I was listening to Lord Wind Atlantean Monument today, and while I’ve been of a long time of the opinion that this CD is the culmination of many themes he started with the second Lord Wind and fourth Graveland albums, now I’m seeing the pure simple truth of it: it’s the completion of his vision, as if enabling him to move on to something else.

Similarly, Profanatica’s latest is the culmination of all the rushed demos and early Havohej/Profanatica albums put together. It reminds me of how the first Master album summarizes Deathstrike and the unreleased 1985 material, and how the STP record then summarizes the next four years of work.

Some might say the latest from Immolation is also of this nature: artist learns his or her art the hard way, by practicing it, and finally reaches a maturity of both artistry and mind, and so summarizes themes that could not be expressed before but ran through their formative works.

I would argue that in an odd way, Immortal Blizzard Beasts is of this nature, although it doesn’t approach the grandeur of the early black metal. Rather, it develops on what the death metal demos wanted to be, a vision of what death metal would be with the passion of black metal.

To some degree, Averse Sefira Advent Parallax is this way also, combining that Deicide-style technicality with the Demilich quirkiness, and then mixing into it nineteen years of melodic black metal.

These albums are immensely satisfying in this light, like finally hearing the second side of a conversation heard years ago in that moment before dropping off to sleep, when everything seems of mythological symbolism. It’s like accepting death in triumph.

Rock music, at its core, was a product of the suburbs. Kids saw how fake it was to run away from problems to a boring little world where there was no hope of adventure. They also finally had money, because they were gonna need cars to get around.

Marketers saw this and started selling them country music sped up with black vocal styles, except made white, because the audience was completely white. It’s important to note that rock and blues were a scam. Nothing in them did not pre-exist, but by making some elements of what did exist outlandish, the marketers were able to claim it was new.

As a result, rock promised the other side of adventure, but it made a fatal mistake, and chose to idolize only the things that suburban life did not celebrate: sex, drugs/alcohol, staying out late, breaking laws, and so on. As a result, it wasn’t a different way as much as an inverse of the current way, and it rewarded those who didn’t take it seriously and so went on to become bankers and be comfortable.

Metal was a rebellion against this, in that in the midst of the summer of love, Black Sabbath were preparing to unleash something that sounded like a horror movie and had the same dark topicality which wasn’t about any single human. Rock was about the individual escaping by doing the forbidden, but metal was about finding the forbidden, esoteric truth to reality, which is that the individual is frail.

The horror movie concept — new horror arises, existing methods don’t work against it, people must struggle against the panic and delusion of others to survive, and finally may or may not conquer it by using cold cruel logic — was echoed in all of metal with some exceptions for the productization of Black Sabbath, heavy metal from 1972 to 1978, and the liberalization of speed metal that occurred as it assimilated hardcore in a time when we all feared the Republican candidate (who, as it turns out, was right more than wrong, but that’s the advantage of experience talking: ignore people who whine during conservative administrations, because most of them are just making a fashion statement).

Death metal was the flourishing of this concept, but it brought metal to a stop-point. All of metal up until that point had preserved its ludic, or playful, side, but death metal was coming dangerously close to being boring protest music like grindcore band Napalm Death and their mediocre forefather, the Dead Kennedys. Protest music is the music of those without souls who wail so someone else might save them. It’s impotent. Death metal took one look at that abyss and self-destructed.

The question was: if modern society is so awful that it resembles a horror movie, and the suburban lifestyle is just a manifestation of that society, and reinforcing “only death is real” removes the illusion, how do we reconstruct or build a new and better society? The answer came in black metal: turn toward the Romantic past, and unite it with a future where those who aren’t befuddled exterminate all the others and move on. Quintessential Nietzschean overman theory, merged with British Romantic poetry (Blake, Wordsworth) and American Gothic (Poe).

However, all through these years, metal has carried along the baggage from rock, which is idiots who “just want to have a good time,” which is the hipster code-word for do nothing but further the decay, because they’ve already given up on themselves. If metal doesn’t break the rock barrier, it will be dragged down into irrelevance, but I warned you of that back in 1992, so it shouldn’t be rocket science.

In discussing the Enlightenment, we stressed that it arose, in large part, as a strong reaction against what had characterized the previous one hundred and fifty yearsa series of inconclusive but extremely destructive religious quarrels and, often under the guise of religious issues, collisions between rival nations growing in power. From this perspective, the Enlightenment we can view as Western civilization’s attempt to seek through reason a means of understanding human problems and discussing them without involving conflicting traditions, especially religious traditions, which, given the loss of unity in the Christian Church, provided no longer a continuing way of reaching a consensus.
…
All of our political options, no matter what we call them (Liberal, Progressive Conservative, Christian Democrats, Social Credit, New Democratic Party, Republican, Democrat, or whatever) all adhere to this Enlightenment program. We have no significant electoral options outside of this tradition. The parties may quarrel about the extent of government control, about rates of taxation, about support programs, but underneath the apparent richness of choice there is a massive fundamental agreement about how society ought to be organized, what priorities society ought to pursue. This is particularly true of North America, since both America and AIDSland were founded as Enlightenment experiments and have no traditions from before this period, other than the Aboriginal cultures, which have been generally marginalized or exterminated in the service of this agenda.
…
There seems to be considerable agreement that what happened in that period we call the Romantic Era (in England from 1798 to about 1840) was of almost unparalleled significance, not simply in the amazing resurgence of quality in English poetry but also in our very understanding of art. Isaiah Berlin, a very well known historian of ideas, called the Romantic Movement the single most important shift in the sensibility of Western thinking since the fifth century BC.
…
In a spirit of boldness I want to offer the following idea as central to what was truly revolutionary about the shift known as the Romantic Movement: it marked for many people (although not for all) the abandonment of the idea that there was a given order in nature; it posited the notion that order was something not discovered in nature but created by the human mind. In words of John Adams: Chaos is the law of nature; order the dream of man.

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/introser/romantic.htm

The Enlightenment was the idea of rationality, and his definition of Romanticism is probably limited, because while it celebrated human choice it based itself on the antiquities and beauty of nature.

I think death metal, more profoundly than black metal, understood that the Enlightenment was a rejection of nature along with the church, and that the best aspects of Romanticism were its praises of nature and the chaotic, bloody, struggle-bound process by which our world came about.

Praising death as having meaning, for example, totally shits all over the idea from this author’s “Romanticism” rejects the order of nature. And one more from a Romantic poet.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; (1)
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, (2)
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus (3) rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton (4) blow his wreathed horn.

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/wordsworth.html

This reminds me quite a bit of this:

As a “rational” being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them.
…
At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence. In comparison with its previous conduct, everything that it now does bears the mark of dissimulation, just as that previous conduct did of distortion. The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it.

Paradoxically, death metal is in praise of life, not by mourning death but by cheering its order in a time of insane delusion. I found that particularly fascinating.

Several threads here (Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, the various Venom arguments, and the Swedish DM thread in particular) have focused my interest on the question of abstraction in metal. It seems to me that key factor separating the classic albums that emerged between say 1988-1995 and both the first couple of generations of heavy metal and most of what has appeared since is the level of abstraction the great classics achieved.

The great inherent weakness of rock based metal was always its insipid literalism. With bands like Venom, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Cannibal Corpse, Cradle of Filth etc., neither music nor concept leaves much to the imagination. Such bands fill their musical spaces with the utterly predictable and their conceptual spaces with lyrics that are painfully self-explanatory. Metaphor and other more oblique approaches to communication are lacking on every level.

In contrast, death metal bands like At the Gates, Incantation, Deicide, Dismember, Therion, Atheist and Demilich introduced music that worked almost as if according to dream logic, as if calculated to leave an ambivalent interpretive space. Among such bands, the juxtaposition of seemingly opposing elements (consonance and dissonance, blasting and doomy passages, violence and beauty) served to create an ambiguous sensibility that embodied both the dissolution of the modern age and the haunting possibility of rebirth.

In black metal, this tendency was even more highly developed, with many bands projecting their music almost entirely into intellectual spaces defined by ideal rather than by fidelity to the current historical moment. Some bands did so through an embrace of the heroic past (Bathory, Burzum, Graveland and Enslaved), while others set their music in worlds that exist only in the mind (Immortal and Summoning).

An Abstract Revolution in Metal?

Some good points made here. Abstraction is a removal from the human perspective, but can be easily abused, because to idiots, the Unicorn in the sky and the the theory of relativity are both either “magic” or “stupid.”

Every Sunday, I get to watch some of my neighbors get rather pretentiously dressed up (ball caps and shorts replaced by chumpy suits) and go off, ostentatiously, to a local church that has plastic floor to ceiling windows, an overhead projection screen and a PA. I think they hand out Ritz crackers and MD 20/20 during communion as well. To adjust the balance of creativity and stupidity in the universe, I often spend the time they’re at church fixing stuff up with the metal site, forum, audiofile, etc.

One thing that came to mind this Sunday was something mentioned in another thread: metal has an anti-human feel to it, in that it’s not about the individual experience, but the experience. It’s like a battlefield condensed into a moral and structural sense, instead of the narrative of some relatively weak individual (”Day 1: Shat myself in terror. Day 2: Died searching for stream to clean beshitted trousers.”).

In my learnings of transcendentalism, I’ve found a similar balance. To transcend is to get out of the individual (exclusively) and to look toward the whole of the experience, to find a role in it which complements its whole. Modern people usually find a role they think fits them and their lifestyles and their neuroses, but this tends to make them even less stable and more manic, because if you only look after yourself your world is less stable and more weak. In the same way, people take comfort in things bigger than themselves as they approach death: oh well, at least my family / this forest / my art / my petrified feces lives on.

Metal by being anti-human is in many ways the most human music I’ve heard, because it escapes the personal pretense to be honest, and in describing what is the effort of summed humans it shows us what greatness is. It helps us escape ourselves and our trivial, tedious, mundane daily struggles. A job was lost, a car was wrecked, a girlfriend left, diarrhea splattering polyester legs… but look at the beauty of the struggle as a whole, like a night sky or a mountain or a vast architecture or a work of genius art summarizing three generations of thinkers.

Someone here mentioned abstraction in metal, and I found it a good observation, if abstraction is taken to mean this transcendental, anti-human, post-human, holistic sense. The opposite of abstraction is to descend into the self, and the social and physical pleasures that self thinks it needs (weak, human); the abstraction is the rising above, the seeing the big picture and why it is meaningful.

Only death is real… and only ideals can be more important than death.

If I could point to one evil at the root of this society, it is that we are careful not to offend. This happens because we manipulate one another for the sake of making profit. We use each other. To keep this illusion from driving us nuts, we hide it behind an elaborate politeness that is one part respect and two parts marketing.

Heavy metal is inherently against this culture of not offending. First, it tackles the brutal truths like mortality that are “heavy” and no one else wants to take on. Second, it is anti-human, in that it is not about personal experience but vast epics of battle, civilization fall, demonic occultism, etc. It’s not the love songs of rock or punk.

While it is extremely rare to find references to antiquity in some kinds of popular music (e.g. funk, rap, pop), such themes are a dominant characteristic of the genre known as heavy metal. Classical motifs are ubiquitous here. Names of groups include Roman Empire, Ancient Ceremony, Emperor, Tiberius’ Minnows and Satyricon. Latin is regularly employed in the titles of metal bands (e.g. Imperium, Ars Occulta, Sacramentum, Ad Patres) as well as in the names of records (e.g. “Odium Omnia Imperat”, “Mediolanum Capta Est”, “Finis Malorum”, “Nemesis Divina”); indeed, some groups (e.g. Imperator Noctis and Nile) have recorded entire songs in ancient languages. It is common, too, for individual members of heavy metal groups to adopt aliases inspired by people or places from antiquity: examples include Caligula, Tritonis, Satyr and Zephyrus. Moreover, heavy metal is permeated with allusions to Classical mythology (e.g. Icarus, Odysseus, Hades, Atlantis). The genre also contains frequent references to specific events in Greek, Roman and Egyptian history (e.g. the laws of Draco, Trajan’s conquests in Dacia, the Battle of Kadesh). A 1986 song by the British metal group Iron Maiden deals with the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the opening line of the song - “My son, ask for thyself another kingdom, for that which I leave is too small for thee” &endash; is a translation from Plutarch (Alexander 6..

Examples, then, are legion. Several explanations may be offered for the phenomenon. For one thing, exponents of heavy metal music often claim that they feel alienated from modern society. Because of this, they find solace in the personalities, beliefs and tales from ancient civilizations instead (medieval themes also recur in the genre). Moreover, heavy metal is an aggressive form of music: songs frequently address issues that reflect the darker aspects of human experience - warfare, tyranny and death. Antiquity is replete with stories of brutality and vice. Paganism is another common theme of the music, particularly in subgenres of heavy metal such as “death metal” and “black metal”: again, the past furnishes paradigms. And a few additional theories about the appeal of the ancient world to musicians can be ascertained from an article written by Iggy Pop, lead singer of the seminal 1970s heavy metal/punk band The Stooges, where he explains the reasons for his keen interest in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Apocalyptic death rock, indeed.

Though it’s since become an almost respectable commodity in society, heavy metal music in the 1980’s was perceived as a real threat by the self-proclaimed “Moral Majority”: the parents, teachers, and legislators in America (they had their counterparts in other countries as well). Its image, sound, and lyrics - as well as the wild behavior of metalheads in concert venues and out on the streets - painted a dire picture in the minds of those stalwart proponents of the status quo.

The PMRC was formed in 1984 by Tipper Gore (wife of Democratic senator Al Gore), Susan Baker (wife of James Baker, then secretary of the treasury) and several other Washington Wives (of ten percent of the senate, to be precise). Considering alarming rises in teen violence and suicide, the group put forth the theory that rock music and lyrics were to blame. Censorship of extreme music was certainly nothing new in the world; South Korea, for example,. had banned heavy metal on its (all government owned) radio stations in 1975, and metalheads had been given haircuts courtesy of its scissor-weilding police.

Frank Zappa addressed the irony of the PMRC’s attacking artistic expression rather than the problems within the youth community that they claimed to be so concerned about. But to the moral majority, music was to blame for youth corruption in the first place. The implication seemed to be that, without heavy metal and other types of music considered subversive, every kid would be happy and healthy despite living in an era that witnessed skyrocketing divorce, environmental destruction, Reaganomics, the AIDS scare, and a score of other social woes.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/126087/the_pmrc_and_the_80s_crusade_against.html

The PMRC was founded in 1985, only two years after Bathory, Slayer and Hellhammer made extreme metal possible, although it was destined to occur for some time. This was how America reacted: crush the outsider music.

It’s interesting that although rap was mentioned as well, the intent to censor that fell off after only a few years, while “satanic” metal continued to be demonized. People are stupid as bricks, Vol. MCLXXVII

Ask yourself something: why does metal get so little mention in the media, in fact just about nothing at all?

It’s like there’s an invisible veil between safe topics and unsafe topics.

We know it’s not because metal is small, since the media frequently covers tiny rallies and fairs and protests.

We know it’s not because they avoid covering media topics, since they’re awash in various bands.

It might be the indie nature of it, since the media doesn’t seem to mention ANYTHING that does not benefit either:

a) an advertiser
b) the morbid, prurient, neurotic public interest

But that doesn’t really make sense, since they do mention and profile indie and local artists.

Is it because there’s something threatening about metal?

Maybe that it doesn’t follow the normal, accepted, moral pattern of events?

It is melodic and achromatic and lawless: it does not have the usual harmonic control points of rock music. And it’s not rock music. Like Kraftwerk, it sounds like classical. Like punk, it sounds like an alienated roar from hell. And when was the last time the media mentioned punk bands that weren’t from LA, and were hardcore, not punk?

I have yet to see the “National Geographic Special on Discharge.”

I argue that metal is not acceptable for its views. It is masculine, assertive, and warlike. It does not toe the line of liberalized ideology, which comprises both conservative and liberal parties at this time. It does not use an accepted structure for controllable mainstream music. It does not attempt to distract.

Like Al-Jazeera, it’s a war call. And they don’t like that. Control is how we make money. Control is how we force other people to be our wives, friends, neighbors. Control is usurped by the independent, holistic-moral warrior.

People bemoan our focus on external aspects of people that create divisions by race, gender, and weight gain, but they then use those same divisions to designate minorities.

Let’s talk about the final minority: people who keep an eye on a grander vision of humanity. Quorthon was one. Varg was one. David Vincent was one, before he gave in to sodomy. Glen Benton was one, before he gave into cupcakes and beer. Obviously the guys from Massacra were, until they got run over by a speeding Renault. And then there’s heroes from literature, like Josef Conrad, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Burroughs, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust…. and from philosophy, our beloved Nietzsches and Platos and Aristotles and Kants and Schopenhauers.

In a world where just about everyone is focused on the karmic cycle:

1. Who am I
2. What can I consume
3. How important am I
4. How can I become more important

There are only a few thinking about the whole;
Only a few of those thinking about increasing the efficiency and design grace of the whole;
And only a few of those thinking about enhancing its overall beauty as a guide.

That’s the final minority,and one we should celebrate here, instead of slighting so we can argue about whether Venom is more important than Bon Jovi (no).