Twilit Idols

For any attempt made on this earth to reach above its constraints, there will be those who understand and make an enlightened form of the idea that breaks mortal bonds and reaches toward clarity, and others who not understanding will drag into the mud of everyday life by making it more like the familiar things they are afraid to escape.

In the case of metal music, both examples proliferate, and for those who think there is a purpose to the music beyond its earthly counterparts of entertainment and hedonism, there is reason to deny the earthbound in preference for the cosmic. For us to see the difference between the two, we must understand the genre as an ideal, and then see how that ideal is different from its surrounding genres, and then point out where some fall short.

Most academic studies attribute heavy metal to the rise of distorted primitive blues in the UK, but a more thorough investigation suggests otherwise. Rock music had grown through the 1960s from simple boyfriend-girlfriend pop to apocalyptic rock like the Doors in the same way the Beatles rejected their sugarpop roots to become morbid and political. What we know as proto-metal with Black Sabbath was a giant slash against the simple, deconstructive hedonism of pop music.

Proto-metal arose almost simultaneously with the aggressive and dissonant progressive rock that followed an earlier wave of technically intensive bands of a somewhat hippie outlook. Much as society itself became hedonistic-futuristic in the 1970s after the massive blast of flower child organicism in the 1960s, progressive rock looked toward more epic topics including how the future might develop -- as well as how it might fail. Bands like Jethro Tull and King Crimson, contemporaries of Black Sabbath (Tony Iommi did a short stint in Jethro Tull), pointed toward a darker worldview that the love, peace and whatnot of the hippies failed to make clear.

Within this new formulation, the proto-metal of Black Sabbath can be understood as an offshoot in interpretation of the fusion between rock, jazz (blues + classical theory) and classical. These three influences formed the basis of progressive rock, with it starting toward jazz and increasingly developing toward what seemed to want to be classical music played on guitars, keyboards and drums. Some may argue it was technologically driven, but what makes more sense is to say that it was technology empowering a natural tendency toward a more complex form. Rock in its mature form was only a decade old, but had grown exponentially, and some desired to shed its simplistic skin and make it a respectable artistic genre instead of entertainment for the rebellious periods of future working class stiffs.

The elements of the new genre were:

• Dark, morbid themes that clashed with the "love will save us" hippie mentality. These are explained by Black Sabbath as being derived from the horror movies of the day, a genre which features a union between technology and the occult (zombies, werewolves) producing a force humans cannot oppose. Normal technologies and methods cannot defeat it. They struggle against this force but their emotional instability causes them to sabotage one another, and often the dark force wins. Examples from this genre: Mothra, Dawn of the Dead, ...
• Songs written from short cyclic phrases called riffs, which unlike rock riffs used moveable chords of inspecific harmonic bonding, making the melody and rhythm of the phrase more important than key or voicing. Metal bands tend to use more riffs per song, and not in the traditional cycle of verse-chorus, in a way quite similar to progressive bands like King Crimson and Yes, both of whom used aggressive distortion.
• A focus on the holism of the human effort as determined by our moral state as individuals in a way that can only be described as "religious." Metal, in addition to sounding eerily like angry Bach-scripted church music, has a similar focus to dogmatic transcendentalism Christianity: what is our future as human beings, and how does how we shape our personalities effect it?
• Bass-enhanced overdriven guitar sound, or distortion, which encloses the primary instrument used in making heavy metal. In rock, guitars and drums come together to emphasize a vocal melodic line; in metal, guitars lead a melodic line for which vocals are a complement and drums a timekeeper, enclosing it in a regularity to give listeners context. The guitar is the loudest single instrument heard and the one that invokes changes in song.

These generalizations reveal the essential traits of the most defining works of the heavy metal genre, and are not inclusive. Some bands went more toward the rock side of things than others, and some bands commonly attributed to heavy metal (Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Who) do not fit at all into this model. But if we were to summarize what made Black Sabbath and the genre-defining bands to follow different from their predecessors in the genre of rock, these are the traits that would stand out. It is most appropriate to say that metal was a revolutionary offshoot of rock that became a new genre, not a rock genre that adopted certain non-rock traits.

Over time, these traits developed further. After progressive rock unloaded its technique-heavy epics onto a rock audience just as willing to lift a lighter for a sixteen-bar solo as a chorus of "yeah yeah yeah," two further explosions in popular music challenged rock's dominance. The first was punk music, which arose from a simplified angry form of rock to be punk hardcore, an almost atheoretical rebellion against what made most people like rock music. The second, again aided by technology, was the rise of electronic music which made machinelike sounds into classically-influenced songs of an epic nature, following the path of originators Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Metal took the technique and intensity of punk and the cosmic focus of electronic music and grew further.

As the 1970s closed, metal had gone from obscurity to selective radio dominance and cultivated itself a dedicated audience, then had become "sold out" or adulterated into commercial stadium rock in the middle of the decade, to meet with a resistance movement in England which made more abrasive, more occult and industrial-doom laden music and imagery. Hybridizing this with punk, metal bands going into the 1980s were faster, simpler and more likely to create violent music less misrecognizable as rock as its forebears. From this impulse came speed metal, which rapidly separated into a rhythmic portion (Metallica) and a Discharge-influenced fast-strumming phrasal portion (Slayer). From the latter, the next generation rose.

Speed metal developed further along the lines Black Sabbath had established. The trademark union of occultism and technology ("War Pigs") was still there, emphasized in in a more practical sense in response to the constant mortal tension of the Cold War and its imminent potential nuclear doom. The metal that came afterwards, first with simple European acts like Sodom, Hellhammer and Bathory and later with a generation of impressively technique-driven American bands (Deicide, Morbid Angel), spared no extremity in developing the apocalyptic thesis further. Where speed metal found a cadence and rode it to a conclusion, death metal was about abrupt change linked by structural advances in song structure and phrase.

Throughout the 1980s, while speed metal and heavy metal bands captured the public eye, death metal developed almost unseen, influenced heavily by the work of British punk hardcore band Discharge (1982) who were the most extreme form of music heard yet in the popular arena. It rapidly branched into black metal half a generation later, and this genre developed the melodic potential of the music that death metal had established. Both fulfilled the vision of Black Sabbath in a post-Cold War era by pointing out that humanity was still on a course to doom because the values that motivate individuals are illogical and deconstructive. Where hippie love, Reaganomics and finally Clinton positivity couldn't save humanity, metal suggested a realism beginning in the individual/philosophy and not socially-mediated political, economic and religious infrastructures. This made metal entirely distinct from the other music of its time.

In the current time (2007), metal has not picked a future direction because it is unsure how to interpret its values into the context of this new time. This is perhaps because this time is liminal, the Clinton liberalism having demonstrated its total failure in the rise of third-world combatants motivated by religion (Middle East) or economic inequity (Latin America) and coming to attack the comfortable working- and middle-class existences of the parents of future metalheads. Having taken its religious interpretation of the need for individual discipline more than state control to its extreme, metal now hovers between deconstructive impulses and what the future may demand: a reconstructive, cultural rising which will counteract the clandestinely deconstructive forces of globalism and mass media that birthed rock in the first place.

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What this shows us, in the present, is that metal has been a developing continuity since its birth along the concepts of a human apocalypse lingering in the absence of our souls. While there have been missteps, and collapses, metal has doggedly pursued this path to its conclusions, which seem ominously similar to those of ancient Greeks writing on the decline of their civilization through hedonism, trivial concerns, public image manipulation and leaders increasingly detached from reality. One view of metal is that it has always been a reality mediator showing the darkness underlying our pleasant illusions, and that in doing so, it has never been deconstructive but has always attempted to make clarity of life by finding beauty in the dark and heavy as well as the light.

This then returns us to the idea of metal as orthodoxy, or a genre in which there is a clear direction and those who deviate from it are parasitizing on the popularity of the genre while weakening it with ideas that oppose it. The terms "sell out" and "poseur" arose in the 1970s to refer to those of this intention, most specifically the bands like Def Leppard who turned their heavy metal roots into radio trash that was essentially rock music with power chords. A poseur was someone dishonest who adopted the most rigorous pose, or identity-affirming lifestyle and opinions, of a genre but was like all hipsters using it for his or her own benefit and believed none of it. These terms persist to this day.

Any ideology is necessarily orthodox, in that if it does not assert a right way and wrong way of doing things, it is not an ideology at all but an ethic of convenience much like the opinionless, directionless motions of rock music or its deferential humanistic political counterpart. Rock stands for a big party and everyone having it their way; this is a meta-orthodoxy that opposes all orthodoxy. Metal on the other hand is orthodox as a tracing of its roots reveals, and opposes meta-orthodoxy because an orthodoxy of no orthodoxy is a lack of direction and does not address the apocalyptic or religious aspects necessary to unite human thinking in a direction for survival. Rock music is a product of the wealth and convenience of a modern time that allows us to have inconsequential lifestyles and opinions, while metal is a revolution against that outlook, a seemingly deconstructive art form that in actuality opposes deconstruction.

In this we see the separation of aesthetic and art, or in the case of music, music theory and artistic theory. It is easy enough to distill the technique of a genre and its production (guitars, distortion) but more difficult to capture its spirit, or the union of consistent elements among its artistic content: the worldview. What defined Romantic poets was not the words they used or their rhyme, or even the topics they wrote about, but their worldview. What defines metal bands is similarly their outlook and not how it is applied. The apocalyptic orthodoxy is the art: it is what the artists hope to communicate, and the world that unites emotion and logic in which they want to show a sense of meaning in existence. For any realistic art, that includes the eternal struggle of nature against the ineffective and for the effective.

Metal bands that sell out, or are poseurs, are those who adopt the visible aspects of the orthodoxy (sound, images) without contributing to the underlying belief system. They are people along for the ride, parasites who use the popularity and audience of a genre for their own personal profit and benefit. Their danger is that by belonging to the meta-orthodoxy and not the orthodoxy, they influence the orthodoxy closer toward assimilation by the lack of its ideas within a format that appears to possess them. In orthodox genres such as metal, "sell out" is more than a personal judgment: it is a philosophical battle line between those who understand the orthodoxy, and those who would sweep it into the directionless mass of society at large.

When Metallica was said to sell out, with the release of their fifth and self-title album in 1992, it was from this failing. Musically, the album resembles their previous work except that it is slower, more consonant and emphasizes longer vocal passages like those of rock bands. The frenetic metal riffs were still present, but the context in which they existed was rock music; Metallica had become a rock band using metal riffs, not dissimilar from the grunge bands and "nu-metal" rising around it. Metallica had joined the meta-orthodoxy, and in exchange for gaining a new raft of fans traded its legitimacy in its chosen genre. For this reason, few metalheads beyond the initiate praise recent Metallica; it is a rite of passage to recognize where it has failed and move on (although many of us still listen to the older works, as these are orthodox).

Similarly, many metalheads are scornful of the band Death, for two reasons. First, starting with its fifth album, it deviated from death metal into heavy metal which strikingly resembled rock in its emotional choruses and drawn out soloing. Second, Death is for various reasons given credit for "inventing" death metal when it was a second-wave act that could have vanished without negative impact on the developing genre. Hellhammer, Bathory, Possessed, Necrovore, Master/Deathstrike, Morbid Angel, Sepultura, Massacra and Sodom released material of a more profoundly influential nature before Death managed a single album. Death was enjoyed as part of the genre but when it broke ranks, as if revealing an insincerity all along, it became part of the meta-orthodoxy and left the metal genre.

This sense of insincerity pervades other bands currently demonized by those who know quality metal. Cannibal Corpse, a Florida death metal band that exaggerated all of the simplistic elements of death metal, offered initial albums that upheld the orthodoxy of the genre but then deviated into crowd-pleasing basic music that many desired but few in the death metal community saw as relevant. Unlike bands who developed their ideas, Cannibal Corpse developed a style and repeated it. It was a formula. It was, when one looked deeply into it, a crass manipulation of the audience by delivering the visible aspects of known things they enjoyed. Like a sheep in wolf's clothing, it offered a non-threatening take on death metal that distilled its ideas to imagery, its sound to repetition, and appealed to an audience who wanted the cachet of death metal without undergoing the obligation of undertaking its orthodoxy. One could appear alienated, but be a simplistic part of the meta-orthodoxy; the music did not change lives, but was an accessory like a purchased tshirt, CD or jewelry.

Black metal had its share of these failures as well. Cradle of Filth came bounding out of England with a hybrid of black metal and Iron Maiden-style heavy metal that was an immediate crowd-pleaser. Yet to most black metal fans, the music seemed to be an afterthought and not a quest for learning or development of the ideas of the orthodoxy; it was an accessory. Similarly, speed metal became burdened with Pantera, who after a dismal failure of a hair metal past cut their old albums out of circulation, got new haircuts and recorded aggressively macho versions of older Metallica. Not only were these simplifications of the metal outlook, but they were obviously insincere, and this alienated the band from its core metal audience.

The question a thinking listener asks when confronted with such an obvious failure is whether the artists were insincere throughout their career and seeking an opportunity to expand to their true selves as meta-orthodoxists, or whether it was the case of artists exhausted by relative poverty, the tedium of touring and dealing with labels, internal squabbles and the labor of recording that made them throw in the towel and aim for something more populist and thus profitable. Clearly some bands that have produced disastrous sellouts like Morbid Angel, Sepultura and Slayer show an influence of the aging process more than anything else, whereby they recognized a need to have a paying career if they were going to keep making music and sought to optimize it before it ended.

The nature of popular music as a sport for those who are young, or young-looking, implements a caesura sometime in one's 40s for most. In many cases, selling out dovetails with a form of exhaustion brought on by the demands of being older, the hatred of day jobs and the rigors of forcing oneself to make a high-quality product. Bands that tapered off into more mainstream versions of themselves by default, like Sodom and Kreator, fit into this model more than one of deliberate selling out. As seems logical, the law of entropy applies to music as well as novelists, and most readers are familiar with the almost cliche habit of authors that has them produce their best work when young and vital, put out a few interviews complaining about the rigors of their lifestyle, and then churn right into formula. Some of us would also blame the mass product nature of purchasable renditions of artforms that requires the artist to produce constantly to keep a media brand active, exhausting creative energies apparently and resulting eventually in works without much real content, like the later novels of John Barth or Ken Kesey.

When one considers metal in this light, it becomes clear that every artistic movement is an orthodoxy challenged by more than direct competitors a meta-orthodoxy or more properly, anti-orthodoxy. Most "art" serves no purpose except to entertain for a few weeks, much as sold out metal bands function. When the orthodoxy is lost, the worldview that unites the art is also lost, and the artist ceases to function as a conveyor of ideas but becomes a producer of mass entertainment, and in doing so joins those who are from the start disigenuous and self-serving in motivation and thus in quality of product. While this quality cannot be measured in technological terms such as production or music theory, it can be perceived by the listener, and as such will be discarded as no longer a voice of sanity in a wilderness of neurosis but an offshoot of that neurosis itself. For this reason, some metal bands will always be scorned for their inauthenticity while others will retain praise for that of their own authenticity they maintain.