It's a barely-unified pseudogenre and closer to a culture, though that isn't quite right either. Lacking metal's first principle and genetic essence, which is the riff, it tries in vain to define itself through dogmatically-asserted ideals. Much like attempts to define what it means to be "American", that meaning rapidly disintegrates when it becomes its own definition. As long as you're an American first and do what Americans(tm) do, you're good. As long as you claim to be black metal and do what black metal people do, you're good. But then things get tricky. Speculators and monopolists begin asserting their aesthetic might over the territory. Black metal seems stronger than ever; after sufficient generations of arbitrary selection, the old guard maintains a total hegemony on what it means to participate in that culture, and largely by luck a few musical elements precipitate from that. Now, it isn't different for the sake of being different, but something New and Exciting. It was easy enough to create a makeshift identity around land ownership or anti-Christianity, but then what happens when new arrivals dilute the once-selective stock through sheer number? Musical migrants around the world came to black metal's shore in search of a new life, enamored by the promises of atmosphere, ambiance, emotion, ambition. Goodbye shoegaze, goodbye neofolk, goodbye noise rock, goodbye 90s JRPG soundtracks, we've left you for the prospects of a new, better sound in which to plow our music. But when they arrived, they found that the soil was little more than sand, with a small number of men dismally failing to hold it into higher order. This endless expanse of two-chord tremolo-picking and drum machines shifts with the winds and submerges all that dare approach her. From the tides, a new race of mongrelized bastards pops out, half-breed stammering incontinent mutants spraying out a putrid mist of Burzum, My Bloody Valentine, and National Geographic soundtracks. If it weren't for their poor ability to actually digest their wide range of influences, you wouldn't even be able to determine them. Plastic paddies as music. Those who created this cesspool are now forever damned to tread it with the refugees they hate and see as antithetical to them, because should they leave it, they would cease to exist at all.