I’ll rise again, Resurgam

It’s been a rather busy summer, but I seem to have returned now, and finished off a piece on Psychotic Waltz which I started, as you can see, back in July. Nonetheless, other than just giving a status update, I thought that I might as well use this soapbox to provide some profound platitudes concerning heavy metal, such being my general inclination.
Percy Shelley once stated that, “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.” Perhaps this is why bands like Redemption find it so easy to offend in their love songs, when they refer to calls from ‘restaurants’, and otherwise take an overly terrestrial and trivial focus. Even ‘A Pleasant Shade of Grey’, which is quite down-to-earth in terms of theme and story, has in terms of effect some of its closest parallels in more spiritual bands like Echo Us and, occasionally, Holocaust. There is the same sense of the intimacy, the connection with the ‘other’ of the lyrics, being in essence an expression of one’s own soul, and this forming an important part of the appreciation; ‘this music is me’, in other words. Despite its outwards direction, the soul is not sacrificed by these ventures, but rather characterized by it. The external object of affection or reverence is not ourselves, so that our love is not simply self-love; however, neither is it absolutely separate from and external to us. ‘I had a dream I was you.’
What does heavy metal have to do with the eternal? Well, that varies. Some bands, like Psychotic Waltz, are concerned not with positively establishing the eternal but in leaving behind the rest of the debris. However, what heavy metal, in its most basic manifestations, has, is a sense of power. Not, however, a concrete form of power, that of the strength to beat somebody up, or to rule a nation. Indeed, heavy metal often enough goes far past this, to exaggerated images that hardly anybody would consent to perform in real life, as for example in Lamp of Thoth’s ‘I Love the Lamp’. The power is not one of worldly concern, but of, so to speak, ‘not giving a fuck’; we are, for a moment, free from Earthly bounds, and the pleasure comes not from the thoughts of doing nasty things (yes, I know, ‘speak for yourself’), but from the fact that the music completely abstracts from real life and real power to offer something far more eternal, the power to leave behind our concern about the physical world for a moment. The moral principles of Christianity? Hey, whatever man, I’m killing virgins.
It’s not that we would do any of this, nor necessarily even that we could, or want to; it’s rather the image of doing it itself which is significant. It’s not that it’s a good thing, it’s that we’re free from such judgments. Such, then, is the first form of freedom represented here. This is one which abstracts from the world, one which does not even acknowledge it in its premises. It faces the problems of the world and goes, ‘Well, you can’t touch me, I’m a soul.’ (with rock and roll.) Hence, here heavy metal comes to represent the eternal, the essential freedom which, with its bass, wipes away the world; Hegel’s destructive, abstract ‘I’, in a sense.
This, however, is in the last instance only a beginning; for all of that abstraction, we must still live, in a world which seems to restrict this ‘I’. How are we to manage this? Well, albums like ‘The Spectre Within’ and ‘A Social Grace’ enter in here; they face the world which seems alien, and they realize that the soul may only be asserted through its negation, and is otherwise neglected through absorption with the material, the endless treadmill of physical pleasure. However, these albums have no answers, but simply declare the truths of finitude, and hence establish that it cannot satisfy the soul; they establish its pleasures as illusory, as ‘semblance’, and hence something which must be transcended, but no more. It is, rather, the preserve of albums like ‘Awaken the Guardian’, APSoG, ‘Tomorrow will tell…’, and so on to take a closer look at our concrete humanity, and at how we live and feel, to return the world of dreams to the concrete world and hence give it substance, and give us action; to let the soul move beyond itself and still be maintained. We live in a finite world, in shades of grey, but this is inevitable and we must make them pleasant. We shall look at this aspect in more detail when we investigate the albums themselves, and elaborate upon the roles of ‘The Spectre Within’ and ‘A Social Grace’ in more depth shortly.
Of course, it is worth noting that heavy metal is not philosophical treatise, but more akin to a picture, and only as such can convey what it will. However, so long as the description of heavy metal in philosophical terms and concepts is also taken as essentially a picture, we should be alright. Even if Greek tragedy and its gods would be incompatible with a modern society, strictly speaking, we can still appreciate it from within its immanent paradigm, not as philosophical treatise but as art; and ‘when we understand everything, we will forgive everything.’