The Devil and Philosophy by Robert Arp

The Devil and Philosophy by Robert Arp

Author:Robert Arp [Arp, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812698800
Publisher: Open Court


19

Satanic Metal—So Bad It’s Good

NICK JONES

Can worshipping the Devil and doing evil in His name ever be a good thing? Yes. When it comes to Satanic heavy metal music, there’s one sense in which it can. Satanic metal can sometimes be good artistically in virtue of its immoral features, especially when it’s produced by musicians who are actual Satanists, as opposed to those who are just pretending.

The Devil—who’s got all the best tunes—has always enjoyed a high profile in the history of rock’n’roll, and no more so than in the heavy metal scene. From early bands like KISS dressing up as super-scary demons, to fans making funny little Devil’s horns symbols with their hands, to members of black metal bands burning down churches and murdering each other all in Satan’s name, the Devil’s murky shadow is cast over the entire genre.

I’m interested in the more extreme uses that the Devil is put to by some heavy metal musicians. As well as the church burnings and the murders, there are plenty of bands who glorify and revere Satan in their lyrics, who urge their audiences to commit crimes in His cause, or whose music blasphemes against God and the Church. In short, I’m interested in Satanic metal.

It’s Just Noise, Isn’t It?

Like many sub-genres of heavy metal music, there’s a boring and pedantic row about how exactly Satanic metal should be characterized. A simple working definition will do: Satanic metal is heavy metal music that expresses the Satanism, either real or pretend, of the bands whose music it is. That said, it will actually be useful to note some of the other common traits of the music that’s put in this particular pigeonhole.

Satanic metal is usually taken to be a form of extreme metal—heavy metal that’s especially intense or brutal, whether on account of a very high tempo, guitars turned up quite loud, or vocals that are guttural or shrieked, often to the point of sounding inhuman or unintelligible. And as Keith Kahn-Harris points out in his 2007 book Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge, one of the main features of extreme metal is that it involves transgression—a breaking of the rules or boundaries.

This transgression can take various forms. Musically, extreme metal is transgressive when it pushes the boundaries in terms of its tempo or heavy sound and so on. And lyrically too, extreme metal can be transgressive with lyrics that are obscene or offensive in various ways. With Satanic metal, this lyrical transgression can take the form of blasphemy. Indeed, Steve Asheim, the drummer in the Satanic metal band Deicide, has claimed that the whole point of Satanic music is to blaspheme.

And within the extreme metal genre, it at least used to be the case that Satanic metal was equated with black metal—a form of extreme metal with extra dark lyrics and typically shrieked vocals. Nowadays though, while a good deal of black metal does take the form of Satanic metal, there are other kinds of black metal such



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