On an intuitive level, we can tell that some black metal sucks, and some is good. The difference mostly has to do with the state of mind of the musicians.

When a musician is in a sane frame of mind, they want to show us a journey that parallels life. They are passing along learning, as all art does, but they’re doing it in a form that shows us the experience, and not the conclusions.

Lazy musicians, propagandists and idiots take another approach. They view a song as a binary proposition, with a good and a bad represented directly by parts of a song.

You can see this in all boring or pointless art: there is no journey, no struggle, no learning. The characters or objects in the art face a dark evil, then suddenly see the light, go to the other side and everything is OK. That light can be God, Satan, liberalism, Nazism, sex, drugs or any ideal. It’s just a very basic technique that’s common to people who haven’t thought through the whole “art” side of music.

To them, it’s just music. You find something that sounds cool and hey, that’s all there is to it. This is what mature artists hate about jazz and avantgarde music. They hate “music for music’s sake” that it means nothing, so it either comes with some baggage of theory to “explain” it, or is like that art exhibit where you see a stuffed rabbit impaled with a dildo sitting on a Bible wrapped in a condom, and you’re supposed to think it’s profound.

And when you think about it, all really great art resembles some struggle we’ve faced in our lives. Early black metal sounded like social isolation and a yearning for more in life. It sounded like a rejection of the comfortable sounds of the blues and church music, replacing it with minor key distorted hellhavoc from which elegant melodies somehow emerged. Not what you expected? Or more likely, what you experienced: when you get away from the crazy crowd, and look at nature and your own soul, you find something of greater value than the callow affirmation of “we can all get along, honest” peers.

Bad black metal — and bad metal in general — suffers under what I call the “hot tub” syndrome. Because it is binary, and has a good state and a bad state, and wants us to go from bad to good, the song can have only one major event: the transition. Because that transition cannot be explained by the art itself, but requires added “theory,” it’s random. As a result, the song needs a lot more embellishment to make the transition believable at all.

The result is a lot like this:

Eddie Murphy – James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub

We sing a song of the hot tub — how great it will be to be in the hot tub, how cold it is out here, how lonely we are outside the hot tub, etc. ad nauseam. Then we get into the hot tub, and how warm it is! And then the song ends.

Watch your favorite terrible black metal bands and pay attention to how they compose the songs you hear. Are they two-tone, in/out of the hot tub songs, or like early black metal, are they epics that slowly and subtly build to a point where you are ready to make whatever steps are necessary to get in the hot tub?

There’s an old expression, “to put the cart before the horse,” which I think originated on Brokeback Island.

It’s comparable to two others: “the tail wags the dog” and “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Each one describes a type of superstition. Superstition is what happens when you confuse an event — that occurs at the same time as a certain effect — with being the cause of that effect.

For example, we burned some heretic and then the rains came after a long drought. Therefore, we should burn heretics to get rain. QED, muddafugga.

In music, we can confuse having an ideal with repeating the symbols of that ideal.

Really good music is always motivated by an intense conviction. You belief in something, therefore you make music that sings its praises and uses its opposite to illustrate why it is good. I sing a song of food, which is awesome, and doubly awesome after a famine. Makes sense.

At that level, politics and philosophy — and even religion, and personal preference — are part of the same spectrum. That spectrum is the conclusions you’ve reached. These aren’t preferences, like “I like pink.” They’re adaptations. If burning heretics doesn’t make rain come, but everyone around you is still burning heretics to end the drought, you may become an artist motivated by the idea that burning heretics is stupid. Is that politics? Is it philosophy? Common sense? One thing’s for sure: it’s not semi-arbitrary like choosing to get your new laptop in pink and not green. There are consequences to which choice you pick, and because we live in a consistent world, they’re consistent from observation of effect to cause.

But people who preach the symbol blindly have gone about this process backward. Instead of having a viewpoint that drives the music, they’ve gotten superstitious. Having a certain viewpoint is associated with being smart, or making good music, or having an audience, so they adopt it. It’s the same on left and right this way.

For every bad NSBM band out there, and except for a handful (Legion of Doom, Absurd, Burzum, Darkthrone, Veles, Infernum, Graveland) they’re all bad, I can find a bad crustcore, emo or indie band that is just as banal. People don’t see this if they agree with the politics expressed. To them, Infernum is bad and Wolves in the Throne Room is good, and they won’t admit — superstition again — that the only reason is that they agree with one, or feel that being seen to agree makes them look smarter, nicer or sexier. Whatever.

Liking these bands is a social decision, not a political or intellectual one (or even an emotional one). People want to seem smart or extreme for liking this stuff, so they use the band as a symbol of who they are. Nevermind that in the process, the art — which I’ll loosely define as a means of finding appreciation for life through distinguishing what one finds beautiful versus what one doesn’t — loses out to cheerleading for the “correct” side.

But with the rise of this hilarious offshoot of black metal-flavored crustcore, which people are calling “RABM” for “Red and Anarchist Black Metal,” we’re seeing again that the same rules apply on both sides of the spectrum. Wolves in the Throne Room = Drudkh, to pick the best of these political bands. Even more, we’re seeing that “unblack metal” (UBM, or Christian black metal) is just as bad. That makes sense since modern populist Christianity is as liberal as secular humanism, just that it argues that God makes the individual sacred, instead of the individual being sacred for “moral reasons” and progressive dogma.

RABM, NSBM and UBM are many heads of the same hydra, which is a deranged mental state that puts the social and symbolic associations of a band before the music. Instead of finding ideas, and making music about them, they find the appearance of ideas and try to use that to convince you to like their droning mundane music. Like all stupid trends, the sooner this one burns, the closer we get to quality music.

For the last five years, they’ve been sitting around wringing their hands saying, “MP3s are coming, what do we do?” In the meantime, many people buy MP3s but even more do not because they know that if the place they bought them from goes bankrupt, they’ll have DRM problems and will not be able to re-download those MP3s if their hard drive crashes or a virus eats their operating system.

But now, the industry is back in fighting form:

The Universal Music Group could rewrite U.S. music pricing when it tests a new frontline pricing structure, which is designed to get single CDs in stores at $10, or below.

Beginning in the second quarter and continuing through most of the year, the company’s Velocity program will test lower CD prices. Single CDs will have the suggested list prices of $10, $9, $8, $7 and $6.

To accommodate the lower pricing, UMG labels also plan to step up deluxe versions of albums that can sell at higher prices for the more devout music fans and collectors. – Billboard

They used to blow off the internet because it’s for nerds, but that changed, and now everyone uses the intertard. Completely weird. But I digress.

The old days of the record industry were big profits. They got these fat profits by signing foolish people like Elvis Presley, Britney Spears and Michael Jackson and having them produce a slightly more quality version of really dumbed-down music. Then they got millions of people to buy it, and reaped record profits. Now, recording is easier and cheaper; you can do it at home and have it sound like a studio. CD pressing is cheaper. Even advertising is cheaper. But there’s piracy among those who want very simple things. That means mass piracy of Britney Spears that affects her record sales because her album is most valuable when new, but not much of an effect on a band like Deicide, whose album “Legion” is immortal.

The new industry will be more niche sales, cheaper CDs, and more extras. Bands will record to tour and tour to eat. It’s less of the Brave New World of the 1950-2005 record industry, and more of a dose of reality that was there all the time.

Take old thrash bands like DRI, SOD and throw in a dash of The Misfits, and you get Birth A.D. from Austin. They write short songs with punk/metal riff hybrids. They’re funny and insightful. Even more, they scorn your civilization. They are a mocking voice of discrimination against stupidity.

And now, they’re going to help destroy SXSW, the music festival in Austin. They’re going to overturn the overflowing portapotties! Smash the overpriced drinks! Disruptive the self-indulgent, navel-gazing indie rock tripe that passes for “profound” among the clueless! And probably sodomize some eardrums.

They’ll be a Headhunter’s on Saturday, 3/20 at midnight. For more information, see the SXSW show directory or read the Examiner article.

When in hipster-infested, poseur-ridden, hippie-aggrandizing, ego-centric, egalitarian and oblivious Austin, don’t get AIDS (there’s really nothing else to recommend there, except maybe seeing the FREE Voivod show).