Hallucinated subgenres

(There are only four)

Metal subgenres don’t exist. I think we’ve imagined them all. I’ve run the numbers, and by my count there’s only ever been four.  “How could we have been so wrong about this?” you ask. I don’t know, but I’m going to expend considerable effort wildly speculating regardless.

I curse my spare time with listening to metal. I’ve charted the tropes, noted the common threads, techniques, the correlations, popular thematic material, trending styles, the cross cultural pollination. And I’ve concluded that it’s all just software. Software we are repeatedly installing onto a very limited set of hardware that’s remained unchanged since about 1985, namely heavy, thrash, death, and black metal, the four metal subgenres.

“This can’t be right?!” you insist. And no doubt you’re already listing off exceptions. So let’s briefly address some of these before we continue. Doom metal has no distinctive methodology over and above the subgenres it grows from (usually heavy and death metal). Speed and power metal are just variations on thrash and heavy metal (accepting that thrash was a media concocted term created to mitigate the poor marketability of “speed metal”, but it’s the agreed term now so it’s the one we’re working with). Folk, goth, glam, progressive, symphonic, post, these are all plug-ins lacking any reality unless they’re installed onto one of the four pieces of subgenre hardware. Industrial is an interesting case. Following the release of ‘Streetcleaner’ it looked about ready to split off and form a fifth vanguard in the late 80s. But it was killed in its cradle in the early 90s under the more well established but external forces behind the alt/funk/groove boom that eventually abducted it from metal’s jurisdiction.

I could go on. But my purpose here isn’t to argue the case for the four subgenre theorem. It’s actually a self-evident truth if you think hard enough about it. The more interesting question is why metal thinks it has exponentially more subgenres than it actually does, and whether this matters.

The first is a simple case of mistaken identity. Decorate the substrata of heavy or black metal with an ensemble of flutes, fiddles, and horns and it becomes folk metal. Sing about Vikings over any subgenre of metal and it becomes Viking metal. A similar prefixing process takes place for lyrics about pirates, battle, and the novels of Gustav Flaubert. Slow heavy metal down and it becomes “traditional doom metal”. Add time signatures to any combination of the four subgenres and it becomes progressive metal.

The “metalness” of blended subgenres like metalcore may be contentious for some. But paradoxically this is because from a genre perspective metalcore is more substantive than something like neoclassical metal. The mix of death metal, thrash, and heavy metal that goes into creating something like metalcore is obfuscated by the fact that it requires non-metal hardware to install, namely hardcore and rock. Metalcore is therefore a more literal subgenre than the majority of cases in the sense that its hybridisation takes place at the compositional level, even if its individual parts are still reducible to one of the original four.

That’s not to say that imagined subgenres are artistically invalid or somehow inferior. Many of my best friends are folk metal bands. Nor is the terminology around metal subgenreing completely useless. Follow the breadcrumbs back far enough and you might wake up one day to the revelation that Mötley Crüe and Electric Wizard are 99.9% indistinguishable from one another. Mitigating the insanity this realisation induces requires the urgent deployment of words. Words that can reestablish some distance between the two entities. Namely that Mötley Crüe and Electric Wizard have installed very different software onto the same heavy metal hardware.

So maybe what I’m arguing for here is not a hierarchy of distinctions but for some perspective. Metal is not some feuding, three dimensional, multi-branching family tree. It’s four pieces of aging hardware constantly receiving new updates, slowly degrading with each reboot, unable to run the latest software. Trimming away the subgenres can also become a kind of game. Here’s some fun I had with a quick Google of the biggest metal bands of the last two decades:

Avenged Sevenfold – rock hardware running heavy metal software
Slipknot – rock hardware running death/thrash software
Meshuggah – thrash/death hardware with a time signature module
Mastodon – rock hardware using a heavy metal plug-in
Nightwish – heavy metal hardware wearing a cape
Agalloch – post rock hardware using various black metal plug-ins

More importantly however, it allows us to isolate genuine innovation from hybridisation for its own sake. All genres are in some sense hybrids. In fact, hybridisation is the very stuff of cultural production. But most wither and die almost immediately. Genres are just the hybrids that survived long enough to be subjected to Theory. The hybrids that took root and developed a centre of gravity.

Genres happen when a group of artists build up a new set of technical and compositional norms, creating an emergent vocabulary. Most metal subgenres don’t do this. They simply rent out technique and theory from other forms of music and install them onto the same four subgenres. It’s a process that certainly warrants commentary, but using the language of genre is a misdirection. What’s happening here is not subgenre production so much as perpetual hybridisation. An aesthetic churn, leaving the subgenre bedrock largely unchanged.

So does it actually matter that we’ve vastly overestimated the number of metal subgenres? I’ve previously addressed this question in terms of artistic production. Here I want to head downstream, don my fan cap and lift the hood on what it’s actually like to listen to metal ever day. What does it look like to do this out of choice?

A lot of listening goes on behind the scenes of this blog. The releases that get featured are a fraction of the material parsed in curating the review queue. But it’s not often that I take the time to consider the effect this has on my mental state. In the last month I’ve taken in music claiming to be inspired by everything from Mithraism, Germanic folklore, Catholic anxiety, medieval mysticism, and the Palaeolithic era. Equally, metal’s penchant for absorbing endless folk traditions, religious music, and an entire plethora of contemporary genres from avant-garde to pop to film scores creates a kind of “everything” mixtape for the average metalhead.

If I was a lesser man, I could walk away from all this with the illusion that I’m pretty sophisticated and worldly. Indeed, why bother listening to anything else if the entire world can be brought to me through the filter of the global metal scene?

And that’s the precisely the point, the world isn’t being brought to me by the global metal scene. It’s just a mixtape, a quick digest of topics for me to explore but will never actually get round to because the abhorrent excesses of today’s content mills require me to listen to so much new material just to stay on top of what’s going on, any intimacy with an individual node will only ever be cursory.

I might be ashamed to admit it publicly, but I don’t actually know anything about Mithraism. Yet the polished black metal album from Armenia accompanied by a promo blurb that was pretty insistent that Mithraism is integral to the music was something I digested and enjoyed regardless. Thus, my intellectual hygiene is vindicated. I am enjoying something sophisticated, historically and spiritually rich, and I can do so without being remotely curious about the source material. There’s no time to be curious about the source material, the next album on the list is already locked and loaded, complete with its own deep and sprawling lore. Metal brings the subject to me, prepackaged in a form I understand and through channels I am already tuning into. An endless mixtape consisting not of music but cultural and historical ephemera.

Equally there’s a lot of music beyond metal. A vast sea of material that even the most switched on listener can only ever engage with a fraction of. Metal’s mixtaping compulsion, absorbing a plethora of other of music from drum and bass to jazz to Sardinian folk music, creates a shortcut, a brief survey of the landscape, mitigating the need to proactively go out and research new territories. But mixtapes were never designed to replace knowledge acquisition. Precisely the opposite in fact. A mixtape implies a primer, a survey, a beginner’s guide. A necessary but hardly sufficient first step.

Take a look at the metalheads around you then, and ask yourself if they view metal as a gateway to new experiences or as a replacement for curiosity? Metal has long been a global phenomenon, reinterpreted and developed through all manner of regional folk traditions, mythologies, and religions. Intuitively this is cause for celebration. A great cultural stew. We are afforded the chance to engage in all manner of material we would never have encountered had not the great metal mixtape brought it to us.

So why does it feel that in practice this often amounts to little more than a set of neckbeards with Mjölnir necklaces painstakingly combing through ancestry.com for traces of Scandinavian heritage? It’s because we’re not treating metal as a primer for other forms of music but as a conveyor belt that brings the world to us. And we’re erecting endless subgenres to disguise the fact.

This is perhaps why, in the case of metal bands featuring adults playing dress up, daydreaming fantasy worlds they couldn’t quite work up into a book, their output is assessed not on artistic merit but by the size of the lore. Castle Rat and Sleep Token may be the latest examples of this, but it’s a craze that goes all the way back to Kiss via Ghost, Lordi, and Gwar amongst others. For some reason, the metal commentariat can’t identify this for what it is – aesthetic production in service of elaborate stage shows – without hallucinating new subgenres in the process.

When you mistake the training wheels for a genuine experience, metal becomes a comfort blanket we are unwilling to part with. It predigests the world, presenting it in a duly processed and homogenised form. Why engage in the world when a single medium can deliver a daily buffet of history and culture to your doorstep?        

This is why it’s important to keep in mind that you’re only ever listening to one of four things when you’re listening to metal. Listening to four things doesn’t inherently imply limitation. There are only twelve notes in Western music after all (yes, I know, microtones, well done). Both within these four genres and through their various configurations and alliances with non-metal music some wild things have happened, and could still happen. But these four genres, creaking under the weight of endless software updates, are not capable of containing all of culture, history, religion, and music. With the best will in the world, metal subgenreing sometimes distorts the meaning of its source material. Some things are lost in translation. We all know there’s too much culture out there right now. It’s a problem that extends well beyond music. Interacting with a fraction of it is a daunting task. Metal’s mixtaping habit provides a welcome survey of the terrain, inviting us to look a little deeper. A useful and artistically efficacious practice. It’s just that we rarely do look deeper. Instead we mark our position with a subgenre, and move on.