A Year of Music

I posted this comment on this post on Cosmo’s blog, but it’s really too long to be a proper comment, so I’m reposting it here, now with bonus links:

In my alternate universe, there is no TRL, and people find music through their friends and impassioned record store staff and critics who give the music they love the attention and respect it deserves, instead of being prey to marketing and publicity operations and the fifty billion forms of payola that hedge us all in. That’s where I want to live!

I agree that LOTFP is needlessly paranoid; I agree that most of us start with Def Leppard or Lamb of God before we get to Make A Change… Kill Yourself; and I agree that Decibel is not going to suddenly make the trve kvlt disappear in a flash from Avenged Sevenfold’s stage pots. I still think he / they make many acute observations about the relationship between metal’s margins and the musical mainstream, and that the relationship is, and in some ways needs to be, antagonistic. He defends the borders between “us” and “them”, and that kind of policing, as annoying as it can sometimes be, is part of what preserves metal’s energy.

You and I both came up through the e-music underground, so we’ve been through the situation where that tension collapsed, more or less, and it left a vacuum that sucked most of the good music in behind it. It’s not that the mainstream coöpted the margins, it’s that the margins sort of shrugged or ran out of energy, and with the exception of tiny pockets in Rotterdam and Ljubljana and east London, the renegade spirit that animated the early rave / techno / jungle scene is almost totally dead.

At the same time, I agree with Sandy: I want people to like this stuff, because I love it and I enjoy it when my friends enjoy stuff that I love. That’s why I write about music. If it weren’t for the inclusiveness of the metal community (to sound totally corny for a moment), I wouldn’t even be here. In large part it’s the unfeigned enthusiasm of metalheads (in the pit, shivering in long lines waiting to be let into The Pound) that sucked me back into heshing after a long chunk of my life mostly ignoring it.

Metal fans own metal because they control the terms of the debate and have deep convictions about what they like and don’t like, and what they will and won’t accept as “true metal”. Just look at the LOTFP. They can be dogmatic and dictatorial, but also incredibly enthusiastic. Just look at the the wave of American one-man black metal bands (Xasthur, Leviathan and Krieg being the ones with which I’m most familiar – pity about the Twilight album): all those guys are a pain in the ass to work with (or so I hear), and prickly to the point of sociopathy, but they are clearly motivated by deep (if inscrutable) passions. And for all their accomplishments as musicians, I think they’re fans first and foremost. That’s the beauty of metal, or any other marginal art: there is no line between fan, performer or critic. We all have a stake (and the fans and performers get more votes than the critics, which is absolutely how it ought to be).

Black metal is a style that lends itself to easy mockery; as Cosmo argues, even in its supposedly hypermasculinist misanthropy, it has a curiously overwrought emotionalism that suggests traditional notions of feminine hysteria:

I would argue that black metal is metal’s feminine side…and that it was a subconscious response to the hypermasculinity of the previous dominant paradigm, death metal. The first time I heard black metal, I thought I was hearing witches. Perhaps there’s some gender play at work, too, what with all the makeup and anorexic physiques…

For a long time, it was this combination of epic, minor-key romanticism with overwrought, screeched vocals that kept black metal at the fringes of the metal scene. Even after being embraced by the metal mainstream, black metal (especially of the more witchy, Cradle of Filth or Emperor variety) is often the butt of jokes. (One of black metal’s saving graces is that it trades the stereotypical misogyny of heavy metal for a more totalized misanthropy – nobody will escape the blackened apocalypse. Pity about the rampant homophobia, though – which in the end just buttresses Cosmo’s point.)

On Defective Epitaph, Xasthur demand to be taken seriously. Malefic puts everything on the same level when he mixes, with so many layers of distortion and reverb and other sonic chowder juxtaposed that the result is smeared across the soundstage like a heavy, greasy paste. This obscures the complex composition style he favors, which trades the easy minor-key “evil” chord changes featured by most of the more epic black metal bands for something more atonal and nuanced – which the untuned guitars, muffled percussion, deliberately overdriven recording and lo-fi mixing neatly conceal. Xasthur have turned the stumbling, inadvertent incompetence of old black metal demos into a consciously developed aesthetic of considerable power.

The effect of this on careful listeners is immediate and powerful; Defective Epitaph evokes a hypertrophically dismal landscape that is cartoonish in its twisted bleakness but exceeds caricature. The sound is relentlessly, tangibly industrial, a forced march through a broken-down old nightmare factory, and in context the harsh grating of the distorted vocals is completely dehumanizing. Some metal aspires to be pagan, or Teutonic, or outright Satanic. Defective Epitaph is beyond that; it evokes the complete negation of life itself. It turns hundreds of years of musical development against itself, and in its dissonance produces a work that is powerfully evocative despite its monumental ugliness.