Liberty, Metal, and Satan. How rock and extreme music shaped my life.
Describe as the state of being free, liberty is for me the most important value necessary for the correct function of society. It means to have the capacity to show and express yourself in whatever way you consider correct without any external authority imposing restrictions on your thoughts and way of life. It is to have the ability to act of your own judgment, but understanding and assuming the responsibility for your actions. Liberty is a condition in which all human interactions are performed by consent among the interested parties without any kind of coercion. But liberty does not only apply to legal terms and political views. Embracing it means to have absolute respect for the life decisions of others, and this includes things like career choice, political views, religion, sexual orientation, dress code, etc.
The world nowadays is completely entwined. Millions of individuals coexisting with each other. Each of them with a different set of rules and values that dictate their life and with absolutely different ways of understanding the world around them. For that same reason, trying to find an absolute truth on how to live your life is an impossible task. Is for this same reason that respecting liberty and individuality is our best ally in improving social interaction.
But these ideas of respect to liberty and individuality were not always with me and did not appear from one day to another, it has been a slow transition, and I think that my background has a lot to do with my philosophy of life. A lot of this libertarian approach to life I have now started to gestate during my mid-teens as a response to the conservative education I was raised with, but especially it was ignited by my natural inclination for rock and extreme music.
“Metal confronts what we’d rather ignore. It celebrates what we often deny. It indulges in what we fear most. And that’s why metal will always be a culture of outsiders.” (Sam Dunn)
Conservatism has always shaped my life, I was born and raised in a conservative family in 1994, although my parents were not religious fanatics, catholic values and morals were always present during my early childhood and formative years. I was taught that there are inherently good or bad things on the way you express yourself to the world, on what you believe and think and that some morals and values should be like imperishable stones that transcend time. As a kid and early teenager, I never questioned anything of that. I thought my parents and adults were omniscient and that their way of seeing the world was unique and right. Like every newborn, I was put under some faith and given a set of rules without the ability to ask why.
By the time I was already 11, the idea of being a child no more started to gestate on my mind, but I was never a rebellious guy, at least not of the kind that goes outside their homes and meets with other kids their ages and hangs out for hours, starts to drink booze, smoke, and skate (you know, all that 90`s and early 2000`s things). For a middle-upper class kid like me, living in a conservative family with an authoritarian leaning father, the only way to rebel was through listening to a different kind of music. I could see and feel how sometimes kids at school started to talk about other things rather than cartoons. Some of my classmates started to get interested in the mainstream stuff, pop music, paparazzi, and gossip about celebs, they would rather sit in groups and chat about that rather than paying attention to the class or do homework, now I understand that maybe that was their way of rebellion, but I couldn’t be fond of it, I felt like I didn´t fit with it.
“Metal is probably the last bastion of real rebellion.” (Corey Taylor, Metal: A headbanger`s journey)
At the same time, something was telling me that in some way I should defy the set of rules I was being given. So one day I simply decided that I should be a “grown-up” kid and start watching MTV (What a rebel, damn I felt so rude!) and then a music video from a band called “Green Day” showed up on the screen, and it was from that precise moment and going forward that everything became different. While I was watching Green Day my eyes shone, what was I contemplating? Billie Joe had make-up on and skinny jeans, Tré Cool and Mike had dye hair, and even sometimes they painted their nails black! (What?!!!). The way they behaved, and how they express their selves to the world was so different from what I was used to seeing. Their music was so new to me that I got obsessed, this was my first encounter with rock music and with what it stands for. It was at that moment that the idea (even though right then I never thought of it or even realized it, for I was just a kid) of my now libertarian philosophy started to develop inside me. I was so hooked with the band that for Christmas I asked for a Sony Discman with the American Idiot album.
“It’s like a lifestyle. Everything else seems like I like it for a week, I lose interest. But metal, metal fans love it forever.” (Rob Zombie)
From the moment I became fond of Green Day, my love for rock music only started to grow, but it was like a drug, I needed to start listening to more bands, heavier ones with a more aggressive and violent sound, and this was my very first inclination to search for my new true love, Heavy Metal music. It was during my time in secondary school at about 14 years old that I started to dwell on extreme music, my older brother used to listen to a lot of heavy music back then, he is 11 years older than me, although I wouldn’t call him influential in my life it would be wrong on my side to not acknowledge that he gave me my very first metal album, it was a Sonata Arctica one, a power metal band from Finland, I fell in love with the sound, with how fast it was and how different from every other thing I had listened before it was, but this was just the very beginning. Then I went further, started to use the internet to gather knowledge about this gender, more bands, why it was so loud and extreme, what were they trying to tell with their sound. I immediately liked more mainstream, big, and well know bands like Korn, Slipknot, Mudvayne, Disturbed, etc. This gender was so different, the imagery that they used was so appealing and portrayed so much power and defiance against the establishment that I couldn´t run away from it. In the beginning, watching Marilyn Mason full of make-up and dressed as a woman was shocking, then it became normal, at the end I started to embrace how transgressor the gender was.
By this time, the lyric aspect of the songs started to grasp me too. I went to my local music store and bought the albums, read the lyrics inside, and tried to make sense of them. I found out that many of the messages they were sending were against the very ideals I was raised with and also they included many others I couldn´t grasp because they were critics against a social system I wasn´t even aware of. But it was when I stepped into the “hard” and “occult” side of the gender that my whole life changed, the Black Metal scene. It was at this specific moment I questioned if I should keep listening to Metal music, but what was the cause of me leaving and quitting the very same gender I have grown to love and became such fond of? The answer is Satanism.
“Church burnings and all these things are, of course, a thing that I support a hundred percent. And it should’ve been done much more and will be done much more in the future. We have to remove every trace from what Christianity and uh… the Semitic roots have to offer this world. Satanism is freedom for the individual to grow and become the superman. Every man who’s born to be king becomes king. Every man who’s born to be a slave doesn’t know Satan.” (Gaahl)
Like I said before, I was raised in a catholic family, and even though we didn´t go to church every Sunday, some morals and values were always there. To doubt the very existence of a supreme being was not a question you would make yourself. You just believe and had faith, besides, not being a believer was kinda “wrong” for my understanding at that time, and being a good citizen meant for me back then having some kind of faith into which to hold to. But Black Metal offered me something completely different, the idea of listening and liking music that “worshipped” the “adversary” made me tremble but at the same time I was spellbound by it, by its sound, how raw and authentic it was. Then Dimmu Borgir came to me. The very first time I listened to their music I was in fear as if Jesus Christ himself was watching from behind and judging me, I wanted to stop the music video but couldn´t, it captivate me. In the music video it is inferred they kill a priest, burn his cross and then start to yell at three big crosses that then proceed to bleed. The video ended, and fast as lightning I started to search for the album online, In Sorte Diaboli. The cover of the album has a big image of a Baphomet with a group of people gather around worshipping him/her. After being captivated with Dimmu Borgir, I wanted more, found out they were from Norway and started to get in touch with what was called the “True Norwegian Black Metal” and all the scene. I started to listen to more and more extreme music. Found out about bands like Immortal, Emperor, Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, etc. and all the controversy around them, the burning of the churches in Norway, and how they wanted to use this new gender as a way to rebel against Christianity and the establishment and all the set of rules, morals, and values it had imposed on society. But even when I liked this new sound I just had found out, something inside me was still in conflict, something was rejecting it, and it was my old values and way of thinking, I needed to get rid of it if I wanted to embrace and accept as normal this new sound. I was living with a dichotomy in my head. I heard one voice inside that told me it was okay to like it, that nothing wrong would happen to get exposed to the sound, but another one told me I was completely off, that I would become a bad person, that listening to this kind of music was not what is expected of a respectable someone, that somehow my moral scheme was being destroyed.
“It’s a negation of the world as it’s handed to you. It says, this daily existence of this boring-ass high school and this dead-end Dairy Queen job, just no. This is something that’s mine and that I own, and f*** you; I won’t do what you tell me.” (Tom Morello)
But time went by, and my old misconceptions about what was expected of someone, what is good and bad started to change. It was at that moment that I realized that there shouldn´t be a canonic set of morals and values set by arbitrary people according to their beliefs. That every social structure was just a story, a narrative that we created in our minds to give meaning to something and weren’t objective trues. My past set of values and ethics faded every day a bit more until they were almost just a memory, but the crucial moment, the inflection point was when I got to watch the documentary “Until The Light Take Us” which give you one of the best insides to the moral philosophy and ethical aspect of the Black Metal movement and why they were doing such and such thing. The worship of satan or belonging to the satanic church was not a real thing among the musicians on the movement, and some of them (like Varg Vikernes would say) even despised the idea of some literally believing in actual Satan. The Devil, as in any other art form, was just an icon, a symbol representing absolute rebellion and discomfort, but most importantly, it was a metaphor for liberty and expression.
So for me, extreme music transcends a simple musical genre. Its sound and its lyrics are used as a metaphor for freedom and expression. It invites you to adopt a philosophy of life that embraces respect for individuality and ways of understanding life different from yours. Metal music is a celebration for all that is different.
