It

I’m back! After a brief hiatus to process what I’m told were “feelings”. What’s changed since I’ve been gone? Well, nothing…obviously. Except the world’s first AI band finally managing to extract the artist from the artwork. A slow march toward technological homogeneity continues apace, something everyone agrees is bad whilst actively embracing it at every step. Oh, and Ozzy died.

In a strange way, I had a very similar reaction to his passing as I did the Queen. A moment too rich in symbolism to it let pass without comment. These are figureheads that we knew, deep down, were always slated to die, but we never truly faced up to what that day might look like, what it could mean. Luckily a raft of think pieces were already locked and loaded years before the actual event to tell us how to feel (for me, the Queen’s death will always be about the precision engineering required to land her generation spanning reign smack in the middle of the halcyon months of Lizz Truss’s mortgage wrecking premiership).

In the case of Ozzy, the media conjured image of continuity with his working class roots has no doubt been orchestrated by his perennially craven wife. His career left the smoke of Birmingham behind decades ago, but the low watermark of The Osbournes in the 2000s was followed by a sharp volte-face, a renewed push to connect Ozzy’s brand back to its authentic self, mostly by shoring up the legacy of early Black Sabbath. The release of ‘13’, new rounds of touring in the late 2010s, one final post retirement push with the Back to the Beginning concert in Birmingham, and, following his death, a trail of think pieces playing up his Brummie accent and humble origins whilst playing down the fact that for most of my lifetime Ozzy himself was something of a pathetic figure, a drug pickled idiot made to dance for our amusement on MTV.

Using someone’s death to reflect on the times is perfectly legitimate. Especially a figure as vast as Ozzy. His passing is the death of something familiar, comforting. A reminder that the golden age of counterculture – an age that the overwhelming majority of 21^st Century culture is still derived from – is slipping from living memory. 

You don’t have to squint too hard to view Black Sabbath’s final show, the lineup, the serendipitous timing, as a wake. A wake not just for an era of music, but for rock and metal played out at this scale. The bill was a sample of the last available artists with this level of brand recognition. We all know time passes. Everyone dies eventually. But metal seems to be walking into this slow death with its eyes wide shut. I didn’t realise it at the time, but Lemmy’s death ten years ago was perhaps the starting gun for this zombie era. His subsequent deification raising the stakes for the nostalgia industry.   

Ozzy’s death can’t just mean nothing. There’s just too much invested in a figure like that to not take stock. And that’s precisely the point. This could be one of the last chances we get to collectively take stock at all. Deaths on this scale will be an increasingly rare thing. Ozzy’s level of celebrity just doesn’t happen anymore, at least not in metal. Metal itself will persist, far longer than it has any right to, I’m sure. But figures with the cultural cache of Lemmy or Ozzy were unique to their generation. Iron Maiden are down a drummer, Metallica look dangerously weary, Glen Tipton bravely battles on to maintain Judas Priest’s Indian summer. Old money will eventually be forced to retreat into its mansion. Vague reminders of a time when artists were characters not content providers. Their personalities informing their art, creating an image and world around themselves. A status, lifestyle, and aesthetic designed to be bought into wholesale by an approving fanbase.

The enormous character oozing from this old aristocracy makes the new, energetic bourgeoisie of modern metal look anonymous. The few exceptions to this rule produced by the 21^st Century are notable insofar as their music flees from a recognisably metallic style, Ghost, Sleep Token, Gojira, Mastadon etc.

Even as character driven metal passes into the rearview mirror their iconography still dominates the landscape (almost literally in the case of Lemmy’s imposing effigy overshadowing Hellfest) precisely because there’s nothing capable of taking their place. The longevity of Ozzy’s career was such that his fanbase went through several oscillations of irony and sincerity. But for all the cynicism and opportunism overshadowing the latter half of his life, it came stamped with Ozzy’s unmistakable personality. Once that personality expires, all that remains is the imagery and ephemera of his estate, a shared legacy the metal community – in the absence of anything large enough to replace it – will continue to desperately latch onto for years to come.

Following the rare collective experience afforded by Ozzy’s passing, and the metal community retreating back into its siloes, I can’t help but ask what purpose it all serves? A niche expression of increasingly obscurantist nodes of mythology, history, and religion, in one sense doing nothing more than “bearing witness to suffering” (to appropriate a phrase). It reminds me of Stephen King’s ‘It’. Those scenes where King abandons his character driven dissection of rural America to describe scenes of racist or homophobic violence where It appears as a mere bystander. No doubt King is trying to shoehorn in a commentary on humanity being the real monster or whatever, but these scenes always appeared incongruous against the very active threat It poses to the story’s main characters throughout the bulk of narrative.

In the context of the vast worlds conjured by metal’s fading landed gentry, the current landscape appears so…small. For all the myth, fable, history, and stories explored across modern metal, it stops short of saying anything. It still wants to convey that the world is dark, intense, scary, but this isn’t a particularly interesting observation anymore. Everyone knows it’s bleak. Lemmy and Ozzy came from a more optimistic generation, one that needed the corrective of their music to peel back the layers of darkness beneath the post war consensus, and later the optimism of early neoliberalism.

The degraded viability of metal looks even more so in light of the technological plates shifting beneath its feet. AI is replacing streaming as the enemy of everything good and true in this world. Throughout the streaming age I maintained a quiet hubris that metal retains some immunity to big tech’s scorched earth attitude to culture. But as collective experience fades from view, everyone plugged into their own private journey through the content mills, metal appears to be almost eager for the coming AI takeover.

The Velvet Sundown gave everyone pause. This entirely fabricated AI band managed to rack up 1 million monthly listeners following the release of their debut album “Floating on Echoes” in early June, something that swept the entire music industry into a state of total panic. Rather than approach this as I always do, with the passive distance of the metalhead, popcorn in hand, maybe we should be paying closer attention to the machinations of mainstream music. We may be more resistant to the winds of technological change, metalheads still values albums, buy merch, attend gigs etc., but this no longer looks sufficient for what’s coming.  

The outrage surrounding The Velvet Sundown was predictable and understandable. To be a music fan is to trade in authenticity, something the deception of an AI band so blatantly violates. A deception made no less bitter by the band’s retroactive amendment to their Spotify bio, claiming that they are “an ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI”.

It reminded me of the Threatin controversy that swept the music world back in 2018. Remember Threatin? Masterminded by one Jered Threatin, an essentially fabricated band created an online mythos by paying for thousands of Facebook likes, creating fake booking agents, record labels, and management companies, all registered to the same GoDaddy account. With this manufactured audience, people were fooled into believing Threatin could pack out venues around the world. The tour that followed saw them essentially play to a series of empty rooms. Following the backlash that positioned struggling music venues as the real victims, Jered Threatin released a similar statement lampooning the music industry’s overreliance on social media hype, asking “what is Fake News? I turned an empty room into an international headline. If you are reading this, you are part of the illusion”. These retroactive claims to some high minded artistic intent seem to be a rather recent development within musical fakery. No Dadaist retconning followed the revelation that Milli Vanilli didn’t sing a note on their hits in the early 1990s. 

Should the metalhead be worried? Does metal’s dedicated fanbase shield it from such scandals? If nothing else, these developments are a shot across the bow. We are every bit the rabbit in the headlights here. Deicide and Kerry King recently courted AI controversy over their choice of artwork. And who could forget Patrick Mameli’s dogged defence of the AI cover art on Pestilence’s recent output? 

His tone-deaf defence that it was a budgetary decision may have attracted the most ire (AI art is based on theft after all), but he also tried to argue that AI is just another piece of tech to experiment with in the artistic process. The next stage in a continuum. There is a logic to what Mameli is saying here. Keyboards were every bit as controversial in metal at one point, as were triggered or programmed drums, live backing tracks, along with the entire armoury of studio trickery behind digital audio workstations. All are now largely accepted within the metal community as valid creative tools. Clearly Mameli regards AI as part of this evolution, believing that metalheads will eventually come to accept it. The use of AI to generate the blueprint of a riff, a kind of text prompt, is already creeping into the writing process, why fight it? People said the same thing about synthesisers once upon a time. 

Or does AI represent a significant break with the past, a categorical rewiring of our relationship to music? I’m no tech expert, so I can only read the tea leaves here. But looking at the actual music of The Velvet Sundown, trading on a facsimile of psychedelic, indie, and folk, it’s the essence of genre without the substance, the ideal accompaniment to some mundane, everyday task. Genres that trade an atmosphere and aesthetic over compositional rigour appear more vulnerable here.

You might think metal then, with its complex lexicon of theory and mores, remains resistant to the effects of Spotify’s playlistification, but it’s precisely this compositional rigour that metal has been shedding in the last two decades without the aid of AI. A quick Google search led me to a trough of YouTube channels churning out hours of AI generated metal music. Their viewing figures are small but growing. Each showcases a boilerplate version of a metal subgenre designed to be played in the background to some other activity. The music on these channels, not that far from 90% of the promos landing in my inbox each week ostensibly made by humans, are reconfiguring familiar tropes into sterile wallpaper music. This is our canary in the coalmine.

The metal community itself appears fatally apathetic in the face all this. Bands sell themselves on genre and ethos more than substance and identity. Something only brought into sharper relief by a reappraisal of Ozzy’s life and work. I’ve mixed feelings about Blood Incantation, but aside from bands that formed in the previous century, they seem to be the only artist able to raise above the parapet and actually provoke a substantive debate within the scene. This is partly because to some they represent the zenith of modern metal’s failures, a choose-your-own-adventure of prefabricated flavours. They just do it more convincingly than the nearest competition. Renting out the aesthetics of the past, time and again settling for newer bands who offer a reasonable simulation of some legacy genre instead of something authentically their own. Or else drawing on obscure branches of history, religion, mythology, and lore to fabricate some aesthetic credibility. Like It, adopting whatever form it thinks will provoke the strongest reaction, impotently “witnessing” the horrors of humanity whilst saying nothing of use or relevance.

Listless and without purpose, some cultures deserve to die, and even appear ready for death. You might think this is all a bit harsh. But metal is one of the things I love most in the world. And to truly love a thing requires nothing less than utter contempt. Contempt that comes from a place of love (probably). It would perhaps be too perfect to characterise Black Sabbath’s final show and Ozzy’s passing as metal holding its own funeral, paving the way for us to all sit back and plug directly into the machine, feeding us a constant stream of tech mediated content drawn from the raw materials of a more vital age…so I won’t.