Prophets and Empires
One of the defining differences between modernism and postmodernism is that where modernism lamented the fragmentation of experience (as in Eliot) or sought to work through fragmentation to reunification (as in Woolf or Joyce), post-modernism celebrates that fragmentation as the exaltation of individual difference. It is this celebration that makes possible (culturally, ideologically) living-through and living-with the false promise of neoliberal individualism. Neoliberalism is the economic and political exultation of fragmentation, alienation as the expression of individuality in the form of entrepreneurial profit on the one hand and the complete lack of a collective politics, a politics of empathy and solidarity, on the other.
Rock and pop music continued to play its role in supporting and maintaining the hegemonic status quo, focusing on hedonism, partying, irresponsibility, and eternal teenage-dom. Time was an eternal present, an eternal youth, whether Bill Hailey was singing about rocking around the clock, the Beach Boys of an Endless Summer, or Ke$ha of how the party doesn't start until she walks in. The hippie movement of the late-1960s paved the way for the continuation of rock and pop ideological complicity after the collapse of the welfare state.
Metal, however, appeared on the scene at just this time in the way that Jewish prophets appeared in times of crisis. Metal presided over the corpse of community and solidarity, uttering Jeremiads against the whole world of alienation and isolation that followed the Summer of Love: the dark, disturbed post-Manson, post-Altamont world of poverty, drugs, mental illness, and lack of social services that postmodernism swept under the rug (or tried to render joyful and liberating in their own right).
In many ways, Philip K. Dick is precursor to this kind of critique of postmodern/neoliberal fragmentation. But the curious thing about Dick is how not dark he is, even at his darkest (the bleak ending of A Scanner Darkly for example). Dick is not metal at all, and so his work has not been as significant an inspiration to metal lyricists as might be supposed.
Metal was well-positioned to play this role in the 1970s, since the very definition of a prophet was to transmute their intensely personal experience into social and political criticism. Indeed, much medieval hermeneutics read the personal drama of the crucifiction precisely as a social and even cosmic drama, the intensely individual transformed into a prophetic text about the ultimate conciliatory end of days. But the promise of the cross was sullied by the wordliness of its application, its contamination with commerce and empire and could never provide a model for metal imagery; hence the satanic and demoniac imagery long associated with metal. The solitude (even solipsism) of the marginalized subject at the end of the 1960s found a way to challenge and rebel against the fragmented order that became dominant in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Images of isolation and constraint (Metallica's "One" and Tool's "Rosetta Stoned" are good examples) combine with ecstatic visions that pierce the complacent ideological veil of late-capitalism to expose the personal cost of the transformation. Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" offers a prophetic vision of war and social control, while Judas Priest's "Dreamer Deceiver" presents a utopian vision of reunification and peace, albeit undercut with the threat of deception. (In typical metal style, "Dreamer Deceiver" follows a song about Jack the Ripper, perhaps - following Alan Moore's From Hell - the archetype of the fallen world of modernity and a touchstone of metal imagery).
Once we combine individual, visionary experience with social criticism, then we have to engage with William Blake. One of the best monographs of Blake's work is Erdman's Prophet Against Empire, and that phrase could sum up the whole metal aesthetic - the spiritual against the worldly, the sense of antagonism, the prophet's purifying critique against the corruption of the secular world. Like all the best prophets, Blake is able to transmute his personal vision into a thoroughgoing and unworldly critique of secular power and the personal cost of living with and through that power. His prophetic books construct a dark, alternative cosmology in which the social drama of the industrial revolution plays out. In his lyrics, Blake concisely replays this drama in subdued and intimate terms. Is there any lyric more metal than:
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
It is no coincidence, though, that early heavy metal came out of the North of England (Black Sabbath from Birmingham, as were Judas Priest; Lemmy Kilmister was born in Stoke-on-Trent), the heart of the industrial revolution that Blake described in Milton as consisting of "dark Satanic mills". Blake's hymn to Jerusalem ends with a stanza that would not be particularly out of place in certain kinds of metal:
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
The "mental fight" of "War Pigs" and the "green & pleasant land" of "Dreamer Deceiver" combined in a single verse.
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Blake's "dark satanic mills" are echoed in Emma Ruth Rundle's new album, Engine of Hell. Sonically, Engine of Hell is like a doom(ed) Tori Amos, and lyrically it bristles with textual references - from Psalm 137 ("by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept" becomes "down at the methadone clinic we waited") to Daniel Keyes ("just like Flowers for Algernon / Something's diminished"). I hear Blake not only in the song title "Blooms of Oblivion", but in the line "And we bring flowers from Albion up to your vision"), bringing to mind Blake's prophetic work Visions of the Daughters of Albion. The opening lines of the book are "ENSLAV'D, the Daughters of Albion weep; a trembling lamentation / Upon their mountains; in their valleys, sighs toward America.
Engine of Hell has usually been described as a personal document of healing and recovery. In this it is obviously a solitary "trembling lamentation", but the echoes of Blake fit Engine of Hell into that larger tradition of metal Jeremiads. Much of Rundle's recovery took place in solitude in rural Wales ("in their valleys") while the recording took place in rural America. The trembling lamentation of Rundle's record applies to the fallen world at large in addition to her own path to recovery ("till we have built Jerusalem").
I don't mean to suggest that Rundle's album is intended to catalogue and address the ills of American society. Rather, she has done what Blake did in the lyrics, rather than in the prophetic books, produced a sombre, intimate reflection on experience which resonates - as all metal has - with the painful side of life denied by postmodern neoliberalism in its desperate search to keep people's minds off their pain and focused on their commodity consumption. In Body, Rundle writes of the "sick sad world that you leave behind".
If Blake wrote of innocence first and then experience, Emma Ruth Rundle's often reverses that procession. From the experience of "soaked, divided, deformed, defiled" - the experience of post-1960s fragmentation that is so often the subject of metal lyrics - to the utopian dram of "my whole life, some dark night / is so much bright now, without you". Because, and this is the point, Jeremiads, lamentations, critique, prophecy, are never merely negative documents, voices crying out in the wilderness, but they emerge from a commitment to a better life, to a utopia to come, Jerusalem builded in place of the dark Satanic mills. What is individual healing and recovery is also at the same time social rebuilding, collectivity, solidarity, peace and home.