I Saw Hell Let Loose: On Panopticon and "Kentucky" (2012)

Place, Ecology and Politics in Contemporary Heavy Metal

"They call Keeney a radical. Who made him a radical? I’ve seen the time when I didn’t have the right to eat in this State. I’ve seen the time when I was refused a job. I’ve been served with eviction papers and thrown out of my house. I’ve seen women and children brutally treated in mining camps. I’ve seen hell turned loose."

--- Frank Keeney, UMWA District 17 President, 1921

“There exists a virtual reign of terror (in Harlan County), financed in general by a group of coal mine operators in collusion with certain public officials: the victims of this reign of terror are the coal miners and their families… a monster-like reign of oppression whose tentacles reached into the very foundation of the social structure and even into the Church of god… the homes of union miners and organizers were dynamited and fired into… It appears that the principal cause of existing conditions is the desire of the mine owners to amass for themselves fortunes through the oppression of their laborers, which they do through the sheriff’s office.”

 -- Report of the Commission appointed by Kentucky Governor Ruby Laffoon, June 6, 1935

One of the things that is potentially the most off-putting about extreme or black metal is the relationship of the music to nature. The reputation of a lot of this kind of music is for a sort of cringe-kitschy paganism, fetishism of a state of nature equated with freedom and genuine human Being. And even when that’s been moved away from, towards themes of ecology and integration into nature it often seems to lack a sense of place and more importantly, the recognition that the human relationship to place is mediated through and by both history and politics. It’s what makes Panopticon’s Kentucky (2012) such an interesting album by using a specific musical tradition it’s able to be both an album that destroys whilst also being a record that understands the fundamentally political and historical nature of the construction of place. Nature is never nowhere, ecology is never placeless and the construction of place is always already one of politics. 

The track opener here, called “Bernheim Forest” is a classic Appalachian stomper, with banjos and strings set up for what feels like a proper country party, before the shift into the first proper song “Bodies Under The Falls.” Like LINGUA IGNOTA’s album, SINNER GET READY, the use of American folk and country music sets up initial friction between what the listener thinks the album should be and what it actually is, but ultimately this isn’t some sort of fusion album, rather it is an exercise in the establishing of commonalities. Black metal has a huge amount in common with the musicality and patterns of country and folk music and traditional music of Appalachia and the American south has so much that it should be righteous, burningly furious about. In other words, on the level of form, this album is an exercise in the construction and building of sonic solidarity. But back to that first track: it’s a ten-minute behemoth with some absolutely ferocious drumming, thematically and lyrically a classic black metal song, but the opening with its banjos and fiddles has given the song a ground that it wouldn’t have without it. Austin Lunn howls that “only trees now know of the horrors seen here, that THE FOREST IS HAUNTED. Softly whispering in the dead air… The blood-stained stones in the deep…Morosely contrasting against Appalachian green… Flows into the river whisked away… vengeance was claimed on that day. Bullets for every pale face.” 

You know who he’s talking about, the same people who made that banjo music that opened the album. If you don’t get it from that track (and if you aren’t used to listening to metal song lyrics you might not make it out on the first listen) then the next song “Come All Ye Coal Miners” makes it crystal clear. It’s a cover of an old song, which, from what I can tell, got its most famous release when recorded back in the early ‘70s but was written in the 1930s by the singer and activist Sarah Gunning. She was married to a miner and her own father was a blacklisted union miner who recorded folk songs too. Lunn’s version is much faster, orchestrated like a metal song, but played with a very traditional musical arrangement, and like many of those songs from the time the lyrics make the connection clear between capitalism, ecology, and the struggles of working-class people.

Coal miner, won't you wake up, and open your eyes and see/What the dirty capitalist system is doing to you and me/They take your very life blood, they take our children's lives/They take fathers away from children, and husbands away from wives.

What can we do? The song makes two suggestions: organize and ‘sink this capitalist system to the darkest pit of hell.’ Lunn’s version ends with a sample, a voice telling you about the mining industry, and it’s worth quoting in full: 

It's a commodity business. Every penny that they have to spend, for safety, for wages, for healthcare, or anything like that, it's money that they see coming directly out of their pocket. And the history of coal mining is very clear on this, it's not a subtle thing. This is an industry that views workers as disposable, and views the landscape as disposable. And it's all about getting the coal out of the ground as quickly and cheaply as possible

The landscape and the bodies of the working class are fuel for the fire, grist for the mill, all to be fed into the gaping maw of capitalist production, yet there is radicalism in the history of the place which is often excluded from our collective shared history. Miners, particularly in Kentucky, have a history of not just radical politics but of armed militancy against capitalism. Harlan County in Kentucky was the site of what gets called the Mine Wars because miners there didn’t just strike, they got organized and they got guns. It’s difficult to overstate the power that coal company operators had in their ability to punish working people to organize. The infamous Sheriffs department of Harlan Country had over 100 deputies who were on the payroll of operators and J.H Blair is on record of saying that he often gave orders to shoot to kill. It’s this history that forms the backbone of Black Soot and Red Blood, another ten-minute stomper. It has a slightly slower opening built around Lunn’s guitar work rather than the pummeling drumming but its build is effective and weighty, the sound of history itself coming down around your ears. 

Hold out just one more day…

Say the same tomorrow…

Say the same tomorrow

For the union, hold out, for a fair wage and a living, this sorrow

For a fair wage and a living, this sorrow

Living and dying union men

Meet them in the streets

Meet them in the hills and don't back down, don't back down

Fight for what is right, for every working man to earn his keep

Fight for what is right till they meet your demands…in Bloody Harlan

This is all history, though right?  But what’s history? It’s never been better put than by the greatest historian of Wales (another area made and devastated by mining), Gwyn Alf Williams. As he put it, history is more than a page in a book! History is the buckle that bites your back. History is the sweat you can’t keep out of your eyes. History is the fear crawling in your belly! 

History is personal. We are such stuff as history is made of, as was the heroic fight of Bloody Harlan, as is every ongoing struggle in this world by working-class people to exert whatever power they have to make their lives a little better. And thus, what that requires is to (as the next song on the album reminds us) decide which side we are on. History is struggle and every struggle requires moments of decision. Towards the end of the album comes the track ‘Black Waters’ which is an eerie and unsettling song. The vocals sound like they come from a place very far away, a place where “once in every green valley there runs a clear stream.” Now, all there is to see is “Sad scenes of destruction every hand/Black waters, black waters run down through my land” and all that can be heard is the sound of dynamite explosions rather than birdsong. It’s a song that resonates with climate grief, a sense of just how much we’ve lost because those who were rich and powerful have decided to take it away. 

Well I ain't got no money, not much of a home I own my own land but my land's not my own but if I had 10 billion or somewhere thereabouts I'd buy Perry County and run 'em all out and sit on the banks with my bait and my can and watch the clear waters run down through my land. 

Now wouldn't that be like the old promised land? 

Black waters black waters no more in my land. 

The album closes as it opens on an entirely instrumental track, this one called “Kentucky.” You complete the circle and arrive back to that specific musical language of American folk tunes and Appalachian instrumentation. But by making the journey, by digging through the dirt and blood and soot of history you are returned fundamentally altered by the experience. It isn’t just coal in those hills. But the unquiet graves of those who have fought and died and struggled for a better, more dignified world. Even in the dark of the mines, there are inextinguishable glimmers of possibility. We just need to dig them out. 

LISTEN HERE