Writing about a dead genre can be exhausting. You search through ten thousand bands looking for the few that grasp what the genre was always about — its newer incarnations are meaningless — and despite enjoying this, find that the good is drowned out by the mediocre.
This is what happens any time herd behavior happens. Without a clear goal, humans circle around, each doing what is easiest, safest, and most advantageous for himself while exposing others to greater risk. The predators outside the circle take advantage of this disorganization.
You can see it in nature with wild animals on the plain. If they are going to a destination, an orderly march ensues; when they have no direction, predators show up, and so the animals circle around, manipulating each other for a place closer to the center of the herd.
It is part of the underlying information dynamics — this is the parent field to physics, mathematics, and numerology — of the universe. When particles are not polarized, they form an equilibrium with nearby energy distribution, increasing entropy until something else polarizes them.
Like predators.
In the case of metal, the predators were hipsters and industry. The former just wanted to be edgy cool for a few moments before moving on to their careers and urban condos, where the latter wanted to pump money out of whatever was trending at the moment.
Metal if anything died of its success, but then again most things do. Black metal finally united what had been floating around in nascent form since before Black Sabbath — a mixture of progressive rock, early hardcore punk, and heavy rock — and after that, there was nowhere to go.
Hence the circling began.
To follow the point that Plato makes about civilization cycles, we can track the industry lifecycle which follows the information dynamics of entropy:
The four phases of an industry life cycle are the introduction, growth, maturity, and decline stages. Industries are born when new products are developed, with significant uncertainty regarding market size, product specifications, and main competitors.
Consolidation and failure whittle down an established industry as it grows, and the remaining competitors minimize expenses as growth slows and demand eventually wanes.
See specifically this:
As maturity is achieved, barriers to entry become higher, and the competitive landscape becomes more clear. Market share, cash flow, and profitability become the primary goals of the remaining companies now that growth is relatively less important.
The decline phase marks the end of an industry’s or business’ ability to support growth. Obsolescence and evolving end markets (end users) negatively impact demand, leading to declining revenues. This creates margin pressure, forcing weaker competitors out of the industry.
When an industry is new, there is high demand and therefore high reward; it grows in response; eventually it achieves equilibrium, which nature hates; that brings about new competitors at the same time margin declines because of oversupply, and then it enters decline.
Some industries remain stable forever. If demand will always be there, and something limits the double demons of competition and expansion, they will keep making money, like that company that sells the same hairspray it did in 1934 for an inflation-adjusted equivalent cost.
Underground metal as an industry started in the late 1980s and grew rapidly through the early 1990s, then peaked at about the time CD sales did in 1996, at which point there were too many market entrants for any one good thing to stand out, so the musicians mostly went elsewhere.
Like any industry, its only hope of rebirth consists of getting back to what made it great that is in demand that its current form is not meeting. In my view, that means getting back to the balance between art and noise that made it great in the first place.
A reader writes:
When you refer to music as a language, I think that is paramount to understanding the best art and artists. Each piece is a layering of symbols and motifs that form a language, whether that is experienced on a shallow, surface level or provides insight on a deeper occult and metaphysical basis is up to skill of the artist. Much like magics — the grand confluence of those symbols is what approaches the transcendent, and arrives at the sublime.
The essence of art is communication. The art represents an experience and a journey in understanding it; the layers of symbols and motifs describe aspects of that experience, then interact to form the journey that transports the listener from one state of mind through conflict to another.
If most of human life is avoiding conflict, art is a way for us to indulge in conflict without feeling direct personal fear. We transcend our fear of this world, with its conflict and loss, and instead embrace the idea of getting to that final point.
We can dispense with the term “occult” by realizing that neopaganism is nonsense. The ancient pagan ways were always clear from the old writing, our intuition which arises from what is coded in our genetics, and common sense about monist spirituality.
All of these things are mistaken as religion when they are more accurately paths to wisdom encoded in metaphysical symbolism. When the metaphysical and physical are synchronized, we see the grander pattern to life which makes it worthwhile despite the suffering; this is transcendence.
As a wise man said:
Our gods became your Satan and Satan became our god
The ancient gods live on, but we can only find them through transcendence, which requires conflict, and that conflicts with bourgeois entertainment from Taylor Swift to Pantera that focuses on mixed emotions, or a refusal to make decisions from fear of conflict.
Names do not matter in terms of spirituality; we share the same world, and may call these things by different words, but they are properties of the world. Science, religion, and philosophy pursue the same wisdom at the heart of experience which cannot be observed directly in all cases.
Underground metal was first and foremost art, not entertainment. It aimed to transport us to transcendence and then have us look at reality with new eyes, including its disease, death, war, symbols of evil, and horrors. By doing that we got past our fears and embraced the potential of reality.
If this “industry” is to restart itself, the only path consists of avoiding imitation of method — whether emo, shoegaze, 70s rock, late hardcore, or previous metal — and getting back to the experience of art which made it poweful in the first place.