What metal artifacts from the 1970s-1990s belong in the Smithsonian?

The Mothership — the iconic stage prop made famous by legendary funk collective Parliament-Funkadelic — has been acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture where it will help anchor a permanent music exhibition when the museum opens its doors in 2015.

[…]

It isn’t the original Mothership. This 1,200-pound aluminum spacecraft was built in the mid-’90s — an indistinguishable replica, Clinton says, of the smoke-spewing stage prop he first introduced to slack-jawed funk fans in 1976.

[…]

When the band lowered the Mothership from the rafters of the Capital Centre in Landover in 1977, the response was rapturous. Not only was it instantly stunning — it felt like a cosmic metaphor for the sense of possibility that followed the civil rights movement.

That symbolism isn’t lost on the Smithsonian.

“With large iconic objects like this, we can tap into . . . themes of movement and liberation that are a constant in African-American culture,” says Dwandalyn R. Reece, curator of music and performing arts for the museum. “The Mothership as this mode of transport really fits into this musical trope in African American culture about travel and transit.”

It will be exhibited alongside other artifacts from American music history — Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, James Brown’s stage costumes, Lena Horne’s evening gowns. – VAPO

Surely metal counts as some kind of “protest movement” or social phenomenon worth studying. Or is it too tightey whitey?

Here’s a sampling from his black metal project (1996-2007) called Benighted Leams:

Sounds like a Manes/Fester crossover.

After something happens, people have to talk it to death to figure out what it meant. What they’re really asking is: What caused this, and what was its goal or ideal in response?

What they are looking for at that time is a summary, a “main point” which can be used to explain the movement in a broader historical context (most artistic and political movements being, only a few decades past their eventiture, minor footnotes in a larger narrative).

They want to know its relevance, in other words.

Napoleon attacked Russia? Fine: a battle; what caused it? Napoleon wanted to conquer Russia… to establish hegemony of the new post-monarchic order… and to ensure French imperial supremacy… which had fallen into disrepair… and been exploited by the monarchs… — so we have multiple factors here, centering on a restoration of power after a failure. Right, a desperate move. The significance is more than what Napoleon “wanted”; it’s the historical context in which he exists.

In the same way, we’re looking at black metal and our society offers a number of failure-prone ways to look at it. First there’s the rock-n-roll industry way, which is predictably airheaded: these dudes just wanted to make the most intense music ever, man, and so they turned to Satan and extremism. OK, that’s useless — only a true retard would accept that as a complete answer. Then there’s the inarticulate musician answer, which is that they were inspired by Venom and so copied their heroes. On top of that, we have the useless academic answer, which is that they were altering the heuristic of their neuro-linguistic token integration in order to re-interpret the world as simulacra through new, opened eyes — that’s crap. Then you have interesting side observations, like the Until the Light Takes Us filmmakers wanting to make a movie about the decomposition of an idea — that definitely happened, and it’s true, but tells us nothing about how the phenomenon came about.

And what might a historian or a philosopher say?

The Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc fell in 1990-1991. That ended the post-WWII order, and the Communism-versus-Capitalism narrative which splintered off into many degrees of socialism, conservatism, greens and others duking it out. But even more, there was no longer a reason for society to strive. The war was over — what was left? The worst of the 1980s, except now we didn’t even have conservative politicians to reign us in. The McDonald’s, the Coca-Cola, the women turning themselves into plastic whores, the men living for novelty and not bravery, the large corporations controlling more of what we think, the democratic governments so easily purchased… that is the background to black metal.

And against all of these ideas, it offered a simple solution:

• Modern society: Everyone is equal. Everyone is important. What is most valuable is not pushing yourself to new heights, but getting along with others. When everyone is included, there will be no war or suffering, and we can all live good lives thanks to these excessive rights and these plasticized corporate products.
• Black metal: No peace can exist, and nothing is equal or pure. Morality is garbage invented by the weak. What matters is making yourself better, pushing yourself farther than ever before. War is our destiny, and this is good, because it cures stagnation and indecision. What matters most is the best rising, the supremacy of the conqueror and predator, so that we do not become weak.

In this rebellion, black metal was revolting against the beliefs of its parents, which were that once the evil Cold War was over, we would finally have reached the promised land.

This was a promised land, incidentally, that they started promising in 1914… or rather, in 1789, because it’s the same narrative. We beat back the privileged, make everything equal, all conflict ends, peace and justice reign, yay!

Except that every age has people that think this way, and they’re always wrong, in part because if you think about such a society, it would be miserable. Paralyzed, because avoiding conflict means not finding answers. Permissive, which both cheapens everything and makes sins not a pleasure but almost a mechanical duty, like our porn and its ever-expanding quest for new extremes (where do we go, really, after the A2M explosion, enema milkshake and 919 man gang bang followed by riot bukkake?).

It sounds like something out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: an artificial, pandering, whorelike world without a soul, but you have no reason to object, because materially, you are provided for.

That’s kind of how Baby Boomer parents treated their Generation X (and black metal was a Gen X thing entirely) kids — here’s some money, you live in a nice house and have the best options our society can offer. What are you upset about? Oh the minor fact that we inherited a first-world nation and left you a third-world one, sheerly by our Idiocracy-style tolerance and in fact encouraging of the reproduction of idiots, our fast food, our television nation, and so? That’s a minor fact. Minor. Don’t complain. Kids in the third world don’t have toilet paper.

Black metal was throwing off all of this: the vapidity, the obliviousness, the guilt and the manipulation.

It was saying we cannot all get along; in fact, most of us are shitheads. We need natural selection. What matters most is not peace, happiness, love, etc. but a warlike desire to get things done right according to a higher standard, and along the way, a Romantic contemplation of what it is to be an individual in the world, melancholy and isolated from the false cheer of society.

This fits right in with what Wordsworth, Blake, Emerson, Keats, Byron, Sterne, Shelley (Mary) and other Romantics wrote about only 200 years earlier, during the last great outbreak of culture in the West.

It also fit into the narrative developed by Plato and expanded on by Oswald Spengler, which says that societies go through life cycles, and when they get corrupted by “too much socialization,” they die in slow passage into third world status: low hygiene, corruption, disorganization, dysfunction and immoralism. Remember that other great mystery figure from the 1990s, the Unabomber? He said similar things.

None of this stuff was new. It was what the foremost intellectuals talked about in the 1960s and 1970s, before they wrote the books and recorded the music that influenced the PARENTS of the black metal generation; these were the artifacts they found, wrapped away carefully as if treasured but denied in a quest to pursue “adult” responsibilities, in attics and garages. And absorbed wide-eyed, as children do.

From that we got black metal.

Is it nationalistic? (Nationalism = one nation, one ethnic group, with a single culture, religion and philosophy to match. Don’t confuse it with patriotism, which is political loyalty to whatever State happens to control the land you’re on right now.)

Yes, it is, as the Romantics were. Not in a bigoted way like the neo-Nazis, but proud of their nations, and aware of the need for each nation to fix itself. We can’t kumbaya, glom together and fix each other. We have to go it alone.

From this view, NSBM is what black metal degenerated into, not its ultimate expression. Of course, not everyone agrees — Alex Kurtagic has a different take on things:

Black Metal artists also emphasize nature and landscape, but a morbid and mystical sensibility is evident even here. Whether inspired by völkisch thought or mere Satanic occultism, nature is always conceived in spiritual, mystical, and Romantic terms. The Black Metal aesthetic dictactes that night and winter are eternal. Coniferous forests are preferred to tilled fields and manicured gardens. Where the glorification of war merges with nature mysticism, the emphasis remains on the latter. Viking and Folk Metal bands, in contrast, adopt a more obviously völkisch approach to nature, allowing daylight in their landscapes and generally emphasizing the idyllic as opposed to counter-Enlightenment Sturm und Drang.

The Black Metal sensibility does not reject culture in favor of nature, but instead valorizes culture and nature, both conceived organically, over civilization, which is conceived in mechanistic and materialistic terms. In the Black Metal universe, cities were never built, the Industrial Revolution never occurred, and modernity never arrived. For all its belligerence, Black Metal is inherently nostalgic, a comprehensive negation of modernity. – Alex Kurtagic at Counter-Currents

I find his second paragraph interesting: the enemy is the senescence of civilization itself, which is conceived — well, here I split — from a desire to please the herd. The herd doesn’t create civilization; it destroys it. Rare individuals overcoming their own dysfunction and rising above the herd, that’s what creates and maintains civilization. But then civilization suicides: in an effort to make life better, it protects those incompetents, and soon creates a giant herd of Homer Simpsons, all subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect where they reject anything more complex than they can understand, and are confident in that rejection.

But that’s a study of methods, not of cause.

The cause is a lack of spirit, and the solution is to reject “safety” and “peace,” and explore the edge of risk. Feel the terror, the pain, the glory and the joy, again. Right now, we’re a society on anti-depressants that barely feels a thing, glad for the comforting numbness but also missing out on lives that, if we were paying attention, offer a lot more than we partake. Instead we pursue the same mechanical pleasures.

We are scheming on modern society, cruising on the wealth of the industrial revolution, to make us all materially fat and happy by removing our fears; our Satans, our Hitlers, and even our fears that there is no moral God guiding us, or no Utopian moral Society guiding us, but only a space in which we must make what we desire. Because we have no idea what we desire. We are living in a plastic simulation of a real world, built from the memories of our media lords and writers of government pamphlets, based on a morality that is dysfunctional and a dream of an empty, sterile pointless existence that we desire because it is both safe and greedy, letting us indulge our fantasies. Yet all of this is part of a power structure that undermines us.

Black metal is a revolution in culture against economics, politics, popularity and other forms of deferring the ideal for the tangible:

Certain performers like Orkis and Bylsma are also preferred for their ability to interpret certain ideas that — like genres have ideas in common and as a result, sounds in common — composers explored as part of their collective membership in certain time periods or recurring ideas, like the Faustian, the Romantic and the reverent/sublime outlook, all of which are shared between metal and classical.

These similarities in composition explain why metal and classical have a lot in common — and this is why the correct interpretors are needed. Rock is harmonic-rhythmic, metal is phrasal-narrative. When making rock music, you pick a rhythm, and then use a standard song form or variation to fit it into a scale, which in turn determines harmony. Rock riffs are not as active or as shaped as metal riffs, because generally they are variations within a scale whose goal is to return to the chord being played; they are based around open chords and lead rhythm playing of the scale. Metal is phrasal, meaning that its riffs take the form of phrases made of power chords, and narrative, which means that metal song structure is determined by content of each song more than by a standard form — that’s the infamous “riff salad” rock musicians bemoan in metal.

Classical music also uses narrative composition. While imbeciles will focus on its fixed forms — sonata, fugue, aria — the more important idea here is that the song follows the poetic content being expressed. This mirrors the epic poetry of ancient European and Indian civilizations, where it was understood that each adventure had stages of ritual, much like we have stages in acceptance of death or change. As a result, there was a need for an overture, a reconsideration, some changes and a recapitulation and synthesis of themes, and these got formalized in the song structures that today imbeciles regard as iron laws. The narrative style however is the common thread in classical music from its beginning to the present.

In rock music, you write to fit the scale to the rhythm, and then melody is added to accentuate that. This is easier work because all of the real variables are defined by the form. Similarly, in jazz, the form is fixed and within it the player riffs off harmony and rhythm, and inserts fragments of melody to that end — this is why most jazz artists make thousands of recordings of a song, and only one or two are considered “the real deal” by collectors: without the artist making it happen, cerebrally, the pieces fit together by random convenience. Classical works by the opposite principle, which is creating or adapting a general form to the poetic needs of a piece — expressing the change in both listener and “actor” within the story or feeling being related — and then designing a combination of rhythm, melody, theme, motif and form to express it well.

Metal is similar, although less schooled in this regard, because it seeks to express a similar worldview — underlying philosophical assumptions about life — to that of classical. Metal is reverent for the sublime; it sees the power and the horror of nature as necessary for its perpetuation, and is like nature intolerant of the oblivious and unrealistic because they create a parasitic slowdown of the exciting experiences in life. It derives much of its thematic development from the pace of horror movies, in which a few “awakened” people realize that they face a supernatural — or invisible pattern underlying all reality — foe against which technology and their oblivious, unrealistic social partners are useless. Finally, metal like classical expresses the Faustian spirit, or a sense of struggling for the rare and inconvenient beauty life offers, and fighting back those who submit to static obedience or dogma; this sense of purity through struggle is called vir, or the virtuous warlike acts of ancient man. These themes repeat throughout classical music, like metal, and while there are exceptions, it’s more than a coincidence that the best among metal and classical use these themes repeatedly. – Classical Music for Metal Fans

It’s a philosophy of triumph through living not for safety, but for adventure:

Where modern society in a desire for safety imposes values designed for an average person onto all of us, and assumes that our material and humanist wellbeing constitutes meaning in life, Romanticism explodes from within. It is not a philosophy of cautions, but of desires for the intangible, and as so it worships risk and conquest and a lack of fear toward the karmic existence. It transcends the desire to either live karmically, or live akarmically, because it sees karmicism as a means to an end and concerns itself only with the end: the ideal.

In this, Romanticism constitutes a philosophy because it posits intangible ideals as a balance weight to the certainty of death. It seeks a sense of unfolding; the discovery of something new in a prismatic space hiding behind the mundane. In doing so, it renovates life itself by working from within and renewing the brain in its aspiration and heroic transcendence of the karmic drag, in the exact opposite principle to modernity, which is materialism/humanism as supported by technology and populist political systems. – Metal as Prismatic Motion

And although we can show how it is connected to Romanticism and classical music, its bigger connection is to an ideal of transcendentalism which has been discovered and forgotten innumerable times — when societies are healthy, they discover it; when they are not, they forget it. This is the Tradition that writers like Rene Guenon refer to:

As a result, metal is sandwiched between protest music of the anarchic left and the wisdom of the conservative ancients, forming itself through fantasy into a vision of a more realistic and more enjoyable vision of life. Rock music is a product of the wealth and convenience of a modern time that allows us to have inconsequential lifestyles and opinions, while metal is a revolution against that outlook, a seemingly deconstructive art form that in actuality opposes deconstruction.

We can trace these ideas through consistent beliefs found across metal generations:

1. Beauty in darkness. It is not ugly, pounding music but music which discovers beauty in distortion, in anger and terror, in violence and foreboding dark restless relativistic power chords. The point is not to deconstruct, but to go through deconstruction and find meaning. This is evident in the works of Black Sabbath and every metal band since, and is what distinguishes “real” metal from hard rock.
2. Worship of power. Unlike pacifying rock music and jazz and “new music” classical, metal music adores powerful, vast and broad simple strokes; it loves the majesty of nature and its crushing final word. It does not have love songs. Instead, its love is directed to forces of nature, including physical forces like storms and intense human experience like war or loss, as if trying to find meaning in these.
3. Worship of nature. Linked to metal’s adoration of power is its appreciation for the function, including its “red in tooth and claw” aspects, of the natural world. Where most are repulsed by the idea that combat exists between animals in which one is victor, and one is prey, metal idolizes it. It finds beauty in ruins, in destruction, and in death, as if praising the cycle of life they engender again.
4. Independent thinking. Metal does not buy into the individualism of a modern time where the only goal is material pleasure of the self (materialism) and keeping others away by granting them the same (humanism). It prefers the independent thinking that looks for higher values in life, mountains to climb and challenges to be met. Where punk music enmeshed itself in a callow “I wanna do what I wanna do,” metal saw this as part of the same gesture of rock music and discarded it.

These are expressed artistically by the following:

1. Dark, morbid themes that clashed with the “love will save us” hippie mentality. These are explained by Black Sabbath as being derived from the horror movies of the day, a genre which features a union between technology and the occult (zombies, werewolves) producing a force humans cannot oppose. Normal technologies and methods cannot defeat it. They struggle against this force but their emotional instability causes them to sabotage one another, and often the dark force wins. Examples from this genre: Mothra, Dawn of the Dead, Alien, The Exorcist, The Shining, War of the Worlds.
2. Songs written from short cyclic phrases called riffs, which unlike rock riffs used movable chords of inspecific harmonic bonding, making the melody and rhythm of the phrase more important than key or voicing. Metal bands tend to use more riffs per song, and not in the traditional cycle of verse-chorus, in a way quite similar to progressive bands like King Crimson and Yes, both of whom used aggressive distortion.
3. A focus on the holism of the human effort as determined by our moral state as individuals in a way that can only be described as “religious.” Metal, in addition to sounding eerily like angry Bach-scripted church music, has a similar focus to dogmatic transcendentalism Christianity: what is our future as human beings, and how does how we shape our personalities effect it?
4. Bass-enhanced overdriven guitar sound, or distortion, which encloses the primary instrument used in making heavy metal. In rock, guitars and drums come together to emphasize a vocal melodic line; in metal, guitars lead a melodic line for which vocals are a complement and drums a timekeeper, enclosing it in a regularity to give listeners context. The guitar is the loudest single instrument heard and the one that invokes changes in song.

These beliefs and musical techniques reinforce each other. Using distortion and loud music, yet finding beauty in it. Using longer narrative phrases so as to tell a story, creating a holistic view in which emotion emerges, instead of citing pre-configured emotions like rock music does. A darkness and melancholy exhibited in lyrics and imagery, corresponding to aggressive music, expressing a desire to seize all of reality, good and bad together, and make something better of it. – Assimilation

Metal finds beauty in darkness.

Modern society tries to shut out darkness and, in doing so, removes beauty.

Coca-Cola or wandering in the woods, wondering if you’ll find fresh water or die of thirst.

One is safe, one is exciting.

Does black metal flirt with fascism? Black metal is conservative, and conservatism is a spectrum from libertarianism through national socialism, just like liberalism is a spectrum from anarchy through Communism.

Black metal implies that our modern time is as totalitarian as fascism or Communism, it’s just that the mechanisms are hidden from us. We are trapped in boring jobs, in ugly cities, in blight-ridden streets that are covered in commercial messages and obscene graffiti. We are not controlled directly; rather, we are sabotaged by society itself, which removes good options from us and replaces them with ever-lowering standards, so we both cannot rebel (hey, you can do ANYTHING, man) and cannot aspire. One way of doing things rules across the globe, and it controls our lives, even if it does so by making sure that the majority prefer dumb options and thus make those into law.

Modern society is a series of bad options because those are what the equal proles prefer; as the rot spreads, the controllers laugh from their ivory towers, watching civilization defeat itself because it cannot enact impulse control, and have preferences for long-term goods instead of short-term personal gain or recognition. We destroy ourselves. We do their work for them, and since most people are too dumb to figure this out, you can shout the truth on streetcorners and you will be ignored. It is a perfect system of control.

In the process we commit ecocide by growing like an obese cancer. Is black metal green? In a way that Garrett Hardin, Pentti Linkola and Arne Naess are green.

Is it fascist? In the way that Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were: when you are in a society of idiots, you might as well carve it up and do some conquering because these people will do nothing but pursue their hollow pleasures, live callow lives of pointless misery, and then blame whoever is in charge for their own failings.

Our world is stagnating; entropy is upon us. The old methods of 1968 will not work because they did not work, and never work. They sound good, but they, too, are hollow.

Black metal is many things. It is religious; in a pagan, transcendentalist sense that maybe the most profound Christian mystics (Eckhart, Emerson) would have understood. It is violent, and it is fascist, but not totalitarian. It is nationalist, but not racist, per se. It is an assertion of the inward spirit of humanity that wants to rise above its own fear and desire for safety, and carve from an empty wilderness of a world a new civilization, one that achieves love not by commanding it through law, but through creating it by making things worth loving.

Black metal is all that this world is not, and the order that will replace it. The next thousand years are ours.

Oh wait, I was supposed to write about NSBM. Well, it’s nothing, really. It’s what happens when the RAC people claim black metal for their own. The original bands — Burzum, Emperor, Mayhem, Darkthrone, Enslaved, Immortal — they all endorsed nationalism, like Bathory did. For them, the point was to rebuild culture; for others, the idea is to wage race war. You can see there’s a difference.

Someone else pointed out what we know — mass culture is a product disguised as individual self-expression:

In the sphere of luxury production, to which popular music belongs and in which no necessities of life are immediately involved, while, at the same time, the residues of individualism are most alive there in the form of ideological categories such as taste and free choice, it is imperative to hide standardization. The “backwardness” of musical mass production, the fact that it is still on a handicraft level and not literally an industrial one, conforms perfectly to that necessity which is essential from the viewpoint of cultural big business. If the individual handicraft elements of popular music were abolished altogether, a synthetic means of hiding standardization would have to be evolved. Its elements are even now in existence.

The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or “pre-digested”.

The most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so “normalized” as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations — passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted (“Swing it boys”) — are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme. In a great many cases, such as the “break” of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Since these possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation — pseudo-individualization. – Theodor Adorno, On Popular Music

This doubly applies to nu-metal. The whole essay is worth reading.

One of the things I love about death metal is that it took a middle path, between the “life is evil and we must reform it” progressives and the “just keep earning money and all will be fine” conservatives; instead, it pointed out the underlying truth, which is that civilizations fail and someday will be our day, and perhaps it’s sooner than we think.

“Hot desire, staggering passion Craving completion and perfection Made us blind Greed of completeness made us, man To subject and vassales of ourselves Presumptuous creatures How narrow are you ? Self-aggrandized, destructive individuals The believing in yourself Growing up to selfishness Egoism discards moral and ethics” – Atrocity, ‘Godless Years’.

• Atrocity – Godless Years
• Revenant – Prophecies of a Dying World
• Therion – Future Consciousness
• Immolation – Nailed to Gold
• Monstrosity – Suffering to the Conquered
• Napalm Death – As the Machine Rolls On…
• At The Gates – The Red in the Sky is Ours

No god to punish us, and yet we suffer
– At the Gates, Gardens of Grief

When the foundations to our existence
Begins to crumble one by one
And legislations protects its breakers
And he who was wrong but paid the most won

Even the gods of countless religions
Holds no powers against this tide
Of degeneration because we have now found
That there is no thrones up there in the sky

Run from this fire
It will burn your very soul
Its flames reaching higher
Comed this far there is no hold
O, all small creatures
It is the twilight if the gods
– Bathory, Twilight of the Gods

Forgotten children, conform a new faith,
Avidity and lust controlled by hate.
(The) Never ending search for your shattered sanity,
Souls of Damnation in their own reality.

Chaos rampant,
An age of distrust.
Confrontations.
Impulsive habitat.

Bastard sons begat your cunting daughters,
Promiscuous mothers with your incestuous fathers.
Engreat souls condemned for all eternity,
Obtained by immoral observance a domineering deity.
– Slayer, South of Heaven

We like to think it can never happen, at least not to us. But it must happen because everything must end. And if you add up all the signs, it’s sooner rather than later.

I’m almost too cynical to think the news is anything but press releases, yet:

Donald Tardy has two passions.

His music – he’s the drummer for the death-metal band Obituary. And his cats – more than 140 of them.

They live in woods, behind shopping plazas and in dumpsters. They scrounge for food, scavenging rodents and trash, and fend off raccoons.

They’re feral cats, and according to the Humane Society of Tampa Bay, they’re among an estimated 200,000 roaming Hillsborough County.

Tardy tends to more than 20 colonies, some with as few as two cats, others with nearly 30. He carefully protects their locations; some people are capable of unimaginable cruelty, while others find colonies a convenient place to dump unwanted cats. Every day he checks on “my gang,” feeding the cats and, when necessary, getting them veterinary care. – TBO

This makes me feel better about the time I went on a bender and re-purchased all those old early 1990s albums (and the Judas Priest catalog up through 2004). Some things just get better with time.

At least, I hope he does. A few mainstream metal journalists have finally noticed that Adam Gadahn, now ascending in al-Qaeda thanks to the untimely assassination of Osama bin Laden, wrote about death metal back in the day:

DAMNATION – Volume Two (demo)
San Diego, California trio DAMNATION have been playing together since
late 1990, and Volume Two, their second effort (naturally), is a
professionally done, musically mature release that, unfortunately, is
lacking in the songwriting department. The two-song tape features rather
boring lyrics about insanity and nightmares, generic Sodom/Kreator style
thrash/death, and monotone Jorgen Sandstrom-style vocals. That said, the
songs do grow on you after a few listens, but I haven’t had the urge to
constantly replay them, as I did with, say, Timeghoul!! As I said, the
cassette is pro-packed and recorded, with excellent production (this is
the sound Timeghoul should have had) courtesy of a 24-track studio and a
great purple logo on the cover! Fans of Possessed and other early
Death/thrash will dig this.

GENERAL SURGERY – Necrology EP (Relapse)
Although this was recorded in November, 1990, this was only recently
released by Relapse Records. This is basically a Swedish “supergroup” of
death, featuring members of Dismember, Afflicted and Creamatory, plus
Exit-13. The 5 songs on this musically draw a lot from old Carcass, but
with a more direct, straight-forward feel and much better production
(courtesy of good ol’ reliable Sunlight Studios and good ol’ reliable Tomas
Skoksberg). Lyrically, the quote on the back cover pretty much sums it up:
“Murder is the only way to kill time”. “Severe Catatonia in Pathology” is
the sickest on the disk, with the happy overtones. Also the opening
instrumental “Ominous Lamentation” will be of interest. With nice
packaging and production, this is a worthy addition to any Death/Gore
metaller’s collection!

HELLBOUND – Apocalyptic Visions (demo ’92)
Although New York’s Hellbound call themselves a Death/thrash band,
I tend to disagree with that. To my ears, they sound more like a thrashier
version of Atheist or Sadus, possessing the prominent bass guitar &
screaming vocals, respectively, of those bands, but with the simpler, less
technical approach of bands like Vio-lence, D.R.I., or Exodus. Their
drummer, however, has his own very cool style that “demands to be
heard”! Amazing that this is their debut! Hellbound showcase their
professionality in both instruments & songwriting throughout the four
tunes on Apocalyptic Visions. The last two songs, “My Guilt is Silence”
and “Infernal Ecstasy”, absolutely rage!!! And the icing on the cake is the
stunning production – recorded on a 16-track machine, all instruments can
be heard clearly, with drums and bass shining through especially! Quite a
debut! HB should have a new demo out by the time you read this, but get
their brutal first effort by sending a blank tape and return postage

ENRAPTURED – 7 Song Demo ’92 (Demo)
This is actually a combination of the unreleased 5-song Reconstrued
Malfeasance demo and a new 2-song demo. Although the “Reconstrued”
tunes, recorded as a 4 piece (Tino Lesicco on drums/vocals, Pierce Totty
on Bass, Jason Smith on guitar and Justin Jones on guitar) and “included
as bonus tracks because of the poor sound quality”, the 2 newsies with 2
new members (Dan Stoops, vocals and David Smith, 2nd guitar) actually
have about the same sound and production. While Enraptured improved
their musicianship in the 4 months between recording “The Downfall of
Christianity” and “Abortion Consumed”, they show a decrease in
songwriting skill, The older tunes like “The Execration” and “Probe the
Flesh” contain headbangable Slayer/Carcass type riffs and deep, growly
Karl Willetts/Barney Greenway style vocals. The new tracks, however,
are generic highspeed Cannibal Corpse or Obituary-esque noise with
annoyingly loud vocals and incessant double bass drumming. My advice:
pick up this demo for the 5 excellent bonus tracks and ignore the 2 cheesy
commercial fag songs.

TIMEGHOUL – Tumultuous Travelings (demo)
Perhaps the best demo I’ve heard since I began listening to Death
Metal/Grindcore less than a year ago is Timeghoul’s debut 4-song,
Tumultuous Travelings. Mixing elements of Immolation, Cathedral, Brutal
Truth and Suffocation, this Foristell, Missouri quartet rage through “Rain-
wound”, “The Siege”, “Gutspawn”, & “Infinity Coda”, with unmatched
intensity and style. All the songs run over 5 minutes (“The Siege” is the
longest), and much variation is contained within. Drummer Tony Holman
can go from a high-speed “blast” beat, to a slow rhythm, and back to a
fast part in the blink of an eye! Jeff Hayden’s vocals are brutal but
different: Check out the singing part on “Siege” and the special FX on
“Infinity Coda”! The band’s instrumental ability is second to none, as are
their song writing skills, but this otherwise top-notch tape is marred by
bad sound. There’s much flutter and warble, and the volume is rather low.
With Timeghoul’s excellent musicianship, it’s a wonder that they haven’t
been signed yet!! So hey! If anyone from Earache or Relapse or whoever is
reading this, come on!! Pick up a pen and ink ’em right now! It would be a
shame if Timeghoul broke up before recording at least one album
professionally! But until then, we’ve got this masterpiece!

These are from Xenocide Zine, an old school death metal zine from 1992-1993 which featured many of the bands we regard today as the canon of death metal. Do you want to find out more about the origins of this music? Hit the Xenocide Zine page and check out their blasts from the past.

While you’re at it, you might be able to enjoy something new from the editor of that zine, Jon Konrath. He took his death metal fueled angst and criticism of modern society, and channeled it through a William S. Burroughs/David Foster Wallace/Neal Stephenson filter to come up with gonzo postmodern flash-fiction. You can read his latest novel, Rumored to Exist, in print or on your Kindle.

Konrath went on to write for Metal Curse, along with Vijay Prozak and other old schoolers. We wish Mr. Konrath luck in his literary career, especially since he crams more internal references to death metal lyrics into literature than anyone since… well, anyone. Not too many people write about the metal o’ death.

As for Mr. Gadahn, who is remembered fondly around here, we hope he takes over al-Qaeda and uses his new power to fight modern civilization. If Samuel Huntington is right, al-Qaeda is part of a “clash of civilizations” where those who want traditional society oppose the modern type of liberal democratic consumerist society, which death metal also seems to hate (with good cause: plastic trash is poison). This could give more people insight into what dissidents from Nietzsche to al-Qaeda are all about.

A reader writes in with one of the big difficult questions:

For more than a year, I’ve been into heavy metal. Being an atheist i listened to bands that mocked religion. As i don’t have any knowledge of structure or how a riff is good or bad, I listened to anything that whose lyrics read well, but soon nihilism struck me and I started losing faith in people and the mainstream. I felt a sudden urge for good art as an outlet of my emotions, but then my idea of art was shattered.

So my question is: what is art?

In 1917 Duchamp took a urinal and turned it over, signed it ‘R. Mutt’ and submitted it to an art show! His ready-mades weren’t meant to be admired in an aesthetic sense and because of this he challenged the belief in art as something holy and placed on a high pedestal, art as something distant and divorced from life during the dada art period

later in 1692 neo dada art was emerging,Duchamp did not agree with the attitudes and direction taken by Pop Art and Neo-Dada

In a letter dated November 10, 1962 Marcel Duchamp wrote: “This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblages, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”

Why is one band better than other? How do I judge?

I’m badly confused which metal CDs I should buy; I also see that one thing you consider while judging a band is you learn the philosophy of the members and the environment they came from, but when the band is so underground the data of their members is not available, what is true metal?

1)one which is highly technical
2)or that maybe immature in technicality but have a strong…. philosophy…and what is more important or inspiring to you
a)lyrics
b)structure
c)or other things…

Is art just too overrated?

Let’s take them one at a time:

What is art?

Art is that which expresses a meaningful view of life; it is a communication from artist to appreciator (listener, reader, watcher, viewer). True cynics like myself view it as a dual natured beast, expressing both aesthetic enjoyment (showing that life has significance) and some form of philosophy, vision, emotional context or other worldview (the end goal that author found meaningful for that signficance). Art takes many forms, and there is no equality between forms or between artists or even between works; some express something that can be said through no other medium.

Which is the true metal band?

Technical, or philosophical? you ask. I respond with this concept: the band that is artistic, and exemplifies the spirit of metal (a Romantic yet warlike notion of transcendence through worship of power, not moral good) is good metallic art.

If the technicality is used in service to this goal, it’s great. But technicality for its own sake is boring, as 100,000 starving nu-jazz musicians in America can tell you.

Does the band need to have a philosophy? Not really — their music needs to show the presence of some organized thought (many would call that a philosophy) and to express it in a way that is artistic, and compelling. If it doesn’t do all of that, it may be art but I don’t want to listen to it.

Lyrics… I have forgotten about these, for many years. Some are inspiring. Most are stuff that rhymes and bounces in the right places with the right number of syllables. For me the archetype is Deicide: their lyrics “sound like” an occult vision of war in reality. Sometimes they’re incoherent. But they always sound awesome.

I don’t worry about trueness; that which is true turns out to be good, amazingly enough. So I pursue quality, because life is short and if you love metal, you want the best stuff.

I am probably an atheist; if God must be singular, anthropomorphic and moral, I am definitely an atheist and a blasphemer. (See my short monograph entitled, “If your human-like God can do anything, can He fuck Himself?”)

I am a nihilist. I believe in nothing but that which can be derived from observation and thought.

At the same time, I have seen more that I and science cannot explain than what it can… and my thoughts have led me to a kind of mysticism that is compatible with quantum physics, esoteric hermetic philosophy and even higher math. Others have found similar paths.

Unfortunately, this leads one to become a realist (in the vernacular, not philosophical, sense) or rather a consequentialist. Back to art above: life has significance. If so, we don’t want to screw it up. So we treat life as a laboratory, and keep the ideas that produce good results, and throw out the rest until we can test them.

This in turn should address your underlying question which seems to be: why care about what has quality over what does not? Why measure quality at all?

The answer is simply: if you love life, you want something that can complement it, and yourself, and that means you seek the authentic, the thrilling, the interesting, the beautiful and the amazing. And that is why, if you’re gonna listen to metal, throw out the shit and seek out the greats :)

We always talk about how here on ANUS, we try to describe the music as it is, not assess it in some “social” way (that easily lends itself to selling the music to dummies). People doubt us. So here’s a brief comparison:

Marketing

Q: What’s the title of the new Slayer album?

A: World Painted Blood.

Q: What’s it sound like?

A: What on Earth do you think?

Nine studio albums, thousands of live shows and nearly three decades into a career that’s made them one of the biggest and most important metal bands in the world, the members of Slayer know exactly what kind of music they make—brutal but beautiful, punishing yet precise. A fresh Slayer record is a thing of terror but also one of trust: You can depend on what you’re getting—even if you’re unprepared for it.

As guitarist Jeff Hanneman says with a sly little chuckle, “At this point I think a Slayer album pretty much speaks for itself.”

And yet there are some interesting things you should be made aware of regarding World Painted Blood, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2006’s Christ Illusion, which debuted inside the Top 5 of Billboard’s album chart, a career best for Slayer. Let’s start with the fact that its fury, believe it or not, was born out of fun.

“The interaction between all of us on this record was really something special,” says Hanneman of his work with the band’s three other founding members: singer-bassist Tom Araya, guitarist Kerry King and drummer Dave Lombardo. “Rather than trying to get something done,” Hanneman continues, “it felt like we were just having a good time. We were discussing things, giving things a go. The prevailing attitude was, ‘Let’s try it!’ It wasn’t even work, really—it was play.”

For the first time ever, Slayer entered the studio—in this case, The Pass, in Los Angeles—without an entire album’s worth of material already written and rehearsed. They’d booked a preliminary chunk of studio time in October 2008 to see how they liked working with producer Greg Fidelman, who’d been recommended to the band by their longtime pal Rick Rubin after the two worked together on Metallica’s Death Magnetic. “While we were in there recording the couple of songs we had, things were just really clicking with Greg,” says Araya. “So we thought, ‘Why don’t we try to write the rest of the record in the studio?’ We weren’t sure what was gonna happen; we just kind of did it, and the music kept on coming.”

Not only did it keep on coming—first during that initial session, then in a second period of work stretching from January to March 2009—but it came in a way it hadn’t before, driven by a new degree of collaboration. For Slayer’s last several albums, Hanneman would write his songs, King would write his, then the two guitarists would bring their separate material into the studio, where the band would put it to tape. “This time,” says King, “everyone was talking about what we were doing. Everyone had a say and was involved—like, ‘Maybe we should go faster here or stop there or whatever.’ It was cool.”

Hanneman is succinct when asked how or why this cooperative spirit took root. “I have no fucking idea,” he admits. “The chemistry was just good.” The guitarist does note that Slayer “weren’t rushed, and that makes a lot of difference with the music. I don’t like being rushed, and on this record we had plenty of time.”

You can hear the effects of that creative freedom throughout World Painted Blood, which Lombardo says fits in with such classic Slayer slabs as Reign in Blood and Seasons in the Abyss. “The rhythm riffs on this one make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” says the drummer, who describes his determination to make his parts sound human and natural, rather than like the product of a machine. “It does it for me the same way those older records did.” King agrees: “I think it has kind of a retro vibe to it,” he says. “It sounds like the stuff we wrote in the ’80s.”

Did this renewed enthusiasm brighten Slayer’s worldview? Not exactly. “We have a tendency to follow a theme, and I think on this record the theme is more apocalyptic than usual,” says Araya, pointing to songs like the title track, a meditation on what the year 2012 has in store for humanity, and “Public Display of Dismemberment,” which King says is about whether or not certain “vulgar but effective” law-enforcement measures might work as well in America as they have elsewhere. “That’s kind of the running concept here,” Araya adds, “but aside from that it’s the usual Slayer topics of death, murder and serial killers.”

Usual, perhaps, but far from ordinary, World Painted Blood is one of Slayer’s most impressive efforts yet—a vicious, uncompromising look at what’s broken in our society and how frighteningly powerless we are to fix it. King says World is “more well-rounded than the last couple of albums.” Lombardo calls it “a speed metal record with emotion.” Anyone with ears will think it’s an accomplishment of a major kind. – Amazon.com Slayer Store

Notice what’s missing: they don’t talk about the music. They talk about the people, how many albums the band sells, how vicious it is, the topic of the lyrics (which is not necessarily the same as the topic of the song), and how shocking it is. In essence, what other people will talk about when they talk about it. Real information? Minimal. Now of course, this piece comes to us from Slayer’s reps via Amazon.com, and is not exceptional in any way. In fact, Slayer resisted doing this shit for decades. Now they’ve got a big label behind them demanding they do it because everyone else does it, and it’s effective, which means that if Slayer doesn’t do it, it’s like fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.

Here’s another:

In junior high, there were three albums whose covers scared the shit out of me, and which I consequently kept in a desk drawer out of immediate view: Reign in Blood, Blessed Are the Sick, and Arise. While the former two remain all-time favorites, at the time, Arise hit the spot best. All three albums are primers on blazing speed coupled with powerful atmosphere, but Arise possessed a stronger melodic quality that never came off as cheesy or compromised. Andreas Kisser’s solos are oases of respite from the Cavalera brothers’ unrelenting, dystopian riffage. As a son of the ’80s and a disciple of films like Brazil, Robocop, and Blade Runner, I really appreciate the post-apocalyptic imagery in Cavalera’s lyrics, an aspect that he’d continue to hone on Chaos A.D.

Speaking of that album, I got shit in an earlier post about saying Chaos A.D. is the album where Sepultura “become men”. I still think that’s true, but paradoxically, I must qualify that Arise presently edges it out as my favorite Sepultura album. Ultimately, it’s a less fully-realized sonic world: the production is flat (what the fuck is wrong with those drums?!), the guitar tones are not layered in any meaningful way, and are almost fatiguingly mid-rangey. While Arise represents Sepultura at their apex as a speed/thrash/death band, Chaos A.D. is them being the band they were always meant to be. You can hear it in the confidence of the songwriting, and you have to hand it to a band when they reach that point in their lifetime; so many don’t.

So why does Arise edge it out? To paraphrase my friend Anson, MY GOD, those riffs. From “Arise” to “Infected Voice”, there’s not a dud in the bunch. It’s also worth noting how deftly they did the speed thing, especially considering they pretty much forsook the blastbeat after this record. It’s the end of an era in Sepultura’s evolution, and they closed it with all guns blazing. Arise still takes me back to a time and place, and that album cover, for all the fear it instilled in me, remains a favorite. Like the riffs, it reminds me of what I love about my favorite superhero comic books: metal, like comics, sometimes functions on more is more. – Invisible Oranges

These are all marketing, because their point is to convince you how cool something is, and not give you a sense of its broader relevance. The individual and the social sphere are the same thing in varying degrees; if something panders to your lower functions, it will do the same for others and thus be popular. Reviews that talk about how popular something is, how influential it is, or how “unique” it is are not commenting on the music — they’re talking about the scene, the fans, the market — and as such as tangential.

Descriptive

Oh look, someone talking about the music.

Pandemic Genocide doesn’t stray too far away from the established Vader/Behemoth territory, although perhaps slightly simplified in execution and with a hint of Immolation mixed in, as well. This is not exactly a problem, in my opinion, as that is prime real estate to explore, and there are 666 metric tons of great, memorable riffs here. To carve out a more unique identity, PG occasionally slows down and gets a little atmospheric, which maybe works the best in the excellent “Arcana Mortem.” These guys also have no problem with faster tempos, as is evidenced in the amazing title track, and really all over the place, with surgical precision. – Metal Curse

Here we have a description of the aesthetics of the music that’s succinct and complete. We know what we need to know about the style. Some assessment of how well it pulls that off, and how the riffs are written and how the song structures work, and most importantly, what sort of artistic content (narrative of moods, progression of ideas) is enclosed, …well, that would be nice. But it’s not going to happen in a one-paragraph review, which is the smart format to do if you’re going to write 5000 reviews like that writer has. He covers every area of metal in a way few can.

And another:

One could have sworn Verhern and fellow label mates Kargvint are the very same band; both sound and musical approach of these otherwise twin bands is almost identical, and even though they do not share any band member between them (Kargvint being a one-man show), Verhern’s self-titled album is so much like Kargvint’s excellent Seelenwerks Fortgang (reviewed on Diabolical Conquest not long ago), it’s uncanny. Verhern, unlike Kargvint, is comprised of three members; the usual classic metal ensemble of a couple of guitars, bass, vocals, a drum set as well as some distant keyboards, buried so deep in the mix, they are ghost-like, hovering above the music occasionally, adding to it an eerie flair, not unlike Burzum’s key work on Filosofem’s opening track Dunkelheit. Again, as was the case with Kargvint’s album, dismissing Verhern’s debut is almost a natural response upon listening to it for the first time; shallow, hollow and derivative, uninspired at best and primitive at the very worst were the first impressions registered by this reviewer who was ready to tear this album apart a second before he actually listened to this musical work carefully, with unbiased ears and clear mind. This is good music in the sense it emanates emotions in abundance; from the heartfelt vocals to the sensual, despairing riffs, the whole creates a thick, relentless atmosphere of pain and sorrow, and a sense of transcendence. The metal of Verhern is fleeting and intuitive, not your usual gut-wrenching heaviness and sonic violence; on the contrary, here the music walks the more humble, insinuative paths, always distant and estranged, touching-not-touching, creating waves of black ambiance and generating almost erotic beauty. – Diabolical Conquest

While this reviewer is almost certainly overpraising this album, he’s making an honest and clear attempt to talk about what’s inside of it. The style is well-known enough that he dismisses it with a sentence or two, then launches into a description of what the music attempts to evoke. For example, Pantera likes to evoke righteous rage and a desire to hump fenceposts. Slayer used to evoke a mythic sense of occult warfare. Opeth evokes a desire to become pacifistic, navel-gazing, sensitive and on bottom during violent gang anal rape scenes. The review contrasts the techniques used in the music to what it attempts to evoke; the only weakness is, perhaps, that the description of emotions is too inclusive and thus vague.

You can see how some people are out there being “successful” by hyping stuff; they’re also not elitists, they’re egalitarians, for the most part. In their view, albums are not good or bad, but “different” and perhaps niche-bound. Other people are more hellbent on describing the music and so, by the natural process forced on them by the writing they do, they’re finding out which music stands above the rest by not being “unique” in some random combination, but by having something interesting to express and expressing it well.