This music is derived from the mixing nordic cultures integrated with southern, african and middle eastern influences. The collaborative nature of band units, with less emphasis on individual importance, can be considered asian in concept descent. Covering this huge geographic spread, it is no wonder it has become a global, international music.
The most amazing stuff seems to automatically emerge from developing nations, which of course contribute their own characteristics in a virtual explosion of industrial energy, much as McLuhan had prophetically theorized in the late fifties.
In a more recent evolution of modern metal, south american death/gore metal bands embody the best in graphic and grotesque mayan-aztec ritualistic blood sacrifice esthetics, some of which can be detected in modern day mexican tabloid culture. Leave it to the scandinavian black metal youth to add a stoic chill of permafrost-pervaded putrefaction, and coagulated blood turns to a color-drained black against the stark albino skin, hair and snow background of this environmental genetic funneling.
Its global popularity is also attributable to the reclaiming of the shamanic function of ancient tribal folk ritual music, which western culture had completely forsaken, in its appropriation of classical music designed for aristocratic indulgent consumption. The development of electric amplification has helped re-adjust acoustic reach across the sheer numbers of modern industrial-sized mass audiences in dire need of tangible cathartic release. Sounds at that tonality and volumes redefine the physicality of interaction with the human body. Those levels are designed to open up by sound waves interstitial cell vibrations, also spawning new interaction scenarios of intimate physical contact with proximals.
And here's an inspired still of Jimmy Page from Led Zep's awesome concert at Royal Albert Hall in 1970. He looks like Michael Jackson! But even more infantile.
