Beneath the Remains:
Keith Kahn-Harris
A Journey into the Known
'Coming out'
Eastern Europe
Underground extreme metal
Metal was always 'out'...
The desire to know more...
Extremity
The Underground
I
1989: a key year in metal
Not a sell out - but a 'becoming known and knowable'
Early 90s black metal
Getting to know metal in the noughties:
Staying 'kvlt'
The 'death of the unknown'
How should we mourn it?
My generation
Do we really know more?
The challenge of knowing the other remains the same
[NB: this is the rubric for the workshop task that accompanied the original presentation on 9 November 2009]
Think back to a time when you were first exposed to a particular subculture, scene or previously secret world. Did it happen face-to-face, ‘virtually’, some other way? How old were you, what else was happening in your life and how did these factors influence your experience? Was the experience exciting, bewildering, scary, dull or something else? Did the experience inspire you to further involvement? What are your feelings about the subculture now?
Now try and capture this experience. Using art, writing or another creative medium try and produce some record of your first experience with this subculture.
Activity:
Presented at arttransponder project 'Beneath the Remains' 9 November 2009
This is a picture of me aged 18.
I was born in London in 1971, to a middle class Jewish family. I attended an elite private school and went on to study at Cambridge University. I was born and raised to entitlement, to privilege. By the time I was born my parents had long ago left behind the insecurity with which they grew up, in the post-war, post-holocaust, cold war era. I grew up with the expectation that I could do anything I wanted when I grew up. More than that, I grew up feeling that I was at the centre for the world: I spoke the global language, English; I lived in a city to which the world flocked; I was part of a western, Anglophone ‘civilization’ whose ‘culture’ was spreading over the world.
In 1989 I turned 18. My stepping onto the threshold of adulthood coincided with a set of far reaching changes in the world in which we live. In the following reflections I want to interrogate some of these changes. In referring at points to my own story, I aim to bring out how the changes that 1989 set in train were and are changes that occurred not simply on the level of the global, but effected the horizons of expectations that all of us lived within.
I have always been intrigued by the term ‘coming out’. Applied most often to the moment when gays and lesbians publicly acknowledge their sexuality for the first time, it also applies more generally to the process of becoming visible, becoming known. That process is analogous to becoming adult. To become an adult is to enter the public sphere; from being ‘locked away’ in school, the newly mature adult enters a world of work and of public visibility.
At the same time as I was coming out into the world as a (heterosexual) adult, two new worlds were opening themselves up to me. One was the world of underground extreme metal music. A scene that was previously largely the preserve of a small elite group of tape traders and underground fans was coming out to be more widely known. The other world that was being opened up was that of Eastern Europe and the then Soviet Union. States whose populations and cultures had been insulated from the west were rapidly opening up, both to travel and to outside scrutiny.
What connects these seemingly highly distinct forms of coming out? In order to address this question I will look more closely into both underground metal and Eastern Europe.
I made this presentation for the first time on 9 November 2009 - the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall set in train a process in which I came to 'know' Eastern Europe...
Being asked to contribute to the 'Beneath the Remains' project, which was organised by the Romanian Vald Moriaru, made me remember when I first encountered someone from that country. In the summer of 1991, as a twenty year old just about to begin university, I spent a few weeks travelling by train around Europe. Most of the time I spent in predictable places like Amsterdam, Barcelona and Paris, but at the end of the trip I visited Budapest. The city was then probably the most traveller-friendly in Eastern Europe and it provided me with an easy way of dipping my toe into the new world that had recently opened up.
After a few days sight-seeing I left the city bound eventually for Paris, on a train that had come from Bucharest. I shared my second class cabin with a Romanian couple and their 2 small daughters. They spoke no English so we couldn’t chat but we did exchange pleasantries and I gave the kids some sweets. When it came time for lunch the family carefully shared out glass bottles of water, bread, cheese and sausage – all unbranded – from a wicker basket.
This is what the man looked like....
The man, probably in his mid-30s, was dressed in a kind of beige safari suit, as worn by Roger Moore in 1970s Bond films, and sported a luxuriant moustache. The wife and kids were dressed neatly in faded pastel-coloured dresses and cardigans, the sort that old women wear in the UK. How representative this mode of dress was of Romanian fashion as a whole I have no idea, but it certainly came across like something out of a time warp and confirmed every cliché about the Eastern bloc as a place where time had stopped.
Such clichéd images are pretty much all I had of Eastern Europe for most of my youth. Even though I lived in cosmopolitan London I never met anyone from Russia or Eastern Europe (save the occasional Yugoslavian). I never ate Eastern European or Russian food. I was only vaguely aware of the diversity that the artificial term ‘Eastern Europe’ itself hid, let alone of the manifold nations inside the USSR. The Soviet bloc was somewhere encountered through the news and perhaps through dissident literature (we read Solzhenitsyn at school).
By 1991 my ignorance was finally starting to be undermined. In Budapest I found a city that had already adopted the familiar trappings of home. After dutifully trying goulash I went on to eat in MacDonalds. After the museums and the relics of the Habsburg era I bought the just-released Metallica album from a well-stocked record shop.
Romania though was still the wild east. If Hungary’s transition from communism had been peaceful, the fall of Ceauşescu had filled the screens in 1989. Subsequent TV reports on Romanian orphanages and the like had only cemented my image of the country as broken and savage. So the time-warped, dowdy family on the train seemed to me to be escaping into something better. And they probably were. Not to underestimate my ignorance and reliance on clichés as a young man, nothing I have read since has shaken my impression of the sheer awfulness of the Ceauşescu period and the hardship of the subsequent post-transition period.
But I was not the only British person to have a cliched view of Eastern Europe. Here we see an early 1990s sketch by the British comedia Harry Enfield that both reinforces and satirises the image of Eastern Bloc people as ignorant yokels...
Since 1991 my knowledge of Eastern European and Eastern Europeans has grown exponentially. In the UK, a place where, with the exception of some small post-war émigré communities, Eastern Europeans were largely unknown, Poles, Lithuanians and others now form substantial and highly visible minorities. The enlargement of the EU has meant a dramatic influx of various Eastern European nationalities. If meeting an Eastern European was a rare event for me growing up, it is a commonplace occurrence today.
And of course some of these are Romanians....
This is a picture of Emma - the Romanian I know best. She is very far from the family I met on the train in 1991. In her late 20s, she is settled in the UK and speaks fluent English. She is well-travelled, having worked in Israel and elsewhere. Her boyfriend is a Zimbabwean refugee from Mugabe’s regime, whom she met through her Petecostalist church. She dresses in ways that are neither anachronistic nor remarkable. She works as the nanny for a friend’s daughter but has a degree and shows every intention of upward mobility. She comes from a small village – I have to admit not knowing where in Romania – and has brought us back gifts of wild honey, but cannot see herself going back.
Emma is no more representative of Romania than the family I met on the train. What she is representative of is the ‘knowability’ of Eastern European. Her background may be very different from mine, but her current reality is entirely within the mainstream of contemporary London life. There are no barriers to getting to know her beyond the reticence of big-city life. Her Romanianness barely signifies.
In 'coming out' , in becoming ‘known’ post-1989, the countries and citizens of the former Soviet bloc lost much of their otherness and strangeness to those of us in ‘the west’. Of course, this ‘knownness’ is highly partial, even perhaps merely a simulacrum of knowing. The stereotype of the oppressed, downcast Eastern European is replaced by a more varied but still stereotypical set of images: the Polish plumber, the Albanian gangster, the trafficked prostitute, the Russian oligarch. Otherness as exoticness is eroded – these are mundane stereotypes, reinforced in everyday encounters in the west, rather than ones that emphasise the mystery of those trapped behind the wall.
What hasn’t changed though is the fundamental position of those of us in The West as having the power to shape what is known. Despite the weekend trips to Prague and the Polish nannies, we have little more knowledge than we had before. In fact, the lack of mystery, the sheer mundanity of the Eastern European in today’s West serves to close down the possibilities for knowledge.
The knowledge that Eastern Europeans now ‘look just like us’, that you can find a McDonalds in Bulgaria, is corrosively reassuring: there is no need to truly know as everyone is the same. No, of course the situation in Eastern European countries is far from being simply victimhood from ‘cultural imperialism’, but the superficial trappings of global homogeneity are superficial proof of its reality.
In short then, post-1989 Eastern Europe was liberated into a state of knownness, but a state of knownness that was in many ways as limited as its previously unknown state.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, another world was 'coming out', becoming known to me...
Unlike Eastern Europe metal was always been known, always present, always asserting itself into my consciousness. Whether you date the genesis of metal in the work of the late 60s Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf or Iron Butterfly, metal was always ‘big’ music - big audiences, big sounds, big imagery. By the 1980s metal was one of the most commercially successful musics on the planet, with bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest inspiring fanatical devotion in their admirers. Metal could not be ignored in the 1980s. Maybe you loved it, hated it, feared it or laughed at it but the bombast of its artistic vision rarely inspired apathy. Metal in the 1980s seemed to be so ‘out’, so ‘in your face’ as to be incapable of surprise or mystery. Yet under the surface of metal’s ubiquity in the 80s, something very different and much more surprising was emerging.
I was first exposed to this subterranean current in metal via a late night radio show. As a teenager I was a regular listener, like many British music fans at the time, to BBC Radio One’s late night John Peel Show. Peel, who died in 2004, made it his mission to expose the listener to genres otherwise neglected by other radio shows. He introduced generations to musics as various as punk, West African highlife, Jamaican raga and acid house.
Here's a picture of Peel...
. In the late 80s he began to play the emerging genre of grindcore and to commission specially recorded sessions by some of its key bands. Grindcore, developed by British bands such as Napalm Death, Carcass and Bolt Thrower and US acts such as Repulsion and Siege, is a manic collision between the heaviness of metal and the speed and radicalism of punk. The most extreme exponent of grindcore at the time was Birmingham's Napalm Death.
Here's a picture of them...
Napalm Death's early albums ‘Scum’ (1987) and ‘From Enslavement to Obliteration’ (1988) were packed with short songs (the shortest being the 1 second long ‘You Suffer’) that sped by in a blur of ‘blast beats’, impenetrably distorted guitar and the absurdly low grunted vocals of Lee Dorrian. This is what they sounded like in their prime ('The Kill'/'Prison Without Walls'/'Dead' taken from their 1987 Peel session)...
It’s hard to overstate how extraordinary and strange grindcore sounded in my bedroom – and the bedrooms of others like me – in the late 80s. The music’s density and complexity, the incomprehensible vocals, the nightmarishly evocative song titles such as ‘Prison Without Walls’: there were no easily identifiable cues or reference points for it. Grindcore appeared unknowable, utterly distinct both from the metal music whose distorted guitars it superficially recalled, and from the punk rock whose radicalism it seemed to recollect.
My exposure led me to want to know more
Grindcore didn’t come from nowhere of course, even if it might seem to have done for a sheltered middle class Jewish boy. It was the fruit of a cross-fertilisation between the metal and punk undergrounds that had developed since the late 1970s. At the time as early 1980s metal was coming into its pomp, a tight-knit, globally diffuse set of musicians and activist were setting out to create a form of metal that would be purified by punk’s cleansing, self-righteous fire.
There were two principle elements to this 'revolution'...
Metal may have always seemed to its detractors to be an outrageous and over the top musical form, but since its genesis in the late 60s metal bands had always adhered more or less to conventional song structures (verses, choruses and the like) and to the dictates of melody and harmony. Underground metal pushed metal beyond the conventional, to an extremist (‘fundamentalist’ in the words of sociologist Deena Weinstein) rejection of melody, harmony and song structure, in favour of noise, power, speed and ugliness. It was underground bands such as Venom, Bathory and Hellhammer who in the early 1980s stripped metal down into blasts of distorted fury, encapsulated in imagery which embraced all the accusations of diabolism that had ever been levelled at metal. It was underground bands such as Death and Possessed that developed death metal out of trash metal in the mid-1980s. It was underground bands such as Norway’s Mayhem that were to develop black metal in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And of course it was underground bands that developed grindcore.
Here's a picture of Venom - th eband many consider to have started it all off...
‘Underground’ is a highly loaded term, redolent of secrecy, subversion and transgression. The underground was a global network, held together by letter writing and to a much lesser extent live performance. With only a few thousand activists worldwide for much of the 1980s, there were few substantial local scenes for this kind of music. Nor were there many underground metal bands signed to conventional record labels. Underground metal was circulated by trading demo and live tapes, discussed in small-circulations and talked up by networks of correspondence. The scene was tight-knit but open to the participation of those who were determined enough. Indeed, there were Eastern European bands contributing to the underground, such as Hungary’s Tormentor and Czechoslovakia’s Krabathor, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here's a picture of one of Krabathor's pre-1989 demo covers...
The underground was largely invisible to those who did not know about it. It took effort to get involved, to discover its institutions. For some of those, like myself, who were outside the underground, to hear grindcore on the John Peel show was to be exposed to a mysterious, unknown world. I began a slow process of investigating this unknown world, a process that culminated in 2006 with the publication of my book Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge.
At the same time though, the very fact of being exposed to grindcore via a radio show that was, for all Peel’s commitment to the esoteric, not an underground show, was a sign that by the late 1980s the isolation of the underground had been substantially breached. In the late 1980s, bands that had previously only circulated their music via demos and tape trading, started to get signed by record labels, some of which were started specifically for underground extreme metal music. 1989 was a key year in this regard. In that year I found Morbid Angel’s ‘Altars of Madness’ in my local – not particularly well stocked – record shop....
And here's what they looked and sounded like around that time, playing my favourite song from the album 'Chapel of Ghouls'...
1989 also saw Sepultura’s breakthrough release ‘Beneath the Remains’, which transformed them from a marginal Brazilian death metal band to an act that would go on to global success in the 1990s. Here's what they looked like...
And here's my favourite song from the album, 'Mass Hypnosis'...
Between 1988 and 1990, other pioneering debut releases by bands such as Entombed, Obituary and Deicide could now be accessed through the conventional infrastructure of the music industry. Once extreme metal could be found in record shops the insulated character of the underground changed – it was no longer unknowable.
Now I am not arguing that when underground metal bands began to release albums on record labels that they had somehow ‘sold out’ and that extreme metal was hereafter creatively dead. What I am arguing is that by the late 1980s the underground became part of a complex continuum in which commercially successful metal bands and obscure demo bands were linked together far more closely than they had ever been before. The process of coming to know the underground became a simpler matter than ever before, in which buying a Metallica album could gradually lead the neophyte metaller to much more obscure bands.
From the late 1980s, underground metal was irrevocably transformed in that from then on, extreme metal genres and scene that emerged quickly became known more and more widely.
The early 1990s Norwegian black metal scene developed a new - Satanic and mysanthropic - form of extreme metal. This development was accompanied by a wave of church burnings, suicides and murders. Varg Vikernes, whose project Burzum was a highly innovative sound in black metal, celebrated the church burnings on the cover of his 1993 album 'Aske'...
Vikernes was later convicted of the murder of Euronymous, guitarist of the seminal Norwegian Black Metal band Mayhem. Mayhem's 1994 album 'De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas' is a classic of the genre...
As black metal developed, it became an established part of the global metal scene. From its violent - in music and in deed - beginnings, forms of black metal emerged that corresponded more conventionally to metal's flamboyant and theatrical image. Here's one of the most popular black metal bands, the UK's Cradle of Filth...
Even if you have never heard any black metal, for even the most casual music fan black metal is unlikely to be an unknown entity. As with the emancipation of Eastern Europe, this knownness is likely to be a stereotypical, but it is a knownness nonetheless.
The internet has accelerated the process of underground metal becoming known at knowable. If today’s teenager were to hear grindcore music for the first time on the radio, like I did in the late 1980s, they would only need to spend a brief time online to ‘discover’ this world. Underground metal may or may not be any more popular than it was in the late 1980s, but it is far more accessible. The difference between underground and mainstream today is only between the potentially knowable and the known.
The internet is such a comprehensive resource that in 2008 a book called 'All Known Metal Bands' was produced that listed over 50,000 current and defunkt metal bands...
The book was based/cribbed/plagiarised from the staggeringly detailed Encyclopedia Metallium - http://www.metal-archives.com/....
And this is what a page of the archive index looks like...
Some bands, particularly black metal bands, try and recapture the thrill of the pre-internet underground by deliberately recording cheap-sounding albums, using hand-drawn covers and even releasing albums on cassette.
This is often known as staying 'kvlt' [sic] and here's a fine example of a kvlt black metal recording by the Australian act Striborg. The song's called 'Beneath the Fields of Rapacious Blood' from the album 'Spiritual Catharsis' (2004)
It is wrong then to speak in histrionic terms of the ‘death of the underground’, this is the stuff of cliché, the tired language of ‘sell outs’. It is however appropriate to speak of the death of the unknown. Not that any one person can know ‘everything’ and in any case it would be wrong to claim that ‘everything’ is easily available on the internet. What has died is the idea of an autonomous underground whose institutions are not implicated in those of the mainstream. Today, no one can ever be sure that they will remain obscure.
We cannot turn back the clock. What we should do though is to mourn the death of the unknown. We should mourn the fact that it is no longer possible to retain the mysterious otherness that made the discovery of grindcore for me and others like me so thrilling. We should mourn the disappointments inherent in the disenchanting reality of this newly knowable world. The liberation of Eastern Europe in 1989 was, as I have argued, also a liberation into stereotype and mundanity. Similarly, the possibilities for knowledge and discovery that the internet has brought come at the expense of a certain kind of excitement and mystery.
I freely admit that I am writing as a 37 year old man mourning my lost youth. There are risks involved in making grand claims of the ‘death of..’ something, when that death ‘conveniently’ coincides with the death of one’s youth. In my defence though, I do think that my generation has experienced an important transition. Those who were born in ‘The West’ in the last few years of the 1960s and the first few years of the 1970s came to maturity in an environment replete with mystery. Post war subcultures had proliferated by the 1970s and 1980s: there was much to discover, much that was exciting and esoteric.
My generation’s transition to adulthood at the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s coincided with the transition to a more knowable world. We grew up pre-internet but were the first generation to use it as adults. We grew up without expectation that the world could be entirely knowable but as soon as we became adults the unknown shrank dramatically changed. For some, this transition was hard...
The death of Kurt Cobain in 1994 was a dramatic illustration of this. Cobain and Nirvana’s early career was nestled safely in the underground alternative music scene. The enormous success of Nevermind in 1991 was not forseen by the band. Suddenly and dramatically the band’s expectations of what was possible had to be completely altered. Cobain clearly neither wanted nor expected to be a global rock star and the difficulties in adjusting to his new status were clear contributory factors in his suicide.
To conclude...
As a ‘western’ intellectual, raised in the global observatory that is London, it has always been my destiny to know the world. We learn from thinkers such as Edward Said and Michel Foucault that this knowledge is not innocent, but an artefact of power. This birthright was both handed to me and taken away from me when I turned 18 in 1989. The death of the unknown and the subsequent development of the internet only strengthened my ability to know. But it also shared this ability out more widely than before and removed some of the intoxicating pleasures of discovery.
The post-1989 death of the unknown that I have discussed in this essay has not necessarily made ‘us’ any more knowledgeable. When we mourn the world that has passed we must take care not to see ourselves as occupying an Olympian position of knowing all.
What we do have is an opportunity to know the other in a more profound way than was possible before. This opportunity is frequently squandered in easy stereotypes and clichés. In our internet-driven complacency we can feel we know the other without ever encountering them. There is no substitute for face-to-face encounters, for dialogue, for seeing others in all their complexity.
The ‘human condition’ – if there is such a thing – remains the same pre and post 1989. How do we know each other? We may now have better access to each other’s little worlds, but the challenge of communication will always be the same as it ever was.
Stereotypes of Eastern Europeans as naive and oppressed have been replaced by other stereotypes. In 2008 Harry Enfield produced another comedy sketch that drew on these 'updated' stereotypes. In place of Sergei, the horny, ignorant Russian, we have 2 Polish waitresses who are simultaneously sexually alluring, mysterious, scheming and 'other'. But however strange they may be, in contrast to 1989 they are now in 'our' neighbourhood cafe - it is they who are now in charge...
