More thoughts on why ontology is fascinating, and the idea that we can identify a direct and obvious existential relationship between entities based on the presence or absence of features is weird.
I was listening to the first Friendship album while running, and I was getting super into it. Reminding me of crusty, downtuned stuff like His Hero Is Gone crossed with the tightest moments from Nasum, I was invigorated. How the hell did I not hear of them before now, and then only because I was clicking around in a digital music for the “other people listened to” bits.
Coming to the end of the first song it was obvious. They’re metal but they’re totally not metal because they defy convention too much. They groove and then blast and there’s heavy headbanging parts, sure. Metal works in certain ways. The tempo changes, you expect certain things to happen. It will be faster or slower in a proportional if not entirely predictable way, such as slowing down to a mosh part or speeding up to a blastbeat.
Instead, shit gets weird. In the second track, the song structure falls apart about halfway through. The bass drum speeds up to the speed of the snare while the snare and crash cymbals go 1/4 time and the guitar goes to half, and then turns into a bunch of squiggly noise. Tonally there are post-hardcore, post-grindcore sounds, but by the end of the song it’s so outside of the lines of genre that for many people it will be borderline unlistenable as metal.
It’s weird. Metal folks listen to metal because it sounds like metal, and that means meeting expectations. You can’t not do it. It’s what defines genre music. 75% metal for most will not be metal enough. Maybe those are the people who gave a grammy to Jethro Tull for best metal recording instead of Metallica. 90% won’t cut it for many.
If you tell my friend Tyler you’re going to put on show tunes and then play music from a Disney movie, he’ll be all, “uh, no.” It might be songs from a story that is told in songs, but that’s not show tunes. But if you play a song by the Magnetic Fields – who in their weird way create twisted takes on American standards, especially the wit and wordplay of show tunes, he’ll be like, “Wait, what?” It’s not showtunes, but it’s not not showtunes.
And yet: If you read this article in the times about attempting to recreate the voice of an Egyptian mummy that’s been dead for 3000 years, and then you tell your metalhead friend about it, adding, “that’s so metal,” she’ll almost certainly agree: “Totally.” Maybe make a metal growl voice, but likely agree.
What does it mean to be “metal”?
The thing is that it describes a quality that is intuitive, but indescribable. It’s ineffable. There is an essence to a thing that makes it metal, and it’s obvious if you’re into metal. A preserved corpse is metal by itself, but a 3D-printed vocal tract which is then digitally emulated intending to be the voice of the dead? That’s metaller than most metal.
Is it that it’s not even music that makes it easier to intepret whether it’s metal or not? Music has many conventions that are literal, so when you force the brain to interpret non-music signals, maybe that’s easier? The musical ones have narrow definitions, but the non-musical ones I’m forcing an interpretation; I’m making them metal by the very proposing of their metalness. And then it is.
Every day we read about machine learning and artificial intelligence and the future as if the job of saying what anything is can be trivially done. But Friendship, when they do something unexpected and dissonant, and you’re expecting it to be unexpected and dissonant in any of the specified ways metal commonly is, it’s wrong, even though they are obviously a metal band.
Metalheads, and all fans of genre music common accepting of new ways of interpreting “wrong” and incorporating novelty into the canon and new ways of making and understanding music. As for our so-called intelligent systems, we have daily evidence of them interpreting incorrectly and… well I guess we’re finding out what that means to us.