Opinions: Underground Metal Disagrees With Mainstream Political Trend

It's a mistake to assume mainstream journalists have intent behind their words. Like anyone selling a product, they dress up their output so it will be popular. And what is more popular than an easy message? Be good to the less fortunate, feel better about yourself, and everything will work out allright. There is no need to struggle for something besides your own pleasures.

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

"Metal is expanding and evolving and becoming more diverse," said Canadian anthropologist and filmmaker Sam Dunn, who directed "Metal: A Headbanger's Journey," released on DVD this summer. "It's at a much more vibrant state than it was even five or 10 years ago."

"It's becoming global and it's becoming a tool for social and political commentary," Dunn said. "It takes on a greater meaning in countries where people have had to struggle to survive. It takes on a much stronger political tone."

Metal music in the 1980s was often homophobic and "very white," she said, but current bands tend to be socially conscious and suspicious of political power. There's also more women in the audience -- and fronting the bands.

The lyrics on Lamb of God's two most recent albums have been expressly political, and the politics lean heavily to the left.

Napalm Death's Greenway is considering work as a political activist when his metal days are over, but he doesn't think metal will ever completely stray from hedonistic and supernatural themes. - official USA news network article

This is the mentality F.W. Nietzsche referred to as "slave revolt." It does not aspire to great things, like architecture and art and grand civilization ("politics"), but toward the pacification of the individual through material means. Cultures that embrace this mentality are on a downward path because they will no longer create anything great and, in stagnation, will collapse from lack of direction and the ensuing selfishness of their members.

It is not surprising that mainstream media misunderstands underground metal. After all, they virtually forced its creation, since any band darker or heavier than Metallica received no recognition; the media wanted to sell us metal as party-lovin', loud and crazy rock music. And so while the underground bloomed in 1985 to 1996, they praised stadium heavy metal and hard rock bands. During the current time, they embrace as "metal" music that is mostly emo hardcore: metalcore and nu-metal.

To avoid this public consensual reality that had nothing to do with actual reality, metal bands went underground and established a parallel system of labels, distros, stores and venues. To get into this underground, one had to do independent research outside of the mainstream sources of music -- mall stores, big mailorder, TV and radio -- through methods like tape trading, underground zines, and personal connection to undergroundmetalheads (the most common method).

Since 1997, this has changed: underground metal is available in mall stores and Amazon.com and eBay, and consequently, the underground has faded out like indie rock and punk music did into increasing irrelevance. It has lost its fighting spirit and has relapsed into its identity as "different" without recognizing what made it different: it saw hope for the future in ideas outside of the same accepted dogma all the mainstream newspapers, television and radio sell to us because it is a popular product.

Far from being alone in this, underground metal has fallen into a general trend of independent art producers seceding from reality. "Literature" has collapsed into a few thousand tiny magazines read by no one but MFA candidates in creative writing, and "visual art" has become a network of small galleries selling cute expensive paintings to uninformed patrons. Even classical music has gotten in on the decline, with "new music" -- micro-symphonies of human voices, squeaking dissonant noise, and other trendy types of sound -- appreciated by a diehard cult following who need a raison d'etre outside of their civil service jobs.

These genres used to speak an independent voice, but now they repeat lockstep the strange formulation of modern liberal democracy -- a "neo-conservative" viewpoint which both champions civil rights and "social issues," but also affirms the need for a strong economy and constant warfare against evil enemies. Political theorists might try to make sense of it, but it is more direct to understand it this way: popularity sells.

"One could argue that American fiction has ghettoized itself by insisting on a self-reifying view (humanist/materialist?) in which all answers are known, the political binary is carved in stone, we all have swallowed whole certain orthodoxies, and the purpose of the fiction is just to reinforce these. At the heart of this lies a selfish agenda, that has (one could argue) really ceased seeing the world as a unity, and has begun aggressively internalizing certain capitalist dogmas that say: Of course you are the most important thing, of course you exist separate from the rest of the world." - George Saunders, in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

Let us look away from the media trend and see what it is that metal has believed as a constant developing curve over its three 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 attributes of heavy metal music were present in heavy metal (Symptom of the Universe by Black Sabbath), speed metal (Escape by Metallica), death metal (Triumph of Death by Hellhammer) and black metal (anything by Emperor, Immortal, Burzum or Mayhem). More examples await your discovery.

If we had to summarize metal as an artistic movement, it would be fair to say it has more in common with European Romantic art than the popular music and boutique art of our present era. Like the Romantics, it sought a transcendence in accepting the world's inequality and horror and using it as a relative opposite against which to project challenges; it wants to bring back the fighting spirit of an ancient time, and give us independent thinking and goals instead of buying us off with the humanist-materialist tripe that the mainstream media proclaims -- dogma which, interestingly, has failed to solve a single widespread problem of humanity.

Metal music desires transcendence: finding the beauty in darkness by accepting the physical struggle that is life, and instead of trying to run away from that struggle into personal material comfort, accepting it as something that gives significance to our existences. Metal music desires to overcome our fear of death and of nature, and by accepting them, to show us a new world of meaning.

It is not surprising that people have wanted to quash metal for years. If one is underconfident, or afraid of inadequacy, it is a terrifying message. You might die, after all (nevermind that inevitably we all do). The "slave mentality" Nietzsche describes is one that runs in fear of transcendence into the welcoming low-entrance-fee arms of materialist humanism and pleasure-seeking individualism, and metal if anything is a force combatting this slavish worldview.

What does a metalhead do, when the entire world seems to follow one dogma and that dogma is unrealistic? First, recognize that not everyone follows this; only people who are by personality slavish believe what they see on their television screens. Like many, they may simply be abuse cases: made to feel inadequate by financial struggle, sexually molested by their parents, or simply shamed and guilted into submission by the "accepted" voices of society. Those who have found clarity of thought run away from this slavish mentality.

You have a voice: The top 30 metal forums are visited by over 100,000 people a day. 30-50,000 visit ANUS.com. You probably talk to another dozen metalheads, and if you send out a notice on MySpace.com (#1 site by traffic on the internet) you can reach more. Metal is not dead -- the spiritedness of metal lives as long as you fight for it. - a poster on Metal Hall Forums

Second, don't give in to the trend-dogma: assert the real metal wherever you go. When some mainstream news article plumps sheepish conformist "metalheads" in your face, remember to ignore those idiots and concentrate on the real bands and promote the best of them to your friends (the most effective method). Do not accept some band because it says it is metal. Accept only those that demonstrate the spirit of resurrecting our fighting spirit, and ignore the rest as they are transient garbage like the rest of modern society.