Journal infoterror's Journal: Future of Metal
Future of Metal
We write about this often for the simple reason that now metal is stagnant. The past is written; it is a codex of riff forms, song structures, vocal/guitar techniques, and drum patterns that can be easily recombined to make a song or album. The aesthetics of ideal are well defined in a collection of imagery and concepts that can be twisted into a list in which order and flavor - specifics - are made to order. In other words, we are in the age of permutation of known ideas and a lack of actual creation of distinctive, relevant statements.
I do not believe in history as a linear progression from ignorance to a higher state. It seems to me that was is true is eternal; it will apply in any age, no matter how many people there are or what technology we have. Regardless of location, political system, wealth or degree of interconnectedness via the (fucking) internet, that which is true is that which is adapted to the methods of the universe and thus raises those who wield it to a higher level. That which is eternally less intelligent will always lower those who use it.
This is a way of seeing natural selection as a dramatic contrast to social history; things get better or worse according to adaptation to the world, not to the social order of the time. While great art may comment on the situation at hand, it does so in order to speak of these eternal truths through the metaphor of the time, because what is true cannot be written down in a form that will survive the aeons. It must be rediscovered, constantly, much as individuals must recreate their own inspiration toward survival if they wish to rise above the eat-sleep-fornicate-buy-things method of subsistence.
In metal, as in life, natural selection is prevalent; some art is simply better than other art. It is not an absolute category, where some join the canon of eternals, but if we compare two albums independent of stylistic concerns, we will find that in different traits one is better than the other and vice versa; when we collect these traits, we can see that one is more effective as art - touching the eternal in us, the sense of striving that gives life meaning - than the other. Those who are more adapted see this as natural and powerful, where those who fear they are less adapted correspondingly fear this judgment, and wish us to see all art as unique and equally valid, because only under that judgmentless veil are they able to feel confident about themselves.
Metal music is currently nearing forty years of age, and has gone through a number of generations, and with the culmination of death and black metal, has reached a musical maturity of being distinct from rock music, hardcore punk, and the other genres surrounding it. One might think, if one believes in linear history, that this is the end of its growth; not so - this is merely the end of its aesthetic, or in the realm of external appearance, growth. What defines coming metal is its internal factors, meaning that regardless of aesthetic, its composition and beyond musical factors, its artistry - how well does it connect us to the eternal process of striving and finding meaning in life. This process of discovering meaning cannot be polarized into praising the good, or describing the bad, but is an acceptance of both good and bad as part of an ongoing process similar to natural selection in which art is an agent for greater clarity.
However, for metal to rebirth itself, it must escape the current constraints of its stylistic uniformity (despite many "unique" variations, the essentials are similar and are in fact drifting closer to the rock ideal) and find in style a voice for these emotions. This requires us to surpass that which makes metal so easy to clone so that it can take the next step in its own evolution and become more articulate, more aware, and more insightful to the process of living. This will not happen through a further descent into the simplistic three-chord bashing that no matter how dressed up with complicated drum patterns, new vocal styles, flutes, etc. will achieve nothing more than a descent to a lower level of adaptation and thought, namely rock music. Metal must break its stylistic surface tension and "go under," that is to same lose all belief in past ways of doing things so that it can re-evaluate them. When we say "re-evaluate" we do not mean discard and replace with trendier and "unique" versions of the same old rock aesthetic and ideal, but rediscover those ideals that are inherent to metal.
Let us look at its growth through history.
Metal music arose from a ferment of proto-punk and progressive elements clustered in the death of rock music as an extension of blues, itself an extension of Celtic and Germanic folk music ("country" in USA) to which was added the constant syncopated percussion favored by waltz and pop bands in beerhalls. Americans repackaged this as first blues, then jazz, and finally rock music in an attempt to convince us that linear history had produced a new form of music; to speak correctly, it produced a new aesthetic and a resimplified genre that, having an easily grasped standard form and standard, easily-moved harmony afforded by pentatonics, could be draped in a new aesthetic and therefore churned out like a product. Same internal aspects, new external ones, a spiffy new name and something different in the vocals or use of flute, and it can be sold all over again even though it offers nothing new as an artistic process. In this, rock music was a degradation of existing art forms to product status, and is exactly what one would expect from industrial society on the eve of widely-available radio (1930s) and vinyl-pressing (1940s) technology.
I.
The earliest rock music spent its years attempting to define itself as separate from the blues; its most celebrated members, the Beatles, introduced a fugue-like style of composition and a more flexible view of key that allowed it to escape the paint-by-numbers approach of blues and early rock. This defined and ended the first generation of rock, meaning that starting in the middle 1960s rock music was inspired to new dimensions. The first offshoot of this was the instrumentalist movement in England, which made a more technical and musically literate form of the blues, and the second was progressive rock, which attempted to infuse classical music and jazz percussion into rock music. By the time 1969 rolled around, these movements were well-established enough to produce a counter-reaction in the form of the first proto-punk (MC5, Link Wray, Iggy Pop, Blue Cheer) and proto-metal (Black Sabbath) bands, as well as an offshoot of progressive rock that hid its technicality in favor of a storytelling epic grandeur in music that was outwardly simple but artistically complex (Led Zeppelin). From this ferment, metal was born, and it it should be recognized that the first signs of its birth were the acerbic distorted guitar stylings of King Crimson and the detuned droning boom of Black Sabbath; it cannot be underemphasized how Led Zeppelin, despite being similar to proto-metal, belongs to the progressive rock canon alongside Jethro Tull and other "loud" bands, but aesthetically and musically influenced the metal to come.
II.
Not surprisingly, metal music found its first home in England. There was first a confusion of the new style with the old, as seen in later Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and the increasing use of distortion in progressive and technical blues bands. This spurred the birth of a "New Wave of British Heavy Metal," who from roughly 1972 to 1978 produced the greatest bands of the classic heavy metal era, including Angel Witch, Blitzkrieg, Budgie, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. These bands often named themselves through an inverted duality, like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath did, taking a known light/positive concept and modifying it with a sense of heaviness or evil. The suggestion in that type of name is that not all which claims it is good and light will turn out so; there is an implication that underneath the veneer of society, something disturbed lurked, and this was possibly best expressed in Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," in which the tendency of society to fight ideological wars for "good" resulted in young men who could not buy their way out of service being sent off to fight for the benefits of the economy, with Satan laughing and spreading his wings, as if his great deception was that not all labelled as good is in fact not evil. Early heavy metal found a fascination with the occult, the undercover, and that which was outside of normal bourgeois or even urban poor lifestyles, including drugs, motorcycles, bar fights, Satan and a "gypsy" mode of living. It was subversion of society by pointing out the unnoticed in which life thrived, outside of the rigid definitions of a mechnical and moralistic society, and this was echoed in visual art and literature by the postmodernists.
III.
To a bored generation tired of the simplistic solutions of hippies, and also afraid of the staid world of function to which their parents in terror of being destitute and at the mercy of society cleaved, this was a breath of fresh air. During this era, heavy metal gained its peak of popularity and was gradually coopted into a hybrid of NWOBHM and stadium rock, the ballad-heavy and strikingly visual style of emotional and individualistic rock music designed to please a mass audience. During the early 1980s, this exploded into form with a metal/hard rock hybrid in England and America, with bands like Rush, Quiet Riot, Def Leppard, Van Halen and even louder commercial pop like The Cars and INXS. At this point, the desire for acceptance that early heavy metal bands had desired was satisfied, but at the price of seeing metal reintroduce rock music aesthetics and ideals inside of itself. One counterweight to this tendency was the "neoclassical" movement in heavy metal lead guitar, which used classical technique and often themes from great classical pieces to highlight a higher ambition than that of its stadium-bound colleagues. While it is impossible to avoid mentioning Yngwie Malmsteen in this context, it is equally silly to disregard the allusions to this tendency in Judas Priest, Deep Purple and other classic metal bands. Neoclassical metal was a natural direction for the most adventurous metal bands to follow.
Reactions to stadium rock-metal were forthcoming; first, punk music exploded with the aid of the ragged sound of heavy metal and songs that were "nihilistic" because they unabashedly used simple musical devices and had no pretentions, artistic or otherwise, toward hiding their mechanism. Punks saw progressive rock as decoration, and when heavy metal sold out, wanted to make a form of art to preserve the spirit of insurgency against a rotted social fabric that they had observed in the best of the early rock and metal bands. Punk itself went from a proto-punk form to punk hardcore, and immediately sold out into what is disparagingly called "punk rock," or simple rock songs restated in power chords and punk rhythms. Naturally, the newer generations of metal bands sought to hybridize the parts of this energy they saw as useful; they were enamored of the simple effectiveness of punk, but disliked much of its anti-artistry, which they saw as crushing imagination at the expense of politics and social activism. The first ventures into this line of thought also came from England, in the form of Motorhead (1976) and Venom (1978), who made stripped-down heavy metal with the bouncy simple riffs of punk bands; these bands were also luridly enamored of after-dark culture (Motorhead) and the occult (Venom), although in an artistic and not dogmatic sense.
IV.
As this style dawned in the early 1980s, it left England entirely and became a phenomenon divided between the United States and continental Europe, and here is where metal's maturation began in earnest. In the USA, two movements formed roughly simultaneously; thrash, or metal riffs in superfast punk song structures, and speed metal, or punk-influenced heavy metal with startlingly progressive song structures. Thrash bands like Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (DRI), Corrosion of Conformity (COC), Cryptic Slaughter, Fearless Iranians From Hell, MDC (an omnireferential acronym) and dead horse startled the world with short, often under twenty seconds, songs and abrasive condemnation of modern society as soulless and whorelike in its pursuit of money. In this they extended the ideals of punk, but to them they gave a sense of the non-literality of metal, a desier to create a mythology of life outside of the norm. Speed metal bands, most notably Metallica, Nuclear Assault, Exodus, Testament and Prong, forged ahead with a more explicitly mythological worldview but infused into it a punk distrust of society's motivations that stretched back to "War Pigs" in its fusion of occult, technological and moral theory. Speed metal borrowed much of its song structuring from progressive rock, not leaving verse-chorus patterning behind, but augmenting it with introductory riffs, interludes, and songs that used more than one pair of complementary motifs before returning to a fundamental theme (Metallica's "Orion" and "Call of Kthulu" are the best examples). Thrash died in almost the time frame of its blurfast songs, and speed metal lingered until 1989 before following its forefathers into the cold still death of being absorbed by mainstream stadium rock ("One" by Metallica is as explicitly stadium rock as Def Leppard's "Photograph," but of a higher aesthetic and conceptual quality).
V.
Europe at the time may have been a more cynical place, in part because while America was threatened by Soviet missiles, Europe was threatened by not only nuclear war but the threat of a second Soviet invasion. To those who did not endure the Cold War, it is hard to describe, but it was a competition of mythos: the evil Soviets bearing down on free will with conformity and a ruthless ideology versus the decadent Americans promising "freedom" and delivering wage slavery (as it turned out, both sides were correct in their assessment of the other). This paranoia fueled the literalism of American thrash bands, but in Europe, it evoked a highly symbolic interpretation of heavy metal that became the basis for all metal to come: the rise of proto-death/black metal with Hellhammer, Sodom and Bathory. It is appropriate to point out how this music was fueled by its origins, namely hardcore punk of the ambient style from Discharge, who produced their seminal work in 1982 ("Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing") and a heritage of NWOBHM including its partial generation in Motorhead and Venom. The new music used the epic riff stylings of metal, aiming for a sense of grandeur and world-weighty topical conclusion as found in opera and classical music, but had the energy of punk and many of its techniques, but it went further: like speed metal, it used song structures adapted to the content of each song, or a collection of riffs that narrated a developing theme. This can be seen most clearly in the ten-minute "Triumph of Death" from Hellhammer, which cycles through several complementary patterns of riffing, often returning to theme but never lapsing entirely into verse/chorus structure, where speed metal bands inevitably did. Also introduced was a rasping vocal, equally influenced by Motorhead and punk hardcore bands like The Exploited, that gave an ethereal and sinister sound to the music.
It is worth mentioning that with the rise of death and black metal in prototypical form, the "underground" was born: a parallel society of fans, labels, magazines ("zines") and venues that supported a style of music that would have been offensive to the ears of most listeners. In the 1980s, the technological futurism of the 1970s merged with a desire for a clear-cut ideological division of the world into a culture that favored only cleanly defined objects and ideas; the sound of 1980s mainstream music was techno-savvy keyboards, discrete percussion, crisp vocals and a lack of noise. Like punk before it, 1980s underground metal was a stab in the face of this: distorted, embracing forbidden underworld topics like the occult and life outside of the working world and bourgeois lifestyle, and contra-moral in its embrace of death in both giving and taking. In fact, one of its primal statements was literally "The Triumph of Death": no matter how much we hide behind social constructs, like money or popularity, we must face our mortality and this more than anything defines our lives - although, it seemed, the mainstream was obsessed in denying and obscuring this eventuality. At this point, bands also aspired outwardly toward classical music in structure and aesthetics, with Bathory's Quorthon listing Wagner as one of his primal influences.
VI.
The middle 1980s showed a flowering of this style into death metal, the more rhythmic interpretation of the new concept, and it occurred at first in the Americas. A speed metal band named Slayer became massively popular by using the new style of riff and song construction, but keeping the shouted vocals of speed metal; in the same part of California, two years later, one of the first death metal bands, Possessed, cut their definitive first album. Similarly, Deathstrike/Master in Chicago were forging ahead with their punkish death metal, and in Brazil, Sepultura had already made microsymphonies of simple riffs in complex ordering schema. By 1989, death metal was well defined, but remained off the radar of the average fan because its albums were for the most part sold in specialty record shops and were not reported on in the mainstream press. At this point, the term "underground" gained currency, much as it had with punk and indie rock before, denoting both a separate marketplace and attitude than that of mainstream rock. Morbid Angel, Deicide, Massacra, Asphyx and Death were releasing albums at this point; they were followed by those who proliferated the style, such as Suffocation, Immolation, Incantation, Morgoth and Nihilist. By 1991, death metal was in full maturity, and perhaps reached its peak with Morbid Angel's "Blessed Are the Sick" and Deicide's "Legion." The underground began to attract mainstream attention as these albums sold over 100,000 copies.
VII.
Like all things, death metal grew, then became bloated, and then obsoleted itself as imitators flooded the genre. Its strength was its structuralist composition: riffs fit together in a narrative style that was specifically adapted to the content of the song, meaning how it translated real-world experience into music; this was in contrast to rock music, which used an exclusively cyclic structure whose goal was to maintain a constant state of high emotional arousal. Death metal did not have a consistent emotion, and to most listeners seemed dangerous in its ambiguous attitudes: experienced was not described and then wrapped up into a handy conclusion, but left in its raw form, including its dangers which were, like mortality itself, inaddressable. It did not offer suggestions that love was eternal and would overcome death, or that emotion was more powerful than the real world. It emphasized the terrifying nature of reality as a balance between death and life, and cast aside individualistic morality for a look at situations as a whole; where individualistic morality makes statements such as that killing is wrong, that is an artifact of its focus on the individual as its primary element; death metal used a holistic morality that looked at the whole of the situation and saw incidental deaths as inconsequential in comparison. Death metal was "nihilistic" in that not only did it refuse to dress up its motivic material as was done in rock music (shades of punk hardcore), but that it accepted that our lives are meaningless except to ourselves and that the only meaning was as found in nature, a process of natural selection and survival. It was explicitly anti-Christian and anti-Capitalist in this regard, although death metal bands were not opposed to making money (in philosophical terms, capitalism is a system where the most important aspect of society is the accumulation of wealth; one can support earning a good living without thinking money is more important than culture, morality or art). Death metal bands wrote about disease, death, the occult and mutilation with verve; underlying these graphic images was a re-centering of life, a discovery that no matter how we categorized things as "good" or "evil," life itself was our goal and life was transacted not in morality but in actions: structural change, genetic change, mystical and mythological conceptions beyond the discrete binary categories of individualistic materialism. As such, death metal was the last great subversive genre to emerge from the 1980s and perhaps its most insightful.
When the 1990s dawned, change occurred in the world. Conservative leaders in Europe and America were supplanted by liberal ones as the cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its associated Communist substates. Metal forked again: while death metal continued to grow, its shadow genre grindcore - death metal restated through a punk ethos - bloomed, as did "industrial grindcore" and industrial-metal hybrids like Godflesh and Fear Factory; simultaneously, surprising everyone, the melodic offshoot of proto-death/black metal rose, this time called by a name it had musically grown to inherit: black metal. Where death metal was a revolution against popular music, black metal was a re-evaluation of its and a distillation of it to its most basic value, which was melodic guitar lines (this was heavily influenced by one of the furthest developments of death metal, the Swedish melodic style as represented by At the Gates and Dismember) causes a re-interpretation of death metal's structuralism: where death metal was narrative through phrasal composition, or a sequence of riff shapes suggesting an ideal, black metal expanded on that by using melody as its primary shaper of idea, and connecting the rhythmic narrative through it, creating not only a sense of progress between themes, but giving a more emotional interpretation without being subsumed by personal emotion (as was common in rock, and the genre that succeeded dying punk hardcore, "emo"). Black metal also grew out of the literalism still present in death metal, preferring mythic and historical themes, and developed an artistic theory that had been lingering in metal since its inception in the neo-Gothic Black Sabbath: Romanticism.
Romanticism remains difficult to define after centuries of study. It is at its most basic a resacralization of life to include not just nature but a human place in it that accepts death as equally necessary to life for the perpetuation of the grounding of life; it is a recollection and celebration of the values of the Greco-Roman ancients, a time before binary morality; a time when natural order was seen as commanding human life not only outside but inside. Romantics espouse an idealization of life, as seen in the concept of "romance" to existence, meaning that through behavior toward higher ideals - fidelity, eternal love, the order of the cosmos - the individual achieves a sense of divinity within life, a transcendence. Romantics do not need individualistic morality, or a world beyond this one for which to live; they live in a physical world but rise above it in thoughts to touch what is important in any age, a furthering of self through greater perception and understanding of the structure of the universe and natural law to the degree that death, life and suffering are seen as agents of fulfilling that structure whose ultimate aim is the beauty and transcendent grace of higher consciousness. Romantics tend to be non-Christian or Christian in a gnostic- or pagan-influenced sense, nationalistic, and in love with the psychological symbolism of mythology and its connection between the present and human life for all time. Romanticism as a genre is almost exclusively European, practiced mostly by the English and Germans and Americans, and gave birth to Europe's height of philosophy, arts and music. The simplest study of Romanticism views it as a period in history, but this is an error, as it is a discipline of thought that has appeared in partial or whole form throughout European history, and continues to be rebirthed to this day. Romantic art can be distinguished for its portrayal of ancient ruins, of the individual as a singular force in a numb world, of respect for the eternal and transcendent attributes of love, and a worshipful attitude toward nature that includes respect for its terrifying aspects, like the singularity of death and the possibility of predation, war, great suffering, and disease; Romantics view suffering as a challenge to be overcome not in and of its own sake, but for the sake of what can be achieved through it, as in the image of a lover suffering for the beloved and feeling his love all the more intense for it. Although like most post-1980 metal, black metal does not mention personal romances, this is its heritage as a genre contrary to individualistic, personal morality; in all other ways, it is strictly Romantic in what it idealizes and represents.
Black metal kept alive in the previous decade through the 1987 release of Sarcofago's "INRI" and the 1989 release of Merciless' "The Awakening," but otherwise, was mostly hibernative. While Venom had coined the phrase "black metal," and many considered Bathory and Sodom to be of the genre, it did not come into its own as a musically distinct whole until renovated by the Norwegians in the years 1990-1993; by the end of that period, it had reached a musical apex and disintegrated in a drama of church arsons, murder, terrorism and politics (the last major outburst of Nationalism, one tenet of Romanticism, was 1933-1945 with the German National Socialist German Worker's Party, or Nazi party, and this similarity as well as outright praise for the NSDAP from black metal bands would cause no end of trouble). The new form of black metal did not use the guttural distorted vocals of black metal, but higher-pitched shrieks that could be contorted to express emotions impossible in a monotone; unlike the detuned death metal bands, black metal bands used standard tuning and turned up the middle ranges and not bass ranges on their amplifiers; where death metal was driven by its percussion, black metal drumming was background timekeeping having more in common with ambient/industrial bands like Kraftwerk and VNV Nation than heavy metal; where death metal song structures aimed at finding an empty mood at the end of conflict, for black metal, conflict in symbolism built to a peak, after which there was a passage through the simplest and barest and most meaningless music possible as a conduit toward an inner peace, and a sense of meaning. In all aspects, black metal was the culmination of the metal ideal since 1969, and its highest degree of musicality and aesthetic yet achieved. Black metal bands, hearkening back to the legend of "Oskorei" or undead warriors who reclaimed earth to remove poisoned-tongued usurpers, painted their faces white and black, and they reclaimed the armor-based aesthetic of early heavy metal which emphasized leather and metal attire. Imagery from the Viking age, from ancient Greece and Rome and India, and the distant occult pervaded songs. Arguably, the first band to spread black metal of this style was Immortal, but it arose simultaneously with Darkthrone, Gorgoroth, Burzum, Emperor, Mayhem and Enslaved, making it difficult to point to one leader. Much as Metallica symbolized speed metal to most people, however, Mayhem was clearly the focal point for most fan attention; not surprisingly, it was the most "heavy metal" of the above list. Interestingly, the next generation of metal produced a number of formative acts, including Graveland, who rediscovered the waltz style in their sweeping and oddly beautiful works.
Black metal thrived for several years and then petered out, with most of the original bands opting to go into ambient and medievalist music (Darkthrone -> Neptune Towers, a Tangerine Dream tribute; Beherit -> "Electronic Doom Synthesis"; Burzum -> a triptych of keyboard albums made from prison). It became the most popular form of metal ever, and coincided with, through a proliferation of CD-pressing technology, home computers capable of recording and mastering albums cheaply, and MP3-based file sharing, the death of the underground. Record companies thrived in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to the new CD technology, which was cheaper to produce and thus granted higher profits, but faltered with the rise of the internet. Record stores were no longer necessary; a wider range of CDs could be had more cheaply online. MP3s meant that fans heard music before they bought it, if they bought it at all (although most metalheads tend to purchase CDs they like if for nothing else because of the often-fantastic cover art). It was no longer a market that sustained an underground and a mainstream, in the conventional sense; if something could be recorded, it would be made into MP3s and sold via super-mainstream sites like eBay and Amazon. Computerized stocking and ordering meant that larger CD-selling enterprises no longer were troubled by the expense of keeping large stocks, and gladly stocked underground metal alongside mainstream bands. The most virulent and antisocial black metal, including Darkthrone and Graveland, appeared in Wal-Mart; mainstream record stores in malls added metal sections, where up until 1997 it was almost impossible to find underground bands. The underground was obsolete and niche marketing replaced it.
VIII.
This brings us to the present era. While black metal thrived until 1993 in Norway, after that it was supplanted by bands from Poland (Graveland, Veles), Greece (Varathron, Rotting Christ), and even the United States (Havohej, Demoncy, Averse Sefira). However, the quality never matched that of the Nordic bands; the "new" black metal was closer to both hardcore and heavy metal, and tended to use shorter riffs in verse-chorus structures interrupted by periodic narrative moments; it was like a throwback to speed metal. As the 1990s waned, it became apparent that little if anything of importance would come out of black metal, artistically, but the genre was more popular than ever before as new fans discovered the formative bands and bought any of thousands of recombinant new ones. It was at this time the first rumblings of discontent emerged from the far-thinking metal fans, although certain Norwegians had espoused this opinion in early 1996: metal had lost forward impetus and had lost sight of its own goals because it was overwhelmed by its new aesthetic power. Black metal, unlike death metal, was beautiful under the distortion; it was theatrical, and it had imagery that called to mind epic surroundings and meaning to life instead of a grungy casting-aside. It had an idea of what society might be, if it were to reclaim itself from the wasteland of modernity. It evoked in its fans a sense of grandeur, a sense of things to achieve, a feeling that the suffering and emptiness of life could be overcome, and that there was something to live for. Imitators poured into the genre, and by 1999, it resembled punk rock and speed metal with black metal vocals more than the foundational black metal of 1991.
Metal will not move forward from this state until it overcomes its aesthetics and finds a connection to its motivation. Early heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest embraced a Gothic worldview; they praised the fallen from past times, used ancient and occult symbolism in their works, and sought a greater meaning in life outside the profit/morality thinking of modernity. This was somewhat sublimated during the speed metal years, but was always present, if nowhere else in the musical dimensions of that genre; it was hard to spot as well in death metal except in the praise of death as a giver of meaning, which is a classic Romantic concept. In black metal alone it found full expression. It was as if black metal, as a language for speaking the values system of all heavy metal genres, gave fluency to an otherwise confused genre half-divided between rejoining rock and becoming something of itself. Now that the language is complete, metal must find a new articulation if it wishes to move on. What might future metal resemble?
Aesthetic
Much of what holds metal back, and against which black metal strained, is the rock-style song format and instrumentation: constant drumming, guitars and bass and vocals, and a need for lyrics to manage some recognizable verse-chorus pattern. Not all of this will disappear, but it is likely these will be used to revert music to a more complicated form as the artistic and conceptual demands of the metal form increase. Form will change with change in conception, and vice-versa; much as Venom's clumsy and primitive music inspired others to develop that aesthetic into a more articulate language, when metal begins moving past the simplistic format of rock music, it will grow toward higher ideals. When percussion leads music, it forces the rigid division of phrase to fit tempo and the conclusion of phrase; in music that is less rigidly aligned to percussion, like that of Tangerine Dream/Neptune Towers or classical, phrases are less repetitive in part because they are not forced into a symmetry of length and position.
Darkthrone, on "Transilvanian Hunger," gutted percussion into a background throb that framed rather than led the development of phrase; other black metal bands experimented with long-phrase drumming that would forego fills to extend a pattern into background prevalence. When drums no longer lead, guitars do, and the changes in riff and phrase expand the music beyond linear repetition. Enslaved on "Vikinglgr Veldi" found some balance in this style by forcing percussion back from a leading role into that of pace, allowing guitars to mingle with other instruments and develop without having to slam to a stop at the end of phrase. Another suggestion here comes from At the Gates, who on "Terminal Spirit Disease" showed full development of longer melodic lines which evolved over the course of each song. Combining these would give metal more of a classical and progressive edge in that it would be purely melodic, and would require greater density of composition, without losing the energy for which it is famous.
Structurally, such a style would give rise to the trellis structure as seen on Deicide's "Legion" and other technical death metal albums: paired motifs themselves split into complementary opposites for several generations, and it is the resolution of each smaller motif that returns the song to the level above it until it achieves a symbosis of its major thematic divide. Gorguts exploited this concept on "Endura," which would be a riff salad except for the clear relationship in pairs of riffs to a central theme; on "Unquestionable Presence," Atheist used this structure to introduce a dominant progression in which variation reinforced theme. In contrast to three-chord rock, this is the fullest extension of the narrative style, and focuses not on completion of a single pattern but on the interweaving of multiple patterns to synthesize an implied common direction to varied pieces. This allows compositions, like classical symphonies, to range widely while having a unifying germinal concept. What is commonly called "progressive metal," like much of progressive rock, fails to utilize this idea so much as it dresses up rock music with a series of distractions designed to obscure the simple-mindedness of the original idea (Opeth and Dream Theatre are guilty here). Although not an argument for "progressive" metal, the idea of narrative trellis composition gives bands the ability to tie together a number of solid but simple ideas into a complex whole based around a central concept of a basic nature; in this style, complexity does not distract but serves to reinforce the major idea.
Into this style will meld a number of techniques. The muffled strum of speed metal can coexist with the open tremolo of black metal because each can be used, in lieu of drumming ending the phrase, to seize or continue a rhythm. Phrases can unfold naturally to fruition and explore each other in a structured improvisation as necessary, or if played as written, be used to develop multiple voices and emotions within a single piece. This is a greater compositional "freedom" than the shorter phrases of rock demand, and while it does require some greater familiarity with music theory, it is not solely anchored to music theory but to the use of music as a voice which represents the content of each song, usually in the narrative format that takes the listener from one concept through its opposite to a sense of balance and continuity. Another technique that will become more commonly used is the wash of overstrum, or adding of notes to a chord by playing them lightly in sequence after the harmonic unity of the chord, which with distortion produces skeins of harmony which not only anchor the melodic phrase but can complement it to differing degrees, changing emotional context. Non-metal band My Bloody Valentine used this technique, as did industrial grindcore act Godflesh, although it also appeared in Mayhem and Burzum among other black metal bands. Together these flexibilities of technique will reduce the need for metal bands to play hard and fast, solid and finite riffs, and allow them a greater range of expression within a dominant mood which will uphold the classic attitudes of metal.
Community
Now that there is no longer a need for the underground, and the underground has shown itself to be susceptible to the same social pressures that made mainstream music detestable to many, it is likely that future metal communities will abandon all pretenses of underground and recognize that only the music will determine its audience. No piece of music can be made so difficult to find or obscure in symbolism that it will not hit the MP3 networks or be sold on Amazon and eBay, so the newer music will rely on its artistic expression alone to select its audience. The true sheep out there have shown they will readily embrace Cradle of Filth and Opeth and Cannibal Corpse even if they sound "angry" because the music is not that different from punk or hard rock, but the preponderance of followers has not followed acts like Neptune Towers or the Burzum ambient keyboard albums. This is not coincidence; people do not like music they do not understand, or which requires too much attention span to deliver the immediate gratification that is favored in increasingly degrees as one approaches the lower mentalities among our society. Metalheads of the future may keep their characteristic long hair and band-logo tshirts, but it is unlikely they will in the future be standoffish; more secure in what their music conveys, and in its esoteric dimensions unlikely to be appreciated by the democratic horde, they will rejoin society as a legitimate voice in its discourse for future. Metal techniques have been assimilated by grunge bands, nu-metal bands, industrial bands and even hip-hop acts; metal cannot stand apart, but must abandon its fear of modern society and fight back by being heard among accepted genres. This is both less extremist than the "underground" and more so, in that it is a demand that the ideas carried by metal, and not just its aesthetic, be considered among others. It is as if metal turned away from society in 1969, but is now returning to the forefront of battle, determined to inject its own DNA into the thoughts of society as whole.
Ideas
Where metal flirted with the occult, it is likely that it will look toward a more academic attitude toward spirituality as a whole; it is probable that anti-Christianity will be replaced with anti-dualism and a sense of the need for a spiritual bonding toward nature in the attitude of Romantics, where there is no dualistic "pure world" (Heaven, "good," Truth, pure forms) but a physical reality in which idealistic transcendence is achieved, and in which a beauty of contemplation can produce a desire to love life and to change it for the better as an ongoing process and not a moral one. It is also likely that a maturing metal genre will cast aside its individualistic baggage, and become not collectivist (like punk) but holistic, in that it will see a cosmic order embracing nature, the collective and the individual, in which the individual plays a role in furthering the development - akin to natural evolution - of higher and more beautiful ideals, of more complex and more perfectly adapted designs. "Truth" will no longer be seen as a dualistic entity which can be attached to a god, or a scientific discipline, or a dollar sign, but as a byproduct of experience by which we assess objects and ideas according to how well they will symbioticaly coexist with the rest of reality.
Nationalism, which caused black metal so much trouble through its use of Nazi symbolism, will likely remain, but in the sense of each nation - Germany, France, Denmark, Iran - speaking up for itself and its indigenous peoples. The "white power" aesthetic that produced National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) will be rejected in favor of a more naturalistic interpretation, and a renewal of traditional culture and musical archetypes. This does not mean that nationalism will lose its tendency for cultural separation on the basis of ethnicity, but that it will lose the violent bigotry common to "white power" movements, by which all things white are accepted, regardless of nationality, and all other things scorned and ridiculed. Nazism may or may not be interpreted, but the interpretation required for the current era is one of tolerant cultural separation, not violent, symbolic and insular isolation. Nationalism makes sense as a way of preserving each culture against the onslaught of globalization, portrayed in "Industrial Society and Its Futures" by Ted Kaczynski as a leftist movement; it is part of Romanticism, and part of respecting nature and its divisions of humankind. However, "white power" movements see only the color line, and this restricts the artistic ambition of metal to propaganda, which explains in part why after three classic bands NSBM degenerated into boring repetitive music like the rest of the genre.
If there is an area in which metal will expand, it will be to follow its naturalism to accept the natural order as the grounding for life and consciousness itself, and thus a post-moral acceptance of predation, death and suffering as essential to life and joy and growth. From this will come a natural praise for forests, as seen in black metal, and for ecosystems at large; it is possible, indeed, that if metal has a future political alignment, it will be non-leftist Greenism. This fits hand in glove with the depersonalizing tendency of metal, in part because many metal musicians view the West as corrupted by the egos of individuals; metal has for some generations favored a view of the cosmic order as a whole in preference to an individualistic outlook as found in consumer society, democracy, Judeo-Christian morality and hardcore punk.
Conclusion
Until it occurs, future metal will remain an enigma to us. The purpose of this document has been to describe the evolution of metal such that what future metal might be becomes apparent, and so that we know on what basis future metal will diverge from the past. It attempts to reveal through ideas, music and imagery what it is that is quintessentially "metal" and what these ideals reveal about the artform and the intentions of those who create it. It has also devoted a good deal of time to showing how metal has stagnated as a result of reaching a high point of aesthetic evolution, and how in the future, it is necessary to overcome this "safe" ground for higher goals. In one of his most poignant moments of insight, British spymaster Ian Fleming summarized his knowledge in this pithy phrase: "Never say no to adventure." Future metallians must be brave enough to move past a sure thing toward an uncertain ground of experimentation, much as each of us welcome each new day with no idea what will occur within it. Metal at the current time is obsolete and suffocating under its own weight, but there is a future open to all who respect and believe in its fundamental values and direction.
http://www.anus.com/metal/about/metal/future/
We write about this often for the simple reason that now metal is stagnant. The past is written; it is a codex of riff forms, song structures, vocal/guitar techniques, and drum patterns that can be easily recombined to make a song or album. The aesthetics of ideal are well defined in a collection of imagery and concepts that can be twisted into a list in which order and flavor - specifics - are made to order. In other words, we are in the age of permutation of known ideas and a lack of actual creation of distinctive, relevant statements.
I do not believe in history as a linear progression from ignorance to a higher state. It seems to me that was is true is eternal; it will apply in any age, no matter how many people there are or what technology we have. Regardless of location, political system, wealth or degree of interconnectedness via the (fucking) internet, that which is true is that which is adapted to the methods of the universe and thus raises those who wield it to a higher level. That which is eternally less intelligent will always lower those who use it.
This is a way of seeing natural selection as a dramatic contrast to social history; things get better or worse according to adaptation to the world, not to the social order of the time. While great art may comment on the situation at hand, it does so in order to speak of these eternal truths through the metaphor of the time, because what is true cannot be written down in a form that will survive the aeons. It must be rediscovered, constantly, much as individuals must recreate their own inspiration toward survival if they wish to rise above the eat-sleep-fornicate-buy-things method of subsistence.
In metal, as in life, natural selection is prevalent; some art is simply better than other art. It is not an absolute category, where some join the canon of eternals, but if we compare two albums independent of stylistic concerns, we will find that in different traits one is better than the other and vice versa; when we collect these traits, we can see that one is more effective as art - touching the eternal in us, the sense of striving that gives life meaning - than the other. Those who are more adapted see this as natural and powerful, where those who fear they are less adapted correspondingly fear this judgment, and wish us to see all art as unique and equally valid, because only under that judgmentless veil are they able to feel confident about themselves.
Metal music is currently nearing forty years of age, and has gone through a number of generations, and with the culmination of death and black metal, has reached a musical maturity of being distinct from rock music, hardcore punk, and the other genres surrounding it. One might think, if one believes in linear history, that this is the end of its growth; not so - this is merely the end of its aesthetic, or in the realm of external appearance, growth. What defines coming metal is its internal factors, meaning that regardless of aesthetic, its composition and beyond musical factors, its artistry - how well does it connect us to the eternal process of striving and finding meaning in life. This process of discovering meaning cannot be polarized into praising the good, or describing the bad, but is an acceptance of both good and bad as part of an ongoing process similar to natural selection in which art is an agent for greater clarity.
However, for metal to rebirth itself, it must escape the current constraints of its stylistic uniformity (despite many "unique" variations, the essentials are similar and are in fact drifting closer to the rock ideal) and find in style a voice for these emotions. This requires us to surpass that which makes metal so easy to clone so that it can take the next step in its own evolution and become more articulate, more aware, and more insightful to the process of living. This will not happen through a further descent into the simplistic three-chord bashing that no matter how dressed up with complicated drum patterns, new vocal styles, flutes, etc. will achieve nothing more than a descent to a lower level of adaptation and thought, namely rock music. Metal must break its stylistic surface tension and "go under," that is to same lose all belief in past ways of doing things so that it can re-evaluate them. When we say "re-evaluate" we do not mean discard and replace with trendier and "unique" versions of the same old rock aesthetic and ideal, but rediscover those ideals that are inherent to metal.
Let us look at its growth through history.
Metal music arose from a ferment of proto-punk and progressive elements clustered in the death of rock music as an extension of blues, itself an extension of Celtic and Germanic folk music ("country" in USA) to which was added the constant syncopated percussion favored by waltz and pop bands in beerhalls. Americans repackaged this as first blues, then jazz, and finally rock music in an attempt to convince us that linear history had produced a new form of music; to speak correctly, it produced a new aesthetic and a resimplified genre that, having an easily grasped standard form and standard, easily-moved harmony afforded by pentatonics, could be draped in a new aesthetic and therefore churned out like a product. Same internal aspects, new external ones, a spiffy new name and something different in the vocals or use of flute, and it can be sold all over again even though it offers nothing new as an artistic process. In this, rock music was a degradation of existing art forms to product status, and is exactly what one would expect from industrial society on the eve of widely-available radio (1930s) and vinyl-pressing (1940s) technology.
I.
The earliest rock music spent its years attempting to define itself as separate from the blues; its most celebrated members, the Beatles, introduced a fugue-like style of composition and a more flexible view of key that allowed it to escape the paint-by-numbers approach of blues and early rock. This defined and ended the first generation of rock, meaning that starting in the middle 1960s rock music was inspired to new dimensions. The first offshoot of this was the instrumentalist movement in England, which made a more technical and musically literate form of the blues, and the second was progressive rock, which attempted to infuse classical music and jazz percussion into rock music. By the time 1969 rolled around, these movements were well-established enough to produce a counter-reaction in the form of the first proto-punk (MC5, Link Wray, Iggy Pop, Blue Cheer) and proto-metal (Black Sabbath) bands, as well as an offshoot of progressive rock that hid its technicality in favor of a storytelling epic grandeur in music that was outwardly simple but artistically complex (Led Zeppelin). From this ferment, metal was born, and it it should be recognized that the first signs of its birth were the acerbic distorted guitar stylings of King Crimson and the detuned droning boom of Black Sabbath; it cannot be underemphasized how Led Zeppelin, despite being similar to proto-metal, belongs to the progressive rock canon alongside Jethro Tull and other "loud" bands, but aesthetically and musically influenced the metal to come.
II.
Not surprisingly, metal music found its first home in England. There was first a confusion of the new style with the old, as seen in later Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and the increasing use of distortion in progressive and technical blues bands. This spurred the birth of a "New Wave of British Heavy Metal," who from roughly 1972 to 1978 produced the greatest bands of the classic heavy metal era, including Angel Witch, Blitzkrieg, Budgie, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. These bands often named themselves through an inverted duality, like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath did, taking a known light/positive concept and modifying it with a sense of heaviness or evil. The suggestion in that type of name is that not all which claims it is good and light will turn out so; there is an implication that underneath the veneer of society, something disturbed lurked, and this was possibly best expressed in Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," in which the tendency of society to fight ideological wars for "good" resulted in young men who could not buy their way out of service being sent off to fight for the benefits of the economy, with Satan laughing and spreading his wings, as if his great deception was that not all labelled as good is in fact not evil. Early heavy metal found a fascination with the occult, the undercover, and that which was outside of normal bourgeois or even urban poor lifestyles, including drugs, motorcycles, bar fights, Satan and a "gypsy" mode of living. It was subversion of society by pointing out the unnoticed in which life thrived, outside of the rigid definitions of a mechnical and moralistic society, and this was echoed in visual art and literature by the postmodernists.
III.
To a bored generation tired of the simplistic solutions of hippies, and also afraid of the staid world of function to which their parents in terror of being destitute and at the mercy of society cleaved, this was a breath of fresh air. During this era, heavy metal gained its peak of popularity and was gradually coopted into a hybrid of NWOBHM and stadium rock, the ballad-heavy and strikingly visual style of emotional and individualistic rock music designed to please a mass audience. During the early 1980s, this exploded into form with a metal/hard rock hybrid in England and America, with bands like Rush, Quiet Riot, Def Leppard, Van Halen and even louder commercial pop like The Cars and INXS. At this point, the desire for acceptance that early heavy metal bands had desired was satisfied, but at the price of seeing metal reintroduce rock music aesthetics and ideals inside of itself. One counterweight to this tendency was the "neoclassical" movement in heavy metal lead guitar, which used classical technique and often themes from great classical pieces to highlight a higher ambition than that of its stadium-bound colleagues. While it is impossible to avoid mentioning Yngwie Malmsteen in this context, it is equally silly to disregard the allusions to this tendency in Judas Priest, Deep Purple and other classic metal bands. Neoclassical metal was a natural direction for the most adventurous metal bands to follow.
Reactions to stadium rock-metal were forthcoming; first, punk music exploded with the aid of the ragged sound of heavy metal and songs that were "nihilistic" because they unabashedly used simple musical devices and had no pretentions, artistic or otherwise, toward hiding their mechanism. Punks saw progressive rock as decoration, and when heavy metal sold out, wanted to make a form of art to preserve the spirit of insurgency against a rotted social fabric that they had observed in the best of the early rock and metal bands. Punk itself went from a proto-punk form to punk hardcore, and immediately sold out into what is disparagingly called "punk rock," or simple rock songs restated in power chords and punk rhythms. Naturally, the newer generations of metal bands sought to hybridize the parts of this energy they saw as useful; they were enamored of the simple effectiveness of punk, but disliked much of its anti-artistry, which they saw as crushing imagination at the expense of politics and social activism. The first ventures into this line of thought also came from England, in the form of Motorhead (1976) and Venom (1978), who made stripped-down heavy metal with the bouncy simple riffs of punk bands; these bands were also luridly enamored of after-dark culture (Motorhead) and the occult (Venom), although in an artistic and not dogmatic sense.
IV.
As this style dawned in the early 1980s, it left England entirely and became a phenomenon divided between the United States and continental Europe, and here is where metal's maturation began in earnest. In the USA, two movements formed roughly simultaneously; thrash, or metal riffs in superfast punk song structures, and speed metal, or punk-influenced heavy metal with startlingly progressive song structures. Thrash bands like Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (DRI), Corrosion of Conformity (COC), Cryptic Slaughter, Fearless Iranians From Hell, MDC (an omnireferential acronym) and dead horse startled the world with short, often under twenty seconds, songs and abrasive condemnation of modern society as soulless and whorelike in its pursuit of money. In this they extended the ideals of punk, but to them they gave a sense of the non-literality of metal, a desier to create a mythology of life outside of the norm. Speed metal bands, most notably Metallica, Nuclear Assault, Exodus, Testament and Prong, forged ahead with a more explicitly mythological worldview but infused into it a punk distrust of society's motivations that stretched back to "War Pigs" in its fusion of occult, technological and moral theory. Speed metal borrowed much of its song structuring from progressive rock, not leaving verse-chorus patterning behind, but augmenting it with introductory riffs, interludes, and songs that used more than one pair of complementary motifs before returning to a fundamental theme (Metallica's "Orion" and "Call of Kthulu" are the best examples). Thrash died in almost the time frame of its blurfast songs, and speed metal lingered until 1989 before following its forefathers into the cold still death of being absorbed by mainstream stadium rock ("One" by Metallica is as explicitly stadium rock as Def Leppard's "Photograph," but of a higher aesthetic and conceptual quality).
V.
Europe at the time may have been a more cynical place, in part because while America was threatened by Soviet missiles, Europe was threatened by not only nuclear war but the threat of a second Soviet invasion. To those who did not endure the Cold War, it is hard to describe, but it was a competition of mythos: the evil Soviets bearing down on free will with conformity and a ruthless ideology versus the decadent Americans promising "freedom" and delivering wage slavery (as it turned out, both sides were correct in their assessment of the other). This paranoia fueled the literalism of American thrash bands, but in Europe, it evoked a highly symbolic interpretation of heavy metal that became the basis for all metal to come: the rise of proto-death/black metal with Hellhammer, Sodom and Bathory. It is appropriate to point out how this music was fueled by its origins, namely hardcore punk of the ambient style from Discharge, who produced their seminal work in 1982 ("Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing") and a heritage of NWOBHM including its partial generation in Motorhead and Venom. The new music used the epic riff stylings of metal, aiming for a sense of grandeur and world-weighty topical conclusion as found in opera and classical music, but had the energy of punk and many of its techniques, but it went further: like speed metal, it used song structures adapted to the content of each song, or a collection of riffs that narrated a developing theme. This can be seen most clearly in the ten-minute "Triumph of Death" from Hellhammer, which cycles through several complementary patterns of riffing, often returning to theme but never lapsing entirely into verse/chorus structure, where speed metal bands inevitably did. Also introduced was a rasping vocal, equally influenced by Motorhead and punk hardcore bands like The Exploited, that gave an ethereal and sinister sound to the music.
It is worth mentioning that with the rise of death and black metal in prototypical form, the "underground" was born: a parallel society of fans, labels, magazines ("zines") and venues that supported a style of music that would have been offensive to the ears of most listeners. In the 1980s, the technological futurism of the 1970s merged with a desire for a clear-cut ideological division of the world into a culture that favored only cleanly defined objects and ideas; the sound of 1980s mainstream music was techno-savvy keyboards, discrete percussion, crisp vocals and a lack of noise. Like punk before it, 1980s underground metal was a stab in the face of this: distorted, embracing forbidden underworld topics like the occult and life outside of the working world and bourgeois lifestyle, and contra-moral in its embrace of death in both giving and taking. In fact, one of its primal statements was literally "The Triumph of Death": no matter how much we hide behind social constructs, like money or popularity, we must face our mortality and this more than anything defines our lives - although, it seemed, the mainstream was obsessed in denying and obscuring this eventuality. At this point, bands also aspired outwardly toward classical music in structure and aesthetics, with Bathory's Quorthon listing Wagner as one of his primal influences.
VI.
The middle 1980s showed a flowering of this style into death metal, the more rhythmic interpretation of the new concept, and it occurred at first in the Americas. A speed metal band named Slayer became massively popular by using the new style of riff and song construction, but keeping the shouted vocals of speed metal; in the same part of California, two years later, one of the first death metal bands, Possessed, cut their definitive first album. Similarly, Deathstrike/Master in Chicago were forging ahead with their punkish death metal, and in Brazil, Sepultura had already made microsymphonies of simple riffs in complex ordering schema. By 1989, death metal was well defined, but remained off the radar of the average fan because its albums were for the most part sold in specialty record shops and were not reported on in the mainstream press. At this point, the term "underground" gained currency, much as it had with punk and indie rock before, denoting both a separate marketplace and attitude than that of mainstream rock. Morbid Angel, Deicide, Massacra, Asphyx and Death were releasing albums at this point; they were followed by those who proliferated the style, such as Suffocation, Immolation, Incantation, Morgoth and Nihilist. By 1991, death metal was in full maturity, and perhaps reached its peak with Morbid Angel's "Blessed Are the Sick" and Deicide's "Legion." The underground began to attract mainstream attention as these albums sold over 100,000 copies.
VII.
Like all things, death metal grew, then became bloated, and then obsoleted itself as imitators flooded the genre. Its strength was its structuralist composition: riffs fit together in a narrative style that was specifically adapted to the content of the song, meaning how it translated real-world experience into music; this was in contrast to rock music, which used an exclusively cyclic structure whose goal was to maintain a constant state of high emotional arousal. Death metal did not have a consistent emotion, and to most listeners seemed dangerous in its ambiguous attitudes: experienced was not described and then wrapped up into a handy conclusion, but left in its raw form, including its dangers which were, like mortality itself, inaddressable. It did not offer suggestions that love was eternal and would overcome death, or that emotion was more powerful than the real world. It emphasized the terrifying nature of reality as a balance between death and life, and cast aside individualistic morality for a look at situations as a whole; where individualistic morality makes statements such as that killing is wrong, that is an artifact of its focus on the individual as its primary element; death metal used a holistic morality that looked at the whole of the situation and saw incidental deaths as inconsequential in comparison. Death metal was "nihilistic" in that not only did it refuse to dress up its motivic material as was done in rock music (shades of punk hardcore), but that it accepted that our lives are meaningless except to ourselves and that the only meaning was as found in nature, a process of natural selection and survival. It was explicitly anti-Christian and anti-Capitalist in this regard, although death metal bands were not opposed to making money (in philosophical terms, capitalism is a system where the most important aspect of society is the accumulation of wealth; one can support earning a good living without thinking money is more important than culture, morality or art). Death metal bands wrote about disease, death, the occult and mutilation with verve; underlying these graphic images was a re-centering of life, a discovery that no matter how we categorized things as "good" or "evil," life itself was our goal and life was transacted not in morality but in actions: structural change, genetic change, mystical and mythological conceptions beyond the discrete binary categories of individualistic materialism. As such, death metal was the last great subversive genre to emerge from the 1980s and perhaps its most insightful.
When the 1990s dawned, change occurred in the world. Conservative leaders in Europe and America were supplanted by liberal ones as the cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its associated Communist substates. Metal forked again: while death metal continued to grow, its shadow genre grindcore - death metal restated through a punk ethos - bloomed, as did "industrial grindcore" and industrial-metal hybrids like Godflesh and Fear Factory; simultaneously, surprising everyone, the melodic offshoot of proto-death/black metal rose, this time called by a name it had musically grown to inherit: black metal. Where death metal was a revolution against popular music, black metal was a re-evaluation of its and a distillation of it to its most basic value, which was melodic guitar lines (this was heavily influenced by one of the furthest developments of death metal, the Swedish melodic style as represented by At the Gates and Dismember) causes a re-interpretation of death metal's structuralism: where death metal was narrative through phrasal composition, or a sequence of riff shapes suggesting an ideal, black metal expanded on that by using melody as its primary shaper of idea, and connecting the rhythmic narrative through it, creating not only a sense of progress between themes, but giving a more emotional interpretation without being subsumed by personal emotion (as was common in rock, and the genre that succeeded dying punk hardcore, "emo"). Black metal also grew out of the literalism still present in death metal, preferring mythic and historical themes, and developed an artistic theory that had been lingering in metal since its inception in the neo-Gothic Black Sabbath: Romanticism.
Romanticism remains difficult to define after centuries of study. It is at its most basic a resacralization of life to include not just nature but a human place in it that accepts death as equally necessary to life for the perpetuation of the grounding of life; it is a recollection and celebration of the values of the Greco-Roman ancients, a time before binary morality; a time when natural order was seen as commanding human life not only outside but inside. Romantics espouse an idealization of life, as seen in the concept of "romance" to existence, meaning that through behavior toward higher ideals - fidelity, eternal love, the order of the cosmos - the individual achieves a sense of divinity within life, a transcendence. Romantics do not need individualistic morality, or a world beyond this one for which to live; they live in a physical world but rise above it in thoughts to touch what is important in any age, a furthering of self through greater perception and understanding of the structure of the universe and natural law to the degree that death, life and suffering are seen as agents of fulfilling that structure whose ultimate aim is the beauty and transcendent grace of higher consciousness. Romantics tend to be non-Christian or Christian in a gnostic- or pagan-influenced sense, nationalistic, and in love with the psychological symbolism of mythology and its connection between the present and human life for all time. Romanticism as a genre is almost exclusively European, practiced mostly by the English and Germans and Americans, and gave birth to Europe's height of philosophy, arts and music. The simplest study of Romanticism views it as a period in history, but this is an error, as it is a discipline of thought that has appeared in partial or whole form throughout European history, and continues to be rebirthed to this day. Romantic art can be distinguished for its portrayal of ancient ruins, of the individual as a singular force in a numb world, of respect for the eternal and transcendent attributes of love, and a worshipful attitude toward nature that includes respect for its terrifying aspects, like the singularity of death and the possibility of predation, war, great suffering, and disease; Romantics view suffering as a challenge to be overcome not in and of its own sake, but for the sake of what can be achieved through it, as in the image of a lover suffering for the beloved and feeling his love all the more intense for it. Although like most post-1980 metal, black metal does not mention personal romances, this is its heritage as a genre contrary to individualistic, personal morality; in all other ways, it is strictly Romantic in what it idealizes and represents.
Black metal kept alive in the previous decade through the 1987 release of Sarcofago's "INRI" and the 1989 release of Merciless' "The Awakening," but otherwise, was mostly hibernative. While Venom had coined the phrase "black metal," and many considered Bathory and Sodom to be of the genre, it did not come into its own as a musically distinct whole until renovated by the Norwegians in the years 1990-1993; by the end of that period, it had reached a musical apex and disintegrated in a drama of church arsons, murder, terrorism and politics (the last major outburst of Nationalism, one tenet of Romanticism, was 1933-1945 with the German National Socialist German Worker's Party, or Nazi party, and this similarity as well as outright praise for the NSDAP from black metal bands would cause no end of trouble). The new form of black metal did not use the guttural distorted vocals of black metal, but higher-pitched shrieks that could be contorted to express emotions impossible in a monotone; unlike the detuned death metal bands, black metal bands used standard tuning and turned up the middle ranges and not bass ranges on their amplifiers; where death metal was driven by its percussion, black metal drumming was background timekeeping having more in common with ambient/industrial bands like Kraftwerk and VNV Nation than heavy metal; where death metal song structures aimed at finding an empty mood at the end of conflict, for black metal, conflict in symbolism built to a peak, after which there was a passage through the simplest and barest and most meaningless music possible as a conduit toward an inner peace, and a sense of meaning. In all aspects, black metal was the culmination of the metal ideal since 1969, and its highest degree of musicality and aesthetic yet achieved. Black metal bands, hearkening back to the legend of "Oskorei" or undead warriors who reclaimed earth to remove poisoned-tongued usurpers, painted their faces white and black, and they reclaimed the armor-based aesthetic of early heavy metal which emphasized leather and metal attire. Imagery from the Viking age, from ancient Greece and Rome and India, and the distant occult pervaded songs. Arguably, the first band to spread black metal of this style was Immortal, but it arose simultaneously with Darkthrone, Gorgoroth, Burzum, Emperor, Mayhem and Enslaved, making it difficult to point to one leader. Much as Metallica symbolized speed metal to most people, however, Mayhem was clearly the focal point for most fan attention; not surprisingly, it was the most "heavy metal" of the above list. Interestingly, the next generation of metal produced a number of formative acts, including Graveland, who rediscovered the waltz style in their sweeping and oddly beautiful works.
Black metal thrived for several years and then petered out, with most of the original bands opting to go into ambient and medievalist music (Darkthrone -> Neptune Towers, a Tangerine Dream tribute; Beherit -> "Electronic Doom Synthesis"; Burzum -> a triptych of keyboard albums made from prison). It became the most popular form of metal ever, and coincided with, through a proliferation of CD-pressing technology, home computers capable of recording and mastering albums cheaply, and MP3-based file sharing, the death of the underground. Record companies thrived in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to the new CD technology, which was cheaper to produce and thus granted higher profits, but faltered with the rise of the internet. Record stores were no longer necessary; a wider range of CDs could be had more cheaply online. MP3s meant that fans heard music before they bought it, if they bought it at all (although most metalheads tend to purchase CDs they like if for nothing else because of the often-fantastic cover art). It was no longer a market that sustained an underground and a mainstream, in the conventional sense; if something could be recorded, it would be made into MP3s and sold via super-mainstream sites like eBay and Amazon. Computerized stocking and ordering meant that larger CD-selling enterprises no longer were troubled by the expense of keeping large stocks, and gladly stocked underground metal alongside mainstream bands. The most virulent and antisocial black metal, including Darkthrone and Graveland, appeared in Wal-Mart; mainstream record stores in malls added metal sections, where up until 1997 it was almost impossible to find underground bands. The underground was obsolete and niche marketing replaced it.
VIII.
This brings us to the present era. While black metal thrived until 1993 in Norway, after that it was supplanted by bands from Poland (Graveland, Veles), Greece (Varathron, Rotting Christ), and even the United States (Havohej, Demoncy, Averse Sefira). However, the quality never matched that of the Nordic bands; the "new" black metal was closer to both hardcore and heavy metal, and tended to use shorter riffs in verse-chorus structures interrupted by periodic narrative moments; it was like a throwback to speed metal. As the 1990s waned, it became apparent that little if anything of importance would come out of black metal, artistically, but the genre was more popular than ever before as new fans discovered the formative bands and bought any of thousands of recombinant new ones. It was at this time the first rumblings of discontent emerged from the far-thinking metal fans, although certain Norwegians had espoused this opinion in early 1996: metal had lost forward impetus and had lost sight of its own goals because it was overwhelmed by its new aesthetic power. Black metal, unlike death metal, was beautiful under the distortion; it was theatrical, and it had imagery that called to mind epic surroundings and meaning to life instead of a grungy casting-aside. It had an idea of what society might be, if it were to reclaim itself from the wasteland of modernity. It evoked in its fans a sense of grandeur, a sense of things to achieve, a feeling that the suffering and emptiness of life could be overcome, and that there was something to live for. Imitators poured into the genre, and by 1999, it resembled punk rock and speed metal with black metal vocals more than the foundational black metal of 1991.
Metal will not move forward from this state until it overcomes its aesthetics and finds a connection to its motivation. Early heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest embraced a Gothic worldview; they praised the fallen from past times, used ancient and occult symbolism in their works, and sought a greater meaning in life outside the profit/morality thinking of modernity. This was somewhat sublimated during the speed metal years, but was always present, if nowhere else in the musical dimensions of that genre; it was hard to spot as well in death metal except in the praise of death as a giver of meaning, which is a classic Romantic concept. In black metal alone it found full expression. It was as if black metal, as a language for speaking the values system of all heavy metal genres, gave fluency to an otherwise confused genre half-divided between rejoining rock and becoming something of itself. Now that the language is complete, metal must find a new articulation if it wishes to move on. What might future metal resemble?
Aesthetic
Much of what holds metal back, and against which black metal strained, is the rock-style song format and instrumentation: constant drumming, guitars and bass and vocals, and a need for lyrics to manage some recognizable verse-chorus pattern. Not all of this will disappear, but it is likely these will be used to revert music to a more complicated form as the artistic and conceptual demands of the metal form increase. Form will change with change in conception, and vice-versa; much as Venom's clumsy and primitive music inspired others to develop that aesthetic into a more articulate language, when metal begins moving past the simplistic format of rock music, it will grow toward higher ideals. When percussion leads music, it forces the rigid division of phrase to fit tempo and the conclusion of phrase; in music that is less rigidly aligned to percussion, like that of Tangerine Dream/Neptune Towers or classical, phrases are less repetitive in part because they are not forced into a symmetry of length and position.
Darkthrone, on "Transilvanian Hunger," gutted percussion into a background throb that framed rather than led the development of phrase; other black metal bands experimented with long-phrase drumming that would forego fills to extend a pattern into background prevalence. When drums no longer lead, guitars do, and the changes in riff and phrase expand the music beyond linear repetition. Enslaved on "Vikinglgr Veldi" found some balance in this style by forcing percussion back from a leading role into that of pace, allowing guitars to mingle with other instruments and develop without having to slam to a stop at the end of phrase. Another suggestion here comes from At the Gates, who on "Terminal Spirit Disease" showed full development of longer melodic lines which evolved over the course of each song. Combining these would give metal more of a classical and progressive edge in that it would be purely melodic, and would require greater density of composition, without losing the energy for which it is famous.
Structurally, such a style would give rise to the trellis structure as seen on Deicide's "Legion" and other technical death metal albums: paired motifs themselves split into complementary opposites for several generations, and it is the resolution of each smaller motif that returns the song to the level above it until it achieves a symbosis of its major thematic divide. Gorguts exploited this concept on "Endura," which would be a riff salad except for the clear relationship in pairs of riffs to a central theme; on "Unquestionable Presence," Atheist used this structure to introduce a dominant progression in which variation reinforced theme. In contrast to three-chord rock, this is the fullest extension of the narrative style, and focuses not on completion of a single pattern but on the interweaving of multiple patterns to synthesize an implied common direction to varied pieces. This allows compositions, like classical symphonies, to range widely while having a unifying germinal concept. What is commonly called "progressive metal," like much of progressive rock, fails to utilize this idea so much as it dresses up rock music with a series of distractions designed to obscure the simple-mindedness of the original idea (Opeth and Dream Theatre are guilty here). Although not an argument for "progressive" metal, the idea of narrative trellis composition gives bands the ability to tie together a number of solid but simple ideas into a complex whole based around a central concept of a basic nature; in this style, complexity does not distract but serves to reinforce the major idea.
Into this style will meld a number of techniques. The muffled strum of speed metal can coexist with the open tremolo of black metal because each can be used, in lieu of drumming ending the phrase, to seize or continue a rhythm. Phrases can unfold naturally to fruition and explore each other in a structured improvisation as necessary, or if played as written, be used to develop multiple voices and emotions within a single piece. This is a greater compositional "freedom" than the shorter phrases of rock demand, and while it does require some greater familiarity with music theory, it is not solely anchored to music theory but to the use of music as a voice which represents the content of each song, usually in the narrative format that takes the listener from one concept through its opposite to a sense of balance and continuity. Another technique that will become more commonly used is the wash of overstrum, or adding of notes to a chord by playing them lightly in sequence after the harmonic unity of the chord, which with distortion produces skeins of harmony which not only anchor the melodic phrase but can complement it to differing degrees, changing emotional context. Non-metal band My Bloody Valentine used this technique, as did industrial grindcore act Godflesh, although it also appeared in Mayhem and Burzum among other black metal bands. Together these flexibilities of technique will reduce the need for metal bands to play hard and fast, solid and finite riffs, and allow them a greater range of expression within a dominant mood which will uphold the classic attitudes of metal.
Community
Now that there is no longer a need for the underground, and the underground has shown itself to be susceptible to the same social pressures that made mainstream music detestable to many, it is likely that future metal communities will abandon all pretenses of underground and recognize that only the music will determine its audience. No piece of music can be made so difficult to find or obscure in symbolism that it will not hit the MP3 networks or be sold on Amazon and eBay, so the newer music will rely on its artistic expression alone to select its audience. The true sheep out there have shown they will readily embrace Cradle of Filth and Opeth and Cannibal Corpse even if they sound "angry" because the music is not that different from punk or hard rock, but the preponderance of followers has not followed acts like Neptune Towers or the Burzum ambient keyboard albums. This is not coincidence; people do not like music they do not understand, or which requires too much attention span to deliver the immediate gratification that is favored in increasingly degrees as one approaches the lower mentalities among our society. Metalheads of the future may keep their characteristic long hair and band-logo tshirts, but it is unlikely they will in the future be standoffish; more secure in what their music conveys, and in its esoteric dimensions unlikely to be appreciated by the democratic horde, they will rejoin society as a legitimate voice in its discourse for future. Metal techniques have been assimilated by grunge bands, nu-metal bands, industrial bands and even hip-hop acts; metal cannot stand apart, but must abandon its fear of modern society and fight back by being heard among accepted genres. This is both less extremist than the "underground" and more so, in that it is a demand that the ideas carried by metal, and not just its aesthetic, be considered among others. It is as if metal turned away from society in 1969, but is now returning to the forefront of battle, determined to inject its own DNA into the thoughts of society as whole.
Ideas
Where metal flirted with the occult, it is likely that it will look toward a more academic attitude toward spirituality as a whole; it is probable that anti-Christianity will be replaced with anti-dualism and a sense of the need for a spiritual bonding toward nature in the attitude of Romantics, where there is no dualistic "pure world" (Heaven, "good," Truth, pure forms) but a physical reality in which idealistic transcendence is achieved, and in which a beauty of contemplation can produce a desire to love life and to change it for the better as an ongoing process and not a moral one. It is also likely that a maturing metal genre will cast aside its individualistic baggage, and become not collectivist (like punk) but holistic, in that it will see a cosmic order embracing nature, the collective and the individual, in which the individual plays a role in furthering the development - akin to natural evolution - of higher and more beautiful ideals, of more complex and more perfectly adapted designs. "Truth" will no longer be seen as a dualistic entity which can be attached to a god, or a scientific discipline, or a dollar sign, but as a byproduct of experience by which we assess objects and ideas according to how well they will symbioticaly coexist with the rest of reality.
Nationalism, which caused black metal so much trouble through its use of Nazi symbolism, will likely remain, but in the sense of each nation - Germany, France, Denmark, Iran - speaking up for itself and its indigenous peoples. The "white power" aesthetic that produced National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) will be rejected in favor of a more naturalistic interpretation, and a renewal of traditional culture and musical archetypes. This does not mean that nationalism will lose its tendency for cultural separation on the basis of ethnicity, but that it will lose the violent bigotry common to "white power" movements, by which all things white are accepted, regardless of nationality, and all other things scorned and ridiculed. Nazism may or may not be interpreted, but the interpretation required for the current era is one of tolerant cultural separation, not violent, symbolic and insular isolation. Nationalism makes sense as a way of preserving each culture against the onslaught of globalization, portrayed in "Industrial Society and Its Futures" by Ted Kaczynski as a leftist movement; it is part of Romanticism, and part of respecting nature and its divisions of humankind. However, "white power" movements see only the color line, and this restricts the artistic ambition of metal to propaganda, which explains in part why after three classic bands NSBM degenerated into boring repetitive music like the rest of the genre.
If there is an area in which metal will expand, it will be to follow its naturalism to accept the natural order as the grounding for life and consciousness itself, and thus a post-moral acceptance of predation, death and suffering as essential to life and joy and growth. From this will come a natural praise for forests, as seen in black metal, and for ecosystems at large; it is possible, indeed, that if metal has a future political alignment, it will be non-leftist Greenism. This fits hand in glove with the depersonalizing tendency of metal, in part because many metal musicians view the West as corrupted by the egos of individuals; metal has for some generations favored a view of the cosmic order as a whole in preference to an individualistic outlook as found in consumer society, democracy, Judeo-Christian morality and hardcore punk.
Conclusion
Until it occurs, future metal will remain an enigma to us. The purpose of this document has been to describe the evolution of metal such that what future metal might be becomes apparent, and so that we know on what basis future metal will diverge from the past. It attempts to reveal through ideas, music and imagery what it is that is quintessentially "metal" and what these ideals reveal about the artform and the intentions of those who create it. It has also devoted a good deal of time to showing how metal has stagnated as a result of reaching a high point of aesthetic evolution, and how in the future, it is necessary to overcome this "safe" ground for higher goals. In one of his most poignant moments of insight, British spymaster Ian Fleming summarized his knowledge in this pithy phrase: "Never say no to adventure." Future metallians must be brave enough to move past a sure thing toward an uncertain ground of experimentation, much as each of us welcome each new day with no idea what will occur within it. Metal at the current time is obsolete and suffocating under its own weight, but there is a future open to all who respect and believe in its fundamental values and direction.
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