Feature
BLa ck and Afr i CAn
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fightin
Genre is a complicated concept in music, going
beyond just technical elements and lyrical content. It’s often linked with stylistic choices outside of the music itself, and certain cultures or even ethnic groups. This is obvious in say, traditional music for a region, but modern genres that are supposedly post-tradition are linked to communities. For example, rap is generally thought of as a “Black” genre, originated in American cities by communities of color, though there are now numerous artists from other backgrounds. The opposite is true for the overwhelmingly “white” genre of metal, especially harder subgenres such as death and black metal. While the contemporary metal community itself isn’t specifically racist, Black metal fans and artists remain distinctly in the minority. When trying to search for “black metal bands,” you’re going to have a difficult time avoiding recommendations for blond Norwegian twenty-somethings in corpse face paint, rather than artists of color. To a certain extent, that erasure was deliberate. Metal has long struggled with racists and anti-Semites being drawn to the genre, though in relatively smaller numbers. “National Socialist black metal” is a real thing, often tied to Northern and Eastern European bands. Even more mainstream artists like Motörhead have flirted with Nazi imagery, leading to a genre that often isn’t entirely welcoming to fans and artists of color. Another aspect that warrants mention is a simple matter of taste: rap and metal emerged around the same time in the early 1970s, and it’s logical that some Black people from New York or
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LA would gravitate towards rap artists from their communities. A key element to keep in mind when discussing the relationship between metal and Black people, specifically African-Americans, is that metal basically wouldn’t exist without the work of blues and gospel musicians. Rock and roll was the progenitor of hard rock, which then led to early heavy metal like Black Sabbath, which then produced later subgenres such as thrash, black, and death metal. But the first step in that historical progression was Black blues artists, mostly in the American south, who innovated new chord progressions, song structures, and darker themes. There’s a reason that blues was often referred to as “devil’s music” in its early days, though much of that was white people fearing it would corrupt their good sons and daughters. Several blues legends laid the groundwork for what would later become metal, at least thematically. A famous example is Robert Johnson, a supposedly mediocre guitarist who developed great skills after making a mythical deal with the devil at the crossroads. Setting his myth-making (or actual satanic deal-making) aside, in several of his songs he references evil and demonic themes, such as a hellhound chasing him down. Eventually, rock and roll would develop out of the blues with the aid of artists such as Little Richard and Chuck Berry, losing a lot of that dark and somber edge, but in many ways, the later evolution of metal served as a return to some of those old elements. At least, it did at first. Black Sabbath, the (arguable) godfathers of metal, originally started
