Let me tell you a story of one of the most interesting classic metal bands who still remain, har har, a bit of a "cult act."
In the late 60s, Sandy Pearlman, an early rock-and-roll critic writing for Crawdaddy! magazine - one of the first to really be serious about the genre. He made a fairly dark realization at one point - that popular culture could be used as a conduit for fascism - and incorporated the idea into a series of poems called "The Soft Doctrines of Immaginos." He set about building a rock group themed around his off-the-wall sci-fi story. Not that Pearlman himself was a Nazi or anything; it was supposed to be a gag. A viciously-unsubtle jab in the ribs to anyone smart enough to get what he was doing. Perhaps this is why he chose to partner with five nice Jewish boys from upstate New York.
"The Soft Doctrines" centered around an alien, Immaginos, who fell to Earth, dying on a treasure voyage near Mexico in 1829. Bleeding out on the shore, the gods - mischievous fuckers that they are - gave Immaginos a renewed life under the name "Desdinova;" he used this life to search for an obsidian mirror in South America, surprising his granddaughter with it on her birthday on August 1, 1893. Through this, Immaginos/Desdinova is able to influence many important events throughout history, ensuring the First World War happens and spreading fascism, even taking up the guise of Benito Mussolini, possibly alongside many actual Nazis. The band were envisioned as standard-bearers for his horrible campaign, contributing to the end of humanity.
And that band... was the Blue Öyster Cult.
Obviously, the real-world BÖC were mostly just there to perform music based on the "Soft Doctrines." Actually spreading those ideologies was not Sandy Pearlman's idea. But sometiems those went to some very nasty places. Today I'm looking at an album called Secret Treaties (and I swear I'll get to it!), which featured the band hanging out around an ME-262 Messerschmidt bomber, used by Germany during World War II, and includes a song that is basically an ode to the might and badassness of that warplane, with lyrics referencing more than a few Nazis (the opening lyrics go (according to memory) "Goering's on the phone from Freiburg, said Willie done quite a job / Hitler's on the phone from Berlin, says I'm gonna make you a star" - referencing Hermann Goering, Willie Messerschmidt (i.e. the inventor of the heavy bomber this song is named for), and the Fuhrer himself). If it makes you feel uncomfortable, perhaps it should!
See, here's where we need to talk about the idea of making this type of edgy joke and ironic humor. There's been a huge pushback against this stuff in recent years, which is perhaps pretty understandable; a big movement that people making jokes where racism is not the punchline are not being some sort of subversive poking fun at the far-right politics that actually rule the world far more than most people seem to realize even when we have a nominally liberal U.S. President. On paper this is understandable. Irony is hard to get and even harder to do. But where does this leave, say, the infamous cover of Queen's "One Vision" by Laibach (titled "Geburt einer Nation" - and you really don't need to know much German to understand that that's just the traslation of a name of an infamously racist American film (although that part's probably ancillary)), which lampoons the song's lyrics and how they can readily be interpreted as sounding fascistic? Laibach are one of those things you'd probably cringe a little at but eventually recognize are extremely left; even their stock response to accusations, "we are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter," reads a bit ambiguously. Hitler was a painter, but he was total dog shit, lacking meaning or inspiration and by and large looking like less-vivid Thomas Kinkade paintings. So is this to say they were not fascists or were trying-yet-failing? The answer is quite obvious if you think for even a moment, but most people haven't got time for thinking anymore, especially nowadays, where the proliferation of social media makes people feel like they have to say things and, worse yet, that anything they have to say might be valuable (weakling behavior, BTDubs; I was sayin' stupid shit in things I posted on the internet and thinking it had value way before Twitter!).
The problems with this kind of edgelord humor/art are two. First, most people doing this are not talented in the fields of humor or art; seriously, most of these "edgelord jokes" are so unfunny that they could actually affect the average humorousness of all written words by themselves, like black holes of unfunniness. Second, and by far more of an issue, is the fact that a great many people who actually believe these things are too stupid to get what "jokes" are. Anything that expresses anything like this is taken at face value. A smart individual could appreciate the wry irony of a band of Jewish art students, under the tutelage of their Jewish director, making a song about a Nazi World War II bomber pilot to pointedly show off how ludicrous a concept it is (or could have before the rise of Ben Shapiro and other Jewish folks who actually believe in fascism). A Nazi would show up at a Blue Öyster Cult concert in full uniform and throw the band a Hitler salute.
I'm a little unsure of the timeline here. I'm at least pretty sure this happened circa 1975. After touring behind Secret Treaties, the band all told Sandy they were not comfortable with this direction anymore, and after that point, starting with Agents of Fortune, the amount of Immaginos-related songs took a steep nose-dive. Even when sci-fi and fantasy were common subjects, they avoided this particular storyline, eventually getting a little more into Michael Moorcock stuff if anything. The band would eventually record an album consisting of songs for the first third or so of the "Soft Doctrines," titled Imaginos (note only one M!), in 1988, with Albert Bouchard eventually creating a three-album project based on the story after Pearlman's passing, called Re-Imaginos (partially changed based on some of Pearlman's ideas, though).
In short, the problem here is ultimately that you cannot pick your audience, but you can get somewhere by not just offending people for fun and just generally avoiding punching down. If you find yourself attracting people who unironically are into the sort of thing you are making fun of, I suppose the best things you can do are either explain as strongly as possible that you do not agree with fascists or quit. But either way, you should cthink very seriously about how you are talking about these things, and how and why you're attracting attention from actual right-wing nuts.
Or, to put it another way, recognize that you are not Mel Brooks.
Anyway. I lied to you. This is not a review of Secret Treaties. Writing about music from a perspective of quality is a bit boring to me now. The short version is "it's a great album full of many genius riffs and hooks and incredibly dark lyrics that really get at the heart of what metal songwriting is all about: writing about horrible things, often with a deep sense of irony by writing from the perspective of the villain." The point of a lot of metal songwriting is that you're supposed to hear the lyrics, go "wow, that's deeply disturbed," recognize that it's villain POV, and get that that's the point, to explore humanity's most horrible sides. (The example I always love to come back to is Faith No More's "Underwater Love", the most cheerful song about a guy murdering their lover by drowning that you will probably ever hear.) This may not be BÖC's wheelhouse on every song (to put it nicely!), but on Secret Treaties, that is their primary mode.
I mean, I really don't feel like I have to say that middle part to most people if they're reading this website, but I've also seen some stupid motherfuckers on the internet. You know, the people who think you can't depict anything or you are promoting it. Real "speak of the devil and he shall appear" stuff. And it ain't new, I know that (my first social media experiences with it were on Tumblr more than a decade ago!). But it persists and it still sucks. So I feel I need to bring it up anyway.
Years ago, I posted music reviews on a side channel on YouTube. I was doing a thing where I covered every Blue Öyster Cult album as they turned 50. But I stopped posting before I could talk about Secret Treaties. This is a version of something I would have discussed in that video if it ever got made. It won't now because of something I already mentioned here.