You bastards think it’s funny
Lyin’ and thieving all your life
Think all there is, is money
Got your future wrapped-up tight
But just ‘cos you got the power
That don’t mean you got the right-Motörhead, Just Cos You Got the Power, 1987
The 2009 game Brütal Legend from the widely and rightfully beloved Double Fine studios, is the ultimate in Heavy Metal fantasy. It is a work of nostalgia for the underdog days of Metal’s origins from the early 70s to its period of relative commercial decline in the 90s towards the late 2000s before its revival in the age of accelerated mass media in the form of streams and YouTube in the 2010s. At the centre is the character you play as, the roadie Eddie Riggs, voiced by Jack Black (joined by Lita Ford, Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, and Ozzy Osbourne among others). Riggs is an avatar of Metal’s underdog vintage. He is a virtuoso of logistics, personnel organization, repairs, stage and set design, automobile mechanics, armed combat, and—of course—riffs. As a roadie, a stagehand, he is a working man; the backbone of any musical operation he is involved in. And yet it is precisely because of this that he is destined to be unacknowledged for the results of his work. His job is to make value appear for, and as, someone else, the stars of the show. This task gives Eddie a clear sense of pride, even when he can be seen lamenting that he will never be the object of a frontman’s praise. It is in the negation of his recognition that he recognizes his work as a job well done, and that he is truly the greatest roadie ‘in the biz’. His labours do not trouble him so much as their object: the artists he works for. The game opens with Eddie working for a band designed to fuse the most grating elements (at least for a more ‘traditional’ metalhead) of Nü Metal, Pop Punk, and a caricature of certain elements of Metalcore. They have record scratches, embarrassingly Caucasian attempts at rapping, and are presented in contrast to the set Eddie has built for them which is torn aesthetically between Spinal Tap’s Stone Henge and the Snaggletooth/War Pig design of Motörhead’s mascot of the same name(s). Eddie wishes to return to an earlier time when music was “real” (“earlier, like the early seventies), and soon gets his wish in being crushed by his own set and returned to the ‘age of metal’ by the metallic sigil of the fire God Ormagöden , sent to a realm thousands of years before modernity.
In this world, we find our fantasy. Amps are buried in cliffs, stone swords penetrate every hill, 20th century songs from subgenres of metal galore spanning from Ozzy Osbourne to Enslaved, Mastodon, Rob Zombie, and relatively obscure bands like Ostrogoth and Brocas Helm are literally buried within the ground itself. Beer flows from a sacred tree, car parts can be mined fully formed, and everyone dresses like they’re on a Manowar album cover. As you explore this world, which is only ours in the past, you discover that there are Gods, metal Gods, who left all of this for us to discover as our birthright, which has so far remained untouched. Humans as well as demons have failed to uncover these secrets. It is up to you, the working man of the future, armed with an axe, a guitar that ignites with a strum of a chord, to free the metal from the Earth, and to lead humanity to freedom, both against demonic forces that would seek to corrupt them and divide them, as well as against humans who would subvert the gift of metal for profit (represented by the aesthetics of glam or ‘hair’ metal). Eddie has returned to a time in which the power of music is ever more material and efficacious. In this world, Metal raises consciousness and razes buildings. In this world, everything he sees reminds him of the aesthetic domain that makes his experience of this power something worth fighting for. He is out of his world, and yet closer to what he feels the world could and ought to be by his very escape from it. In the age of Metal all contradictions in this world are now obstacles to be negated in the fusion of work and play, of music and mass organization. The gameplay lends itself to this, being part 3rd person hack-and-slash, part real-time strategy, and part rhythm game.
The game in its narrative is thematically in a vague opposition to capital, but its opposition can only be expressed in the attempt to aesthetically transform and deterritorialize away the manifold tensions within Metal itself as a collection of commodified works of art. The game is set in the past, and yet everything within it, from the existence of amplifiers, to the 20th century music, to the omnipresence of t shirts, merchandise booths, beer kegs, cars, denim and leather—all of it screams with the production quality of the mid-late 20th century. As already described, most of these things are explained in their origin as being from a Metal quality imbued within nature itself by a race of Vikingesque (and seemingly, exclusively male) Titans before they ascended to Godhood. Metal is no longer a descendent of the Blues, Black culture, and the historical preconditions of Racial Capitalism. In this framing, all music is now implicitly a descendent of Metal, as is modernity itself. What went ‘wrong’ such that Eddie lives in his future (our present) is never revealed, because this game is not about saving the future, but remaining in a past which has a greater reality. It may even be that, by revealing the technology of Metal latent within nature, that Eddie has partaken in a causal time loop which brings modernity into being from within itself (and it is later revealed that he is a child of parents from this very past he is cast back into). From this past where all of the commodities of Metal are secured yet extracted from their commercial reduction to mere commodities as natural artefacts of a divine manufacture, Eddie can now fight against the encroachment of capital as a cheapening of the Metalness or Metality of nature. He frees the Headbangers, the outcast youth condemned to toil in mines, he organizes them to defeat the Glam Metal warlord General Lionwhyte in what the latter calls a “labour dispute”, and the mines themselves eventually become an employee-owned cooperative. The workers work for Metal first, not for money or to avoid boredom, and so the entire world becomes a musical tour, a nomadic festival of sonic war, taking place in an age of natural abundance of all that Metal’s people could want. In this world, there are no farms, breweries, sweatshops for hats, pins, patches, jeans, leather, and t shirts. The Metal Gods are in their heaven, never disturbed, and constantly rewarding you with the raised lighters of their favour. In the age of Metal, all is essentially right with the world; and Eddie Riggs now lives in an album cover from the early 1970s as he so desired in the game’s opening cinematic.
Aesthetically, the game compels me to nostalgia for the time of its own release, when I would indulge in the fantasies of Metal itself from Eddie’s own position (albeit at the age of a preteen, obsessed with the cringe-inducing self-seriousness Manowar and the beloved old occult vibes of Ozzy Osbourne). That I have been obsessively replaying it recently has taken my Metal nostalgia to a numerically higher power, and it forces me to wonder what the aesthetic fantasy of Metal truly is. To reiterate: Eddie Riggs escapes the world, and yet he escapes our world by moving deeper into its ground. All the trappings of our world which he finds pleasure in consuming are preserved, and he marinades himself in them just as he did in modernity. Like Eddie, I wear band shirts and have a ‘battle jacket’, a jacket with various attached pins and patches predominantly of Metal bands and associated iconography. A battle jacket is a source of individuality in its composition and assortment, a source of pride. Yet this pride obscures or at least is often unwilling to confront the fact that what merchandise does is less of a signifier of commitment to an aesthetic or conceptual ideal, and ultimately more of an act of free advertisement. Battle jackets seek a fight with the world and instead function as a billboard for musicians who today exist—wherever it is still possible to attempt such a career as a working-class person in the age of the dismantlement of the welfare state—as jingle-writers, as a touring t-shirt distributor of which they are both the band members and the brand ambassadors. Metal, due to the proliferation of relatively accessible music technology and internet distribution, is now for everyone. And yet it has only achieved this universality in allegiance with the world it sought to do ‘battle’ with. Manowar have never been ‘fighting the world’, nor have any band through music alone. They aren’t fighting because they are simply playing songs, and Brütal Legend aims first and foremost to reconcile this abyss at the heart of Metal performance.
Metal may sharpen its political tongue lyrically, as welcome efforts from artists such as Ashenspire, Panopticon, Feminazgul, and Dawn Ray’d have shown. Their aesthetic, escapist ecstasies also confront us with the failure of the autonomy of Metal as a work of art, in that our escape too is only illusory. Lovers of the music can unite to push fascist bands from venues, but we are only appealing to the personal moralities and commercial whims of proprietors, to one aspect of the economy in which Metal is a part. Everyone rightfully and thankfully can partake of Metal now, and all power to them, yet the mediation of this access is also that which denies us the ability to grasp this enjoyment as a collective material reality in which we can play a deeper part. Music may grant us individual enjoyment, even when it does so in the guise of a collective chorus of appreciation or the mosh pit of a habitual organizing of our emotional embodiment. However, this enjoyment qualitatively different from empowerment. The impulse to build the scene of our escape, the Heavy Metal Utopia, is obstructed by the poverty which impedes all counterculture for the working masses. Namely, the regime of private property, in which the mythology of the will which implants itself in objects is recognized by law as a narrative of legal personhood, in which objects become things and masks of personae become their owners, negates itself. Property, as the gift of a state which honours the contract of ownership, and holds the sole power to do so by virtue of its coercive force, exists only on the condition of its total absence. There can be no counterculture today under the now unchallenged hegemony of private property, because under this regime the fact is that nobody owns anything. The communities that make the shows what they are have control of neither venue nor platform nor resource, and this poverty of control over the aesthetic and material dimension of the ‘scenes’ becomes quantitatively and qualitatively closer to absolute truth every year. It is hard to escape the creeping conclusion that as metalheads we can only express ourselves as consumers, we can only vote with our wallets when we can (and this risks total detachment from the very things we consume which nourish us in this very identity as a ‘metalhead’). Our power is liquid, enmeshed in the flows of a despotic reign of capital, and so our Metal is the poisonous reactivity of quicksilver in the veins of our material reality.
Unlike Eddie Riggs, we have no birthright to the world defused of its tribulations in the simultaneous persistence of its treats, in which our work will love us back in divine affirmation through the aesthetic domain of music. We are faced only with our enjoyment and what it presupposes. We are haunted by the possibility of the ironic recognition that our musical endeavours are not enough, and our genre-obsessive remnants of archival taxonomy correspond to just as much of the organization of commodities than communal events of expression engendered in the rapture of song. The terror is that it is just music and all that is Metal has melted into the stale air of commercial equivalence. The fantasy of Metal is that we can be more than merely representatives of commercial art-products. The Heavy Metal Utopia in its impulse is a response to the trauma of labour and of mass marketized culture. The tips of Tony Iommi’s fingers were severed by industry in such a manner that they made his escape from the mills both possible and immanently desirable. Manowar represent the farce of this fantasy, what is the Triumph of Steel compared to the historical forces which have made such a metal ubiquitous to the point of banality? The autonomy of Metal in relation to these dialectical tensions is itself part of the same illusions of its own self-importance. The music of our times may speak in many modes upon which we cast our taxonomic nets in search of genre, and at various volumes, but its voice is one in the hegemony of the relations of the capitalist present.
Happy Hour at Hippel's 