You can see the whole article at the link above, but here are some exerpts that stood out:
Since its invention (to which we will return in a moment), heavy metal has been the popular music most ardently devoted to Frazer’s underground magma pools, and most grandly expressive of their inevitable eruption. Metal’s commerce with the lower realm has been extravagant, ridiculous, and covered in glory. The sleeper parched of his dreams, or purged of his nightmares, goes swiftly bonkers: without fantasy there is no reality. It might be argued—indeed, it will be argued, by me, right now—that heavy metal has kept us sane. It’s been 40 years since the release of Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality and 25 since Metallica’s Master of Puppets, the first presenting us with the aboriginal metal vision, the second refining that vision dramatically. And today we find ourselves in something of a metal slump. There’s plenty of it around; the kids, in hundreds of thousands, are buying albums by Disturbed or Avenged Sevenfold; longtime casualties like your correspondent are enjoying Mastodon, High on Fire, and the smoldering Zoroaster; the extremist has his niche metals—his death metal and his black metal and his drone metal and his vocals that sound like a man vomiting in a cathedral. And the hoary old gods (Slayer, Metallica) are still chucking the odd thunderbolt. But metal’s profile is low: the mega-tours seem to pass invisibly from city to city, with no new figureheads arising at whom the general populace can scream and throw turnips. Metal didn’t even dent Billboard’s top 50 best-selling albums of 2010. Prompting the question: Have we passed peak metal?
Unlikely, I think. Metal renews itself, as we shall see.
[...]
By dwelling at such length on the lyrics, and mentioning Schopenhauer, I of course risk the capital vice of the writer-on-metal: I risk being intellectual. Nothing disgusts a metalhead more than to be intellectualized. Which is not to say that he himself is without conceit in that department. The metalhead, quite counter to stereotype, is floridly pretentious. He will call his band Sanctum of Carnality, or Thy Maleficence; he will steep himself in the Stygian prose of H. P. Lovecraft, possibly the most insane overwriter since Webster; he will root through his thesaurus to find a fancy word for “dismemberment”; he will make up his own words, heavy-sounding words, like thraft (High on Fire) and cleansation (Chimaira). But all of this is best understood as a kind of voodoo, a force field of metal-ness with which to ward off the triflers and non-tragedians, while simultaneously short-circuiting the apparatus of good taste, correctly identified by the proto-metalhead G. K. Chesterton as “the last and vilest of human superstitions.” Faddists and lightweights: keep your distance. Critic: we will make your brain explode.
[...]
The great scholar of heavy metal Robert Walser, doing research for his 1993 book, Running With the Devil, interviewed a Twisted Sister fan who told him that the easy-listening music favored by her mother had made her paranoid. In Walser’s words: “It so obviously seems to lie to her about the world.” An Avenged Sevenfold fan might say the same today about the music of Jack Johnson, or John Mayer, or Jason Mraz, or any of the golden troubadours on heavy rotation at your local Starbucks. I don’t mean to be ungracious about Starbucks—I happen to spend a good deal of time in Starbucks—but heavy metal reminds me that Starbucks, like much of modern life, is a fiction. Go through the membrane, break the crust, and everything is metal.
― Loud guitars shit all over "Bette Davis Eyes" (NYCNative), Saturday, 14 May 2011 09:02 (fourteen years ago)