Pleasure

In 'The Pleasure of Text', Roland Barthes wrote: "The more decent, well-spoken, innocent and saccharine a story is told, the easier it is to invert it, the easier it is to blacken it, the easier it is to read it against the grain".

But that operation also works the other way around: "The more indecent, evil and bitter a story is told, the easier it is to invert it, the easier it is to whitewash it, the easier it is to read it against the grain".

Some posts on this blog seem to work this inverted Barthesian operation: reading Xasthur's very depressing black metal as Can's buoyantly optimistic 'Future Days', reading Christian themes into Godflesh's industrial bluster, imaging dubstep's warm bass under black metal's treble-icy guitars...

Is this inverted operation just as pleasurable as the blackening operation described by Barthes? Does the possibility of such an inverted operation on (black or industrial) metal means that these formations have lost (some of) their transgressive dynamism and have become stable and stabilizing? Or is it a sign of metal's continuing renewal, of the metal's youthful ability to evolve? Does it foretell the evolution of strange new metal sects?