I like my metal drunk, angry, and ugly. Like it was meant to be. The merits of metal should seem obvious in a world where information is delivered with the subtlety and precision of a bunker buster in Kabul. Slayer (God Hates Us All) and Neurosis (Sun That Never Sets) are perhaps two of metal’s most potent forces at this time.
Let’s be honest: metal is not some ignored art form, nor are the progenitors of grind, death, black and sludge lackadaisical intelligentsia slumming it in the sewers of self-loathing. They really are drug addicts, ex-cons and thugs. I’ve been stiffed on too many occasions to doubt this. Due to Canada’s immigration laws, many a band member’s passage up here has been denied. Some minor transgression (like burning a few churches to the ground a la Norwegian metallers Mayhem) is somehow construed as a means to keep them out of the Great White North. Go figure. The point is not what metal does to further intellectual growth—there are already too many blowhards waxing philosophically on about the social merits of dance music or the “culture” of clubbing. Even punk never attacked its subject matter with the ferocity of bands like Neurosis or Brutal Truth. Hardcore evolved but was still not enough to contain the likes of Neurosis, so what does metal say?
I don’t care if the annals of academia sit up and take notice of the devastating social vision offered by the likes of Slayer, and I doubt Slayer care much either. Their incisive social documentation: “Pessimist, terrorist, targeting the next mark, global chaos, feeding on hysteria,” is ominously prescient, given the current political climate. Not the words of nascent political activists, but opinion expressed purely and sharply, unfettered by academic pretense. Slayer is an unflinching representation of the street fighter’s answer to politics: punishing and unrelenting.
Fierce tribal hybrids like Neurosis are prime examples of 21st century blues. On Sun That Never Sets, spirituality finds a new context in the texture and might of Neurosis’ soundscapes. Perhaps they are the truest progenitors of “globalization”; eastern and western are rendered virtually indistinguishable. They don’t say “I told you so,” but channel anything valid, influential or creative. Neurosis is a juggernaut collective subconscious, simultaneously state-of-the-art and primitive. While institutions make progress at a snail’s pace, Neurosis evolves in leaps and bounds. What does all this babble mean? Do away with pretense. Cover yourself with tattoos. Surviving the dissolution of the global map depends on preparation, and stockpiling as many doomsday riffs as possible. Call me a hesher, call me a metalhead…just don’t call me a philosopher.
