The Metal Fetus
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[Mar 11,2004 8:29am - prozak ""]
I.
It is one thing to make popular music, as it claims nothing other than brief distraction. Entertainment. Feeling better about oneself in vapidity. It has no goal, thus cannot disappoint. If you ask Britney Spears whether her music communicates anything profound, she will respond with the same justification her critics use to dismiss her: "It's just entertainment."
Entertainment is a product, like a car or a new type of shampoo, that aims at satisfying an individual need for comfort. There is nothing epic in it at all, or meaningful. Great heroes do not launch wars because they prefer Buick to Ford. Products are exclusive to modernity.
II.
Metal music has a different goal. In the late 1960s, almost all of the music being made was a glorified form of entertainment, talking about the hippie ideals of "peace and love" while making money hand over fist from a new generation looking to buy musical products. These people had their denial shattered by the heavy chords and dark topics of bands like Black Sabbath.
The happy parade of denial works like this: don't think outside the boundaries set by society. Get a job, and a house, and buy things, and consider yourself lucky because, of all the things that already exist, these are relatively better than others. Metal shattered this denial by appealing to the inner heroic spirit, one that can't ignore when society is in denial as it slowly approaches death "with a whimper and not a bang."
III.
Between generations, metal music always collapses. The creators put forth a way of thinking outside of the current social disease, a communication between members of a generation that aims at results, even if expressed in supremely intense art. Once the creators have had their say, the joiners appear.
Joiners want to be part of something, whether to bolster self-image or find a way to socialize. They work only with what already exists, and they pick the relatively better pieces and celebrate those. In short, they're looking for products, while creators look to make something new.
Black metal and death metal were born of the same gesture in 1983. Bathory and Hellhammer and Sodom converged on an idea, probably inspired by punk bands like Discharge and The Exploited, and they put it all together in a type of music that rejected the comfortable world of denial. "Only death is real" - death, Satan, apocalypse, nuclear war, disease, and disfigurement.
These were the colors in a palette designed to wake up the sleeping fetus in humanity.
IV.
A fetus is by definition, inert. It is dependent on its parent to feed it and remove its waste. It knows only its own needs, and is for lack of other terms, a parasite upon those who wish to raise it. If the fetus grows up and becomes an independent organism, then it is a success; if it remains in the fetus mindset, unable to effect change on its world, it becomes increasingly parasitic.
In the modern time, humans are the fetus. Our morality has us comparing ourselves to others in the field of emotional projection, seeing how attentive we are to the pity and guilt and fear that is the language of directionless crowds. This impulse, from Christianity to industrial society, is engineered to make us inert fetuses who do the bidding of corporate or governmental or priestly overlords.
V.
If metal music wishes to be art, and not entertainment, it must escape this fetus mindset. But you can't make great music "elite" by limiting access to it. Money breaks down all of those doors. No, there is no test that one can make, except to see whether or not each new member is a metal fetus or not.
A metal fetus buys products. It selects products for reasons that are tangible: I know the people in this band, I'm friends with this 50 copy CD-R label, or this zine/company sends me free promotional stuff. The metal fetus does not care if these bands all sound roughly the same; what is important is to have new products.
Where early 1990s black metal innovated, today black metal - and metal as a whole - is immersed in the metal fetus. Scenesterism and financial speculation are more important than the art itself, art being the property of both music and the ideas that compelled the artist to create it. It seems as if the metal fetus has triumphed, and has replaced the proud and free metal of earlier days with soundalike products.
VI.
There is a solution: those who can create must escape the social and financial framework of "the underground," which is not as much an underground as a way for burnouts to run mail order businesses without paying taxes. Let us raise a Christian cross over the metal scene as we know it now, for it is Christian in nature, and let the few who aren't metal fetuses move on to do greater things.
For those caught in the middle, those who comprise the bulk of the community as sensible people who simply like the music, I write this article. I encourage you to use the one force you have at your disposal to better both metal and society at large.
That force is discernment.
VII.
Before "discrimination" was a bad word, it applied to the process of telling the difference between what was mediocre and what was excellent. Mediocre is a mean word; technically, it means "average," and in a democratic society we've come to see average as meaning normal, the sum total of all of us. But in reality, average means without distinction or leadership. In short, a product.
Discrimination is what you must wield. If something sucks, don't be afraid to speak up about it. The metal fetuses around you will praise the trend of this week, or the next, and they will hate you and look down upon you if you step out of their lockstep sheep herd. But you gain power, because you didn't let them coerce you into letting go of the one power you have: the ability to choose.
Choose the good metal over the bad. If there's nothing good, praise music from the past. The metal fetuses will tell you that for metal to be strong we need more bands like Thornspawn, Katharsis, Open Grave and Nargaroth. But if you exercise your power of thought, you will realize these bands are average imitators of something that was once great.
And why would you want entertainment, when that mentality - buying products, doing the moral thing according to the Christian church, and being a slave to money (popularity of product) - is exactly what you detest? If you got into metal in the first place, you want to escape the fetus, and by extension, the metal fetus.
Shout down the crowd. Crush the metal fetus. And maybe the next generation of metal will arise
For more info:
http://www.anus.com/metal/