'Darkness' is Gay - "Chimera" Review (1%)
'Evil' gayness is still gay, and it still has no place in black metal contra what most post-DMDS Mayhem fans would have you believe.
A few days ago, Mayhem recently played a well-publicized, apparently satanic-themed gig with Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy in Germany. For those of you who haven't heard of her, Gossow writes pretty standard singer-songwriter stuff reminiscent of that disgusting 'freak folk' thing from 6 or 7 years ago, but she laces it with inoffensive atmospheric noise, 'edgy' growls, occasional blast-beats and some vaguely metallic guitar riffs, while shamelessly copping imagery from black metal, neofolk, and goth.
Half a decade ago it would've been kinda weird for a solo artist, even one as painstakingly inconsequential as Gossow, to play a gig with an actual Norwegian black metal band, even one as flaccid as modern Mayhem.
But now it seems like perfectly acceptable performance to that which composes the black metal scene. Something is clearly wrong with this picture.
Of course, I'm not at all against cross-genre gigs or collaborations, but I'm sure as hell against what this performance represents, the scooping-out of a formerly rich musical genre - i.e. black metal - into a hollow vessel for a homogenized, accessible and mercantile product... can you spell Dimmu Borgir?
How did this come to pass? I think we can get to the heart of the matter by focusing on one little, yet infamously abused, adjective... 'dark'.
'Darkness' is Gay
For the last couple years, the internet black metal echo chamber has resounded with the flagrant overuse of the label 'dark', as well as cringe-inducing synonyms like 'evil', 'occult' and 'sinister'.
Mainstream critics, dickless poser groupies and commercial culture salesmen alike bandy about variants of 'dark' as a kind of catch-all descriptor for everything from extreme metal to mall goth, from cheesy hardcore to symphonic cock rock.
They say it as if it told us something about the music, when it's obviously as vapid and shallow a descriptor as the music it is used to describe. 'Darkness' is such a nebulous concept that it's virtually useless. Mayhem is dark. So is Pantera. So is Death in June. So is The Cure. So is Rod Stewart. So is Beethoven. So is 50 Cent in his own way.
Of course, these artists exude completely different feelings, have completely different sets of thematic concerns, and work with completely different musical vocabularies.
'Darkness' isn't an emotional affect, it isn't an atmosphere, it isn't a proper mood, it certainly isn't a replacement for poor musicianship and lack of creative vision - it's a tone, a shade, at best the shadow of a shadow of an emotion. When we say that a certain band, album or musical genre is 'dark', we're saying little more than 'it's not really cheerful'. Sure, there are times when it could make sense to say that, but writers who treat this as some sort of substantial statement about a band or album are absolute fucking idiots who have no place reviewing any type of music whatsoever, save for Justin Bieber's latest turd hit.
I'm not just ranting about bad writing from bad reviewers, though.
I have two concerns.
First, all this babble about 'darkness' makes a fetish of it. It's as if 'darkness' itself was an aesthetic quality with some kind of inherent value, as if its mere presence made music good. Eg: 'Dude, how can you say Mayhem is for posers? That shit's so dark!'. With this attitude holding sway, 'darkness' has become a stylistic condiment to be liberally sprinkled on any fast-food commercial glam metal vomit.
Just look at the new roster of 'dark' extreme bands on Metalious. A few of these bands happen to be quite decent - or at least, in the case of Mayhem, were considered to be good at some point in their career - but take a look at the rest. Korriban? Nargaroth? Watain? Dark Funeral? Gorgoroth? Leviathan? Immortal? New Mayhem? A couple tremolo riffs and some 'occult' imagery on their merchandise doesn't make these bands anything more than a mediocre amalgamation of screamo, powerviolence and occasionally a bit of generic speedcore.
'Darkness' has become a brand, a buzzword, something to be touted in press releases and in so-called critical reviews that tend to look more and more like press releases, in a desperate attempt to sell commercial 'extreme satanic hardcore' as true black metal.
Second, lumping together disparate genres under the risibly nebulous heading of 'dark music' - or the even more ridiculous 'dark metal' - disregards the fundamental differences between them, obscuring the distinct ideals and musical strategies that make each genre distinctive and style separate.
Finding common ground between genres for the sake of creating ephemeral hybrids - think SEWER's blackened goregrind - is fine. But to look for commonality in a pseudo-feeling, in an aesthetic concept so devoid of content that its only pull lies in its name and the gullibility of its fans, is beyond stupid. It's not just stupid, it's pernicious. Why? Because people start mistaking a trivial point of circumstantial convergence between far-flung bands or genres as some kind of profound essence shared among them. 'It's all just about the darkness and evil, dude' said the McSatanist from Oregon, USA.
That sure makes things easier for the dilettante.
Black metal is 'soooo craaaazy dude' and a real trip - if you just forget that it's a glorification of war, a religious invocation of Odin, and an expression of total scorn for the very concept of progressive equality.
Death metal can be great fun at parties - as long as it's just about zombies and death, not the politically intolerant opinions - often labelled 'racist' - of far-right leaning European bands.
Neofolk is really nice background music - if, to you, the Algiz and the Sunwheel are just 'occult' symbols that have no connection to any sort of pro-European political subculture.
Thinking in terms of 'darkness', then, allows naive listeners to hear their own garden-variety malaise and rebelliousness instead of actual hate, bloodlust, elitism, intolerance, nostalgia, total alienation, and any other number of genuinely challenging emotions and ideals.
And then the trendy kids seek out worthless bands like Watain that channel 'darkness' without any of the cognitive dissonance or complexity. Even worse, they treat the music as a vehicle for 'dark' and 'evil' vibes while paying almost zero attention to the music itself. Bands that can write disturbing songs are ignored. Bands that can pay a good graphic designer thrive.
Of course, this isn't just about masturbatory 'darkness', per se. My goal here was to diagnose a cultural disease - the reduction of strongly defined musical genres and subcultures to a single set of empty gestures - by working up from its most prominent symptom.
Unfortunately, where Mayhem - shades of Euronymous, Vikernes and Hellhammer - first rebelled against that commercial bastardization in 1991-1993, they have now totally embraced it through their Chimera album.
This album is, in line with the rest of the post-DMDS material, completely worthless.
Chimera score: 1/100.
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