This site started from a number of text files designed to promote quality metal over commercialism, the process of dumbing down art so that it can have a wider audience along the Bell Curve, and grew to resist assimilation, or the absorption of metal back into rock ‘n roll as a flavor instead of a genre on its own.

As our audience knows from the FAQ, metal arose from a hybrid between early punk, progressive rock, and heavy rock in the aesthetic context of horror movie soundtracks, themselves owing a heavy debt to modernist classical like Bruckner, Saint-Saens, Wagner, and Respighi. Metal distinguished itself by being phrase-based, through-composed music, where rock is beat-based with formless riffs and tends toward verse-chorus loops.

However, as a product, heavy metal is inconsistent. That is, it has its peaks every generation or so, but then goes into a long period of decline where people try to make it more like rock by mixing in emo, indie, punk, jazz, blues, and pop because those unrelated genres are easier to replicate year-after-year, which means constant profits which the rank-and-file of industry vastly prefer to a few peaks followed by many lean years. In the peak, you hire lots of people; in the valleys, you have to either file them or shovel garbage out the door like most labels have been doing since 1994.

Industry would prefer rock with metal touches like Alice in Chains or Gojira. They can recycle riffs, melodies, and rhythms easily that way, since most rock albums are borrowed mostly from the B-sides of the influences on the band. To that end, they keep trying to make metal into punk, which has already been assimilated into rock, as a means of dominating it for the 1960s agenda:

If death metal is more fatalistic, more depressive — though not necessarily nihilistic — black metal, at least early on, was more interested in examining evil and proclaiming the nullity of certain values, including musical values. Death metal, by contrast, put more emphasis on recording technique and musical prowess, whereas black metal disavowed that sort of refinement — it was initially far more invested in low-fi than low-fi was — just as it also disavowed belief in anything god-fearing. Black metal was in a sense theological, but much of it was closer to the theology of H.P. Lovecraft: The real gods will kill everybody, including those who love and follow those gods. In this way black metal has been at times closer to the anti-natalist philosophy of Emil Cioran and the pessimism or Eugene Thacker — writers who essentially extrapolated H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional mythos into full-fledged philosophy.

Between death metal and black metal, the latter is more complex and has, no question about it, proved more worrisome. As it found new roots and adherents in Nordic countries — where the music fit the weather — black metal asserted a particularly troubling manifestation in Norway, where one of the music’s prime respected practitioners committed the notorious murder of another musician in the scene (he went to prison for 16 years, still managed to make some music while there, and returned to his career after release). Others from the movement preached virulent racism, identified with a renewal of fascist values, and committed a wave of church burnings. Much of black metal has typically maligned Christianity and other institutional religions, and some practitioners took parts in Norwegian church burnings in the 1990s. Even so, the music continued to spread worldwide and in years since many who make black metal have now staked out the music as a resistance music that stands in opposition to fascism and nihilism. It’s still a pretty bleak world they pay witness to, but making music and interacting with the community of their audiences provides them with affirmation. They aren’t about to kill anybody or burn anything down. Black metal is a sound that its devotees value immensely and they are ready to argue for its meanings.

These artists and labels are not in the metal business for the money, or even primarily as a business. They are in it for the unique music they create, and the unique meanings and purposes of that music. Metal — and its diverse manifestations — makes for the best and most fascinating music scene I’ve ever encountered. Everything I said above about the currency of popular music? There is no currency more far-reaching than metal, and yet the alternative and mainstream music media rarely recognize that currency.

When most people think of the 1960s agenda, they think of hippies, but they should really think of WW2 propaganda and how it changed after the Korean War. At some point, it became clear that our former allies the Soviets were worse than Hitler and Napoleon combined, and America moved away from overt Communism but tried to compete with it on social values.

This creates a race to extreme individualism in different forms. The Soviets offered direct subsidies, so we offered indirect subsidies (entitlements) and civil rights, which the Soviets were weaker on because theirs was a surveillance and repression oriented total state. We were the open society dedicated to equality, but theirs was the closed society enforcing equality (for most).

Most importantly, however, the 1960s showed us the final triumph of bourgeois (urbanized, versus country) middle-class values: the self above all else, especially natural order and social order. What the individual desired mattered more than anything else.

Metal was a pushback against this, the ultimate blasphemy to a human herd. Black Sabbath wanted to shock hippies into waking up to reality, since the world of shared human intentions and desires was not real nor an aid in survival. If nothing else, it was a herd manipulating itself with illusions.

The new genre took on Satan because he was the ultimate scapegoat. Humans were running around, subsidized by the wealth of the past, blaming others for their own bad decisions, like a Garden of Eden event mirrored in recursive mise en abyme infinitely toward the horizon beneath the world.

Naturally, this upset the entire rock ‘n roll narrative of the antihero who was “me first” and untouched by the world around him like a perpetual teenager (Boomers are still stranded in this place; you can liberate or “renew” them with a pillow and four minutes of downward pressure).

Consequently, rock wants to grasp metal and bring it back into the safe herd of the movement that has gripped the West for a thousand years, the steady drive toward individualism, which includes Christianity and liberalism, both of which reject heliocentricism and posit the individual at the center of the universe. In these theories, there is a universal, absolute, and objective space of “truth” and “morality” shared by these individuals in which principles matter more than outcomes in reality.

With the rock culture against it and wanting to control it, and industry wanting to make an inferior rock version of it so it can sell edgy products like it does with Harley-Davidsons and Jack Daniels, metal faces an array of forces that threaten its soul.

Metal fought back by, instead of aspiring to what people want, pursuing what people fear and makes them feel small (not individualistic) and making from it an art form, sort of like it makes beauty from distorted guitars despite them sounding like malfunctioning machinery or dying animals. This is why underground metal pursued imagery of death and decay instead of large-breasted promiscuous women, motorcycles, beer, and Jesus:

When it comes to sheer disrepute, nothing in all pop – except for some of the more notorious rap artists – can compare with the speed-metal bands. Inspired as much by the brutal rhythms and bellicose stance of early-1980’s hardcore punk as by heavy metal’s own styles and obsessions, these groups are making some of the boldest and brightest music of our day and, some critics would claim, also some of the most frightening.

These shirts are rife with horror-derived imagery, including depictions of rotting ghouls, greenish skulls and apocalyptic demons. The iconography may sound gruesome, and yet, when you’re confronted with an endless variety of these shirts in mass quantity, there’s actually something mesmerizing about it. Plus, it’s simply a kick to draw the attention or disapproval of others by wearing these shirts. It’s a way of boasting your toughness and your proud status as an outcast. Conservative moralists can fume all they like about the question of what art is tolerated inside the nation’s museums, but they’re missing an important point: The canvas has shifted in this culture, and it is kids like the ones who are gathered here in San Antonio who are bearing the defiant new art on their chests.

Metal recognized that assimilation is the fundamental threat to humanity; whatever rises is pulled back down into the Crowd, which has very low standards and wants to assert those low standards on everyone else. Crowds are made of fear and resentment, which is why popular music plays to self-pity, except metal of course.

We represent the last group willing to break free from the hive mind and its groupthink to embrace both (a) realism and (b) a transcendent sense of the ceremony of opposites, namely that from ugliness beauty can be formed, and that this ability means we no longer need a pathology of assimilation.

Tags: assimilation, commercialism, punk, rock 'n' roll, slayer, Speed Metal