First of all, it seems that there is little of the Apollonian in heavy metal, but there is. Think of the that great song by Rage, about Danny and Lisa. I forget the words, but think of that operatic interlude that goes something like “They take me away from / The strangest places, / Sweet Danny and Lisa.” Quite a beautiful passage, I think, sharply contrasted with the chorus, which moves from rocking out on the radio (strictly musical) to rocking out on the video (visual art). Somehow, in this song, the primordial music of Dionysius is translated into the Apollinian image. The Apollinian beautiful image does not, I think, necessarily need to be beautiful as we generally think of beauty; rather, I think that Nietzsche’s point is that the images of Dionysian primordial energy are themselves beautiful--perhaps, kind of like how Socrates tells the story of his eyes begging to see some carnage, and him telling them, “All right, then, go ahead and look!” Or, perhaps as Samuel Daniel has it, “Feed apace then, greedy eyes.” The images made of the primordial Dionysian are not going to be “pretty.” They are going to be “savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to hold…” but beautiful none the less.
For another parallel, I think of Richard Wagner’s theory of gesamptkunstwerk. Basically, Wagner believes that his art should make use of every medium of art in its presentation: the lighting of the stage, costumes, music, backdrops, and acts of the stage performers all should unite in an intense, unified art form, as exemplified in his theatre. I’ve been to a couple of Slipknot shows, and they have thrown this idea completely into their own art. Their live shows aren’t just music; they include music (aural art), painting (an impressive and a bit disturbing backdrops), video, with huge television screens enlightening many different angles, crazy light shows and special effects (visual art), and athletic art (a type of drama--band members jumping into the mosh pit to crowd-surf, drummers climbing all over the set, long and dirty hair thrashed wildly in time to the music…).
The song “Psychosocial” is a pretty good example from Slipknot for some lyrics that seem to be working in the tragic genre. Unfortunately, I don’t know the words of the verses to the song, but check this chorus: “And the rain will kill us all, / If we throw ourselves against the wall; / And no one else can see / The preservation of the martyr in me.” Glenn Cannon Arbery suggests that the central paradoxes of tragedy are these: “that only the individual par excellence who strives sacrilegiously against nature can break the spell of individuation, and that nature, which generates the lie of the individual, also tells the truth of primal unity and heals the devastation of the truth with the healing image that is the aftermath of looking into the abyss.” Elsewhere, he adds, “The tragic hero [such as the main character of “Psychosocial”] is actually Dionysius himself undergoing in this disguise the agony of appearing at all, having to be and act in this circumscribed and limited mode of being…. Dionysian truth overcomes this inner doubleness [consciousness of consciousness] … by plunging consciousness into the abyss where one forgets oneself and ceases to appear before one’s own consciousness.” As the singer says, “No one else can see the preservation of the martyr in me:” just as Nietzsche says that only the actors themselves, behind their masks, really face the tragic abyss, whereas the audience, in the displacement of their consciousness; only they can face the dreadful martyrdom that the tragic hero undergoes (even if there always must “children who did not specially want it to happen“).
Well, I guess the point is, these metal bands descend into Nietzsche’s tragic abyss, and that their audience, including me, gains some kind of knowledge from it.
