Lamentations of the Flame Princess Presents
Impure Metal:
How Underground Heavy Metal
Became Mainstream Heavy Music
A pdf version of this article is available for download here.
Discuss Impure Metal on the LotFP message board!
Words Are Not Just Words
I know this sounds a little cliché
But I don't give a damn anyway
So let this be a lesson to you
Though we leave we are never through
If you help to keep metal alive
The underground will always survive
I pledge to keep it alive
I promise metal will thrive
I swear myself to the cause
I'll teach all the metal laws
Razor "Iron Hammer"
Lessons? Causes? Laws? In today's world, the lines Dave Carlo wrote seem to be quaint relics from a bygone era in which the words "heavy metal" had a meaning that transcended music and embraced an ethos. Almost every time you placed a record on a turntable or a cassette in a deck during the 1980s, some singer was belting out lyrics targeting a whole host of enemies. Battles, wars, and violent acts were filtered through a heavy-metal prism and became tales designed to rally denim and leather troops for an approaching cataclysmic confrontation that would banish posers from the face of the earth, shatter the societal chains wrapped around individuals from birth or fundamentally alter the way that the world worked. Metal was not merely a genre of music, but an antagonistic philosophy seeking changes in the status quo:
I always understood rock as a form of revolution of young people against the establishment. Though nowadays, of course, it's one big commercial machine, deep within me the spirit is there. I can't deny it, because I experienced it like that when I was a kid.1
Tom G. Warrior's sentiments were not always explicitly expressed by thrashing, banging, and screaming metalheads; however, his belief that "rock [was] a form of revolution" was buried somewhere in the mix whenever heavy metal blared from stacks at shows or headphones at home.
In fact, the "underground" spoken of in "Iron Hammer" was not a concept magically appearing from nowhere without any antecedents, but a term with a particular history that dovetailed with the position metallers occupied within the wider societies in which they lived. Although there are numerous interpretations of the word's meaning when it is employed in an oppositional context, each one is a variation on the idea that an underground movement is "separate from prevailing social or artistic environments, and often exercises a subversive influence."2 This definition is broad and can cover everything from the high-brow pranks of a performance artist to the ham-handed plays of unreconstructed Marxists--but the origins of the term stem from two historical events.
When Germany rapidly conquered France, the Third Reich believed that the absence of a concerted counterattack was a sign of the country's resignation to its fascist fate. Thousands of men and women, however, refused to meekly line up behind the puppet government the Nazis installed and formed a fragmented Free French state that resisted the German occupiers and native collaborators. Secrecy was essential to the resistance, and an elaborate network of safe houses, cryptic codes and alter egos were utilized to frustrate the coercive arms of the authorities. This collective effort to fashion a new nation within the boundaries of the corrupted state came to be called "the underground," because the fascists forced freedom fighters to conduct their operations in a covert world that existed below the surface of everyday life.
After the colonial war in French Indochina inherited by the United States became the Vietnam War, a complex protest movement coalesced around various anti-establishment impulses that embraced and expanded the notions associated with the designation "underground." Newspapers like The Barb in Berkley, California, and The Paper in Lansing, Michigan, played a central role in the rebellions of the 1960s and were referred to as the "underground press" to distinguish the publications from staid mainstream periodicals that refused to publish material deemed to be detrimental to the war effort and the morality of Americans. Articles extolling the liberating effects of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll ran next to screeds clamoring for social justice, attacking consumerist materialism and condemning the war machine in the underground papers; and out of this psychedelic printed stew, a variety of underground movements emerged that wanted to return to a barter-based agricultural economy, undermine the power of the military and big business, muster an outlaw army made up of freed prisoners or reconfigure human consciousness with LSD.
By the late 1960s, similarly inclined undergrounds had arisen in the industrialized countries of the West and provided some of the foundational material for what would become the first heavy metal band to ever exist. There is little doubt that Black Sabbath was a unique group that pioneered a dystopian and discordant sound which made the tame bohemian strains of The Velvet Underground appear soft, smooth and decadent; however, the fact that the band's lyrics were a direct outgrowth of the ideological underground of the sixties receives much less attention. But Black Sabbath's scathing anti-militaristic anthems ("War Pigs"); bleak fables about technological hells ("Into the Void"); weed-inspired odes to freedom ("Sweet Leaf"); and revolutionary dreams of peace and love ("Children of the Grave") were subjects ripped from the headlines of the underground press and continue to reverberate with a distinctive metallic clang today.
Yet many music journalists lauding the flowering of countercultural rock believed that Black Sabbath were benighted barbarians who traded in brutish power instead of refined art, and a deluge of derogatory words rained down like soot from a Birmingham mill on the heads of the band. So, at its very inception, heavy metal was presented as a medium fit for maladjusted miscreants who deserved derision when the genre could not be ignored. These haughty attacks only strengthened the folkways imparted to heavy metal by its working-class cultural origins, and by the time the phrase "The New Wave of British Heavy Metal" served notice to the world that the genre was not going to disappear, metal was the musical form for the downtrodden and disenfranchised who refused to break under the pressure applied by the authorities.
Gamblers, rakes and outlaws were protagonists in the yarns spun out by Motörhead; convicts, harlots and delinquents populated the back alleys where Iron Maiden lurked; and Witchfinder General chronicled the wanderings of wastrels who lived for the rush of sex, drugs and music, while Saxon was being hassled by the "Strong Arm of the Law" that Judas Priest was busy breaking. The dark and depressive notes about human existence also remained a lyrical staple, and the horror of nuclear warfare (Raven "Seek and Destroy"); the moral bankruptcy of modern civilization (Judas Priest "Savage"); the vapid venality of the media (Motörhead "Talking Head"); and political corruption financed by businessmen (Legend "Frontline") were all topics heavy metal bands touched on in songs.
The music itself also became a subject during the first half of the 1980s, and titles such as "Heavy Metal Mania," "Heavy Metal Thunder," "Metal Daze," "Heavy Metal Rules," and "Heavy Metal is the Law" began to appear on the back of record covers. These paeans to the power of the weighty chords were not only signs of a thriving genre, but also evidence that the music formed the basis of a culture that was hostile to mainstream conceptions of aural entertainment. Bands slowly started to identify enemies within the music industry, and popular bands capable of producing insipid hit singles became the adversaries metalheads sought to eliminate with their strafing and searing sounds. Although industry-approved trends and fads assumed various guises during the decade, obstinate headbangers continued to scoff at the posers, prostitutes and pimps that presented safe, radio-friendly fare as the future of music.
Disparaged, derided, and dismissed as misfits with no prospects in the industry or life, metalheads appropriated the term "underground" to mark themselves as brothers and sisters united in opposition to mainstream society. The haphazardly constructed definition of what it meant to be underground, however, was not completed until the fury and force of heavy metal was ratcheted up to feverish levels by the bands who considered themselves to be thrashing maniacs. There is no need to trot out evidence underscoring the anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian leanings of thrashing heavy metal due to the numerous examples readily available, but the importance of the amorphous ideology of the underground was conveyed in some out-of-place lyrics contained in Tankard's "Acid Death:"
Fight for the nation underground
Dyin' and killin' so hard tonight
We break up the wall of sound
The end is near we will fight
The unifying principle of the underground was lifted from the do-it-yourself credo and contrarian conventions of hardcore punk, but thrashers made it all their own to highlight their marginal position within the wider confines of the music industry and polite society. Tankard's adversarial lines were one of many verses that vaguely outlined the parameters of the underground without ever spelling out what it meant, but certain components were as clear as the shards of glass littering the floor wherever drunk thrashers congregated.
Almost nobody writing about heavy metal is concerned with such fundamental matters though, and the majority of journalists are content to prattle on about the underground with little thought of what it actually means. The only serious attempt to define the concept was undertaken by the sociologist Deena Weinstein who used Dante's Divine Comedy as a model to claim that paradise represented widespread commercial acceptance and success; hell the underground where "music...too extreme sonically, lyrically or both to even attract a mainstream audience" resided; and purgatory the twilight regions located between the two poles of popularity.3 However, while heavy metal was a genre of music that certainly welcomed the freedoms associated with material wealth, the shifting of units was not the overriding goal of the musicians cranking their amps up to insane levels.
In "All the Aces," a song attacking the money-minded "parasites" who latched onto Motörhead and had a decisive effect on the early career of the band, Lemmy Kilmister proudly proclaimed: "The only thing I know is playing rock 'n' roll / I'm not a businessman / I'm just in a good time band," bringing a conflict masked by contracts and public relations agencies out into the open and providing an example of what really separated metal from the mainstream. Money was necessary for the metal to flow, but many exponents of heavy metal were exasperated by the grasping nature of the industry. After many years and labels, Joey DeMaio saw this struggle in stark terms and compared it to the war indigenous peoples waged against the predatory plans of politicians and businessmen:
I mean the natives got fucked again. It's just the way it is. I just don't understand it. It really sucks. You've got native people who live with a sense of atmosphere and feeling in their heart; then you've got all these business types who come in and fuck everybody over. That's the way it is in the music business, in the whole world. It's the people doin' battle with all these other motherfuckas who think they're going to create fashions and trends.4
And as thrash metal encountered the "commercial machine" Tom G. Warrior identified as a spirit-sapping force, numerous bands and fans rejected the scramble for cash the industry encouraged and championed ideals rooted in their common underground identity.
For example, when Dave Carlo venerated "the metal laws" and swore fidelity to "the cause," he was not making rhetorical statements--but airing convictions that paved the career path Razor followed. In the liner notes of Violent Restitution, Carlo included a "special message to our fans," informing listeners that the barbs of critics had failed to diminish his "drive" and announcing the creation of a self-financed label named Fist Fight. Razor had made no money from record deals in the past and the hard and costly financial ropes Carlo had been taught enabled the band to begin to make a "bit of money," but he was not wallowing in wealth and not inclined to do so:
[W]e're far from rich. We don't care. We do this because we love the music and for no other reason. As long as there are people who want our albums, we'll be making them. We don't have a major deal, we don't have mega management, we haven't been offered a decent tour proposal throughout our career, but we're having a hell of a lot of fun and we don't kiss anyone's ass, ever.
But by the time Razor released their next album, it appeared as if there were no people who wanted to hear the band's songs. Roadrunner declined to release Shotgun Justice due to the allegedly poor sales of Restitution and had begun turning its attention to other fields of music. The refusal of executives to stay the course with Carlo's band, however, was not an isolated incident--but merely one event out of many that signaled the beginning of a larger industry-wide movement that would change how metal was bought, sold, distributed and defined in the mainstream and the underground.