{"id":756,"date":"2012-11-27T23:10:25","date_gmt":"2012-11-28T04:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/?p=756"},"modified":"2012-11-27T23:10:25","modified_gmt":"2012-11-28T04:10:25","slug":"the-misanthropy-of-solo-metal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2012\/11\/27\/the-misanthropy-of-solo-metal\/","title":{"rendered":"the misanthropy of solo metal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Striborg<\/p><\/div>\n

In some regards, the development of heavy metal over the last 40 years can be understood to chart key phases in pop-music consumption under late capitalism: from mass culture to subculture to individualized culture.\u00a0 This arc can be seen, first and most obviously, from the vantage point of heavy metal fandom.<\/p>\n

As Will Straw has argued for the genre’s 70s origin<\/a>, heavy metal’s audience originally came together around teen rituals based on corporate-label offerings; the genre lacked a “strong middle stratum between the listener and the fully professional group.”\u00a0 It took the rise of the new wave of British heavy metal in the late 70s and U.S. thrash metal in the 80s for this middle stratum to fully develop: specialist nightclubs, record stores, zines, tape-traders, amateur photographers, and other quintessentially urban\/regional infrastructure for fans’ ‘productive consumption.’\u00a0 By the 90s, the Internet-based diffusion of publicity, fan dialogue, and finally music itself hastened the globalization, generic splintering, and reappropriations of heavy metal into scores of sub-genres and fan constituencies.<\/p>\n

Arguably, this trajectory can also be observed in heavy metal’s modes of lyrical address.\u00a0 Mass culture metal summoned and inspired its teenage audience with odes to collective strength and the outsider’s calling, as illustrated by “United,”<\/a> the 1980 hit for classic metal icons Judas Priest.\u00a0 “So keep it up\/Don’t give in\/Make a stand\/We’re gonna win.”\u00a0 The leather, the volume, the aggressive imagery and lyrics: all were signifying means to other ends, totems symbolizing the collective exuberance of the audience. \u00a0The “we” in this first stage of lyrical address made clear the listener was included, if they wanted to be, in the larger group defended against an external “they” \u2014 most likely parents and authorities lurking outside the bedroom and the concert hall.<\/p>\n

Subcultural metal raised the stakes of the genre’s aggression and by doing so began drawing lines between listeners, as exemplified by Metallica’s thrash anthem “Whiplash”<\/a> from their 1983 debut Kill ‘Em All<\/em>.\u00a0 “Adrenalin starts to flow\/You’re thrashing all around\/Acting like a maniac\/Whiplash!”\u00a0 Entering violent moshpits required a special form of commitment, as does learning about metal shows by word of mouth.\u00a0 Still, unity shaped the collective \u2014 by this stage, a smaller circle who produced their music’s culture via direct (face-to-face and postal) contact with one another.<\/p>\n

Perhaps no sub-genre of heavy metal has subverted the subcultural communion among the heavy metal fans better than black metal.\u00a0 So-called second-wave Scandinavian black metal groups from the 1990s made themselves up in corpse paint and wrote explicitly Satanic lyrics in order to strike fear in outsiders and disturb the subcultural fence-sitters.\u00a0 Consider the typically explicit paeans to Satan heard on, say, Emperor’s 1994 In the Nightside Eclipse<\/em>: “Forever wilt I bleed for Thee\/Forever will I praise Thy dreaded name\/Forever will I serve Thee\/Thou shalt forever prevail” (“Inno A Satana<\/a>,” sung in a classic Gollum growl).\u00a0 A few groups backed up such lyrical tributes to “evil” with real evil deeds \u2014 church burnings and murder, most notoriously \u2014 that they either committed themselves or condoned in others.<\/p>\n

As black metal has grown in popularity and come to “blacken” other extreme metal genres, particularly death and doom metal, the impulse toward lawlessness seems to have faded in the current era of third-wave black metal.\u00a0 Now, “evil” is expressed in the misanthropy that characterizes many extreme metal groups.\u00a0 I find it particularly interesting how some of these misanthropic expressions push hard against the traditional communion of the metal mass or subculture.\u00a0 Most obviously, the elitism implied by some groups’ allegiance to the “left hand path” (i.e., Satanism, blasphemy, other profane doctrines) draws deeper lines between musicians and listeners.\u00a0 It’s not clear in recent groups like Teitanblood<\/a> or Negative Plane<\/a> that these bands care for their audience at all, much less the impulse to “rock and roll all night and party everyday” with the music, so committed are these groups to a purism and authenticity of misanthropic expression and the “brutality” (another recurring modifier) of their musical assault.<\/p>\n

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Misanthropy has also yielded one of contemporary metal’s most unexpected developments: so-called bedroom black metal.\u00a0 This is the subject of a new Vice\/Noisey documentary, “One Man Metal,” which focuses on three notable solo black metal projects.\u00a0 From the Bay Area, Leviathan is the vehicle for Jef Whitehead, who goes by the name Wrest.\u00a0 Out of the Los Angeles area, Scott Conner a.k.a. Malefic records as Xasthur.\u00a0 And deep in the island of Tasmania, off the Australian continent, Russell Menzies adopts the name Sin Nanna and records as Striborg.\u00a0 All three musicians have each recorded some 1-2 dozen albums and demos since the late 90s.<\/p>\n