For this video, I ask why, despite metal self-consciously embracing extremity and transgression, it goes to great lengths to conceal its politics, and why subsequent attempts to reveal or create a politics of metal have met with ideological and artistic failure.
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Hi, Thanks for this very insightful video. As a left wing person myself (albeit closer to old Marxist principles), I don’t think modern “progressivism” can really make any inroads into metal due to all the points you raise. In many ways modern progressivism is too much part of the institutional system that metal nominally rallies against. Progressives are found in universities, media, political parties etc. The working and lower middle classes are now viewed by many progressives as “deplorables.” The old left wing was more overtly anti-institutional and confrontational towards institutions. Hence it appealed to both hippies and punks which then flowed on to metal (even if in a hypocritical manner). Indeed Napalm Death comes across as genuine simply because they are rooted in working class left wing politics and not modern meaningless virtue signalling. Or Rage Against the Machine which very much adopted an anti-colonial form of Marxism which was often rooted in grass roots movements. A band coming across from the perspective of mainstream progressive media and academia or that adopts some of the more progressive notions that some bluegrass and indie bands exhibit would be viewed as essentially contrived and corporatised or at worst appropriating metal culture. Indeed look at the hate directed to Deafhaven who arguably came from that perspective or the hatred Ne Obliviscaris was subjected to when they tried to run a Patreon to fund tours (ie moving out of traditional metal formats of raising money).
The other thing is that in many ways modern progressivism doesn’t stand for anything. The old notions of class conflict, distrust of capitalism and calls for some form of socialism have been replaced by vapid virtue signalling based on interests of small minorities (though the same can be said of the right). At the same time modern progressives support capitalism as well as many principles of modern neoliberalism and globalism (eg free movement of labour aka immigration and free trade – indeed it is amusing how many progressive media have decried Trump’s plans for tariffs against China). The makes the modern progressive essentially a hypocrite. On one hand they support quotas for overt minorities yet on the other hand they support what is essentially slave labour in China. None of this fits in with metal, at least not in my opinion. Metal’s core guiding principle is to be anti-mainstream. This was prevalent both in extreme metal but even mainstream genres such glam metal with its overt attempt of corrupting wholesome youths to a life full of sex, drugs and rock n roll. As you mention metal doesn’t care about its internal contradictions (eg both anti-capitalist and pro-capitalist at same time). But that anti-mainstream antagonism is key to the genre’s mythos and aesthetic. Modern progressivism is very much a mainstream phenomenon. People see it in action when they turn on Netflix or Disney + or go to their work’s mandatory diversity training. Progressivism has become the mainstream bogeyman that people now rally against. In some ways society has caught up with metal’s anti-mainstream principles. Trust in government is low, hard right wing parties are ascendant and democratic systems are under pressure in Europe, Asia, Latin America and even the USA. Many people are now willing to believe in the most ridiculous of theories such as QAnon, anti-vaxxers, lizard people etc, all of whose anger is basically directed against government and mainstream media and academia. The other elephant in the room is the fact that metal is still largely the choice of music for males. This includes both the ageing white metalheads of old and younger ones not just in west but rest of world as well. And as we all know significant chunks of male population and in some cases sizeable majorities rankle against concepts of female rights and equality. Even with what little gender diversity has crept into metal, women metal musicians are viewed more for their appearance than their ability to play. Maybe we will reach full circle with this global rise of right wing absurdity and metal will turn to a more progressive perspective. But I doubt it. I sooner see the genre continuing its manner as a commercialised exercise in male posturing.
Sorry if I have rambled. I am certainly not as eloquent as you and hope I have made sense. Regards, DenisTasmaniaAustralia
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“Metal’s core guiding principle is to be anti-mainstream.”
This is mistaking metal for punk. Metal has two guiding principles — at a musical level, it is built around the rhythm guitar as the lead melodic instrument, and at a philosophical level, it is inherently satanic in spirit when Satan is understood as the mythological incarnation of all that is harmful, pernicious, baleful, sly, and ruinous. Any intersections with whether that is “mainstream” or “anti-mainstream” are nearly entirely random.
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I think you raise some good points but I do think “harmful, pernicious, baleful, sly, and ruinous” ignores a lot of what metal is about. And assuming the counter-mainstream facet takes away a lot from the early development of the genre from 1970 to 1990.
Firstly metal takes as much from punk as it does metal. Most early metal bands took influence from punk. This includes not just Venom or Motorhead but a lot of extreme bands too – Slayer, Sodom, Metallica.
This gave metal a social conscience that is strong to this day. Eg Napalm Death and also less overtly, Carcass are very much left wing, but most thrash and thrash adjacent bands had political lyrics about not just war but political corruption, corrupt religion, homelessness.
Secondly, in its original format, early bands like Black Sabbath had a counter culture aspect about (as much as Ozzy denied being a hippy). They embraced anti-mainstream themes such as drug use, anti-war as well as more misanthropic themes (as well as bizarrely pro-Christian eg After Forever).
Third, even the original purveyors of metal and even extreme metal tended to view themselves as shock value. They embraced things that were taboo to the mainstream in order to shock. Sabbath themselves said they wanted to scare people by making the horror equivalent of music. Cronos from Venom always affirmed they were looking to shock and not inspire people to burn churches. Even Accept deliberately tried to shock with of allusions of homosexuality for which you could to gaol even in some western countries in 1980s (which incidentally would’ve shocked a lot of metalheads too – if you read the 1980s issues of Slayer mag, many band members were overtly homophobic).
The shock value encompassed all of metal – the music, the aesthetic (be it album covers or fashion accessories like bullet belts and Iron Cross to the portrayal of band members in photo shoots) and lyrical themes.
Early death metal was a real return to shock value – Death, Autopsy, Obituary, Cannibal Corpse were great examples of bands that really embraced that Sabbath concept of musical of “musical equivalent of a horror movie” and were tied in very much with the horror movies of the 1980s.
At some point you get goregrind and then pornogrind as the ultimate in shock metal (eg Intense Hammer Rage’s infamous album that resulted in them being arrested by the police).
More critically if you think about who the target of the shock is, well it’s parents and other adults. Basically premise was almost that the kids would buy that Iron Maiden, Tomb Of the Mutilated or Reeks of Putrefaction album and their families, teachers and mainstream school mates would be outraged.
This is where your concept of the “harmful, pernicious, baleful, sly, and ruinous” really comes IMO.
The early pioneers of metal didn’t believe in the stuff they were doing. They embraced the “harmful, pernicious, baleful, sly, and ruinous” to shock audiences. It was closer to Alice Cooper than a serious outlook.
It’s not until 2nd wave black metal rumbles around that the whole thing coalesces into a more serious thing.
The other thing that made it more serious was the death of commercial metal in mid-1990s. With the casual fans dropping off by the thousands, not much new blood and only a hardcore of true metal fans surviving though the 1990s, the genre took on a more serious ideological outlook (though it’s sadly devolved to tepid shock dad rock over the last 2 decades).
All my $0.02 and I will admit I could be very, very wrong.
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A few responses to that in a random order:
Witches gather at black masses
Bodies burning in red ashes
On the hill the church in ruin.
Is the scene of evil doings
It’s a place for all bad sinners
Watch them eating dead rats’ innards.
I guess it’s the same, where ever you may go
Oh lord yeah
Carry banners which denounce the lord
See me rocking in my grave
See them anoint my head with dead rat’s blood
See them stick the stake through me
Oh
Don’t hold me back cause I just gotta go
They’ve got a hold of my soul now
Lords got my brain instinct with blood obscene
Look in my eyes I’m there enough
Yeah
On the scene a priest appears
Sinners falling at his knees
Satan sends out funeral pyre
Casts the priest into the fire
It’s the place for all bad sinners.
Watch them eating dead rats’ innards
I guess it’s the same, where ever you may go
Oh lord yeah
These lyrics were re-written by their label, who feared backlash, and there were plenty of similar examples throughout their career. As such, using their published lyrics as an example of metal being “socially conscious” is suspect; it wasn’t a metal band being socially conscious, it was the industry apparatus.
2. Using grindcore bands as an example of metal having a strong social conscious is inaccurate because grindcore is a hybrid genre that is more punk than metal with a number of exceptions small enough to count on the fingers of one hand (with Blood — probably the least socially-conscious grind band ever — being the most notable grindcore band to lean more heavily on the metal side of things than the punk side of things, a fact which is not coincidence). Likewise, it’s the most punk-adjacent metal subgenre (speed metal) which occasionally dabbles in radical political lyrics — this isn’t a coincidence. This is a punk trait which sometimes shows up in heavily punk-influenced metal, not a metal trait.
3. It’s simply inaccurate to say that every satanic band prior to the Norse black metal bands weren’t sincere in their beliefs. You certainly aren’t going to brand an inverted cross onto your forehead without some degree of conviction, and even a cursory knowledge of genre history would inform you of bands such as Mortuary Drape, Mortem, or Pentagram (the Chilean one, not the poseurs from the U.K.) which predated second-wave black metal by years. Even more commonly known bands from the ’80s have talked about finding books on Satanism to study (such as Hellhammer/Celtic Frost) or even performing rituals (such as Morbid Angel). And this isn’t even going into the Greek black metal scene, either, which predates the Norse scene.
4. For the bands that whose inspiration for making sinister art was driven by shock value, this doesn’t change the fact that they were in fact making sinister art. The goal wasn’t “let’s be anti-mainstream!”; it was “let’s be dark and evil”, and their motivations for it do not change this fact.
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Fair point on Sabbath’s Warpigs. But that ignores Children of the Grave, Wicked World, Hand of Doom etc. Sabbath sang about lots of different things including social issues .
Writing off grindcore and speed/thrash metal as mere punk offshoots and thus not relevant is a fallacy. You forget death metal and black metal also incorporate lots and lots and lots of punk/hardcore even if not lyrically.
Speed/thrash metal was the original extreme metal genre and its most commercially successful one and it had a lot of socially aware lyrics. Socially aware lyrics also appear in death metal (eg Bolt Thrower, Carcass or Dying Fetus and Napalm Death when they play death metal), NWOBHM, melodic death metal and early power metal before it became all about hobbits and dragons.
Yep, some small percentage of early extreme metal bands might have practiced childish satanic rituals or worshipped the fictitious ancients ones. Most did not. Read the Slayer Mag diaries which contains many interviews from those early halcyon days – most of those guys just wanted to be the fastest and more brutal than the other guy. And they hated the mainstream.
The shock was more than just dark and sinister. Glam metal for all its faults shocked through androgyny and overt sexuality. This was also present in NWOBHM, some early thrash and extreme metal ala Venom and is also present in pornogrind.
You forget or unaware that the late 1970s/early 1980s had a real “Satanic Panic” in the USA that spread to other countrieseg Dungeons and Dragons were viewed as Satanic and the media drumming up stories of satanic cults conducting vile rituals. So if you wanted to shock people, sing about Satan.
Also society was far less liberal in terms allowing youth to be exposed to sex and violence, especially for youth. So in addition to a bit of Satan, sing about wars, psycho killers and sex. It was still shock value in 1990s eg Cannibal Corpse but also Carcass and Pungent Stench and all their banned album covers.
Dark and evil was a gimmick and bands used other’s if they could. Eg look at Iron Maiden or Metallica or Anthrax or WASP or Accept or whatever. It was all shock. Not all death metal/grind wasn’t initially even shocking or dark and sinister.
“Even a cursory knowledge of genre history would inform you of bands such as Mortuary Drape, Mortem, or Pentagram (the Chilean one, not the poseurs from the U.K.)”
Wow you’re digging deep and probably too deep. These bands are about as obscure as you can get. Again we can talk about them with hindsight now that we have the internet. Back then not many people would have heard of them. Your average metal fan or even average death metal fan would not have heard of them. Also none of them were present in any real fashion at the birth of the genre or even extreme metal’s formative years in 1980s though to be honest I don’t even know which Mortem you are referring to. And the Greek black metal scene pre-Norway is so amazingly obscure (I know nothing about it except Rotting Christ).
Even guys I know who were around at the breakthrough of death metal wouldn’t know of such bands.
“Pentagram (the Chilean one, not the poseurs from the U.K”
Huh what British one? Are you referring to the American one started in 1971 but that really got going in the 1980s? Yeah they suck but I don’t think they were posers.
And finally to bring back the reality of “cursory knowledge of metal.”
Your average metal fan doesn’t even listen to extreme metal. They listen to stuff like Pantera, Slipknot, Iron Maiden, Mastodon, and of course Metallica.
Your average extreme metal fan doesn’t really deep dive into ancient Greek black metal. They listen to stuff like Behemoth, Six Feet Under, Cannibal Corpse or even Black Dahlia Murder, Amon Amarth and Cattle Decapitation. They will call the new Opeth progressive death metal when it contains no death metal. I’ve known plenty of extreme metal guys who didn’t even know who Necrophobic, Cancer or even Benediction were, let alone some obscure Chilean act from 1990s.
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Writing off grindcore and speed metal as punk offshoots is perfectly relevant because the socially conscious lyrics are a punk thing, not a metal thing. These are hybrid genres that lean at least 50% to the punk side, and thus cannot be considered representative of metal. Glam *also* is not metal, so we can discount that example, as well.
But the rest of your post makes me suspect that you got lost on your way to Loudwire. Thinking that titans of the genre like Mortuary Drape (or, even funnier, Pentagram (Chile), who are famous enough as one of the founders of death metal as a genre that even mainstream darlings like Watain will namedrop them in interviews expecting to be understood!), while naming non-metal bands such as Slipknot or Mastadon as examples of the genre is laughable, nevermind the self-defeating logic that a genre which you declare to be anti-mainstream could be defined by the most popular/mainstream bands existing within it.
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What Denis said is very true. It isn’t that “leftism” as such does not belong in metal. Anarchism, social democracy, Marxism, etc. have been part of metal for just about as long as metal itself has existed. The purity fetishism of twenty-first century liberalism may not belong in metal, but there is no reason that one can’t reject “cancel culture” or “idpol” while remaining true to one’s principles as a socialist, social democrat, anarchist, Marxist-Leninist, etc.
Personally, as a card-carrying communist myself, I find it silly to see Gen Z liberals on RateYourMusic compiling lists of which black metal artists are “sketch” versus which are “clean” or “safe.” Beyond the obvious irony of applying such obsessive purity fetishism to a genre that very much intends to be unfriendly and unsafe by definition, I don’t see it as particularly consequential whether or not the bassist from some also-ran Swedish black metal band ever publicly apologized for playing live (in Olaf’s parents’ garage) with Wolven Kommando back in ’97.
Such unserious luxury obsession is what doesn’t belong in metal – not opposition to capitalist and imperialist exploitation.
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Neoliberal capitalists like the Democrats are not in any way whatsoever Left Wing, they believe in most of the same policies as most conservatives, Joe Biden was president for 4 years and did not do anything at all to advance progressive policies or even undo the blatant fascist policies and people that Trump implemented, the Democrats and Republicans both are not on the side of anybody but themselves and corporations who bribe them into doing what they want. It’s infinitely worse than mobsters in the past because they control both sides of the propaganda machine of places like CNN and Fox News to distract all of us from the corporations killing our environment, our education system, and ultimately the end point of what they are doing will result in a dead planet and human extinction
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True left wing politics are dead in the English speaking world.
Here in Australia even the Greens party is pro-free trade, pro-liberalisation (eg removal of restrictions on sale of drugs or immigration) etc.
Left wing politics died in Australia in 1967 when Gough Whitlam became head of the Labor Party (and later PM).
The most successful neoliberal reformers and destroyers of union movement in Australian history were nominally “left wing” Labor Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating (much like Tony Blair was right wing economically in Britain).
I’d even go so far as to say that the lack of ideological difference is killing western democracy as well as living standards. It is twiddle-dum and twiddle-dee.
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Well said. The “elite” beneficiaries of imperialist finance capital promote division through identity politics and “culture wars” to impede the exploited classes from forging unity and asserting their material interests against the oppressors. Many metalheads fall for this power-serving false dichotomy between “based chuds” and “woke SJWs” in the same way that almost every niche or subculture these days does, whether siding with the former or the latter. The situation isn’t unique to metal at all, but unfortunately pervades just about any and every subculture or niche to be found, nowadays – again, whether the subculture/niche in question generally sides with the cultural “right” or “left.”
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