In the 1980s, the longest and coldest of cold wars, that of the old against the young, entered into a new and warmer phase. Before that time, it was waged beneath a veil of complacency. The “fronts” on which the “battles” were contested had an uneven advantage. The emergence in the postwar era of “popular culture” and “adolescence” created a youth consumer market that allowed people of college age and younger some sway in the direction of public taste. Not that this threatened the adult authority in any sense, because all media was still a grownups-only dominion. Emerging trends through which to experience this new public culture were dramatically detonated but did little to fundamentally tilt the social balance. Anything could sink into an easy-to-package mold within the certain-to-endure market. This was true even in the 1960s when youth revolt was still more or less underwritten by someone older, whether it was Julian Koenig or Mao Zedong.
Though no revolution took place in the 1980s, there were ominous signs that the adult grip was loosening. The advent of MTV widened the space in which youth could feel more in control of their cultural destiny. It made room, especially after David Bowie publicly shamed them, for cultural expressions that had been largely ignored outside the communities that created them. Hip-hop and more dissonant offshoots of rock found their way into households that would have otherwise restricted them. The advent of the cassette tape perpetuated them further creating, in effect, a grey market of aesthetics, just as VHS tapes did for cheap and prurient visual media.
Something was gradually but not trivially shifting. The cold war had to be intensified. But rather than restrict the media innovations themselves, it focused on the expressions the innovations most encouraged.
The most famous “campaign” of this new phase was the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). Founded in 1985 by Tipper Gore and other wives of Washington, DC elites, the PMRC aimed to arbitrate, as best they could, the consumer content to which young people were exposed. This included Senate hearings, which called Dee Snider, Frank Zappa, and John Denver as witnesses, and the iconic “Parental Advisory” sticker. We all know how this all went down. The hearings fell apart when not even John Denver would concede the Boomer lawgivers their wholesome aims, and the sticker served more like a Pavlov’s bell to the young than as a warning to the ones doling out their allowances. To rehash this comical detour of history at all seems only to serve for entertainment value, but I do so with a concise purpose in mind: to vindicate Tipper Gore.
The victors of this campaign, like the victors of any war, are apt to see Mrs. Gore’s defeat as pre-ordained and cosmic. Wars are often absurd, even on the rare occasions when they are just, but never are they cosmic. Failures in battle are not of the heart, but of the nerve and of strategy. The PMRC and their Senatorial lackeys would never have fought if they didn’t see a worthy enemy: heavy metal. Heavy metal did, in fact, oppose the PMRC in everything it embodied. The trouble was that the PMRC failed to appreciate its enemy and therefore did not know how best to conquer it. They chose to confront it head-on, not realizing that defeat of metal meant first to defeat themselves.
To understand both metal and the PMRC, one must first understand the suburbs. We tend to think of the Clintons as the culminating force of America’s suburbanization, but in fact the Gores were its true articulators. It was a perfection of American identity after more than a century of internal struggle and failures of self-definition. All was in perfect balance upon its carefully zoned landscape. The guiding principle was a simple one: sufficient prosperity encouraged a plausible morality. Plausible, I say, but not demanding. It was something like an easy formula. Something you slipped into like an after-dinner slipper. And something you only noticed when any one element seemed out of place. Not just when a household was below average but when they were far above it: too ostentatious or too reverent for their liking. Not that they often did anything about it as such, doing anything directly went against the moral code. What, then, was the moral code?
Suburbanites learn the moral code as early as possible. Like the place it codifies, it is a stitching together of elements that, when looked at piece by piece, may be incompatible but which are nonetheless forced into perfect balance. Where the national allegiance of the weekday somehow exists beside the spiritual yearning of the weekend. It is of living and letting live within each household but also of respecting the boundaries of civic order in the neighborhood. It is worldly and celestial; individual and communal; principled and pragmatic: the perfect recipe for American adulthood.
This hardly seems problematic in practice. Unless you undertake a costly and drastic intervention, adulthood will discover and overtake you; and you accept it without thought. If you hated the suburbs in your adolescent life, its siren call is much sweeter after having crossed certain milestones and ascended into an actual tax bracket. You settle into the formula, you resolve its internal conflicts with its amenities and petty tasks, and you go to your grave reasonably contented.
But what about those people you may have noticed with a certain ambient sensitivity? Who cannot reconcile the contradictions because there are none, just a fallacy of contradiction? The morals espoused in the suburbs, the more they try to act on them or consider them, appear contingent at best, insincere at worst. Rather than equal with the prosperity, the plausible morality is subservient to it. It is a packaged product. When morality is just another consumer good, moralists go shopping.
No one asks to become a moralist. Who would want the kind of mind that looks at their peers and their families and says No? Moralists are always and everywhere finding reasons to say No to anything. It appears first as an impulse, but it can grow into something more elegant. Moralism is more than just determining which conduct is good and which is bad; it’s about seeing Person A in the mirror and thinking if and how they can become a more refined Person X, or a more disciplined Person 3. It is a creative vocation. No formal education can even hope to constrict it, let alone instill it. That is a journey the moralist must take in isolation; impulse must become instinct. It is a journey that in the present circumstances leads to metal. And like moralism, people think metal is easily understood.
The PMRC and its allies thought they could hector and shame metal out of existence, like spraying Raid on a hornet’s nest. Their brief and very public encounter with metal demonstrated that you cannot hector at something that loud, or shame something that flies far above common conceptions of guilt. They weren’t even attacking the really good metal. True, the hearings took place before Reign in Blood, From Enslavement to Obliteration, Scream Bloody Gore, Altars of Madness, Left Hand Path, Cowboys from Hell, or even Van Halen III were released. So it was ill-advised but not unreasonable that Gore and company mistook Dee Snider and Eldon “El Duce” Hoke to represent the full measure of metal at the time. Though if they’d waited, their defeat would have simply been more assured and more devastating.
The resolute, uncompromising nature of metal only calcifies when set before direct opposition. It feasts on the anger and unease of its declared enemies. Every note and sentiment of metal is a contrary expression of whatever its Other exalts or desires. When the grownups are polite and repressed, and their property is contained and meticulous, metal is vulgar, combustive, and chaotic. This has long been the default divide of the conflict. It peaked in the mid-1990s when Marilyn Manson released Antichrist Superstar, which is not strictly a metal album so much as it is a deliberate curation of everything thought offensive by the adults in good standing at the time—even down to those weird rib-removal rumors. But not even Marilyn Manson could keep up with the metal imagination. In the late-1990s, adults gained in prosperity and confidence, and the suburbs became pretentious and extravagant; so metal, following Helmet and Godflesh, became ascetic and troglodyte. In the 2000s and the 2010s, adulthood became exhausted, the suburbs looked inert and monotonous; so metal shifted to elegance and eclecticism. It gave us the banshee shoegaze of Deafheaven, the hallucinatory adventure novels of Mastodon, and the infernal operas of Lingua Ignota. In this mode, even Low is as metal as Morbid Angel.
Youth has a most ingenious weapon in metal. And metal’s philosophical track, as much as its sound and aesthetic, shares the preoccupations of youth. Not merely because youth and metal both resist restraint, or exalt the sublime and the mysterious and the fantastical with great ease; but that both have an enduring innocence. Innocence is often misconstrued in adult culture. Depending on the adult you ask about it, innocence indicates either an excess of virtue or a lack of worldliness. Neither of these versions of youthful innocence are seen as being especially threatening in the adult mind. Metal, on the other hand, seeks to inflame that innocence into a kind of celebratory stupidity. It never occurs to the adult that virtue finds its greatest amplifier in stupidity. Nothing clips the wings of conscience more injuriously than overthinking. Heavy metal, selectively thoughtful at best, is applied stupidity, affirming rather than annihilating morality.
But how is this so? How does this put the professed guardians of suburbanite purification—Tipper’s kids—on the side opposite to virtue? This is easily rectified by borrowing a conception from Jonathan Swift, who in his most memorable satire on British religious affairs distinguished “nominal” Christians from “real” ones. “To offer at the restoring of [real Christianity], would indeed be a wild project,” Swift wrote:
it would be to dig up foundations; to destroy at one blow all the wit, and half the learning of the kingdom; to break the entire frame and constitution of things; to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the professors of them; in short, to turn our courts, exchanges, and shops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal of Horace, where he advises the Romans, all in a body, to leave their city, and seek a new seat in some remote part of the world, by way of a cure for the corruption of their manners.
The PMRC found every possible horror bubbling underneath this authentic morality and sought to assemble a passable but ultimately defanged morality to counter it. That it failed is hardly a surprise. If Tipper Gore committed any crime, it was that of aggravated grownup-ness: of being practical, sensible, and righteous, but focused ever on the most desired and agreeable result. The suburb is the desired result made manifest. The desired result is always of a material nature. There is sanity in that. Materials can be grasped, and therefore materials can be used. But in order to be grasped at all, materials must be present. God help a material-centric society when those materials are absent or scarce. Not only does it bring added discomfort and irritability to its most committed adherents, but it makes a sizable, not to mention defenseless, vacuum through which opposing sensibilities may slip.
Metal’s crime, quite naturally, is its immateriality. The morally imaginative prowess of metal allows it an adhesiveness to any passing abstraction. Any vivid fantasy, any heightened emotional state, any theoretical fancy is endowed by metal’s performance-enhancing capabilities. The downsides are just as apparent as that of adulthood’s. In addition to being amenable to youth’s stupidity and to its sensitivity toward the correct and erroneous things in life, it is also enabling of its inflexibility and its crudity, no matter in how refined or nuanced a form metal presents itself. Even as it reemerges at an opportune moment, it is not especially cagey, and is prone to inertia where other cultural communities have remained mobile and able refine without putting its spirit at too much risk.
You’d have to be heartless to snicker in contempt at the PMRC’s efforts. I doubt you’d have conducted yourself any differently had you been in their position. A fear of a culture dominated by the imperatives of youth is a valid fear. But even if you can see their efforts as comical in their own time, they are unthinkable in ours. Censorship reigns in some form or other across online mediums, at least on a case-by-case basis. Any blanket attempt at redress through a halfhearted imposition of “high standards” would find its weaknesses exposed with ruthless efficiency. Does this indicate also that metal, at least as perceived on battlefield lines in the PMRC era, is equally obsolete? It does seem that way to people every bit as small-minded as you appear to be; but I wouldn’t be so sure. Old ideas don’t so much as disintegrate under the march of progress as they disperse beyond the pale in hiatus. Metal as we know it is a fragmentation of the moral imagination (and also its most helpful euphemism). America’s love of the practical, its veneration of everything adult, always had a ceiling. Dispersed fragments have a way of coming together when that ceiling crumbles and collapses into dust and rubble upon the foundations that held it aloft. Pretty metal, actually.