The History of Heavy Metal Music & the Metal Subculture

HISTORYof heavy metal music

& the metal subculture

a historical view of metalby the American Nihilist Underground Society

COPYRIGHT © 1988-2004 MOCK HIM PRODUCTIONS

AMERICAN NIHILIST UNDERGROUND SOCIETY 5

ThesisPOPULAR MUSIC WAS recorded and marketed as a Counterculture which op-

posed the normal, functional, and unexciting Culture that was dominant in

society; by being outside of that which was in power, Counterculturalists argued,

they were able to see what was “real” and to implement a “progressive” world view

in which moral correctness brought us gradually closer to a utopian state.

This marketing mirrored the process of adolescents, the main audience for

popular music, who first reject the world of their parents, then once indepen-

dent re-assess their own values, and finally, rejoin society on the terms of these

recreated values. This determines “reality” as they will act to create it, based

upon their values system.

While dominant Culture sought what was pragmatic, and Counterculture

pursued the moral, metal music became its own movement because it could not

agree with either of those approaches, preferring instead to try to seek what

was “real,” or meaningful and “heavy” (in the LSD-influenced vernacular of the

time). Their approach did not aim at correctness, but assertion of subjective

meaning.

Early metal bands, in emulation of popular music as a whole, hoped to discover

what was real by finding out first what was not. This attitude, over the course

of four generations of music, took metal beyond the grounds of “good” versus

“evil” into nihilism, where nothing had inherent value or classification, but

could be described in terms of experience.

Nihilism is a frightening belief system for those in societies organized by dual-

istic (heaven versus earth) and liberal (individualistic, egalitarian) societies, as it

denies that our values systems are more real than events in natural reality. To a

* HISTORY OF HEAVY METAL MUSIC & THE METAL SUBCULTURE

6 AMERICAN NIHILIST UNDERGROUND SOCIETY 7

IntroductionMETAL MUSIC BEGAN as the work of the youth born after the superpower age

began, during a highly developmental period for Western civilization in which

it, having defeated fascism and nationalism and other old-world evolution-

based systems of government, considered itself highly evolved in a humanistic

state of liberal democracy which benefitted the individual more than any sys-

tem previously on record. During this era, society served citizens in their quest

for the most convenient lifestyle possible, and any questions or goals outside of

this world view were not considered: it was considered a “progressive” continu-

ation of human development from a primitive evolutionary “red in tooth and

claw” state to one in which social concepts of justice and morality defined the

life of the individual. The individual has triumphed over the natural world, and

faces none of the uncertainty of mortal existence brought about by physical

competition and predation.

Politically (the global quest for egalitarian society) and socially (the empower-

ment of new groups and loss of consensus) humanity viewed itself as getting

ahead and being superior to other forms of civilization, including the equally

egalitarian but totalitarian Communist empires of the Soviet Union and

China, but as the thermonuclear age dawned in the 1950s, this dichotomy came

to define the “free West” as much as its enemies.

The first generation after WW11 created early proto-metal in a time when

all older knowledge and social order was being overturned in the wake of an

impulse to redesign the world to avoid the “evils” of the previous generation.

The people of this age, and coming ages, were new in that they could not recall

a time of direct experience of nature as necessary; the grocery stores, modern

medicine and industrial economies of their time took care of all of their needs,

and no unbroken natural world could any longer be found except on specialty

nihilist, truth is a way we describe some things in reality, but there is no eternal

life nor eternal truth which exists separate from immortality. Nihilism means

accepting mortality, and experience as what we have in place of a religious or

moral truth.

These ideas exceed limits of social acceptability, which in a capitalist liberal

democracy threatens the self-marketing which individuals use to gain business

partners, social groups and mates. As a result, metal was forced to wholly tran-

scend the artificial consensual reality shared by Culture and Counterculture,

and to create its own value system including its nihilism.

Seeking the real, and not the moral, this value system in turn surpassed its own

nihilism by moving from a negative logical viewpoint to an assertive one, look-

ing not for something objectively determined to be “eternal” but for that which

will be true in any age past or present, discovering through personal experience

and acceptance of nihilism (a symbolic analogue for mortality) that which

society will not recognize, completing the process of adolescence in a state of

actual outsidership.



hauer before him, to realize this was an “undergoing,” or embracing of nihilism:

the belief that there is no value other than the inherent, physical interaction

of the natural world. To a nihilist, there is no inherent morality or value, thus

there is no reason to view social status and financial success as ultimate goals,

only as methods to a path ranked by subjectively-derived importance. This view

threatens the beliefs and punishments used to hold Western society together

since roughly AD 1000.

Regardless of benevolent social objectives, Nietzsche argued, religion and soci-

ety were cults that banished death through the “revenge” that morality offered

in giving the individual a vector by which to be “better” than the world itself,

and by being “equal” to all others, immune to comparison (a symbolic form of

predation triggered by Charles Darwin’s arguments on “survival of the fittest).

In essence, Nietzsche saw social behavior itself as an enemy of reality recogni-

tion in the individual and thus, like morality, an ingrained influence that would

prompt rebellion and instability within a society that would know no other

recourse than moral norming.

Heavy metal, as the music most visibly fascinated with death and suffering (and

most likely to mention Nietzsche), addresses the sublimated issue of Nietz-

sche’s abyss in Western society, which has based its founding principles and

individual social and mystical values upon the polarity of “good” and “evil,” is an

identification with the enemy. In the Judeo-Christian view, death and suffering

are an enemy which is banished with “good” behavior in the hopes of heavenly

(and earthly) reward. In secular form, egalitarian capitalist liberal democracy

“empowers” the individual and gives him or her the moral “freedom” to act with-

out regard for the natural world, thus being immune to predation and any form

of assessment outside of the social and fiscal. When one embraces the breadth

of history (outside of the current civilization), the nihilistic lack of eternal pres-

ence of value, the predominance of death and predation, and the logic of feral

tours. Their civilization had become exclusively introspective and was losing

contact with the (natural) world beyond its self-defined boundaries.

During this time, a “peace” movement which embraced pacifism and egalitarian

individualism was gaining popularity at the forefront of the counterculture, a

phenomenon which had existed since in the 1950s smart marketers (namely Al-

len Freed) had promoted rock music as an alternative to the staid, traditional,

monogamous and sober lives of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon Americans. With

WW11 polarizing the world against first German and later Russian “enemies,”

and Viet Nam revealing the moral bankruptcy of benevolent superpowers

motivated by their economies, society was becoming more dependent upon the

ideological tradition building over the last 2,000 years: focus on the individual,

or individualism, as politically expressed in egalitarianism and liberal democ-

racy. This was expressed in both culture and counterculture.

In contrast, metal music emphasized morbidity and glorified ancient civiliza-

tions as well as heroic struggles, merging the gothic attitudes of art rock with

the broad scope of progressive rock, but most of all, its sound emphasized

heavy: a literal reality that cut through all of our words and symbols and grand

theories, to remind us that we are mortal and not ultimately able to control our

lifespan or the inherent abilities we have. This clashed drastically with both the

pacifist hippie movement and the religious and industrial sentiments of the

broader society surrounding it.

PhilosophyThis was a confrontation with the “abyss” as first described by existentialist

F.W Nietzsche: the awareness that life is finite and of functional, transactional

maintenance; that we are both predator and prey, and that we have no control

over our lives or death. To Nietzsche, and thinkers such as Arthur Schopen-



the nihilistic mandate of “now that you believe in nothing, find something

worth believing in.” The ease of social and political identification found in rock

music is eschewed, as are aesthetics which endorse the myopic neurosis of first

world lifestyles. And while metal has evolved over several generations, several

musical facets remain the same, suggesting a corresponding shared conceptual

underpinning.

This “design form” of metal differs from popular music in one simple way, but

from this arise any number of techniques and attributes which allow composers

to create in this method. Its primary distinguishing characteristic is that metal

embraces structure more than any other form of popular music; while rock is

notorious for its verse-chorus-verse structure and jazz emphasizes a looser ver-

sion of the same allowing unfetter improvisation, metal emphasizes a motivic,

melodic narrative structure in the same way that classical and baroque music do.

Each piece may utilize other techniques, but what holds it together is a melodic

progression between ideas that do not fit into simple verse-chorus descriptors.

Even in 1960s proto-heavy metal, use of motives not repeated as part of the verse-

chorus cycle and transitional riffing suggested a poetic form of music in which

song structure was derived from what needed to be communicated.

SynthesisIn this structuralism, metal music asserts a concern for the underlying

mechanism of the universe as a whole, instead of limiting its focus to human

social concerns. This degrades the public image fascination begun in the West

with absolutist morality; in its use of power chords, the most harmonically

flexible chord shape, and a tendency toward melodic composition, metal music

emphasizes an experience, where rock can articulate at best a moment and then

put it into a repeating loop. While rock uses more open chords and aesthetic

variation, its outlook is ultimately a utopic form of the counterculture: progres-

impulse, one has directly challenged both modern capitalist liberal democracy

and the extensive religious ( Judeo-Christian) and secular (liberalism) heritage

upon which it is built.

8,000 years before Christ there was a religion in Northern India which ad-

dressed these issues in a sense without dualism; it believed that life is known to

humans through sensual (eyes, ears, taste, smell, touch) perception of a reality

composed of ideas which was similar in structure to both nature and the pro-

cess of thought itself. In this religion the Faustian spirit was clearly present, as

while a heroic deed was more important than survival, personal mortality was

clearly affirmed. Thus there was both meaning and death, and no absolute God

or Heaven to reconcile the two. This required the individual to declare values

worthy of filling a life, and worth dying for, and from this origin the ancient

heroic civilizations were spawned. Metal’s belief system is closer to this than to

any modern equivalent, thus it is sensible to posit a closure of the cycle and its

renewal in the ideas gestured by heavy metal music.

MusicArt does not exist in a vacuum within the minds of its creators. If a concept is

applied to music, there is a corresponding concept in structure and the world

view of the artist that creates the frame of mind in which the artist creates mu-

sic which sounds like its desired value system. Art is too complex to be created

without any prior thought as to what it expresses; this concept is common in

literature and visual art, but ignored in popular music (perhaps because in most

popular music, the concept - and the music - reflect crass materialism and

futile neurosis and not much else).

At the end of an age of moral symbolism and technological norming, metal

is recreating the language of music to reflect heroic values, formulated from



sive trends leading to some ultimate state of an absolute, such as “freedom” or

“joy” or “popularity.”

By way of contrast, metal music is a portrait of the post-humanist mind set:

concerned more about natural reality than social symbolism, addressing experi-

ence instead of moral conclusion, and, when it seeks a context of meaning,

oriented toward the subjective experience than an “objectivity” derived from

shared societal concept. It is aware that leaving behind the comforting alternate

reality of social assessment returns to a natural state in which the individual is

ranked among others according to ability, much as predation did years ago, and

is forced to accept mortality and limits of personal control. This thought dem-

onstrates the modern era of Western civilization facing the ideas of the ancients

while eschewing the consensual social reality of industrial capitalist liberal

democracies, and, as said societies collapse from lack of consensus, a potential

future direction for Indo-European culture.



Period 1 [ 1865 - 1949 ]History [Populism]IN THIS AGE, America matured from its beginnings into the bureaucratic

complexities of a modern republic, decided on its unifying concept, and conse-

quently, experienced demographic and social change.

Having been formed in 1789 on a compromise between those who wished

to remain colonies and those who wished for a centralized federal entity, the

fledgling nation had resolved few of its internal disputes in part owing to the

chaos of its birth and the ongoing warfare that afflicted it as late as 1812. Having

dispatched this, it began attempting to find consensus among the disparate

viewpoints that had not found home in a Europe wracked by internal religious

infighting descended from the conflicts of the middle ages.

As the nation-state of America expanded, especially toward the West, there

was an increasing need for governmental intervention to resolve disputes (seen

by the republic as transactional) between settlers and Indians, settlers and each

other, Westward republics and the banks that owned them back east. This

required a commitment to a bureaucratic entity, which in turn required central

authorities and standards.

The result was, after some internal peregrinations, a Civil War not fought over

the issue of slavery (as asserted in middle school textbooks) but the issue of state’s

rights: was the United States a confederacy of small independent nations, or a

republic made of states which were essentially local variants on the order imposed

by a strong central government? The latter prevailed due to the industrial su-

premacy of the northeast; this would be a central theme in most American wars.



Music [Rock]One cannot contemplate rock music without viewing its roots; that being said,

its roots cannot be viewed without analyzing their origins in turn, and the

political circumstance which shaped their public image.

Derived from English drinking songs, Celtic folk music, German popular music

including waltzes and the proto-gospel singing of Scottish immigrants, “country

folk” music had been an aspect of American culture since the early days of the

Republic, but as it existed in country and not city was rarely recognized by cul-

tural authorities of the day. Further, once new populations became empowered

and replaced the old, most of this history was forgotten.

In part, the reason for this was political: the members of society who advanced

American popular music as an art form were not of the original Northern

European population, nor were they disposed toward thinking benevolently

toward the same; further, they needed to invent something which, like advertis-

ing through the 1950s, presented itself as an oppositional alternative to the “tra-

ditional, boring” way of doing things (early advertising extolled the virtues of its

products, while later advertising promoted products as part of a lifestyle which

had to demonstrate both novelty and uniqueness to have value as a replacement

for the traditional, boring, and otherwise effective way of doing things; this

transcendence of function for image has fundamentally shaped American char-

acter). As a result, the mythos of blues as a solely African-American art form,

and the denial of the Celtic, English and American folk influences on both

blues and rock music, was perpetrated as a marketing campaign with highly

destructive results for all involved.

The blues was not formalized until it was recorded, and at that point in time,

a fixed structure was imposed on it based on the interpretations of others.

Broadly stated, it used a minor pentatonic scale with a flatted fifth, constant

Once this concept had been decided, it was over the next forty years unified

by an expansion of the founding concepts of the nation in accordance with the

decisions of the Civil War. The highest power was the Federal State, but the

Individual was its currency, and therefore America came to embrace its image

as the “melting pot” in which the “poor, huddled masses” might find refuge. As a

result of this new marketing, America invited and enfranchised new groups of

people, starting with recently-freed African slaves and continuing to an accep-

tance of previously unwanted immigrant groups, such as Irish/Scots, Italians,

Jews and Slavs.

Because of this change, a shift in alignment occurred that would plague Ameri-

ca in the coming years: the original Northern European population of America,

now seen as the top dog in a complicated caste system, began to isolate itself

through financial and social means from successive waves of newcomers of

fundamentally different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. This was

contrasted by an egalitarian movement to accept these people and “diverse,” or

non-collectively-consensual ideas into the mainstream; as time passed, this

movement became known as the counterculture, but that could only occur

after World War 11, when the country was united in temporary consensus by a

shared enemy.

As a result of these social changes, American ideology underwent public

change. Where it had once been an elitist nation designed for those who could

rise above the need for a normative social order, it became an inclusive and fa-

cilitative society whose greatest degree of commonality was a desire by its new

and old populations to rise in class rank through the earning power afforded

by a vast industrial civilization. Over time, this view, in which society pandered

to the diverse and non-consensual individuals for the purpose of “empower-

ing” them to be socially equal, earn money and become autonomous agents of

wealth, became known in a generalized sense as “Populism.”



tiguous such that a player of Indian classical music and a Celtic folklorist can

complete each others’ melodies in the traditional manner. Similarly, pentatonic

music also derived from the Indo-European tradition was present in Germany,

most notably in the biergartens and public ceremonies requiring simple music

that everyone could enjoy. These musics employed improvisation, as did clas-

sical playing from the previous four hundred years; when these historical facts

are recognized, American popular music can be identified as the marketing

hoax that it is.

The consequences of this hoax have been a persistent blaming of white Ameri-

cans for “stealing” a black form of music that never existed, and in return, a con-

descension toward traditional forms of music of all races that became identified

with, and scorned as, a black form of music. As we shall see, marketing has

both shaped the American experience and contributed to longstanding internal

conflicts without resolution. In terms of popular music, marketing is impor-

tant precisely because it insists on standard forms; they are easy to reproduce

without requiring any particularly unique talents on the part of performers,

producers, marketers or audience. This has caused an increasing simplifica-

tion of music while marketing has grown correspondingly more savvy and, like

American advertising as a whole, has grown away from focus on the product to

focus on lifestyle associations unrelated to the product.

However it arrived, blues-country became “rock” in the 1930s-1950s mainly

because of technology. Adolph Rickenbacker invented the electric guitar in 1931,

and recording equipment advanced from the primitive to the cheaper and more

portable units brought on by vacuum tube and then transistor technology.

Additionally, microphones improved, especially those which could capture the

nuances of voice. Louder guitars and vocals required the simple shuffle beats of

blues drumming to gain volume, prompting a revolution in drum kit assembly.

As a result, the simple blues-country hybrid became a marketing standard

syncopation, and distinctive “emotional” vocal styles. Of all of its components,

none were unique, nor was its I-IV-V chord progression unique to the blues. To

view it from an ethnomusical perspective, the blues is an aesthetic (not musical)

variation on the English, Scottish, Irish and German folk music which made

up the American colloquial sonic art perspective since its inception. From a

marketing perspective, however, the blues had to be marketed as a revelation

from the downtrodden and suffering African-American slaves, so that it might

maintain an “outsider” perspective which, to people bored with a society based on

money and lacking heroic values, might appear more “authentic” than their own.

When country music was re-introduced to the then-standardized blues form,

the result was called rock music. Its primary difference from country was in its

use of vocals which emphasized timbre over tonal accuracy, and the adop-

tion of a more insistent, constant syncopated beat. While German waltz and

popular music bands had invented the modern drum kit and developed most

techniques for percussion, their music and that of their country counterparts

in America tended to use drums sparsely, much more in the style of modern

jazz bands than in the ranting, repetitive, dominant methods of rock music.

However, it is hard to find someone in a crowd of mixed caste, race, class and

intellect for whom a constant beat is intellectually and sensually inaccessible,

so it was adopted as a convention. Much as the standardization of the blues

took diverse song forms and brought them into a single style, rock swept a wide

range of influences into a monochromatic form.

Some historical backfill is worth noting here. The Celtic folk songs of Ireland

and Scotland had two main influences: the pentatonic drone music of the

Semitic “natives” of the UK, namely Scythians and the diverse groups forming

“Picts,” and the Indo-European traditional music which is continued in India

today. The melodies, including pentatonic variations of many different forms

(many of which include the flatted fifth or modal analogue), are almost con-



moralism, which places not harming others as a higher value than finding the

right answer for all people) which accelerated after the Civil War, as it needed

to justify its crushing of those who wanted America to be a loose confederation

of countries with different rules and customs for each, and after WW11, when

America had to justify her total war and nuclear engagement against “totalitar-

ian” empires by coming up with a better marketing slogan, namely the “land

of the free” rhetoric. Thus individualism travelled from a minor technique of

asserting independence from the dominant religious tradition of the mother

continent to a justification for global military and cultural supremacy.

Art did not escape this influence. As art is a mental process that, if the artist

wishes to survive on his or her skill, produces a salable physical entity, public

and popular art by definition must find something to sell to its audience, usu-

ally by exploring concepts with which they are familiar and enamored. For this

reason, in capitalist liberal democratic societies especially art tends to follow the

trends of each era, and in America, art has gone from being of the elitist classi-

cal music and fine arts tradition of Europe to having a distinctly popular flair,

reflecting the individualistic concept that no idea can be judged by collective

standards, and thus that like individuals all art and all perspectives are “equal,”

and have no meaning except aesthetics; thus if art appeals to one for sentimen-

tal or visual reasons, it is more important than any transcendent meaning it

might attempt to convey. This individualism shaped the stylistic aspects of rock

n' roll more than any other single force.

Influence [ Country, Celtic ]Country, Folk and Celtic music originally had a diversity of forms but under

the influence of rock music, became increasingly closer to the standard rock

form while feeling the pressure to change stylistically. In this the normative

influence of monochromatic forms such as rock music is seen.

known as “rock n’ roll,” then “rock,” as it was absorbed into the American main-

stream. The earliest bands lacked much in the way of style, but wrote compla-

cently harmonizing pieces based on the European popular music of clubs in

the 1930s (much of jazz is based upon the same music). As time went on, the

stylings - appearance, performance and cultural positioning - of the music

became more advanced, and the songs themselves became simpler and more

like advertising jingles.

Art [Individualism]If one thread had to be described in the art of the era as rising parallel to

Populism in the political and social consciousness, it would be Individualism:

the belief in the decisions and desires and needs of the individual as the most

important value held by humans, especially in the context of “lifestyle choices”

which involve the purchasing of products. Much of this relates to the desire of

new American immigrants to both fit in and be accepted for what they were, as,

lacking the cultural affectations of Northern Europeans, they demanded a “tol-

erant” society such that their own customs might not come into conflict with

any dominant or consensus-oriented cultural standards. Thus non-consensus

became consensus through the vehicle of absolute individual autonomy, and a

depletion of any standards for the goals of individual behavior.

When the religious impetus to America first developed, it was in the form of

settlers escaping the imperial sentiments of a Europe united by Christianity;

after one thousand years of wrangling in which the mostly Judaic-Buddhistic

doctrine of early Christianity had been replaced with the Euro-Brahminic

doctrine of Catholicism, the continent had accepted the modified religion and

begun the process of bringing disparate cultures and peoples under its yoke.

As government became necessary, it followed a pattern of allowing universal

non-consensus (a process similar to the autonomy granted the individual by



Period 2 [ 1950 - 1969 ]History [Counterculture]

"I’ve watched the dogs of war enjoying their feast

I’ve seen the western world go down in the east

The food of love became the greed of our time

But now I’m living on the profits of pride"

- Black Sabbath, “Hole in the Sky,” 1975

WHEN WORLD WAR 11 broke out across Asia, Europe, and finally the

Americas, there was at first confusion as to how to portray this war. A world

already sickened by the first World War and the Great Depression was inclined

toward non-interventionist policies, favoring sticking close to home and fix-

ing local problems (the Depression having run for a decade, most countries

were starved for social services and public works that had lapsed during that

time). Ultimately, what leaders and propagandists alike made the tone of their

argumentation was the concept of the “free world” versus leaders who were

seen as arbitrarily totalitarian. Where before World War 11, Hitler was seen as

an ideologue who would use any method to achieve his ends, in the hands of

US propagandists he became an insane man lusting for power who would use

ideology to justify his ends (the same was done to Tojo, Mussolini and later, in

a case in which it may have been accurate, Stalin).

The result of this propaganda was to consolidate the different aspects of egali-

tarian philosophy in the West into a single imperial doctrine, that of bringing

“freedom” of individualism to an (obviously) otherwise “uncivilized” world, thus



cessible to the second-tier European populations such as Italians, Irish/Scots,

and Slavs (all historically less favored because of their racial mixture, in the

case of the Italians, Arabs, the Irish/Scots, Scythians and other middle eastern

groups, and the Slavs, Mongols, Gypsies and Jews). When the Beats faded

toward the end of the 1950s, they had been statistically insignificant except

in academia, which meant the next generation of teachers in the 1960s were

well-versed in Beat and liberal orthodoxy, and taught it to students from age

13 onward. Consequently, the youth coming of age in 1965 were aligned against

the religion, social practices and values of their parents, and burst into full

flower as a “Counterculture” whose primary doctrine was that opposition in the

name of traditional American values of liberty, equality and fraternity applied

to disenfranchised populations from African-Americans to American Indians

to Jews and Homosexuals. These groups united under the Countercultural

banner to become a force that assimilated American liberalism and redirected

its agenda to empowerment for all, once it became dominant. However, before

it gained any social status, it had “outsider” authenticity and cachet which made

it a sought-after cultural force across the West, in part because of its contrarian

status and its lack of acceptance among the cultural and social mechanisms of

the day.

Music [Proto-metal]Since 1950s rock had been such white bread wholesomeness, centered mainly

around puppy love and going to the beach or the sock hop, the revenge of those

who had been left out focused angrily on dissident and alienated themes, but

expressed them to some degree in the civility of the day, leading to forms that in

our current time of literal and material thought are tame, but in their time were

offensive by the nature of their existence. These came in three forms, one crude,

one arty, and one technique-oriented.

justifying the right of America and her allies to engage in any warlike practice

that suited them against nations which did not uphold the capitalist liberal

democratic government, widely held to be the most “empowering” and “moral”

form of government. Whether fighting godless Communists or the “Hitlerian”

nationalist Milosevic, the Americans - and their allies of liberal powers including

wartime partners the UK and Australia - felt themselves justified in waging war

for the reason of bringing capitalist liberal democracy to the “people” of distant

homelands. This was in many ways parallel to COMINTERN, or the Communist

movement to “empower” workers worldwide with Communist societies.

However, the first tremors of uncertainty cracked this facade during the years

following WW11. First in Korea, and then in Viet Nam, the Americans faced

wars of murky practices and equally murky outcomes following the doctrine of

“Containment,” by which Communism was blocked from gaining a foothold

across the world. As it turns out, Containment was not incorrect, for Commu-

nism or any other system, as industrial powers tend to influence their neighbors

through gifts of weapons and financial aid (carrot) and military intimidation

(stick). The Vietnam war brought this uncertainty to a head in 1968 during the

Tet Offensive, when an American public who had been assured by their TV sets

that the Vietnamese Communists (NVA/VC) had been all but beaten suddenly

witnessed a Communist force of unpredicted size and strength swarming from all

corners to attack a demoralized, racially-divided and drug-addicted US military.

The result was politically contained, later, but it was clear to most alert observers

that American doctrine was facing a major challenge both externally and surpris-

ingly, internally (it took two decades before a liberal president, Bill Clinton, would

apply the same policies with limited success in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan).

The result of this doubt and political posturing was most profound in America.

In the 1950s, Beats and other cultural insurgent groups cast aspersions onto

the traditional American way of life, one which had in the 1950s become ac-



Trees are worth mentioning here, but these bands had a foot as well in inspira-

tion from the first dark rock band to exist, the Doors. Where other rock bands

had focused on love or peace, the Doors brought a Nietzsche-inspired morbid

subconscious psychedelia to rock music, and were the origins of much of the

neo-Romanticism which later bloomed into metal, as well as many of the more

inspired moments of progressive and punk rock.

By 1969, the influence of these artists had saturated the forms of public

consciousness which were focused on rock music as a developing art form,

and contributed to the explosion of hard rock (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple)

and proto-metal (Black Sabbath), both of which occurred simultaneously to

the development of distorted, power-chord based technical music from King

Crimson. This year was thus the watershed for loud forms of rock, as it started

three threads which would run concurrently during the 1970s and hybridize in

the next decade.

In many ways taking up where the Doors left off, Black Sabbath were originally

a British electric blues band named Earth, but after guitarist Toni Iommi had

a stint in progressive rock band Jethro Tull (and not coincidentally, members

of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath participated in each other’s projects), the

quartet surged forward with a new sound, inspired by horror movies and the

same morbid, neo-Gothic animal nihilism that had made the Doors strik-

ingly out of place. Using perhaps the most extreme distortion heard so far, and

reducing the flowery instrumentalism of the time to the basics, Black Sabbath

combined progressive rock with electric blues and created something that differed

from its contemporaries in several ways: it almost exclusively used power chords;

it used bassier distortion; it had narrative song structures like a progressive band,

but relied on gut-simple riffs for the majority of its air time; it was morbid, occult

and negative in its lyrical outlook. For all of the political change fomented by

1960s rock, Black Sabbath were a shock - but even more surprising was their

The first was the advent of loud, distorted blues, which was pioneered by a

mess of a band called Blue Cheer, who made braying, droning, grinding blues

rock with the aid of deformed amplifiers and a passion for crudity. They were

the vanguard of a range of electric blues bands from Cream to Jimi Hendrix to

ZZ Top, and inspired much of the loud rock which followed, including proto-

punk-rockers the Kinks and the Who. Much can be said about these bands,

but what is most important is that they took the traditions of folk and blues

improvisation and turned them into something technically on par with the jazz

and big band acts of the day, adding guitar fireworks and lengthy songs to a

genre that was otherwise strictly radio-play ditties.

The second tine of the fork was progressive rock, which in 1968 found its most

extreme act in King Crimson, but which truly flowered during the early middle

1970s. Arguably, this genre was given impetus by a band overmentioned in any

history of popular music because they were among the first to leave standard

rock format, overcoming its novelty, namely, the Beatles. Their work was one

of many that allowed bands to mix classical and jazz training into their rock, re-

sulting in longer song structures, many of which were narrative or neo-operatic

(Camel, Genesis, Yes) and the use of distortion and dissonance in artful ways.

While these bands ultimately choked on their own “virtuosity,” being nestled in

a genre that could barely appreciate them but not reaching the level of complex-

ity of classical works (in part because of a need to service the unending drum-

beats and syncopated rhythms common to rock), they lived on in contributions

to other genres.

Finally, there was a tradition of bands who grew from the surf and garage rock

traditions into a technique-oriented neo-proto-punk-rock format, beginning

with half-American Indian guitarist Link Wray and leading through surf guitar

champion Dick Dale, both of whom were users of distortion. Psychedelic

bands such as the 13th Floor Elevators and semi-punkers like Love and The



that was the basis of the English drinking songs and Scots hymns that inspired

the blues, including some degree of instrumental vocal shadowing (“call and

response”), repetitive verse chorus form, and a bridge taking the song to a brief

melodic counterpoint and then resolution. The more intricate Black Sabbath

songs were thus mostly lost to radio, encouraging any artists wishing to develop

those concepts to do so elsewhere. Further, the morality of the time and the

counterculture was offended by the occultism Black Sabbath had chosen as an

aesthetic image, yet had found it loomed larger than life (aided by the semi-

serious occultism of Led Zeppelin’s Jimi Page). Occult beliefs are distinguished

from “normal” (Christian, Jewish) religions by the occult’s tendency to accept

good and evil as forcing balancing the universe, both being necessary, as in the

gnostic tradition. This doesn’t sit well with church elders nor with Counter-

culture members trying to come up with a universal, absolute reason why

change and empowerment of the less-fortunate must occur. Years later, even

highly political punkers were often skeptical and repulsed by the amorphous,

indefinite stance of heavy metal, as if they fear the reaction of an occult mystic

to their rule-based logic.

Art [Moralism]During this era, in which the superpowers re-aligned themselves internally

to justify their violent projection of individual “freedom” upon the world, as a

consequence of their competition with the Communist empires of Russia and

China, the primary goal of Western art was to glorify the individual and the

choices it faced approaching “freedom” in an industrial society. Jazz rose into

the mainstream and took on new forms, most notably the harmolodic (free

harmony) of Ornette Coleman and the consequent adoption of that technique

by John Coltrane, as a coda to hard bop. Mainstream film and literature both

praised the individual and its range of choices, and warned of possible confu-

sion in this new society. Don DeLillo’s 1972 novel White Noise is emblematic

consequent success on radio and in record stores. They had tuned into something

their worldwide audience found relevant, if not appealing.

Legend relates that the members of Black Sabbath, looking for a new “angle”

(trend) in rock music, drove past a marquee for the horror movie titled Black

Sabbath in English speaking countries. H.P. Lovecraft, arguably the founder

of that genre, once stated that in life he had not observed good or evil, but an

abundance of horror - meaning that there was no moral classification for the

“bad” things that happened, but that the experience would be horrific. Black

Sabbath as a band, in adopting their new image, sought to express the experi-

ence of horror and truth, eschewing for a moment the rigid morality of rock

bands around them.

It is important to note that most of this occurred with notice - by the mem-

bers of Black Sabbath. They wanted to be musicians and fit in somewhere

between power blues and progressive rock, and despite drug use, psychological

mishaps and basic personal instability, they created a “sound” that was ahead of

its time - and ahead of its musicians. Much less articulated than Led Zeppelin

(and farther from the rock norm of the time), they launched themselves ahead

of the crowd and then had to look back and gather some sense of direction,

causing the band to collapse artistically by 1978. At that point, however, the

formula for 1970s heavy metal was established: a smidgen of the King Crimson

esoteric weirdness, the dark Gothic haunting cavernous sound of Black Sab-

bath, the guitar wizardry of Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, the physical

thunder and brash insane hedonism of Blue Cheer. At this point in history,

“heavy metal” (a term borrowed from beat writer William S. Burroughs’ 1962

novel, The Soft Machine) was viewed as somewhere between prog rock and

psychedelia, but already its content was starting to differentiate itself.

Primarily, mainstream radio music will always follow the same song format



Influence [Prog, Jazz]If one were to diagram the influences between metal and progressive rock, it

would resemble a game of Pong more than anything else, as any idea one had

would quickly influence the other, in part because early hard rock bands such

as Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin had “virtuosity” and harmonically advanced

music which put them in roughly the same league as bands such as King Crim-

son and Camel, mainstays of the progressive rock era. Hard rock bands didn’t

tend to be as “weird” or venture as far from the conventionally accepted song

format, as their audience was less art-school and more blue collar. However,

the influence occurred, and through prog rock was absorbed quite a bit of jazz

and classical theory as well. (An influence also came from Roma guitar player

Django Reinhardt, who like Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi was limited

in motion to only two fingers on his fretboard hand.)

of this tendency, in that it both explored the importance of each individual life

and warned about a lost span of consciousness in a world of brands, constant

distractions, entertainment and cities which were more like machines than

dwelling areas. Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the years following, Gravity’s

Rainbow, warned of the moral - individualistic - consequences of too much

technological thinking. Some years before, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch

had suggested that society operated according to an “Algebra of Need,” in which

the drug seller’s dependency on his client’s dependency was compared to the

system of capital itself. While these books were highly critical of society itself,

their criticism was based in liberal democratic thought and the importance of

the individual, which made them both critics and collaborators in the society of

the time.

At a certain level, there is truth in the observation that to explain evil is the

first step to excusing it; indeed, that all explanation is, de facto, exoneration. It

is a dangerous step down a path to moral relativism, situational ethics and the

enfeebling of the will to fight the evil from the washington times.

Naturally, in popular music, this formula was pared down quite a bit. Most mu-

sic was still about love, but it had gone from “puppy love” to “serious” adult love

to the concept of love as political activism, in a neo-Christian belief that if we

embraced all people equally, peace would reign on earth. While to anyone from

the 1990s or later this concept is all but a punchline, at the time a less experi-

enced society found it a welcome respite from the Cold War and the balance of

power between two nuclear-tipped adversaries. In the vision of the music of the

time, now labelled “classic rock,” a moralism of the individual could prevent the

abuses of the past, and thus by process of elimination, have solved the problems

of the future.



Period 3 [ 1970 - 1981 ]History [Futurism]THE WORLD SAW the postwar order of superpower rule fade as the failures of

Vietnam and the cold war culminated in a lack of faith in previous ideologies.

The hippie generation, as an appeal to values inherent to the American political

dialogue since the writing of the Declaration of Independence, was a culmina-

tion of internal stress in the democratic, neo-liberal, individualist political cli-

mate of America. While claiming ourselves to be liberators, detractors argued,

we were shepherding our own third world with segregation of the oppressing

and subjecting ourselves to a social order that put a monetary/political value

on lifestyle, sex, and desire. America - the great savior of Europe during World

War 11 and the world policeman for commercial hegemony - confronted her

own hypocrisy in the rice fields of Viet Nam and the crowded race riot kindling

of America’s ghettoes.

In chasing the symbols of peace, happiness, love and tranquility, the “youth

counterculture” of the 1960s and 1970s embraced its oppressors and soon

the peace sign became another icon of commercial culture. In the absence

of ideology behind the dissipating hippie movement, technological futurism

without ideological structure mated the sensual lifestyles of the 1960s with

the commercial values of the 1940s, leading to a vapid culture which quickly

assimilated anything however rebellious into its stream of social entertainment.

The unstoppable machine of basic commerce which had been untouched by the

hippie revolution began to justify itself with morality while increasing the ben-

efits of first world living. Free love became swinging, experimentation became a

steady diet of drugs, and ideology turned into coffee table discussion. By these

mechanisms the 1970s became a futuristic decade, or one in which belief turned



Having been thus born of the rock tradition early metal remained much

within that framework, with dual lineages existing in Black Sabbath, the

proto-metal architecturalists, and Led Zeppelin, the blues-folk-rock extrava-

gantists. While the 1970s struggled to develop further the innovations in rock

between 1965-1969 the influences that hit metal were primarily from European

progressive rock. These musicians used classical theory to give narrative context

to themes which in the popular music style repeat through cycling short

complementary phrases or riffs which center motives. This technique migrated

classical styles adapted from acoustic guitar and espoused structure over total

improvisation.

As metal grew in the middle 1970s, its fragmented nature brought it both

commercial success and hilarity as a retarded younger brother to rock. The

rock side coupled with trash rock bands and formed stadium metal, which was

the apex of metal’s popularity and the nadir of its creativity, with bands being

known for musical illiteracy, hedonistic excess and often mind-wrenching stu-

pidity in interviews. These bands would come into full flower in the 1980s, but

marked their territory well before the turn of the decade. On the other hand,

however, some of the most dramatic growth in metal occurred when bands

merged progressive leanings with desires for traditional solid, sing-along songs.

From this fork in the metal path came three greats whose influences cannot

be underestimated, birthed in the early 1970s but becoming most dramatically

influential in the 1980s: Judas Priest, Motörhead, and Iron Maiden. Each had

musicians from a progressive background who added new ideas to rock and

metal, whether the neoclassical guitar duo of K.K. Downing and Glen Tipton

or the melodic basslines of Steve Harris of Iron Maiden. Even Motörhead, the

simplest and most basic of the three, wrote songs with a melodic baroque ten-

dency that rivalled that of the Beatles, except without the flourishes and happy

feelings. Bridging between psychedelic space rock like founder Lemmy Kilmis-

toward the future and technology as a savior where ideology had petered out,

paving the way for a decade following which would affirm the industrial revolu-

tion as its own value system.

During the 1980s, the only relevant symbols were monetary and social success,

meaning a modern adaptation of the white picket house in the suburbs, the

minivan, local church and school groups and happy children with no cares in

the world. A decade of overextension and massive expenditure on cold war

buildup shattered most of this and replaced it with a literal reality of subservi-

ence, slowly flipping the power balance to a sublimated leftism. As the smiley

futurism came to a close at the turn of the eighties it was clear the alienation

was not an affliction but a condition of the system, and more extreme responses

arose. Both the old-school conservative system and the hippie “revolution” had

failed in their aims. In the mainstream, the previously “new left” leanings of our

culture were overshadowed by the pragmatism of gaining money and power,

and in the underground, a new series of dissidents found themselves in desper-

ate paranoia against the industrial society slowly surrounding them. Slowly,

the pragmatic “eat and assert needs” conservatism of America flowered with

Ronald Reagan, and the underground new left moved toward media and went

mainstream to combat the money and power of old school interests.

Metal [Heavy Metal]Metal began in prototype form with Black Sabbath, whose trademark occult-

ism symbolized life in terms of the eternal and ideal, while their gritty, sensual,

lawless guitar gave significance to the immediate and real. The resulting fusion

of the bohemian generation with a nihilistic, dark and morbid streak birthed

early metal. Those who had rejected the hippies and found no solace in social

order embraced this music and lost bohemians everywhere began to find new

directions in this sound.



rock n’ roll had run itself into redundancy, relying on extremity to make itself

something other than mundane.

The result of this pursuing tangible heights in a void of actual belief was a

profound hedonism. Casual sex reached the mainstream, as did drugs including

more powerful variants of marijuana and cocaine. The futurism of a commer-

cial society replaced ideas with lifestyles based on products, conspicuous con-

sumption, and the Me generation at its most flagrant. The result was that most

fell into mainstream lockstep, having absorbed the methods of the previous

generation but lost its belief; the dissidents in art were hardcore punk, ambient

and electronic music.

Influence [Electronic, Ambient]From the public front, the Sex Pistols exemplified all that hardcore was: brash,

loud, and in total nihilistic denial of almost all value (except curiously being

anti-abortion, since even punk vocalists find it hard to shake past indoctrina-

tion). For every band that was a public face on punk however there were garage

bands and hardcore bands which labored in obscurity, rarely recording much

that survives to this day, in part because their attitude toward musicality was

so dismissive that their one- and two-chord songs had few fans except those

caught up in the cultural movement itself.

In ambient music, musicians such as Tangerine Dream and Robert Fripp

probed a new form of spirituality in pieces that eschewed the obvious, tangible

and quantifiable sounds of traditional rock instrumentation, preferring instead

lengthy pieces which slowly developed through layers of atmosphere and con-

tained a poetic content of revelation, much as classical pieces progress through

motives to uncover an essential melody or inspiration. They were echoed in

this by electronic musicians such as Kraftwerk, who originated the genre when

it was necessary to be able to manufacturer one’s own instruments, who used

ter’s Hawkwind, aggressive punk and simplified metal-rock in the style of Blue

Cheer, Motörhead sounded like a glass-gargling vagabond and an impromptu

jail session band, but developed much of the technique and basic riff forms for

the hybrid music to come.

The more obscure and threatening NWOBHM bands grew with the subgenre in

the 1970s to oppose commercial slickness with direct and primal music. Angel

Witch and Diamond Head and eventually Venom tore technique to its basics

to get to the ballad-meets-firefight balance of rebel music. All of these fused the

DIY attitude of punk bands with the epic nature of metal and created as a result

music that was bold and far-reaching but accessible, both to fans and to those

who would like to pick up their own instruments and emulate it.

Art [Hedonism]“My purpose was always just to express myself,” he answers.

“People are kidding themselves when they think music is going

to change the world or enlighten people. It’s a bunch of hogwash.”

- Paul Stanley, Kiss

The 1970s brought an era between the peace love and happiness age and the

more serious years to follow; as the Cold War intensified and the threat of

ICBMs became more pronounced and definitive, the 1970s were privately a grim

time of preparation for the worst and publically a time of vast hedonism. Part

of this existed because underneath the hopes of the last generation had been a

vast despair, in knowing that force would solve what pleasant thoughts of peace

and universal love could not; part of this occurred because the movements of

the 1950s had run their course for a generation without finding anything new.

Hippies were essentially Beats with a more artificially positive outlook, and



their classical training to make sublime pieces overlaid on top of minimal beats,

reversing the trend toward more ornate percussion that had grown through

rock and especially its progressive variant.

While these three exceptions existed, the rest of the world essentially anaesthe-

sized itself, including most rock, metal, jazz and blues musicians, leading to a

time of innovation in technical detail but loss of basic impetus. For this reason,

hardcore punk changed the entire way sonic art was viewed, and electronic music

took a subtle backseat while providing the groundwork for the next generation.



Period 4 [ 1982 - 1987 ]History [Reactionarism]ONE DEFINING ASPECT of the 1980s was the ascent of conservative leaders

in the United States and Britain who favored building up large militaries and

nuclear weapons stockpiles to counter those of the Soviet union; this was a

reaction to the more passive eras previous which had hoped that love and later

technological futurism could drive away the basic problem that faced human-

ity, namely two edgy superpowers ready to clobber each other with bombs that

turned cities to glowing dust. The feeling was that the Cold War could drag

on interminably, or could explode at any moment, and the West wanted to be

ready for that eventuality.

The result was a decade which outwardly tried to affirm all that the people in

their 30s and 40s found meaningful, namely a white picket fence vision of Amer-

ica from the 1950s, and this boiled over into England and the world as a whole. It

was a bracingly reactionary time, in which “Communist” was once again a career-

threatening insult, and in which the Christian religion and the process of mak-

ing money for oneself again became the way in which one’s social importance

was reckoned. Naturally, this provoked a resurrection of the Counterculture and

its strongest incarnation yet, since it had been absorbed in the 1970s and, since

popular opinion was close to its own values, had been assimilated. Now that it

once again had something to rebel against, it manifested itself in a growing cadre

of die-hard liberal specialist movements and alternative art, literature and music

scenes, none of which produced anything enduring.



Classic speed metal bands were Metallica, Megadeth, Testament, Slayer,

Anthrax and Prong, but these were the largest and most commercial and many

others existed concurrently. Thrash remained underground and lasted for less

than a decade, thus it retained its primal trio of Cryptic Slaughter, the Dirty

Rotten Imbeciles and Corrosion of Conformity, although it is academically

interesting to mention offshoots like Suicidal Tendencies and Fearless Iranians

From Hell, both of which were more punk rock and rock n' roll than the core of

the thrash genre. Although toward the end of the 1980s people began referring

to bands like Destruction and Kreator as “thrash metal,” it makes more sense to

identify them as essentially speed metal bands which borrowed attributes from

thrash and nascent death metal bands.

At one point praised by Robert Fripp for remaining apart from mainstream

culture, these bands faced a growing divide in the music industry, namely the

availability of cheaper recording technology (thanks to advances in digital and

manufacturing ability) as well as, for the first time, the ability to press records

and CDs in small runs, giving rise to a horde of smaller labels. While hardcore

punk bands had maintained the DIY aspect for years, they were unwilling and

unable to make any money doing so, but in the 1980s the ease of access to these

technologies meant that small, independent (“indie”) labels could both publish

eclectic rarities and not go bankrupt in the process.

For youth growing up during this time period, life was an uncertain and

duty-bound prospect, threatened on one side by ICBMs which could arrive in a

matter of minutes and vaporize cities, and on another by a tide of reactionary

politics and social conformity which forced people into norms to avoid the risk

of standing out and being tacitly avoided by employers and potential social con-

tacts alike. Speed metal and thrash bands, who were in the crux of generational

exchange, experienced both worlds: the public image and the private reality,

including political dissidence.

Metal [Speed Metal/Thrash]Metal aged and so did the generation that produced the hippies, drifting into

commercialdom and then self-hatred for losing sight of basic goals. Having lost

both of their fundamental systems of iconography (traditional + hippie “revolu-

tion” and New Left) within a decade while most of the population remained

ignorant to both, the youth of the 1960s and 1970s were more cynical and

materialist as they aged than any previous group. This awakened a scavenger

coming to carcass in the 1980s which rolled into glorious rehash of the com-

mercial ambition of the 1950s, leading to a wave of denial and an ever-present

conformity in face of new fears: drugs, technological warfare, disease.

A desperate paranoid climate emerged underneath the murmuring denial

neurosis of commercial social doctrine. Ideology in popular music became

an intense moral crusade of horror at the history of humanity to that point,

hearkening back to WWI-era dissent. In this environment, metal updated itself

with the aggression and simplicity of hardcore, and came back for the attack in

at first two hybrid genres: speed metal and thrash.

Speed metal took the classically-influenced structures of neoclassical pro-

gressive heavy metal from the 1970s and merged them with the palm-muted,

choppy strum of violent British hardcore, as well as the whipping speed-strum

of the more fluid crustcore genre. An example of the first influence can be

found in violently alienated bands like The Exploited and Black Flag, where

the latter originated in Amebix and Discharge, who twisted three chords into

a song where the guitar playing was fast but the drumming and vocal delivery

slower, creating like ambient music a disorientation of pace and thus of activity.

Thrash was crossover music based more in hardcore, so unlike speed metal,

which added hardcore riff stylings to metal song forms, it added metal riff styl-

ings to hardcore song forms.



its tendency to sound like everything else. In con-

trast, electronic music was exploring increasingly

existential themes and broader questions of intent,

eschewing the moralistic humanism which overran

speed metal and thrash.

This conflict led to change in the form of the rise

of metal’s dual underground genres, which by

1987 had established themselves in nascent form

as a handful of ideas and techniques each. These

would await another generation to be brought into

much focus, as the transitional time of the end of

the 1980s and the dominant liberalism of the early

1990s caused further ideological confusion in metal

(and essentially eliminated punk hardcore as an

art form, since it drowned in the same ideological

conformity). At first, these two genres were the

same musical formation, but over time differences

in scope and belief separated them.

Early bands which explored this new territory

fused the melodic, elemental speedy hardcore of

Discharge or The Exploited with the more architec-

tural song forms, as developed initially by bands

like Judas Priest and Angel Witch, and added to

them an emphasis on chromatic intervals, both for

their simplicity and the dead sound they gave to

any melodic temperament to the song as a whole.

After Discharge’s “See Nothing, Hear Nothing, Say

Nothing” came out in 1982, metal responded the

Their hardcoresque anthems of social and political

dissent are leftist but even more so, “rejectivist.” The

world is pushed back and its mechanisms declared

incompetent. Many began the slow spiral into

fatalism, where either through belief in religious

mechanisms behind historical growth or a lack of

ability to apply their passion, lapsing into a hedo-

nism of self-destructive principle. The hedonistic

attitudes and hail-satan paeans to deviant creativity

evaporated as a politicized theory of what ought

to be done, inherited both from hardcore punk

and the surrounding public culture, seized metal.

Songs were written about the evils of drugs, the

mistreatment of American Indians, the oppression

of minorities by a WASP majority, the desire for

individualist independence from the conformist

horde, and the abuse of our natural environment.

At its inception a genre of palm-muted, Morse-

codish riffs and epic song structures the speed

metal of the 1980s held out until the 1990s before

being absorbed. Speed metal and “social conscious-

ness” dimmed many fantasies; it had become as

moralistic as both the conservative society and

self-righteous countermovement against which

1969 metal had rebelled. This caused dissent among

those who felt that both commercialism and this

moralistic trend were absorbing the “free spirit”

they had admired in the music previously, and that

it was becoming predictable and self-destructive in

Q: What is its appeal to Laibach?

Well, it’s very industrial, and formerly it was very innovative, especially techno music. It’s a very innova-tive practice, in the way of inventing a new form. The only real revolution which has happened inside of pop culture was for instance Kraftwerk. They have actually formed a new language inside music; they could easily be treated as the last important German classical composers. And after Kraftwerk there was no other revolution inside music-yet. Everything was based on what had already been stated.

It’s all based on the format of rock and roll. Rock and roll is a matter of something which originated in the Six-ties and Fifties and it is not very original-it’s coming out from traditions of Gospel and Blues and that goes further into African roots, the roots of African music. The only real revolution-ary music was when they started to invent electronic instruments, that was in the Twenties. And computer music–Kraftwerk were the first ones to do it properly.

c'tdJesus Christ Superstars also features a very strong ele-ment of heavy metal. Heavy metal is a matter of genre. We don’t consider ourselves as huge innovators of styles, but we are using different genres to express different intentions which we have. Heavy metal is definitely a very authentic genre of popular culture and actually quite interesting changes are happening with heavy metal at the moment. The fact is there’s not such a big a difference between heavy metal and electro-industrial music, or techno music, or basic industrial music, if you go back further. I think that lots of prejudices are on power, and that’s the big-gest problem. Heavy metal does have its own concepts, its own logic and it works-it works very well for certain aspects of music. There’s not much difference between Metallica and Wagner.

Laibach, from Delirium Magazine interview



trast to Metallica, whose lyrics were ultimately more embracing of patriotism

and a rigid rights-based view of reality. The same split occurred elsewhere in

popular music; folk-rockers like REM were Democrats for the college kids, and

country-folk bands reached out to working people who voted Republican.

The end goal of the two messages were the same, but they catered to different

lifestyles. This fragmentation began to occur more frequently along the division

between “indie” and “mainstream,” a fact used by each side to claim the other

was either self-marginalizing or sold out, respectively. The Atlantic magazine

would in the early days of the twenty-first century write about the differences

between rural commonsense types (“Red”) and cosmopolitan, urban, multicul-

tural administrative elites (“Blue”), a division which came into form in the split

described above.

Influence [Hardcore]"British heavy metal and punk is what we are.

It is fusion of two styles. We said that from day one."

- Jeff Hanneman, Slayer

The predominant musical influence during this era was the rise and fall of

hardcore, something which was birthed in the late 1970s but expressed its

technique and ideas most fully in the 1980s before choking on its own excess.

Because it was accessible to both fans and musicians, it was soon flooded with

followers; because it took a doctrinaire but identifiable political stance, it was

soon flooded with people for whom the art was secondary to mind control;

because it had no consensus on its ideology in whole, it pulled itself in too

many directions, fragmented and dispersed. Its influence on metal was undeni-

able, but equally obvious are what happened to hardcore bands. Henry Rollins

following year, with new bands Bathory, Sodom and Hellhammer developing

morbid Goth-Romantic versions of the new style, embracing death and evil and

nothingness, as if channeling the apocalyptic thermonuclear fears of the previ-

ous generation of metal into a certainty of existential doom. Their essential

thesis seemed to be thus: the world had become obsessed with its own power

and political-moral attitudes, but had forgotten the finity of human life and

thus the need to pick things that were important and eternal, such as nature

and strong emotions, which had been obscured by the need to avoid threats

and defend against philosophical enemies.

In the mainstream, Slayer produced their own version of this style in 1983, but

did not differentiate much beyond a fusion of Judas Priest, Angel Witch and

Discharge until their album of 1987, “Raining Blood.” By that time, Celtic Frost

had emerged from Hellhammer with a mock operatic drama of searching for

value in T.S. Eliot’s wasteland, Bathory had unleashed a Viking rock spectacu-

lar which identified strongly with the heroic values of ancient societies, and

Sodom had gone from praising Satan to warning of environmental holocaust

and dicatorship. Further bands had joined the fray, most notably Sepultura,

Possessed and Massacra, each of whom added a degree of interpretation of a

style coming to be known as death metal. Of note also were Necrovore and

Morbid Angel who created similar styles of acerbic, abstract death metal.

Art [Humanism]Because the 1980s were so reactionary, the Counterculture lashed out with an

onslaught of individualistic, egalitarian, humanistic values, which coincided

with the reasons Culture gave for its being “superior” to the godless Commu-

nists. This meant that the art of the period expressed humanistic sentiments

from one of two poles, but could never bring them together. Cosmopolitan

speed metal bands like Nuclear Assault and Anthrax emphasized this in con-



ity of genres which shared a common instrumental heritage, but not necessarily

a musical one, being now two generations removed from the original blues-

country fusion that produced rock music itself. The ones that stood out most

clearly as not part of the crowd were the synthpop or electronic bands, the

industrial bands, and the metal bands - for all practical purposes, punk and

hardcore had collapsed into repetition and ceased to be an influence in popular

music. The only exception was the progressive/emo music of bands like

Fugazi, and the new hybrid form of thrash/death metal known as “grindcore,”

pioneered by bands like Carcass and Napalm Death in the middle 1980s. These

genres like many of the split ideas of the 1980s had to ferment for several years

until the 1990s had dawned, at which point a new political and social climate

gave them a more fertile medium for growth.

At this point, it was impossible to find a clean lineage for any of these genres, as

they existed in parallel and cross influenced each other not solely musically, but

aesthetically. For example, much of indie rock came to borrow riff styles and

song structures from punk rock, but rock as a whole lifted any number of aes-

thetic changes, including the harsher vocals and distortion which these bands

used. Industrial music was initially an affair of tape loops of industrial machin-

ery noises, in the style of Einsturzende Neubauten, but moved from that into

a “pop” form which used distorted keyboards and punk riffs in the context of

aggressive synthpop. This in turn hybridized with grindcore in the late 1980s

to form “industrial grindcore,” exemplified by Godflesh and later emulated by

pop industrial bands like Ministry. However, it’s hard to argue this descended

linearly from the influences mentioned, as early 1980s industrial synthpop band

Killing Joke provides an equally viable template. For this reason, it is more

accurate to say that after 1985, partially because of the new abundance of labels

using cheaper technology to produce CDs and records, there was a complicated

inheritance of different traits through many avenues, mostly aesthetic and not

musical, and this alone distinguished not only 1980s music but all music after it.

of Black Flag went on to an alternative metal project, the Henry Rollins Band,

and musicians from Amebix put out a metal album (“Monolith”), while ex-

Discharge personnel ended up in the Slayer-sounding Broken Bones.

Hardcore itself disintegrated, having reached its furthest point of extremity

and beyond that, having few ideas (none were possible, since once one breaks

music down to its simplest point, there is very little ground upon which to

expand in that direction). What occurred in its place is what is popularly called

“punk rock,” which resembled the stripped-down rock which had inspired the

creation of punk music before it had branched into hardcore, its “underground”

counterpart to the more public music of bands like Iggy Pop, the Ramones,

and the Sex Pistols. The result of this fragmentation was a range of genres,

from “emo” or emotional melodic punk rock, to various forms of progressive

punk and descendents of hardcore-metal hybrids, most notably thrash (with

substantial migration to the rising death metal and industrial music scenes).

While finding direct progeny of hardcore is more difficult, finding its influence

is not. Band like Soft Machine and Public Image Limited formed “post-punk,”

a genre in which the bands traded guitars for keyboards and, taking influence

from electronic bands like Kraftwerk, made punk-like basic music. When this

genre in turn crossed wires with the still below cover indie rock scene, the result

was “80s music,” which possessed the instrumentation of the postpunk bands,

including drum machines and sequenced keyboards, but had more in common

with the “sensitive” side of popular music, including (depending on the band) in-

fluences from jazz, rhythm ‘n’ blues, country and industrial. At this point, it became

difficult to tell this music from the “indie rock” except by instrumentation, as both

featured melodic composition, gentle harmonies and “sensitive” vocalists.

For these and many other reasons beyond the scope of this document, the

1980s are viewed as a watershed for popular music, as it branched into a plural-



was like the indie and punk scene before it in its distribution channels, but radically

different in what it produced; instead of making an alternative version of the music

which received radio play, it was making an alternative art form which violated the

very attributes that made music radio-playable at all.

The two genres which arose from this were death metal and black metal, and as of the

first generation - Bathory, Sodom, and Hellhammer/Celtic Frost - there was no

differentiation. For that reason, this narrative branches at this point and double-covers

the period from roughly 1983-1996, so that each of these two different genres can be

revealed for its essential attributes, ideology and ultimately, influences it had. As these

genres are aesthetically similar but musically and philosophically far different, it is

imperative to distinguish between them, especially regarding what occurred with black

metal and “forbidden ideas.”

Interlude:Explanation of the next two sections

Bathory lineup from blood, fire, death era displaying traditional scandinavian values

in repelling invading judeo-christians. After speed metal had reached the furthest

extremes possible in music that was still saleable and then, like hardcore music before

it, became assimilated by the mainstream ideologies that it unwittingly espoused, the

elements in metal that emphasized an artistic and not political thrust to lyrics and

imagery moved forward by, taking their cue from first the punk scene and then the

indie scene, going “underground.” This meant they took advantage of the ability to is-

sue releases on small labels with no broad-spectrum sales, and designed their music for

a market which did not intend to be mainstream. Music could be more aesthetically

distant from conventional rock and pop, and unlike music which needed to be sold in

stores which had to respond to complaints from potentially offended customers, could

embrace any topic or aesthetic it wanted (interestingly, it was this development that

also fueled the rise of political music of various extremes). This new “underground”



Period 5 [ 1988 - 1993 ]History [Egalitarianism]POST-COLD WAR INSTABILITY arose when the sudden collapse of communism

under Western economic pressure created a vacuum of social direction which

was eventually resolved in unity between moral emotion and needs for power.

As little had changed, social boredom increased and with the official ideology

of non-change created the most nihilistic, disposable society ever. Entertain-

ment media became prevalent as CDs, VCRs, and stereos of a high-performance

nature became common. The large screen TV lit America at night and warmed

her power grids with the drooling inattention of a stagnant, functional land.

Worldwide, America was seen as a cultural leader and thus was embraced de-

spite the horrifying failures of the American system. The focus of world leaders

turned inward to militarize against drugs, racism and separatism.

Any analysis of this time will reveal the increasing presence of television, cable

television, movies and radio in the collective consciousness of Americans. In

addition, the Internet, a defense communications subsystem, exploded into

public life with AOL and dot-coms clamoring for inflated market share. The

new Clinton economy raced up to meet it with token appeals for heart-tugging

issues but a fundamentally sound economic policy which fostered growth, al-

lowing a sudden hideousness of corporate focus. It became relatively easy to be

wealthy in America, and wealth spread to non-white ethnic groups. World cul-

ture sighed a collective disbelief of ideology and iconography except as applied

to hedonism, entertainment and public status. Belief in any meaning toward

a cause was seen as a method of getting killed, and conflict avoidance for both

commercial and moral purposes became the public standard of behavior in

America and other countries in its economic model.



immediately embrace their own scandals while failing to address environmental

issues, social/educational reform, and corporate domination.

The new generation of liberals were far more informed than the previous

generation, and had powerful economic advisers; as the conservative party had

shifted liberal a decade before, the liberals had shifted conservative with new

allies in the media and financial sectors. The media in return supported the new

thrust in liberal government, identifying with its the moral values and human-

ism inherent in its leftism. The first televised war had birthed a generation who

absorb information subconsciously from TVs and expect it delivered with the

flickering attention span of a cathode ray tube. The iconographic treatment of

“stars” from the 1970s became a slavish worship and prurient inspection of the

tragic lives of public individuals; media sped up the event horizon by pumping

endless news of change in thousands of voices into the lives of people worldwide;

the soon emerging triumph of computing. Children who had grown up with

television and radio recognized familiar citations in patchwork creations by rap

artists, collage artists like Beck, and the disassociative lyrics of grunge bands.

The New Left had triumphed, yet was still in conflict with the basic conflicts

of democracy, and the slightly more enlightened age had come. Underneath it

all beat the dying embers of Christian morality and symbolical idealism, with

a Puritan work ethic matching a rigorous desire for vengeance. While this did

not affect current generations as much, as their inertia in coming from a more

hopeful time insulated them, the duality of public image and private reality

shattered the following generations. Broken homes, degenerate and abusive

marriages, parents working until late at night and a constant stream of media

emphasizing human failure and conflict took its toll. Almost aphasic in their

approach to politics and ideology, these generations were entirely temporal in

their approach to values and without belief in any form of ideal, as all ideals had

behind them a commercial engine. As if in sick replay of the Vietnam conflict,

human intentions seemed “good” but turned out “bad” - through something we

The culture of the 1960s fully matured into raves, drug orgies, strange internet

sex, etc. Whatever felt good was real. And while the edges of boredom on this

vision showed, to many the classic 1960s archetype of the population being op-

pressed in being kept from the fulfillment of their urges, as a means of express-

ing a template of life, came true in the ability to have a job, make money and

express hedonistic outpourings. Barricaded emotions became a perverse zen of

neutralism, in which individuals saw society as unchanging and their own ac-

tions as ineffective, so hedonism and personal “moral neutrality” was required.

Recycling and condom use, working out and finding a career somehow became

bedfellows with the hippie aesthetic and a 1970s value structure in music and

iconographic treatment of musicians. An aging hippie draft-dodging privileged

youth of the 1960s became president, and his hypocrisy matched his grand

gestures, overflowing generosity and appropriately sentimental tears at suffering

everywhere. His performance was central to the age: where Generation X had

grown up blown to hell in the 1980s and then moved on to yuppiedom, the new

generations were casually debauched and hedonistic but mostly simply holding

on to whatever they could find in the empty youths of yuppie households.

Their frustration bore a sobering truth: humanity was too large to collectively

mobilize for complex political ideals, and were mostly pacified with television,

shiny cars and consumer electronic goods. The rising generations of the world,

acclimated to years of non-issues and political icons without significance, began

to withdraw from society in protest not of its application of values but its lack of

values. The average person responded more to television and emotional appeal

than political logic; media had saturated every aspect of life in nearly every coun-

try, and carried a strong bias with its frivolous programming. Strategic futility and

single-issue, knee-jerk responses dominated this era. The single issue nature of

the new voting consciousness meant a focus on the negative and on change of the

wrong, since by tacit agreement no collective plan could move forward. Conserva-

tism went with the way of the dinosaur and liberal crusaders charged in only to



degree by the majority of death metal bands and fans. However, by taking this

route, death metal avoided the increasing politicization of post-hardcore music

which was occurring around it, and the consequent “internalization” of dialogue

to the point where a genre only existed by the barest of aesthetic commonality:

it used the same instrumentation and distorted, but shared no culture or musi-

cal direction or belief system. Over the next two decades, this litmus test for a

genre would be reinforced time and again, with genres that could not maintain

shared direction collapsing into commerce.

Many bands applied the styles - chromatic progressions, fast strumming,

ambient rhythms - into different incarnations of a new genre, death metal.

The mainstream-moral/underground-nihilist dichotomy was illustrated in the

songwriting of older metal bands, which followed too much of the friendly rock

music format and allowed itself to anticipate the conditioned desires of the

listener, as contrasted to the new music which emphasized structural change

(narrative) over finding a convenient harmony and riff and sticking with it. The

innovations of Discharge, allowing chromatic riffing to be used in the context

of melodic songwriting, and of Bathory, in building song structure around the

shape of its riffing, were applied in the works of bands obsessed with death,

mortality, and the obscurist predictions of mythology. Apocalypticism, which in

speed metal bands had been a dire warning, was here a foundational assump-

tion. As part rebel and part insurgent structuralist, metal broke the scale into

broad tonal leaps and chromatic rhythm playing where the structure was the

message, not the root note to which it was harmonized or the conventions

of such construction followed; key is used carelessly if at all at focal points of

intersecting themes in motif development, eschewing the cyclic silhouette of

rock form.

This was most clearly defined in the second generation of the new style, which

began with Sepultura, Massacra, Possessed, Necrovore and Morbid Angel,

brought with us no matter where we went. Emotional nihilism approached, and

raging spirits sought reason to live or, in other ranges, significance of death.

Metal [Death Metal]“Certain individuals I like, but people as a whole suck!

Nothing but talking monkeys with car keys.”

- Kam Lee, Massacre

Death metal existed without a name for many years, being influenced by both

the extremes of speed metal (Destruction) and Thrash (Cryptic Slaughter), as

well as carrying forward influences from hardcore (The Exploited) and Gothic

influences to original heavy metal and industrial. In fact, like a genetic profile,

the genre is not identifiable by a single trait alone, but by a collection of traits

and the common ideas that allow them to be organized as such. Riffs from The

Exploited, for example, could be transplanted into modern death metal without

being out of place (especially from their “Let’s have a war...” album); similarly,

distortion and song structures from Destruction can be played “in style” by

death metal bands without seeming out of place. However, what unified these

concepts, and gave the genre its name, was its literal morbidity: it did not praise

death, nor warn of it, but explored it in a strange obsession designed to rein-

force the existence of “ultimate reality”: the physical, natural, objective world in

which we live, and in which we die. In fact, the early death metal especially can

be explained almost exclusively by the Hellhammer slogan, “Only death is real.”

This outlook, a primitive denial of all that asserted the existence of society on a

level above or more important than natural reality, was not explicitly political,

nor was it identifiable with any social movement except perhaps fragments of

existentialism, nihilism and naturalism; it was certainly not studied to that



From here the genre bloomed, splitting into several different styles. Massacra

was representative of the flowing, liquid, high-speed strumming style that

rapidly included bands like Incantation, Hypocrisy, Vader, and later, the heavy-

tremolo and electric blistering distortion-clad bands from Sweden, including

Dismember and Entombed; Morpheus (later Morpheus Descends to avoid

legal conflicts with the hard rock band from Sweden) established the percussive

speed-metal-influenced style of choppy, muted riffs and precise drum pat-

terning, a subgroup that included Sinister, Suffocation, Suffer and Cryptopsy;

Possessed created a style somewhere in the middle that eventually included

bands like Therion, Demigod, Monstrosity, Deicide and Unleashed. Sepultura

reverted to being a speed metal band before getting in touch with their punk

and world music roots, and Celtic Frost veered into glam rock before calling it

a day. Sodom remained consistent, but gained instrumental prowess, making

their new music unrecognizable to older fans. For each of these styles, diversifi-

cation occurred, sometimes with interesting results.

Some blended jazz with death metal, as did Atheist and Cynic; others mixed

in grindcore for an aggressive but often blockheaded style called “deathgrind.”

Some tried to work ambient into the mix, as did Kong, and a few worked on

hybrids with past versions of metal and rock, most of which were absorbed by

their rock half and thus were unpalatable to metal fans, and equally unrecog-

nizable to rock fans, causing the bands to either shift fully to rock music or to

give up entirely. Some found a balance between the faster and mid-paced styles

of death metal, to which they added simple but spectacularly effective melodic

composition; good examples here would be Amorphis and Demilich. In sum-

mary, this was the genre of metal so far which created the greatest room for

variation, in part because it was unified by a belief system more than a lifestyle

choice, and in part as a result of its broad range of musical applications and few

“rules” or genre conventions, despite having a clear musical identity in its nearly-

keyless, atonal-and-dissonant friendly melodic structural form of composition.

whose music was both a radical primitivism and a futurist adaptation of clas-

sical theory. Although many elements of metal and hard rock remained, what

was emerging that made the genre distinct from all others was a way of taking

a “riff salad” and shaping it into a changing pattern which eventually revealed a

conclusion. Much as Mozart’s music would dance through motivic change for

most of its duration, finally uncovering its central theme, a gentle melody, in

death metal a thunderous barrage of chromatic riffs prepared the listener for

certain expectations in tone and phrase shape, then brought out the conclu-

sion, like the last stanza of a poem: that which explained the journey and why

its conclusion was apt. This style was most reminiscent of past centuries of

Romantic and Naturalistic European poetry, art and music, but was missed by

all but a few death metal fans - not, however, by the innovators creating music

in the genre.

Aesthetically, death metal was abrupt and disturbing to most because of the

vocals, which were organically distorted by pitching the voice either lower or

higher than normal and forcing it to volumes not normally invoked except in an

open-throat shout. It was a guttural growl, like that of a defensive animal, and

it matched the often downtoned guitars and layers of thick distortion which

as often as not cut out the middle ranges of sound in favor of low-end and

high-end. Drums used an extreme form of syncopation known as double bass,

in which two bass drums were played alternatingly at high speed, destroying

the syncopatic effect in the context of the song but providing a buffeting, urgent

constant rhythm. In this genre, power chords exclusively were used, and new

forms were incorporated including dissonance. Further, rhythmically the genre

operated more as ambient bands do, with percussion framing the music but

not leading it on, avoiding the expectation-based “funky” rhythms of rock, blues

and jazz. The result was that even without analyzing the music most listeners

identified it with something unearthly, morbid, malevolent and antisocial.



In its own way, this music was both deconstructive and constructive. Its nihil-

ism and alienation escaped the rules of society entirely and exceeded the limits

of religion and conventional morality; it was born to be offensive and thus

marked itself as not only not belonging to society but happy in that alienated

view, preferring a separate truth to a compromise with something it saw as false

and in denial of mortality, thus unable to seek any meaningful values (when

life is infinite, and the self is the limits of perception, is there any reason to care

about anything but gratification?). Unlike most genres of the time, however, its

deconstruction was predicated on the notion that if enough of society were re-

moved, a truth could be seen which was less constricting and less without value.

This was years later a fulfillment of the Jim Morrison summary of William

Blake’s basic theory that if humankind could remove its perceptive confusion, it

would see the world as it is - infinite.

Art [Deconstructionism]The theme of art in this age was deconstruction: removing consistent threads

of thought which constituted a world view, and supplanting them with an often

random collection of observations and personal notes. In terms of the philoso-

phy of this age, this could be a decisional point leading to either a negative state,

in which total randomness and lack of direction (or intent) prevails, causing an

entropic state of ideas, or toward an ideal state, in which people re-affirm sub-

jective perception and make decisions based upon it determining how they will

influence the physical, actual world; this is the opposite to the false objectivity

and judgmentalism of morality, industrial/monetary “value” and the binary

state of social acceptiveness. It remains to be seen which direction the genera-

tions of music engendered in this time will take, but so far, evidence suggests

that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and they are embracing the ideals of

the Counterculture generations before them.

Death metal had taken the style underground, but also generated a flood

of “angry” mainstream imitators and sellouts. Bands like Pantera, Cannibal

Corpse, and Tool made use of death metal imagery or technique in the format

of complacent suburban music designed to fill lives with distraction. For many,

death metal died with the explosion of the Swedish scene and lyrics like those

to the first Therion album - self-conscious, moral, and pious while being anti-

religious and “metal,” in a conflict that while not touching the music defined the

decomposition of focus in the genre. Morality was “safe.” So were rock hybrids

like Entombed’s “Clandestine.” Flamboyant useless stylings of rock music and

stadium heavy metal crept in alongside a dearth of ideas and repetition of

known formulae. It seemed as if growth had made the genre too self-conscious,

and as a result, it had abandoned itself to the methods of its antagonists.

Worth mentioning in the context of death metal is the rise of a similar genre,

grindcore, which grew from punk and thrash melded by convenience, to which

the guttural vocals and detuned guitars of death metal were added. While the

earliest bands such as Master and Carcass achieved some success, they eventu-

ally felt pressure to diversify and found themselves constrained by the emphasis

on constant slamming rhythms, like rock based around expectation and not

continuity as death metal was, as well as the need to be “extreme” (interestingly,

Carcass spawned Napalm Death which in turn spawned Godflesh, leaving a

trail behind its creators in search of a flexible but aggressive yet musical art

form). Lyrics from Carcass were baffling to most as they consisted of humorous

descriptions of illness soaked in the language of medical doctors, with latinate

words falling into the gurgling voice like a radio broadcast from the land of the

dead. Bolt Thrower, from England like Carcass, adopted a more “epic” style, de-

scribing conflict in both ancient and modern times, and Blood, from Germany,

who took on a mythological-occultist view, added to a genre that was other-

wise strikingly literal like punk bands; Napalm Death and Terrorizer provide

examples of this general direction.



socialization-based, thus they were more emotive and less pragmatic, avoiding

the explicit political trap of hardcore punk (some notable exceptions occur in

the hip-hop/rap genre, including Public Enemy, who are as worthy an example

as one is likely to find in any of these genres).

Influence [Alternative]Among popular music, three main genres dominated this time: techno, or very

simple beat-based electronic music, hip-hop, or beat based rhyming poetry

constructed around samples, pop angst industrial, and alternative rock, which

is a fusion of 1980s indie rock with punk rock and some of the more appeal-

ing techniques of 1980s metal. Clearly Nirvana bursting onto the scene (with

the less popular but more archetypal Mudhoney) in 1991 was the inception

of alternative rock radio domination, while the early popularity of Nine Inch

Nails showcased pop industrial, and too many artists to name dominated

hip-hop and techno (examples: The Orb, the Crystal Method, Cypress Hill,

Public Enemy). Together these musics seem to have little in common, but when

interpreted for their basic artistic direction, all are very similar.

Alternative rock fused the emotionality of emo and the energy of punk rock

in a style that proclaimed its dissidence but had no ideas outside extreme

versions of the counterculture before it; that so many of these bands, once the

money was made and a band member died or went into rehab, relapsed into

making 1970s style rock is revelatory. Techno is like electronica, except without

the melodic complexity or song structures; it follows a simple pop format and

samples from all genres equally. Its twin is hip-hop, which like techno is built

around the construction of new variations on accepted percussion rhythmic

patterns, building on that foundation a vocal track of rhyming street poetry and

samples, as well as simple keyboard riffs. Techno borrows much from disco and

rhythm and blues, while hip-hop has a rich legacy of jazz, rhythm and blues

and television soundtracks from which it derives inspiration (interestingly,

the first hip-hop song sampled a Kraftwerk electronic riff, courtesy of Afrikaa

Bambataa). These genres were deconstructive and filling for the moments when

one needed music, thus were functional music for a dysfunctional time; they

did not espouse any radical change that had not been present in the dominant

attitudes of rock through the time, but their methods were more lifestyle- and



Period 6 [ 1991 - 1996 ]Metal [Black Metal]THE BLACK METAL GENRE however, dormant since the burst of creativity that

brought Celtic Frost, Sodom and Bathory together in roughly the same year,

roared into life with a modernization that encompassed all of what death metal

had done in a compositional framework unified by melody, creating music re-

quiring a longer attention span but delivering a greater sensibility. Darkthrone,

Immortal, Emperor, Burzum, Enslaved, Havohej, Gorgoroth and Graveland

created more than an imposing sound in music: they used the rough textures of

alienated music to create structural music that, unlike the rhythmic and mostly

chromatic composition of death metal, used a range of intervals and harmonies

to render melodic structure. It continued the tradition of using motivic, nar-

rative construction, but added to it the complexity of uniting a song in tone as

well as rhythmic shape. The result was some of the most majestic metal with

sonorous aesthetic and deepening feeling for the listener, almost all of it emerg-

ing from Scandinavia between 1991-1994.

Artistically, black metal sought to exceed the narrow direction of reaction to

mainstream events that the increasing trend toward morality in death metal

brought. Resentment over “jogging suit death metal,” which reduced lyrical

focus to politically acceptable social sentiments, boiled through black metal. Its

original concept revolved around “evil” and occult mysticism, from which it got

the name “black” (as in “black magic”), but this rapidly gave way to its Romantic

and Naturalistic side, which soon united several concepts around a general

idea: the natural world is more important than a society which has no values

except money and not offending anyone, and meaning is discovered when one

accepts death (a form of occultism in itself ) and is willing to look outside the



ties was the music: unlike any form of metal or popular music previous, it was

epic and spoke grandly of emotional values of a nature not limited to the 15

minutes of fame accorded modern acts.

As black metal grew, from roughly 1991 to 1996, its impetus toward majestic

music forced its lyricists and inspirational minds to devise new concepts for

creation, spawning a range of sub-styles which each polarized around an ideol-

ogy: self over all, destroy all, or the variance of ideas within pagan or natu-

ralistic/fascist directions. These each took a different approach to aesthetics,

coloring the raw sensation of whole perception of their work in the textures

and constructions of different needs. Over time the fire of black metal spent it-

self, as most of these can only state their apocalypticism once. Astute historians

might note that the insistence of black metal bands upon paradox in music and

idea produced a massively different aesthetic for the time but spent it instantly

once others cloned it with nonsense content in stylistic imitation, as hardcore

had fallen.

Where initially many including the creators of black metal viewed its artis-

tic content as being polemic for occult war against Christianity, over time

divergences appeared within the same general areas of mysticism, philosophy

or politics. As is traditional, Romantic music in any culture tends toward a

worship of nature and appreciation for the whole of the past, including Pagan

tradition; because of its adulation for natural diversity, it also tends to be

nationalistic, or believing that countries should not be “nation-states” composed

of political boundaries but should be “nations” composed of unified ethnicities

and cultures, as that is how one maintains the different points of view that con-

stitute diversity. However, when one explores dangerous and forbidden ideas,

with it come the symbols and concepts which are demonized by a multicultural,

liberal democratic society.

NSBM, or National Socialist Black Metal, became a phenomenon after Norway

boundaries of the self. Vast, metaphorical songs with epic titles (“I am the black

wizards” and “My journey to the stars” come to mind) resembled small classical

pieces more than popular music, with multiple themes converging over the

course of poetic movements, and the values espoused in aesthetic and interview

hearkened back to Pagan Europe and in some cases, to the Vedantic religion of

Indo-Europeans before that.

Ignored were moral concerns over the survival and political rights of the whole

of humanity, supplanted by a concern for the natural environment and pre-

Christian tradition, as well as an appeal to the “eternal” - that which existed

outside of a “progressive” society and its politicized march toward individualis-

tic utopia. While these musicians were strongly independent, they distrusted

illusions such as total autonomy of the individual, immortality and universal

absolutes such as “freedom” and “justice.” Theirs was the world of the wolf,

the blizzard, and the indefinable idealism of those who exist alone in nature.

Ideology and causes of intellectual desire drowned out the hedonism and lack

of discipline of previous eras. Black metal was responsible to nothing but itself,

and the fantasy combined with reality to ferment a neo-terrorist movement.

Much has been said about the burning of churches and killing of people that

occurred in Norway and Sweden, but one thing is clear: where previous metal

bands performed stunts to draw attention to themselves, the church burnings

and killings were originally not intended for public consumption; they were

private acts intended as ideological statements, not promotions for the person-

alities or bands behind them. That indictment and capture eventually occurred

is more a product of the youth and inexperience of teenagers regarding crime

than a “me, me, look at me!” approach to publicity. Whatever the intention, as

soon as news stories broke that over 70 churches had been burned, and at least

five people killed, public attention took to black metal as it never had before.

What kept the stories from being something other than human interest novel-



art and “entertainment,” where in the latter media pander to the anticipations,

weaknesses, lowest common drives and energies of the general population.

As black metal’s indulgences went from obscure opera to dinnertime comedy

circus (Dimmu Borgir, Cradle of Filth, Dark Funeral), the faith of the public in

the genre began to wane, and a new range of fans began to replace the old.

As it collapsed black metal reverted to a surefire crowd-pleaser: 1970s style heavy

metal and simpler forms of fixed harmony music. As the older bands who were

“true” to what had once powered their works, after years of band and social in-

teraction as a result of their art, became repetitive or commercialized, the playing

field was equal for any entertainer. This egalitarian style of black metal pandered

to the crowd and became the most popular genre of any “underground” metal,

ever. The results of the first wave of “entertainment black metal” became mixed

with underground styles, and the genre was inundated by simians imitating

media icons and classics toward which a morality of “true”ness exists. By 1997, the

consumer could buy black metal in the flavor of his or her caprice: underground,

melodic, punkish, electronic. Content no longer mattered. Novelty in style domi-

nated with the exception of a few dedicated souls.

unloaded a surprise dawn attack and swept the

genre, but the extremist tradition in thought had

been present for far longer than that. Where Iggy

Pop’s guitarists may have worn Nazi emblems out

of pure provocation, or Slayer displayed emblems

of both Satan and Hitler for an antisocial reaction,

the new bands stated what many in the community

had been thinking for years and further, invited it

into their thought process to influence their music

through am embrace of pan-European and Greco-

Roman classicist ideals. They affirmed their need to

exist as national populations, and condemned the

invasion of Judeo-Christian belief and non-native

peoples into Europe, as well as praised forbidden

figures such as Adolf Hitler, Ted Kaczynski and

Pentti Linkola. Fascism and eco-fascism were

endorsed as an alternative to the weakness of

individualism, which in the eyes of these bands had

with Christian thought led to a separation of mod-

ern humanity from nature, tradition and honor.

The romantic streak of metal recurred with many

destructive acts, and then amazingly fast black

metal sold out in 1995 and death metal returned

as longstanding artists improved technicality and

specialized artistically. To say “sold out” in this

context means to reveal the fundamental principles

of an effort to be motivated by short term human

desires, most commonly monetary greed or public

image. Making extreme music is a fine line between

Q: On “Bathory - Blood, Fire, Death” an epic sound is present through the use of longer songs with greater symbolic significance to their movements and motifs. what inspired this change from the dark, heavy and primitively simple music of “under the sign of the black mark”?

Probably from reading biographies on masters like Wagner and Beethoven and their works. I began to listen to classical music shortly after form-ing Bathory, and from 1985-1986 it was all I would listen to. I had been playing various types of rock in various constellations since 1975, so picking up Wagner, Beethoven, Haydn and others really broadened my musical awareness exten-sively. The motif signature naturally comes from the world of opera.

Quorthon, from an interview with anus.com



Period 7 [1996 - present]History [Globalism]AS THE CLINTON ERA of American leadership wound down, a new confidence

emerged in the world. Unprecedented wealth brought on by the Internet

boom, and a world political strategy which encouraged the bombardment of

those who did not tow the capitalist liberal democratic line, enabled America

and her allies in NATO and the UN to take on newfound importance. Europe

unified itself into a financial consortium known as the European Union, and

as a consequence international business took on new power and importance. It

seemed that modern society was finally reaching its apex, and nothing would

stop its might.

Small conflicts were both inconclusive and victories for the liberal West as it

smashed dictators in Yugoslavia and the Middle East; back in the USA, the

Clinton administration generated a flood of legislation empowering minorities,

women, homosexuals and other marginalized individuals (except metalheads).

The internet, arguably the most important development during this time,

became popularized with AOL in 1996 and by 1999, it seemed everyone was

getting online. Worldwide countries were linked up and citizens could share

information and make personal connections. Consequently, a boom in liberal

thought occurred once again, as it seemed that truly understanding and moral

righteousness were triumphing over the darkness. With a President who played

in a jazz band, smoked pot and considered himself “the first Black President,”

America felt it had lived up to its covenant with liberal democracy. In fact, this

was the era in which the Baby Boomers, or children of the 1960s and 1970s,

experienced the greatest degree of political power and those who were pre-war

children retired.



Metal [Retro-cumulative]During this time, the movements of black and death metal, having spent their

initial impetus, relapsed into a process of searching past influences for a “true”

strain of each genre. The result was a reactionary “retro” movement which in-

spired brief revivals but then flagged. Death metal returned in force, with older

bands releasing new albums and newer bands putting out releases that at the

time seemed promising, but since none of it was sufficiently distinct from the

past (or each other), there was no direction to be had. This is not to espouse

some “innovation,” as music has been so well-defined that there is no room to

innovate, but there is room to create, and apparently, the creativity of these acts

lagged behind where their shows of allegiance to past proven styles did not.

In black metal, the controversy over NSBM died down once the white power/

white nationalist movement absorbed it, creating bands whose topics were

solely about the propaganda they espoused, unlike the original NSBM bands

who stamped out songs about topics related to their ideals as they would exist

in life itself; the new bands, like white power punk and metal before them, es-

sentially ranted out propaganda without end. Unfortunately, for the bands that

weren’t NSBM, a worse fate awaited: repetition of past symbols and “unique”

novelty reconstructions of the same, causing them to rapidly fall into a droning

litany of praise for black metal itself, and internal dialogue of black metal itself,

without finding in it what had made it great and inspired. The result was a

flagging of the genre.

The populist front of metal in the meantime had two fingers, the first being

a hip-hop/emo/metal hybrid known as “nu-metal,” and the second being a

reactionary movement which praised 1970s heavy metal hybridized with speed

metal technique into a new form known as “power metal.” This was at least an

honest if simplistic gesture, and brought about a resurrection of the metal spirit

in those who had been young in the 1980s and late 1970s, enabling them a bit of

Other advancements included the distribution of cable networks into more

homes than ever before, and the marketing appeal of American media gaining

worldwide audiences. It seemed as if nothing could stop the progress of prog-

ress. The Unabomber was convicted, multiple civil rights trials convicted people

from the draconian past of racial discrimination, and Hispanic immigration

into America blossomed as did racial mixing, promoting a newfound sensitivity

that people in the 1960s only dreamed. With the maturation and power seizure

of the “hippie” Baby Boomers, the Counterculture had triumphed and the New

Left had gained power in the most respected and oldest ways. Further, the

Y2K bug, which had threatened to crash the world’s computers and plunge us

into a primordial chaos, had no effect and was beaten by an army of well-paid

programmers. It seemed nothing could stop the advancement.

As the new millennium dawned, a new presidential race brought doubts, char-

acterized by Atlantic magazine as the conflict between “Red” (rural Americans,

conservatives, traditionalists) and “Blue” (cosmopolitan Americans, liberals). The

outcome of Gore vs Bush was both uncertain and definite, as so few people turned

out to vote that an election could be decided by a handful of votes in a single state.

The old divisions re-opened when George W. Bush took office to inherit the

“dot-com bust,” in which over-valued Internet stocks collapsed, and a recession that

eroded confidence in American prosperity. That was followed almost immediately

by terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and other locations in Europe and

the Mideast, showing that a new adversary - representing a conflict between older,

nationalistic Islamic republics and the progressive American regime - would heat

up the future. Western citizens immediately felt the old divisions of the Counter-

culture vs Culture return, except that this time, neither necessarily was “in charge”

but both existed in a pluralistic, multicultural democracy.



groups (one might point to movies such as “Save the Last Dance” and “A Day

Without a Mexican”). Music, literature, and art are howling out the theme of

the importance of every point of view, especially those where the position of the

individual determines what its values should be, and the result is a cacophony

of voices that have divided the art market according to the background and

political preferences of the buyer. As such, it is hard to derive any trend from

these but universalism: a moral belief in the equality of all people, the impor-

tance of the individual and its choices, and a desire to crush any “oppression” or

marginalization wherever it is found.

Influence [Hip-Hop, Techno]Similar to the condition of metal are the genres of hip-hop and techno and

alternative rock, which are also out of ideas and fragmenting to pander to dif-

ferent audiences. While originally maintaining a strong pro-black-community

outlook, hip-hop has now become home to rappers with a range of different

skills and outlooks, including those which reduce it to a marketing gimmick

designed to sell “extremity” to suburban kids. The positive outlook, PLUR

(peace, love, unity, respect) community which techno became in the late 1990s

has lost focus as raves have begun catering to an older crowd who seem more

serious about drug use than music. Alternative rock? Like other rock genres,

it has been absorbed into the generic pop realm and now resembles indie rock

more than it did previously. Genres like country and pop punk have suffered

the same norming.

The influence of metal on these, and their influence on metal, is for the first

time not direct: it wholly affects outlook and lifestyle philosophy. Where once

only pop bands chanted a mantra of “be distinct, be unique,” it is now the

province of black hardcore bands to differentiate themselves with affectations

and recombinations of “profound” ideas borrowed from mainstream sources.

nostalgia as their dollars flowed into supporting the genre.

Once these changes were visible, the supporting commonality of belief behind

black metal fell away completely, and its actions became wholly responses to de-

velopments with the metal and punk genres. It is probably fair to call this new

genre of black metal “black hardcore,” since in music and ideology it has more

in common with the punk rock and punk hardcore of the middle 1980s than it

does to black metal. Predominantly liberal in direction, it espouses either Satan

or “equal” death to all human beings, and bands are virtually indistinguishable

between each other in part because, unlike the original black metal bands, they

rely on three-note riffs and radio-rock style song structures. In response, almost

all of the old black metal bands either quit, became “heavy metal” versions of

themselves (Immortal, Enslaved, Gorgoroth), or took an honorable exit into

electronic music, as Burzum, Neptune Towers (Darkthrone), Beherit and

Ildjarn did.

At this point, black metal is reliving the past that hardcore experienced. A few

seminal acts created something great; others, mistaking the form for the sub-

stance, emulated it and expected to be as profound, but weren’t, so instead they

campaigned for lowered standards. The result is an egalitarian free-for-all where

almost no musical effort is being made, most energy going into socialization and

image, and the result is that black metal has become that against which it railed.

People die, genres die. Only the deeds of honorable artists are immortal.

Art [Universalism]With immigration to America and Europe at a record high, and enfranchise-

ment of non-conventionally-favored groups occurring, most art at this point

in time emphasizes the universal nature of human experience and equality

of all people in an attempt to profit from the purchasing habits of these new



ConclusionTHE METAL MOVEMENT migrated from a position among the Counterculture

as a rebel to one of denying everything the Counterculture stood for, prefer to

eschew the intermediate tradition and hail what occurred thousands of years

before the modern world. The domain of rugged individuals, it went from

hedonism to rejecting the individual-over-all preference so that it might find

meaning in the process of life itself. And finally, it grew from a position of deny-

ing all value to inventing value where society has publicly declared that none

exists. What brought about this extraordinary journey?

Since its genesis, metal music has been “outsider art,” looking inside society

from the basic position of “I don’t like what I see.” In a time of absolutes and

universals, it looked for the ultimate answer, the truth that laid waste to all else,

in part to reconcile its members to their position outside of society but in part

in a desperate search for something to hold on to, and in which to find mean-

ing. Over the course of several generations it distilled this value system and

found its connections to knowledge outside of the realm of popular music.

Oddly enough, it has done this by embracing the lack of meaning in a nihilistic

deconstruction that presupposed significance existed elsewhere, since that

which had public meaning made no sense to someone who could recognize the

importance of the morbid end awaiting each of us. Its outsidership, unlike the

political and lifestyle alternatives others chose, was based in feeling and not

tangible elements or ideas within society. This brought it full cycle from a rebel-

lious adolescence to a warlike but life-affirming adulthood.

In this transition there is hope, as for every adolescent who takes one look

at the adult world and says, “Take it back - it’s broken!” there is this path of

learning. While for now metal music has lost its impetus and been assimilated,

As it was something to do in the 1970s or 1980s to have an indie or punk rock

band, now it’s an activity for lonely teenagers to record black hardcore albums

on their computers and to trade them with “friends,” guaranteeing each other

a tiny slice of the cheap immortality afforded by recognition without respect.

Ultimately, this serves to strengthen the original convictions of death and

black metal more than reduce them, in that where mainstream and metal once

crossed paths, it has again been proven that they are incompatible.



perience that this absolutist, universal, mechanistic viewpoint was illusion, and

that what was real was the life that all along we as modern humans have hidden

past layers of interpretation and religious dogma derived from dualism.

Schopenhauer wrote the philosophy of the “will,” urging awake a force to life in

each person that aims toward a refinement of the human being and a focusing

of ambition toward life and desire for existence. Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” is a

technical restatement of this to clarify that while the will is indeed all, presup-

posing a lack of external world that may resist your will is ignorant. Nietzsche

rightfully brushes aside the trivial question of “Is reality real?” by suggesting

that a system of consistent reactions and structure will always be “real” in that it

has effected us, and our interaction with it affects our survival which in turn is

important to the system. He rails against contentment and moral dogma, and

suggests the evolution of humans to übermensch status - people fully accept-

ing the nihilism of life and moving forward to embrace what design, evolution

and passion have to offer.

This cuts aside much of the guilt and ineffective action of the world voting public.

Someone told to save the planet will join an organization for saving baby seals

that mails stamps around the world to collect donations, but will not be able

to tell you a single action except “drastic change” that would actually solve the

problem. A postmoral person will correctly respond that most sufferings are tied

to a few central problems, and that the largest is general disregard for the environ-

ment. The übermensch that Nietzsche wrote of could arise, but by the suffocating

nature of a media-fed democracy will be an extremist; after that, the next genera-

tion is to be a lone wolf for forms of radical change through thought.

this path isn’t unique to metal, and in many ways, metal can be considered

one vector of re-introducing this truth to a forgetful (15 minutes, Orwellian

memory hole) modern industrial society based on the convenience and wealth

of individuals. One can hope for the future in following this transition, and

as an epitaph to metal, organize the ideas with which any future generations

would start:

Nihilism - from Vedic and European transcendental idealism, the idea that noth-

ing has any significance or value inherently, only by the valuation of a human mind.

Ethnic pride - from Latin America to the Nordics to the American Indians to

Malaysians to Chinese to Hispanics worldwide, metallions recognize natural ethnici-

ties as the only vehicle for their unique national culture.

Environmentalism - a great horror of humanity is the destruction of earth and

anti-corporatism and environmentalism are part of this.

Melodic poesy - the sense of melody and layering of the same as central to any

complexity in composition, developed further toward a language in which uniqueness

is appreciated over novelty of form.

Anti-moralism - a fear and resentment of morality as a construct at all, prefer-

ring nihilistic and deontological moralities.

Heroism - personal pride and passion for honor in existence will be seen as more

important than social approbation.

Any future movement that hopes to transcend the ills of this era must heed

well to what metal has discovered: one cannot use external force (carrot and

stick) to force things to fit into a framework or world view; the force must come

from within. Without a culture emerging to support a consensus of values, one

is left with yammering monkeys using authority to beat on each other for the

gratification of their own sense of self-importance. This is “absolutism,” and it

is represented in things ranging from money to morality to the war on drugs to

the crusade against “racists” and “terrorists.” Metal discovered by exploring ex-


80

Jaci Sabbathi designed & typeset this book in New York City, in the spring of '10.

The copy was typeset in Adobe Jenson Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach; based on a Venetian old style text face cut by Nicolas Jenson in 1470. For the section titles, Goudy Text MT was used.

All of the design elements are blown up and abstracted black metal logos / artwork.

For more information on the American Nihilist Un-derground Society, please visit: www.ANUS.com.

[email protected]

The History of Heavy Metal Music & the Metal Subculture

Documents

Transcript of The History of Heavy Metal Music & the Metal Subculture