Does Death Metal possess an ideology?
When heavy metal evolved in response to the hippie culture around it, it took darker themes to a new intensity and warned of apocalypse. Fifteen years later, speed metal bands were wailing about armageddon. But as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is different from George Orwell’s “1984,” death metal had accepted that the apocalypse would be a whimper, and not a bang, and that its progress was inevitable. This paranoid and soul-wrenching logic created an immediate need to overcome the superstition and self-pity of a complacent age. in consequence, as if approaching Nietzsche’s “abyss” and going under instead of over, these bands have embraced a philosophy of nihilism and a delight in the intellectual, sensual and spiritual extremes of a dying age. From this, much can be learned about a human future: nihilism frees us from much of our fear by confronting it head-on. Death metal bands have created an epic change in american subculture from one of morality to one of existential self-asser
