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The SJW strategy for #metalgate: denial

by Cory Van der Pol on December 14, 2014

The phenomenon of #MetalGate expands as social justice warriors (SJWs) find themselves on the defensive, so they have retaliated with their favorite accusation: “There’s no issue here!” They want you to believe that #MetalGate was drummed up in response to “just two lines” in a SPIN article.

In their spin (no pun intended) metalheads and #GamerGate veterans formulated this whole situation out of pure hype, despite these being only a few of the articles written to try to shepherd metal into bowing down, becoming sociable, adopting the dominant paradigm of its age, and in other words becoming like everything else in media and music in its endorsement of an agenda favored by some people but not most metal fans: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. These are just a sampling of the many articles written about metal and how it is either bad and terrible because it is not PC, or how now that it has become focused on “social issues” — generally something only grindcore bands do — that it is OK for normal, soft, fluffy and well-intentioned people to like it, but only the good bands with the right opinions. You know, the opinions like those of the 1960s bands that metal rebelled against in the first place!

Now let’s look at those “just two lines” again:

Metal is still dogged by the issues that arise from its deep-seated conservative values, but thanks to an increase in conversations about racism, politics, and feminism, those on the right side of history have gained solid ground.

Two-line statements have launched wars, ended careers and brought down economies. The question is the content of those lines, and in those words the writer tells us that metal is conservative, conservative is bad, and thus metal is bad, and that metal is on “the wrong side of history” if it does not start immediately making its focus creating propaganda (and let’s be fair: preachy lyrics are propaganda) about “racism, politics, and feminism.” This assumes that metal has not addressed these issues in the past and found another way of addressing the underlying issues. When the writer at SPIN says that metal needs to adopt these issues, she means that metal needs to preach the dogma she agrees with and abandon its own take on these issues. For political fanatics, framing of the issues is everything, and they frame those issues so that their conclusions are the only ones you can reach.

What we have here, as in #GamerGate, is a small group of people who — being inclined toward media and pop music — have infiltrated the metal scene and are trying to use it to preach their own propaganda. Metal already has its own way of addressing all these issues. We do not need to be bullied into agreeing with this small group of SJWs who contribute nothing but commentary and support only the “new” metal bands which are most emphatically not the classics of the genre, nor in the views of many of us anywhere near the quality of the classics. But these bands have the “right” opinions, you see, and for these fanatics, that is all that matters. Their latest attempts to minimize #MetalGate are just an attempt to distract and deflect from that reality, but they have picked the wrong group to attack, because metalheads specialize in unpleasant realities that socially pretentious people would like to avoid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oZCZicsuHc

20 Comments

Tags: hipsters, metalgate, modern metal, propaganda

Calling #metalgate what it is

by Brett Stevens on December 13, 2014

We all went to high school. #MetalGate reminds me of those dark days when there were cool kids and un-cool kids, and if you weren’t in the former group you were just nobody.

Growing up with a single Mom who kept our budget tight, I never had the cool clothes. Since I worked after school and then did homework until bedtime, I didn’t know the cool stuff on TV or in movies. Not having been raised around the cool kids, or having a parent with the time or energy to show me how to be “cool,” it never occurred to me to try. And suddenly people were pointing and laughing and then my head was getting bashed into a locker.

When one of these people approached me and started making fun of me, my instinct was to cower away and assume that they knew something I should know which gave them some kind of “authority” in the high school social scene. Over time I realized that this “something” was nothing important, and their real goal was savor the Schadenfreude of making someone else miserable for being who they were. I learned that there is one way to stand up to such people: do not apologize, do not back down, but go straight to the biggest one and hit him as hard as you can. They usually backed down and often apologized after that. I let the matter drop at that point since most of these bullies came from troubled homes: Dad drank too much, Mom ran around with the neighborhood used-car salesman, or there were money troubles. Some of them ended up being lifelong friends, after we settled our differences on the schoolyard.

When I look at #MetalGate, I see a whole industry cowering before these people who want to make metal “socially conscious” and politically correct. We, as metalheads, have refused to call these people what they are, so I will: bullies. They are bullies whose weapon is guilt. In high school, it was guilt for not being “cool.” In the hipster-nerd infested metal scene, it’s guilt for not having the “right” opinions. Haven’t we all matured past this?

Bullies always have a clique. This clique agrees that they are right and everyone else is just not cool enough. They need an excuse that other people will accept for their bullying, so they come up with a reason that sounds good. They do not care if it is true. They just want to rally other people around them who will agree that you deserved getting your head pounded into that locker. Like all cliques, their little group works by every member validating every other. It is the worst aspect of humanity which we saw at the Salem witch trials, at Nuremburg, even in lynch mobs hanging African-Americans. This is the psychology of prejudice, and bullies struggle to conceal their prejudice by arguing that they are defending their ingroup against an outgroup:

What Tajfel discovered is that groups formed on the basis of almost any distinction are prone to ingroup bias. Within minutes of being divided into groups, people tend to see their own group as superior to other groups, and they will frequently seek to maintain an advantage over other groups. – The Psychology of Prejudice, Professor Scott Plous, Wesleyan University

In other words, if you group people together by any arbitrary means they will quickly act like a tribe and enforce their rules on others. This is how bullies operate: they gather together people, offer them entry into an ingroup, but the price for that entry is that they must join in the bullying of the outgroup… and so kids get heads slammed into their lockers for wearing cardigan sweaters (hey, it was a hand-me-down) which is totally uncool.

The #MetalGate people, who I am told call themselves “Social Justice Warriors” or SJWs, are bullies of this type. They will claim they are against prejudice, but really what this means is that they are using that argument to conceal their own prejudice. They just want someone to bully. The reason is probably the same as with the high school bullies, which is that their lives are miserable and they want to take out their frustration and anger on others. This pattern occurs time and again, with the most famous being the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC):

On August 19, 1985, the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee of the United States Senate opened public hearings intended to gather expert testimony on “the content of certain sound recordings and suggestions that recording packages be labeled to provide a warning to prospective purchasers of sexually explicit or other potentially offensive content.” Widely known as “The PMRC Hearings” after the acronym of an independent group—the Parents Music Resource Council—advocating for the “voluntary” adoption of warning stickers on record albums whose lyrics it deemed to be offensive, the hearings did not, in fact, end up leading to any kind of legislative action.

This group also wanted to bully metal because they were looking for a scapegoat for what they saw as a decline in public morality. They figured they could pick on metalheads because we are not the wives of Senators, we may not have education and money, and we are prone to be silent when society bullies us. But metalheads stood up against them, whopped them in the nose, and refused to take it. Another group of bullies back in the 1980s were the Dead Kennedys fans who decided that Slayer was really, really bad for singing (with clear disapproval) about Auschwitz and the horrors of the Holocaust. “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” was their theme song and they used this as an excuse to beat on random fans wearing Slayer tshirts. Punk had just gone through its own #PunkGate at that point, I guess, and the politically correct people came out on top.

There are plenty of groups of bullies in metal today. The pretentious hipsters who think you are unenlightened if you do not “appreciate” Deafheaven are one, and so are the people who think that if you are not a full-on SJW you are a bad person. So are the “tryhards” who insist they support diehard underground music but use that as an excuse to troll anyone who does not exclusively listen to three-chord Blasphemy or Incantation clones. In each group, the solution is the same: tell them where they can shove their pretense and guilt because you know their secret, which is that they are just bullies.

The difference with SJWs is that they act like they are revolutionaries who are re-educating us in important topics. But guess what, guys: you are not disenfranchised anymore. You get positive press and in fact most of you work in the press. The US government agrees with you, as does the UN. Your ideas are not revolutionary because they are the norm. Like most bullies, you are cloaking yourselves in the ideals of the mainstream in order to punish us outliers. This is no different than what happened in the Soviet Union or Nazi regime, where people who “thought differently” got shot at dawn. You are the new Nazis.

Metal should fight back because metal should not become a vehicle for the control agenda of any group. Metal is its own group, and people police this because we know that many other groups would like to assimilate us and use us for their own purposes. It has been tried before, with hard rock in the 1970s, punk in the 1980s, and now post-punk in the 2000s. Like all bullies, they want to stop us from being different and make us more like them, which is to say the bog-standard generic mainstream. Their bands are all second-rate and their ideas warmed over slogans from the 1960s. Metalheads should feel no guilt about acting in our own self-interest, which is to keep our music away from this group of bullies and refuse to let them dominate us.

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Tags: gamergate, Hardcore Punk, Heavy Metal, metalgate, post-hardcore, punk

#MetalGate

by Cory Van der Pol on December 12, 2014

I had hoped that the busload of squalling drama that was #GamerGate (see here: pro | con) would not come to metal, but #metalgate has arrived courtesy of the same people who intruded into the gaming industry despite a striking lack of actual contributions:

Metal is still dogged by the issues that arise from its deep-seated conservative values, but thanks to an increase in conversations about racism, politics, and feminism, those on the right side of history have gained solid ground. – SPIN

Before we get involved in this partisan squabble, consider that metal is beyond the left-right divide. The left wants individualism through equality, and the right wants individualism through lack of social obligation. Neither recognize that societies, like metal genres, are organic entities where more is required than individualism; we need cooperation.

It is easy to see however why someone might want to — as writers have in the past — call heavy metal conservative. Metal avoids “social issues” and other internal questions of a society and instead looks at the health of a society as a whole, or in other words, how sane it is. We see a world gone insane through a refusal to pay attention to reality. The methods of that are beyond an artistic genre and should be injected into it, but since 2006 at least trying to reform metal has been a pet project of certain groups:

More than three decades after Black Sabbath conjured images of the dark arts, heavy metal is growing up. The genre is increasingly incorporating social and political messages into its dense power chords.

Cattle Decapitation vocalist Travis Ryan said his San Diego band’s mix of charging guitars and an animal rights message is drawing a diverse crowd that includes activists as well as traditional metal fans. – The Washington Post

The grim fact is that metal has split into two groups. When the newer group encountered the older group, they were appalled that it did not share their opinions, not just on politics but how to live. This new group is inherently “social” and they share opinions which make their friends feel warm and fuzzy about them. That is at odds with the older metal tradition of not caring what society thought, telling the hard truth, and being obligated to no one because most people are crazy.

It is only when you get involved in a managerial role with society, like a kindergarten teacher insisting that we all play nice together, that you care at all about making sure that everyone is included. Metal does not. Metal looks at society from the view of history and whether it is healthy or diseased from within. The metalhead view is consistently anti-managerial, since metalheads recognize the deficiencies of people and want to keep most of them at a great distance. It is not that we want to manage them, like political people do, but that we want to be free of them.

For years people have tried to make metal more sociable. They first tried in the mid-1970s when they mixed Black Sabbath with Led Zeppelin and produced hard rock, hoping that they could sell it to more people. “Sociable” sells. Then they tried in the 1980s with rap/rock, funk metal and other abominations. Finally they hit on nu-metal but that turned into an extended conversation about the impact of child molestation. And then, during the early 2000s, they rolled out a metal/hardcore fusion that had sociable lyrics like hardcore punk has for many years.

Notice that none of this was brought on by metalheads. It was created by people who wanted to be metalheads, but felt they could not be metalheads unless the genre agreed with their existing social, political and lifestyle biases. At this point, the metal community has entirely split between those who like the old school and those who want to be “nu-skool.” This is because they are two separate genres. Metal is metal, and the indie-metal/metalcore wave is someone else trying to use us for their agenda. #MetalGate is just the latest salvo in this fight.

98 Comments

Tags: gamergate, indie metal, metalcore, metalgate, politics, sjws

Sepultura and Les Tambours du Bronx – Metal Veins: Alive at Rock in Rio

by Cory Van der Pol on December 12, 2014

Had Sepultura taken this direction instead of the path they chose on Chaos A.D., they would have receded into rock history as legends and not warmed-over attempts at former glory that got swallowed by their attempts to popularize a form of music that is inherently against all things dictated by popularity and illusion in the heart of the individual.

As every write-up on this band will tell you, Les Tambours du Bronx are a sort of Blue Man Group from New York whose shtick is to have a dozen men banging on samizdat percussion instruments, most visually impressive when made from 55-gallon drums and malleted with baseball bats. Like Crash Worship, on whose fame they surely predicate their own but with an intent for a more public spectacle, Les Tambours du Bronx put on a show that is as much visual as audial. They team up with Sepultura, playing its crowd favorites from Chaos A.D. onward into the post-Max years. The result shows a great deal of promise that with a nudge it might live up to.

To make this a great release, they would have dropped the vocals and given Andreas Kisser more time lacing his lead guitar through the riffs like a jazz player covering an old standard in a new interpretation. They might have allowed Sepultura to do what they do best, which is to write a string of ear-snagging riffs in a riff salad that nonetheless makes sense, and let the rhythm of Les Tambours du Bronx carry the songs entirely. This would have given the music an intense ritual air with primal undertones that belong to no tradition and fuse the modern with the energy of antiquity. Instead, as usual, there are too many chefs stirring the pot, or as it might be said for metal music, too many influences warring for dominance. Random industrial noises and squeals, the ranting pseudo-death vocals of Derrick Green and other attempts to impose rock-style song structure onto this open jam limit its power.

Since leaving speed/death metal behind, Sepultura have sought a way to become a Ramones for heavy metal, playing simple riffs that unite a carnival crowd and bring people to a point of energetic focus. Similarly, the style of percussion on this album creates a massive feeling of unison especially as it internally deviates from the archetypal rhythms it sets up for the audience to follow. Together these make for a spectacle, but the musical intensity is not here mainly owing to the lack of focus on the Sepultura side. Instead of trying to use outside forces to accent their own music, they should adapt their music to complement those forces and through mutuality, achieve something new. Metal Veins: Alive at Rock in Rio as a live album makes for dubious listening owing to the muddy sound, but with this being basically a “we’re different” stunt using nu-Sepultura in unchanged form, it offers little for repeat listens.

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Tags: les tambours du bronx, modern metal, sepultura

Christmas shopping for metalheads

by Brett Stevens on December 9, 2014

Every now and then we have discussion threads here for the community to express their thoughts. As we approach the end of 2014, many of us are busy with last-minute shopping for our friends, many of who are metalheads.

What are the essential albums of 2014? What about other recent (last five years) albums that have stuck with you and make you want to listen repeatedly? Or even metal memorabilia, paraphrenalia and other useful gifts for metalheads.

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Tags: 2014, discussion

The best metal music for cooking

by Brett Stevens on November 27, 2014

Like many of our American readers, the Hessians around here will be sitting down to eat a huge meal tomorrow and then unceremoniously lose consciousness in a tryptophan coma before rallying for dessert and shooting guns at the moon. But before we can eat, we must cook, which leads to the topic of metal for cooking.

Unlike the average musical genre, heavy metal is very easy to do but very hard to do well. Maybe one in a thousand bands are worth hearing for more than a week, and one in ten of those worth buying. But some albums adapt more than others to playing in the background while a Hessian cooks.

The following are the suggestions endorsed not only for you, but that will be playing in our house as the feast is prepared.

Metallica – Kill ‘Em All

Metallica took the mixture of heavy metal and hard rock with punk spirit that was NWOBHM and re-hybridized it with a new generation of punk. These hardcore punk bands used maximum distortion and as a result could get a chopppy abrasive sound out of their guitars. Metallica applied to this the muted strum technique that other bands used periodically and created from it a genre that used guitars as explosive percussion instruments. Kill ‘Em All uses the classic melodic riffs of NWOBHM, the open chords of an adventurous metal band, and the new speed metal riff style to make an album of high energy and relentless impact. While it sounds ancient now, most ancient things are good, because if it has survived this long, it has more going for it than the flash-in-the-pan stuff that pops up a dime a dozen anytime someone thinks a shekel or dinar can be made from them. The first Metallica album still compels but in the simple-hearted way that teenage ambition wants to conquer and/or destroy the world, but would settle for just raising hell and then passing out early.

Mixes well with: Iron Maiden, Exodus, Cathedral and Godflesh.

Misfits – Static Age

Glenn Danzig reinvented music three times, at least. He started out composing melodic punk music that injected a sense of emotion into a genre that was otherwise close to droning refusal to conform, then turned down a metal path with Samhain and then modified that path to include a bluesy Doors-style hard rock in the mix with Danzig. Having had his fill of music for people who need a constant beat, he turned to soundtrack music but gave it a metal flair, coming out with Black Aria in 1992 and presaging the neofolk and dark ambient movements. Lately he has thrown southern rock into his metal mix but he continues to forge into paths that others did not see before him. On this early Misfits album, Danzig writes songs filled with longing, like a spirit soaring over a world composed of a daylight layer of pleasant lies and a nocturnal substrate of grim violence and bitter alienation. The result is one of the most Romantic statements to come out of punk, but it also produces the perfect environment for churning out turkey, stuffing and sweet potato mash.

Mixes well with: Cro-Mags, Repulsion, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles and Suicidal Tendencies.

Suffocation – Breeding the Spawn

How do you exceed the standard set by an album like Effigy of the Forgotten? Suffocation launched into their second record with large ideas that did not quite form into song, but it came together quickly enough and then ran out of time, plus had a production style that was less nuclear than the previous album. Nonetheless some of the best material from this innovative band, who took the percussive strumming of speed metal and worked it into death metal songs with complex jazz-inspired rhythms, appeared on the second album. This exploratory work sets the perfect mood for fudging your way through that recipe for cranberry sauce that you sort of remember from when Aunt Griselda made it fourteen years ago. It also satiates the palate that craves metal which is willing to throw aside everything that “works” and leap into the great unknown with the intent to reinvent metal as we know it.

Mixes well with: King Crimson, Bathory and Celtic Frost.

Deicide – Once Upon the Cross

After exhausting their artistic energy with the legendary Legion, Deicide had to re-invent themselves as individuals and as a band in order to crank out this release. Written (rumor has it) primarily by drummer Steve Asheim, this album takes a look over past Deicide and strips it down to what it does best: rhythm, structure and even the occasional hint of melody. These songs muscle along with intense power and high energy and make for the perfect kitchen companion to those recipes which require slashing meat, smashing tubers and bashing berries. Not only that, but if you are experiencing guilt for having invited the mother-in-law over even though she is a Jehovah’s Witness, never fear! You will pay back any debt incurred to the gods of blasphemy with the absolute livid hatred of Jesus, Christians, God and the Bible that pulses through this album like the raging heart-rate of a murder suspect pursued by police helicopters through Ferguson, MO. Not only that, but if you are worried about people “backseat driving” during your cooking and they happen to be Christian, this album will guarantee you the kitchen to yourself.

Mixes well with: David Myatt, Ted Kaczynski and Charles Manson. Actually, anything… or nothing.

…and the best for last…

Mercyful Fate – Don’t Break the Oath

There are no bad albums that make good albums to cook with, but there are albums which are bad albums to cook with despite being good albums. In addition to being the best of the King Diamond/Mercyful Fate oeuvre, Don’t Break the Oath represents the furthest into technical speed metal with the least amount of overdone musicality or theatrics. King Diamond and his team achieve the perfect balance of his Alice Cooper dramatics, the guitar pyrotechnics of Hank Sherman and Michael Denner, and the mainstay of this band which has always been their ability to write a song with dramatic changes and hints of melodic but a consistent ability to hit hard and with a sense of grandeur and mystery that is essential to any darkside metal. In particular, the rhythms of this album work really well with sword training, bear wrestling and cooking for the traditional highly critical American extended family. Crush eggs, beat flour, and pulverize tissue to this classic of speed metal with an edge of the dark occult side which gives metal its mystique and aura of the mythological. Not only does the music provide power, but the album as a whole provides a landscape that roughly fits the panicked improvisation at the heart of any good holiday meal.

Mixes well with: Metallica, Slayer, and the tears of your enemies or entrees.

12 Comments

Tags: cooking, Deicide, Heavy Metal, mercyful fate, metallica, suffocation, thanksgiving, the misfits

Heavy metal as an extension of the Romantic movement

by Brett Stevens on November 24, 2014

Yesterday’s post on Romanticism reminded me of how long the Death Metal Underground has been making the comparison between Romanticism and heavy metal. The Heavy Metal FAQ has mentioned this association since its formulation in the early 1990s, but before that, it was written on the early versions of this website.

We continue to write about it because the linkage is and always has been inevitable, although it is clearest from literature — such as Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake and John Milton — that the metaphorical comparison can be made. On a subtler level, one can find connections between Romantic imagery in every generation of classical music, including the “Romantic era” which produced Franz Berwald, Niccolo Paganini and Franz Schubert in addition to the oft-mentioned Beethoven.

Our writers have highlighted the relationship between Romanticism and Satan, and the meaning of black metal, the linkage between Romanticism and mythic imagination, early black metal and Romanticism, and the relationship between Blake, Goethe and black metal. The connection has been clear from the get-go, when the Miltonic language of Slayer such as “to reign in Hell” made it clear that this genre had origins in the Romantic canon, as if the Gothic-cum-psychedelia of the self-titled Black Sabbath album did not:

While it has taken them over two decades to catch up, others have started to wake up to the heavy metal-Romanticism connection:

But “beneath all the grim vibes of Black Metal,” Hunt-Hendrix insists, “there’s this kind of spiritual ecstasy.” The tremolo picking creates the effect of “a string orchestra.” The great “unacknowledged influence” of the genre? Nineteenth century Romanticism.

…Byron, as did many other Romantics, courted what scholars have since come to refer to as “Satanic aesthetics,” a rebellious and sinister dandyism that manifested not only in their artistic creations but also in their personalities. Romantic violinist Niccolo Paganini–whose successor Franz Lizst maintained an “unbelievable” yet strictly heterosexual “passion” for fellow-heartthrob Byron—was rumored to have perfected his musical technique while imprisoned for the murder of his mistress, a skein of whose intestine had been repurposed as his G-string. The bejeweled and frequently open-shirted Bryon was the pointed inspiration for Lord Ruthven in John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), whose “Byronic look” was marked by “the curl of the upper lip, and the scowl of the brow.”

Black Metal, of course, has a penchant for Satanic aesthetics as well. In the hooded, sword-wielding visage of Rob Darken of Poland’s National-Socialist-leaning Graveland we see a medieval specter worthy of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), or one that might have been conceived during the famous 1816 idyll of Byron, Polidori, and the Shelleys on Lake Geneva, which ultimately yielded Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Much of the resistance to this idea comes from metalheads who wish to believe that their genre is sui generis, a term popular among hipsters used to mean “unique” in the sense of a style of yarn-bombing that no one else in Williamsburg thought of, and having the genre related to Romanticism diminishes its uniqueness. Others fear entryism if metal is associated with any other movement, hence the high hostility of metal to politics and organized religion entering its ranks (in addition to generalized hostility to feel-good illusions, of which organized religion is often considered one). Still others rage at the thought of heavy metal having anything “artistic” to it, and yet another group opposes this idea because it wants to find sociological (i.e. unconscious to the participants) motivations behind metal, not artistic ones which show some degree of alertness by the participants.

Among those who do investigate the link between Romanticism and metal, many look into the German writers. After all, DRI named an album after a Herman Hesse novel, and the term “heavy metal” was partially popularized by a band who took their name from another one of his works. Alistair McCartney, in The End of the World Book, writes about the connection between death metal and Romanticism:

Back in the late 20th century, specifically in the decades that have come to be known as the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed that every other day, teenage boys, tired of the sturm und drang of adolescence and inspired by the death-positive lyrics of so-called death-metal bands, were taking their own lives in very violent ways, which, according to sociologists, was typical of young men: a gun in the mouth and a car over a cliff were the preferred modes of suicide.

We can see these young North American men who were infatuated with death as direct descendants of the young European men, who, in the late eighteenth century, read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which ends with the lovesick hero with the supremely heavy heart taking his own life. Upon its publication in 1774, the book inspired two crazes on the continent: one for wearing blue coats, just like the coat the moody Werther wears; and one for suicide.

In this sense, although the first death-metal album did not technically appear on the horizon until 1985, with the release of Seven Churches by the band Possessed, this genre or subdivision of heavy metal was already getting slowly underway in 1772 when the then twenty-three-year-old Goethe, in residency at the Court at Wetzlar and fresh from a failed love affair, began writing the book to ease his own heavy heart.

…Historians argue that death metal’s popularity peaked in 1994. Similarly, not quite as many fans of death metal are taking their own lives — historians argue that this trend also peaked in 1994.

However, it seems the connection between Romanticism and metal is gaining momentum in the mainstream discourse. The bigger question is where we go from this point of realization. Romanticism was itself a reaction to the Enlightenment, and German Idealism a reaction to the reaction. History seems to be dancing around some idea it cannot quite get a handle on, and balances this with eternal sentiments like those of the Romantics: ideas that appear wherever society is “too much with us” and the individual is squeezed out by judgment of the herd.

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Tags: Black Metal, Heavy Metal, heavy metal academics, Romanticism

Metal as Romanticism

by Brett Stevens on November 23, 2014

Romanticism defined resistance to social pressures in the post-Enlightenment world, but also caved to the pressure to accept the fundamental ideals of that earlier era.

Where the Enlightenment placed emphasis on individual choice and emotion, so did the Romantics, although they tempered this with a strong attachment to ancient values and the ruined forms of a prior world. It had a number of salient attributes:

A revolt against accepted form: democratization of subject and language, a less formal poetic voice, and a new range of subjects such as the supernatural and “the far away and the long ago” adopted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and others; the visionary mode of poetry adopted by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake; and the use of metaphysical symbolism.
Focus on the poet’s or writer’s own feelings instead of a universal emotion shared among all humanity. This emphasized spontaneity, meditative stillness, and a sense of discovery through intuition. Imagination was seen as more important than fact.
External nature (landscape, plants, animals) became a persistent subject.
Often written with the poet or writer as protagonist.
A sense of progress, or of limitless good achievable by use of the imagination, instead of reliance upon past methods. — (M.H. Abrams, “Neoclassic and Romantic” in A Glossary of Literary Terms, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Orlando, FL 1993, pp. 125-129.)

While it was an affirmation of the individualism of the Enlightenment, it also rebelled against the group-think thus created, and emphasized the thoughts of the exceptional individual — personified in the writer — over the “universal emotion shared among all humanity.” This template provided the basis for any number of tropes among pop culture including the “rock star” himself, who is assumed to have messianic powers of insight which he conveys through the ritual of the concert.

Metal began with a mixed heritage arising from rock and soundtrack music. Among the rock influences were The Doors, Jethro Tull and King Crimson, all of whom emphasized apocalyptic themes beginning in a crisis of direction in the human individual. These dystopian rockers showed us that under the progress of technology and advancement of society lurked a dark undercurrent, which was our lack of faith in our own future. Since the future is determined by the present, they looked to sources of doubt and fear in humanity. Metal carried this onward in a mythological H.P. Lovecraft inspired form.

This caused a clash with Enlightenment values. What are those? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a handy summation of the values of the Enlightenment:

In his famous definition of “enlightenment” in his essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), which is his contribution to this debate, Immanuel Kant expresses many of the tendencies shared among Enlightenment philosophies of divergent doctrines. Kant defines “enlightenment” as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Enlightenment is the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act. Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of reason.

Metal brought a counter-Enlightenment mythos, as did much of the Romantics including writers like Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth: people are delusional and tend to prefer happy realities, and so they are not “guiding themselves” so much as choosing illusions that deny the fundamental nature of life as conflict. In the metal universe, conflict is a good thing as it leads to the rise of the stronger above the rest, and thus improves the quality of what is there. From Black Sabbath to Slayer and beyond, metal has criticized the happy hippie “love” mythos and replaced it with one where, in contrast to the Enlightenment, individual judgment does not reign supreme but instead misleads.

Death Metal Underground has advocated the belief that metal is a Romantic art form for over two decades now. In our prior incarnation as other web sites, FTP sites and even g-files during the bulletin board days, we emphasized the Romantic nature of this music as an explanation for its occultism, warlike outlook and amoral or nihilistic worldview. Now it seems that metal journalism has caught up with this idea somewhat, as an article on urban metal site Invisible Oranges mentions it:

Beethoven’s music was less a road map through musical theory and more a guide to the very center of the human psyche. And history has rewarded his efforts; the name Beethoven is now known to a significant portion of the world’s population. His music was still recognizably Classical, but it introduced a host of new compositional techniques that shook the entire creative world.

And you know what? The same thing is happening to metal. Right now. And it’s not just a single band or album that’s leading the charge, either; Deafheaven, and Ihsahn, as well as less prominent artists like Aquilus, have also become what I’ll affectionately call “musically uninhibited.”

Other than the premise of this article being badly flawed, which is that anything “new” equals Romantic, and that recycling burned-out 1990s rock tropes through black metal and death metal is somehow “new,” it leads us to question the nature of the Romantic in metal. Metal displays many attributes of Romantic thinking but, like Mary Shelley or later Romantic Gothic writers including those in the Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft traditions, also displays skepticism about the “Enlightened” future. Specifically, it knows most people are purposeless and weak, that most “truths” are lies, and that society covers up its inner core of decay and desire for conflict. That’s perhaps the most useful way to frame this question, instead of “does nu-indie constitute a Romantic revolution in metal?”

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Tags: Black Metal, death metal, Romanticism, the enlightenment

Metal has nothing to fear from Tiny Doo arrest

by Cory Van der Pol on November 22, 2014

A rapper in LA gets indicted on murder charges just for the cover of his rap album. That is what the headlines scream, and among the metal community and its media some are comparing this even to previous onslaughts of music-related censorship like the PMRC days.

That is not the case. The metal media likes to think it is, because it gives them something to write about in the midst of a dearth of events of actual import (versus paid promotions disguised as reporting) and it lets all metalheads feel self-righteous about being warriors for the truth and martyrs for free speech, or something like that.

Even more, the case of Tiny Doo and his album is more complex than a first glance reveals. The album cover was one piece of evidence but the bigger and more important piece was that he was in the gang that did the shooting.

[Tiny Doo] is a documented gang member with a “gang moniker” of TD, according to the San Diego police.

…The evidence against Duncan, Watkins said, consists of his rap album and pictures on a social media page of him and several other defendants.

So now we’ve got three data points: (1) known gang membership, (2) photos of himself with the killers, and (3) an album which promises “no safety” for snitches.

Is there an analogy to this in metal? Certainly: when Burzum named his first EP Aske, put a burned church on the cover, and sold it with a lighter with a burnt church on it, that too could have been considered evidence against him. If he had been in the Crips and had Facebook postings of himself standing among them throwing gang signs, his conviction might have been easier as well.

The point is that the prosecutor is using this album to tie it all together. And really, it fits in well: known gang member hangs out with killers and then puts out an album suggesting that he would hunt down his enemies and shoot them, at least from the cover. (We can hope that he has in fact pulled the ol switcheroo and instead released an album of ambient black metal about the Viking war against Christianity but this is unlikely to be the case).

For these reason, cool your jets about censorship. The case is more complex than the headlines allow, as usual. As our media devolves further into clickbait, rational and thoughtful headlines fly out the window, but even more, good luck expressing anything complex in 72 characters. It is the people who followed up on this with hysteria who should be embarrassed.

No, they are not coming for your metal. They do not need to. Your metal was always at best a tiny movement, a fraction of the sales and activity that big hard rock bands like AC/DC generated. It is not even on their radar for social trends. Further, they have something better than censorship: the genre has been taken over by indie rock. Now all songs are going to be about feelings, disguised in the usual blood ‘n guts material.

Not only that, but if authorities wanted to censor rap music, they would have done so long ago. Rap in the 2010s is like Madonna in the 1980s: everybody listens to it. While many of us consider rap and hip-hop the artistic equivalent of deathcore, and suggest a nice Coltrane live set instead, it is a huge moneymaker that now occupies the most respected position in pop music.

We wish Tiny Doo the best in his upcoming case. He is after all innocent until proven guilty. But metalheads need to chill out and stop seeing this case as the censors versus artistic expression, or a backdoor attempt to take your progressive grindcore with lyrics from ancient Olmec sorcery away from you. Only your Mom can do that.

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Tags: censorship, deathcore, hip-hop, rap, tiny doo

Metal documentary The Distorted Island release planned for December 18, 2014

by Brett Stevens on November 5, 2014

Heavy metal documentary The Distorted Island: Heavy Metal Music and Community in Puerto Rico will see release on December 18, 2014, at an unveiling at the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico in Santurce. Tickets are limited to 300, but free of charge, and can be acquired from the organizers.

The Distorted Island: Heavy Metal Music and Community in Puerto Rico explores the birth and growth of the metal scene in Puerto Rico, zooming on on how local bands have survived for three decades thanks to strong strong community ties, while highlighting the cultural and historical challenges faced along the way. The film is the brainchild of Dr. Nelson Varas-Díaz, professor and director of the Puerto Rico Heavy Metal Studies program, and fellow academics Osvaldo González-Sepúlveda, Eliut Rivera-Segarra and Sigrid Mendoza.

Local artist Kadriel Betsen will release a new promotional poster each week until the film’s release, with each image showcasing a different angle of approach to the topic matter. These posters will familiarize the public with some of the individuals interviewed for the film and set the mood for an appreciation of Puerto Rican metal. For updates, see the Puerto Rican Heavy Metal Studies Facebook page.

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Tags: eliut rivera-segarra, Heavy Metal, heavy metal studies, metal academics, nelson varas díaz, osvaldo gonazalez-sepulveda, puerto rico, puerto rico heavy metal studies, sigrid

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