I shot the above photo of Omega Crom in Vancouver in 2009 by convincing them I was a reporter for some made-up magazine. I’ve always felt bad for never running it so here they are. Lest the headline suggest otherwise, they don’t suck. They rock, and sing songs about killing people with giant swords, medieval orgies, and stuff like that.
Sometime after three in the morning last Saturday I received a text from a good friend I’d not heard from in months asking about this column. Sean D. wrote:
Please use your Motherboard power to detail the de-evolution of fuckin’ metal music. Nobody cares about Kim Kardashian.
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That’s a good point. As goofball as Kim’s marriage was, and as much as we all want to be like Justin Bieber and George Clooney, deep down in our bones what we all really want to do is talk about metal. Specifically, we want to know why metal is absolutely, mind-meltingly terrible these days.
It’s truly horrific: In the span of a few decades, we’ve gone from Iron Maiden singing Satan’s music — followed by coke-fueled Mötley Crüe rocking the panties off of everyone from Hollywood to Moscow — on to Hed PE, Powerman 5000, and the rest of the dreadlocked nü-metal bunch whose only throwback to real, bone-crushing, soul-burning metal was the umlaut.
Even individual bands aren’t immune. KISS was once considered to have a direct line to the devil. Then they came out with Crazy Nights. Judas Priest spent years rocking people’s private parts dressed as evil leatherdaddies. Now they’re providing the soundtrack for minivan commercials. The decline even affected Kettle Cadaver, who, despite being more meth-core than metal, made a name as one of the most horrifying bands ever by driving nails through their penises on stages covered with dismembered animal parts. Now they’re playing rockabilly screamo. What in the hell is the problem here?
KISS was once feared. Then they started producing third-string tracks for the credits of melancholy 80s relationship movies.
One of the mechanics of evolution that doesn’t receive much attention is the old ‘use it or lose it’ bit. When Darwin was talking about the ‘survival of the fittest,’ he wasn’t suggesting that the evolutionary process favored the absolute strongest, fastest, or even healthiest organisms. Instead, favored are the traits that most perfectly suit an organism’s set of conditions and obstacles. In a sense, the evolutionary process works by constantly selecting for ever-more efficient creatures.
The perfect example of this streamlining process is the evolutionary history of cave animals, also known as troglobites. The troglobites – including fish, insects, millipedes, spiders and worms – all evolved trapped inside of deep, dark (as in zero light, period) caverns. The most striking response to this? Thanks to already being effectively blinded by their environment, the vast majority of known troglobites are blind, and many simply have no eyes at all. I mean, what’s the point of spending the energy to maintain eyeballs and sight, especially when you’ve got an extremely limited food supply, when you won’t use them once in your entire life?
Here’s an interview with a Ph.D. who has a very healthy admiration for blind crayfish.
It’s all about efficiency, as noted by a must-read National Geographic piece on these blind, often pigment-free (who needs color when everyone’s blind?) animals:
To survive stagnant, low-oxygen air in dead-end recesses and months without food, many troglobites have super-slow metabolisms. And because they live slow, they live long. The Orconectes australis crayfish of Shelta Cave in Alabama may reproduce at 100 years, and live to 175 … Instead of vision, many have elaborate appendages and beefed-up nerve centers to interpret slight air-pressure or temperature changes, sounds, and smells.
If incredibly rare cave insects seem too distant, we have mammalian relatives that display similar traits. The sabre-toothed sausage, aka the naked mole rat, is seemingly missing a number of traits we’d expect from a mammal: They’re blind, hairless, can’t feel pain in their skin, aren’t good at regulating their body temperature, and have some of the most pathetic sperm on Earth. Sounds depressing, but when you think that they’re environment is limited to dark tunnels that don’t really require most of those traits, it’s more apparent that they’ve just cut out a lot of dead weight. That efficiency is especially helpful when their only hope to eat is to blindly stumble across something tasty.
It’s sad to think that this type of production has been metaphorically relegated to lost caverns.
So how does this apply to the downfall of metal? Let’s look at the decline of individual bands first. A band that’s first starting out is obviously going to have to rock people’s faces off to make a name for itself. But if that band gets big, over time that effort might not be necessary. According to evolutionary theory, if it’s not necessary, it won’t be maintained. So KISS could put out a lazy, pandering albums because they knew that their brand was strong enough to find buyers. (I know there’s also a major creative component here, and that bands’ styles change, but a quick look at how much crap KISS merchandises is enough to suggest they’d put out any album knowing it would sell.)
As far as the decline of towering, Satanic guitar riffs is concerned, the troglobites are an apt analogy. It’s not like the troglobites chose to lose their eyeballs; instead, it was a response to the fact that, at some ancient juncture, they got trapped in caves. As listeners’ tastes changed, the market for bad-ass metal became more and more like a shrinking cavern.
Bands are therefore faced with a twist on Def Leppard’s age-old question: evolve, or fight for a smaller piece of the pie. Thus, on one hand you have Motörhead still going strong, and on the other there’s that Metallica symphony album and whatever Guns ‘n’ Roses has done for the last decade. It’s a bummer that the old heavy metal market has mostly faded away, but as similar as the story is to that of the troglobites, we’ve got one advantage: Although their eyes are gone, I’ve at least still got my Maiden records.
Evolution Explains is a periodical investigation into the human-animal (humanimal?) condition through the powerful scientific lenses of ecology and evolution. Previously on Evolution Explains: Annual Migrations Explain Why We’re New Year’s Eve Party Animals
Follow Derek Mead on Twitter. Have a question? Write Derek at derek(at)motherboard.tv.
