After saturating mainstream American culture, yoga’s now starting to pool into smaller communities, many of them drawn along lines of musical tastes as well as geography. In Williamsburg you can do Drake yoga; in Bushwick you can do hipster New Age yoga, and in Seattle the incredibly paradoxical-seeming noise yoga.
Heavy metal yoga sounds just as ridiculous on the surface, but its existence shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s paid attention to the sliver of the underground metal scene that’s replaced the genre’s historical combination of fretboard speed-runs and shlocky Satanism with trance-inducing drones and a mishmash of occult interests. At a slant, this sect of the genre can read like a dark side cousin to the New Age movement. Yoga fits into the mix nicely.
Kimee Massie is one of a handful of yoga instructors folding metal into their practice. For the past few years she’s been holding classes soundtracked by selections from bands like Sunn O))), Earth, and Wolves in the Throne Room. Now she’s released BLACK YO)))GA: Asanas Ritual, Vol. 1 an hourlong video of "vinyasa style yoga set to drone, noise, stoner metal, ambient, industrial, space doom, and other traditional meditation music" that as far as I know is the first "real" metal yoga video to come to market.
Before you ask: yes, it’s pretty funny to watch if you want it to be. There is something inherently amusing about watching a bunch of pale-ass white people with dreadlocks and tattoos and all-black outfits very seriously practicing yoga, and an instructor who introduces the practice in a hooded cloak, occasionally invoking the kind of chipper "do what feels good" white-yoga mantras that seem like a better fit for the "Yoga With Adrienne" videos on YouTube that I do a few times a week. There are also times where the video’s dark aesthetics get in the way of actually doing yoga, to comic effect, like when the soundtrack—provided by a supergroup called the BLACK YO)))GA Meditation Ensemble, featuring Massie’s husband, who also plays in the band Storm King—overwhelms the instruction, or when the shadowy visuals make it hard to see what’s going on.
Metalheads tend to be good at appreciating the ridiculousness of the thing they’re passionate for, while being intensely, earnestly into it. That’s what’s allowed them to take a campy devil-worshipper shtick, steer it into hardcore, church-burning Objectivist-inspired Satanism, and then build a metaphysical praxis from bits of other belief systems. It clearly still means something real to the people who practice it. Metal might turn out to be the first pop genre to launch something like an actual religion. One that now includes yoga, apparently.
As far as BLACK YO)))GA’s utility as an actual yoga workout, rather than as an indicator of a postmodern spiritual movement, it’s pretty good, and more challenging than I expected. Two days later my abdominal muscles are still sore from an extended chair pose sequence that was in its own way as satisfyingly brutal as any metal show.