People frequently ask “So what is an ‘ambient metal’ band? Have you actually seen one? Are there any metal bands out there who, if asked, would identify themselves as ‘ambient metal’?” To understand why the term is used, it is important to examine first why bands do anything that they do and second, what the term “ambient” means in the context of history.

Bands are assembled of individuals who together, in some form, decide what their output will be and create it. While much of this is a spontaneous project, there is behind-the-scenes transfer of information through shared musical influences or ideas and concepts the band members collectively find useful. It is unlikely that four guys with guitars sat down one day and said, “We should be the next cutting-edge thing. I know – let’s do ambient music, but on guitars.” A more realistic version is that a band formed and started playing with some ideas they found intellectually or musically stimulating.

The earliest human music was strictly rhythmic; the next generation of change brought linear melodic music; the generation after that used harmony and syncopation to integrate the two, and this slowly gave way to the furthest evolution of form, in which melody as the primary content expression was given context by the most complex understanding of musical devices yet known. Despite its seemingly technical origins, this music achieved an acme of expressiveness in artistic outlook. Human culture is still waiting for another artistic movement with the patient spirit and yet unbridled passion of Beethoven, Bach, Strauss or Wagner.

In the media age of the 1950s-1960s, the previous popular forms of Christian hymns, blues, country and polka were whipped into a single entity and called “rock music.” It has the populist features that classical music lacks: repetitive beat, droning pentatonic harmony, and constant dynamic intensity. It is cyclic music of an unchanging character. This linear constancy reflected the literature and ideals of the early industrial age, or modernism, although presented in a postmodern (“non-hierarchical”) aesthetic concept, until punk music distilled rock music to a few chords and shattered the illusion of uniqueness to any given rock band.

We might call rock “discrete music” because it aimed at a simple, 1:1 ratio between simple and gesture in the music. While earlier music had used pentatonic scales, including accidental or “blue” notes, blues and rock standardized on the pentatonic scale plus a single blue note; most rock is major, harmonic minor, or blues scale composition because these allow a flexible harmony in which no notes are specific to major or minor keys, meaning they can be used over different tonal centers without any notes that sound bad against a chord. Rock standardized the song format on a simplified version of English sea ballads; rock standardized constant syncopated percussion; it also standardized topics and a role (sexual initiation of teenagers). It broke away from the classical idea of phrases which periodically harmonized to exclusively use chords — descending from the guitar’s role as a rhythm instrument in ensembles, minus the ensemble — which caused rhythmic strumming within a narrow tonal range to replace the many notes and changing time signatures of what came to be called “lead rhythm” phrases. Borrowing from Anglo-Celtic, Scandinavian and German folk music, and adding a simplified version of the instrumentation used in German beerhouse bands, it took the lowest common denominator and made a fixed form of it. In short it was the perfect product, but in order to do that, it had to simplify itself into interchangeable parts which each had contextless and thus universal emotional symbolism.

In the 1970s, a countermovement arose in which musicians began looking to new forms for inspiration, and found them in the neoclassical: a merging of classicalist ideas of melody and layered structure with the newfound populist beat patterns of reduced structural changes to prevent intrusion upon the actual song pattern established by melodic architecture. Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and arguably the first ambient guitarist, Robert Fripp, embraced principles of this ethos contra the simplistic lifestyle support of mainstream rock. In this atmosphere underground metal was born with 1983 luminaries Slayer, Sodom and Bathory. Each put out an album colored by the dark careless phrasing of Venom and wrought in the tremolo strum and ambient offtime rhythmic structures of extreme hardcore. This heritage forms the basis of all underground metal.

The opposite of discrete music, but not yet approaching the complexity of classical, ambient music creates a harmonic texture and relegates percussion to a background role, letting the phrase lead the change of song structure, key and tempo. An ideal ambient composition takes unchanging rhythm and over it layers phrases, creating harmony from their conjoined effect in the way classical music does, making moods “ad hoc” relative to its starting point. Where discrete music focuses on each piece of a song being a thing unto itself, using a universal set of symbols, ambient music invents symbols specific to each song and as a result gives pieces of a song meaning only when existing in the context of others. In this, selected metal and synthesizer music (synthpop, electronica, ambient) are closer to their classical heritage than the distillation of popular memes that is rock. Not all metal and ambient music fits this description; many artists, figuring that their listening audience would rather have something immediately recognizable and familiar in a “new” form, use rock-styled composition with different instrumentation.

Good examples of ambient metal are found in At the Gates The Red in the Sky is Ours and Darkthrone Transilvanian Hunger most prominently, but these are the end product of an evolution that began when Black Sabbath began imitating the phrases of horror movie soundtracks in streams of power chords. The first three Morbid Angel albums, anything from Burzum, the first two Sepultura EPs, and Sarcófago I.N.R.I. all exhibit ambient tendencies, among many other albums. Not surprisingly, these bands tend to write about topics that are not “universal” in the sense of common to all human beings in the way morality is surmised to be absolute, but write from a perspective outside that of the human, as if showing us interactions of people and nature in a dispassionate, nihilistic universe which delights in conflict and interconnection more than symbols held up above nature itself.

As any change in musical style points to a change in thinking patterns, the rise of ambience in metal signifies a falling away from mainstream views — which tend to be discrete, moralistic, utilitarian, and universalist — toward a naturalistic and scientific view of reality. The linear is broken; the complex and multithreaded view of causality that ancient civilizations had, in which no single event led to change, but a collaboration of events, has been restored in the music itself, as has a belief in varied dynamics, implying a greater narrative range. In this light, it is impossible to see this music as anything but an ongoing revolution, even if the names used here are still foreign to most of the bands producing it.

Ambient music and its relation to metal

The genres grew up simultaneously and converge in the current generation
by Alex Birch

After Burzum started producing pure electronic soundtracks to Pagan mythology, Fenriz from Darkthrone decided to go avant-garde and composing electronic space explorations, Ildjarn left his Discharge-empowered poetry and began producing synth-layered soundscapes, and Beherit, in an attempt to revive the band from the dusty archives, set out to create simple but haunting digitalized neoclassical harmony, many metal fans previously only accustomed to the sound of raw guitars, slamming drums, dark basses, and tearing screams from the abyss, now began taking great interest in what the electronic genre had to offer. To the surprise of many, electronic music was close to the compositional and aesthetic roots of metal, acknowledging new bands using ambient and metal to fuse a blend between two modern instrumentations.

am-bi-ent (am’be-ənt)adj. Surrounding; encircling: ambient sound; ambient air.[Latin ambiens, ambient-, present participle of ambire, to surround : amb-, ambi-, around; see ambi- + ire, to go; see ei- in Indo-European roots.]

– The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

As shown by the etymological explanation above, ambient music is an artistic medium trying to achieve an atmosphere or a particular surrounding, based most commonly on electronic sounds that are looped until the listener feels a certain mood and place arise within the mind. Usually the artist takes use of a basic synth-layer, using that as a base for a melodic or harmonic development. The synth-layer can collaborate through assonance or dissonance with another layer, in order to create balance and expand the instrumental possibilities. Tribal beats or other forms of percussion may be used to set a rhythm along with the flowing electronic waves, but most commonly these are left out completely. On top of the basic flow of key tones, the ambient artist experiments with melody and harmony, which we as listeners recognize as thematic communication. The melodies are often looped for a certain period of time, in order to achieve a form of transcendental, hypnotizing effect. Only by listening to the music continuously without interruption, perhaps over a time span of 30 minutes or longer, can the intensity and the thematic realization reach a high-end point.

Due to its very nature as music, ambient is ideal for meditation, as it means long listening hours, often with a calming and soothing effect for the mind, body, and soul. Its instrumental simplicity adds up to this, but the compositional method is often very complex. The artists can integrate different kinds of sound effects to create additional musical experiences: rivers flowing, people screaming, distorted political speeches, and even computerized sounds from a car or a machine, to further enhance and set the mood to its relative course. The leading melodies often intertwine with the basic synth-layer, ending in collaboration between rhythm (“pace”) and harmony. Some artists are able compose entire songs only by manipulating a few synth-tones, co-ordinating them into different patterns or cyclic key melodies, and as a result achieve an echoing effect in harmony. Percussion-only, like one tribal beat played against another, may also create an ambient-effect of great use — the possibilities lie within the ideas of the composer. Not surprisingly the ambient genre is a very experimental one, fusing metal, folk, jazz, and even classical music, into an organic symbiosis.

Ambient music can be seen as a structuralistic form of music, meaning the listener must recreate the compositional structure within the mind, in order to understand the ideas communicated through the musical medium. While popular music and most of the metal created today, are built around the concept of musical progression through key choruses that function as leading melodies, ambient music often lacks melodic development and instead tries to achieve an atmosphere by slowly building up harmonic tension over a large time span. The listener is forced to maintain a close relationship to the variation in tonal, melodic, and harmonic presence, and forge all partial developments of the music into a central motif. While this may sound academic, it is often very simple: by paying attention to the music you’re listening to, following the progression of the composition itself instead of the melody, you will automatically gain an understanding of the underlying structure within the music.

This does not mean that the structure in ambient music “exists” in the objective sense of the word, but that it functions as an assessment of the how the music is structured and what it tries to tell us through ideas. This, along with the fact that ambient music is created to achieve an atmosphere, makes it a very esoteric listening experience, almost like a religious ritual or an intense philosophizing thinking process. There are many kinds of ambient music and, like in metal music, certainly not all subgenres are relevant in the categorizing of the main genre. What they all share in common is a free compositional method of creating music, breaking the boundaries of verse-chorus-bridge-thinking and using the rhythm as a pacesetter and not as determiner of melodic or harmonic progression. This leaves the field open for the artists to create different patterns of ideas without being restricted to a linear beat, like in rock or popular music.

The relationship between ambient and other forms of music may seem far-fetched, but is in fact something that has helped it gain a larger listening audience outside underground circles. Metal music, like ambient, is built around the compositional idea that originates from classical music: long and intense pieces communicating an active life experience, through the inherent variation in musical structure. The free boundaries of harmony in classical music, are in ambient used to let go of all sense of percussion and instead form a continuous rhythm by regularly looping melody and sound effects, until a consecutive working arises and determines the overall thematic and musical base, on which to build upon through progression or deconstruction. Like with classical and metal music, ambient is through its free composition able to take use of partial experiences, and merging these together to form a central motif. While most rock and popular music is built around one key melody without significance to experience, classical, metal, and ambient music can only be understood when interpreting the melodic/harmonic and structural changes in the pieces, and construct these together inside the mind of listener, into a solid whole representing and describing an overall ideal, sensation, feeling, or experience.

The links between metal and ambient music are therefore multiple, and when leading bands within black metal realized the decay of the genre as a whole, they quickly turned to what must have been seen as an obvious next stage within creating neoclassical music: pure electronic textures, free from drums and conventionalities, trying to revive classical music through modern instrumentation. The ambient veteran Klaus Schulze proved that this was fully possible by releasing his album entitled “X”. In it he composes pieces functioning as musical biographies of famous German artists like Georg Trakl and Friedrich Nietzsche. While the first pieces are entirely created using the infamous synthesizer (an electronic instrument creating musical output by mathematically or by hand, manipulating keys and sounds by different musical techniques), Schulze gradually integrates classical instruments like violins. In the final piece he takes use of a full symphony orchestra and manages to create music where the classical meets the modern ambient sound techniques. The result is beyond what any artist within the ambient field so far has achieved.

Other ambient projects like the old-school synthesizer masters Tangerine Dream, began experimenting with the possibility in letting concurrent synth melodies function much like a symphony orchestra works with counterpoint, leaving out most percussive determiners and thereby form a music driven by a free melodic progression in sound. Post-techno projects like Polygon Window instead went the other way and tried to create harmony by working with tribal beats and looping them concurrently, so that a meta-harmony was taking shape as both rhythm and key melody. Early artists like Screaming Corpse would even strip the music of all melody, instead collaborating with sound effects in order to fuse different collage into central motifs. Buzzing sounds and distorted screams passing a digitalized filter, would function as instruments themselves, experimenting with echo-effects and extreme reverbing techniques.

This method of composing music was later developed into what we today refer to as “industrial ambient”, meaning a form of music that by working with machine-driven beats and sound effects replicating mechanistic and robotic parts of modern society, achieves a post-industrial form of electronic music. Similarly many projects take use of sound effects from nature, which nowadays is called “nature ambient”; samples of thunder, running water, moving glaciers etc. together with electronic instrumentation, in an attempt to describe an experience related to nature and its process as organic system. Amir Baghiri demonstrates this when forming melodic motifs by using water drums to evoke the soul of nature with its own organic material. Neoclassical ambient artist Biosphere can also be added to this list, manipulating sound effects from nature with cold and bleak soundscapes, forging a timeless atmosphere set out in the freezing northern Europe.

However, the most common form of ambient is that of long and simplistic synth tones, balancing between different tonal heights and variation in intensity, slowly building up a meditative state of mind within the listener. Lustmord and Lull are two classic examples of this compositional method: no percussion, no beat, no central melodic or harmonic motif, only hour-long sonic textures forged by the most simple of tonal variation. The theme is only understood by listening to the whole piece from start to finish, paying close attention to the underlying structures in the music and placing them in context with the central compositional idea. Metal works the same way: the understanding of the music is only apparent to the listener who follows the structural progression and not simply trying to find any “truths” within the aesthetic alone. Classical music is even more free from boundaries than metal, and requires a high attention span in order for the listener to follow each small harmonic change, and realizing its relevance from a larger contextual “truth”, which is assessed only within the mind of he or she who listens, but nonetheless is a result of an assessment of what the medium is trying to communicate.

Sometimes the entire musical picture is disintegrated into monotone sound waves, like a radio transmission being converted into pure synth layers, moving back and forth between two levels of intensity, much like the waves of the sea meets the shore. Post-Beherit project Suuri Shamaani composed music this way, following a logical progression of its previous attempts in creating solid and flowing music without as little rhythmic restrictions as possible. Inspired by synthpop masters Kraftwerk and the previously mentioned Tangerine Dream, Suuri Shamaani gained a new presence within ambient music with its desperately bleak, dissonant, organic, over-simplistic instrumentation. Fenriz’ side-project Neptune Towers was following the same lead when breaking apart the sparse beats found within the music of Tangerine Dream, and instead using the synthesizer to both shape rhythm and harmony around improvised melodies, thriving on free contextual motifs connected to the organic space of universe.

Similarly have some ambient artists been trying to use instrumentation from more traditional elements like heavy metal, to explore the possibilities in letting metal, ambient, and classical music collaborate on a common idealistic basis. Canadian ambient project Ashtorath and the more well-known artist Robert Fripp, found new life in the electronic genre when integrating classical harmony and metal instrumentation, like piano and guitar solos, even taking use of violins to achieve a neoclassical atmosphere.

While the composition behind ambient music has been complex as in the case of Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream, the simplicity of the instrumentation has remained as a hallmark for most of the material created within the ambient field. The veteran and official founder of the concept of ambient music, Brian Eno, stated in the liner notes to the album Music for Airports, that it had to be “[…] able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” His music was built around this idea: simple key notes balancing on equally simple central motifs, both working as background meditation, but also providing the listener with a deeper contextual depth that only could be found by paying close attention to the structural core of each piece. In this sense, ambient music is both passive and active, as the mind of the listener concurrently experiences a background and a leading theme. This was nothing new to the metal fans that started to listen to Klaus Schulze and Neptune Towers after the outbreak of populism within the genre after 1996.

Metal music follows the same compositional method as described above: what to most people sound like “noise”, is to the regular metal listener a clear and distinctive form of music close to the classical ideals. This is understood only by seeing through the “noise” generated by the guitar riffs and the slamming drums, and instead paying attention to the underlying melody, structure, and thematic presentation. Still the metal artist is able to take use of the “noise effect” by manipulating it and turning it into an aesthetic pleasure – an important part of the musical experience as a whole. Classical music almost completely breaches the boundaries of passive/active switching by its continuous flow of partial melodic development, but similarly has the ability of being understood as both an overall tonal advancement towards a certain key motif, and as partial context in melodic detail: the focus on the partial and the whole becomes a clash that can equally by seen as the switch between the passive and active listening experience. As listeners of classical, metal, and ambient music, we both interpret the active experience and the “passive” one automatically generated, by letting the mind making a continuous re-assessment of the overall advancement of the music. This is how we are able to remember certain key parts in a musical piece, from over an hour of perhaps 40-50 different melodies; we’ve registered the overall tonal variation and from there on, remembered the partial textures built around the central motif of each piece. This can be compared to the sense of hierarchical memory by which our brain often functions: you read the word “Burzum” and think of keywords linked to that phenomenon: “ambient”, “Odin”, “Discharge”.

Is should be somewhat apparent after this reading, that ambient and metal music have a lot in common, and that the narrative basis in metal music made a logical progression away from blues/rock standards, instead trying to conquer new grounds by leaving the standardized format and migrating to an open and free composition closer to that of classical music. With that migration, the blockheads that still today are producing four-chord-cycled riffs, were left behind and still to this day do not understand nor comprehend the genius in Neptune Towers or later Burzum and Beherit. The metal artists proved once again that their ideal was an elitist and romanticist one, creating art after experience and ideal, and not after commerce and popularity. Ambient was the choice for many serious black and death metal bands when the genre became crowded with too many populists, and since the ambient field was both close to classical/romanticist ideals, and offered a modern way of reviving ancient wisdom from centuries far left behind, it was seen as the only step towards a more unrestricted musical area, filled with the passion and atmosphere that defined the best of black and death metal. Today most serious metal fans also listen to classical and ambient music, knowing these three genres contain a lasting artistic expression towards natural and traditional ideals, free from conventions found within blues, rock, and popular music, breaking new boundaries as further possibilities are explored, along the way on the journey to the stars.

Any genre of music can be said to have an ideology, or ideological range. The musicians and fans had to pick the music because it sounded like something they wanted in their lives. With a really dumb genre, that would be distraction or posing like a slacker or a pimp. With more complex genres, the aesthetics and organization of the music suggest ideals people desire. For metal, the aesthetic — finding beauty in dischordant darkness — and organization — a “riff salad” that narrates like a poem — suggests a rejection of the human perspective for a more holistic reality.

It is this style of metal, from its first riffs derived from the modernist-classical-lite melodies of horror movie soundtracks, which, by eschewing fixed “meaning” for a sense of fitting together as a whole and having an architectonic clarity as the songs, shows us a world from the perspective of a movie, or a scientist, or history: the camera pans back and we no longer think of individuals involved as being important in their own right. We think of the story, the situation, and the outcome, but with our knowledge we cannot be limited to an anthropocentric position.

This is how, without even reading the lyrics, we can tell what metal has in the way of values and worldview, which if you believe in them enough to think they’d make a good organization for civilization, you call an “ideology.” The ideology of Britney Spears is “what the hell, who cares”; the ideology of jazz is cosmopolitanism; the ideology of techno is vibrant distraction; the ideology of classical music is a respect for intensity and attention span. All forms of art have some form of ideology, although sometimes it is hard to recognize because it is subtle or, in many cases, non-challenging (see “Britney Spears” some words ago).

The Metal Ideology

With a little more analysis, we can enumerate the metal ideology as follows:

• Feral naturalism – Horror, predation, violence, and battle are praised for their intensity as experience and their power. Morality is thrown away in favor of this appreciation for the mechanisms of reality.
• Technofutilism – As in horror films, technology and social institutions are useless for dealing with the problems we face.
• Realistic individualism – The wisdom of crowds is feared and seen as false, since they pander to each other (poseurs, sell-outs). However, the individualist is realistic and so knows that everyone in a crowd is an individualist, and that’s how a crowd forms.
• Nihilism – Morality is a human imposition, as are value and purpose. Nature doesn’t care what happens to us, and neither do the gods. We’re in the driver’s seat and whether we sink or swim is 100% up to us.
• Holism – There is a frustration with the tendency of modern society to break down experiences and concepts by using exclusive logical OR operations in a categorical context; it is either a truth OR an opinion, but can’t be both, and so on. Metal is a genre of logical AND, in that it sees all of our judgments as attributes and reality as the only arbitrer.
• Ludic, absurdist materialism – In a metal view, we are only fleshy bodies and we can have transcendent thoughts, but we will always be what we are. From that, we can clear aside pretense and enjoy life, which is inherently absurd, gross, terrifying, crass, insane and beautiful, the most rational design ever, rewarding.

Evidence for each of these assertions can be found in metal lyrics, imagery and through a thoughtful perspective on the sounds and structures used in metal songs. You could claim “the past is alive” and “only death is real” as good starting points, but even early Black Sabbath lyrics have the romanticist, naturalistic, holistic and nihilistic tendencies that create the above values system. In this, metal bands are not dissimilar to European Romantic poetry and classical music, which was also post-moral, saw the individual as a means and not an end, nationalistic, and playful.

Christianity, on the other hand, is more complex because it is open to wide interpretations. Narrowing in on what most people believe, we can see it has several basic tenets, originating in its idea of individual equality in the eyes of God. To a metalhead, this interpretation of Christianity seems anti-nature, because we are not equal in ability and any interpretation of equality is a human imposition that does not exist in nature; further, metalheads distrust the creation of alternate realities like God, heaven and hell. Not all interpretations of Christianity have these tenets, and some in fact are closer to what metal believes (the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johannes Eckhart or Arthur Schopenhauer come to mind). But for the mass religion that conquered much of Europe, these are its beliefs:

• Dualism – Christianity believes in a second reality that exists outside of this one. This reality, in which there is pure moral “good,” is called Heaven and we are supposed to impose it on earth; Hell exists in this same spirit realm.
• Morality/peace/benevolence – In Christian lore, the best possible method of living is one that is peaceful, as that way you do not interrupt others. To a metalhead, this is ridiculous because people can be doing things that while not explicitly immoral cause bad consequences, and so of course you interrupt them.
• Discrete individualism – Christian dogma supports the idea of the individual as absolute in that they are to be granted as much freedom as possible, and can be judged only by God, and should be forgiven when they screw up. This is to a metalhead imposition of the will of the Crowd on the individual and a type of slavery, as it retards those who do have a clue from acting to keep the clueless from dominating via superior numbers.

The common root of these Christian beliefs is humanism, or belief in the predominance of the human form and its incarnations, individuals. The Christian God is shaped like a human; Christian morality rewards never harming or killing humans even if they’re doing insane things; Christian morality emphasizes how we’re all equal. We can see how the elaborate dance of morality and theology supports a much simpler human truth, which is the desire of the ego of each one of us to be independent from forces which can humble it with reality. We want to be free from the consequences of making bad decisions and the social judgment of others, because either can show us to be incorrect or to have a weakness, and that scares us in a social setting and makes us lose social status. The root of Christianity is affirming the ego’s power; the root of metal is affirming the power of nature and by unintentional consequence, decreasing the supremacy of the ego.

Romanticism

Romanticism, the parent belief of metal, originates in a more naturalistic time before beliefs like Christianity separated the self-valuation of the human individual from nature, and gave them an imaginary reality (morality) with which to compensate. Although Christianity means well, the unintended consequence is that it makes people more selfish because instead of just trying to live their lives, they are now trying to prove and justify their worth in a moral context. The resulting drama creates many social problems because it ultimately boils down to a denial of reality in favor of individual withdrawl from reality, and it creates neurosis and ego competition.

For this reason art — which tries to affirm our bonds to reality, or through unitivity remove us from false worlds and the withdrawl into our own perspective — has been at odds with society for at least a millenium, perhaps longer. Where social control, power, law and religion require external affirmation for the individual to justify themselves, art confronts the accepted vision of reality with a fantasy that is metaphorically more accurate than the “scientific” and “objective” beliefs of a dying society. Art reconnects us with cause/effect reasoning by taking us out of a false context, and through a new context, showing us where our values lie.

Both Romanticist art and metal are therefore in conflict with Christianity as 99% of its audience practices it, and they have run into additional conflict through Christian propaganda trying to emulate the original art forms. When a Christian or secular humanist (atheistic version of Christian morality) sees metal, which is a value system that not only denies their own but makes it look like an arbitrary fantasy into which people escape their fear of mortality and failure, they have a tendency to do what any good propagandist would do: make their own version of the art in question, and then point to that new creation which did not emerge from the artistic movement but was imposed upon it, and use its existence to claim that consensus does not exist in the artistic movement.

We call this imposed, false, externalized metal “Christian metal” because its defining factor is that it is Christian. It is not a genre, but can appear in any genre; it is an ideological tag with a parallel in neo-Nazi music in that what matters most is its message, and it uses metal as a conduit for that message, instead of wanting to create metal for metal’s sake and therefore explore the values of metal.

A History of Christian Metal

Metal is a romanticist movement which was inspired by the classical era of European humanity, including as part of its view many Romantic philosophical ideals which are pre-Christian in their derivation and anti-Christian in their values.

• Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath were originally a blues band who later shifted to metal to reflect an interest in the occult. After three albums in which massive drug use and public outcry over their beliefs battered them down, they created an album which had several pro-Christian songs. This does not necessarily reflect their beliefs, nor is likely to do so, but illustrates the confusion and doubt they encountered at the time and the religion of their youth to whose programming they returned. Further, their songs which had a “warning” about the occult were a product of their having an interest in occultist themes, but not necessarily a propagandistic outlook on it (where in contrast, every single “Christian metal” band that has ever existed has taken a preachy, condescending, demagogic tone toward their audience).
• Metal – Metal, in Black Sabbath and related bands of that era including King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, and Blue Cheer, reflected a tendency toward darker worldviews which could best be described as Romanticist in the spirit of the literature, art and music of the post-Renaissance in which artists disaffected with the humanism of the time sought a greater meaning than a moralization to existence through art. Poets like Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley were a revolution against a secular Christian movement in which, despite little talk of afterlife and spirituality, a tendency existed for the first time in European art to preach a secular morality to which one adhered or drifted into the ambiguous, obscure and “evil.” The works of those poets and others from the modern Romanticist movement were invoked by the similar themes of early proto-metal bands, including a fascination with the morbid and with ancient times, a desire for transcendence within the world itself, a ruthless sense of self-discipline and heroic character, and a desire for more significance in life itself more than a concern for post-death salvation.After some years of heavy metal, the movement had solidified much of its artistic technique but had degenerated into hedonism, and fortunately was able to merge with the more dogmatic punk to form the first generation of speed metal. These bands were alarmingly preachy and leftist and as a result quickly self-destructed, prompting the extreme side of metal to go “underground” and dispense entirely with morality and, in the lead of heroes like Bathory and Slayer, who arguably invented the next generation, to preach an imaginative, Romantic “Satanic” outlook which like Black Sabbath was more fascinated with the occult than with preaching its values. The music of Slayer for example uses metaphorical Satanism to describe the errors and horrors of war, disease, violence and crime. Following these bands was a genre made more alienated by the increasing failures of society to recognize its error, and made somewhat bitter by the increasing resentment rising from a society (America at least) that in 80% of its members found an affinity for Judeo-Christian beliefs. Death metal and following it, black metal, as a result were more violent and more dogmatic toward Christ and Judea; part of this was inherited from their “hidden” ancestors in hardcore punk music, who as part of their alienated nihilism recognized religion as the social control mechanism which many of us allege it is.
  
  From the No Right to Disagree With Us Department:

  The national poll of 1,000 American adults conducted April 26 through May 6, 2002 found that 17% of Americans – or about 35 million adults – hold views about Jews that are “unquestionably anti-Semitic.” source

  With the state of metal now, virtually every formative band in the underground has taken a negative stance on Christianity (and many have attacked Judaism and Islam as well). This is a result of the evolutionary process within the genre detailed above. Times have changed since Black Sabbath, and to a perceptive youth of today the strengthening role of religion and secular moral symbolism derived from religion is not only clear but alarming. Consequently, the most popular metal genre ever, black metal, is unanimous in its destructive impulses toward Christianity and its parent religion, Judaism from the middle east.

• Why Christian metal is destructive – The Christian — or to a philosopher, humanist, whether secular or ecclesiastical — worldview is the underlying outlook of our society. That means that anything which is not Christian or secular humanist is the rarity, not the other way around. Christians confuse a lack of symbolic agreement with Christianity — saying “I am a Christian” or similar — with a lack of agreement. Essentially, secular humanism and Christianity are the same philosophy and they’re what all but a few people in our society take for granted as “correct.”With this in mind, it makes almost no sense that Christians would attempt to subvert metal for their own dogma, yet they attempt it because symbolically, metal is threatening to the Christian outlook because it endorses a theory in which good and evil are necessary balance, yet does not endorse true “evil” (selfish, deconstructive, callow acts). We should be cynical toward the Christian metal perspective and question it at all times, because it is paradoxical for the following reasons:
  • First, if people should write about what they really believe in, why should they spread the dogma of a religion that they didn’t invent?
  • If they really believe this religion, then metal – as a movement with overwhelming occultist, nihilistic, fascistic overtones – is something they should avoid. Why would they choose to join a genre which contradicts what they believe?
  • Is there no greater “trend” than the 2,000 years in which Judeo-Christian religions have been gaining prominence in the west? What is “un-trendy” about following the same religion that at least 80% of the people in your country follow?
  • Why should metal desire “a lot more of the youth” to be interested in it, if conformity is not our goal? Metal is like many genres self-selecting, and does not aim to be broad. By your logic, we should start making music like Britney Spears (except with a Christian message!) in order to get a wider audience.
  • How can one “truly feel” something which one has to be taught in order to regard it as true? A man raised alone in the forest may invent a religion, but perhaps not the whole dogma of Christ.

  There is obviously more to be said along these lines of questioning, but it’s not necessary here. I’d like to close by mentioning something else: that every single “Christian metal” band that has ever existed has been a poor copy of a “secular” band. Even the most popular, “Believer,” were a ripoff of an Atheist album coming out a year earlier. The separate nature of “Christian metal,” and that the genre itself draws a clear distinction between “secular” and religious music, demonstrates how Christians view “Christian metal”: a tool for preaching acceptable lyrics into a genre that has otherwise on the whole rejected Christ.

In 1990, ninety percent of the adult population identified with one or another religion group. source

In our current time, Judeo-Christianity is not only dominant in social thinking but has become secularized and dominant there as well. Prior to Judeo-Christianity’s arrival, concepts such as “morality” and “equality” and dualism were rejected by the inhabitants of Europe as insane or alien. After years of slowly working its way into that culture, Christianity became the dominant religion through its influence among the poor, the downtrodden, the pathetic, the less-capable and the spiteful. Currently, Judaism and Christianity are the dominant religions in America and most of the Western World. For example, both presidential candidates in the last election spoke extensively of their relationships to “God” and of the “morality” of their ideas, including vice-Presidential candidate Joseph Liebermann who considers himself “the moral voice of the Senate.”

“From these two religions we find at least all of our last ten presidents and their ancestors, and among the believers we find the owners of every major media establishment in the country as well as most of the smaller ones. Virtually every Congressperson has prominently featured in his or her campaign propaganda the Christian or Jewish nature of his or her morality, and most television anchors will make reference to secularized Christian moral concepts or the Judaic “God” in the midst of a supposedly objective broadcast. Before Judeo-Christianity, these concepts did not exist in the Western world; their sole origin is in the religions of Christ and Moses (who were both born Jewish).

This article is not an attempt to smear the people ensnared by these sick ideas; on the contrary, I view them as “victims” also in that their consciousness has had a control mechanism implanted within it. This goes for secular people like yourself, who in good faith sit down and write me a letter like the one quoted above in which you espouse humanist ideals of “individual choice” and “belief.” In the cases of believers however, those ideals do not exist; what does exist is conformity to an ideal of social control, and metal rightly rejects it.

Christians see themselves as very tolerant of people of other faiths, with 81% of Christians saying that Christians in the United States are “very” or “somewhat” tolerant of people of other faiths. People who are not Christians agree with this view for the most part, but not nearly as many of them are fully convinced of Christian tolerance. Only 54% of non-Christians see Christians as being tolerant of people of other faiths. source

Another Form of Humanism: Satanism

Satanism in black metal, death metal, “doom metal,” heavy metal, evil metal, speed metal, thrash and grindcore/metal hybrids arises from the need of metal musicians to understand emptiness in the universe and find a metaphor for its acceptance, a trait in evidence in death metal, black metal, heavy metal and ambient metal to extremes. Much like Romantic poets John Milton or William Blake explored the occult, evil and Satan as metaphor, metal bands find Satan a tempting metaphor for a society against which you can rebel without escaping its psychological trap.

Many of society’s abused denizens, looking at the over-the-top exultation in Satanism, Evil, deviant or degenerate behavior in metal, find themselvs turning back in disgust: “Awk! These kids are just trying to piss me off – contrarians, they only want to invert what is, and to create attention for themselves.”

One could not be more wrong. Contrarians wish to behave “badly” to grab the attention that comes from swimming the wrong way up the stream, but to get that attention, they depend on a cousin of pity: the belief that those who choose a different path are lost and looking for the others to bring them back in to a hearth of comfort and goodness. In short, a contrarian affirms the belief system she is rejecting.

Satanism, as practiced by death metal and black metal bands, does not involve an inversion but a surpassing of moral norms and social custom. To understand this, one must first understand the nihilism of metal bands: they do not believe there is “good” or “evil,” but see events as disconnected from any form of absolute other than their inherent function – that is to say, metal bands believe that events do not have a face value and instead view existence with a scientific eye that traces a complexity of causes, reactions, and similarities but does not attempt to ascribe any of it to absolute forces except logical tendencies.

Where Satanism exists for metal bands it functions as metaphor in following the footsteps of the Master: in each mythology where he touches, the Satan-figure is the youthful and ambiguous rebel who rejects what has come before in favor of his own path, and despite his consequent exile from society, finds truth in what he has created and found. The cry from Milton of Satan’s independence – “I will not serve!” – echoes in a genre that insists on finding out its own answers, and creating its own paths, on an individual basis. Unfortunately, that leads to the ego-basis of Christianity and secular humanism, and shortly afterwards, the sickening morals that constrain begin again.

Resistance

You can strengthen the genre of metal by resisting this form of social control in form of boycotts, public awareness of its true intention, and a refusal to accept it as metal. If it is played on the radio, call in to speak the truth about its agenda. If a friend plays it on a stereo, speak out against the controlling mindset of the music. If someone tells you that it’s “open-minded” to accept music that attempts to destroy the philosophies of the genre to which it theoretically belongs, tell them that art does not reprogram human souls toward giving in to a fear of death, and that true metal will liberate them from their fear of existence.

Black metal arose at the end of the previous decade but was able to get itself published in the 1990s; this decade was characterized by the fall of the Soviet Union, a corresponding resurgence in liberalism in the West now that no leftist enemy existed, and a decade of prosperity as the profits of Cold War expansion were consumed. Black metal injected its viral DNA with a message of extreme occult opposition to the norm, hatred of Christianity, national-ethnic pride and loathing for normal, trend-oriented humans.

To most, it seemed like an excessively dischordant voice. After all, the good times had arrived — hadn’t they? The big evil was gone, and only good remained, and with our new good intentions for all — liberalism — we were sure to make friends, raise the wealth of the world to our level, and (some assumed) end war, suffering, tragedy, racism and religious hate forever. Black metal idealized all of those things and to most at first seemed a movement for lost teenagers looking for an identity outside of the suburban lifestyle sure to assimilate them.

However, as the 1990s drew to a close, black metal no longer seemed a voice in the wilderness. The loss of US-USSR detente fractured the two former political blocs into wildly disparate and conflicted groups, swarming the world with unrest, ethnic cleansing and jihad. After years of being a Christian nation supporting the Jewish state against its Islamic neighbors, the United States brought religious conflict home through the guerrilla attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.

What made black metal so dissident — and so prophetic? After all, it had come to public awareness in 1994 as the progenitor of church burnings, a few racial slayings, numerous arrests and several suicides. Its adherents appeared lost in a world of imagination in which occult figures and ancient gods were as real as Wal-Mart, a Gothic diatribe in which death was positive and a madding crowd, unseeing and unthinking, dominated a world from which the independent mind must escape.

In this, black metal seemed constructed of modern allusions to a genre which had flourished two hundred years earlier: the European Romantic movement in art, music and literature. Famed for such classics as Ode to a Grecian Urn, Frankenstein and Paradise Lost, this genre had been an outpouring of resistance as the effects of industrial revolution hit Europe: a newly important lower middle class, corporate feudal property and labor wealth, and a series of popular rebellions which overthrew aristocratic governments and replaced them with democracies.

The principles of the Romantics were simple: the transient physical world had replaced the immortal and abstract world of meaning, and that invisible world needed to be re-discovered by brave souls willing to face the challenges of mortality and finding meaning in a time when physical survival was increasingly easy. Like archaeologists, the Romantics plumbed our souls to uncover artifacts that made life significant, like romantic love and adoration of the eternal as seen in ancient societies. They also, in books like Frankenstein and Dracula, warned of technology having occult-like consequences of unseen but pervasive power in our world.

To a Romantic, most people see only a fragment of life, the visible. They deny the world of meaning and spirit which requires one conquer fear of death and recognize its utility in making our life precious, something which cannot be spent on merely material pursuits but must be expended in the discovery of great ideas or accomplishment of great challenges. While the Romantics failed to enact political change, mainly because the newly-empowered voting masses were manufactured without the intellectual circuits necessary to grasp these concepts, their ideas remain pervasive among contemplative people to this day.

Black metal, in resurrecting this belief in full form, idealized the ancients and the pagan transcendentalist faith of ancient Europe, a spiritual belief which unlike dualism (good/evil, a pure Heaven versus an impure earth) found spiritual meaning in our physical lives and by finding that meaning, balanced the emptiness of death with something of eternal value to the individual. Romantics were nationalistic, embraced mortality as both giver of significance and deliverance, found beauty in ancient ruins and solitude, and disdained the crowd empowered by technology and its primitive, brainless pleasures.

To a Romantic, Wal-Mart is hell and there is no heaven.

As the decade rolled into a new millennium, the precepts of black metal as established during its formative years of 1990-1994 became a prophecy fulfilled. The Christian and Jewish West engaged in war with Islam, ready to fight the Buddhist East when the current conflict ends, and the oil supplies and natural resources that empowered technology showed visible signs of decline, as anyone with a brain could have predicted. Further, the influence of mass media, mass taste, and popular opinion began to show its frailty in how easily it could be manipulated by fear of terrorism, religious symbolism and individual economic motivations.

Currently, most of what original black metal bands espoused remains taboo, and the genre has been infiltrated by groupthink in the form of thousands of bands that emulate the founders in appearance while holding none of their challenging ideas. It, too, is now a product. However, as the travesty of the decline of the West unfolds, the ideas of black metal not only take on new meaning but become realized before our eyes.

We measure our lives by either quality or quantity. If it was a great steak, we say so and leave it at that; if it was mediocre, we say that sixteen ounces of it for thirty dollars was a “good deal.” The quantitative view is most popular because it is accessible to everyone, since only those who are endowed by nature with the sense to know a good steak from a crappy one can tell you its qualitative value. Since most people are not so fortunate, we talk about what a “great deal” it is that you can get something that legally qualifies as steak in prodigious amounts at a low price per pound. This is the essence of democratic liberal free enterprise society, in that it eschews all things which require a higher kind of person and replace them with the kind of assessments even a moron can follow (and congratulate himself for the “good deal” he’s getting).

But how does the qualitative work in a society? After all, say the “wise” pundits, wouldn’t it be hard to organize a society around qualitative value, since only a few can assess it? This column offers an example in the small. Peer-to-peer file sharing can take many forms, but one of the most common is that of a hub; this is a small community where people exchange files. Normally, to get on a hub, you must have some quantity of files to be shared, and without that, you can be excluded “fairly” because, of course, everyone can see that you need to have a minimum amount of stuff to get on. Like cheap steak, it might be stuff that would only appeal to morons, but it shows you’ve done the effort and therefore deserve to be on the hub – that’s “fair,” sensu liberal democracy.

The hub toward which A.N.U.S. contributes, the neoclassical hub, does not operate this way. There is no minimum share size to get on, and there is no reward for having more stuff; instead of quantity, the hub focuses on quality, because unlike liberal democracies it recognizes that unlimited moronic music is not “equal” to a small amount of quality music, no matter how much the average voter can’t tell the difference. You can get on the hub right now and start participating, but the admins who periodically peruse shares will eventually check out what you have and — Slipknot? Cradle of Filth? Pantera? — those who have moronic music get booted. I frequently get mail from these people, objecting that their ejection was not “fair,” and these mails invariably contain the line, “But I had (amount) of share!” These people are used to a quantitative, passive society, where no matter what the quality, as long as you get enough there to put a number in the blank on the form, you’re considered part of the club.

Not to say that a hub is a club, of course – a hub is a tool for sharing files, and a social space, as well. But what it is more than anything else is a reflection of the values of those who meet there. People who want to listen to crowd-pleasing music go to the bigger hubs and hang out with other people who like Britney, or cool jazz, or light rock, or even indiscriminate metal and grindcore – what the crowd wants is acceptance for mere quantitative participation, such as the number one (1) – if there is an (1) individual, then it should be equal, and admitted to the club, because – look – it exists, after all. This is what the crowd always desires, which is the paradoxical concept of group participation through pseudo-individuality. You can’t tell them their taste in music sucks, because then they’ll wail about how they’ve been wronged and it’s not “fair.”

For those who have made their way out of the biggest slice of groupthink, it’s healthier to find an enclave, or a smaller place where their views are protected from the majority view, which is the quantitative. If you have unending time and nothing better to do, it might appeal to you to listen to all 100,000 death metal, grindcore, black metal and heavy metal bands yet created. More likely, unless you’re a retarded invalid, you’ve got other things to do and so depend on finding the quality stuff through socialization and information resources. Naturally, the crowd will oppose you wherever you try to do this, as they like to believe either (a) that all music is equal or (b) that the most popular music is the best, and therefore you don’t need to actually look – just see what they’re playing on the radio now; “trust us.” The enclave ideal is naturally opposed to that of open to the public group participation.

Any social unit based on this notion of qualitative logic, and eschewing unnecessary quantitative logic, would naturally be a better place to live. Quantitative logic gets you the lowest common denominator, but if you return assessment to that of degree of quality, you instead get only the better efforts. Select the better people to be part of this community; that’s inherent to its nature. Let them pick the better art, learning, science and products, and then you’ve got less garbage (inferior products break frequently, and can rarely be repaired). When they make rules, they don’t have to worry about everyone – oh no, fat people in wheelchairs cannot fit into our new library – but those who actually make a difference. To people concerned about quality, the opinions of the mass are not important, and thus they don’t have to worry about offending people and can actually tell it like they see it – something you cannot do in our liberal democracy, or you’ll be blacklisted and investigated and eventually forced to take a job as a janitor somewhere.

A qualitative society is by nature structured toward building consensus. If you have something of quality, you hold it up as a shining example, and what is agree on is not that we should all have a similar quantity of thing, but that we should all work toward having a similar quality of character, strength, intelligence in ourselves. Since your society only admits people of quality, you don’t have to assume that every other person on the street is a moron, and thus can have compassion for random people in society – and have the option to socialize more, since you don’t have to first apply a filter to screen out the idiots. This is how society used to be, but it was lost in the populist revolt that demanded we all be equal and have an equal right to quantities of money; see what you’ve given up, in order to please the crowd? Well – at least on this hub, there’s a sliver of what once was, and what, if we work toward it, will be again.

Both religions have the same core: me first, reality second

Of all the subcultures to emerge following the dominance of rock over popular music, heavy metal and its associated genres remain unique in that they have maintained a counter-culture that targets not just the visible “establishment,” but also all things that hold the core values of that philosophical system; metal is a naturalistic movement opposed to the utilitarian values of modern society, but it has kept its head up and thus far mostly avoided assimilation by not taking an explicitly political stance, but an artistic and metaphorical one.

This outlook has increasing driven it out of the mainstream consciousness, which has allowed it to keep its independence in part by mostly separating itself from the crowd of hopeless people looking for an identity and an easy, one-size-fits-all solution to they subliminal angst they feel about living in a fatalistic and submissive era. Of course, it has not managed this exclusively; some of the biggest sheep, and most profound losers, of our time have been metalheads, even some who have been very influential in the genre. In this way, within the metal genre the drama of the larger society is acted out in microcosm: the few who understand pulling away from the mass which wants what they have, and would emulate it to the point of drowning out legitimate voices in the genre.

What makes the mass destructive is the nature of a crowd, by definition: it is people who come together on the basest pretense and, out of fear for their individual selves, enacts a mass-will upon society at large to remove anything that threatens the herd. When you see a crowd, you are not seeing uniform people, but vastly different people who are disorganized and thus can only accept the lowest common denominator motivation, which is usually as follows: do not criticize me for anything that I do, insofar as I do not violate this basic tenet of crowd-belief toward others; give to me everything that our best people have, as I am participating in the crowd and thus “contributing.” As with all utilitarian systems, this mentality punishes the more capable in order to keep the broader masses from feeling inferior, or that they’re missing out.

Heavy metal music, by its very nature and alienation, recognizes that society operates on two levels: a public level, which comprises the kind of things you’d tell a crowd to make them feel you have their best interests at heart, and a private level, at which actual motivations are acted upon using the tokens of the public level in such a way that their function does not match their definition. It is a lot like hacking, actually; you overload some kind of input buffer with data that appears to be harmless, but contains concealed instructions that the machine, unaware that something labeled “data” might be “code,” executes and hands control to the intruder. William S. Burroughs famously declared, “Language is a virus,” and thus explained the same concept as applies to modern mass-media psychology.

What happens in a computer is that it confuses appearance with reality; the code is reality, but the idea that it is harmless data is the appearance. Similarly in our society we are divided between appearance, which generally consists of happy nonsense to keep you distracted, and reality, which is the relentless pursuit of wealth and a spiritual emptiness that justifies it. (As mentioned here before, this takes us back to a split that the Greeks noticed, between things as they are and their abstractions, which are often mentioned as that which casts a shadow, with the shadow we see being what we know of “reality.”)

Since any tokens manipulated on the public level have dual meaning, and are thus meaningless, heavy metal targetted something more sublime: emotions and self-image. The Gothic, Romanticist, naturalistic and elitist-individualist imagery of even Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin did this, but it flowered from there into a proliferation of forms, each of which took the basic concept and developed it further, all without explicitly knowing why or what was being done. This ignorance of an articulation of what is being done allowed it to be passed, from mind to mind, through the subconscious channel of appealing imagery and concept in personal life, much as it was done in Romanticist literature, art and music: those who found greatness in the past, specifically medieval and ancient civilizations, and could process a melancholy acceptance of death and desire for personal greatness in heroic accomplishment, would naturally find the music appealing.

This is in part because, in addition to imagery, metal music literally sounds like the description of Romantic ideals above. It doesn’t embrace the centralized harmonic structures of rock music, which is Indo-European folk music simplified to the degree of fixing a harmonic center and manipulating major/minor changes for mood, over a syncopated beat so that even the dumbest person can follow it, and it doesn’t embrace the pleasing sounds and casual human vocal noises of pop. Where pop attempts to define beauty and approximate it as a medium, metal attempts to find what is beautiful in that which is, on the level of things that explicitly defined, ugly. If society exists on a level where public discourse is manipulated by private reality, metal is an inversion of that, such that the meaning of public discourse is found within private reality.

Metaphorically, metal almost exactly mirrors Romanticist literature, even down to its fascination with nature and the occult. Loneliness and alienation create independence; obsession with the forces of nature and the power of warfare creates a post-moralistic sense of seeing how life works rather than judging it; wandering into the embrace of Satan affirms the pagan belief that there can be no public level of “good” separated from “bad,” but that good and bad are forces which together create a meta-good, mainly the ongoing process of life itself. These are the values of metal, and they are almost never explicitly spelled out because to do so, in the music, would be to expose the inner workings of the subculture to manipulation by those who have not discovered this meaning on their own; emulation and cheapening would follow.

For this reason, it is important to remember that Satanism in metal is metaphor. Many of the largest proponents of Satanic imagery in metal were Deists and some were Christians, but used Satan in a way similar to that of John Milton or William Blake to describe the individual Will or Ego; when Black Sabbath wrote “War Pigs,” and described how modern society sends its workers off to die in foreign fields for abstract and mostly irrelevant political objectives masking a private reality of profit and power, they concluded it with “Satan laughing spreads his wings” not to praise Satan but to describe, in theological metaphor, what had occurred: humans had confused public reality with absolute truth, and thus been manipulated, and from that, an inner resentment and fatalism expressed itself in the confusion that followed. Satan laughing spreads his wings: a statement of the futility of our time, and in later bands, of the uselessness of religions that conflate Absolute truth with the public level of reality.

In doing this, metal attacked the fundamental Platonic split between the world of appearance and the world of structure; appearance was seen to be aesthetic, and not necessarily related to structure, which was defined by context, something which theological and occult imagery, by the nature of its cosmological outlook, expresses succinctly. While hardcore punk musicians attempted to rearrange the symbols of the public imagery into a meaningful private discourse, metal brushed past and declared the public reality defunct, urging its listeners to look instead toward their inner motivations and animal feelings. However, as with all things, the surging crowd – those who by definition did not and thus could not do it the first time around – sees something it likes and apes it furiously, producing a parody of it by only understanding the level of appearance and taking that appearance as truth, something which belongs to the domain of structure alone.

For this reason, although I have never been a Satanist, I have often employed Satanic and occult imagery in my writing, much as the smarter metal bands have done. In a world ruled by a Christian or secularized Christian (liberal) concept of absolute truth as public reality, one strikes back by upholding all that cannot be ruled by such a petty device, in the process pointing out that such dualistic thought patterns are in fact a simple rhetorical device misinterpreted by the crowd and thus used for its own purposes. In contrast, the crowd embraces Satanism as a truth in itself, and tries through silly literal rituals and laughable posing to be “truer” Satanists that the others, or more “extreme,” or some variation of attempting to find a devotional truth in life. It cannot be done, and therefore these bands and individuals tend to ring hollow to the thinker, and their works — well, let us say that in the years following 1996, there have perhaps been three black metal bands of the caliber of those who occurred 1990-1996, and it is similar in their own times with other subgenres of metal.

I can extend this concept further. National Socialism is popular in some black metal circles, but that is mainly because it’s easier to label oneself a National Socialist and start collecting gear and posing than it is to understand the core concept of National Socialism, which is a feudalistic ethnocultural post-moral revival of classical Indo-European culture. That relatively complex thought gets distilled down to, as Faulkner said, “a hatred of black skins” alone, and thus parodies itself. What kind of idiot believes that African genocide will solve humanity’s problems? Black Sabbath were more advanced in thought with “Satan laughing spreads his wings” than all the goose-stepping fools, or those from the opposite end who make the same mistake, the leftist: they assume that by labelling themselves as egalitarian and tolerant that humanity’s problems will resolve themselves on the level of public discourse. All of them are misguided, and represent waste by the roadside of a path to knowledge.

Death metal and grindcore had its own version of this comedy. Bands like Carcass and Morpheus used intricate descriptions of death and decay as a way of reminding their audience that public reality is a dream designed to deny death, and that when we realize our own mortality, we can comprehend that meaning is not found in public discourse or in liberal/conservative platitudes, but in addressing reality – yes, actual reality, including that good and bad are needed to produce meta-good – we liberate ourselves from illusion and can begin work on the real task. They were followed by unnamed and now thankfully forgotten bands who found an identity in glorifying death, bloodshed, violence, disease, perversity and disgust, all in full ignorance of the original concept. It is not surprising the music of these bands was also of a lesser nature, as their thinking was clearer on a more basic, linear level.

In my view, there is truth to be found in all of these viewpoints, if interpreted correctly. National Socialism and liberalism are not that far apart when we look at their basic motivation; both want to establish healthy cultures where people are not left to the predatory whim of speculative capital. Satan and gore both wish to affirm natural belief over that of the thing-as-named public reality. Even Christians and pagans have the same essential goal, which is to find a larger reason to have values outside the material and thus find meaning in existence. However, our time is confused, as somewhere along the path to this “great” industrial society we have lost the systems of thought that give a whole meaning to the entire process of life, instead of selecting some aspect with which to label oneself and hold up as a shield of “meaning” against death. In a confused time, only a few actually seek truth, while everyone else looks for it as they might a product on a shelf or the best fruit among the ripening burden of branches.

This article is not an attempt to discredit or assault bands who use Satan as metaphor; much like Blake, or Dante, or Eliot, or any number of artists, their quest is legitimate. It should serve, however, as an introduction to the theory of metal as an art form, and an explanation of why there are so many mediocre imitators, of “Satanist” or leftist or NSBM variety alike, and only a few leaders, and thus, a mandate for future thinkers in this genre to start with the leaders and not the followers. Metal remains under assault by both public culture and public “counter-culture” (an anti-establishment affirmation of public cultural beliefs, in trendier form) alike, and thus must keep an intellectual and artistic lead or it will be assimilated and left with Slipknot, Korn and Creed as its tombstone.

Genre and subgenre identify the differing factions within metal music, which mate analytical technique to worldview and to the sound they desire. For this reason, a death metal band is not only aesthetically and musically different from a speed metal band, but is different in ideology and artistic outlook, representing together a philosophy of life.

Definitions:

• Entertainment – a medium of expression that distracts from life’s negatives
• Culture – organized intergenerational values for turning life’s negatives into positives
• Music – organized sound
• Art – a medium of expression that communicates culture
• Genre – the broadest level of aesthetic, philosophical and musical similarity among artistic outputs that still distinguishes them from other groupings
• Subgenre – within a genre, specialization of thought that results in specialized technique, philosophy and aesthetics for expressing an interpretation within the ideology of the genre but evolved further in a unique direction

Genre and subgenre, terms denoting groups related by ideology, methodology and appearance in art or culture, suggest more than a division of classification: a hierarchical system of musical evolution. These terms and their usages (in the oft-cited examples of ludicrousness with death metal, dark metal, black metal, ambient metal, doom metal, viking metal, forest metal, thrash, speed metal, grindcore, and such combination terms as brutal new york style swedish death metal and trolling dark forest folk metal) convey an extraordinary tendency of the genre to expand toward complexity and with it create from similar philosophical bases radically different diverse intellectual constructs.

For many people, genres convey the same ambience that products do: if the thing can be categorized it is one of several things that perform as it does, therefore it’s just a different face on the same essential material. Some people even extend this theory to the differences between rock and metal. This is categorical thinking and it does not reflect the usage of genre/subgenre terminology.

Heavy metal begat speed metal and thrash, which begat in crossover death metal and grindcore, which crossed over once again to make of a flowering of metal styles in the most diverse genre yet: black metal (ranging from slow percussive material to lightning fast melodic to folk-ish rhythms and acoustic guitars). It has all of the characteristics of the previous metals in some form although it ostensibly tends toward the nontechnical. It also drops some of the traditions and patternings of the older material, and through its composition suggests a chaos theory of musical composition.

Yet heavy metal bands, some speed metal bands (but not many), death metal bands, and grindcore bands continue to survive simultaneously. Genre are belief clusters apart from other forms of expression – they have their own self-defined language and topic structure – but subgenre are diversified elements of that original idea, prospering in their own tension as much as similarity to the rest of the family.

For even more kicks, the concept of genre demonstrates a philosophical difference between categorical thinking and nihilistic thinking. In the former system, each thing has a property which defines its boundaries and isolates it from the chaotic, the unknown. In the latter chaos is a natural formation of complexity in our environments which creates life, throughout the perceived boundaries of objects and in a hierarchy of systems which derive their position from placement in a position of energy exchange within the overall system. Here follow a few tips:

In metal, genre means ideas. What is the basic approach of different bands? Heavy metal: hippie-style breakdown and apocalyptic recognition; Speed metal: apocalyptic paranoia and realizations of insanity behind social oppression; Death metal: deconstruction of humanity through insanity and fear of mortality, evolution of mind toward complexity of focus; Black metal: twilight of humanity postmodern joyful mourning; Thrash: frenetic rejection and belief in core concepts; Doom metal: misery is inherent so appreciate pain as masochism of self-matyrdom in creation. Central ideology, called “metal” although there is perhaps no type of music which falls into that pure category: joy and awareness through nihilism and the separation of humanity from doubt and evil as concepts. It folds forth as music theory, structure of songs and language, lyrics, and aesthetic.

Writers review individual bands to strengthen a genre by promoting the better acts, but when writers turn to address the metal genre as a whole, the “state of the metal” reports that result are an assessment of the collective mentality of the community which produces and appreciates that form of music. Currently, this writer looks wryly at the metal community and proclaims, “It is afflicted with pity.”

To put us all on the same page, we’ll synchronize our definition of pity starting with this gem from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “PITY implies tender or sometimes slightly contemptuous sorrow for one in misery”¹. In other words, feeling sorry for someone from a position of being more fortunate. As F.W. Nietzsche brilliantly revealed, this is a subtle and passive way of placing oneself higher than the person being pitied; “it must suck to be him” is a relative measurement which requires that the speaker know what doesn’t suck.

Pity also plays into the “good guy” sense of self when one takes action according to pity. A burned out, feces-encrusted, proto-Simian intelligence who shuffles out of the city sewer system to ask for handouts can be pitied and handed a trivia of pocket change, making the giver feel important as the groveling lice habitat demeans himself in the presence of his benefactor. Even someone who is basically impoverished can feel richer by giving someone less fortunate a nickel; some say this explains sympathy sex from ex-girlfriends. Pity is the basis of all Abrahamic religions, including the ubiquitous and demented Christianity.

Since reality is not literally symbolic, except in certain Hollywood fairytales, pity in metal doesn’t pop up and scream its own name at the top of its lungs. However, it is clearly visible in the actions of metal as a community following the conclusion of the formative period of black metal in 1996 or so: increasingly, the goal in metal has been less to produce amazing music that a few understand, and the new goal has been to produce music that more people understand. An astute observer will note that dumbing something down for someone else is, similarly to the pity equation, a way of claiming to be smarter than that person; “here, I’ll translate it into shuffling, groveling, lice-infested prolespeak for you” is an equivalent statement of purpose. (And you wondered why the ANUS refuses to write reviews in the tongue of the common man.)

Originally, black metal was a byproduct of the genesis of death metal, something aesthetically inspired by Venom but really a derivative of melodic hardcore like Discharge, spawned in acts like Celtic Frost, Sodom, and Bathory in the early 1980s. It lay dormant until the next decade, when the Norwegians singlehandedly revived the genre by brushing aside much of the stridently-voiced social criticism (read: “complaining”) of speed and death metal and bringing out something with heroic ambitions, in which the greatest value wasn’t communicating to everyone but communicating to the part within everyone that wishes to rise above the mundane world and achieve great things; to have this spirit, you must believe that change can occur and is in the power of the individual. In this it was grand Wagnerian tragedy, the entire genre, as its practicioners knew they were hopelessly outnumbered and would be outvoted by the masses, who prefer tamer fare and resent anything that forces them off the couch.

Regardless of this adversity and sheer defeat, the Norwegian forces – we’re talking about Burzum, Emperor, Immortal, Darkthrone and Mayhem – mobilized themselves and went on the warpath to speak their piece no matter how unpopular it was. At first, although no one remembers this now, black metal was considered the retarded younger brother of death metal. Only a handful of people listened to it, and even then most of those didn’t understand it, or claimed they were doing it for the laughs. Only a few people caught on to its concept, and thus both its artistic method and ideological content. And before the old tired “music doesn’t have ideology” whining begins, we should realize that black metal was designed to sound like Gothic doom descending for a reason, and for one to believe that art should sound like that at this period in history, one must have a certain ideological bent – one that disagrees with the mainstream and foresees doom in its populist undertakings.

It was heroic, Romantic, passionate and yes, elitist; black metal was not music for the masses. Those who say at the current time that the values of the original black metal bands don’t matter, and who suggest we “progress” to other values (values that suspiciously resemble those of every other genre in its twilight years, namely values that make it more accessible to wide ranges of people because they approximate the liberal beliefs of a democratic social order), should ask themselves what over the past eight years of metal has had the impact of the original handful of bands, or attained that level of quality. The answer is: very little, if anything. The Norwegians remain absolute in their dominance of this artform, although nothing from Norway has approached that type of intensity since about 1997. We can see in the history of black metal’s descent into popularity the proof of the original concept as elitist and withdrawn from the masses.

After all, populism – or dumbing something down so that everyone in the herd can appreciate it – is a form of pity and negativity. It doesn’t have a heroic “do what must be done and damn the crowd” outlook, but cares about its status in the eyes of others and in not offending them by producing music that’s too complicated for their addled capacity. This populism is pity for the idiots who must have music tailor-made to their retarded consciousnesses, as well as being pity for the musicians themselves: the art of expression and finding reasons to believe in one’s own existence have been supplanted by keeping other people happy through being bland. Interesting how bland well describes recent black metal in the eyes of anyone but a fanatic who, thankful for some social scene that will accept him, embraces the genre like a lost parent.

Way back in the 1980s, when speed metal was first disintegrating, people talked about “selling out,” or dumbing down your music so that more people would buy it. By the time of black metal, it’s no longer “selling out” that’s the problem, but “becoming populist,” or taking a genre of archly unique neoclassical metal and turning it into the same three-chord, constant-rhythm morass into which death metal, speed metal and hardcore music before them all degenerated. This occurs in two forms, of course, the purist (“tr00 black metal”) and the avantgarde, the former trying to ape the format of the original works and the latter trying to turn them into something combined of odd parts of other genres. Neither succeeds because the focus is no longer on the music, but on the crowd.

Of course, to adopt the attitudes, values, and musical methods of every other genre out there returns metal to the level of generic music; it is assimilated by rock music, which was formed only through a desire to appeal to as many people as possible, and loses its uniqueness except in terms of the poses its fans strike and the antics and novelties its bands bring to the stage. It has lost heroism, both in music and in action, and thus has become another voice clamoring loudly of its uniqueness when that uniqueness died long ago. To persist in making such sold out and generic music, one must be negativistic to the degree that one believes no stirring music is any longer possible, thus “you might as well just make something people like.” Not only is this pity for the audience, but – as the virus of pity is wont to spread – it is pity for the self. No belief in ability to change the world makes one an emulator and, conscious of this status, one becomes miserable.

Interestingly, metal isn’t alone in this. Punk music went down this path in the late 1980s and became the totally soundalike, rubber-stamp similarity we hear today. Today’s black metal bands espouse “being the most extreme ever” and therefore like to sing about killing everybody on earth, destroying everything, killing themselves and other forms of self-pitying trash. Lacking self-confidence, these shadows of past glory have all of the “extremity” of a six-year-old’s tantrum, but none of the honesty: they’re simply out of ideas, but since they can’t socialize otherwise, are afraid to admit it and move on to something else. Like the doom metal bands who sing about the meaninglessness of life, or the punk bands who complain for forty minutes about society and then finally spit out the truth in a “love song” about being lonely and virtually stalking some unsuspecting female, these people have run to the end of the line and have nothing to offer to us but their pity and, of course, a chance to pity them – after all, they need us the crowd in order to have a meaning to exist.

In the deconstructive age in which we live, it is considered normal to disassociate necessary parts of a mental or physical process where these parts might threaten our image of the individual as supreme decision-maker in each life. Our religions espouse the concept of a soul becoming immortal when it went to a place of perfection where (it was implied) every wish that could not be fulfilled on earth was indeed made real, by connotation escaping the interconnectedness of life and thus the inherent need to regulate resources such as time, money, energy and affection.

In a perfect world, the logic went, the interleaved order of nature was overthrown in favor of an absolute time and space where the gap between mental concept and reality was far reduced. In the same way that in the views of these religions the soul is entirely disconnected from physical presence, requiring that it either be created “before” the physical human or on another plane of existence (dualism), in the views of people in our modern time there is the concept that art is independent from the ideas and desires of its creators.

This excessively moralistic view exists most prominently in popular culture, where people fear inequity for the stigma belief in it evokes, and thus preach a constant easy solution: “It’s just music! There is no value conveyed by music other than your personal enjoyment, which is a choice made in a void or a dualistic environment in which purely abstract choices have no effect on reality.”

We can see the fallacy of this outlook immediately as it requires supernatural overtones to be made coherent at all: it assumes a plan to life outside of physical, biological, realistic existence, and therefore assumes that art like spiritualism takes place entirely outside of the realm in which we must survive — and survive by its rules and not those of the spiritualists.

Thus we come to music, and a form of music that hovers between popular music and being a legitimate artform (that which expresses ideas, instead of that which provides pleasing background noises emphasizing as its conclusions the assumptions of the crowd) in its own right, and see how damaging this view will be. If no music can convey a value system or an idea, a forcibly leveled playing field is created, and the only thing taht will distinguish one band from another is novelty or marketing, since there is no content — concept, message, belief, learning or experience — communicated to the listener.

Every sound is equal, and equally arbitrary; they are not symbols which strung together conduct a meaning between humans. There are no choices to be made, only a stream of bands to be purchased continuously. Naturally business and mediocre artists (who make up the bulk of any artistic population) love this democratic adoption, as it enables them to keep pumping out recombinant re-arrangements with clever surfacing, keeping a large flow of lackluster purchasing.

This murders genres; while the easy sales pitch will go quite far, at some point someone else somewhere introduces something more competitive, and the genre which has equalized itself to such populist mediocrity is then bypassed as it can, indeed, be stereotyped as mediocre – it has made itself so, and offers nothing another halfwit genre with a newer aesthetic does not. It has traded away quality for quantity in order to please those who wish to be part of it; each of them wants a part of it, and can have that, but only at the expense of the overall level of quality declining, because among humans only one in ten thousand will make music of any appreciable importance.

For contrast, one can for a moment imagine that one’s physical body is the seat of the “soul” and that one is created by physical circumstance more than by some mystical equality of soul defined by a religion made 2,000 years ago on another continent. Within this vision, humans are what they make themselves to be, but their impulse to make themselves into something better depends on their inherent inclination to recognize the possibility of something better existing; as many have noted, the truly stupid cannot conceive of anything different from the accepted format, and therefore cannot tell the difference between good art and garbage, as what makes art great is not some external factor — having a flute, more breakdown beats, or pipe organ solos — but an internal factor, such as how it is composed, its melodies and the ratios of cadences, and its structure formed from the sequence of musical parts that compose its whole.

Further, truly stupid parents never produce children of vastly greater intelligence, but advance incrementally only if several successive generations push themselves to greater heights and advance those among them who via fortunate accident exceed the previous standard of intelligence. Thus we can tell that body and mind are linked, much as artistic product and artists are linked. Do stupid artists make great art? Only in simplistic genres, one might think.

Returning to the question of whether or not an ideology produces art, we have only to think a moment about the process of artistic creation: an artist has some idea from which he or she produces an artistic work; there is concept, and then rendering of that concept into a sensual medium. In other words, there is a content outside the medium; great art is not achieved by randomness, or stupid people would do it. What makes art powerful is its ability to communicate, and what it transfers is the original idea of the artist as tempered through their past knowledge which like all philosophy or science is cumulative.

Based on the content to be communicated, the artist chooses style, medium and methods for conveying it, giving the work of art an enduring “meaning” for perusers to grasp. Much as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest uses an insane asylum as a metaphor for society, and White Noise makes a metaphysical statement from society’s confused internal dialogue, movies use the language of gangland to portray the workings of a modern city (Chinatown) and music lets a voice drop onto the discontent of a generation, channeling it into a symbol or feeling which unites disparate thoughts around a common central point (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” works as well here as “My Journey to the Stars”).

While not every artistic view is explictly political, any view can be interpreted politically: for example, “I just want to have my own space and have no one bother me” is a political view, if interpreted in the mechanism for achieving such a state in a world of other people; clearly this is an appeal to the liberal-democratic axis in politics, where the highest value is individual whim, wealth and comfort and social collectivism (or a holistic ideology such as Traditionalism) is not considered a viable option.

Similarly “We should stop pollution and not drive large cars” in a political sense appeals to the collectivist/fascist axis of human socio-political systems because its inherent political necessity is a decrease of personal liberty in exchange for a collective program that reduces pollution otherwise generated by many individuals in parallel caring only about the democratic-liberal aspects of politics. Even something like the faux angst whining of Kurt Cobain has its inherent liberal politics; he senses himself as oppressed by society, which is too uniform and too pointless, but that opinion is a counter-political action to that of society and thus does not differ in substance but application.

The concept that art is purely aesthetic, and thus conveys no ideas from the artist, is a means of nullifying it and reducing any differences it has from other forms of art to purely aesthetic disagreements; one band uses melody and carefully structured arrangements where another band is cyclic and uses rhythm more than tone, and this in the view of the nullifiers is no more significant than choosing to paint the sky blue in one painting and electric pink in another. This nullification is moral and democratic by its very nature, and it is only through careful sleight of hand that we are trained not to notice is condemnation of certain “political” art as what it is — a subtle but aggressive means of excluding other political views from discourse.

Originally published in “Anti-Art Manifesto #3,” 2004.