Welcome to the week where you will not be able to get through a day without someone mentioning the new Darkthrone album, Pre-Historic Metal. The legacy of this band lives on through its ability to stir up chaos.
A short review: this album, like black metal, is trying to relive the past instead of returning to its original themes and making them fit into the world that has changed since black metal.
Borrowing from speed metal, heavy metal, and lots of Celtic Frost as usual, this album sounds more like Motorhead covering Saint Vitus than a black metal album, and except for nostalgia, creates little lasting appeal.
This is not to defame Darkthrone, who are talented musicians who have contributed far more than their share to black metal, but to point out where the genre has been since 1994: trying to figure out what it all meant.
That being inscrutable, it goes to the past from the outside-in, trying to reinvent itself as styles and influences, forgetting the raw feeling and understanding that propelled its original success.
You cannot treat any genre as simply music. It is ideas translated into aesthetics, conveying a journey from the confused to the clear, and without this conceptual basis, it becomes decoration without purpose.
Pre-Historic Metal is better than almost everything that comes across my desk, but there is no motivation for repeat listening; it feels like a placeholder and at that point, why not just listen to the originals?
Darkthrone seems to be churning out music for the fun of it and to keep their past releases in circulation, which is admirable. It does not mean that anyone should listen to their material past Total Death.
What happened to black metal is what happens to everything of power: the people who could not create it come in, form an audience, and convert it to the same stuff they always listen to (The Metallica Problem).
At that point, everyone else tries to compete by making a mishmash of whatever has succeeded (The Pantera Problem). You end up with genericization but even worse, a heavy burden of technique which replaces intent in composition. The music no longer has a purpose. It is simply outside looking in, imitating the past, hoping for a “magic formula” (like picking the right numbers for Powerball) that will unlock the riches awaiting from the heroin-like warmth of social affirmation.
Black metal did not exist until the Norwegians fused Bathory, Mercyful Fate, Celtic Frost, Slayer, Deicide, and Morbid Angel into something new and powerful. It had purpose: express how winter killing off the weak people, ideas, and institutions produced a greater competence and thus, greater beauty.
If metal finds beauty in darkness and noise, black metal finds it in Darwinism and transcendental realism: until you can accept the wisdom of things like winter, natural selection, death, and war, you are not engaged with the world; you are filtering out everything that offends your ego, and forming a social group of similarly weak people to enforce your filter on people who do not need it. Maturation requires that we accept that nature is smarter than we are and there is a purpose to everything in it, including the stuff that we fear; in fact, our greatest risk is the human tendency to avoid controversial and upsetting but vital issues and instead to pursue symbolic issues as distraction. We fear ugly truths, but working with ugly truths makes us stronger and smarter.
I have now dug through ten thousand releases or more in the review queue. Almost all are disorganized, meaning that the riffs do not talk to each other to make a feeling or journey to the song, which in metal is fatal to long-term enjoyment.
We do not need music theory; we need practical understanding of the world and how it is organized. That which would be beautiful in nature will also make for good music. Art must be dangerous because it involves ugly truths, or it fades away like any commercial product past its prime:
When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t stop people from buying dangerous books. Now that books are deemed virtuous, nobody picks them up.
People on the internet talk a lot about women and why they are dangerous. The prevailing view is irrelevant; what matters is that women do their best to soothe pains, and this (in a leadership or work setting) becomes agreement with sad people that ugly truths are terrible and should not be mentioned.
Even worse however are the committee members. These are individualists who, being self-interested, avoid ugly truths and vital issues and pursue trivial and tangential but uncontroversial issues instead, simply because this presents the least amount of personal risk to the committee member and the most “consensus” and “compromise” among the crowd.
No one is really threatened when you repaint the fire station, but if it is structurally unsound, taking on the task of rebuilding it carries a great deal more risk, so most leaders will punt on the question until it is actually falling down. Any visual image functions as a symbol, since it is the single point of contact that people have with that event, and therefore serves as the archetype on which they build their perceptions in every contact afterwards. They remember that first news story about the fire station falling down, and since it is a tangible symbol because the collapse is already visible, they can work with that, but have trouble with commonsense analysis like load-bearing tolerances and the like.
Everywhere humanity goes, it carries its seed of self-destruction, not so much in the ego but in the tendency of the individualist to fall into self-pity as a method of justifying their exclusive and manipulative self-interest pathology.
Humans in groups always default to the lowest common denominator, which is an urge for subsidized anarchy with grocery stores “justified” (backward-looking) by self-pity and therefore, a quest for equality. Self-pity arises from a lack of “amor fati” or belief that life is good and therefore, our destinies also lead to what is necessary even if sometimes unpleasant. However, this means that humans in groups will always favor the sociopaths who offer easy answers over the complex thinkers who favor ugly truths. That is how a Crowd forms.
The Crowd wants “lesbian black metal” that serves to validate lesbianism, even if this is entirely irrelevant to black metal, which probably cares very little about LGBT generally because they are not within the Darwinistic arc since they almost exclusively do not reproduce. The Crowd wants “red anarchist black metal” to validate its Crowdism beliefs. Books, music, and cinema require not so much beliefs as a willingness to grapple with the stuff that scares us and reveal what we learned about it, the adventures we had with it, and how it changed us. This bonds us to life again, even if fairly negative.
People want to believe in compromise because it avoids conflict. This is why they always want something “bipartisan,” “universal,” “humanist,” or even red lesbian midget black metal. These things deny the necessity of making choices between more-functional and less-functional options; the compromise, like equality, smooths over conflict so that everyone can live in a state of brainless pluralism. At the core of this disagreement is probably a genetic difference between people: it’s the tackle-difficult-issues people versus the avoid-difficult-issues people is not a political split, but a genetic one, which ends up in a political split with the monarchists, Darwinists, capitalists, nationalists, eugenicists, and naturalists on one side and the Christians, Communists, and anarchists on the other.
Our human pretense — this is what makes Crowdism, the union between individualists who want a human-only mental worldview, where they and other individuals can agree on emotional symbols and therefore manipulate each other — compels us to see art as a social, economic, political, and navel-gazing (“introspective”) event. In reality, what makes good art is what makes good though, a combination of functionalist realism (nihilism) and a transcendental striving for the “good, beautiful, and actual,” mainly because art is based in the patterns of reality and not exclusively human thoughts:
Behind many great melodies, researchers found something surprisingly powerful: symmetry. Their work shows that advanced algebra can reveal deep musical patterns that are not always obvious by ear or even on a written score.
“When we think of melodies as shapes we can transform, it becomes clear that composers have been using these kinds of symmetries intuitively for centuries.”
They simplified melodies into their essential note groups and examined how common musical changes affect structure. These changes include transposition, which shifts a melody up or down; inversion, which flips it; retrograde, which reverses it; and translation, which moves it through time.
They rediscovered Bach’s method of writing fugues, apparently, but more importantly, hit on the idea of musical shapes communicating with each other across the song, which more than music theory — a template for harmonious note patterns — serves as the basis of the song, communicating a change in events and perceptions of them which serves as a feedback loop, with human mental changes driving choices which in turn drive responses from the world. The patterns of reality are mirrored in thinking and music.
Our other option is to embrace individualism, which requires self-pity because the world is contrary to the desires of the individualist, which makes us negative because we view the world as bad, and forces us to turn to “introspection” (navel-gazing) in order to justify (backward-looking) our complaining heart worldview:
Maurício Martins and colleagues analyzed the lyrics of the top 100 most popular English-language songs in the United States each week between 1973 and 2023 (20,186 songs), according to the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The authors found that, in general, the lyrics of popular songs have become simpler and more negative over time and contain more stress-related words.
Some of this simply reflects the decay in civilization since the middle 1960s, when we adopted not just civil rights but Keynesian socialism, the managerial state, administrative agencies, consumerism, disposable products, plastic everywhere, women in the workforce, the military-industrial complex, and industrial farming. All of these are symptoms of civilization trying to manage things it should simply exclude, which is a committee mentality type of decision. Some of it reflects different cultures being incorporated in lyrics. But much of it shows the rise of individualism and how to be individualist is to complain about the world that refuses to obey your every whim.
Individualists love pluralism because it means they can do whatever they want and everyone else has to tolerate and subsidize it; much as people want “subsidized anarchy with grocery stores” they also consider themselves clever if they can (1) steal or destroy (2) be safe from retaliation by others and (3) have others be frustrated by this impotence. To the monkey-human, which is most humans everywhere, this seems like they are the cleverest monkeys in the troupe, even though this is basically the Dunning-Kruger Effect revealing itself in the moronic individualism of those of limited awareness and imagination.
Pluralism is what happens before natural selection. Natural selection is intelligent enough to use stochastic effects, which means that it does not aim for perfection but for a comfortable and constant exchange between function and less-function. This enables (relativity again) the lower adaptations to reinforce the distinction of the higher adaptations. In other words, natural selection does not aim for Christian purity/perfection but a mostly-good balance in which more-functional and less-functional battle it out, not just to suppress the maladapted, but to signal the more-functional which way to move.
Weird as it may sound, some people do not enjoy music at all:
About a decade ago, scientists identified a small group of people who feel no enjoyment when listening to music, even though their hearing is normal and they experience pleasure from other activities. This phenomenon is known as “specific musical anhedonia.” It occurs when the brain regions responsible for hearing fail to properly communicate with the areas that generate feelings of reward.
Like the best anaesthesia, this phenomenon disconnects the perception of events from the direct nervous sensation, so that pain occurs but you do not notice it or remember it. We should probably exile these people to some kind of Silent Planet where they can exist without music, and the rest of us can continue enjoying Desecresy, Kommandant, Grandeur, Infamous, and Consecration on our evil black stereos.
Some of the most important science tells us what we already know, but by “proving” common sense, gets science more out of the limitless sky of incomplete mental models and more into the functional view of things. In this case, the effect of music on driving plays out about as you would expect.
Drivers listening to music tended to have more simulated collisions, poorer speed control and less stable following distances than those driving in silence.
Other outcomes such as lane position, signaling errors and pure reaction time show more mixed or inconsistent effects.
Music often changes the driver’s heart rate and makes it more variable. It also increases their arousal and mental workload, meaning how mentally “busy” or stretched they are while trying to drive.
Music intensifies life (if you can enjoy music). However, to spent our time with it requires our consciousness, which means that if we listen to music while doing something else, the “something else” had better be muscle memory or it distracts from enjoying the music.
The people today — mostly Boomers — who listen to music while scrolling social media, answering text messages, watching television, and filling out Wordle puzzles probably spend little time actually listening to the music. This is why they can listen to Bruce Springsteen, the Grateful Dead, and Necrofier instead of more interesting material. Repetition is good when most of your mind is not paying attention to the music but to another repetitive task!
Music fits in with other aspects of patterns of reality more than we realize anymore. You can literally get the blues if the color of your lighting clashes with the emotions in your music:
Happy music received the most positive responses when using warm white lights, and the least positive response came from blue lighting.
On the other hand, when participants listened to sad music, they gave the lowest ratings to red lighting and the highest rating to blue lighting, which surprised researchers because previous research had pointed to blue wavelengths as stimulating or energizing and something that helps people stay alert.
Cool-white lighting, despite generally being visually acceptable, was rated as the least fitting for happy music.
Like music, lighting follows patterns of nature: blue implies moods in which the light is a stark disturbance from the darkness, red implies full summer days and autumn strolls where we are happy and relaxed.
Most people short-circuit their own perceptions of music in order to follow social perceptions of what music, ideas, and musical motifs are important:
Scientists recognize that both music and social interactions activate the brain’s reward centers. This shared activation suggests that the social setting in which people listen to music might alter the fundamental way the brain processes musical pleasure. The mesolimbic reward circuitry, a network in the brain responsible for feelings of intense pleasure, plays a major role in these experiences.
“We were surprised to find that shared listening increased pleasure specifically for the friend’s favorite songs, rather than in a general way,” [Curzel] said.
More notably, the researchers found that sharing the listening experience increased what they called pleasure similarity within the pair. This means that as the song played, the two friends experienced rises and falls in their enjoyment at the exact same moments.
“Our findings suggest that when we share music with a friend, we don’t just listen together, we actually experience it more similarly,” Curzel explained.
This makes it very unsurprising that music is very similar because social bonding occurs with pleasing “color notes” instead of scary stuff like dynamic creation of harmony through melody:
The researchers recorded the participants’ brain activity using a technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy. This method uses special caps fitted with small sensors that shine safe, low-level light through the scalp to measure changes in blood oxygen levels. Because active brain regions consume more oxygen, this technology allows scientists to map brain activity while participants sit up and interact normally.
During the experiment, the participants listened to two different types of musical tracks. One track featured a highly predictable and harmonious chord progression that is very common in Western popular music. The other track used the exact same notes and instruments, but the timing and structure of the piano and bass were completely scrambled, making the melody unpredictable. Both tracks featured the same steady drumbeat.
“There are several take-home messages,” Hirsch explained. “Music with predictable chord progressions (unlike typical jazz, for example) was found to be most effective in increasing feelings of social connectedness.”
Normies like music with nice bluesy or open interval chord progressions, derived from the music of thousands of years ago when Celtic and Egyptian pentatonic music spread around the world. It makes them feel connected.
Not surprisingly, live music can function like a cult ritual when the good feelings from typical chord progressions unite with synchronized brains perceiving the same midtempo beat:
Neural entrainment is the brain’s tendency to align its internal electrical rhythms with external patterns like a musical beat.
Phase-locking measures how consistently the cyclic patterns of brain waves line up with the rhythmic pulses in the music. For the fast-paced musical pieces, live performances resulted in significantly stronger phase-locking than the recorded tracks. Specifically, the brain waves synchronized more tightly with the rate at which individual musical notes were played.
In the fast pieces, this brain wave synchronization occurred in the theta frequency band. This specific frequency corresponds to about four to eight cycles per second, which perfectly matched the speed of the individual musical notes…”Stronger neural coupling with the music’s rhythm during live performance was directly associated with a more positive subjective experience. This points toward a bidirectional relationship between low-level auditory processing and affect that we find exciting.”
Of course, if one believed in humanity, it might be possible to view music theory as something which we pick up, and therefore, can appreciate music outside of the salted, sweetened, and fat-soaked normie zone:
Music is organized into layers of notes, phrases, and sections, similar to how language is structured into words and sentences…Previous studies have yielded mixed results regarding how formal training impacts a listener’s ability to process tonal context. Tonal context refers to the overarching harmonic organization or key of a piece of music.
“On the surface, our different musical stimuli sound pretty uniform: same piano timbre, same tempo, no change in dynamics (volume),” Cassano-Coleman explained. “So the only thing that changes across conditions is the underlying structure. What we wanted to test is to what extent listeners used that structure, specifically to remember and predict in the music.”
“What we found is that listeners do integrate musical context over time, and that you don’t need formal training to make use of it,” Cassano-Coleman summarized. “In other words, disrupting structure (via scrambling) disrupted listeners’ ability to remember and accurately predict what comes next. The biggest thing that surprised us was just how similarly musicians and non-musicians perform in these tasks – musicians did seem to have an advantage in explicit labeling (experiment 4), but otherwise both groups performed better (at similar rates) with more intact context.”
However, what the human herd seeks to avoid most is “herd panic,” which is what happens when fears spread from one person to another:
Beyond simply seeking company, shared emotional arousal can create a sense of unity. Previous studies indicate that fear can spread from person to person, synchronizing heart rates and reinforcing group cohesion.
This is why that stupid al-Jesus guy made like John Lennon and told people all they needed was love. People tend to be negative because they are narcissistic by nature per the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which requires them to deprecate the world because it does not follow their whims.
Thus, more important than what al-Jesus argued is the simple idea of realism: any belief or action must be measured by its consequences in the real world, and achieve the practical goal of improving that which is in parallel good, beautiful, and realistic.
Ancient history recognized the need for extreme realism that saw the world as an integrated whole, not random or the product of some weird far-off made-up Heaven inhabited by an anthropocentric god:
Heracleitus, who acknowledged, just as Parmenides did, the ontological antinomy of is and is not but reversed it, holding that the real way of understanding things is to grasp their essential contradiction, their intrinsic opposition to everything else. In this view, one must say that to be a table is also not to be just a table and that to be a chair is not to be just a chair but to be also a table, because not only opposite things but also things that are merely different are bound to each other. Thus, life is death to Heracleitus, death is life, and justice would be meaningless if it had no injustice to defeat.
In essence, then, the possible ways are three: (1) that of renouncing all contradictions whatsoever (truth); (2) that of contradicting oneself relatively (seeming); and (3) that of contradicting oneself completely and absolutely (Heracleitus). And Eleaticism chose the first, the absolutely noncontradictory way that says that only what is, Being, is really true.
This is why al-Jesus is off-base: you cannot crush something by doing the opposite. You must have another goal instead. Fear is defeated not by love, but by having something you want more than you fear.
Ego-death can only be done by discovering the transcendent, because being anti-ego only affirms the ego since the ego is still in control. This is the point of the “Aeolian Harp” in Romantic literature, and also what the Buddhists and Christians missed.
In other words, reality must be viewed as the result of an invisible shape which projects reality, but plays by the same rules, which means only aspiring to understand that shape as a principle of pragmatism gives us sanity:
Their solution is built on a framework that describes the shape of the pulse as something cast by a hidden geometrical structure — as if it were a shadow of a 3D object on a wall. In the field of quantum physics, this perspective is referred to as quantum geometry.
The curves and corners of the invisible shape can dictate the parameters of the pulse, like a dancer’s choreography. The Virginia Tech researchers realized that they could simply adjust the shape of a 3D space curve to design a pulse that suppressed noise errors.
It turns out that music may help us understand such things by working past language and symbol. In the meantime, cultural engagement seems to make us healthier, pointing to an inherency of music, images, and stories in our existence:
Singing, painting or visiting a gallery or museum helps people age more slowly, according to the latest study to link taking an active interest in art and culture with improved health. The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending events, such as viewing an exhibition, lead to people staying biologically younger.
Those who take part in artistic pursuits the most often slow the pace of their biological aging the most. Under one of the study’s methods of assessment, those who did so at least weekly slowed their aging process by 4%, while monthly engagement led to it slowing by 3%.
Similarly, another of the tests showed that those who undertook an arts activity at least once a week were on average a year younger biologically than those who rarely engaged in such pursuits. Those who exercised once a week were only six months younger by that measure. The benefit the arts confer on the pace at which people age is so dramatic that it is comparable to the difference between smokers and those who have given up smoking, the researchers say.
For something as important as art, it is amazing that the marketing of it could be so botched:
Algorithmic targeting, real-time analytics, trending audio campaigns, creator partnerships — the infrastructure is more sophisticated than it has ever been. Yet something is still off. Campaigns launch, get their moment, and fade without leaving a mark. Artists rack up streams without building fans. Content goes viral without creating connection.
The most disconnected rollouts of recent years share a common thread: they read like they were designed by people who consume music as a category, not a culture.
The thread connecting all five perspectives is the same: music marketing has optimized for reach at the expense of resonance. The tools got better; the connection got thinner. Emotion, boldness, real-world presence, artist perspective, patience, none of these register cleanly on a dashboard. That’s precisely why they keep getting skipped.
To recap, music peaked in 1996 before hip-hop/rap kicked in and replaced rock and everything else with soundalike music. The labels, facing a loss of big winners, focused instead on a huge supply of all the similar stuff.
At this point, music is easy to find. Good music is hard to find, however, because with that much music, people become immune to differences, and just want something new that sounds about like the rest.
Like progress and moralism, it is how you become repetitive without being identically repetitive. Instead of repeating the same thing, you come up with infinite versions of the same thing and repeat those.
This is why we say that black metal and death metal have become like “late hardcore,” or any genre in the years past its vital innovations: the founders are displaced by people who want “their share” of the excitement of the genre.
In the late hardcore punk period, everyone had a band, label, zine, or store. There were constant new releases, each trumpeted as some kind of groundbreaking iconoclasm. Instead, they all sounded about the same because they had nothing to communicate except a desire to participate.
These releases were all the same inside, variations only in aesthetics, boring because there is no point, imitation of an imitation looking in through the window. All that mattered was flying the flag of hardcore.
In dying genres and civilizations, symbolism and quality are the same thing. It is an easy shortcut to make something that signals belonging strongly without having content. It is similar to “Christian rock,” Nazi music, and Leftist punk bands.
With that thought in mind, let us appreciate the takedown of an overrated hipster beer:
Guinness’s texture is creamy, the taste pleasant, and the body thin enough that you can sink 10 and be pushing out black stools come morning. But if the best thing on draught is the black stuff, you are in a bad pub.
Tags: Black Metal, darkthrone, Guinness, late hardcore, lesbian black metal
