You haven't made it in alternative music (including metal) in our nation's fourth-largest city until you've been covered in Space City Rock, a webzine that has for the last decade kept us informed as to the hippest of the happenings before they show up in the glossy pages of our culture mags.
In a recent article about the black metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us, this music magazine gave us an insight into what makes metal quite so... metally:
At the same time, though, I find myself fascinated by the existence of the whole black metal scene -- these guys (since it does seem to primarily be guys) seem to not just view the music and image as something fun to do that they love, but treat it instead like a blueprint for their whole freaking lives. They one-up the Rennies by living this s**t, day in and day out, it seems like. - "Black Metal on Film," August 6, 2009
Yep, that they do. They live it; they think it's not just music, but a spirit, an idea, a philosophy and a vision of how life should be, all rolled into one. That is something we can't really say about most popular music. Is Lady Gaga a life theory? Is U2 an ideology? Would we consider Eminem a vision?
More likely, pop and rock bands have celebrated performers who have political views, wisdom of life, and lifestyles, but these aren't connected to the music. They're just there, usually variations of hedonism or altruism. They are separate from the music because the music itself is emotional in nature, and targets the individual, not group activity.
Then consider what metal writes about. War, disease, apocalypse, violence, and struggle for survival. That's not individual exclusively. It's not written from the perspective of the individual. It's written from the perspective of life itself, a disinterested non-human observer. Metal is post-human, and that's what makes it scary to many people: in metal, everything does not turn out all right. No one cares if you die alone. And no one is there to hear you scream. It's constant battle and struggle and loss and tragedy, without a comforting sense that we're all together here and with the light of our personalities, driving back the darkness of nature red in tooth and claw. Metal is the darkness.
This may be why, and here's my main point, that metal is getting mentioned more and more with jazz, folk and other admittedly "artistic" -- meaning of enduring cultural value, not distracting entertainment like pop music -- genres:
Jazz stages and metal stages are places where a certain kind of experimentation happens: brainy and cabalistic, with a hint of a smile. Both increasingly depend on educated virtuosos. In both genres you can develop curious harmonic worlds, warp the tempos, brush against folkloric or conservatory music, play many notes very speedily and engage sturdy American grooves or a more studied system of fitting odd-number beats into even-number meters. Pat Metheny, jazz guitarist, meet Paul Masvidal of Cynic; Jeff (Tain) Watts, jazz drummer, meet Tomas Haake of Meshuggah. Both forms seem to have a neatly divided audience: maybe two-thirds respectfully fixated on the music’s past, one-third concerned about building paradigms for the future.
Both have become increasingly local and international at the same time; they depend on the scenes of certain communities — whether Brooklyn; Chicago; or Savannah, Ga. — but their audiences are everywhere. As of the late ’00s both have been the subject of serious academic conferences. And aside from a few tanklike, old-favorite examples — Metallica and Keith Jarrett, say — if you want to keep up with either, you have to listen to cuts on MySpace pages and go to gigs.
Jazz and metal are both diversifying at a fantastic rate, feeding on their old modes and languages, combining them and breaking them down. (In both, the fans have become more suspicious of genre heresy than the musicians.) An album by a typically ambitious ’00s metal group — like Baroness, Isis, Krallice or Nachtmystium — might put a dozen kinds of metal in a supercollider, as well as kinds that lie outside the genre, spewing them all out in complicated, episodic song structures. So too with some of the better current jazz groups, including Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Marcus Strickland’s Twi-Life, Stefon Harris’s Blackout, Mostly Other People Do the Killing and the similarly named groups Bad Touch and the Bad Plus. - "Jazz and Metal, Riffs in Arms," December 30, 2009
Metal has made it to being serious music for serious people with backgrounds in art and culture. That's a major achievement in our lifetimes, since in the 1970s metal was locked in the pop-music ghetto, and in the 1980s it was protest rock for angry kids, and in the 1990s, it got scary but also got demonized, followed by the 2000s in which metal regressed to being angry, dad-hating screechy rock music for self-declared misunderstood children.
Interestingly, metal has been this musically and artistically advanced for some time -- it's just taking the world a bit of time to catch up. Feast your ears on these to see the variety, diversity depth and power of underground metal:
Comments
Wow, judging from the examples in this article heavy metal as art fails HARD.
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