Chord...

During an unusual time, in which a large number of bigger historical trends reached one of those periodistic points of brutal evidence, metal music punched through the pleasant facade of mainstream music and brought to bear upon a slumbering populace remnants of the ancient Indo-European spirit of vir. It did so through a Romanticist, Faustian form of music-culture which to this day remains controversial, despite the attempts of commercial bands to turn it into a predictable, fatalistic, impotent version of itself.

However, for now it has run its course, so it makes sense to look over the past and from that, divine what might exist of it in the future. The fundamental questions of any artistic movement are "What did it believe that others did not?" and "To what did it appeal?" In metal, there are two interpretations: first, what the musicians who contributed something sizable to the genre intended - I'm not talking about popular but artistically meaningless efforts like Cannibal Corpse or Cradle of Filth - and second, what those outside the genre would like it to mean; generally, since it threatens their worldview, they want it to mean nothing.

To see this, we have to trace thirty years of its progress. It emerged from the proto-metal of bands like King Crimson, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, and soon solidified into a 1970s style of heavy metal most notably represented by Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Motorhead (we would include Venom here, but everything they did was done by Motorhead except the explicit and repetitive occult imagery). Heavy metal arose roughly concurrently with punk and hardcore, best represented by early work like Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the Ramones and proto-punk like Link Wray and the MC5. Both movements were dissident movements, meaning that they rejected everything present in popular culture at the time and took a path of ambiguous degree of opposition, but clearly a different and thus incompatible choice.