“A pop song—and metal, for all its fuck no, is pop music—is a commodity, and its market conditions are written into its chord structure. It is caught up entirely in capitalism’s circuits. A wash of guitars and a blast beat do not have the power to resist the contradictions they expose and express.
“Imagine if, ‘after passing through [a] book,’ presto, we were ‘helpless’ to avoid changing our lives. Sometimes I wonder what metal would sound like after capitalism, or whether we would even need metal then. I wonder the same thing about poetry.”
— Michael Robbins, from his essay “Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives.” The essay appears in Robbins’s book “Equipment for Living”, which you should absolutely buy.