Take a sneak peek at this fascinating chart: over the last few months, interest in hipster “indie metal” and “post-metal” bands has been fading like interest in a Justin Bieber death metal album. This could explain the vast nervousness and agitation among that group, who had a ten-year window to take over metal and use it for their own ends by replacing the original metal fans with a larger audience of quasi-mainstream SJW-style indie hipsters.
But they have failed.
As Google trends reveals, hipstermetal has been a flash in the pan, and these bands that received huge media attention from SJW journalists have collapsed. Even much more extreme and abrasive and non-hipster bands maintain a surprising degree of relative popularity in comparison to the dying indie/hipster metal trend.
Even Windir is more popular even today than Liturgy and Wolves in the Throne Room combined. Why is it that even though all these bands try so damn hard to sound like real black metal, true fans can always tell? Moreover, people with the true metalhead personality always end up gravitating to the real stuff. I think that’s because of psychological makeup and possibly even genetics related to brain structure.
In other news, the henhouse is clucking. But how they will be screeching when the destruction specialists appear for the first time. The anticipation is unbearable. The savoring of the flavor of the moment, as SJWs realize their gambit failed and they have now again been reduced to being low-paid entry-level workers in a world that does not care about their “Male Tears” mugs and bold, independent, brave and different social justice opinions…
Metal — and everything else humanity-related — is like the first day of first grade. People are still using the same tactics they used then as the basis of their behavior, mainly because there are only so many options and the goal hasn’t changed.
What is the goal? Society is a cooperation for the sake of survival. We need to get other people to work with us. Most people do that through socializing, others use raw power, some others can only deal with it through the filter of money. But when you socialize, there are only a few paths. You can try to be the over-achiever, with all As and good at athletics. Or you can stand out another way, which is being The Opposite of what people expect. You see this in high school drama departments the clearest, but it’s also present in entertainment and politics among adults.
The tactic is this: stand out by being “different.”
The problem with this tactic of course is that it’s bone-headed, ignorant and predictable. They like blue? You like green. They turn right? You turn left. They like steak? You pick ice cream. Despite it being obvious as heck, this tactic continues to work. You “shock” people and then, using their reaction as a justification for the importance of what you do, rally everyone who hates them to your side. Even if that hatred is concealed.
With their much-lauded second album, “Sunbather,” the group broadened the black metal palate with swelling, enveloping guitars oft-associated with the foot-asleep-on-the-distortion-pedal drone of the British shoegazer ranks.
The album won the band an audience beyond the traditional partisans of the harsh, love-it-or-leave-it sound, and as such, Deafheaven was quickly branded a hipster act by scene purists.
In the same passage, the article both calls Deafheaven “different” and then acknowledges that the band is basically ripping off British shoegaze, a genre from thirty years ago.
That’s “innovation”?
Since 1994, we haven’t really had much from black metal. The underground shot its wad, and since only a few dozen people understood it in the first place, it collapsed in on itself while the rest of us try to figure it out. This is one reason that metal academia is important, especially if they stop studying the easy stuff — the newer material and the hard rock like bands — and go to the roots of the genre: Bathory, Immortal, Hellhammer, Burzum, Emperor, Darkthrone, Enslaved, Sodom, Slayer, Mayhem.
Right now our over-written (“foot-asleep-on-the-distortion-pedal”? are you kidding?) media and adamantly clueless fanbase are churning through the ruins of the past. By being “different,” one claims an audience. Black metal was different in a different way, namely that it didn’t try to be different so much as it took off in its own path. So what’s the binary opposite of that? Well, being the same old thing but pretending to be black metal, for starters. Hence the invasion of metal by non-metal bands: Opeth, Boris, Necrophagist, Sonic Youth, Dillinger Escape Plan.
Most of these bands reverted to what was simple and easy to create, which was post-hardcore. With its compositional style that cherished the random over the orderly, and its tendency to drift off and suddenly return to a repetition of its major theme, it was easy to compose. That was probably why it developed the way it did, namely that the punk songwriters who couldn’t come up with Hard Times in an Age of Quarrel or Arise! had to make their also-ran status seem less pointless by “innovating,” or coming up with a half-cooked version of more musically adept genres. Imitators imitating imitators, by being “different,” all the way down.
Deafheaven is no exception. Gone are the complex song structures and the intelligent use of drone. Gone are the troublesome Nietzschean existential questions, where we wonder if life is totally empty of anything, or if we can find a clue to its significance in nature. Gone are even the overtones of Viking metaphysics and Pagan mysticism, the interesting sociopathy for art’s sake, and the rebellious streak that took aim at anything the instant it became accepted, knowing that whatever the crowd likes is a lie. Instead, we get the music you can play at a school dance. Easy beats, head-nodding go-nowhere melodies, symmetry and rock ‘n’ roll conventions from time immemorial. It’s the same old brand new thing.
But really, this act of “being different” can be seen everywhere. Nu-metal was based on being different, or at least on the perceived emotional contrast between sing-song verses and ragey choruses. Metalcore was based on being different in that the riffs had no relation to each other so it was like hearing carnival music on a fast-moving merry-go-round. Later punk was based on being different, in that it was punk but it got in touch with its softer side and went all progressivey and stuff. All different, all the same.
Metal will begin to recover from its 1994-2014 slump when it acknowledges that these easy ways of socializing are gone. Appearance is not reality. The kid who really got ahead in socializing was the kid no one noticed. He made friends by being genuine, made connections with teachers by learning something even if he didn’t get As at all, and everyone knew him because he didn’t fit into any of the easy slots that almost everyone else did.
Or the kid who got ahead because she had an interest that was very specific and just fit her personality, so instead of going for all the drama, she just spent her time on that. Or on being a good friend, and being there when people were in need. Those were the people like black metal, which was the genre that chucked socializing away and focused on both outside reality and the inner spirit in all of us instead. I miss those days. It wasn’t pure whore, all the way down.
This issue is about to explode into public discourse because the rise in new-style metal bands has forced this question upon us all.
What is the underground?
Before even reading this article, keep in mind that there are some excellent resources. First, The Heavy Metal FAQ provides a complete answer. Second, Underground Never Dies! is a whole book dedicated to this topic through the eyes of metal bands from the 1980s-1990s underground era.
But we can come up with an even quicker definition.
The 1980s through early 1990s were a different time. Not only was there no internet, but music distribution was fairly strictly defined. Mainstream stores got what the big distributors had from the big labels and a select few smaller labels that pushed their way in. If you wanted a wider selection, you went to an “alternative” music store which stocked smaller labels. Often you bought imports, at a 50% markup. Most stores were completely uninterested in stocking something such as death metal, because it appealed to a small and antisocial niche audience. Why bother with selling a single copy of a Deicide album when you could sell 20 copies of Motley Crue without even trying?
In addition, there were forces of opposition to any metal that was not radio sanitized (which meant speaking on code words, probably encouraging deviant behavior to a greater degree). Very few people now remember when Tipper Gore and her Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) were a powerful lobby for parental warning stickers on questionable albums. In addition, the threat of such people caused record stores to actually card people for buying violent rap or occult metal. You had to be 18 and prove it, or they would not sell to you.
And getting it on radio? There was college radio and also a handful of independent radio stations but these faced the same problem. Why play death metal when you could throw on a few sets of Sonic Youth and Rites of Spring and have 20 times as many listeners? Even among alternative music, death metal was unpopular because it was abrasive and did not have a large social movement behind it which made people like it. NWA was a violent, misogynistic and hilarious rap group that got banned just about everywhere, but there was a large social movement behind their work. It was easier to find that than your average, or even your top-selling, death metal band.
What underground meant back then seemed to be that it was offered through alternative channels. A few record stores, some college radio stations, tiny record labels run on a basically non-profit basis, and photocopied hand-assembled zines made of a pastiche of typed content and tattoo-style margin drawings. How did most people find new music in the early days? They hooked up with pen pals who would mail them cassette tape mixes of new music they found, often dubbed from cassette demos from the bands. Sometimes these tapes were many generations down the line and you could barely hear the band under the crepitant tape noise! But they did the job that mainstream media, record labels and magazines would not.
Toward the middle of the 1990s, this situation relaxed. First, the rise of used CD sales meant that smaller labels were making it into bigger stores via a backdoor. Second, magazines like Spin eventually gave coverage to death metal. Finally, changes in the way music was distributed opened up the middlemen who supplied record stores to the smaller labels. This meant that the traditional split between underground and mainstream was going away. Record labels, scared by the possibility of used CD sales eating up the profits from big mainstream releases, which relied on novelty to sell and interested their audiences for only a few months, started looking toward “niche” sales. But what really blew it out of the water was the notoriety of black metal.
Starting in the mid-1990s, rumors of the black metal movement in Norway and its legacy of violence — church burnings, murders, and stockpiling of military grade weapons — began to leak out through the zines into the magazines. Then the whole drama exploded with the trial of Varg Vikernes, who conveniently also ended the old black metal era with Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, an album so deeply nuanced and impossible to follow that most musicians shrugged and went back to three-chord, “punk style” black metal instead. He raised the bar at the same time bands like Darkthrone codified the genre with Transilvanian Hunger, an album that was difficult to create but easy to mimic. As mentioned in the documentary Until the Light Takes Us, black metal witnessed the decay of an idea. This decay happened through emulation that, because it looked at the outward traits like distortion and blast beats, missed the actual meaning of the genre which caused musicians to make such similar music in the first place.
It’s hard for people to realize now but black metal was initially viewed as slightly touched in the head. Death metalers often hated it violently; almost everyone else seemed to criticize it for its lo-fi approach and almost childish use of blasphemy and antisocial imagery. Many of the albums sounded like they were performed by people who had barely picked up an instrument and might have zero social graces. It was roundly mocked… until it started to become popular. Then the tables were turned. Within five years, black metal was in mainstream record stores (this shift happened in about 1997) and became really popular with a new generation.
After that point, the term “underground” seemed to lose meaning. The internet had come and made music and information about it universally available, and the proliferation of high-powered desktop computers meant that recording an album, running a label or making a zine involved far less labor and looked and sounded a lot better than the DIY labor of the 1980s (or even 1960s-1970s, when proto-punk and punk bands innovated it). At this point, people started going for an “underground sound,” which meant artificial lo-fi, simple three-chord songs, lots of ranting about antisocial topics including the occult, and a deliberately offensive resistance to any positive reinforcement.
The other issue that’s sparked controversy is exactly which bands get press — take Deafheaven and fellow shoegaze black metal band Alcest, who both benefited greatly from non-metal-centric coverage in 2013. The idea of using these bands to open of the gates of metal and let readers discover a new musical genre (or actually take it seriously) is a contentious one. One of the issues is the promotion of palatable metal bands that could potentially reach the masses with a sound that isn’t “metal” in the classic sense. Instead, these bands have been referred to as “extreme,” a catch-all, provocative phrase guaranteed to attract listeners who are looking for a more intense metal fix – and to satiate that self-satisfied outsider-metal “cool factor” that insecure metal fans love to laud over the pop-music contingent.
In the years from 1995-1998, the underground basically rehashed itself. It had no ideas, and more importantly, the bar was raised. To be a good death metal band, you had to be at the level of Morbid Angel’s Covenant or Suffocation’s Pierced From Within. To be a black metal band of note, you had to be at the level of Burzum’s Hvis Lyset Tar Oss or Enslaved’s Frost. Not many bands could do that and so an alternative underground built up based on fan-driven metal. Most of this was in emulation of the previous years and took the form of three-chord simplified versions of the more complex originals. The result was that, outside of a small cluster of people hanging around internet forums, this music went nowhere.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so from 1999-2006 or so, metalcore took over. This was also music designed to be easy to make. It took the randomness aesthetic of late hardcore punk and combined it with death metal riffs, making chaotic songs that made no sense but were plenty distracting and extreme. The music industry flogged this dead horse walking (to brutally mix metaphors) for five years before the trend started to die. Then from 2006 through the present, the music industry took a different tack: instead of trying to make a new genre, emulate something that has worked in the past. They found the fertile ground of the post-hardcore years where indie rock, shoegaze and post-rock coexisted in the same sphere of influence. This was generally what was called “alternative rock” before “alternative rock” became a brand for flannel wearing bittersweet droning hard rock bands from Seattle.
Deafheaven is a polarizing band becomes it comes from this tradition. Listening to it, it is not clear there is any metal in it at all. But labeling something “metal” or “underground” or “extreme” excites interest, mainly because few people trust the aboveground media. Thus there is a huge financial incentive to classify Deafheaven as metal, and for smaller blogs and magazines to go along with this fiction as well, if they do, they get advertising revenue and possibly a shot at the big time.
This leaves us with a complete quandary: does the term “underground” have meaning anymore at all?
My suggestion with my last article, “In defense of elitism,” was that underground is a misused term. The point is that metal has a spirit which defines it and separates it from everything else. That spirit must be expressed but it is of a nature that does not trust the dominant paradigm. Black Sabbath wrote their music to rain on the hippie parade of love, drugs and pacifism; their point was that altering our perspective does not change reality. Underground metal had a similar message and was unwilling to alter it in order to fit with the expectations of people who would rather hear about the denial fictions of love, drugs and pacifism (underground rap did the same thing in parallel, but with a different set of issues and a different set of denial fictions).
What makes a metal band underground is that it is unwilling to compromise its vision of truth for what people want to believe is true. It is unwilling to compromise its aesthetics for what people believe is comfortable and pleasant. It is committed to the idea that the only legitimacy comes from the art itself, not its popularity or album sales. Some would identify this as the ultimate non-“bourgeois” statement, in that it casts aside comfortable oblivion in favor of a raw blast of cold hard reality. This sense of underground is more fundamental than how the albums are sold or which zines write about them. It is an attitude and discipline. Underground means that which puts truth first and popularity second, which is a dramatic reversal of the way everyone else goes about it.
Metal is not the only genre to have an underground. Punk was originally underground but as it became fashionable in the late 1970s hardcore punk bands started vanishing into squats, playing midnight parties in abandoned foundries, and selling their music on 7″ records out of shirtsleeves. The noise movement in Japan remains underground to this day, with artists like K.K. Null constructing elaborate and beautiful pieces from raw noise, instead of making harsh blasting rebellious stuff like record labels had hoped. Robert Fripp, former guitarist of King Crimson, uses electronics to make his guitar sound like an organ and plays small concerts across the world. Underground is not a term specific to metal, but a term to describe any activity that is not encouraged in society at large yet believes it has ideological, artistic and/or political value.
You aren’t going to hear about any of these artists in big media and you may not be able to buy their CDs in regular stores. However, that is the symptom, not the cause. The reason they’re not in regular stores is that they’re not only niche, but also not given to comfortable oblivion. In a time when people can choose the artistic equivalent of a cheeseburger over the more challenging and substantive art, people tend to do so, which marginalizes actual art. As a result, the actual art is alien and threatening to most people, which makes it a terrible product, which means that it ends up in small record stores, small zines, and small labels.
If anything, the internet has exacerbated this tendency. In an age when we can find anything by googling it, the real problem is knowing what to google. Even worse, Google uses a search engine algorithm that moves higher links up the chain, thus burying marginalized results. We have all the information in the world but without a guide to it, none of us know what to do with it. It is for this reason that traditional media has won out on the net and the sites that attract the most eyes are the ones that are promoting essentially mainstream music.
What Deafheaven represents to a metaler is the triumph of mainstream music. There is nothing in Deafheaven that challenges the listener to even a second of soul-searching or discovery, or whatever it is that art does — that’s a separate debate — in contrast to what death metal and black metal provoked in us. Deafheaven in fact is the listening equivalent of wallpaper, a pleasant series of repeated images that make us think about shopping, perhaps. Whether it is bad music or not is irrelevant. “The medium is the message,” we’re told, and in the case of Deafheaven, the medium is inoffensive pop pretending to be “extreme.”
Since then, anything “new” and “innovative” done in metal has involved musicians stepping outside the boundaries of the genre more and more. Shoegaze, industrial, post-punk, krautrock, progressive rock, jazz, trance, dubstep. It’s been happening gradually over the past ten years, but Deafheaven’s 2013 album Sunbather just might be the first major splintering that will eventually see “extreme music” separating completely from actual heavy metal. Although my opinion on the album has already been published and will not change, it remains the most critically acclaimed album of 2013, of any genre, marking the first time an album that has occupied that grey area between “metal” and “extreme music” has captured the attention of so many mainstream critics and audiences. Some critics still call Sunbather “metal”, but to do so is to forget what makes heavy metal heavy metal in the first place, merely clutching to the few metallic threads in an otherwise richly varied musical fabric. In reality, Sunbather is a tremendous example of extremity transcending the metal ethos entirely.
In other words, there’s a reason Deafheaven doesn’t sound like Beherit, Demoncy, Imprecation, Blaspherian or any of the other bands which have resurrected the underground sound over the past five years. Deafheaven represents the mixing of mainstream sounds into underground metal, while Beherit represents underground metal growing and developing on its own terms.
If anything, the underground is in a renaissance because it has finally escaped the old standard of lo-fi music sold on cassettes/vinyl through dodgy mail orders and reported on only by small zines. We have gone from alienated from society to accepted (grudgingly) by society, and so now we are “niche” music. But what defines this niche is that it is underground. We face the hidden truths and evoke concealed emotions, and thrust a fist in the face of oblivion. That is what makes us underground, and it’s why the masses chose Deafheaven over Demoncy to report on as a face of extreme music.
