Metalhead burnout, entrepreneurialism, and the chore of modern listening

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Essay version:

For a hyper engaged fanbase like metal, the age of smart technology presents a problem. It has turned listening to metal into a chore. The attitude we now take to our hobby is so often expressed through the language of exhaustion, of work. “I need to catch up on new releases”, “there’s too much to sift through”, “I don’t have time to follow what’s going on anymore”. The joy in discovery, the intimacy we cultivated with a particular release, the love for specific pieces of music, all were in part engendered by the frugality of pre-digital listening habits.

The dominant logic of the modern internet is one of warped convenience, a convenience that ultimately leads to bottomless puts of material to sift through at any available moment. As a result, increasingly large chunks of the day are given over to the totalitarian need to scroll and engage with social media content. The metalhead as hobbyist expects themselves to stay abreast of the scene, its general topography, activity. The metalhead does not see themselves as passive consumers beholden to the whims of marketing strategies, even if big tech does. This creates a near compulsive need to undertake significant amounts of administrative labour to keep on top of the scene.

The result of this intersection between social media’s craving for our engagement and the metalhead’s need to actively engage with their fandom is content. A LOT of content. Because the best way to engage with the scene online is to actively contribute to the discourse through all manner of informal and formal platforms.

The early internet brought many benefits for metal fandom. It gradually brought underground scenes into closer contact with one another via forums, blogs, and small-time review sites. MSN chat and email replaced the need to write letters. And promos could be sent digitally, wiping out the cost and hassle of postage.

When social media initially arrived on the scene it looked like the perfect tool for curating an online existence around a hobby. One could receive updates from whichever pages they chose without having to visit individual sites. One could engage in conversation in groups or chat threads without the need to proactively check each forum. And once streaming software was released into the wild, there wasn’t even a need to send each other mp3 files to share music. Promos go straight to Bandcamp or YouTube, readily sent to a wide distribution list. And sharing various new recommendations comes in the form of a Spotify link or joint playlist curation.  

But this drive to convenience is a Faustian bargain. As big tech moved in and developed apps and services too user friendly to ignore, the infrastructure under which metal had chosen to govern itself was suddenly beholden to the whims of large corporations well outside its control.

The metalhead takes time cultivating an online persona. The edgy usernames we used on forums and MSN extended out into online platforms, becoming a brand we use to mediate our relationship to the subculture. And because our unique brand is now expressed via social media platforms with a very different agenda, we are required to generate digital material under certain conditions and in a certain rhythm in order to grow that brand. We parasitically share each other’s brands (pages, channels, profiles etc.) in the hope of garnering more followers for ourselves. We endlessly update for the sake of audience retention. Bands make anniversary posts for their releases, constantly asking fans which is their favourite album or hinting at new material being worked on. Records labels share memes. Gig promoters endlessly attempt to work up hype for the next event through random updates on ticket sales or pictures of stocked bars. It’s not their fault. It’s what the system requires of them.

Further, the unbridled convenience of these apps has led to their near universal adoption within metal, along with the inescapable irony of the fact that any critique of this system is mediated and distributed via the very same apps. This makes dissention all but impossible. Any conceivable alternative would need to operate outside the ultimate profit motive of big tech, something that would inevitably involve offering less convenience, asking for more money, and ultimately generating less content pound for pound. All for a vague promise of returning to a time when listening to new music was a prelapsarian joy and not a constant, ambient demand on our time.

But even the most peripheral user of major social media platforms will have noticed that something is amiss. Much has been made of the data harvesting these companies undertake in order to generate ad revenue. They require our engagement because our activity and personal information is the product, advertisers the customers. But for the vast majority of individuals, their network on Facebook or Instagram will be limited to a few hundred people. That, and the pages they like and the groups they join set a clear limit on the amount and variety of content that will appear on their newsfeed. Social media platforms have tried to solve the diminishing returns of this model by stuffing our newsfeeds with recommended content, sponsored content, popular meme pages, Instagram shorts, until your feed no longer feels like your own curated newsletter and becomes a seemingly limitless cacophony of junk. The user is free to scroll on an endless sea of digital material, most of it only tangential relevant to their interests, in the vague hope that occasionally they might see an update from a page or individual they actually follow and wanted to hear from. Needless to say, bots and AI have only accelerated this pivot toward the zombie internet (as it’s now known). With Facebook now consisting of a mix of boomers talking to bots, bots talking to bots, and sponsored content boosted by engagement from….bots.

The passive consumption of content recommended by cold algorithmic logic is anathema to the metalhead’s own ideal of their relationship to the scene. They like to think of themselves as discerning free thinkers, passionate, able to take the time to discover and learn about new music (or old obscure music) independently, immune to the whims of any marketing strategy. Metal involves dedication to learn the ways of an arcane form few outsiders understand the value of. But across the apps one merely has to login (usually first thing in the morning in bed) to be “shown” content we “may” be interested in based on our digital habits.

On social media, more often than not it’s not music we are being guided toward but some influencer, meme page, humorous Tiktoker, “on this day” nostalgia post, or fan art. Very little of which will be of genuine interest to a thinking metalhead. The streaming apps themselves will happily oblige in curating recommendation lists and pushing playlists based on your listening habits. Again, stripping the metalhead of their autonomy by casting the widest possible net of content your way. Such ease has a degrading effect on the metalhead’s ability or even desire to hone discernment, frugality, and critical faculties.  

It’s at this point that we arrive back at the initial problem. If it’s all so convenient, why does modern listening feel like a chore? On paper a personal newsfeed is a net benefit. Keeping us up to speed on the latest activity within the micro-communities of global metal mitigates the feeling of administrative labour that often accompanies staying abreast of new releases. But social media’s remit has nothing to do with how you personally view your relationship to online metal scenes. Its sole purpose is to keep you engaged for as long as possible. Using algorithms that have no discernment or concern for your interests to send your more recommendations, governed only by the need to funnel more pages, videos, and posts your way based on what they already know about your online preferences. As the carefully curated newsfeed dissolves away under trash content, the chore of keeping up to speed with metal returns, along with a growing dissatisfaction with social media as a whole.

But the metalhead is complicit in this. Everyone is now aware of the sheer volume of new material released each week because of how readily available it is regardless of geography (or quality). None of the platforms this stuff is shared on, from YouTube to Spotify to Instagram and even Google, generate any content of their own. Their job is to marshal all this stuff into a user friendly app, keep us on the ap for as long as possible, harvest the data and activity we lovingly imbue into it, and sell that data on to advertisers. The longer and more active our engagement, the more detailed and amount of the data they are able to sell on, increasing its market value.

If our information is the product, surely we are the producers, engaging in economically viable labour in our spare time, with no financial renumeration? Not just our likes, follows, subscriptions, clicks, but any public page from bands to labels to blogs posting content to keep up audience engagement, all constitute a form of voluntary labour that generates real value for distant shareholders. The “service” meant to incentivise our use of these platforms is meanwhile having an increasingly degrading effect on culture, psychology, and individual well being.

If that’s the case, it’s worth asking who the metalhead is in this context. Who is generating all this content, and why are they doing so of their own volition? There are a few ways to answer this question. Any band, blog, label, artist, meme page, or maybe just a very active individual with a significant online presence. What are these things? Are they simply expressions of a hobby that got out of hand? Or are they something more? I would argue that in behavioural if not strictly economic terms, social media has turned the entire population of metal into small business owners. Don’t worry, I’ll develop this point straight away. Time for a conceptual unboxing. 

It’s worth placing record labels (everything from Nuclear Blast down), promoters, semi successful bands, and larger publications in a broader economic context. Put crudely, they are essentially small businesses (some of them quite large). They produce a tangible product. They have marketing strategies targeting an identifiable customer base, requiring knowledge and foresight into the nature of said customer base, where to find them both physically and online, and what sort of marketing strategies they’ll respond to. Labels on the larger side will have tax arrangements, staff, an office, and a degree of control over the means of production. Social media has dramatically changed how these companies operate, certainly. Everything from Bandcamp levies, paid Facebook advertising, and a strategy for generating regular content to keep audiences engaged. But the underlying economic relationships remain largely unchanged. They produce a product targeted toward a specific market.

But what about that nebulous category of casual blogger, meme page, Instagram short(er?), or random YouTube channel? In the first instance, there’s no denying that they at least look like the activities of a simple hobby. But again, because this hobby is expressed through and made possible by social media, the language of labour relations again encroaches. The need to catch up, carve out time, innovate, develop a USP, until the word burnout floats around to describe the lived experience of someone posting silly images on the internet. I’ve genuinely seen meme pages share the “burnout” post btw. I’ll freely admit that I, as a blogger, made one burnout post shortly after becoming a father.

What can start out as a simple expression of love for music garners a following, and is thus quickly subsumed under the laws of social media, which requires a certain tempo and intensity of updates in order to continue growing a following, lest your page be lost in the recommendation aether through lack of shares and engagement. And suddenly, with no incentive beyond the status afforded by a lot of likes, one’s life is governed by the need to maintain a certain rate of updates, reply to messages, engage with the wider ecosystem in order to generate more content. The next step is a logo, branded merch, a YouTube channel for Q&As, online polls to generate more engagement, producing yet more exclusive content for your Patreon supporters, until your hobby mutates into a small business in all but name, one nowhere near viable enough to allow you to quit the day job, but requiring a significant portion of your free time to maintain. And social media platforms gladly harvest the output of all this free labour you willingly volunteer, translating it into a genuine commodity.  

Whatever revenue one is able to eke out of these pastimes, rare are the individuals who make enough from metal to have it be their sole source of income. It’s therefore probably a bit previous to label this process as some new proto petty bourgeois class formation. But there’s no denying the striking effects social media has had on how the metalhead perceives and expresses their fandom. The new ecosystem of hobbyist entrepreneurialism is a unique product of the digital age. One cannot conceive of a meme page or YouTube channel prior to the technology that made these things possible. Even blogging, a direct descendant of physical zines, adopts a casual, temporary approach to the generation of content, a kind of ultra-DIY anti-aesthetics that sits apart from the lovingly crafted print zines of old.

But as the clutches of social media and its ultimate motivation to generate profit for shareholders sends down dictates on how these digital activities should be mediated, they begin to mirror the structure and attitude of the old fashioned labels, bands, promoters etc., i.e., they begin to look like small businesses, generating products, with target audiences, and marketing strategies. The only difference being that a record label ultimately has a product it can sell you independently of an online platform in exchange for traditional currency (a CD or t-shirt). The newer content mills are free at the point of use, requiring only your likes, subscriptions, and comments. But even here, sites like Patreon step in to offer a quick and easy payment tool for content creators you follow closely, encouraging voluntary donations with the promise of exclusivity.

Ultimately, even if you only maintain a set of personal social media pages, and even if you’ve never made a penny from this activity, if your online presence is specifically geared towards engaging with and sharing your love of metal, it will take on the habits and behaviours of the small business owner. This is distinct from the traditional petty bourgeoisie who tend to own their own means of production (a van, their tools, a business premise etc.), and of course, who make a tangible living. So it’s probably worth asking why I keep framing the online metalhead as some kind of emergent entrepreneur.

Thus far, we’ve essentially carried out a lengthy diagnosis of why metal scenes feel just a little bit off right now. It’s therefore tempting to work our way backwards in time in order to locate the sweet spot before it all went horribly wrong. But there’s a sense in which metal never got this right at any point. The fact that metal has always been forced to negotiate its existence through a preexisting economic superstructure has had profound effects on how metal views its role as social critic, dissenting voice, a thing that exists outside of or in contradiction to the societies it arose from.

The explosion of counterculture in the 60s was characterised by deep seated class tensions. Dismissed by conservative undercurrents (Nixon’s silent majority) as a movement for privileged students at one end, but constantly in a state of recapture by a working class base who valued the energy, anger, and escape that music in particular could offer from the drudgery of life within economies defined by Fordist modes of production.

In music this was simplistically understood as the push and pull between good old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll and an increasingly gauche complexity. Progressive rock being the ultimate expression of the latter, punk of the former. Although a good portion of punk’s founding canon were of an art school milieu that was anathema to traditional working class values, and some of prog’s most visible figures came from working class backgrounds.

The new wave of British heavy metal was unique in this respect. Of the bands that gave form to this music, from Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Saxon, Raven, Satan, Diamond Head, and Angel Witch, all were from working class backgrounds and areas. From the urban sprawl of London, to the decaying industrial heartlands of Birmingham, Yorkshire, and Newcastle.

Despite this, their music sought to bridge the gap between the vaulting esotericism of prog rock and the raw, street level energy of punk and old school rock ‘n’ roll. This was working class antagonism expressed via fantasy, escapism, high literature, and theological meditations. The music was high energy, intense, but also complex, indulgent, and meandering.

This tension between immediacy and cerebral reflection has arguably defined metal ever since. Speed metal sought to bypass the gauche pretensions of glam metal, but ended with songs like the neoclassicism of ‘One’ or the three dimensional prog of ‘Rust in Peace’. Black metal rejected the polished technicality of Scott Burnsification, but quickly developed into the overwhelming orchestration of ‘Anthems to Welkin at Dusk’ and ‘Stronghold’.

The reason for this can be found in the cultural makeup of the new wave of British heavy metal. Namely, that as a movement it was not class conscious, let alone working class. Glen Tipton once stated that his motivation for playing in bands was to escape his fate in the factories of British Steel. This is emblematic of the attitude of many from the time. A desire to escape their class, not rise with their class. This is the language of Thatcher’s individualism. And later of New Labour’s social mobility. Work hard, graft, distinguish yourself, and you will rise out of your class and become something better, you will escape your circumstances. This is anathema to the Marxist characterisation of the working class as a self-conscious collective conspiring to overcome their circumstances, take ownership of the means of production (or essentially take ownership over their lives and work), and elevate the lot of society as a whole.

By contrast, the petit bourgeois aspiration of early metal artists is, in purely economic terms, essentially what a band amounts to in the post war period. They generate a product, they brand, market, they work hard, and if they’re lucky they will get big enough to earn a living from it. Ditto the surrounding infrastructure of labels, publications, promoters, and venue owners.

Would it be fair to say that whatever the form of metal’s social and philosophical critique of society, it will always be relegated under the dominant ethos of the libertarian entrepreneur? A belief in social mobility, pulling oneself up, meritocracy, individualism? These ambient values take precedence over metal’s front-of-house values: anti commercialism, suppression of individual needs and wants for the sake of naturalism, the submission to the determinism of mortality, or the sense of collective triumph felt when experiencing music as a group. There has always been a tension between metal’s need to transcend its own surroundings whilst negotiating this transcendence through the management of capital. The murder of Euronymous was in part motivated by a dispute over royalties.

Metal is distinct in this regard due to this ambiguous relationship to escapism. The terms and even sincerity of its critique of society are also highly ambiguous as a result.

In one sense, regardless of how individual actors view capitalism and liberal democracy, the very existence of metal, in particular extreme metal, is problematic for society. Music obsessed with death, with monstrosity, with nothingness, that will not allow us to unsee the gaping void behind the empty promises of consumerism. Music that denies the self, refuses to buckle to the dual requirements of selling labour and buying consumer goods. Going even deeper, a form of music that is not only immature, but actively embraces immaturity, makes a virtue of it, asks us to revel in it and interrogate it in the face of the reserved, ironic detachment cultivated by other subcultures. The metalhead’s love of music is sincere, guileless, unqualified, and ultimately honest. Criticism of music they detest is expressed in equally unreserved terms. Such conspicuous passion for music that aspires to live outside of social systems is bound to attract external ire.

But in another, very real sense, metal has always been a hostage of fortune. The NWOBHM moment came at a time of great social upheaval within the UK, as social democracy gave way to neoliberalism. The shift from industrial to service economies did not just constitute unemployment for the working class, it was the loss of community, meaning, and sense of self worth. NWONHM was one expression of the struggle to find new outlets for what in one sense was the evisceration of working class masculinity.

The explosion of styles throughout the 80s was part expression of the sheer panic of late Cold War tension, part near total acceptance of the rampant individualism encouraged by neoliberalism, and the over the top, extreme lifestyles this engendered. Day to day life felt accelerated. Governments gradually ceded control of economic planning, infrastructure, public services, and fundamental social values to the free market. The lack of direction, control, or sense of higher purpose was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. It’s telling that in this context Christianity, the last Western institution with the potential to challenge the hegemonic guiding principle of capital accumulation was singled out by metal as uniquely abhorrent, a system of control and indoctrination anathema to the freedom metal promised.

This presents us with a duality. On the one hand metal pointed to the hollowness of neoliberalism’s promises via an obsession with death and finality. On the other hand, it outright embraced neoliberalism’s totemic commitment to social mobility as the balm to sooth the total erasure of community and collectivity. That tension has always been present in metal, expressed through the primal and visceral on one side, and the cerebral and complex on the other. But equally a case could be made that metal owes an unacknowledged debt to social safety nets, the welfare state, civic life, and the public realm.

Neoliberalism’s justification for wiping out these spaces was to disincentivise scrounging. The slacker has always been much maligned, making them an easy scapegoat. Electorates were willing to allow the pillars of post war social democracy to be gradually dismantled if it meant the elimination of benefits scroungers. And the project has been largely successful, it is now all but impossible to live off benefits, even for those with a genuine need or those more than willing to work but still in need of support due to inflation outstripping wages. The price we paid for a tiny minority leaching off a system was the obliteration of any social safety net, community cohesion, or sense of purpose beyond consumption and labour. But on a more trivial level, slackers were responsible for some of metal’s most profound works. And we have all but lost the conditions under which great works by young people can be created.  

This has had profound effects for the evolution of metal in the 21^st Century. Music used to provide important milestones marking the passage of time. The metal that came out in 1987 was different in kind to 1988, more so 1989, almost unrecognisably so by 1990. By contrast, the metal released so far in 2024 could have come out in 2015, or 2010, or even 2005, and much further back if you consider the unjustifiably large bandwidth we currently allow for explicitly retro metal in its many guises.

Again, approaching this phenomenon through a wider economic lens, this is explainable in two ways. The first, as mentioned, is the evisceration of the public realm. Spaces for kids to simply meet, waste time together, imagine together, in physical places whose sole purpose is not the acquisition of capital. An overture to this neoliberal project has been the removal of affordable higher education, youth programs, the denigration of the arts and media within the education system. These have barred access to creative environments save for a wealthy few.

The second is the conditions under which young people are expected to live. Not just in terms of increasing economic precarity, stress, atomisation, anxiety, but also the demonisation of young people to the point of cutting them off from any expectation of a better future, from home ownership to a liveable planet. There is no space to formulate an artistic response to this because young people are required to cultivate their brand from a very young age. The demands of social mobility require them to begin thinking about careers, hustles, funding the debt they will inevitably rack up, or making rent. Social media footprints play an important role here. Parents rich enough to support their kids will likely be unwilling to see the weekly allowance siphoned off into a metal band. Previously benefits, free education, and social housing would have plugged the gaps left by disapproving parents, now kids have no choice but to capitulate to their wishes.

Add to this the near impossibility of boredom now. Engulfed by anxiety at their precarity and future at one end, and a constant stream of digital diversions at the other, there is no room to let the imagination wander with any semblance of independence or freedom. With every space and environment approaching a state of near total commodification, sleep becomes the only zone where dreaming the radical is still a possibility.

For example, there’s a reason black metal emerged in Northern Europe towards the end of the Cold War. The social democracies of Scandinavia offered young people some of the most stable, secure living conditions imaginable. A small group of kids in Norway, having been inspired by underground metal of the 80s, wanted to fashion their own version, distinct from what they saw as an increasingly kitsch, consumer friendly product being churned out by the emergent international darlings of death metal. But beneath this well known narrative sits the strength of civic life they grew up in. Norway’s Overton window skews left to the point that when Jeremy Corbyn proposed a similar set of policies in the UK he was ousted as a communist. For kids in the early 90s growing up in this system meant one of the safest, most secure existences imaginable, but it also meant boredom, total, euphoric boredom. By today’s standards, the Norwegian scene was drawing inspiration from a very limited pool of metal material. But it provided the spark. A combination of space, security, unending free time, boredom in the extreme, and the beauty of Norwegian nature did the rest in creating a scene that bubbled with unprecedented creativity. A similar case could be made for punk as it emerged in the 1970s in the UK which, at the time, was still engaged in a form of social democracy, albeit one lurching between a series of crises.

But from the outset, and just like any other form of metal, Norwegian black metal was confused (at best) as to what it wanted. Was it critiquing the economic model that made black metal even possible in the first place? Or was it anti religion? Nationalist? Naturalist? From the outset the age-old dispute of true and untrue music set in, the music defined itself by an endemic state of hostile antagonism toward its very being.

This antagonism is the engine room of all metal. The many binaries that define our attitudes to the music give rise to its most profound moments, moments arising from some trade-off between conservative and progressive inclinations. But it’s also this radical ambiguity that makes metal such an effective tool for escapism. For offering hints and clues at alternative outlooks, philosophies, approaches to life. The utter commitment to the moment, belief in what you are doing, building worlds from sheer will, constructing vast, unwieldy compositions to prove your worth to an incredibly limited set of peers and obscure posterity. That utterly sincere love of the craft at the risk of looking foolish, immature, ridiculous in the eyes of society. This allows metal to be ideologically manipulated into endless contradictory forms (what do Skepticism and Blind Guardian have in common aside from escapism?). But there is also a temptation to claim that this radical escapism is what makes metal attractive to both the far left and far right.

This seems to be a myth that metal continues to believe about itself. But aside from portions of politically explicit subgenres (NSBM, grindcore, some thrash), metalheads seem to be stubbornly apolitical.

Stubborn, because no matter the genre, there is an overarching value placed on authenticity. On the honesty of the craft, on not selling out. But when it comes to interrogating the underlying economic gravitational pull of commercialism, the pull toward commodification and the degrading effects this has on art, most will stop short of naming the demon, instead limply accepting that capitalism is the best system we have so we’d better put up with it.

And so…they buy into an entrepreneurial ideology. At this point it may be helpful to distinguish between pre digital and post digital metal, both in terms of scene and music itself. Pre digital metal opened the door and created the conditions for bold new possibilities under liberal democracies, untroubled by polite notions of good taste, restraint, irony, or reserve. It did this via a mediation between working class resentment and neoliberal aspirational politics, which led to a form of music in constant tension with itself. Pulled in equal force toward primitive, traditional, grounded forms at one end, and radical, complex, esoteric forms at the other. But it never realised the vision it set out. Never stepped through the proverbial door. As a result, metal was left uniquely exposed in the digital era, more so as social media hegemony bedded in.

The reason for this is the laissez faire economic grounding that metal accepted in order to mediate its project. All forms of music in some sense accept the logic of entrepreneurialism, but few embrace it so readily as metal. The proud petty bourgeoisie logic of self-reliance permeates metal at the economic level, which inevitably frames the terms under which it is willing to critique a capitalist ideology it fundamentally views as beneficial.

We could say of post digital metal then, that we as metalheads are all small business owners now. Even for those of us in gainful “real world” employment, there is no space to slack off. If our hobby is metal it will be mediated through social media, which demands of us that we build and maintain a brand. Equally for the youth, once the bedrock of musical progression, there is no space – both physically and digitally – for them to articulate themselves. Real world places to come together and imagine the new have been shutoff by the pivot to austerity following 2008, but were slowly eroding long before the 2000s. Equally, they are drowned out by the endless archivist tendencies of digital culture, its anally-retentive need to organise pockets of the past into categories ripe for rediscovery. Drowned out by legacy acts whose advantages in terms of digital and real capital are clear. And drowned out by each other, all competing to generate appealing, unique, niche, novel, or otherwise attention grabbing content regardless of whether it says anything about anything. The result is some of the densest, most elaborate, conceptually weighty metal ever recorded, but none of it amounts to anything beyond itself because its purpose is not to say anything, its purpose is to engage you, the potential fan, to hit like, subscribe, to stream, to generate traffic, to share posts.  

Given the role played by macro economic forces in this process, it’s worth asking what we can do from within metal. It’s perhaps important to understand what exactly it is that we want at this point. Metal in its pre digital form ultimately failed to live up to its promises, calling for a radical return to this era is therefore redundant. As is a limp call to support good artists or quality platforms that don’t just post for the sake of it.

Whilst there is a certain virtuous appeal in radically dropping out, listening to one new album a month, limiting social media use to the bare essentials, the continued dominance of social media and streaming platforms means that such things undertaken on an individual level can only have limited success. If you’re not on Spotify or Instagram, you don’t damage these platforms, you simply limit your following and cede the ground to those willing to engage on their terms.

Social media’s decline is all but inevitable at this point. Their strategies for keeping people online are not only failing but actively encouraging people to switch off as the apps become unusable havens of unwanted junk. But history teaches us that what may follow will be exponentially worse for culture and society. Whatever the grassroots response, it would need to be collective, imaginative, and novel. And it would need to start by asking what metal is for. A set of tools for giving voice to a certain malaise, a way to metabolize the horrors of whatever term you wish to assign to the present historical moment? An approach to music? An outlet? Or something more radical? Or more fundamentally, if metal did open the proverbial door, maybe it is up to some other as yet unimagined form of musical offspring to walk through it and realise a vision of art that resists the overwhelming pull toward commodification. And to create the conditions for this by renegotiating the capitalist economic common sense metal currently accepts as inevitable.

This provocation is indebted to the following materials:

Mark Fisher (2014): The slow cancellation of the future, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ

Jason Koebler, 2024: Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet, https://www.404media.co/facebooks-ai-spam-isnt-the-dead-internet-its-the-zombie-internet/

Dan Evans, 2023: A nation of shopkeepers – the unstoppable rise of the petty bourgeoisie, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60262450-a-nation-of-shopkeepers?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=HxeZ75DWAU&rank=1

Alessandro Gerosa, 2024: The hipster economy – taste and authenticity in late stage capitalism, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204596523-hipster-economy