Some civilizations have public viewings of the dead; some bury them as soon as possible under cover of night. Some have wakes, others solemn commemorations. Human death rituals take many forms but they all serve to fix a discontinuity, to knit a past that cannot continue with an unknown future.

Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant heavy metal. Acknowledge, we humbly pray, 
a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock,
 a sinner of your own redeeming.
 Receive it into the arms of your mercy, 
into the blessed rest of everlasting peace,
 and into the glorious company of the saints in light and darkness.

To be honest, with the exception of a handful of bands and releases by older bands, heavy metal died in 1994. Its furthest reach, black metal, finalized what Black Sabbath started in 1969; its public form, heavy metal, became assimilated into hip-hop and alternative rock during the Pantera and Nirvana years.

We carry on because we believe, but for metal to live again, first it must die. The current crop of hipster Reddit poseurs who make up 99% of its fanbase must move on to a new shallow and hollow trend, and the grave must be dug, headstone raised, and mourners encouraged to munch canapes in the rain.

Elon Musk, commendable for bringing us back to space and not his mediocre electric smugmobiles, gave us a hint recently on what kills anything good and complex, namely luxury as the Buddhists and Trappists told us:

This is how great civilizations throughout history have ended.

People assume it was due to conquest, but it was actually often simply too much prosperity leading to low birth rate and population collapse, which ultimately enabled them to be conquered.

Others have written on the idea that overfeeding kills civilizations as surely as goldfish, but even more, that success creates a void until people stop competing with victories of the past:

Unlike most hypotheses in this regard, mine addresses the fact that human civilizations die of success.

Do civilizations die of prosperity? Indirectly: they die because once prosperity is established, people fear deviating from its methods. They are correct to do this, but they interpret it in a means-over-ends way, which creates a morality of restraining people so they pretend to be good. From that decay follows.

As Kam Lee said recently, metal is dying of abundance:

Wanted to share these screenshots from Jason Kiss and his astute observation of the current metal scene. I completely agree with his statement and assessment and the reason I’m sharing this is because I only wish I could articulate what he is saying here as precisely and clearly as he’s saying it.

Jason has a clear concessive outlook and explanation that I feel completely mirrors my own sentiments — so instead of just aping his words and insight for myself — I feel it’s best to instead post the source.

Don’t misunderstand my intentions — this is not my way of staying absolved from these sentiments — but rather I highly endorse and fully agree with them 100%.

Mr Lee is referring to the following statements made by Mr Kiss on some ambisexual social media platform, slightly edited and reorganized to form a thesis progression:

Metal is dead, buried by the weight of its own overproduction.

What prevails in the current zeitgeist is not metal in its true essence but a diluted commodification of it.

Legacy acts remain the primary cash cows in metal, including extreme metal, where established bands from the 80s and 90s operate like small businesses. Music industry insiders often lament the short shelf life of releases, which are seen as mere stepping stones between tours more than any sort of artistic expression.

If by alive, you mean thriving, which necessitates the existence of a scene that fosters true innovation and creativity beyond the suffocating grasp of neoliberal capitalism, which, by its very nature, reduces all things to diluted commodities, stripped of their essence and repackaged as easily digestible products for mass consumption, then no genre is alive, [because] the very conditions required for vitality are precisely those that our modern economic structures erode, including stemming the potentiality for true grassroots scenes to emerge.

In addition to the “aura,” which is tied to the conditions of the time and place in which the work was produced (scenes), three defining elements are essential for genuine artistic expression: unique presence, authenticity, and originality.

What has happened is that “sameness” has seeped in: thousands of bands sounding like each other, derivative of better bands.

I started out writing about commercialism in metal, specifically around 1988-89 when it was clear that speed metal was about to fall into the abyss it had resisted, namely the conformity to the crowd-pleasing material that builds careers in place of integrity.

Since then, we have riffed here on the entropic inertia of assimilation, the social dynamics of selling out, the commoditization of non-conformity, the cloning of original metal, the loss of legitimacy and authenticity with catering to the established popular tropes, the need for outsider status instead of tolerance and acceptance, the erosive force of safety, the use of victimhood to passive-aggressively demoralize us, how entertainment destroys art, the pervasive infiltration of commercialism, the role of social status and search for acceptance more than economics in driving sellouts, and the insincerity of hipness and trends. None of these were wrong, but it took time for others to catch up with visual reminders instead of abstractions that parallel undiscovered reality.

Generally speaking, I agree with Messrs Lee and Kiss. A few points of exception:

• Art represents reality, even if as metaphor, in either ludic (playful, conjectural, self-referential) or mimetic (imitation of reality) modes. It must create a consistent world in which readers, viewers, or listeners can struggle with the human condition and want to rise above inertia. In this sense, it must express both the transcendent and the morally ambiguous, disturbing, and often terrifying nature of reality.
• Originality probably means having its own direction rather than avoiding cloning. You could make a Motley Crue band with artistry and express more of the artistic than the original band ever attempted, or a good Carcass clone band. Originality of approach is valued; originality of method does not matter: many riffs will be recycled, recombined, or made into minor variations, and this does not impact artistry. Some of the best classical music was based on existing folk themes expanded into the new song forms.
• Sameness consists most often of un-sameness; that is, bands focus on the level of method and not approach/intent/goal/ends, and therefore throw their energy into being different from something else, essentially recreating it as a linear opposite, which shapes the music to be as directionless as cotton candy sugar pop or hairdresser lounge easy listening jazz. Or Muzak.™
• Culture needs to come into the picture here. For example, heavy metal is a production of the Anglo-Saxon world and its ongoing struggle with means-over-ends logic brought on by the domination of procedure in order to preserve the wealth of the past without forcing individuals to think independently, since this offends the individualist and is biologically/genetically beyond at least four-fifths of the Bell Curve.
• Means-Over-Ends occurs in every dying business, society, band or genre because people stop sharing a goal, and instead focus on doing what succeeded in the past or “contrarian ironism” that is anti-realistic which allows the individualists doing it to claim they have new superior knowledge from God or science. Recombinant music occurs because bands have nothing to say, and therefore they make music within a format, but the songs express nothing more than membership in a genre and are as self-referential as any comeback album by a post-AAA musician trying to pad his retirement fund so he can get really good at trading BitCoin.
• Capitalism has dick-all to do with what is going on; commercial acts want to make entertainment that also makes money, since the musicians involved want careers. No one is making much money in underground metal except the big established bands, so everyone else is doing it for social cachet or hipness. These bands want to be cool for awhile, and the members will use the introductions occasioned by their fifteen minutes of fame to make contact in the music or other industries.
• Publishing in general suffers from this fate: having lost direction, it focuses on means-over-ends recombination and introduction of ironic “different” elements like other failed genres, which results in the industry pimping the latest favorites with encomium and hyperbole, but these “revolutionary” books and recordings always end up being a variation on the existing standard but with “quirks,” like throwing in a jazz part, mandolin solo, or guy screeching like a troon after kinetic amputation of a body part.
• Metal resembles Romantic literature and music in that it aims to find beauty in darkness and does so through the worship of power, instead of retreating into the warm world of the local pub where everyone agrees that life is bad but we can have a few moments of happy here in a codependent relationship instead of challenging ourselves to rise above the mediocre human norm. Death to all hipsters, death in the ovens.

Metal died of success and having too many rules, which is a form of entropy in that many possible choices are cut off, which makes the remaining choices more likely to be repetitive. The heat-death of metal came about because it was no longer a flexible musical language, but a formula and format which had to be upheld to keep the diehard NEETs and emo hipsters discharging through their neovaginas.

Across the board, the world is turning from conjectural ideas like “if we we force equality on everyone, we will achieve Utopia” to naturalistic ones that involve observing reality and coming up with an adaptive strategy that is Darwinistic and noble in that it rewards the good, smites the bad, and leaves everyone else alone; some call this conservative but it is closer to realism and a desire to emulate the patterns of nature:

What defines the conservative turn? A return to disciplinary bedrock, an insistence that the methods and purposes that first defined the discipline be respected and, in some form or other, resuscitated. The conservative turn also, therefore, revives interest in the discipline’s history. It remembers and reappraises not just English’s pathways and achievements but also its core values.

What metal must do is chuck out the methods and focus on the purposes.

If I had to pick a winner for the future of metal, it would be Ancient Trolltaar since at this point, metal needs to escape the ghetto of four-note music and start writing actual melodies like Kraftwerk did, using the former rhythm instrument (guitar, keyboards) as a voice, replacing the human voice which is already suffocating the globe.

In the meantime, we should have a funeral for metal. Metal is dead but must live on, still to life and yet it breathes. To die is just a concept of living. “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.”

Tags: assimilation, authenticity, commercialism, commercialization, conformity, entropy, Heavy Metal, non-conformity, selling out