I've been reading an interesting book by Castro-supporter-turned-neoliberal Mario Vargas Llosa about what he calls the "Civilization of the Spectacle" (he reads an essay from the book here). Setting aside some glaring contradictions in the book - not the least of which being the gap between the author's political life and the book's main thesis - he paints a gloom picture of contemporary society: a world of acritical consumption, a global generation bent on destroying culture (high culture, he would point out) and reducing the heights of artistic achievement to the banality of everyday commodities. A state of affairs wherein price overtook value; form overtook content and representation overtook meaning.
In a society where Oprah dictates mass market trends in literature much more effectively than the whole body of academically informed literary critics in North America, we can understand why this might pose a problem. This crisis of meaning being replaced by its representation - the real being set aside in favour of the artificial - should not come as a surprise to anyone who has read Guy Debord (in fact, the book is not innocently named) or, for that matter, Marx. But Llosa's lament here is unique in that it reflects upon the soul of society and on a particular struggle - the artistic struggle - of mankind when facing its own smallness, its own mortality. Indeed, the Civilization of the Spectacle is not merely one who lost its way with its own entertainment, which replaces culture, it's one who lost its humanity, its life.
It's gazing at this collective drive to dystopia that I most appreciate the work of drone/doom bands like Earth and Sunn O))). In its own way, the abrazive, disharmonic sentiment of the drone act reflects to me the attempt to turn the toppling ship back on its track, to force meaning through the deafening white noise by disregarding musical form. The deep, low vibrations resonate with our very biological senses, in a way that's so real, it defies or even rejects explanation (which is one of the many reasons why I enjoy the absence of lyrics). At the same time, repetition is rebellion: if the repetitive motion of drone music is a sort of defining motif, it can also be seen as a resistance to a world of excess in stimuli, a call to reflection and pause when facing the constant barrage of commodities tailored to please, to amuse, to entertain.
Dissonance is bliss, and few do it so well and dig so deeply like Habsyll, our feature band for today. A first listen will rightly remind us of doom terrormancers Khanate, who have built a solid empire on this matter, but Habsyll stands on its own feet, a giant of heavy, powerful, destructive, bottom-of-the-well doom. If my textual pacing so far took us to understand "underground" metal as an artistic call-to-arms against the static of contemporary society - an argument, as it stands, that I've been making in my other blog posts -, Habsyll cranks it up to eleven with a blanket refusal of norm, pleasantry and harmony. NO-DOOM, anti-humanistic. To deny form is to enforce meaning. Here we are at the tipping point, where rejecting humanity is what makes us alive.
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