Attention all users who care about this site and aren't merely here to bicker like OWS protesters and basement dwellers Chains, Eleison and Sidereal:
One man's bickering is anothing man's passionate, well-intended views. I produced, wrote for, and ran the Aussie tribe while it was going, and this was not basement dwelling. Anyway, onto bigger things:
As you probably know, I support and applaud this move. I've joined the mailing list, but for now I'd like to mention a few points.
I would strongly encourage DLA 3.0 to, overarchingly, be utterly neutral and objective, though particular subjective sections of the website are certainly permitted as long as they don't necessarily bias the rest of the website. In my mind, little can be said about metal in a totally neutral or objective manner, so the entire point is to encourage various subjective sections to arise within the website. For example, I understand it's very difficult to maintain a blog with frequent and high-quality postings. But consider that the DLA has excellent Google page rankings, and there are many bloggers out there who may like to contribute. All metal blogs I can think of right now only feature content that coincides with the views of the larger website they're a part of... what about a blog with posts of a variety of authors who harbour strongly divergent views? I suspect you could attract numerous interesting authors this way, myself included. More broadly, you would not alienate potential readers for your website, because DLA 3.0 wouldn't have anything potentially offensive or unappealing in its manifesto, it would just encourage vigorous debate beyond the surface layer and stuff. Personally this is something I'm striving for with my own website (see sig), although I don't have time these days to work on it very much with school and all.
I'm disgruntled and tickled by the irony that the website with the best capacity and opportunity to truly pioneer online metal discourse and academic studies just happens to be the same website with a most peculiar view so isolationist and anti-cooperation. But metal teaches us that destruction is creation, so perhaps in your own views, perhaps you could destroy your map and find a new territory, in the chaos and flames of the very thing you despise you could find the best way to promote your own unique views, because people will listen more attentively, your message will be much louder and to more people, and you'll be publicly engaging your philosophical opponents in open and substantive discourse on DLA 3.0. Instead of forming a message and devoting so much time and effort to get it out to the masses and / or to the metal elite who might understand it, you can invite the masses and the elite in to your website, and if you truly believe your views are correct then surely you must believe they are persuasive enough such that the corner of DLA 3.0 dealing with them will be one of its most influential corners and can evolve and expand simultaneously while it integrates new people into it's movement; the only caveat is that your message may suffer if the reader is bombarded with so much BS, just like a totally deregulated capitalist market is not truly 'free', but obviously you still retain a degree of editorial authority to prevent BS from being posted on DLA 3.0 (which is different than from allowing views contrary to your own being posted). I often hear it promoted on these boards that we should not throw our hands in the air and declare the task of changing people's minds impossible, we should not cut ourselves off from the society we seek to change, rather we should bite the bullet and try as hard as we can to change it from within as well.
For what it's worth, if you do adopt a neutral, objective manifesto, if you're at all interested I'm quite certain I could integrate my website with yours if you wish, so you would have an information aggregator and other nice lists (books, documentaries, etc), though I also promised cooperation with an upcoming academic website in the future however I definitely think I could swing it; you have to understand it's very difficult for metal to be taken seriously academically in the first place, let alone in the medium of internet website and discussion forum, so it's crucial not to harbour alternative views overtly in your manifesto (this includes any significant relationship with Amerika.org). I am as alternative as they come, so I feel badly emphasizing this part, it's just that on a practical level it's a deal breaker. Also please note I in no way mean to hold my website on the same level as yours, I just would like to point out it deals with an area in its aggregator which seems to me to be highly complimentary and compatible with what you're trying to achieve.
While I know where your coming from, I think the following are bad ideas:
*Objectivity - While there are elements of structural analysis which might come close to some 'objective' analysis in music, it is quite subjective in the end. I like DLA for promoting only the bands that it does and I note the uncanny correlation in most cases between bands it reviews and bands which are...good! If you become more 'objective' you might become less interesting. Nietzsche says in beyond good and evil that one sometimes has to close one's mind to other perspectives to advance another.
*Pluralism - If you open things to all viewpoints, people who like new nile albums and nocrophagist will slowly and surely drown out the perspective which makes this site valuable. There are just more of them. And they will destroy the 'old way'. This is not because the perspective espoused around here in official album reviews and metal philosophy is 'weaker' or unfit for conflict, but because art has a massive amount of subjectivity involved in its appreciation. There is nothing objective like a heavy, sharp sword with which one view point can 'beat' the other. The metal here appeals to certain TYPES of people (more abstract minded, structuralist minded). The bulk of metal appeals to a different TYPE of person.
A better way to promote good metal more effectively is, in my opinion, to more or less keep doing what DLA does, with a few small but significant changes:
1) De-emphasise the blog - it seems to contain a lot of reactionary commentary and bickering. If you want new content, review a new good band properly or put up a new article on metal philosophy. Say yes to the good stuff. Obviously people will want to know why the new burzum or nile album wasn't reviewd, so a bit of no saying might have to be done, but perhaps not as much.
2) Distance the DLA from ANUS - move domains. If my hunch is correct, many people get turned away from an overt political message when they just want metal. Make DLA a place - when not posting another long, quality review of a new or old band or a short review of a non-quality work by an old band - for structuralist, nihilst, evolutionary analysis of art. Promote the metal and reach more people.
What attracted and still attracts me to DLA is its analysis of art (and deconstruction of reality and anthropomorphism) through nihilism. Not the promotion of a conservative platform which apparently necessarily stems from nihilism. I'm not discrediting the latter, just suggesting it be dissociated in time and space from the dla. This will enhance the impact of dla, and probably enhance the impact of anus by accident too.
3) Associations with that opening in the human body which vents feces in the web address will never be productive, despite philosophical connotations. w w w.dla.com, or something like?
The DLA is great as it is, in (a) only reviewing bands it finds valuable and (b) writing from a very unique point of view. ANUS is very interesting. But they should be seperated.