The Metal Audience

We are all sick of hearing the old rejoinder from those in power to those seeking it: "You are your own worst enemy." I know that nothing infuriates me more than seeing this destructive, ignorant homily repeated in the lyrics of hardcore and metal bands. The reason I hate it is not that it is not in some cases true, or partially true in some cases, but that by its presentation of classification of "self" and "enemy" as the same, it appears monolithic. A better way to phrase it might be "Your strengths are often your weaknesses as well."

This is abundantly true in the metal community. While the rage and passion of metalheads is highly useful to the genre, it is also self-defeating. While intoxication can unlimber many previously self-censored thoughts, it can also break down consciousness into repetition. While being a genre committed to undermining social thinking will attract many free spirits to our door, it also means that to some the metal genre looks like a "Home for Wayward Youth" and a free ticket to popularity.

Just like the bands, the fans vary across a wide range of positive and negative traits. The great stuff has vision and passion and a sensual rebellion against all that is static and useless, coupled with a rage for disorder and open spaces in which life can expand. The degraded metal carries the same self-consumptive traits that inspired a rage in metal against the society which bears them, including blind hedonism, fatalism and a willingness to accept short-term, limited-perception dogma as a polar foundation for human life.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to level the floor-clearing comment at metal: "This problem is your own twisted, damaged, underconfident egotistical selves." While there is truth in this, it is partial truth. In the media age of the 1950s-1960s, the previous popular forms of hymns, blues, country and polka were whipped into a single entity and called "rock music." Rock became a symbol of popular culture itself, of the hipness of youth and rebellion, in the hands of post-WWII American propaganda for the American way of life. Ever since that time, public portrayal of rock music has involved the marketing ideas of young|hip|fresh in contrast to a society seen as boring|old|oppressive, even though last generation's rock fans are today's enforcers. To identify with popular music is thus to have those traits.

Coming out of this movement as a response to it, early proto-metal bands attempted to get outside of the cloying morality of "peace, love and happiness" which had enwrapped metal. They did, to some degree, but metal provided an interesting testbed for Nietzschean ideals: his vaguely-stated concepts of social behavior sensu Judeo-Christianity reinventing itself proved true. In each generation of metal, as soon as a subgenre began to take the lead in expressiveness of metallic art, and thus popularity, it was mobbed and thus had to play by social rules.

Social rules are that we must all get along, respect each other's beliefs, be pleasant in social circumstances and respect each individual as a unique and important contribution to the culture. This is the worst possible enemy of metal. When everyone's input is assumed to be valuable, it's all essentially the same, since it's all important/valuable, and therefore there is no chance for discernment. Without the ability to discriminate between "crap" and "visionary" metal, the genre stagnates and overpopulates with clonish music.

Is our worst enemy our selves? It could be more accurately phrased: Metal is its own worst enemy when it begins assuming that the individuals are more important than the art. For those who want smarter, more intense, more distinctive metal, the best attitude to take is one of violent bigotry against the mediocrity that prevails in metal music, journalism and thinking under the guise of social behavior. Without that attitude, there soon will be no difference in thought between metal and rock, and assimilation will follow.

As one metalhead put it, "I would have most of you killed. You're a disgrace to everything that hardworking metal bands achieve."

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