Metal has two basic ideas: death worship and crowd control.

The first involves the notion that death is necessary not just to purge the weak, but to give meaning to life, and that by opposing it, we are fooled into retreating into an illusory human-only world formed of self and social group, and that by doing so we self-destruct, instead of discovering the beauty of darkness and the excellence within power that are necessary to understanding existence.

The second addresses the nature of humanity: any good idea is taken by the crowd, dumbed down to the point where they can digest it, and then destroyed because the adulterated version is weak since it lacks whatever made the idea good. This cycle persists throughout human history, and even in our interpersonal relationships; we are talking monkeys with car keys forever striving for clarity and realism.

Blasphemy is our only salvation, because what most of us think is true is always a lie.

Death worship means, more than an appreciation of death itself, a delight in the joys of humanity itself. Death is where we become powerless; perhaps we should be powerless in other areas, because our choices reflect the desires of the human body, and not the inner self of who we actually are, or who we might become, if we were brave and followed the path laid out for us by the demands of life itself.

Consider the nature of the phrase “holy asshole.” It suggests a unity between what is least entrenched in life, and its most basic biological reality. In this phrase, naturalism and idealism are joined; the biological and Darwinistic find unity with the sacred and reverent. It is transcendence itself.

Luckily, art shows us this unity:

Narrator: All of you stick your hands into the holy asshole and when it lights up you’ll have found the one.¹

If paired with:

Rip the sacred flesh
Sodomize the holy asshole²

Coincidence? I think not.

Emptiness and destruction are with us always. The path of the cakravartin belongs to those who can make the darkness serve the light, or perhaps the meta-light, which is the state of existence itself, a somethingness always striving to overcome nothingness and make meaning out of the vastest of voids and most depleted of empty spaces.

Metal is more than music. It is a philosophy of life: how to accept imperfection, and through it, realize that perfection is a human perfection, and that what we perpetually need is a constant struggle for imposing beauty through darkness, instead of fleeing what is dark to what appears to be light, only later discovering that it was illusion.

Tags: blasphemy, holy asshole, reverence, sacred, sodomy