Metal and self-expression

Metal is defined by its rich tapestry of disagreement. A vast chunk of its vocabulary is oriented toward distinguishing between versions of truth and falsity. Even specific genre tags, ostensibly purely descriptive terms, carry the weight of judgement when used in certain contexts or by certain people (post metal, blackgaze, melodeath, metalcore, nu metal, rock, glam metal, all are considered vulgar by different groups within metal).

This leads to a fixation on authenticity and a deep seated suspicion of individuals who use the fauna of metal – aesthetics, concepts, musical styles – as a means of attaining cultural capital, a way to outdo their peers and thus gain more traction within the scene. This disposition is most acute in – but not limited to – the self-identifying underground, i.e. the level within a scene where activity is driven by social instead of financial capital.

As metal’s closely guarded borders became increasingly porous thanks to the bright lights of social media scrutiny – and the myriad self-branding tactics this encourages – these implicit and explicit codes of conduct have grown ever more complex. In parallel to this, measuring cultural capital via likes, follows, and shares has become a brutally objective matter of fact.

There has long been a contradiction in the underground mentality, but in the new digital era it is unignorable. On the one hand, good faith actors within the scene foster community, mutual cooperation, and support (important incentives in an increasingly fragmented social landscape). On the other, the ever more Darwinian impositions of social media platforms forces anyone looking to gain a decent sized following into competition with their peers. The mere fact of taking up space on someone’s news feed means that you have gamed the algorithm more efficiently than your mate’s band through likes, post frequency, more engaging “content”. Engagement breeds engagement, allowing you to occupy digital space alongside the fanbase’s time and attention, incredibly valuable commodities within algorithmically determined consumption.    

In order to resolve this contradiction, metal has undergone a shift in its attitude to contest. Going back to testimonials from the 70s, 80s, and 90s reveals a deep sense of contest, of distrust and even outright hatred of other artists, labels, and magazines, perceived as direct competition. Today the opposite is the case. Everyone with a voice within the scene trips over themselves to praise, support, or otherwise get involved in the upward journey of other platforms, under the guise of building communities.

In one sense this is perfectly understandable. Collaborations have always partially rested on a parasitical logic by sharing access to the fanbase pool. But psychologically, this repression of competition could be read as a way to cope with or supress the overwhelming impulse to take up digital space, time, and attention via more (objectively measurable) engagement from the fanbase pool.

This is, without doubt, a deeply cynical and simplistic reading of this shift. Good faith collaboration was undoubtably common in the pre-digital age, just as much of today’s upbeat communal rhetoric is in good faith. I draw this out as a way to approach the problem of self-expression within metal.

On the surface, it seems obvious that metal is about self-expression. How could it not be? But if we look at the way metal rents out imagery, ideas, and conceptual material from other fields (history, religion, mythology), and combines this with metal’s (traditionally) strict focus on musical form, structure, predetermination, it begins to look like a deeply rigid, inflexible, unwieldy tool for anyone looking to pour out their heart. Metal provides the user with a set of musical and conceptual tools they can manipulate and even add to in order to craft compositions. The aim is always a contribution to an ongoing dialogue with a wider historical current. Any novel or individual input is immediately placed within the pool of resources available for the next generation. Hence metal’s fixation on who influenced who, who was the first to deploy a particular technique (the blast-beat), and whether bands were as significant as common sense wisdom would have us believe (Venom).

This is clearly not the case anymore. Metal, as understood by a younger generation is ostensibly about self-expression. Whether this be cultural, political, social, or personal. But paradoxically, it retains and even exaggerates its use of extra musical signifiers. This is especially true now as metal’s global presence makes itself known, and all manner of regional folk traditions and mythologies become wrapped up into versions of preexisting metal genres.

If one can render a convincingly expert expression of a specific period in history, there’s a sense in which they have cornered a certain market. They have gamed the system by plucking a readymade brand off the shelf that no one else spotted. Today I can listen to artists that sing exclusively about German mining accidents, or Napoleonic France, or the Eastern Orthodox Liturgy. The further one goes back in time, the less specific metal’s imagination becomes. Until we arrive at Black Sabbath and their deadpan reference to Satan as a vague antagonist, the source of conflict, discomfort, contest, paranoia.

The forms of metal that are most explicit in their self-expression (literally about the experience of being a self) are those most derided by individuals marked out as antagonistic to the community (elitists, gatekeepers etc.). Specifically, post metal, depressive black metal, any form of metal that self-identifies as being experimental, progressive (in the contemporary sense of the word), or deploying the “gaze” suffix. These are regarded with suspicion by a “true” metal public precisely because they facilitate and even encourage self-expression, rendering them not metal but indie-alternative. It is precisely because these styles define themselves in opposition to traditional forms of metal that they become a troubling prospect. They refuse to submit to the rules of engagement, both at a cultural level of contributing to the collective pool of compositional resources, and at a musical level by valuing individual expression as paramount. As a result they fail to point toward a viable, collective next step for metal in a way that previous generations did.

In many ways then, metal resembles Nietzsche’s last man. Without direction, time, or purpose, too aware of history (both the internal history of metal and the deeper currents of global history), picking at different areas of culture as idle curiosities with ironic detachment, unable or unwilling to say or do anything meaningful with them. But metal has mistaken this “cosmopolitan fingering”* for a celebration of self-expression. A communal hub where all creativity is valid if it is a true reflection of some inner personal need, and where everyone is engaged in a project of mutual support and love.

The intersection of coping with the relentless competition that is now a feature of running a digital platform (bands, but also labels, publications, promoters, artists) alongside the façade of self-expression leads to a kind of dilettantism, an idle investigation of historical, cultural, theological, or mythological material as a shortcut toward some kind of brand or image that would gain currency within the social media economy. This is self-expression with a false consciousness.

The underlying Darwinian competition of social media is imposed on metal externally by monolithic multi-nationals. That’s not to say that we should escape by returning to some pre-digital sweet spot in 1989, insisting on tape trading and handwritten letters. Even at the height of its power the imagination of metal, in terms of an ability to express alternatives to consumer capitalism that we simply cannot imagine from within capitalism itself, was never fully articulated. But between the current dictates of small business competition via social media driven engagement at one end and historical dilettantism contrasted with freeform self-expression at the other, is an increasingly large gap through which metal can shed these paradigms and move into a place of pure, radically immature escapism as a vehicle for realising the deeper human condition submerged beneath the constant, brutal banality of market ideology.  

* For more info on this concept, see Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism