The Failure of Death Denied

Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body-experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it. We can do so with a clear vision, without awe or terror. We don't have to cling to life artificially, or death for that matter. Waves and radiation. Look how well-lighted everything is. The place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet. A priset walks in, sits down, tell the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed. Doors, windows sealed. He has serious business to see to. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.

--Don DeLillo White Noise

I've always loved this passage because, despite its deliberate absurdity, it describes the way our society really works. We have built a culture defined by its veneration of the supreme worth of the individual human being: its institutions, its corpus of myth, its art - all exist to exalt the Sovereign "I." Death then becomes the great enemy, because Death makes "I" meaningless. A more realistic culture would re-evaluate its position in the face of this truth (most ancient cultures evolved an epic tradition for this reason - to reconcile man to the reality of death), but our society has far too much invested (often quite literally) in the sacred individual. So, instead, we engage in the Dance of Death Denied hoping that if we buy the right plastic ****, worship the properly complected Jesus and vote for the right politicians, somehow, the reality of Death will be dissipated.

The problem is that not everyone is dumb enough or deluded enough to buy into this crap. Inevitably, there are people that see the truth for what it is. Some are broken by it - they take themselves out with pills or heroin or just put a bullet in their brains. Some become enraged and shoot up their high schools or hijack airliners and fly them into icons of world commerce or mail package bombs to biotech profiteers. These people are dangerous to society, but only in a very limited sense. They are easily marginalized - they're 'fascists' who 'hate freedom.'

Some, however, choose a different course. Rather than burning out or blowing up, they speak up. Artists. Philosophers. Leaders. These are infinitely more dangerous to the social order, because they tell the truth when others regurgitate the lie, and truth, given substance by the weight of reality, becomes rather hard to ignore once the taboo against speaking it is broken. Like the beached whale at the seaside resort (reality intrudes upon purchased fantasy), the longer it is ignored, the harder it becomes to ignore it. Eventually, you're going to have to admit that something smells.

As a result, our society has a built in incentive to marginalize the truth tellers. From the perspective of the Death Deniers, it is imperative that Slayer be meaningless - if they aren't, then Death is indeed real, and, oh by the way, this society is totally ****ed. So, first they turn to mockery:

"Ha ha! It's just dorks singing about Satan!"

"Ha ha! Deathklok!"

When mockery proves insufficient, appropriation must suffice. If Burzum or Mordid Angel or Nietzsche or Wagner or Dawn of the Dead cannot be mocked into silence, then the market must puke out something that apes the form but removes the truth-telling inner spirit, replacing it with something meaningless that can be mocked. Thus, we end up with Cradle of Filth, Cannibal Corpse, Jaques Derrida, ****ty film scores and Dawn of the Dead.

It's all rather disheartening on the surface, but if you give it a deeper look, hope blossoms in the darkness: the Death Deniers are impotent. They cannot silence truth, nor can they make reality go away. All they can do is mock and copy, and, in the end, they are doomed to that they fear most.

This is the very reason I write.

I guess I don't quite get the black metal references but the rest makes perfect sense to me. In my opinion art is supposed to be cathartic, not destructive. But there is always the theory that you have to destroy in order to create.

Mocking the social order, especially that of the United States, has always been a dangerous business. Naturally the ultimate denier of death, the corporation, marginalizes art by making it palatable to the masses, I do think art should be for everyone, but the sanitization that comes along with mass production definitely lessens the impact.

__________________
"You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do." -David Cronenberg

It puts me in mind of Dark Party's attack on Kubrick the other day. There's this whole mass of critique out there that says stuff like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Seventh Seal are 'pretentious' and 'boring' because they deal in ideas instead of merchandisable 'characters' - but what is that resistance if not a reluctance to deal with the reality - DEATH - at the center of those films?

To play off the Dawn of the Dead reference, look at the way assimilation has sanitized horror movies. The power of horror fiction and film as an artform lies in its head on acceptance of the reality of death - but commercial horror film neatly sidesteps that uncomfortable conclusion, giving us death once removed - death as something that happens to other people (the slut, the skeptic, the stupid kid in the woods), but not to us.

I have gone there with the French new wave, but not for the same reasons.

As far as other films and filmmakers who have been labeled "pretentious" I have no problem with Bergman although it took me a very long time to "get it" I always loved Truffaut for the reasons listed above. But some of the more manic productions of that era, ones that had an influence upon the late 60's and 70's British films (especially films like A Hard Days Night and the rash of British sex comedies, and even to some extent the sex scene from A Clockwork Orange) always left me cold.

The Dawn of the Dead reference I get. Romero always had an agenda, and still has one although it is more deeply shrouded. The consumerism aspect of Dawn was the first thing that struck me about it, being so indoctrinated into consumer culture at such a young age by having next to nothing, it struck a nerve in me. Getting into the goo, the actual entrails of the living by the dead was an apt metaphor. The racism metaphor of Night, having first hand experience with that as well, struck a chord too. That last ten minutes culminating on the shooting of Ben (Duane Jones, RIP) was a body blow that has lasted with me to this day.

I guess I have a hard time with the reference to Burzum especially. I have never understood Black Metal or Goth; mark me as one of the masses who just see it as a glorification of death rather than a catharsis shining light on life. Vikernes, although mislabeled as a Nazi, still has some tendencies in his philosophy that are more than dangerous and challenging, they just seem so anti-life. I know just enough to be turned off by Black Metal, that is my ignorance.

I guess that’s why punk appealed so strongly to me. There was the same intensity, but moshing and slam dancing however violent, always seemed life affirming. Until of course the record industry killed it dead.

I don't see Burzum or most black metal as 'anti-life' - on the contrary, this is music that affirms life in its vital power. At the same time, there is a recognition that life is a temporary condition - a part of a much larger existence of which death is just as significant a component - more, that all lives collectively fit into a larger puzzle. What Burzum rejected was not life, but the attachment to the condition of living at the expense of a larger picture: living well, dying well, and giving both life and death meaning by contributing something beyond mere existence.

I can see that, I just don't get it personally. I really try so hard to listen to as much music as I can from many different genres. Black Metal just never did it for me. Its not a matter of pretension, after all I am a HUGE Rush fan, and I like most Prog Metal bands like Voivod, Queensryche and Iron Maiden, I mean you can't really get more pretentious than that. It just seems so plodding, indelicate and way too complex for my ear.

Exactly...I mean of course "IMHO" at its utmost symbolic pretense. T.B.S. (not "thats B.S.", but yet "that being said") As a philosophy major (trust me I am not proud of this ) I can say that "grey" is sometimes black and white is sometmes "grey" and in the end we all are no more educated than we were before.

__________________

“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

The irony is that within the metal scene, there's a tendency to criticize bands like Burzum for their technical (though certainly not structural or conceptual) simplicity.

But I think you get to the larger point that people who think of complexity in terms of 'how hard would this be to play' miss - which is that the 'extreme' end of metal doesn't really work like rock music does, rather, it works more like classical or even ambient music in the way it is structured and executed. Rock trains you to 'hear' a certain way, specifically, it trains you to attend to the vocal line as the central arbiter of melody and to hear the 'music' (accompaniment) as harmonic and rhythmic shading. Rock trains the ear to hear dynamics purely in terms of volume (or, perhaps, as in much modern radio rock, as the difference between distorted and 'clean' riffing), and it trains the brain to think structurally of music as a cyclic pattern of verse and chorus. Death and black metal work differently, and in a sense have to be heard differently - otherwise, they sound like a mess.

So the non metal equivelent would be something like Sonic Youth or Glenn Branca, drive Like Jehu...et al?

More like Maeror Tri or Lustmord or some of the darker Robert Fripp ambient releases - or maybe Richard Wagner....

Just like your strawboss theories...go figure.

Do you have anything to add to this conversation, or are you just going to hang around and be a jackass by innuendo?

You are right, my appologies I will, in the future, refrain myself. All I ask is that you please do the same. Thanks.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING.

A brief and incomplete history of my musical miss-education:

I'm torn between whether tightly structured layers of sound clean or distorted, are more life affirming than an improvisationaly structured song. I have heard a lot of improvisational rock (bass, drums, guitars and sometimes keys) and the fact that it is improvisational and still somehow fits together, especially when done live, just pulls me out of myself and into something higher. Classical, although I am not nearly as well versed in it as I should be, does this too but using the opposing method.

I have always been a fan of layers, complexity disguised as simplicity, or covered in noise. It has taken me years to pull apart some compositions to experience the individual pieces of the unified whole. I pitter around with bass and drums but I am no musician, but I do have an excellent ear although many have disagreed with that assertion.

I grew up listening to the Beatles, Motown and Jazz, AOR filled my young life and as I grew into adulthood I discovered modern R&B, Hip Hop and rediscovered album rock, In high school I discovered metal, I stayed away from the glam stuff in favor of heaver slightly more obscure Metal. Sophomore year I think it was I discovered classical, Rush and had my first taste of punk. I had a hand in both "disco" which was of course a code word for "black" and "gay" music, funk and Metal, one of the few odd souls who would let both simultaneously infect him.

I went off the deep end musically when I hit college, snapping up every possible odd CD I could, I discovered Naked Raygun, Big Black, scooped up everything Husker Du and Public Enemy. My tastes always seemed just outside the mainstream, but always had a certain amount of quality.

I met a guy named Carl in college, a big jovial fellow who had at least 3 huge cassette cases full of various metal cassettes (remember those?), from Helloween to Bathory and became once again a convert to heavy metal music in all its various forms. The black metal scene was really just getting off the ground Venom and Bathroy often are cited as early influences, and the speed metal scene was booming thanks to just barley mainstream Mettalica, Anthrax, Overkill and Slayer. And as much as I resisted I eventually became a Metallica fan. Anthrax always appealed to me, they were one of the few metal bands (aside from Venom) that had a sense of humor, and I liked that.

Then I found Tool. Tool, like Rush, changed the way I looked at Rock composition. There were so many good and unheard albums I discovered at that time. There was a CD by a band that a friend of mine and I discovered simultaneously it was Klinefelter by the Nashville band Clockhammer, that album and Opiate as well as solo Bob Mould and Sugar, sustained me through the rough years of college. The two former defied pigeonholing genre-wise and the later two redefined for me the emotional power of rock music.

As I look around here and see some of the stuff other people listen to I sometimes feel like the most mainstream guy on the planet, yet still when I mention most of these bands to acquaintances they look at me like I'm nuts.

OK so what you ask is the point of all this. Aside from the public display of a crucial part of my hidden persona, it gives perspective to the origins of my tastes, the musical nuances I seek out and my need to reach out safely to the extreme within the mainstream. By all accounts I am a musical populist and that goes for film and art in general as well. But I am willing to go beyond that to touch the edges, if not live there. There is still so much left to explore, in life in music in art, love, friendship…. but I digress.

I guess to sum, I look for emotion; it makes for contentious relationships in my life and continuous conflict within myself, which to me is the very essence of life affirmation. Not the denial of death through strong emotional ties but the constant need to experience as much of life as I possibly can before my eventual expiration. Music in all its diverse forms, both extreme and mainstream helps me channel that through my writing. I always write to music, and usually it’s a strange mix of genres depending on the subject matter, which is always based on some level on some emotional pinion.