Does heavy metal, and rock in general, have anything concretely to do with evil? Are we even allowed to talk about the sweepingly, and embarrassingly, theological themes that the music repeatedly imagines? Fans and bands certainly take such liberties, but the conceptual resources of rock criticism-usually a mix of sociology and progressive politics--don't seem adequate to the task: we all know about the false accusations of Satanism and the typical solution has been to just censor it out. There is a peculiar sort of rationalism at work in this, which has tended to restrict the admissible range of thought and feeling about music to certain safe themes. What lies beyond these barriers, or is it just too horrible, or stupid, to contemplate?
From Black Sabbath's durable, symptomatic, and utterly narcissistic visions of the Apocalypse (secularized in other music of the time as the Revolution) to Earth's unpleasantly literal account of flirtation with fascist imagery ("spent the night with Joseph Goebbels/think I'm coming down"), there is a major strain in rock music, clearest in Metal, which fantasizes about the destruction of the present order. This paper will look at the apocalypse in Doom Metal and asks if this might tell us anything about rock's political romanticism in general.
-Given at the EMP Pop Music conference in March 2004
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