A girl walks across the patio of a suburban coffee shop on a sunny day, wearing a very short skirt, bare legs, a very tight and very short-sleeved low-cut shirt which shows off her still under-developed breasts. Her feminine contours are emphasized, but are not yet fully realized. Why does she dress this way? Not because it suits her; as she walks her eyes dart, her brow rises, her arms fold across her chest, her feet drag. Her tentative manner is at odds with her revealing attire, and evokes images and norms dominant in current advertising more than an inner sensuality or confidence. It seems that perhaps advertising media imagery has caused her to want to dress this way because this attire is "feminine" in the "right" way. The point here is that, as the cliché states, sex sells. But we must ask: from where did advertising media obtain this image? What is it reflecting? It is not reflecting anything. Advertising media imagery is looking less and less to actual people, events, and conditions for its images; people are looking more frequently than ever to advertising media imagery for guidance. While constructivism is a centuries-old phenomenon and is not peculiar to postmodernism, the acceleration of the degree to which widespread imagery is constructing the lived experience of those who are exposed to it is now having tangible effects on those people. It seems that people are increasingly living in reference to images produced by the media, constantly comparing themselves to them, and judging themselves and others accordingly.

For example, "Lush" has been a popular dance club in Edmonton for approximately three years (at time of writing), but it no longer attracts people who want to dance. Now the people who go to Lush are going there to act out scripts. This is evident through, among other things, the way they dance. They have very little rhythm, and the movements of their bodies have almost no relation to the music being played. Their dance pattern remains constant throughout the whole song, regardless of the song's dynamics. Their eyes are wide and looking around at everyone else, to make sure they are "doing it right" and to make sure that everyone else sees them doing it right. Some get rowdy and have "lots of fun" because that's the "cool" thing to do. This is evidenced through the decontextualization of their actions. Their behaviour seems unrelated to the subtleties of the Lush environment: the music, the other people, etc. Also, people are "making out" everywhere. They are not lying on couches though, nor sitting in stairwells, retreating to car seats, or finding secluded corridors. They are "dirty dancing" on the dance floor. This in itself is not noteworthy, until they are doing it "to" music like Korn, house techno music, and 1980s rap music. They are not doing it because the music is appropriate, suggestive, or arousing. They are doing it because it is the thing to do. "Getting dirty" on the dance floor is a popular notion right now, seemingly as an attempt to experience past sensual experiences of our culture, and the sensuality of other cultures. Their behaviour appears to be reproducing such things as the Hollywood film "Dirty Dancing" from the 1980s, Latin American dancing, and images from today's music videos in rap, dance, and pop. But the music they are dancing to is none of these. It is 1990s heavy metal, techno, and rock. They continue dancing unaffected when the DJ changes from a metal set to a punk set, and from a techno set to a grunge set. Everything they now do is "in quotation marks," an artificial reproduction of an image they want to experience. People are not dancing because they are letting themselves go, or are being moved by the sound of the music. Now dancing is a self-conscious project, a self-contained scenario that comes from outside of the dancers, which they deliberately re-enact regardless of the actual sound of the music surrounding them. Here is the (continually less visible) schism between the controlled, constructed, fictional, "ideal" realm of advertising media imagery and reality. This "simulated" behaviour is symptomatic of the same cultural state of affairs manifested in new metal. Both are reflecting and negotiating the new level of postmodernity characterizing the end of the millennium. What I describe has already been observed by Jean Baudrillard: "[a] sociality everywhere present, an absolute sociality finally realized in absolute advertising—that is to say, also totally dissolved, a vestige of sociality hallucinated on all the walls in the simplified form of a demand of the social that is immediately met by the echo of advertising. The social as a script, whose bewildered audience we are" (88). Rock music scholars such as Neil Nehring have also discussed "such regrettable cases as the 'fratboys' at a Rage Against the Machine show described by Valerie Agnew of 7 Year Bitch, who 'were just singing along with rebellion' and 'did not get the message at all'" (Nehring xxi).

To begin the second chapter, I will examine new metal using the perspective of Simon Reynolds' and Joy Press' book, The Sex Revolts, which deals with rock music through history with a framework of cultural theory (a rare and valuable combination). The Sex Revolts is a book about gender in rock, and while my study is not particularly interested in this area, gender is inextricably bound up with psychological processes and matters of the spirit and soul—of feeling—processes and matters which new metal addresses almost exclusively, while grafting them onto a very corporeal rhythmic vehicle. The book's title suggests that the rock Reynolds and Press are studying rebels against standards of gender and that issues of sex/gender are often linked with feelings of disgust and with unpleasant ideas and images. These ideas are well-suited to new metal, which revolts in form, sound, and lyrical content. Reynolds and Press cover a vast area of rock music, and I will use only a handful of their ideas, where they are useful to me and related to my project.

Reynolds and Press begin their book with a chapter entitled "Angry Young Men: precursors and prototypes of male rebellion," which is an appropriate discussion for me to use to move from history into contemporary cultural study. They write that

Male rebellion is a re-enactment of the primal break that constitutes the male ego: the separation of infant from the maternal realm, the exile from paradise. The rebel re-enacts the process of inidividuation in endless and diverse rites of severance, continually flees domesticity. Inevitably, this flight is alloyed with regret, and often—as in the music of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix—leads on to a quest for a new home; unrest subsides and comes to berth in a mystical or idealised maternal idyll. As Nietzche put it: 'to build a new sanctuary the old sanctuary must be first destroyed.' (2)

This is a lucid point which serves as a foil for understanding new metal. Much of the newness of new metal lies in the fact that many understandings of past popular music cannot be used by scholars, listeners, and participants to come to grips with new metal. New metal is indeed rebelling in many ways, but in others ways it is very much not-rebelling. And, still in other ways, it is transcending the polarized dichotomy of rebellion and acceptance. Thus the above illustration of the rebel is useful, but not applicable. New metal is responding to the disappearance of "the new sanctuary" from visibility. Rock rebellion has not found a new sanctuary which is satisfying to new metal artists, and thus their music is expressing anxiety about this spiritual and literal "homelessness." But, even prior to this anxiety is the fact that the "old sanctuary" has been discovered to be so entrenched, abstracted, and ubiquitous that not only is it possibly indestructible, but its destruction may have very negative consequences for the musicians. With no new forms of expression on the horizon to express their experience and era—indeed, new metal artists feel they are confronting a pure void when they look to the future of their lives and of their culture (as Marilyn Manson sings in "Great Big White World": "I dreamed I was a spaceman / burned like a moth in a flame / and our world was so fucking gone / but I'm not attached to your world / nothing heals and nothing grows")—destruction of the present structure may be an act of sheer folly. In an interview posted on http://www.korn.com, Jonathan Davis said "Yeah, I am really pissed off that I inherited this world. I wish sometimes I was born back in the day because today's society is just so fucked up. Now it's just ridiculous."

New metal artists are aware that rock has been rebelling against controlling discourses, seeking freedom and autonomy. They have also realized, in a seriously postmodern turn, that this rebellion is itself a controlling discourse. This idea was what brought an end to the authenticity of grunge music: they became popular because they were indifferent to popular music standards of popularity, and thus rebelling became "cool" and ceased to be rebellion, and then was no longer cool, and became unpopular. Thus, what new metal artists are revolting against is not "the system," but systems. As if this were not disconcerting enough, new metal artists are realizing that systems are ubiquitous, and thus inescapable. They know that they cannot escape, for they are confronted with controlling images in every direction they turn. Victims of the cliché that "everything has been done before," they are seeing that no matter what route they choose, their identity will always already be or have been constructed for them. They are therefore not tangibly focussing their energies on reversing an identified evil, nor are they singing the virtues of any status quo. As in a standard horror film, new metal artists express a sensation of being surrounded by mocking, incomprehensible forces which want to drain out their identity and take control of them. They cannot move, but they cannot stand still. Panicked, new metal is screaming for lack of other routes of action. But, contrary to most angry music, they are not screaming with words—-not entirely.

Much new metal music is characterized by elements of shock, excess, and incomprehensibility. These elements are techniques used by new metal artists to come to grips with a culture overloaded with information and drained of meaning. Jonathan Davis' "tongue-speak" is a manifestation of the tension resulting from a profiteering music industry which rewards musicians for what they do while trapping them and disempowering their expressive capacity, and of the confusion resulting from the ubiquity of the shallow image and the neutralizing of language. Korn's song "Twist" is the purest example of this phenomenon—panicked, growling, confused, angry, whining guttural utterance over droning, buzzing, heavily rhythmic music. The song "Seed" has similar qualities; Jonathan Davis' use of the word "fuck" is very effective in conveying his frustration and confusion. It often has no obvious referent, such as in the first line of the song "Justin": "Fuck all that bullshit!" The most potent and stirring example of this is in the song "Reclaim my Place," which discusses alienation and revenge (from and on forces not fully specified). In the song Davis repeats the line "What the fuck?" as a refrain. The expletive has no referent, and fully embodies not only the absence of answers to his questions, but the larger absence of questions to ask, of frameworks of understanding, and of points of departure.

Fred Durst, especially on Limp Bizkit's first album, increases the intensity of his utterances to the point of incoherence. The emotion which colours his vocalization at times overcomes the linguistic emphasis of his singing and transforms it almost into musical crying, into pure hysteria, such as at the end of "Pollution." The same is true of Chino Moreno and his vocalizations on Deftones' albums. His lyrics are at times indecipherable because of the confused hysteria of his emotion. Also, his lyrics are extremely poetic, rivaling the vagueness of lyrics penned by Beck and by R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. This contributes to the frantic, confused quality of the music. In the song "7 Words," Moreno, in a performance similar to Jonathan Davis' expletive surrepetition, shrieks repeatedly "Suck! Suck! Suck! Suck! Suck!" until the word seems to lose all meaning. The difficulty of reconciling authenticity with the loss of meaning caused by today's hyper-media, accompanied with chart-success, is apparent in Korn's "Reclaim My Place," in which Jonathan Davis sings "Give him something to say / Something super fly, never play / All I hear is disgrace" ("fly" meaning stylish or cool). In "Freak on a Leash," we hear: "Feeling like a freak on leash / Feeling like I have no release / How many times have I felt diseased? / Nothing in my life is free."

In response to today's scarcity of unclaimed image-territory, Marilyn Manson has taken up what has been called "shock rock." Thus the visual imagery used by the band is intentionally over-the-top. Shock rock is not a new phenomenon; Marilyn Manson is following in the footsteps of Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne. It is thus that Marilyn Manson must be even more shocking. In a semantic environment where every space has been occupied and defused, Marilyn Manson is striving to take up visual turf-space that has remained unoccupied. The imagery in the package of their 1996 album entitled "Antichrist Superstar" is centred on corporeal decay and disease, and angels. Angels are shown to be of flesh and mortal. Underneath the cd tray is a diagram showing the muscles, skeleton, and circulatory system of an angel. The front cover shows a dirty, scarred, bandaged angel with tubes hanging from its groin. The inside of the liner contains various photos involving skulls, blood, decaying semi-human beings, human larvae, and designs evoking dated scientific research. The back of the cd package is a photo of Manson standing bandaged, legs spread, between two other sitting band members. Each of the other two people wears on his face a hospital oxygen mask with a tube connected to a hose worn on Manson's crotch. One can speculate on the potential meanings of these images. By fusing angels with flesh, it is possible that Marilyn Manson is illustrating the transitory nature of the icons in which people of today's culture put their faith. This could show that, contrary to the elevated, super-human status they have been given, the figureheads of today's mass culture are merely human like those who idolize them, and are as subject to the same forces (time, elements, disease, etc.) as any earthly thing. The last image I mentioned could signify that celebrities must perform the same unmentionable bodily functions as everyone else, or that the products and works that everybody adores and purchases (music, film, sports, etc.) are merely waste product from the lives of those celebrities, or even that the worship of celebrities has escalated to the point that people consume even the bodily waste of celebrities. What is most likely, though, is that Marilyn Manson is using shock simply for the sake of shock, in order to cause people to think critically about the nature of shock, offense, controversy, and cultural rules, and perhaps even to show that the only ideas that have not been played out to exhaustion today are shocking and offensive. The imagery in their next album, "Mechanical Animals," is radically different from that of "Antichrist Superstar," but equally bizarre. It evokes a science-fiction-like future that is completely sterile, too clean, drug-based, and androgynous. Manson wears wild, tight, flashy clothing, and outlandishly colourful make-up. Pictures of hospital graphs and machinery, drug paraphernalia, keys on a computer keyboard, and various numbers, codes, and binary sequences are plentiful. The back of the cd package shows a small, simple figure typically used to designate a men's washroom, but one arm is longer than the other. The most striking image is on the front of the package—it is an entirely white-skinned Manson with overly long fingers, nipple-less breasts and a bulging crotch. This imagery is a visual equivalent of Jonathan Davis' psychotic, unintelligible, shrieking babble. It is psychotic, unnerving, shocking, unsettling, and lacks definite semantic, linguistic meaning.

Marilyn Manson's view of the world is apparent in their songs' lyrics, such as "You were automatic and hollow as the 'o' in god," "our earth is too grey but when the spirit is so digital the body acts this way," "when you love it you know it's not real," and "I'm as fake as wedding cake." Given the emptiness in their picture of the world, Marilyn Manson's visual images are no surprise. The images have no concrete significance beyond myriad possible symbolic resonances, and in their general meaninglessness they are the sole property of the band. In a world where beauty has become insignificant because of its status as the ubiquitous standard, Marilyn Manson revel in ugliness. They express a feeling, as does Korn, that any comprehensible utterance will be appropriated by the money-making image-circulation system. It is thus that, as a vow of authenticity, they choose to go beyond the security of comprehensible words and images in order to resist cooption by any preexisting signifying system. They are screaming, for a lack of meaningful words—Korn is screaming aurally, Marilyn Manson is screaming visually. Rob Zombie's imagery is similar in function to Marilyn Manson's, but it is more playful. Rob Zombie's work goes "over the top" as well, but whereas Marilyn Manson's implies a more sober-faced disgust and a defamiliarization in the manner of the Russian Formalists, Rob Zombie's imagery and live performances suggest carnivalesque fun and entertainment. Again, some of the imagery in Rob Zombie's album liner are reproductions of arcane scientific and spiritual diagrams which today have lost their original value and significance and for that reason are interesting. But most of his imagery is simultaneously silly to today's generation and hyper-offensive to previous generations. In fact, its over-offensiveness is what makes it silly. Pictures of goofy monster puppets subtitled "DESTROY," ghouls framed by rows of teeth and overlaid with "THE DEVIL'S MEN ARE HERE," and old-style comic book collages of Zombie's face, naked women, and skeletons advertising licentious freak-shows all poke fun at the sensitivity of past pop culture and mock them for even giving meaning to such images. This is the crucial point in Zombie's imagery: it is meaningless by today's pop-cultural lexicon by virtue of being the lexicon of previous pop culture. It derides past pop culture for being serious about meaning. Other new metal bands show differing levels of concern and anxiety over today's disappearance of meaning, but Rob Zombie laughs about it, and thus makes his career. The current inability to rebel and the acknowledgment of the ubiquity of the drained image has caused the disintegration of self-identity, apparent in the lyrics of Korn, Deftones, and Limp Bizkit and in the imagery of Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie. All of the techniques and elements I've outlined are used by new metal artists to fight against a sense of emptiness which they appear to feel is plaguing today's culture and consuming everything around them. For this reason, one of Reynolds' and Press' chapters, entitled "Flirting with the void: Abjection in rock," helps to shed some light on the experience and expressions of new metal artists. The authors discuss rock's love-hate relationship with "abjection," a concept they describe as female bodily fluid associated with "going under," "stagnation," "castration," identity loss, stasis, immobility, and death. While they view this conflict through the lens of gender, equating, on behalf of male rockers, abjection with the womb, the concept of abjection in rock is well suited to an examination of new metal. (A more comprehensive discussion of the concept of abjection can be found in Julia Kristeva's Pouvoirs de l'horreur: Essai sur l'abjection.)

Reynolds' and Press' chapter begins with discussions of explicitly sexual issues in older punk music, moves through a discussion of gore and muck and explicit bodily violence, then becomes more applicable to new metal as it deals with new metal's predecessors, grunge. They accurately describe Alice In Chains' album, Dirt, as "literally doom laden, like limbs struggling to avoid being sucked down into the slough of despond" (Reynolds and Press 96) and point out such lyrical themes as "born into the grave" and the "slow castration" of love. While the description of the riffs is well suited to the riffs of Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Deftones, the abjection being resisted in the lyrics is of a different nature. The authors go on to discuss the lyrics and media images of Nirvana, the best-known grunge band. Nirvana and grunge are described as "the sound of castration blues," (emphasis mine 96) and possessing a "turgidity [which] embodies the struggle not to go under," (emphasis mine 96). Themes of "political and existential impotence" and "being 'neutered and spayed'" (96-7) characterize Nirvana's work. According to the authors,

Ann Powers has argued that their success was a desperate attempt by the rock community to resurrect the phallus (a return to hard, masculine, aggressive sound, to rock as a signifier for youth rebellion). But the crucial qualifier is that it was a failed attempt, closer to flaunting the scars of castration. When the band wore dresses in the video for 'In Bloom', Nirvana weren't just deflating/mocking grunge's hard rock masculinism... (97)

Nirvana's lyrics are characterized as peppered with signs of a desire to return to the womb—to domesticity, idleness, and abjection—and "to refuse manhood in a world where most manifestations of masculinity are loathsome, a desire to be infantalised and emasculated" (97). Nirvana fans are described as "feeling that they have no defense against stagnation ... twenty-somethings who were directionless, incapable of personal or political commitment ... But unlike the Clash, Nirvana couldn't shift from dormant to militant because, like most of the American underground, they were skeptical about attempts to politicize rock and marshal it into a movement" (98). New metal has realized that grunge was a failed attempt at meaning-creation, and thus refuses to go the same route in terms of giving in to abjection. While grunge was skeptical about popular discourses, new metal is skeptical about skepticism. The abjection that new metal is resisting does not take the same form as the abjection which riddled Alice in Chains and Nirvana. While the latter bands were plagued with drugs, gender, love, and politics, new metal is taking on a demon far broader in scope: the aforementioned loss of identity caused by a postmodern capitalist system of meaning making that appropriates all signs, symbols, and images.

New metal artists have seen in grunge that resisting capitalism results only in self-destruction. In refusing to adopt the resistance stance of grunge, they are also experiencing the theft of self-respect, meaning, and identity resulting from hyper-capitalism, or what Jean Baudrillard calls "the era of murder by simulation" (Baudrillard 24), for "[a]ll current forms of activity tend toward advertising and most exhaust themselves therein," and "[t]hus the form of advertising has imposed itself and developed at the expense of all the other languages as an increasingly neutral, equivalent rhetoric, without affects" (Baudrillard 87, 88). Exemplifying and expressing this, Deftones' Chino Moreno sings, in "Lhabia": "Somewhere, outside, there are tricks and evil ... I don't want to go, but I want it. Well at least, you fucking care. ... I'll be faint, like a crook. It looks and feels great, but look at what's it's doing to you, but that's ok, look at how it feels." The media savvy post-grunge generation knows unhappily that "[n]o one would grant the least consent, the least devotion to a real person. It is to his double, he being always already dead, to which allegiance is given" (Baudrillard 26) and, knowing this, exists in the "[h]ell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning" (Baudrillard 18).

The abjection faced by new metal is not the bodily fluid, but the bodily vacuum, the pixel, the photograph, the word, all of which are becoming arbitrary assemblages which refer to nothing but themselves and each other. This abjection takes the form of a nothingness, where reality is unlocatable because it is, as Baudrillard writes, "[m]ore real than real, [and] that is how the real is abolished" (81). (Few comparisons could be more strikingly evident than White Zombie's biggest hit single, in 1995, entitled "More Human than Human.") To new metal artists, all spiritual, social, and political directions are identical and equally meaningless in any terms other than dollars and popularity. Still, in the face of such complete hopelessness, the very presence of new metal indicates a refusal to "go under." Faced with the apparent fact that nothing said can possibly have any meaning, new metal continues to speak. Some lyrics, like Korn's, cling to the fact that directionlessness and lack of meaning can be articulated, while others, like Marilyn Manson, satirize those who continue to speak a semantic language owned and written by capitalist forces. Still others, such as Deftones, re-appropriate the language stolen by capitalism by explicitly and gradually degenerating it into nonsense or by stringing together words like an abstract jigsaw puzzle, to be arranged and concretized into meaning only by the listener. New metal shows that despite what the death of grunge may suggest, abjection can be resisted until one is utterly and absolutely silent, and still.

As I have already discussed, one of new metal's unique elements is its orientation towards rhythm, dance, and the body. While heavy music has always had some form of corporeal element, new metal involves the body in the music in ways which are relatively new to metal. Reynolds and Press illustrate a prior approach to the body in heavy music by discussing metal/punk musician/songwriter/author/vocalist Henry Rollins. They point out that Rollins had very little sense of identity as a youth and lacked a male role model growing up (a situation common to Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and Korn's Jonathan Davis). He learned to work out with weights and "never looked back." Rollins describes his weight training as a mystical experience, and Rollins' own description of his experience of withdrawal from weight lifting is similar to the experience of abjection. Rollins' spiritual state is frankly related to his physical state. While Nirvana drew from Rollins as a musical influence, Nirvana ignored his emphasis on the body, and thus fell prey to the increasingly discarded Cartesian body/mind division. Certainly grunge lyrics often addressed the body, bodily indicators (lips, teeth, and throat sounds) were present in the vocalizations, and moshing was an utterly physical experience, but these did not represent the inclusion of the body in the grunge experience. The body-oriented lyrics were primarily naturalist, speaking of organs, disease, pain, and drug addiction. The bodily sounds in the vocals were side effects of rage and never took on the primacy of new metal's corporeality. Moshing, in being a randomly chaotic mish-mashing of bodies, did not so much emphasize the experience of the physical sensations as it did the venting of spiritual anguish and the drowning of the body.

Being arational, the emotive language of physical sensation and the body cannot be appropriated and collapsed into non-meaning simulacra, for it lacks tangible, circulating words. The discourse of emotion and the body is vague and unformed, unable to be packaged and concretized into words shared by language-users in a set of conventions; since emotion and feeling cannot be strictly defined, they cannot be re-defined, until virtual reality becomes as ubiquitous as posters and highway billboards, making emotion and sensation a shared, common discourse of the same order as words and images. Thus the music of some new metal bands and the imagery of others are very corporeally-oriented. Korn, Deftones, and Limp Bizkit produce music soaked in what Roland Barthes calls "grain." To summarize, Barthes defines this as the corporeal dimension of the human voice which gives it its individuality. The more grain is present in an utterance, the more one can hear the presence of the speaker's/singer's physical body. There is absolutely no erasure of the physical and spatial specificity, or of the grain, of new metal performance in the recordings. Human limitation is made instrumental in the form of distortion and the sounds of lips, teeth, throat, tongue, mouth, and breath. Even the intonation of the vocals is too-human: whining, pleading, raging, crying, and laughing. New metal artists are never simply singing; their songs are always living, always alive.

Even more than "grain" and emotion, this inclusion of the body in the experience of new metal music focuses on dance. Not the same kind of choreographed dance as saccharine dance-pop acts, but a dance closer to rave techno dancing—a bouncing and movement of the limbs to heighten the experience of the "groove" of the music. While this dancing gets very frenzied, it is never of the same chaotic order as moshing, which was a random response to a comparatively "grooveless" music. Korn and Limp Bizkit are particularly dance-oriented: Jonathan Davis sings "So come dance with me" and "Get your boogie on," and Fred Durst sings "Now you mother fuckers got a reason to jump" and "Do you wanna catch the vibe that's keepin' me alive? Following these phat-ass beats until I die." This aspect of new metal's corporeality, while fighting capitalism's and postmodernism's ubiquitous non-referentiality, also leads to an analysis of one of new metal's most important defining characteristics: fusion. Ethnomusicology has not created appropriate materials to bring to bear on this aspect of new metal. To adequately analyze this dimension of new metal, one may have to travel discursively from Reynolds and Press to Mary Louise Pratt. New metal's fusion of black- and white-American popular music styles bears important signification in terms of understanding new metal as a reflection of the culture. The reasons for and meanings of the marriage of hip hop and metal approaches are myriad and fascinating and likely merit an entire independent study. Because such inter-cultural considerations are somewhat separate from concepts of simulacra, hypermarket, and information/communications technology, I will be addressing them only in passing in this study.

Historically speaking, new metal bands have been the artists the most reactive to the drainage of authenticity caused by today's advanced capitalism to top popularity charts. Grunge bands were incredibly popular, but were still grounded in conventional rock techniques, plain, straightforward imagery, and in language (whether or not the lyrics were recognizable, the words were still there). Neil Nehring's study addresses the problem of the inauthenticity of anger in rock music and examines punk, grunge, and riot grrrls. While he makes myriad invaluable points, his book was (naturally) written before new metal occurred; new metal does much to refute and/or qualify his points. In his introduction, Nehring outlines a popular academic thesis against which he intends to argue:

There are actually two closely related ideas here: All expression, even the most rebellious forms, is tamed and made completely inauthentic by its 'incorporation' (sometimes 'recuperation') into multinational corporate capitalism; and, more specifically, emotion is somehow detached from any meaning or significance in the process. Any performer's emotional commitment, as a result, is either transparently phony (like [Michael] Bolton) or simply inarticulate and incoherent (like [Nirvana's Kurt] Cobain), making it impossible for anyone to take that emotion seriously and to make any commitment in return. (Nehring xi)

While Nehring argues against these ideas on behalf of truly angry music, new metal simultaneously embraces these ideas and shows deep-seated discomfort about them. Korn, Deftones, Marilyn Manson, and Rob Zombie all have web sites set up to advertise their bands and have e-mails sent—automatically to a list of addresses—which boast of "news" but which are in fact simply advertisements for merchandise, upcoming fans' choice awards (where fans phone to vote for their favourite), and other promotional miscellany. Nehring's book is useful to me as a site where intellectual analysis of rock music meets with postmodern theorizing. Examining Nehring's statements about postmodernity and rock music will allow me to illustrate the role of postmodernity in new metal (or vice versa) and to clarify the significance of Baudrillard's concepts of simulation and advertising.

New metal is largely a phenomenon which has given up the fight against corporate capitalist domination of the popular music industry, which frankly and blatantly sells itself, and which is brutally aware of the drainage of perceived authenticity necessary for successful big business music. Still, new metal artists simultaneously express concern about these losses, as well as the loss of innocence involved, and fight for self-hood, identity, and expression within the framework of corporate capitalist music industry. This, along with the drainage of meaning in symbols, language, images, and experiences, has contributed to an intense anxiety on the part of new metal artists regarding their own identity, their ability to know the world concretely outside of themselves and spiritually know what is inside themselves, and their capacity to invest their faith in anything offered by their environment. This paradoxical quality of the postmodern hypermarket is termed by Baudrillard "implosion": "[t]he absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real" (Baudrillard 83). Implosion caused grunge's indifference to image, fame, and money to be an image itself, and thus be equated with the things to which it was originally opposed. Nehring's statements regarding the angry popular music that preceded new metal (such as grunge and riot grrrl) and the world that surrounded that music support this idea.

Nehring argues against the postmodern idea that "holds that any expression of rebellion in contemporary culture is inauthentic, merely a pose," and that "[i]t is supposedly impossible for any emotional appeal in a commercial medium like popular music to be anything but a prostituted imposture, whether Kurt Cobain's vitriol or Michael Bolton's treacle" (x-xi). While Nehring is arguing against such a dismissal, new metal is not. New metal has internalized the idea, whether or not the concept be factually true. New metal resides in the aftermath of mass media over-saturating itself and causing information and expression to lose power because it has flooded its own market. This has resulted in what Nehring summarizes as

...when academics and journalists convince young people themselves that their efforts are futile, precisely what authority wants the young to believe. ... Even students with social consciences, as a result, repeatedly tell me that 'you can't change anything.' Broadcasting the postmodern belief in the futility and aimlessness of angry music, therefore, is far more insidious than the merely laughable denunciations of 'aggressive and hostile music ... by transparent idiots like the infamous Parents' Music Resource Centre (PMRC). (xii-xiii)

It is indeed far more insidious, as it is now not only the PMRCs of the world which believe in the pointlessness of musical rebellion, but new metal musicians themselves. New metal artists express their negotiation of a world in which political action in music has "imploded" into selfish, profiteering leisure, and rage has imploded into partying. It is thus that the energies of these artists have turned inward to inner spiritual turmoil, to personal troubles, to ironic social satire, and to pure escapism. Seeing that "[i]ncreasingly expensive, substanceless spectacles, posing as politics, have effectively disenfranchised the majority of the citizenry" (Nehring xiii), it is no surprise that new metal has been topping the charts (the latter being the indicator of what the majority of the young, consuming citizenry is watching and listening to). New metal is also either increasingly expensive, substanceless spectacle (like Rob Zombie, whose budget barely breaks even on his concerts and whose lyrics are purely entertainment, and like Marilyn Manson's imagery and stage shows), or lamenting this very state of affairs (hence Chino Moreno's repeated lyric "A part of me gets sore! A part of me gets sick!" as well as—speaking of "drainage"—his well-known and anthemic lyric "Suck! Suck! Suck! Suck! Suck!"), or even trying to fight and/or escape it (as in Korn's "Freak on a Leash" and Jonathan Davis' tongue-speak).

New metal is another step along the road into postmodernity that popular rock music has been visibly taking, when examined in retrospect. Grunge evidenced vague discomfort with inauthenticity, but continued to use hegemonic languages such as guitar rock based on blues and classic rock and lyrics concerned with objectively knowable problems such as rape, drugs, love, and government. Grunge musicians showed no doubt about the value, status, and meaning of their music. Indeed they were secure in the conviction that "acerbic music has been the most conspicuous public voice of protest, almost singlehandedly keeping visions of humane social change alive in the mass media, where fissures in corporate dominance still exist," (Nehring xiii, emphasis mine). But now, whether they exist or not, new metal artists see no such fissures and simultaneously embrace the smooth, uncracked (but hopefully not uncrackable) surface of corporate dominance as a survival/success tactic, while doing what they can to remain their own, to keep their own language. If one does not subscribe to the conspiracy theory of his murder, the end of grunge was pointedly marked and delineated by Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994. It is reasonable to suspect that at least part of the reason for his suicide was that he perceived the advent of exactly what I am discussing and what new metal is negotiating, and he was ill-prepared to navigate such a state of affairs. Korn's appearance on the musical scene marked the beginning of new metal's popularity, but not its presence. The very first lyric on Korn's first album is a rising scream which introduces the first booming riff: "Are you ready!!!" Cobain evidently was not ready for the next step in the postmodernity of popular music and culture. As Dennis Cooper wrote in his article entitled "Grain of the Voice" (presumably an acknowledgement of the relevance of Roland Barthes' "the grain of the voice" to Cobain's brand of music and singing), published in the June 1994 issue of Spin magazine: "[Cobain] believed in the communicative powers of popular music, [and] showed what was possible, even in this ugly and demoralized culture" (37). New metal artists do not believe in such communicative powers, living as they do in what Greil Marcus calls "a world ruled by a language one refuses to speak" (Marcus 337). And yet they must believe, or at least desire belief, in something, for the only true indicator of absolute despair would be silence.

Ellen Willis wrote, in her 1995 Village Voice article entitled "When Bad Things Happen to Good Brains," that "[t]he problem with the Enlightenment ... was not in its belief in understanding, but its failure to understand a culture whose civilized veneer concealed mass ... frustration and rage" (8). This is a problem that has been repeated in the twentieth century. Two World Wars badly tarnished North America's civilized self-image, and in the post-war 1950s popular culture and polite society did their best to restore that "civilized veneer," to prove to themselves that they were, indeed, quite civilized. This resulted in over-compensation, and the youth of that culture felt, as I discussed in my first chapter, oppressed, repressed, and forced into false emotion and behaviour. Also, the Wars brought about an economic boom which caused corporate capitalism to thrive, providing fertile ground for ubiquitous advertising. By targeting youth and making them feel as if they were being told what to do, this sudden surge in advertising indirectly resulted in the popularity of raucous rock and roll. Once again, with the sudden, late 1990s surge in information and optimism, Willis' complaint about the Enlightenment has become relevant. The difference is that, today, new metal artists, unlike the rock and rollers of the 1950s, have no faith in any remedy, cure, or antidote to the fragmentation, replication, and redundancy in popular culture. In arguing against the concepts of postmodernism which work to defuse the authenticity and power of angry music, Nehring helps to outline what it is that is driving new metal.

According to Nehring, "postmodernism fully arrived in rock and roll when punk lost its momentum around 1981, with the advent of New Pop posers ... and a new cable channel reliant on their videos, MTV. If punk achieved mass popularity a decade later, it did so under very different circumstances, when 'alternative' music was well incorporated into the music industry" (Nehring xxvi, emphasis mine). Alternative music (musical styles outside of the mainstream popular tastes) has been incorporated and has been popular for so long (at least a decade) that a new generation of popular music is rising up out of this new "incorporated alternative" ground: new metal. The brutal failure of "Woodstock 1999" shows that this new generation knows that "As Dominic Strinati points out, ... musical authenticity has never really existed, except in mythologies about past innocence and in marketing strategies exploiting that nostalgia" (Nehring xxvi). New metal reflects a generation that sees itself inside the hegemonic discourse that exploits, and thus mocks, nostalgia, and yet positions itself outside it, fighting angrily for credit in an incredulous world.

In the perception of new metal artists and their fans, things are not as simple as they appeared to be for grunge, punk, and riot grrrl musicians. Nehring points out that "[t]he large amount of angry music at present reflects the steadily worsening situation since the original moment of punk" (xxvi) and "there has understandably been an expansion of anger in the music of the increasingly large number of economically obsolete young people" (xxvii). No longer can the young sing about peace, lament about authority, or scream about boredom—exploitation of nostalgia, ubiquity of advertising images, and the Edenesque promise of communications technology have rendered such straightforward expression impotent (hence the smiling cheers of the "fratboys" at dance clubs as they drunkenly scream along with Rage Against the Machine's Zack de la Rocha: "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!"). This generation has internalized "the view that some hopeless postmodern condition has taken hold of music—the eternal rule of multinational corporations" (Nehring xxvii), and yet continues to feel an instinctual yearning for authentic self-expression. They know that "it's all been done before," but instead of shrugging silently, they have engaged in the bizarre new qualities and fusions of new metal.

The problems which characterize postmodernism are what fuel new metal, and thus a clear understanding of the relation of postmodernism to new metal is essential. Nehring's chapter entitled "An Introduction to Postmodernism" is extremely useful for its delineations of what he sees as the arguments postmodernism uses against angry popular music, which are also delineations of what is preoccupying new metal. While not all of the aspects of his analysis are relevant to my work, I will mention a few of his points to help illustrate the relationship between postmodernity and new metal. Nehring argues that

we need, in various forms depending on the person or groups in question, some relatively stable sense of individual and collective identity to assert against the status quo. Multiculturalism and pluralism are vital; theories of the fictionality, fragmentation, and nonexistence of identity are another matter. ... Identity politics ought to be uncoupled from the rubric of postmodernism ... Identities, however diverse, ought to be a matter of assertion, not dissolution... (Nehring 5).

Nehring reveals his affinity for older music throughout the book, writing, as he does, about punk, riot grrrls, and grunge. It is clear he has no interest in new metal, for most of the points he makes about angry music are not applicable to new metal—this is largely the defining quality of new metal. Fans and creators of new metal have no "relatively stable sense of individual and collective identity" (Nehring 5). Indeed, the "status quo" is the very condition in which reality defines itself in relation to the myriad images and ideas put forth by limitless advertising images, which include the idea of assertion against the status quo. There are no "groups" in question anymore, every group is only defined arbitrarily through adherence to one image or another, be it a gothic/industrial image, a brand name, or a coastal hippie. Nehring points out differing types or approaches to postmodernism, noting that they all "employ a similar rhetoric in diagnosing a universal 'schizophrenia,' or delusional detachment" (Nehring 5). "Fictionality, fragmentation, and nonexistence of identity" are no longer "another matter." They are the matter. Popular culture has arrived at that very point. For new metal, identity politics are not "uncoupled from the rubric of postmodernism." Identities are at the same time infinitely diverse and completely identical and are a matter of dissolution, not assertion.

In my introductory chapter I quoted two of the three areas in which, according to Nehring, postmodernism involves development. As I have briefly stated, these qualities describe the preoccupations of new metal quite well, although it must be admitted that the words "French poststructuralist theory" and "structures of ideology and power" are not used in new metal songs. Some new metal artists take the second point to an extreme by criticizing and celebrating mass culture simultaneously. This type of internal-paradox phenomenon abounds in new metal, as it does in postmodernism. Bruce Robbins, in his "Social Text and Reality," published on July 8, 1996 in In these Times, claims that postmodern theory "gathers people and groups who are trying to deconstruct the same identities they also rely on" (29). Nehring argues that "A juggling act of this sort is plausible, although the deconstruction of identity typically becomes an end in itself at the expense of actual politics, by requiring a disabling acknowledgment of a free-floating power that supplies identities" (Nehring 7). New metal reflects a condition that exists beyond such a "juggling act," in which the balls have been dropped. Instead of "acknowledging a free-floating power that supplies identities," new metal artists are lamenting the absence of such a power. Nehring's brief account of what differentiates the postmodern from the modernist is also helpful in outlining the preoccupations of new metal:

These three areas [of postmodernism] do have a common denominator—a crippling loss of faith in human agents, both individuals and groups. Modernism had already grappled with alienation, or a sense of separation from others and from the possibility of fulfillment through everyday experience. Thus, modernist works of art are largely monuments to the internal processes of their individual creators, deliberately refusing any political engagement. "Post-" modernism basically means pushing modernism over the edge by giving up on the lonely individual as well as possibilities for political action: The problem is no longer alienation, but sheer fragmentation. ...self-reflexiveness, pastiche (a degraded form of montage), and indeterminacy, all reflecting a preoccupation with the weakness of the individual—occur throughout modernism. The only difference from modernism in what passes for postmodern, therefore, lies merely in the increasing extremity of descriptions of fragmentation. (Nehring 6)

The extremity of these descriptions has now, in new metal, reached the point that conventional verbal language is no longer adequate, and fragmentation must be expressed through the visual imagery which accompanies the music and through the utterances of the vocalists in the songs. While I concur with Nehring's points about the presence of these preoccupations in modernist works, I would add that such elements were not to be found in mass culture as much as they were present in works by and for the (briefly aligning myself with Nehring's thinly-veiled contempt for dismissive academics, I choose to avoid the word "well-") much-educated and much-read. I argue that the presence of these preoccupations in some of the most "mass" of mass culture products is indicative of a significant increase in the fragmenting effects produced by the "information age." The fact that the seemingly paranoiac discomforts of the ascetic, eccentric, and "high-brow" modernists are now commonplace in chart-topping hit singles can hardly be ignored.

Nehring outlines postmodernism in order to challenge its premise, or to defend angry popular rock music against the debilitating efforts of postmodernists. Nevertheless, many of his points about postmodernism, in direct opposition to the punk and riot grrrl music he defends, are accurate descriptions of new metal. New metal does not present the fight-back, stay-strong, unifying tendencies which Nehring sees in "music conveying both discontent and a concern with renewing common feeling" (Nehring xxiii). Instead, new metal is caught up in the postmodern condition Nehring argues angry music is created to resist. There is no unity, no corralled energy, no target of discontent for new metal. But new metal is angry. There is rage, discontent, and emotion. While the music is postmodern, it does not succumb to the intellectual futility described by Nehring. This postmodern age has convinced the new metal generation that, as Nehring describes, anger is futile. They have internalized this belief, and yet continue to find themselves angry. Convinced that expression of their undeniable emotion will now be nothing but a self-mockery, new metal artists are striving to find a way which is acceptable to themselves to express their discontent with the prevailing conditions of their culture. While they continue to rage against machines such as religious and parental oppression and dismissal, they now must also rage against the absence of their own machines to use for such raging.

Despite his contradictory position towards the postmodern thesis about popular music, Nehring discusses, in the context of supporting feminist arguments, one point which is invaluable to a comprehension of new metal. Post-Enlightenment culture has dismissed anger as an emotion, which is of the body, and is in opposition to reason, which is of the mind, concluding that anger is meaningless (and feminine—read "weak"). Feminists and women in rock have endeavoured to erase the separation between body and mind in order to reassert the power and meaning of emotion. This is precisely what new metal artists, perhaps without as much conscious or focussed intent, are doing.

New metal places a lot of emphasis on the body. Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Rob Zombie are very rhythmic and oriented towards dancing and moving the body, Deftones' Chino Moreno has a very physical, corporeal vocal style, and Marilyn Manson's imagery focuses almost exclusively on things that they do to their bodies. This is where new metal is similar to grunge, punk, and riot grrrl music, but in a different way, for

[t]he postmodern thesis that emotion has become disconnected from ideology (or reason) is entirely undermined if feminist philosophy is right in arguing that emotions are rational judgements formed out of social interaction (and thus educable in both good and bad directions), that physical sensations are just as important as verbal articulation in those judgements, and that anger is the 'essential political emotion'. (Nehring 107)

Theorists from Enlightenment to Modernism have associated emotion with the unconscious, with instinct, with ferality and barbarism, and with animals. Angry popular music, and the women involved in it, have refuted that, asserting that leaving emotion out of cognition and judgement is an entirely erroneous process, for "[e]motion, properly understood, is the whole works involved in evaluating a situation: our cognitive appraisal of it, our physical feelings about it, and our subsequent choices in expressing our approval or disapproval and acting on it" (Nehring 108). Grunge, punk, riot grrrl, and other visibly angry forms of music have been criticized for being unintelligible, inarticulate, and for being a mere saleable pose. This music has operated by stretching the bounds of established language, but still by remaining within it. Screams have always been, in charting-topping singles and records, distortions of words, drawing out the endings of words, or simple yells that sound like the singer is at a loss for words. Since

any words you could use to condemn [societal wrongs] have already been taken and twisted, the only thing left for any sensible person to do is scream, which is exactly what a lot of young people are doing. They're not worrying about a 'message', which fascists like Gingrich and Limbaugh, given the absence of anyone in the government or news media who will contradict them, would just spin into a soundbite. (Nehring 154)

And while "[p]ure screaming is what grunge, hip-hop, metal, punk, and Riot Grrrls have in common" (Nehring 154), new metal artists have gone beyond pure screaming, for screaming is no longer pure. It is tainted with the benign-ness of people who have enjoyed listening to it on top 40 radio. All that Nehring writes about "words you could use to condemn" is now true of "pure screaming" as well. Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth (a very angry band), was quoted (by Kim France in her article for the September/October 1992 Utne Reader, entitled "Angry Young Women") as saying, "Screaming is a kind of vehicle for expressing yourself in ways society doesn't let you" (24). Now, the loss for words has reached the point at which the loss itself is a word. It is not just a word, but word-terrain occupied now by over-popularized music. Now, the hypermarket has made screaming into an information, and "[r]ather than creating communication, [communication] exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning" (Baudrillard 80). The same forces that took words of condemnation away from angry musicians have taken away the non-words of outrage. Screaming for lack of anything else to say has now been packaged and sold (and consumed by dance-club fratboys); this sheds light on the vocal techniques of Jonathan Davis, which seem to create an entirely new language, known only to himself (it is not likely that drunken fratboys can emulate Davis' vocals). The creation of new pseudo-languages in angry popular music makes it more apparent that "a recognition of the intelligence of emotions is needed in popular music criticism as well as in academic work" (Nehring 109).

My intention in examining this particular similarity between new metal and past angry music is hardly to show that new metal is not very new after all. I have already shown what makes new metal new, and will proceed to demonstrate that new metal is indeed authentically angry—even if new metal artists are unsure why they are angry and even if they participate in the discourse of the hegemonic forces with which they may be angry—as well as to explain the dance/body inclination of the music, hitherto unknown in angry music. New metal musicians appear acutely aware of their own sensation that possibilities open to them for honestly expressing themselves are increasingly few. This is why they have pushed "indecipherable" expression even further than their predecessors. Earlier angry music screamed; new metal babbles and dances.

If language (and thus reason) has been entirely occupied and drained of tangible meaning by the music industry, angry music must, in order to continue expressing itself credibly, move along the Cartesian body-mind axis towards territory which remains unclaimed by a meaning-draining market. That territory is the body. Simple images of the body have, of course, been the property of advertising forces for decades, and thus earlier angry music was adamantly opposed to a strong focus on body image. New metal occupies the ground of the body by fusing dancing body movement with angry music (like Limp Bizkit and Korn), by injecting more of the body into the sound of the music and the vocal performance (like Deftones), and by pushing images of the body into new extremes (Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson). The opposing poles of body and mind and are connected by emotion, and "[a]s opposed to choosing between either the body or the intellect in our approaches to popular music, therefore, we need instead 'a full understanding of the way emotion can act as a mediator between reason and desire,' as Peter Middleton puts it" (Nehring 127). If there is a straight line drawn between the concepts of mind and body, with emotion in the middle, angry popular music before new metal stayed primarily slightly to the body side of emotion. New metal is much farther towards the body pole. Given that popular music has moved its emphasis from intellect to emotion (not just in lyrical content, which has always been supposedly "emotional," but in sound, texture, style, etc. as well), new metal's assuming of a place near to the body pole of such an axis is indicative of further socio-cultural movement towards the anxieties expressed by postmodernism. This reveals the importance of the link I have drawn—using the body-mind axis—between grunge, riot grrrl, and punk, on one hand, and new metal, on the other. Earlier angry music shares with new metal an emotive, corporeal sound and style, but is more rational (i.e. grounded in prior language and semantic systems) than new metal. This is apparent in "an objection frequently raised against Nirvana, in particular: that one can't hear the lyrics" (Nehring 124). This complaint relies on the idea that there are comprehensible, English-language lyrics to be understood underneath the screaming and distortion. In the case of Jonathan Davis, the incomprehensible lyrics are perfectly clear; they are simply not in English, nor do they belong to a language system designed like any conventional language intended to be understood. Jonathan Davis speaks words that are meaningless, because the potency of Kurt Cobain's indecipherability has been defused. He thus cleans up the precision of his utterance, but completely erases its relation to known systems of language. Other new metal vocalists do not go this far, especially Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie, who remain primarily within decipherable language. Still, Deftones' Chino Moreno and Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, as well as Jonathan Davis, increase the ferality of their performance by using emotive elements such as squeals, moans, whimpers, sobs, and bodily elements such as pants, snarls, and sounds of the throat, teeth, tongue, and lips. Here, "[t]he body in the voice, or embodied voice, is celebrated for exceeding rational meaning through a tactile 'grain' and jouissance (in Roland Barthes' terms) or a corporeal signifiance (as Julia Kristeva puts it)" (Nehring 131). These elements make the music far less rational-sounding than previous emotive angry music, and are indicative of an increased confusion induced by postmodernity.

By being even more corporeal and less rational than older angry music, new metal has taken up a position which is strongly bound up in the body. New metal artists are involving the human body in their work in ways which angry music has never previously done. Now it appears that angry music can provoke dancing. "Head-banging," the movement provoked by previous styles of metal, for instance, lacks the coordination and the bodily comprehensiveness of dance. While new metal does not rely on choreographed dance to the degree of The Backstreet Boys, bands like Limp Bizkit have been known to feature breakdancing (a highly coordinated style of dancing originated in the 1980s with hiphop and rap music) on their stages. The reason for this originates in the struggle for that elusive treasure: authenticity. The idea of keeping the body foreign, of not being "in tune" with it, and of paying it little attention and leaving it to its own devices is now old and marketed. The unkempt, sound-is-more-important-than-look idea has been in vogue in angry music since punks took the time to spike their hair. Attention to one's appearance—whether to guide it towards the acceptable fashion trends or away from them—and attention to how one's body moved was relegated to hegemonic music. Now, inattention to such things has also become property of saleable musical commodity, and angry popular musicians are looking for an approach to their bodies which they can accept as solely their own.

The idea of words and the concept of language have been occupied by forces which make them meaningless. The same is now true of non-words, such as screams. Indeed, the very idea of voice is now being questioned by new metal music. The body is a strong presence in new metal music and imagery because

the old 'voices of the body' are now 'always determined by a system,' leaving only 'contextless voice-gaps' that indicate the body's absence from discourse. Thus the 'voice of the people' has been utterly fragmented into 'aphasic enunciation [of] bits of language.' That aphasia, or the loss of the power to use words, results from the voice somehow being universally 'cleaned up' by the various techniques of sound reproduction... (Nehring 130, quoting Michel de Certeau)

Now new metal artists are seen wearing athletic gear, braiding their hair, "dreadlocking" their hair Jamaican-style, breakdancing, hiphop dancing, singing about the body, and using such lyrics as "come dance with me." Fewer possibilities offered by the body have been closed off by market/advertising money-generating forces than those available in spoken language and the voice. New metal presents bizarre combinations of hegemonic elements such as dance, techno, and dress with formerly underground/alternative elements such as "grainy" utterance, dissonance, profanity, sheer volume, and the grotesque in order to create new semantic ground unclaimed by inauthentic, profit-motivated forces. But a deeper paradox remains: being averse to profit in music is now a pose located in the infinite lexicon of media images which are quick to appropriate any form of expression. New metal musicians are perhaps the first popular musical generation to be forced to acknowledge this phenomenon. Consequently new metal artists are doubling back semantically, and fusing counter-cultural elements with elements of pure hegemony. Kurt Cobain's music and identity was overtaken by this process, and his resistance appears to have killed him. Now new metal artists simply embrace the process while remaining anxious about the loss of authenticity. This seemingly infinite unfolding of paradoxes is like two mirrors facing each other, and new metal artists are caught in the middle, each taking their own approach to addressing the predicament in which they find themselves.

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