Heavy metal is a culture because heavy metal is a unique spirit: a warlike desire for adventure and meaning, not safety and egodrama.
No mosh! No core! No trends! No “fun”!
Idiots continue to want to make heavy metal into rock music.
Rock music is based on individual drama — the same thing that makes people feel it’s OK to litter, vote for manipulators and then blame others, buy McDonald’s and then bemoan corporate domination. People are the problem. Not institutions.
We like to think we’re all equally capable, and so if something went wrong, it was a misfortune/victimhood. The truth is that most people cannot balance a budget, shop for good food, or avoid repeatedly doing self-destructive and pointless actions. Humanity is overrated.
Now we have idiots who want us to think that if we just relax our standards, everything will turn out just fine — like that worked for the hippies, Romans or other groups of deathbound fools:
A YouTube user named “iAMVyt” has posted a video clip online discussing the idea that metal elitism is causing the downfall of the entire genre, and that there cannot truly be an “underground” scene in the age of Facebook. Take a gander at the video clip, and feel free to share your thoughts on metal elitism and what it means to be “underground” in the comments section below. “iAMVyt” also commented on the clip:
“This is just a short video covering a couple of my beliefs about metal elitists. No, this is not criticizing everyone who enjoys metal. It is not criticizing everyone who identifies themselves as a ‘metalhead.’ It is not criticizing everyone who has a strong belief in anything involving music or metal.
“It is criticizing what I believe to be foolish views and opinions. If you do not agree with my opinions, that is FINE. If you are a metalhead and find that this video does not describe you… You are not a metal elitist.”
Elitism is the one thing that saved metal.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, metal was a scornful, fascist genre.
These bands knew they did not want to end up like the just-sold-out speed metal (Metallica, Testament, Anthrax, Exodus, Megadeth) and the mainstream heavy metal of the time, which was laughably bad hair metal and beginnings of industrial and alternative metal (Ministry, Faith No More).They had just seen metal get popular in the late 1970s only to die, then come back in the early 1980s, then start to die again.
The black metal bands were even more extreme. They realized that as long as they made music for beer-swilling know-nothings to tap their toes to, the genre would go nowhere. It would get re-absorbed by the mainstream and turn into the same horrible shit that infested both the radio and (in goofier, hipster form) the indie charts.
Elitism is the cornerstone of quality metal. When they abandoned it in 1994, a dearth of quality music resulted, with a few exceptions (later albums from BEHERIT, CIANIDE, ASPHYX, DEMONCY, AVERSE SEFIRA, SUMMONING and a few others). Those bands rose against the grain because they believed in quality over quantity. Whether they would call it “elitism” or not, it’s roughly the same animal: we want quality music, so we push away from the pointless, commercial or derivative.
Now this idiot tells us elitism is killing metal?
More like he means poseurdom is killing metal, as it always has. Poseurs are people who want to use the music to make themselves look cool.
Opeth listeners who want to show you how “open-minded” they are, Primus listeners who want to talk about how technical their music is, self-righteous Rage Against the Machine and punk rockers talking politics, and metalcore devotees who embrace the combined hipster/bohemian bourgeois lifestyle of over-emotionality and self-righteous moral indignation… these people then are the faux elitists — the poseurs — who are ruining metal.
Did he think of that?
No, because that would require him to admit that heavy metal is truly a different view of the world.
Although I listen to many different musical styles, including classical, jazz, blues and even bluegrass, my contemporary tastes lean toward heavy metal, hard rock and alternative. In other words, loud, aggressive songs with ear-piercing vocals, massive guitar solos and heavy bass and drums. The musical talent of these artists is undeniable, but the appeal is definitely an acquired taste.
Long story short, this isn’t your parents’ music. Unless your parents were long-haired, headbanging types who wore copious amounts of black clothing and makeup, that is.- National Post
We are a new generation that pisses all over the old. 1968 was hippies telling us the same crap that metalcore bands tell us today. If you want to be the musical inheritor of your parents’ or grandparents’ failed and stupid political projection, be my guest. You’ve just admitted you want to repeat the dysfunction of the past. Sounds like what an abuse victim would do.
For 2,000 years now we’ve had helpful morons to tell us that “all we need is love.” If it were that easy, it would have happened millennia ago. “All we need is asparagus” has similar relevance to the morally complex problems we face. In addition, unless you have your head up your ass, you can see how the human individual acting selfishly is a much bigger problem than whatever failings our institutions have had. We just like to blame the institutions so we can keep being selfish.
Trust nature instead:
Every sensible swimmer knows that avoiding a school of bait fish or immediately leaving the water if a cut started to bleed is ‘best practice’ when attempting to avoid a meeting with a shark.
But Eyre Peninsula’s Matt Waller has added another tip to the ‘don’t get eaten’ handbook with his discovery that Great White’s are much less aggressive when listening to ACDC – particularly ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.
{…}
“I started going through my albums and ACDC was something that really hit the mark.
“Their behaviour was more investigative, more inquisitive and a lot less aggressive – they actually came past in a couple of occasions when we had the speaker in the water and rubbed their face along the speaker which was really bizarre.” – ABCA
We’d love to know what the sharks think of DEICIDE and INCANTATION.
The self-obsessed rhythms and whining, self-pitying hooks of pop music would probably just make them attack the boat.
Similarly, poseur bands like MASTODON, KYLESA, GOJIRA, OPETH, etc. would have the same effect.
Lack of elitism is killing metal.
Elitism means tolerating only quality music. It’s like natural selection for heavy metal: keep the good, throw out the shit.
Metal is dying because it is flooded with insincere hipster bands, commercial trash and pointless rehashing of underground styles.
The only force that opposes that are the people who insist on quality control, a/k/a the elitists.
The opposite of an elitist is a poseur. Poseurs want to use the music to make themselves look smart, unique, interesting, different, etc.
When those people started infesting metal in 1994 or so, the downward spiral began. Now there’s only a few acts that aren’t as abysmally bad as the stuff on mainstream radio.
– Comment on the above “elitist bashing” article
Nature knows metal is a path of its own. It’s only selfish humans who keep trying to neuter it, so they can stop fearing it. Hail elitism!
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Black metal was unique.
Chris Reifert is on top form as a vocalist. His ability to evoke majestic visions of dismemberment and perversion seem to contain a greater dynamic than usual, as to suggest that nearly fifteen years of prolonged absence has only allowed his strengths to re-accumulate.
Death metal is structuralist heavy metal that borrows heavily from classical and industrial music. Its heritage is equal parts neoclassical heavy metal from the 1970s and hardcore punk from the early 1980s; if you throw Discharge, Judas Priest and King Crimson into a blender and set it on “high,” you might get something like death metal. It took from roughly 1983-1988 for death metal to fully evolve, and at that point, it experienced six golden years of fruitful growth before lapsing as black metal eclipsed it in popularity.
The history of rock music has been written by commercial promoters who have tried to establish its “authenticity” and uniqueness, and therefore, almost all mainstream publications are hostile to death metal. Death metal reminds us that rock music, blues and jazz did not arise autonomously in America, but were based on centuries of European popular music (the I-IV-V chord structure of the blues is derived from European folk music, and its “blues scale” is a modification of Asian and Celtic scales). Rock music is a scam, and its marketing makes it seem to be something greater than what it is, which is the same old music dressed up as a product. Death metal more than any genre before it broke from the rock tradition, and therefore is a threat to the rock establishment and its profits.
Like most musical genres in the modern time, death metal is constantly under assault not only from external interests, but from within, as self-interested people try to make rock music and dress it up as death metal. These attempts to simplify the genre would benefit those who attempt them, as they would both be able to make a saleable product (being similar to established musical tastes, it sells easily and broadly) and be able to claim the “authenticity” of belonging to an outsider form of art such as death metal. These false death metal bands have polluted the genre with the same mainstream dogma and musicality that death metal sought to escape. Like all human social breakdown, this breakdown occurs through the selfishness of individuals who are unwilling to admit that the health of the genre is more important than their personal profit.
During the years 1983-1985, a style emerged that was between death metal, black metal and thrash, and from this all of the succeeding genres were to derive their musical inspiration. Bathory, Sodom, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost formed the basis of this style, augmented in the Americas by Possessed, Slayer and Sepultura. From these founding acts styles diversified into death and black metal. While many give credit to Venom for the term black metal, musically speaking they were rooted firmly in the heavy metal tradition.
Death metal bands are occultist in that each of the founding bands and most to follow had an occult focus or research interest evident in their lyrics. However, few practise mysticism and most seem to use it solely as metaphorology for their works. This is convenient because our moral society, even when secular, bases its morality on Judeo-Christian mythology.
From this, much can be learned about a human future: nihilism frees us from much of our fear by confronting it head-on. Death metal bands have created an epic change in American subculture from one of morality to one of existential self-assertion, but further, the “gore” lyrics of many bands have targeted social denial of collective fear of death.
