Afterword to All Known Metal Bands:
I. Forty million years ago, the gorillas that would eventually metamorphose into the earliest humanoids split off from the evolutionary line of great apes. Thirty-nine million seven hundred thousand years ago, we see the first signs of a proto-human (Australopithecus afarensis) that can be traced directly, through a continuous set of fossils, to Homo erectus, the most common mammal that exists in the year of the creation of this book, the year two thousand eight of the Common Era.
There are those–the author of this book included–who believe that in that shadowy stretch of three hundred thousand years, the blink between great apes and humans, a distinct race much like ourselves came into existence, evolved, flourished, and ultimately destroyed itself by monstrous means, wiping clean the surface of the earth with horrific, fire-bearing tools of their own design, leaving but a thin layer of compacted ash to be dug through in the later search for thicker paleontological meaning.
Perhaps they formed books like the one you now read, books that recorded the knotted, frayed, and powerful doings of the Ur-men, the very first of those whose faces leveled gazes against each other, and toward the horizon; who grasped the ape’s tool–the stick–and sharpened it, or lashed it to a stone, or struck it against a hollow tree in concert with the beating in their chests. Perhaps they fashioned books of reeds or barks painted with dye or ink or blood or mud, scribed in wild tongues now dried and shriveled, jacketed in stone or skin or plant or such stuff as exists no more, in no way envisionable by our later minds.
It may be that these early women and men did and made and acted in such lofty or lowly ways that would uncloak us as simple clods.
II. The names in this book are invisible tokens to be uttered aloud, each conjuring a group of humans formed to play rock in its extreme forms–with the greatest impact of sound, in which the floorboards shake and the walls quiver, and ears split and leak blood; or of sight, with faces painted, hair preened bird-like, horse-like, arms and belts packed with stone and metal, skin stained life-long with arcane or vulgar signs; or of speech, wherein is screamed and growled what woman and man alike shun to speak of: death, abuse, horror, evil, hate, and the ever-yawning black maw.
Not only do these bards proclaim the fears that shadow human life as ghastly blood blots cobbled roads–in doing so, they also summon the vital forces that rise up in the face of these appalling dangers. Picture the whaleboat staved in twain by a great whale breaching beneath it, the oarsmen snarling, ready to make clubs of sweeps, harpooner turning to pierce the beast, even as he is tossed, to be swallowed in the foaming thing’s wake.
III. The names in this book were amassed as grains of sand in a bowl–the more that were piled, the more that evaded one’s grasp. The grains of metal players and hearers are scattered in their vast multiplicity throughout society, ubiquitous but concealed. Never has a music relegated to the underground of a civilization had so many devotees; no radio need transmit its power, for it is sought fiercely and freely by the doomed and the dispossessed, those whose ears are never touched by songs of love and weakness.
This volume contains just under fifty-one thousand bands. For each name that is used by more than one group, that name is listed once for each distinct group. Should one presume that each of these bands had an average of four members, and multiply that by the quantity of bands, one might calculate that at least a quarter of a million humans have undertaken this quest–to unearth, embody, aim, and deliver power itself–and have brought that quest into the harsh light of the public world.
IV. The names herein were collected by the author, with no direct aid from other humans, gathered from the ether in relative secrecy, using the tools of this moment: a kind of book with a static but changing screen made of light, and an invisible web tying many such books together, wherein language and pictures are transmitted through a refined from of lighting. But when the light books sputter out and die, this brick of paper shall remain. This dusty volume, which you may have unearthed from a tomb, or a burned-out library, or from a metal box submerged in dessicated mud. If you can read our language, then read of these beings who once populated the earth, and who are now gone. Examine this stone and read in it a fallen civilization.
Read it–and weep.
