Aesthetics of the Unrepresentable: Reflections on Varas-Diaz’s Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America

I feel like I’ve been a detective when it comes to heavy metal since moving to Colombia.

My tastes have skewed towards the more musically sedate for the last two decades, but my background in extreme music sensitized me to its presence in Bogota.

I don’t know how effective of a detective I’ve been in investigating any of this — I’ve been more of the clueless Philip Marlow from Robert Altman’s satirical version of The Big Sleep (minus the Rip van Winkle anachronisms) than the Chandler one. But, as a guest/observer, I’ve had the sense that I’ve intuited something in the way that Colombian metal seems to reflect undercurrents of socio-political critique and a defiant form of historical memory.

So, when I saw a post about Nelson Varas-Diaz’s Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America (Intellect 2021) on Instagram the other day, I had to drop everything to read the chapter on Colombia along with the one outlining the theoretical framework. I worked through some of the remaining chapters over the next day or two.

It’s based on nearly a decade of ethnographic research and really nicely clarifies how extreme music in Latin America fosters what Varas-Diaz calls “extreme decolonial dialogues” aimed at coping with and transforming the impact of the region’s colonial history/ongoing experience.

I’m a guest in Colombia, not a Latin American studies scholar by any measure, and have limited understanding of the country and region (I’m working on it). Still, speaking from that perspective, I took a lot from the text.

It condensed in really powerful analytic prose the sense of the Colombian metal underground that I had intuited. Perhaps most essentially, Varas-Diaz underscores how Latin American metal refashions metal aesthetics in a way that is political, yes, but also distinctly Latin American and decolonial (the former a disposition furthering the goal of the latter). He persuasively demonstrates that this version of metal is not a rehashing of Tampa death metal expressed in Spanish, though the metal scene of the Global North may mistake it as such. It is a spontaneous creative expression that draws on a metal register while reflecting a unique ethical (Dussel) and epistemological (Mignolo) commitment to local knowledge(s). On that note, I thought it was nice the text addressed the celebratory facets of metal, which are particularly important in a colonial/post-colonial context, and often underappreciated in general, I think.

As Varas-Diaz points out, both the lyrical content and artistic imagery of a large part of metal in Latin America are often overtly decolonial. In this way, it can serve the Friereian goal of starting a non-hierarchical educational dialogue regarding the region’s colonial experience. I was particularly interested in how it serves as a bottom-up movement to preserve the face of those who’ve suffered (thinking of Levinas), which was the theme of the chapter on Colombia. On this account, decolonial metal is a type of insurgent democratic monument to memorialize the face of those who’ve suffered when perhaps the state might not provide such (or may even try to actively erase it).

As I was reading the text, I started to wonder about the sonicality of the music. What I mean by this is the form or character of the sound of the music (as opposed to the lyrics, album art, or stage show). For example, Varas-Diaz points us to the use of indigenous instruments in some decolonial metal. I found myself wondering about how those instruments can be a type of symbol, certainly, but also how the sound they produce might generate a sensory experience that implies an idea or perspective. I think Merleau-Ponty might talk about sound in that way in the Phenomenology of Perception.

One then wonders the same of metal. Perhaps something about the experience that the sound of that music generates might be conducive to certain ways of thinking. Is there something about the harsh sonicality of metal that may have marbled into it ideas or perspectives that might even go beyond verbal expression but nevertheless communicate a certain standpoint?

If that is the case, then the aesthetic experience of decolonial metal could be thought to work on two levels simultaneously. As a slight riffing on Claude Lanzmann’s language regarding the image in his films, decolonial metal might entail lyrics that understand what they represent and music that maybe doesn’t (to be clear: in the case of metal sonicality in particular). On this interpretation, metal sonicality might be thought to reach beyond the literal content of the music (which is explicitly decolonial) to gesture towards suffering that, again thinking of Lanzmann and now Ranciere, might be unrepresentable (which would then be implicitly decolonial). If that is the case, then something like decolonial metal’s lyrical content might lead us to enter into a vigorous form of decolonial dialogue while the sonicality and general aesthetics might point towards dimensions of social trauma that overflow or cannot be fully addressed by that lyrical content. The two levels would work in tandem.

That line of inquiry then leads me to wonder about the history of the genre in the region. It was interesting to hear about how some of the originators of Colombian death metal, such as Masacre in the 1980s, had found themselves almost inventing the genre as they went due to a lack of international exposure. That’s fascinating for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being the question of why those fans settled on metal rather than a related but more overtly political genre such as punk, which particularly in its 1980s form may have ostensibly been a more congenial vehicle for overt social critique. It might have just been a matter of exposure, or it had something to do with the phenomenology of the sonic experience of metal. Likely both, I guess, as well as other considerations, too, I’m sure. I’d be curious to see the results of further historical scholarship that would build on what Varas-Diaz has given us.

To put my cards on the table, some of this line of thinking might stem from my own musical biases: I grew up going to shows in the 90s, which was well after the “crossover” era of the 1980s had blended metal and hardcore/punk, but the genres still didn’t mix much at that point. I’d listened to metal in elementary school, but it seemed very Dungeons and Dragons — especially when compared to the likes of groups like Crass, Gang of Four, or Bad Religion.

Maybe I’d underestimated metal. As Varas-Diaz points out when discussing the indifference and condescension of the Global North’s metal community to decolonial metal, the genre can be reactionary, but perhaps it also has the seeds of a counter-thrust woven into it. That’s certainly how I related to and defended the more boneheaded, macho sides of 90s hardcore, which at least at that time I made endless excuses for.

I don’t quite know. My sleuthing continues.

A few of the Colombian groups Decolonial Metal Music in Latin Americafocuses on: Tears of Misery, Corpus Calvary, and Masacre.

Selected Bibliography

Dawes, L. (2013). What are you doing here? A Black woman’s life and liberation in heavy metal. Bazillion Points.

Derrida, J. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Michael Naas. Stanford University Press.

Drabinski, J. (2011) Godard between identity and difference. Continuum.

Dussel, E. (1985). Philosophy of Liberation. Wipf and Stock.

Friere, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed, 30th anniversary edition. Bloomsbury.

Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity. Translated by Richard Cohen. Duquesne University Press.

Mignolo, W. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton University Press.

Ranciere, J., and Murphy, T. (2002). “The saint and the heiress: A propos of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema.” Discourse 24(1), 113–119.

Varas-Diaz, N. (2021). Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America. Intellect.