This determines “reality” as they will act to create it, based upon their values system. While dominant Culture sought what was pragmatic, and Counterculture pursued the moral, metal music became its own movement because it could not agree with either of those approaches, preferring instead to try to seek what was “real,” or meaningful and ‘heavy” (in the L SD-influenced vernacular of the time). Their approach did not aim at correctness, but assertion of subjective meaning. Off henchman, a founding member of slayer, described their music as a mix between old British heavy metal and melodic hardcore pungently metal ands, in emulation of popular music as a whole, hoped to discover what was real by finding out first what was not. This attitude, over the course of four generations of music, took metal beyond the grounds of “good” versus “evil” into nihilism, where nothing had inherent value or classification, but could be described in terms of experience.
Nihilism is a frightening belief system for those in societies organized by dualistic (heaven versus earth) and liberal (individualistic, egalitarian) societies, as it denies that our values systems are more real than events In natural reality. To a nihilist, truth is a way we describe some things in reality, but there is no eternal life nor eternal truth which exists separate from immortality.
Nihilism means accepting mortality, and experience as what we have in place of a religious or moral truth. These ideas exceed limits of social acceptability, which in a capitalist liberal democracy threatens the self-marketing which individuals use to gain business partners, social groups and mates. As a result, metal was forced to wholly transcend the artificial consensual reality shared by Culture and Counterculture, and to create its own value system including its nihilism.
Seeking the real, and not the moral, this value system in turn surpassed its own nihilism by moving from a negative logical viewpoint to an assertive one, looking not for something objectively determined to be “eternal” but for that which will be true in any age past or present, discovering through personal experience and acceptance of nihilism (a symbolic analogue for mortality) that which society will not recognize, completing the process of adolescence in a state of actual outsiders.
Introduction nuclear missiles threaten the daily existence of most life on our planet Metal USIA began as the work of the youth born after the superpower age began, during a highly developmental period for Western civilization in which it, having defeated fascism and nationalism and other old-world evolution- based systems of government, considered itself highly evolved in a humanistic State of liberal democracy which benefited the individual more than any system previously on record.
During this era, society served citizens in their quest for the most convenient lifestyle possible, and any questions or goals outside of this worldview were not considered: it was considered a progressive” continuation of human development from a primitive evolutionary “red in tooth and claw” state to one in which social concepts of justice and morality defined the life of the individual. The individual has triumphed over the natural world, and faces none of the uncertainty of mortal existence brought about by physical competition and predation.
Politically (the global quest for egalitarian society) and socially (the empowerment of new groups and loss of consensus) humanity viewed itself as getting ahead and being superior to other forms of civilization, including he equally egalitarian but totalitarian Communist empires of the Soviet union and China, but as the thermonuclear age dawned in the sass, this dichotomy came to define the ‘free West” as much as its enemies.
IOW Jim dawned a new age of moral supremacy in the postwar superpower Status first generation after WI created early proto-metal in a time when all older knowledge and social order was being overturned in the wake of an impulse to redesign the world to avoid the “evils” of the previous generation. The people of this age, and coming ages, were new in that they could not call a time of direct experience of nature as necessary; the grocery stores, modern medicine and industrial economies of their time took care of all of their needs, and no unbroken natural world could any longer be found except on specialty tours.
Their civilization had become exclusively introspective and was losing contact with the (natural) world beyond its self-defined boundaries. During this time, a “peace” movement which embraced pacifism and egalitarian individualism was gaining popularity at the forefront of the counterculture, a phenomenon which had existed since in the 1 sass smart arresters (namely Allen Freed) had promoted rock music as an alternative to the staid, traditional, monogamous and sober lives of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon Americans.
With WI popularizing the world against first German and later Russian “enemies,” and Viet Name revealing the moral bankruptcy of benevolent superpowers motivated by their economies, society was becoming more dependent upon the ideological tradition building over the last 2,000 years: focus on the individual, or individualism, as politically expressed in egalitarianism and liberal democracy. This was expressed in both culture and counterculture.
In contrast, metal music emphasized morbidity and glorified ancient civilizations as well as heroic struggles, merging the gothic attitudes of art rock with the broad scope of progressive rock, but most of all, its sound emphasized heavy: a literal reality that cut through all of our words and symbols and grand theories, to remind us that we are mortal and not ultimately able to control our lifespan or the inherent abilities we have.
This clashed drastically with both the pacifist hippie movement and the religious and industrial sentiments of the broader society surrounding it. Philosophy This was a confrontation with the “abyss” as first described by existentialist F. W Nietzsche: the awareness that life is finite and of functional, transactional maintenance; that we are both predator and prey, and that we have no control over our lives or death.
To Nietzsche, and thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer before him, to realize this was an “undergoing,” or embracing of nihilism: the belief that there is no value other than the inherent, physical interaction of the natural world. To a nihilist, there is no inherent morality or value, thus there is no reason to view social status and financial success as ultimate goals, only as methods to a path ranked by subjectively-derived importance.
This view threatens the beliefs and punishments used to hold Western society together since roughly AD 1000. Regardless of benevolent social objectives, Nietzsche argued, religion and society were cults that banished death through the “revenge” that morality offered in giving the individual a vector by which to be “better” than the world itself, and by being “equal” to all others, immune to comparison (a symbolic form of predation triggered by Charles Darning’s arguments on “survival of the fittest).
In essence, Nietzsche saw social behavior itself as an enemy of reality recognition in the individual and thus, like morality, an ingrained influence that would prompt rebellion and instability within a society that would know no other recourse than moral morning. Heavy metal, as the music most visibly fascinated with death and suffering (and most likely to mention Nietzsche), addresses the sublimated issue of Nietzsche abyss in Western society, which has based its founding principles and individual social and mystical values upon the polarity of “good” and “evil,” is an identification with the enemy.
In the Jude-Christian view, death and suffering are an enemy which is banished with “good” behavior in the hopes of heavenly (and earthly) reward. In secular form, egalitarian capitalist liberal democracy “empowers” the individual and gives him or her the moral “freedom” to act without regard for the natural world, thus being immune to predation and any form of assessment outside of the social and fiscal.
When one embraces the breadth of history (outside of the current civilization), the nihilistic lack of eternal presence of value, the predominance of death and rotation, and the logic of feral impulse, one has directly challenged both modern capitalist liberal democracy and the extensive religious (Jude- Christian) and secular (liberalism) heritage upon which it is built. ,000 years before Christ there was a religion in Northern India which addressed these issues in a sense without dualism; it believed that life is known to humans through sensual (eyes, ears, taste, smell, touch) perception of a reality composed of ideas which was similar in structure to both nature and the process of thought itself. In this religion the Faustian spirit was clearly resent, as while a heroic deed was more important than survival, personal mortality was clearly affirmed.
Thus there was both meaning and death, and no absolute God or Heaven to reconcile the two. This required the individual to declare values worthy of filling a life, and worth dying for, and from this origin the ancient heroic civilizations were spawned. Metal’s belief system is closer to this than to any modern equivalent, thus it is sensible to posit a closure of the cycle and its renewal in the ideas gestured by heavy metal music. Music Art does not exist in a vacuum within the minds of its creators.
If a concept is applied to music, there is a corresponding concept in structure and the worldview of the artist that creates the frame of mind in which the artist creates music which sounds like its desired value system. Art is too complex to be created without any prior thought as to what it expresses; this concept is common in literature and visual art, but ignored in popular music (perhaps because in most popular music, the concept – and the music – reflect crass materialism and futile neurosis and not much else).
At the end of an age of moral symbolism and technological morning, metal is creating the language of music to reflect heroic values, formulated from the nihilistic mandate of “now that you believe in nothing, find something worth believing in. ” The ease of social and political identification found in rock music is eschewed, as are aesthetics which endorse the myopic neurosis of first world lifestyles. And while metal has evolved over several generations, several musical facets remain the same, suggesting a corresponding shared conceptual underpinning.
This “design form” of metal differs from popular music in one simple way, but from this arise any number of technique uses and attributes which allow imposers to create in this method. Its primary distinguishing characteristic is that metal embraces structure more than any other form of popular music; while rock is notorious for its verse-chorus-verse Structure and jazz emphasizes a looser version of the same allowing unfetter improvisation, metal emphasizes a mitotic, melodic narrative structure in the same way that classical and baroque music do.
Each piece may utilize other techniques, but what holds it together is a melodic progression between ideas that do not fit into simple verse-chorus descriptors. Even in 1 9605 proto-heavy metal, use of datives not repeated as part of the verse-chorus cycle and transitional riffing suggested a poetic form of music in which song structure was derived from what needed to be communicated.
Synthesis Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the few humans with any cognitive ability this structuralism, metal music asserts a concern for the underlying mechanism of the universe as a whole, instead of limiting its focus to human social concerns. This degrades the public image fascination begun in the West with absolutist morality; in its use of power chords, the most harmonically flexible word shape, and a tendency toward melodic composition, metal music emphasizes an experience, where rock can articulate at best a moment and then put it into a repeating loop.
While rock uses more open chords and aesthetic variation, its outlook is ultimately a topic form of the counterculture: progressive trends leading to some ultimate state of an absolute, such as “freedom” or “joy” or “popularity. ” By way of contrast, metal music is a portrait of the post-humanist mindset: concerned more about natural reality than social symbolism, addressing experience instead of moral conclusion, and, when it seeks a context of meaning, oriented toward the subjective experience than an “objectivity” derived from shared societal concept.
It is aware that leaving behind the comforting alternate reality of social assessment returns to a natural state in which the individual is ranked among others according to ability, much as predation did years ago, and is forced to accept mortality and limits of personal control. This thought demonstrates the modern era of Western civilization facing the ideas of the ancients while eschewing the consensual social reality of industrial capitalist liberal democracies, and, as said societies elapse from lack of consensus, a potential future direction for Indo- European culture.
Period 1 [ 1865 – 1949] History [ Populism ] In this age, America matured from its beginnings into the bureaucratic complexities of a modern republic, decided on its unifying concept, and consequently, experienced demographic and social change. Having been formed in 1789 on a compromise between those who wished to remain colonies and those who wished for a centralized federal entity, the fledgling nation had resolved few of its internal disputes in part owing to the has of its birth and the ongoing warfare that afflicted it as late as 1 812.
Having dispatched this, it began attempting to find consensus among the disparate viewpoints that had not found home in a Europe wracked by internal religious infighting descended from the conflicts of the middle ages. As the nation-state of America expanded, especially toward the West, there was an increasing need for governmental intervention to resolve disputes (seen by the republic as transactional) between settlers and Indians, settlers and each other, Westward republics and the banks that owned them back east.
This required a commitment to a bureaucratic entity, which in turn required central authorities and standards. The result was, after some internal peregrinations, a Civil War not fought over the issue of slavery (as asserted in middle school textbooks) but the issue of state’s rights: was the United States a confederacy of small independent nations, or a republic made of states which were essentially local variants on the order imposed by a strong central government?
The latter prevailed due to the industrial supremacy of the northeast; this would be a central theme in most American wars. Once this concept had been decided, it was over the next forty years unified by an expansion of the founding concepts of the nation in accordance with the decisions of the Civil War. The highest power was the Federal State, but the Individual was its currency, and therefore America came to embrace its image as the “melting pot” in which the “poor, huddled masses” might find refuge.
As a result fifths new marketing, America invited and enfranchised new groups of people, starting with recently-freed African slaves and continuing to an acceptance of previously unwanted immigrant groups, such s Irish/Scots, Italians, Jews and Slavs. Because of this change, a shift in alignment occurred that would plague America in the coming years: the original Northern European population of America, now seen as the top dog in a complicated caste system, began to isolate itself through financial and social means from successive waves of newcomers of fundamentally different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds.
This was contrasted by an egalitarian movement to accept these people and “diverse,” or non-collectively-consensual ideas into the mainstream; as time passed, this movement became known as the undercurrent, but that could only occur after World War II, when the country was united in temporary consensus by a shared enemy. As a result of these social changes, American ideology underwent public change.
Where it had once been an elitist nation designed for those who could rise above the need for a normative social order, it became an inclusive and facilitative society whose greatest degree of commonality was a desire by its new and old populations to rise in class rank through the earning power afforded by a vast industrial civilization.
Over time, this view, in which society endeared to the diverse and non-consensual individuals for the purpose of “empowering” them to be socially equal, earn money and become autonomous agents of wealth, became known In a generalized sense as “Populism. ” Music [Rock J One cannot contemplate rock music without viewing its roots; that being said, its roots cannot be viewed without analyzing their origins in turn, and the political circumstance which shaped their public image.
Derived from English drinking songs, Celtic folk music, German popular music including waltzes and the proto-gospel singing of Scottish immigrants, county folk” music had been an aspect of American culture since the early days Of the Republic, but as it existed in country and not city was rarely recognized by cultural authorities of the day. Further, once new populations became empowered and replaced the old, most of this history’ was forgotten.
In part, the reason for this was political: the members of society who advanced American popular music as an artwork were not of the original Northern European population, nor were they disposed toward thinking benevolently toward the same; further, they needed to invent something which, like advertising throughout the sass, presented itself as an oppositional alternative to the “traditional, boring” way of doing things (early advertising extolled the virtues of its products, while later advertising promoted products as part of a lifestyle which had to demonstrate both novelty and uniqueness to have value as a replacement for the traditional, boring, and otherwise effective way of doing things; this transcendence of function for image has fundamentally shaped American character).
As a result, the myths of blues as a solely African-American artwork, and the menial of the Celtic, English and American folk influences on both blues and rock music, was perpetrated as a marketing campaign with highly destructive results for all involved. The blues was not formalized until it was recorded, and at that point in time, a fixed structure was imposed on it based on the interpretations of others. Broadly stated, it used a minor pentatonic scale with a flatted fifth, constant syncopation, and distinctive “emotional” vocal styles. Of all of its components, none were unique, nor was its I-IV-V chord progression unique to the blues. To view it from an ethnological perspective, the blues is an aesthetic (not causal) variation on the English, Scottish, Irish and German folk music which made up the American colloquial sonic art perspective since its inception.
From a marketing perspective, however, the blues had to be marketed as a revelation from the downtrodden and suffering African-American slaves, so that it might maintain an “outsider” perspective which, to people bored with a society based on money and lacking heroic values, might appear more “authentic” than their own. When country music was re-introduced to the then-standardized blues form, the result was called rock music. Its primary difference from country was in its SE of vocals which emphasized timbre over tonal accuracy, and the adoption of a more insistent, constant syncopated beat. While German waltz and popular music bands had invented the modern drum kit and developed most techniques for percussion, their music and that of their country counterparts in America tended to use drums sparsely, much more in the style of modern jazz bands than in the ranting, repetitive, dominant methods of rock music.
However, it is hard to find someone in a crowd of mixed caste, race, class and intellect for whom a constant beat is intellectually and sensually inaccessible, o it was adopted as a convention. Much as the standardization of the blues took diverse song forms and brought them into a single style, rock swept a wide range of influences into a monochromatic form. Some historical backfill is worth noting here. The Celtic folksongs of Ireland and Scotland had two main influences: the pentatonic drone music of the Semitic “natives” of the UK, namely Scythian and the diverse groups forming “Picks,” and the Indo-European traditional music which is continued in India today.
The melodies, including pentatonic variations of many different forms many of which include the flatted fifth or modal analogue), are almost contiguous such that a player of Indian classical music and a Celtic folklorist can complete each others melodies in the traditional manner. Similarly, pentatonic music also derived from the Indo-European tradition was present in Germany, most notably in the barbiturates and public ceremonies requiring simple music that everyone could enjoy. These music employed improvisation, as did classical playing from the previous four hundred years; when these historical facts are recognized, American popular music can be identified as the marketing hoax that it is.
The consequences of this hoax have been a persistent blaming of white Americans for “stealing” a black form of music that never existed, and in return, a condescension toward traditional forms of music of all races that became identified with, and scorned as, a black form of music. As we shall see, marketing has both shaped the American experience and contributed to longstanding internal conflicts without resolution. In terms of popular music, marketing is important precisely because it insists on standard forms; they are easy to reproduce without requiring any particularly unique talents on the art of performers, producers, marketers or audience. This has caused an increasing simplification of music while marketing has grown correspondingly more savvy and, like American advertising as a whole, has grown away from focus on the product to focus on lifestyle associations unrelated to the product.
However it arrived, blues-country became “rock” in the sass-1 sass mainly because of technology. Adolph Racketeered invented the electric guitar in 1931, and recording equipment advanced from the primitive to the cheaper and more portable units brought on by vacuum tube and then transistor genealogy. Additionally, microphones improved, especially those which could capture the nuances of voice. Louder guitars and vocals required the simple shuffle beats of blues drumming to gain volume, prompting a revolution in drum kit assembly. As a result, the simple blues-country hybrid became a marketing standard known as “rock ‘n’ roll,” then “rock,” as it was absorbed into the American mainstream.
The earliest bands lacked much in the way Of style, but wrote complacently harmonize pieces based on the European popular music of clubs in the sass (much of jazz is based upon the same music). As time went on, the styling – appearance, performance and cultural positioning – of the music became more advanced, and the songs themselves became simpler and more like advertising jingles. Art [ Individualism ] If one thread had to be described in the art of the era as rising parallel to Populism in the political and social consciousness, it would be Individualism: the belief in the decisions and desires and needs of the individual as the most important value held by humans, especially in the context of “lifestyle choices” which involve the purchasing of products.
Much of this relates to the sire of new American immigrants to both fit in and be accepted for what they were, as, lacking the cultural affectations of Northern Europeans, they demanded a “tolerant” society such that their own customs might not come into conflict with any dominant or consensus-oriented cultural standards. Thus non-consensus became consensus through the vehicle of absolute individual autonomy, and a depletion Of any standards for the goals Of individual behavior. When the religious impetus to America first developed, it was in the form of settlers escaping the imperial sentiments of a Europe united by Christianity; after one thousand years of wrangling in which the mostly Judaic-Buddhist doctrine of early Christianity had been replaced with the Euro-Brahmins doctrine of Catholicism, the continent had accepted the modified religion and begun the process of bringing disparate cultures and peoples under its yoke.
