Please read the following scenario carefully

Please read the following scenario carefully. A discussion will follow.

Scenario One:

Andrew Lee is an American of Chinese descent. He has a death metal band called Ripped to Shreds. Ripped to Shreds were booked to play a gig with a much older death metal band called Master, who were in the middle of a US tour, but Ripped to Shreds decided to cancel their gig with Master and end ties with their booking agent Heavy Talent. Ripped to Shreds released a statement explaining that Master were booked to play the Metal Threat festival on a previous leg of their tour. The lineup for Metal Threat featured the openly Nazi band Arghoslent. Ripped to Shreds cited this as the reason why they cancelled their gig with Master and ended their relationship with Heavy Talent. Master were set to play on a different stage and on a different day to Arghoslent. They are yet to comment on this.

Following the announcement that Ripped to Shreds had cancelled their gig with Master, a Facebook page was created called Metal Hypocrites. The first post on this page claimed that Lee had associations with someone called Brandon Corsair of Nameless Grave Records. The post also contained screenshots of a private conversation where Corsair admitted to owning Arghoslent records. Lee subsequently responded to the Metal Hypocrites post, saying that the screenshots shared were edited to paint Corsair in a negative light, and that whilst Corsair does own Arghoslent records he explicitly said he would never display or post about them in public.

Lee was also criticised for his associations with Corsair in light of a recent video Lee posted to his YouTube channel where he discussed the problem of white supremacy in the metal community.

I will now split you up into smaller groups to talk about this scenario. Please use the following notes to guide your discussion.

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Feeding the death metal scene a spat like this is like giving a kid a wad of sugar. One day there’s a flurry of activity and debate, the next utter despondency at just how inane it all appears.

This scenario is particularly curious. Namely because it features actual, self-identifying Nazis that no one (except other Nazis) wants to public align with. Arghoslent couldn’t be more explicit in their Nazism. This gives the situation a fixed point from which everyone can navigate the minutiae, funnelling the debate in the same direction. Specifically: how many handshakes away from Arghoslent is an acceptable amount?

And here’s where the highly individualised nature of music fandom reveals itself. The steady flow of traffic through the comment threads on this matter reveals an entire matrix of individual standards, each one subtly distinct from the last. “Master were wrong to play Metal Threat but Ripped to Shreds didn’t need to cancel their gig”. “Ripped to Shreds were entitled to cancel the gig but shouldn’t have virtue signalled it”. “It’s fine to play Metal Threat if you’re not playing the same day as the Nazis”. “None of this is cool and even Lee’s association with Corsair means he’s guilty by association”. “Owning Arghoslent merch is wrong”. “Owning Arghoslent merch is ok as long as you don’t wear a t-shirt in public”. “Owning Arghoslent merch is wrong but you can listen to them in private as long as you don’t financially support them”. “It’s not fine to listen to Arghoslent even in private because it normalises fascism in metal”. “Listening to Master on the third Tuesday of the month is now prohibited unless you are also purchasing a meal at the same time”.

Music scenes often think of themselves as communal operations. But loving music is also deeply atomising. People are very resistant to being challenged on what they love, or considering its implications in the context of a community. It’s like a gosling that imprints on the first thing it sees after hatching. This is usually their mother (or Iron Maiden), but sometimes it’s a human, or an unsuspecting dog (or NSBM). Music bypasses the rational part of our brain; we develop a pre-rational attachment to it.

With age comes the realisation that the things we love – from Britney Spears to Burzum – have come at a cost, they exist in a cultural and historical context. They might even be “sketch”. So, to ensure that this attachment is not severed, we develop a matrix of principles dictating the terms and conditions under which we can interact with problematic art. The problem being that in a lot of cases this matrix is not some rational set of principles to live by but more like someone trying to regulate their sugar intake.

When something like Metal Threatgate erupts we see a whole plethora of matrixes thrown around online, all bespoke to the individual. The result is a scene talking at cross purposes. We are all asked to think about our personal codes and consider the possibility that someone else’s might be better thought through. The reflexive response is to be defensive.

If your matrix is on a different tier to someone else’s, it can feel like someone is trying to erect a barrier between you and the thing you love. Sometimes it’s not even the thing you love but some vague association. Maybe you never dreamt of listening to Arghoslent, but now that Master gig is being cancelled because of them. Is it still ok to like Master? Or any of the other bands that agreed to play Metal Threat? Is the entire Nameless Grave roster out because its co-owner has Arghoslent vinyl?

It’s these webs of equivocation that a page like Metal Hypocrites seeks to exploit, deliberately complicating the picture by drawing a tenuous link between Ripped to Shreds and Arghoslent. Any passerby may come away thinking that they must be every bit as culpable as Master. The waters duly muddied, all we can do is shrug and conclude that we’re all as dirty as each other so why bother engaging with any of it?

And that’s kind of the point. The video Lee posted to YouTube on white supremacy and metal argues that – at least in the US – metal is still a majority white genre, and it displays all the hallmarks of majority white spaces as a result. Namely, the erasure of non-white experiences, the handwaving of casual racism, and the denial that racism is even a problem. Not all of this is malicious or even intentional. Lee attempts to contextualise these prejudices, explaining their origins and how they’re perpetuated when white people continue to turn a blind eye. He’s essentially trying to make the issue visible to us again, so anyone claiming to be against racism has no excuse for ignoring it.

It’s that layer of (usually) white, (usually) male, (usually) older fans that proves most resistant to people like Lee who use their platform to speak on these issues. I’ve referred to them as the “common sense” fandom before. Broadly conservative, self-identifying as apolitical, deeply attached to metal and likely involved in the scene for many years. They would still regard Arghoslent as a step too far, but may be generally at ease with the kind of casual racism Lee has experienced in the metal scene as an American of Chinese descent.

These people are susceptible to fascism, but most of them aren’t fascists yet. They’re the remnants of metal’s origins in angry, white male working class culture in the 1970s. Historically, metal has been able to direct this demographic’s rage into a positive cultural expression in a way few other forms of music can. But these origins also explain metal’s confused or absent political orientation. It’s a form of libertarianism, oscillating wildly between left and right positions that looks incoherent at times. But there is an internal logic at play that allows strong anti-war sentiment to sit happily alongside worship of power, a proud self-reliance blend with a profound sense of community.

The older generation of death metal pioneers Lee makes reference to in his video, who unthinkingly repeated racist stereotypes to his face, were equally hostile to the paternalism of Reaganism in the 1980s, along with its deep ties to the Christian right, ties that the modern right have now – aesthetically if not in practice – all but severed.

And this brings us to the broader point. Arghoslent are that rare thing in a culture war. Clarity. Literal, goose-stepping Nazis. They are the thing that we all – at least rhetorically – claim to want nothing to do with. There is nothing postmodern or whimsical about their Hitler salutes. This is entirely distinct from the broad, Trump voting mass, some of whom converted to Trumpism after supporting Bernie Sanders. Similarly, in the UK there is some polling data indicating that Corbyn, the most high profile leftwing MP in the UK, is viewed more favourably than Kier Starmer amongst people intending to vote for the far right insurgent party Reform.

This is the chaotic politics of metal’s common sense fandom playing out in practice. The original crop of death metal artists in the late 1980s didn’t conceive of their music as political in any sense. But it was. And this is one of the most frustrating things about older metalheads. Their music has the power to make people confront a worldview diametrically opposed to their own and be moved by it. But they are utterly unwilling to engage with the implications of this in a broader historical or cultural context. And this, in turn, is one of the most frustrating things about (usually) younger, more progressive fans keen to politicise everything. Their efforts often result in little more than boiling nuance down to consumer choice. They find themselves drawn to music made by people they see as problematic. Yet rather than use this as an opportunity to interrogate their worldview, they create a set of rules that will dictate when and under what circumstances they can enjoy the music.

Incidentally, Master’s culpability in all this is curiouser still. They are a rare example of an old school death metal band with a more explicit, left leaning politics. But their appeal, much like punk, bridges the divide. At the time of writing, Master are yet to comment. I’ve met Paul Speckmann a couple of times, and we interviewed him for the Necropolis Podcast. So I can only speckmannulate (I’m so sorry) on what he makes of all this. He’s a mellow, personable chap, keen to shore up his legacy as one of the founders of death metal. He seems a little bemused by politics now. Troubled by the hyperbole of Trumpism, but unsure of where or how this came about. In regard to contemporary metal he seems equally ambivalent. Happy to ride out Master’s legacy, release the occasional album, and continue to enjoy the good graces of anyone appreciative of his music.

I’m not even convinced he looked too closely at the Metal Threat lineup. But Lee clearly thinks that avoiding a festival willing to book Arghoslent is, in his words, a very low bar to clear.

The common sense fandom outlined above will no doubt see Lee’s actions as an unwanted slap on the wrist. More woke finger wagging and policing of behaviour that they will dismiss as “unmetal”.

Maybe the one thing we can all agree on is that episodes like this make us uncomfortable. Uncomfortable that racism is still a problem in “our” space, uncomfortable that you might be complicit in it, or uncomfortable that you’ve been liking your thing for many years, and now you’re being challenged on that love and you just don’t like it.

But this discomfort allows us to boil down an apparently complex issue to a simple binary. If you’re a fan of metal, you either accept the discomfort that comes with the territory and choose to learn and grow with it, or you don’t really like or understand metal as an artform in its totality. 

To metalheads that refuse to admit that metal is even small “p” political, what exactly do you get from this music? And if your response to Ripped to Shreds throwing down the gauntlet is to claim “it’s metal, it’s meant to be offensive etc. etc.”, sure, it’s metal, it’s meant to be difficult and it’s meant to challenge you. Did you think liking music this extreme and over the top would be easy? Uncomplicated? Did you think you’d never be asked to think about why or on what terms you like it?

This whole episode may well be farcical, but at least it gives us the opportunity to do a little housekeeping. If you like metal as intensely as you claim, this comes with a degree of responsibility. I don’t necessarily agree with every point Lee has made this last week, but at least he’s engaged with his relationship to metal and spoken out about it.  

Equally naïve is demanding that everyone conform to your specific metrics in these scenarios. That Arghoslent are over the line may be an agreed fact. But just before that line is an array of people trying to understand their love of Master, or Sinister, or Unleashed, or any of the other broadly popular bands that agreed to play Metal Threat. It takes time, effort, and a lot of good faith discussion to understand how the scene should metabolise something like this. It also evolves in light of new information. How should we react if and when Master do respond for example?

The need to engage with other fans is especially urgent if, like me, you’re a factory settings straight white bloke born after 1985 who grew up in a broadly liberal environment. You are not subject to discrimination and feel broadly at home in metal spaces, but you also consider yourself anti-racist and alive to the “issues”. You already have at least one thing in common with people espousing slightly different views on these comment threads. You both love metal. And you both love metal from apparently divergent political and social positions. Why not take the opportunity to explore that with each other? It’s not enough to be like “yeh, boy, racism sucks right”, because, aside from the Arghoslents of the world, more often than not racism is never just about racism.

I realise that trying to squeeze something positive from such an untidy episode makes me look hopelessly naïve. But social media is designed to stoke these exact hostilities. And whoever is behind the Metal Hypocrites page is cynically manipulating the situation to erase further discussion on the problem of racism in metal. In light of this, I’d rather be naïve than silent.