Note: This is part of a bigger piece on radicality in music written in 2021/early 2022 for college. A LOT OF IT IS KINDA TRASH!!! Lots of misuse of terms and concepts. HOWEVER, it still has some ideas and good bits, just look past the shit.
Violence of Metal and Noise
Metal is an interesting genre in that its community and position economically has developed differently than most genres. There is a tendency for genres to start out, develop commercially and in popularity, and then eventually fade away.
In comparison, metal began as a highly commercialised genre, corporate ideas of edgy, appeasement to the youth culture. As with all things, time passed and it was commercially replaced by other genres, but while it fell out of the mainstream, the underground thrived and grew, in a new form. Today, the genre stands popular, but is no longer dominated by large commercial ventures, but rather small communities creating music. The contemporary metal scene has countless independent labels and artists, releasing music on various platforms, and while there are large labels and a heavy commercial aspect still, it is almost exterior to the real scene. Whereas the likes of punk and grunge are dead, metal has continually evolved. Moreover, the extreme music scene fosters a heavy DIY attitude, with many fans of the music eventually succumbing to the creative drive and producing their own music, or just playing along to existing songs. This combination of factors has potential for liberatory politics, it just has to be nurtured and guided towards it. The primary element that prevents this shift is the deeply entrenched fascism in the metal and noise scenes.
There are countless subgenres of metal, but a large number of them are unified with their focus on death. Music often deals with mortality and the factors thereof, but in contrast to the ontological obsession with life and immortality, of staving away the inevitable (which is prevalent in Western cultural spheres), metal reveres it, embracing negation as a process. The focus and explicit manifestation of this negation differs among genres (and within them). Death metal often explores the body, dissecting the human form, experiencing catharsis in the violent destruction of the life-essence. The fragility of life is not to be pushed away and ignored, but accepted. Black metal on the other hand ushers in a pure nihilistic outlook, rather than embracing the violence of life in open arms, it seeks negation of life outright. Whilst being mere surface level examples, it illustrates the point.
There is an implicit radical potential in this pure negation. The capitalist ontology is that of infinite growth, of expansion and everlasting life, with ideological tracings going back to Christian views surrounding death. The Christian framework is built atop immortality. Beyond death there is life in paradise, so while the present condition may not be ideal, there is an infinity of pleasure beyond the mortal coil. The spirit is merely trapped inside of a flesh body temporarily, but who you are is eternal. There is not a fear of death itself or the cessation of your being, but the judgement that lies beyond it, a fear of retribution and pain.The base of Christianity is an ideation of everlasting life, whereas for many other cultures, death marked an end to life, not strictly in the sense of the complete annihilation of the self, but in some form nonetheless. Moreover, many cultures warned of the promises of eternal life and immortality through stories and song, for instance the story of Oisín in Tír na nÓg from Irish pagan folklore.
Today, it is no longer the Christian God that represents eternal paradise, but business ontology, celebrity status and Silicon Valley technofetishism. Capitalism is marked by paranoia and anxiety, a complete aversion to the end of things. This idea pervades all of society, economically and culturally. Ideas are recycled ad nauseum, there is no future, “retro” is the standard, the world built atop infinite layers of simulacra of simulacra, bloated reanimated corpses forced to grow into themselves.
This obsession with perpetuity is what allows an acceptance or embrace of mortality to rupture so deeply, as it cuts directly across the contradiction present in this framework. However, while a negation of this obsession displays potential for radical movements in the genre, as it stands this notion has been used for the opposite. Fascism and reactionary ideology is rife within the scene and directly utilises this negation of Christian immortality. Black metal groups in particular espouse a return to tradition, evoking imagery of pre-Christian paganism, a perceived European heritage that has been lost and must be recovered. Blood is honour and sacrificing oneself for a greater good is a virtue. Flaws in the present state of things are seen, but not understood and the solution to them is one steeped in romanticism. This isn’t exclusive to just black metal however, and even more blatantly “National Socialist Black Metal” (NSBM) does not only exist, but is widely tolerated.
Reactionary tendencies exist in all corners of these genres, many of them even present unwittingly. For instance, the way violence is portrayed diverges and is expressed in various forms. From the outset it may seem as if all the gore filled violence in the likes of death metal is all the same, the target of that violence plays a large role in the subsequent messaging it signifies. Many groups, including the likes of Cannibal Corpse, express violence as the perpetrator. The violence is brought down onto an unwitting victim, in many cases being a woman, which not so subtly demonstrates the latent misogyny underlying the culture. Other groups however express this violence in a more general way, rather than violence against a subject, exploring violence as the subject itself.
Upto this point metal and noise music has been lumped together under the label of extreme music, but the cultures, while similar, have their differences. In particular, there is a noticeable larger amount of queer people involved in noise. The genealogical traces of electronic music are encapsulated in noise and bring an amount of the queer. Despite metal’s aggression, it utilises standard instrumentation for the most part. Guitar, bass, drums, vocals. The sound that emerges from these is loud and harsh, but they are limited in capacity, and experimentation is hard to come by. Noise on the other hand evokes a queerness in that it utilises and reconfigures anything into a new form which it desires. Nothing is locked into its original purpose, anything that creates vibrations, electronic signal, power hum, is subject to the desiring-production of noise music, injected with new signification. Kitchen appliances, power tools, a television, all of these are reassembled and become assemblages on the surface of noise music as musical instruments. Moreover, noise music is unstable, it is a turbulent plane of intensities and fluctuation. Noise performance is transient, spontaneous, irreproducible. These notions are strongly felt in the experience of queerness, so perhaps it is no surprise the much larger amount of trans people who create noise music.
Reactionary ideas are still prevalent in the noise scene; abuse, racism, fascism are all present as with metal, but the radical potential of noise can still be applicable and utilised.
Vocally opposing fascistic traits within the scene is of utmost importance. Creating spaces, or even vocal groups that are hostile to reactionary ideas is important as it reduces the spread of those ideas and presents an alternative. Extreme music expresses both the negation of the present as well as production of the new, but this potential is bogged down in a deeply rooted reactionary culture. Despite the difficulty in utilisation, the potential is there however, and there has been a rise in groups that oppose the reactionary values in the scene. An increasing number of bands have begun to release under the banner of Red Anarchist Black Metal (RABM) as a counter to NSBM. Artists coming from various marginalised groups such as Manuel Gagneux’s Zeal & Ardor and anarchist theorist Margaret Killjoy’s Feminazgûl, have grown in popularity within the metal scene, while some of the most prolific noise artists today come from marginalised groups. Whereas displacing the dangerous elements entirely is out of reach, creating and growing radical spaces is.
