Ego-death, death metal and black metal

Ego-death is a concept that psychedelics and zen monks alike discovered. In it, the person realizes they are one part of a giant system, and stop seeing the world through themselves. They see themselves in the world, but they see the bigger process first. Ego-death tends to lead to a transcendent state where one sees all of consciousness as a continuum, and becomes less afraid of d-y-i-n-g.

I experienced ego-death most profoundly on two occasions. The first involved a marijuana brownie made by my co-DJ Christian Holocaust, two beers, a pot of coffee and about fifty bong rips. We tore into the night like a rapist and were raging by midnight. Trying to get the smoke out of my head, because I could barely stand and could not form a complete sentence, I went outside onto the porch of the apartment in Los Angeles. I looked up, saw stars, and then below them on earth, I saw streetlights which starred in my blurry vision and I saw how the distribution patterns of the two were about the same. Underneath me the night trash people were taking out the dumpster, there were people walking on the street, and I could hear muted voices from the apartments around. As these things sank into my mind, I started seeing myself as one person on one balcony in a world where every balcony was the same type of place, a contemplation zone. When I went back inside people asked me what had happened, and I could talk again. They said I looked very calm, even resolute. It did change my life.

I had one previous experience. A friend's mother in the midst of a divorce got herself silly drunk and drove home, only to be clobbered by another drunk as she made a left turn off the suburban freeway near his house. She was DOA at the local hospital. I spent all morning dreading the funeral and then finally went. I didn't have time for the stiff drink I thought I needed. I went in and my friend was talking to people, but clearly he was ill-looking and pained to even interact so I said nothing, just gave him a sad little smile. When the ceremony was beginning, they opened the right of two joined doors, which meant that people had to change course to go around the giant flower wreath in front of the door. It was on a tripod and big. My friend noticed this and saw their discomfort and went over to move it. He turned to me and said, "Can you help me with this?" Something changed in my mind, like the other experience later, without being abrupt. I just no longer was thinking in terms of myself alone. When he and I were connected by that wreath as we moved it, I felt like we were part of something much bigger, and that I was as much one of its irrelevant cells as his mother was, now cold and pieced back together with wax in the coffin. I accepted death more than ever before on that day, and also committed myself to doing more with my time and less with myself.

Extreme metal had always been something I considered as sound more than ideas. It was guitar chords and drums, some guy screaming, after all. I listened to Slayer but laughed at the idea of finding anything of meaning in their lyrics. They were just describing things: war, death, horror, Satan. It didn't mean anything. It was the same way I laughed at the lyrics on the first Metallica album, which appeared to be about cruising the night looking for combat and methamphetamines. Whatever, you think. When you're that young often you believe the world is something you can describe in whole mainly because your world is still small, no matter how you try to expand it. You're fighting against lack of experience. It was lack of experience with art that made me misnote the importance of not just lyrics but sound in metal. It did not occur to me that it was more than an aesthetic decision to distort the guitars and play fast with many riffs. It just sounded cool, like an esoteric vision of the apocalypse, and that's what I thought they were communicating. I did not associate wanting that sound with having certain ideas. I saw it as being part of the ongoing destinationless hedonism of heavy metal that made it easy for the working class to strive for nothing further than dead-end jobs in a dead-end world, as if apologizing for their own inactivity and getting as a result the bonus of a small party so they could go back to work for the majority of their time.

Again, one day at a party in my small dormitory, and the five-disc changer kicks in (after Enya, Dead Can Dance, Led Zeppelin "Houses of the Holy" and Muddy Waters) with Hellhammer, the EP named "Apocalyptic Raids." That edition of the disc had a Posada-like artwork on the inside cover and the legend, "Only Death is Real." An acquaintance who wasn't yet aware of my fanatical dedication to death metal asked me what it meant. I told him it meant that we were meat for the grist, flesh of a temporary nature and that all our illusions of immortality and Gods and morality were complete garbage and illusion. I told him about how when I was a kid, one day at Sunday School I looked up and said to the teacher, "This is all about adults being afraid to die, isn't it?" and to her credit she said that was a big part of it. My youthful logic had been that if death was so bad, we shouldn't waste time talking about it and should just go on to do whatever we can before it comes. The way people at church talked, it was coming any minute. Two years later I told a teacher that I was a nihilist, because I didn't believe in anything. I wanted to deal with reality. All of my writing from that period was super-realistic, or dedicated to bringing people into a moment of realization that what they were touching and doing was real and they needed to grasp command of their own minds and make it work. My enemies were panic and illusion, fear and pleasant unrealistic thoughts.

It got me thinking about what death metal and black metal were trying to communicate. Coincidentally I was reading "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad and "Paradise Lost" by John Milton. The latter I liked because it was about Satan, and the former I liked because the story was so much like the reality I experienced: a man drifting through a wrecked world that he knows is wrecked, and he takes a long journey at the end of which he finds the nothingness of everything to be very real, and overcomes it partially by taking the actions he knows he must, but uses that knowledge to re-interpret what he has known. Conrad's protagonist Marlowe begins the book impotent and ends it with a powerful tool, like a sword or fire, to explain why what he sees is as impotent as he once was. It's like an adolescent story, but for humanity, growing out of its moral illusion and seeing reality as a pragmatic task.

Having had similar thoughts as a nihilist since age 15, five or so years after departing church so suddenly, I took to it immediately. "Paradise Lost" remains one of the few mature religious works I have read, since it gives good and evil a yin-and-yang approach instead of a strictly moral one. Satan is appealing in it, but he has made an error in opposing the order of nature/God, yet still he has to make this decision, to explore the world in a Promethean sense of fearlessness and self-command. His undoing is too much self and not enough command. Here were books about social dysfunction and Satan; this reminded me of something. I drew out the Slayer and Hellhammer CDs and for the first time, began reading lyrics...

Lyrics to me are the finishing touch on a song, or the concept that spurs it, but rarely fit in the middle. Metallica wrote riffs, then came up with a general concept ("this sonng is about fuckin' fire") and then filled in the lyrics to accomodate rhythms. Slayer wrote songs around a clear concept but it seemed to me often filled in the lyrics in the studio, with Tom Araya or Kerry King translating a paragraph of Jeff Hanneman's ramblings into a clear linear discourse, although often filled with silliness and obvious ad libs. I knew a great deal of Black Sabbath was random aesthetic junk, but that Bill Ward wrote many with purpose. I saw there being a divide between the folk bands and punk bands who were "activists" and metal: metal wasn't political, in the sense of picking an option available in the political spectrum and repeating it ad nauseam. It was philosophical.

Metal wants to change our view of the world and through it change what we desired, so we could then make the right decisions in any number of fields including politics. I saw wisdom in this because the political nature of punk made it easy for morons to slap anarchy stickers on their rockabilly guitars and start repeating the same old stuff; how many times do you have to repeat it, I wondered, before you realize it isn't working? That mentality always reminded me of the bitter old hippies who used to jaw into the same rant about how nobody has just woken up, etc., while I'm sitting there thinking, "But your solutions are impractical." Philosophy establishes our values and strategy, where politics establishes our tactics. If you get involved in politics without philosophy, you're trying to use tactics to change a leadership/values problem, and that never works.

"Only Death is Real" conveyed a lot more than I had first established. This was a statement of ego-death: no matter how big you think you are or how important, death is more real than your visions, so you must accept nothingness. To accept nothingness is to cast aside the unhealthy parts of the ego and to give it context, so that the ego is a motivic force but only one of many on a planet. To see only death as real is to wonder what else can be real. The answer is right past the end of our noses: the world is real, and it's a continuum that renews itself, so it's worth working for. If you like life, you work to make it better. If you hate life, you deny the reality of the world and you go further inward into the self and its desires, which has never worked for making anyone happy no matter how stupid. We are social creatures, and it is as mathematically logical why that is so as the collaboration between parts of a computer program. We are all of the same thing, and we want to take our part in this thing, which includes nature and our fellow humans, and if we like being alive, we want to do what's best not just for ourselves or for humanity but for the whole thing. What a stream of interesting thoughts "Only Death is Real" can unleash, in part because our society does everything it can to deny the reality of death.

Similarly, I reinterpreted Slayer's Satanic imagery as more than being opposition to Christianity. For one, they do not seem to oppose Christianity. If anything, lyrics like "South of Heaven" or "The Final Command" illustrate, like Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" before them, a world in the grips of evil based in power based on an illusion. In Slayer's complex theology, Christianity is Satanic because like political strength and industry it is a false outward power when inward the person is underconfident and weak. Christianity however is seen as often accurate, in that the apocalypse does come from selfishness, and Christian morality ("bastard sons beget your cunting daughters") is the best way to live, but a way that makes no sense in a world addicted to the power of illusion. As in Milton, Slayer's Satan is a rebel against a singular order encroaching upon the world, a necessary force like magnetism that opposes any such centralization. In Slayer and Milton's view, to have any single power controlling the universe is to bring the universe toward sameness, something thermodynamicists call "entropy," or a state when any direction yields the same results as any other because of the uniformity of the universe. Milton was edging toward a transcendental view of God as being a property of the universe, and not an ego or personality such as that overbearing one against which Satan revolts, himself a victim of his own excessive egoism.

This brought me to further analysis of death metal and black metal music, imagery and lyrics. For starters, the music has a few interesting traits: it is loud and distorted and uses riffs that instead of emphasizing a harmony use harmony as a base on which to construct often wild phrases. It is dark and morbid yet energetic, not self-pitying (death to all goths). Even from Black Sabbath's time this was true: other bands wrote songs around open chords which were strummed in a repeated pattern, and then modulated, while Black Sabbath used moveable power chords to make phrases into riffs and it was the change in those phrases that communicated a difference in outlook. It was more like classical music, where harmony is so well-studied that it is used as a device toward "narrative" compositions where the change in motifs and their accompaniment conveys a string of moods that like a mythology or a fable convey the idea of a journey from one point to another.

These are mental journeys as well as physical; while describing battle they are revealing the fight inside of us to achieve heroic impulses, and while describing beauty they are tuning us to appreciation of the undiscovered beauty in mundane things. This is music that combines philosophy and atheistic transcendental religion, giving us a reason to live without having to rely on absolute notions of "good" and "evil" that turn out to be illusion. In the Milton-Slayer worldview, "God" encompasses both bad and good, because together these create a reality in which we can strive for better things. Similarly, in Conrad, the tokens of good and profit are chased in such a way that they create an illusion sustained by greed, in which the only heroes are amoralists like Mr. Kurtz who use brutality and combat effectively, but are conflicted over the underlying reasoning for their goal, namely the need to produce income through ivory when greater challenges await. In the worldview these artists offer, profit motive and morality are a going-inward into the protective mantle of fear, and morality is something we impose on the world to avoid the heroic challenge of leaving that inward sanctum and achieving goals that are not justified by physical survival (morality) or material comfort (profit).

When we look at metal with these opened eyes, the sound and imagery and lyrics are far less random. Distortion is a finding of beauty in darkness, a clarity emerging not when one looks at individual grains of sound but when one hears the blurry whole and deducts from it both pure tone and the harmony of randomness to that clarity; distortion forces us to take a view from above, and see the whole picture in order to understand what occurs at any moment. It is also a metaphor for our inability to ever fully perceive the universe, telling us that if we look at the center of the distortion we will find what is occurring, even if we cannot see it perfectly. The gritty, chaotic sound of distortion defies our logical containers that look for purity and instead finds a reality that although hazy is as clear as it if were pure. The "riff salad" of metal bands is a way of establishing that music is not a cyclic loop of verse-chorus, resembling our going inward to the world of our own thoughts and preferences, but a journey in which our inward struggle parallels our outward struggle (much like the jihads of Islam: the lesser Jihad is the war against ignorance/infidels, and the greater Jihad is the war for spiritual clarity in oneself). Metal is art because it does not preach a political solution, but shows us the reasons for it. When that sort of higher thinking fails, metal relapses to liking noise and hedonism but little else.

It is one thing to preach, as if politically, against the ego. It is another thing to show a path beyond the ego. "Only Death is Real," like nihilism itself, is a way of dispensing with "belief" in order to begin the journey to discover what is real and what is supra-real. The supra-real is that dimension where heroism and creativity lie, where one has accepted the feared attributes of life (d-y-i-n-g, disease, sodomy) and has transcended them by seeing what is not material/tangible yet is also important. It is this journey that metal music, classical music, and all great art describes. It is starting from nothing, like Satan exiled from Heaven, and getting over resentment of life and fear of death to see the beauty in darkness and to return to life with a desire to make it better. It is a recognition of the inherent distortion of our perception, and tuning our ears and minds to see past that faltering. When only death is real, the ego dies for a moment and we see the world as a whole, and can get out of the prison of our limited perspective and re-bond to the life that produced us and produces all we value. It is a hedonic state higher than hedonism, to love life and want to make it better through better design. This is where death metal broke from heavy metal, and it is where all thinking that rewards strong souls begins.