Metal after the fall: cultural zombiism

For a community obsessed with memory, metal has never been closer to collective amnesia. Much like England after the fall of Rome, we live in proximity to a sophisticated past we seem unable to fully grasp. The purpose of the historical evidence all around us, what it means and how it was constructed, lost to time and neglect. For Dark Age England, this meant losing not just science and technology, but the written word, networks of trade and communication with the wider Empire, systems of government, the very stuff of civilisation. The process would have been gradual, as news from beyond England’s shores slowly dissipated and an older generation died off, until one day the memory of Empire became locked in the villas, bathhouses, and forts populating the landscape around them. Alien artefacts, mystical clues left by a highly advanced race from a forgotten past.

For metal, the process is the opposite. An overwhelming flood of information, content, and opinion disguised as fact leads to endless revisionist histories and pick ‘n’ mix narratives. But the outcome is still history relegated to interpretation and guesswork, shared values and infrastructure decaying beneath a plethora of competing takes. A world of content saturation without proper governance, administration, where every opinion has value and art is beyond critique because that would create friction between the consumer and their product (a process commonly referred to as gatekeeping). A loose free-for-all topographically indistinguishable from a culturally barren landscape.

The evidence of past greatness is still very much on the mind, but – in terms of specific cultural and psychological prerequisites – any understanding of how this greatness was crafted is slowly melting away. This is not a reflection of the artistic calibre within newer generations. Many elder survivors of metal’s brief heyday seem equally unable to break with a legacy they helped to fashion.

Being charitable, metal was a viable living organism roughly between 1975 and 1999, approximately a quarter of a century. This would make it a product of a very specific set of historical circumstances (within very specific locations). Things impossible to replicate or manufacture. It has continued in zombie form for almost as much time again, with each new wave of artists after 1999 only able to add to the vocabulary of a pre-existing language. Striking out into territory that would represent a genuine break with the past – in a manner comparable to thrash metal in 1984 for example – remains elusive.

Younger generations seem condemned to fashion their entire body of work within the long shadow of a legacy they do not fully grasp. When their contributions do reach for comparable levels of profundity they are lost beneath the sheer quantity of content on offer, and the absence of media establishments with the clout required to manufacture a collective cultural experience. To extend our analogy further, pre-Christian Saxon England practised a highly localised form of paganism. Whilst some deities spanned regions and nations, rituals and beliefs could vary from one village to the next. One can walk through the world of modern metal operating under an entirely different set of norms to another metalhead, buying into contradictory narratives as to what metal is, and who the significant new artists, publications, festivals, or labels are. Such is the vastness of the digital fiefdom metal now occupies.

Given that metal’s zombie state has lasted for almost half its lifespan at the time of writing, it now seems dubious to characterise the current phase in terms of nostalgia. The past is now the exception. The current wilderness defined by its unknowable excess of content, the rule. The overwhelming majority of bands, releases, publications, and labels are products of this post 2000 zombie period. If the capture of the present by the past goes on for long enough, metal becomes a culture in suspended animation, a gradually disintegrating echo of a momentary blip. This is a distinct and decidedly more insipid condition than pure nostalgia.

The default state for metal is a set of disconnected cultural streams, loosely bound together by a half remembered shared ancestry, now relegated to brands, affectations, or vibes, the parameters of which are defined by a pseudo scholarship unable (or unwilling) to interpret the symbology of the past into anything more substantive than vague aesthetic auras. Within this environment, the resulting dearth of imagination leads many to conclude that the only way to revolutionise metal is to break with it entirely, hence the endless reams of chimerical avant-garde or experimental metal policing the borders of what innovation might look like.

I speak as one that listens to and engages with new releases every week. One who is deeply invested in the idea that metal has options beyond autopilot or breaking with itself entirely. These are not the words of a tunnel vision intent on lamenting the past and refusing to see the reality right in front of them. Many will still object that metal is living through a never ending present of vibrancy, replete with exciting new releases, interesting artists, boundless innovation, and challenging new music. These people are wrong, and are either motivated by desperate optimism or ignorance of the culture they claim to speak for.

How to break out of this cycle? To extend the Fall of Rome analogy to breaking point, salvation for Britain came from without, with wave after wave of cultural transmission from Northern Europe imbuing the local population with new ideas, knowledge, and technology, allowing society to gradually rebuild itself into a unified Anglo Saxon kingdom. Just as metal’s salvation lies not from within its traditional Western holdouts, but those previously marginalised locations so often treated as an afterthought in the popular narratives of genre.

In the first instance I am of course talking about South America, specifically Chile. I’m not the one to write a comprehensive historical survey of Chilean metal. But even casual engagement with the output of this nation reveals a potential third path for metal. Away from the baggage of a declining West, replete with populations paralysed by anxiety, self-doubt, and self-flagellation, culture is still capable of expressing new ideas in old forms. Through the creative freedom at work behind the death metal of Mortify or Blood Oath, or the outrageous speed metal bombast of Letalis, the carefree neoclassical thrash of Demoniac, these artists are working within very familiar forms notable for its total lack of self-awareness. There is no room for layers of interpretation, no room for complexes of hesitancy.

It’s too small and too soon to tell if these signs of life are anomalous or translatable to a global setting. Similarly promising shoots exist in other South American nations and parts of Southeast Asia. Essentially anywhere untroubled by a legacy of bourgeois identity crises. But they must operate within the same environment of total content saturation. A cacophony of noise, marketing, agendas, the ever present spectre of a shared past reduced to symbols and signifiers, the meaning of which is gradually being buried beneath over interpretation and contestation.

There’s also a sense in which any scholarship on the matter is at best redundant, at worst actively hampering efforts to break with the zombie cycle. A healthy press no doubt spurred many historic moments on. But more often than not, those brief moments in metal’s twenty five year period of viability were not recognised as such until after the fact. Short bursts of reckless creativity lasting little more than two or three years, defined by flashes of wildcat genius. These were often only championed by the press after the fact, when the majority of the important works had already taken place, and the slow descent from the peak had begun. If and when metal breaks out of its default state of prelapsarian redundancy, the only thing that’s certain is that we won’t be writing about it until after the fact.