American Black Metal

Wolves in our Throne Room ... ? 

   Sometimes I have to answer my own, long-suffering questions - about my taste in regards to certain other things which have haunted my musical sensibility and concurrent social, musical discussion, about conformists and non-conformists ... but perhaps more importantly, about this thing itself and why it has grown so looming and popular that, even in forums and collectives and podcasts, devoted to opposition either of its element or by ignoring it making its denizens self-important. its popularity secretly lingers, grows and subsists, but is actually only a secretive, particular interest because it maintains a facade. It sounds like I am describing a pandemic flu, but therre are similar problems, more important than just people dying (death and plague are not easy subjects, but it is to a fault universal). Certain other TRENDS, and CULTS, that demographically are just as widespread and oftimes problematic as infectious disease. A mainstream crowd canonizing a band  based on pilfered values; foreign, subcultural, formerly esoteric and even unknown genres (to American metalheads). Very often this kind of musical sleight-of-hand has a typecast villain and perpetrator; American, shallow indie-progressive-metal eclecticism, and the rest of the world - and the snobs above the snobs within USA - has slowly been either discriminating, or fallen in love with these bands and their art thieves. Americans have stolen everything musical somehow, but the world always believes they can make it better. And that was exactly what they did with death metal a decade earlier: Autopsy were a scatological, rumbling self-propelled missile of disgustingly perfect music.

DEAD AS DREAMS

   In 2000 WEAKLING came onto the American "alternative metal" scene (I use the term due to the website/store of Aquarius Records; gathering place for intense elitists Stony McProgsalots scene for a long time). Fans were rabid and shows were sold out and the musicians apparently came from nowhere (though of course it was all done in a very calculated, but misleading and illusory fashion). True story: their record was such a sought after gem that for a while there was a marketing campaign - or if you'd like, a joke played on bozos and the obsessive - that included TREASURE MAPS to find HIDDEN, BURIED copies of Weakling's record.

Prior to the release of the album, a few odd tales sprung up about the possible ways it could be distributed, including printing a single copy to be given to a single fan in Europe or burying copies of the album in the ground and giving maps to fans who wanted to find them. Band leader John Gossard has since decried the spread of these stories as a publicity stunt pulled by the band's record label noting that the ideas were never intended to be more than a joke between the band members.


Weakling entry on Wikipedia

   For myself, with the go-ahead from a band member online, I avoided purchase and went straight to AudioGalaxy - ancient piracy for nerds - for the record, titled Dead as Dreams. It is likely in the top 20 epic-type metal records ever. But it is doing hard time in the convicting hearts of us elitists and record nerds, because Dead as Dreams and Weakling were, in overtly conscious, American fashion, giving birth to the cutest little toddler ... American Black Metal. And at night he turned to stone and emasculated you.

  Now, death metal had been a whole successful thing, with both international popularity and homegrown legends, giving birth to the more tech-progressive and brutal styles of death, and a certain promiscuity yet genius lay in that category of American bands. The past decade's mainstream has remained mostly the static, faceless fan base who have bought the same Cannibal Corpse record for 20 years and now thinks Suffocation is something new (cause they re-formed), and only trying to ignore all the Canadian death metal they own by blasting Nile -- which is an exotic joke about Egypt and Americans.


But that is all normal and ... to be expected of "those people".

  American Black Metal, however ... that descriptor does not begin to describe how flesh-eatingly potent the growth of interest in black metal has been over the past decade, and how battered the resulting inspirations can be, still all hailed glorious from some bag of tricks like SONG LENGTH, CRAZY TRACK INDEX, LONG TITLES, NO BASS GUITARS, ALL BASS GUITARS ... just all over the fucking place. It more resembled, and did in fact grow from, the punk scenes, thrash bands, indie-metal guys, Alternative Tentacles and fucking secretly pederast prog people, who are now the hot and bothered journalists hailing all American Black Metal bands as revolutionary.


Do you know what happened in Norway when Black Metal unleashed as a sub-culture? 


[TO BE CONTINUED: within November's end]