First and foremost I wish to all who care to read me to have a happy and prosperous new year, one full of health, personal and professional success.
This time it is a matter of sociology and music that preoccupies me. Death Metal music, no less. A genre that arose, flourished and now is very popular in the countries of the Scandinavian Peninsula.
In the years that followed the first wave of the social revolution of the mid 60s – mid 70s theese countries continued to change rapidly. They turned, little by little but steadyly, from agricultural and livestok breeding to industrial, capitalist economies. The rise of incomes along with the modernising of every-day life brought about new morals and social habits that these traditional societies found it difficult to embrace at first. The joinig of the old and the new cultures was hasty, even clumsy at times. This lead to a more “fresh”, looser view of things, one that introduced the prism of “if I’m OK and having a good time, all is OK” in their lives. Sex was totaly demystified, althought theese societies had been traditionaly puritan, part because of being Luthiran. Family bonds loosend and having children outside a marriage became a habbit, despite the fact that those people had been long content with strict patriarchical structures. Acceptance of doings formerly unspeakable of, such as drug abuse, abortions and homosexuality was becoming fast a prerequisite for one to be considered “modern”. Consequently followed a rise in alcoholism, divorces, domestic violence and other such side-effects.
At the same time, and because of the modernisation, scores of people from the countryside of those counries started to move towards metropolitan areas. Theese people were very particular about their long established beliefs, of how things should be done, and habits. From the young among those people came forth a wave of “opposition” against what they thougt to be ill-conceived modernisation. They felt they should preserve their ways at all costs, part because it would help them not to be absorbed in the big city and part because they believed that theirs was the right way to to live. It was the super-conservative ideologies where those teenagers found shelter and comfort, as long those beliefs have comforted the angry and those who do not quite fit in. Along with conservatism came racism, xenophobia, violence and an ansatiable desire to go against the current, to fight back the winds of change, to put oneself in a head to head fight with the rest of his own people.
It was that anger, with the help of a chemicaly altered teen spirit, that gave birth to the bastard child of Noise and Scream that goes by the name Death Metal. Metal is by definition angry, provocative and full of opposition but this was something else. It was the collective conscience of a small society-inside-society trying to say as loud a possible “we are still here, alive, and we do not want to live like you, we were fine the way things were”. It is a music meant to be listened to loud, meant to help you let loose the screams you have long kept inside. The rythm is so fast you are almost unable to keep track of, the drums beat loud and the lyrics speak of evil, oppression, doom and of course death. In a manner of speaking it is the purpose of these hearings to provide the final drop for the bucket to overflow, so as to say. It fills you up with so much hate for everything that combined with your own negative feelings, in the case of those people a lot of them, leads you to the point of no return.
No music is by definition evil. This is a fact. But in the case discussed here music has not been of use in order to heal but to provoke ill passion. To heighten insignificant differences and estrange people. In a society where the chains keeping things together were constantly loosing links, Death Metal was the heavy, spiked chain that would hold the few self-proclaimed martyrs, keepers of the fine-old-ways by their account, together.
Sands Of Time, by Rolex
Janus Of January 
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