiest access to most metalheads; however, it is also the most annoying, given the high prevalence of noise to signal from personality disorders rendered into text. 4.4.1 Newsgroups Metal groups at the time of this writing: alt.rock-n-roll.metal - commercial metal alt.rock-n-roll.metal.heavy - commercial metal/grunge alt.rock-n-roll.metal.death - death metal alt.rock-n-roll.metal.black - black metal alt.rock-n-roll.metal.metallica - fan group alt.rock-n-roll.metal.ironmaiden - fan group alt.music.black-metal - black metal alt.music.black-metal.nazi - nazi black metal alt.music.slayer - fan group alt.fan.metal - metal fan social group alt.fan.metal.burzum - fan group alt.fan.metal.suffocation - fan group alt.rock-n-roll.metal.progressive - prog heavy metal alt.rock-n-roll.metal.doom - doom/commercial metal alt.thrash - thrash music alt.music.grindcore - grindcore music alt.music.underground.metal - underground metal/crossover alt.music.underground.metal.death - underground death metal 4.4.2 History One of USENET's earliest hierarchies was the alt.rock-n-roll hierarchy, started to complement .sex and .drugs in the middle eighties. By the next decade, a .metal had been added and by the early nineties a new group, .metal.heavy was added to accomodate "heavier" metal, not knowing that "heavy metal" is a keyword for more commercial, rock-based offerings. Somewhere in this time alt.thrash was created for skateboarders and taken over by crossover music fans. In order to advance this hierarchy to a contemporary state of metal knowledge, in 1993 I created the newsgroup alt.rock-n-roll.metal.death, which was followed by .progressive, .doom, and the newer hierarchy of alt.music.black-metal in the middle 1990s. 4.4.3 Constructive use Metal newsgroups should function to empower the most possible users both as reference and interactive medium. Thus the best way to split their identities is to divide them according to musical genre tree and history, as that is how they are marketed and how people will know to find them: alt.rock-n-roll.metal - general commercial metal alt.rock-n-roll.metal.heavy - "heavy metal" alt.rock-n-roll.metal.doom - doom metal alt.music.grindcore - grindcore alt.music.metal.death - death metal alt.music.metal.black - black metal alt.music.thrash - thrash music alt.rock-n-roll.metal.lifestyle - metal lifestyle alt.rock-n-roll.metal.commercial - product ads 4.4.4 Etiquette Unlike most of the rest of the net, the metal zones are not based on morality or material aesthetics; therefore, nothing is taboo and anything not expressly permitted is completely legal. People fire flame and fist across text that is in the end to all of us completely meaningless, and so Hessians do not worry about rules, only keeping the content meaningful. Metalheads are naturally anarchistic, and so there is no need for rules. A few good ideas: 1 - Look to see if someone has asked/answered your questions by scanning the Subject: lines of your news messages, and then by using http://groups.goole.com/ to find older messages on that topic. 2 - Avoid taking USENET seriously; it is a playground for minds and personalities, and much of what goes on is not "serious" in that it is not "real," but is serious in that someone is attempting to communicate something, even quite possibly something of which they are not yet fully aware. 3 - Use a fake address in order to avoid letting spammers harvest your email address. Use a free web page with a contact form to allow people to reach you instead. 4.4.5 IRC Internet Relay Chat, while being a bastion of the petty and authoritarian, has some useful contributions in the form of active worldwide metalhead chat. Check out these channels for metal discussion: #metal #death_metal #black_metal #blackmetal #blackplague #deathmetal #blackdeathmetal #666 #hessian #slayer #burzum #metal_rulez #paul_ledney 4.5 About this FAQ Brief authorship information about those who created this FAQ, their origins, beliefs and other projects. 4.5.1 Authorship The staff of the Amerikan Nihilist Underground Society and the Hessian Studies Center contributed extensively to this FAQ. Most written by Spinoza Ray Prozak, formerly a DJ at KSPC FM (88.7) in the eastern Los Angeles basin, and now a free-lance writer in The Netherlands. For contact, corrections or additions, please contact SRP at http://www.anus.com/etc/people/srp Design and contents copyright 1994-2008 Spinoza Ray Prozak and the Hessian Studies Center. 4.5.2 Contributorship The position of contributor is shared with a constant stream of references to USENET or email list postings from talented individuals worldwide. If we use your text, attribution will be given including your name and a cite to the publishing of the original work. 4.5.4 Affiliated The staff that produced this FAQ are involved with a variety of sites: http://www.anus.com/metal/ Master philosophical metal reviews, history, info, pictures and sound. http://www.deathmetal.org/ Institute for the study of death metal. http://www.grindcore.org/ Academic study of grindcore. http://www.hessian.org/ Political representation for metal culture. 4.5.5 Inspiration Call the Metal AE! +1 201 879 6668 (8N1) PW: KILL ================================================================ © Copyright 1994-2008 Hessian Studies Center http://www.anus.com/metal ================================================================