Regarding Metal

Regarding Metal

Metal is a genre of music characterized by extensive use of distorted electric guitars and basses, drums, and vocals which are vamped or stylized by screaming, growling, falsetto, or an over-the top operatic delivery.  Metal lyrics invoke dark subject mater, almost universally touching on aspects of power and powerlesness, often invoking moods of violence, agression, and supernatural evil.  Musical compositions in metal songs are intended to convey feelings of aggressiveness, rage, transcendent doom, or a desire to indulge in wanton acts of hedonism, womanizing, and drug use.  Classical minor scales and blues scales are often recognizable, but it is rare that a metal song is written in a particular key.  Rhythms can be textured and elaborate, with multiple changes in tempo within a song.  The above definition is far from comprehensive.  It is easy to find an excellent metal song that does not fit within the definition at all.  Opeth’s “Silhouette” comes to mind, as do Mayhem’s “Silvester Anfang” and Bathory’s “Ring of Gold”.

The genre is loosely split into many subgenres, mostly listener-defined and often very arbitrary in their usage.  Lyrics are various, but themes of supernatural evil predominate in some of its subgenres.  In others, feelings of isolation, anger, and nihilism are more typical.  In still others, fantastic battles, actual historical conflict, or scenarios intended to tell tales of womanizing and debauchery are the norm.  Some of its subgenres embrace extreme showmanship, including black and white “corpse paint”, studded and spiked costumes, fire, and fake blood.  Other subgenres adopt an almost obsessive minimalism in their stage attire, focusing upon performances rife with rage and angst.  I have never known fans to be strictly adherent to one subgenre or another.  In a typical night of listening, fans typically play whatever they want to hear, regardless of the label attached to it.

The term “metal” is a contentious one because its listeners, especially die-hard fans, are apt to reject musical techniques, styles, and elements that do not conform to their definition of what “metal” is, effectively policing the genre from adopting a sound that might have mainstream appeal.  This tendency has caused a recent movement in the metal scene to refer to all types of metal, and music that sounds like metal but is rejected by hardcore fans, as “heavy music”, to avoid these kinds of arguments.  

Labels divide.  Labels limit.  Labels also serve a purpose, arise spontaneously, and serve as guides to cognition.  Terms like “metal”, “grindcore”, and “new wave of British heavy metal” almost universally provoke contention, but they are also a fundamental consequence of the way humans categorize.  In visual art, literature, music, and other creative forms of thought, something called a genre tends to form spontaneously, whenever the limit of creative expression are such that artisans are free to craft music to their own liking, and yet, must operate within a set of parameters intentionally and unintentionally defined by the audience and artists alike.  Music, in particular, has had something akin to genres since its inception, the existence of multiple different Ancient Greek music scales, each attributed to a particular island or region, suggests that even at the beginning of what we might term Western Civilization, artists and listers have acted in concert to create distinct styles of music.  For music, especially, the effectiveness of the art form relies in the mind’s ability to predict musical patterns as they develop, and effective music both satisfies, and denies, these expectations, to create a combination of tension and resolution that most listners consider to be beautiful.  Other than its most fundamental unit, the octave, the existence of a music scale is a cultural construct,  Though the patterns of tones and semitones we associate with pitch have a neurological basis, the arrangement of tones in an interval, and exact combinations of steps and half steps included in a scale is determined by society.  Music is in the mind of the listener as well as the musician.  In his book “This is Your Brain on Music”, Dan Levitin devotes an entire chapter to musing on what is known, and unknown, regarding how the brain forms genre specific categories.  He suggests that human minds have an inherent tendency to recognize a genre by gestalt, from only a few examples, and that music listeners are surprisingly adept at recognizing examples of an art form that, while they fall within a genre, are not normative.  

As human societies have grown more complex, and the density of listeners has grown exponentially to an unprecedented scale, each group of listeners having the potential for worldwide, virtually instantaneous access to the newest music, there has been a proliferation of genres in music, and a fracturing of these genres into subgenres.

Metal eludes a strict definition because genres, in any field of artistic expression, lack strict definition.  Genres form spontaneously because the human mind constantly seeks to categorize.  A genre is an aggregate of similar objects or things that the humans in a culture find to be fundamentally similar.  For every genre, listeners, readers, or viewers, can point to examples that seem to be paradigmatic, central to, and typical of the genre, and other examples that seem to stray from the center or cross over into other genres.  It is this crossover that often produces the best music, art, and literature, thought it can only exist once genre boundaries are established.  In a culture of total innovation, each artist working from his or her own first principles, such genre crossovers, and the innovation they bring, is impossible.  The genre must exist in order to transcend it.  That said, each genre has certain cultural innovations, and attributes, which are either more common among the art or music that the genre encompasses, or employed in a way that is idiosyncratic or distinctive when they do appear.  New movements in any art form do not usually receive a name until much of the innovation that produced that art form has already occurred.  Once recognized, listeners often close ranks on new innovation, perhaps in a subconscious effort to restrict the evolution of an art form they have grown to appreciate.  The listener feeds back to the musician.  The reader influences the writer. 

Possibly, no form of popular music is more prone to factions, more able to split into subgenres, and more defensive of its own cohesiveness as a recognizable art form, than metal.  These properties result not from radical innovation, or the individualism that metalheads are sometimes known for, but from cultural conservatism.  Metalheads evaluate each new technique and trend, in conversations online, between cigarettes at band practice, and in line at shows, searching for consensus.  Even for rock bands, which are amazingly consistent compared to other forms of music in their arrangement of members and instruments, metal bands are almost hyperconsistent in their lineups.  Only certain arrangements are permissible.  The most acceptable arrangement, currently, includes a drummer, a bassist, one or two guitarists, and possibly a vocalist, though it is more in keeping with some genres of metal that one of the guitarists, or the bassist, also sing. There is no a priori reason for these members.  Other arrangements are certainly possible.  A metal band is limited, thus, to three to five members, except enormously successful acts which accumulate members as their ambitions grow.  Even in these acts, it is much more acceptable and common for a band, such as Sweeden’s In Flames, to sprout an extra guitarist, than to accumulate an extra drummer.  

A “Front Man”, a dedicated vocalists that does not play an instrument, is permissible, but more welcome in some sugenres, than in others.

 vocal duties are typically split among the members of the band.  In the 1980’s, it was a major point of division among metalheads whether an electronic synthesizer was an appropriate instrument for a metal band.  It was not sufficient that some fans enjoyed them, and others did not, a consensus was necessary.  Now, synthesiers are employed freely, and expected, in some sugenres of music, but necessarily absent from others.  Consensus, but the splitting of subgenres.  Currently, in Chicago, metalheads are challenging the genre again by exploring the possibility of the drum machine as a metal innovation.  

All genres of music have such parameters.  Metal is only unusual, if it is unusual at all, in being slightly more restrictive than other forms of popular music, though much less restrictive than older, more traditional forms of music, such as Gamelan music or even classical chamber music.  These restrictions are products of cultural evolution.  They are analogous to the thought structures that must have existed in the minds of Ancient Greek and NeoTropical potters as they crafted pottery and emblazoned it with culture-specific patterns.  Indeed, it is possible to trace the extent of trade in ancient North America, and elsewhere, by the movement of pot shards.  These thought structures serve to limit permissible types of innovation in the musical genre.  They restrict inventiveness, but in doing so they funnel creativity in consistent directions.  The emphasis on guitar, bass, vocals, and drums, has created innovation in interplay of these instruments that would not exist if metal bands commonly incorporated saxophones, xylophones, or harps.  It has created special scenarios, such as the introductory passages to black metal songs, where such innovations are strongly called for.  Most importantly, it has created an audience of listeners who have trained themselves to distinguish certain sonic patterns of timbre, rhythm, melody and harmony, that seem like mere noise to uninitiated listeners, but are pleasing to the metalhead.

Analogous situations are present in other genres of music as well.  Experience listening to jazz, especially avante garde jazz, generally makes a better listener.

Other than a moderate degree of cultural conservatism, metal is somewhat distinctive in that it seeks to create a sound that the uninitiated often find unpleasant.  With the possible exceptions of experimental music, some forms of jazz, and possibly some forms of classical music, no other form of music such a polarizing effect on the listener.  Certainly, it seems that metal bands enjoy creating sounds that the uninitiated find to be ugly, dissonant, and unpleasant.  Though avante garde jazz has the same effect on listeners, generally, metalheads seem to take pride in this.  Uninitiated listeners often loathe metal, and would prefer to listen to silence.  Most metal artists never expect to be played on the radio.  Metal is rarely played at parties, almost never at weddings, and though appropriate, never at funerals.  Something that the uninitiated listener, the nonmetalhead, often fails to appreciate is the extent to which the initiated listener, the metalhead, actually enjoys the elements in music that nonmetalheads find discordant, ugly, and brutal.

The metal aesthetic is easy to recognize.  Battle axes are metal.  Mercedes convertibles are not.  Fire is metal.  Champagne is not metal.  A nude woman carrying a sword in one hand and a severed head in another is metal, the same woman in a bikini, leaned over a motorcycle, is not....not currently, at least.  In the 1980’s, having gained mainstream acceptance and mainstream radio play, images of postadolescent men having a good time were an accepted part of the aesthetic.  It has evolved and consolidated since then, however, as mainstream success has eluded most acts, and influences from science fiction, crime, religion, and horror have combined and recombined endlessly.  To me, one of the most metal images imaginable, and one of its most influential, is the image of the wraithlike “Eddie”, wielding an axe, some faceless victim vainly clutching the creature’s shirt as he or she slumps to the ground.  This was, of course, the image  on the cover of Iron Maiden’s “Killers” album, and it typifies the aesthetic perfectly.

Though permissible modes of subject matter for lyrics differ from one subgenre to the next, metal has always been focused on power, and its absence, darkness, and its consequences, and elements of mythology and storytelling that invoke the big questions of life and death, heaven and hell, war and peace, freedom and slavery.  It is both apolitical, in the sense that metal songs only rarely have explicitly political content, and intensely political, in that its listeners frequently form cohesive working-class bands of individuals who share a common identity and values at odds with the expectations of middle class family life and consumerism.  Metal is not punk, it does not seek to overthrow the government.  Metal both laments and celebrates the brutality of dictatorship, slavery, and torture, the same way the builders of the ancient pyramids both lamented and celebrated their conscription into a task so brutal, so epic, and so ultimately out of their power to control.

Metal is not alone in music, art, or any other form of human expression in seeking images of darkness and evil.  Its single-mindedness is unusual however.  In most forms of metal, songwriters are essentially forbidden to stray from images and situations of darkness and evil.  Among songwriters, and among subgenres, however, destinations differ.  Some metal explores darkness and evil for the purpose of escapism; by allowing the listener to enter a fantasy world of dragons and succubi, events of the real world melt away or become minor cogs in a much larger landscape of heaven and hell, freedom and slavery.  Other metal is antiauthoritairan, an influence borrowed from hardcore punk, and focused strongly on current political issues, but always from an individualistic perspective and virtually never calling upon its listeners to follow in any sort of movement.  Following directions, joining a movement, obeying authority, are not metal values.