On his study on aesthetics titled Beauty, English philosopher Roger Scruton outlines the most noble mission for modern art to accomplish, if it does wish to attain greatness:
“Moreover, there is another, and truer, history of the modern artist which is the story told by the great modernists themselves. It is the history told by T. S. Eliot, in his essays and in Four Quartets, by Ezra Pound in the Cantos, by Schoenberg in his critical writings and in Moses und Aron, and by Pfitzner in Palestrina. And it sees the goal of the modern artist not as a break with tradition, but as a recapturing of tradition, in circumstances for which the artistic legacy has made little or no provision. This history does not see the pastness of the present moment, but its present reality, as the place we have got to, and whose nature must be understood in terms of a continuum. If, in modern circumstances, the forms and styles of art must be remade, this is not in order to repudiate the old tradition, but in order to restore it. The effort of the modern artist is to express realities which have not been encountered before, and which are especially hard to encompass.”
Thus, we’re far past the many contemporary attempts at radically redefining the nature and goal of art, all born out of empty navel-gazing and vanity, be it the elaboration of a sort of self-fashioned “anti-art” or its total conversion into a product no different from the latest smartphone or fast food you buy at the shopping center. Instead, we recognize that the times change and, inevitably, so do the enveloping contexts and textures by which we find ourselves surrounded and, by extension, the conditions under which all human activity, including works of art, is created. The core appeal here is not a fundamental change of purpose or methods, but their continued application to constantly shifting forms of existence.
Heavy metal’s propension for extremity, sonically and thematically, is in many ways particularly suited for certain aspects of our day and age. We can say that out of all genres populating today’s overcrowded and largely superfluous musical landscape, heavy metal is the one most dedicated to the brutally honest expression of ugly truths in their crude nakedness; the most adequate soundtrack to some of the current realities that traditional art was probably not meant to portray, such as the technologically enabled scale of slaughter and mass destruction, long thought to be impossible, generalized alienation and disaffection and the enslavement of all domains of life to the demands of consumption and industry.
Indeed, one of metal’s most prized qualities, at the heart of its mysterious appeal, is the ability of giving coherence to raw, toxic materials seemingly impossible to discipline artistically. Inhuman levels of distortion, bleak atonality, reigning chromaticism and an entire aesthetic of the unpleasant and the corrupted, are all integrated into a meaningful whole by means of an obscure magic.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s monumental The Birth of Tragedy attributes the ability of glimpsing truth in its utmost purity beyond the veil of individuality, and delight in its necessary destructive aspects, as a Dyonisian trait. This is a requisite for the proper appreciation of tragedy, that most glorious expression of the indestructible will in the face of all the suffering implied by the mortal condition.
Some of the most inspiring metal albums are precisely those that revel in this type of ecstatic revelation and reply with an heroic attitude that deems struggle the highest justification of life. Unlike the latest 10 hour symphony consisting of silence, or the much lauded noise album entirely made up of colonoscopy and washing machine noises, metal employs the tools of music, however mutated by its dark alchemy, in the honest representation of something that is very real and worthy of the attention of the muses, even if for various reasons it has been neglected for a long time.
