The Tyranny of Tradition

We are the freak future. We are the new violence.

We are rapidly approaching a new epoch in human history. One marked by the complete destruction of all form and meaning. This formless apocalypse appears to us now in the form of a rapid decay of authentic creativity and a terminal bloodlust for conformity. That will change.

It seems as if the envelope has been pushed to its limits and there is nothing left to do but repackage the old as the new. New technologies once seemed to open an unlimited array of possibility; instead of using this to push beyond the boundaries of mystery and wonder, we have recycled our thoughts and ideas to the point of unintelligibility. The world is a meme of a kitten playing with a ball of yarn.

This horrible present will not last. Eventually, the strings to the puppet show will become so obvious, even the most blind and witless among us won’t be able to delude themselves into thinking the grand illusion is truth. Our culture of zombiehood, our everyday suicideless suicide is unsustainable.

There are no more landscapes to be painted. No more sunsets to be photographed. The art of the future will be the expression of the psychic terror at the core of our being. The repressed animal within us can only be held down so long.

You can see it everywhere you look. We have defiled our economic, political and social lives with empty expressions of the past. We are hell bent on the destruction of our planet, our communities and our physical selves because we have begun to sense the hollowness at their core. We have begun to awaken only to find ourselves imprisoned in a coffin six feet under the ground.

There is only one means to revive our worm-infested corpses from the decay and rot that has become our world. A new destruction. A new violence. Complete and total annihilation of tradition in all of its hideous mental forms.

Even the idea of destruction has been castrated by cliché. People often equate destruction with physical violence. What is rarely understood is that the French Revolution ended the minute the first head fell into a basket. The Russian Revolution was over the moment the Czar and his family had been slaughtered. Physical violence is not a revolutionary act, rather an attempt to mirror the tradition of the consolidation of control that has stymied the best impulses within us.

The destruction being talked about here is much more akin to the idea of rejection. It is a non-stop war on reality. This battle will be fought on a psychic level in every moment. The minute it is given a name it has lost its power. It can only exist in the present and can only be understood in the form of contradiction. We think therefore we are not.

All revolutions begin and end in the mind. They are physically manifested in art but are reified and trivialized in their transformation to the form of commodity. Only when metal was new to us, a creation of our need to rebel against anything and everything, was it real.

At the core of each metalhead is a revolutionary. The moment each of these disparate people discovered their own alienation and connected to the experience of isolation and hopeless embodied in this form of music was the moment that each of us threw off the chains that strangle the thing within us that seeks to live.

The simple classification as heavy metal as a style of music is wrong. Metal is, in its rawest form, an accusation leveled at our societies the failure to treat us as authentic beings. Our moment of awakening was our revolution. But we have let it wither and die by making it a thing to be bought and sold.

Instead of understanding this break with organized, polite society as a revolutionary action, we have simply attempted to return to the moment of our awakening over and over again, never understanding that this myth of eternal return is the single greatest death we could ever experience.

This is why we must destroy heavy metal. Only by destroying it can we live. Only by tearing down its mythos, by defaming its heroes, by annihilating its stagnant form can we bring about a moment-to-moment revolution of the spirit.

Walk away from metal. Right now. In the middle of this sentence, walk away. Use its destruction to power your new life. Pick its body clean of experience and leave its carcass in the past.

We are the freak future. We are the new violence.