I'll say black metal. The reason lies below. Isn't my opinion entirely but the message is the same. Rock is fake. Metal is truth.
Rock music, at its core, was a product of the suburbs. Kids saw how fake it was to run away from problems to a boring little world where there was no hope of adventure. They also finally had money, because they were gonna need cars to get around.
Marketers saw this and started selling them country music sped up with black vocal ****, except made white, because the audience was completely white. It's important to note that rock and blues were a scam. Nothing in them did not pre-exist, but by making some elements of what did exist outlandish, the marketers were able to claim it was new.
As a result, rock promised the other side of adventure, but it made a fatal mistake, and chose to idolize only the things that suburban life did not celebrate: sex, drugs/alcohol, staying out late, breaking laws, and so on. As a result, it wasn't a different way as much as an inverse of the current way, and it rewarded those who didn't take it seriously and so went on to become bankers and be comfortable.
Metal was a rebellion against this, in that in the midst of the summer of love, Black Sabbath were preparing to unleash something that sounded like a horror movie and had the same dark topicality which wasn't about any single human. Rock was about the individual escaping by doing the forbidden, but metal was about finding the forbidden, esoteric truth to reality, which is that the individual is frail.
The horror movie concept — new horror arises, existing methods don't work against it, people must struggle against the panic and delusion of others to survive, and finally may or may not conquer it by using cold cruel logic — was echoed in all of metal with some exceptions for the productization of Black Sabbath, heavy metal from 1972 to 1978, and the liberalization of speed metal that occurred as it assimilated hardcore in a time when we all feared the Republican candidate (who, as it turns out, was right more than wrong, but that's the advantage of experience talking: ignore people who whine during conservative administrations, because most of them are just making a fashion statement).
Death metal was the flourishing of this concept, but it brought metal to a stop-point. All of metal up until that point had preserved its ludic, or playful, side, but death metal was coming dangerously close to being boring protest music like grindcore band Napalm Death and their mediocre forefather, the Dead Kennedys. Protest music is the music of those without souls who wail so someone else might save them. It's impotent. Death metal took one look at that abyss and self-destructed.
The question was: if modern society is so awful that it resembles a horror movie, and the suburban life****is just a manifestation of that society, and reinforcing "only death is real" removes the illusion, how do we reconstruct or build a new and better society? The answer came in black metal: turn toward the Romantic past, and unite it with a future where those who aren't befuddled exterminate all the others and move on. Quintessential Nietzschean overman theory, merged with British Romantic poetry (Blake, Wordsworth) and American Gothic (Poe).
However, all through these years, metal has carried along the baggage from rock, which is idiots who "just want to have a good time," which is the hipster code-word for do nothing but further the decay, because they've already given up on themselves. If metal doesn't break the rock barrier, it will be dragged down into irrelevance, but I warned you of that back in 1992, so it shouldn't be rocket science.
http://metal-blogs.com/death/2007/12/31/metal-versus-rock/
Log in to comment