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(Insert a string of obscenities here. None are enough. There are no words vile and hateful enough.)

Per the suggestions thread, I'm going through Abraxas, and I've had to stop because I may vomit.

I linked a ton of great stuff -- interviews, band pages, histories, flyers, etc. -- with each of these reviews. I remember spending hours on this, late at night and when I should've been doing other things.

So far, 90% of them are gone:

1. The sites are down. Guess what? It costs a minimum of $120 per year to host a site in such a way that it won't fail randomly. People get tired of that, and free providers all collapse because of the high cost of discouraging abuse.

2. http://web.archive.org/ is awesome, but people whined to them and complained about not being able to remove stuff. So the admins came up with a rule: put in a robots.txt and if it excludes the content we've indexed, we'll delete it! Except that when domain grabbers snag the domain, the first thing they do is put in a robots.txt excluding the content so that they don't get inundated in search engine crawler 404s.

Thus, the content is gone to the winds, or I should say, gone forever.

One reason I and others behind this project have FOUGHT for years is to keep rock from assimilating these genres, and the memory hole from eating up their meaning. We have some resources but I wish I'd blatantly pirated everything I ever liked, because it's all melting away.

I am watching the history of a movement and a generate evaporate before my eyes.

There are not words...

I believe in metal; I believe it’s a form of art, and like all respectable forms of art, has something important to communicate. In the case of metal, it’s worship of feared things. metal finds beauty in darkness, and morality in power. It discovers meaning beyond the realms of mortality, both by taking a “larger picture” than the life of the individual, and by exploring the questions of metaphysics and religion. It sanctifies violence, disease and horror as essential to not just the experience but the meaning of life. It reminds us that daily we’re in an existential struggle, but also a Darwinistic one. Mocking us like the voice of Satan, it also points out that meaning exists in life and it’s there if we want to reach out to it, and if we’re not, it’s a choice we made to back down. Even more, metal gives people reason to want to live and fight again. Most popular music isolates people in themselves, and tells them meaning in life is found in external pleasures. Metal opens up the scope beyond the human social scene and the ego-drama of modern people, and shows us a world of adventure. To dystopia it says “Do your worst!” and makes us feel like knights of a new regime waging war to civilize the land of rust and decay. It embraces space exploration, post-humanist morality, denial of the self (ego death), and the possibility of mythic imagination. It is an antidote to the me-culture, television-watching, consumer-oriented brain death of this modern time. Metal is the genre that brings us ideas that can liberate us from the failings of this time and help see the next, in contrast to most “art” (actually: entertainment, a way to pass the time without challenging yourself) which tries to find ways to glorify this time or join in its sick habit of protesting itself and then going home to eat cheeseburgers and watch Netflix. I believe metal is worth believing in. Underground metal — death metal and black metal — are also the only real artistic expression of Generation X, who themselves were the children of the postwar children and those who grew up under the height of the Cold War. Metal is history, metal is philosophy, and metal is ultimately pragmatic. It is a way for people to feel the pointlessness of this modern world, its ugliness and repetitiveness, and its complete lack of soul, and the empathic tension of billions of people locked in existential misery and too afraid to admit they want out; when they feel it, it galvanizes them to act instead of hiding behind ego-drama and underconfidence. Metal takes children who feel defeated by their suburbs, their dysfunctional families, the broken nature of the adult world, the failure of history, the complete crassness of consumer society and the utter inability to have values of a pluralistic industrial world, and gives them instead of a view of life from outside that narrow intellectual ghetto. It liberates us not by “equality,” but by adventure. Metal is life. It has things to teach us that have barely been explored. Also, it’s killer music.

Interview with Vijay "SHEEP ANUS NOW" Prozak

Some good stuff on why metal's metal, the founding of ANUS, etc. Probably only useful if you're bored, drunk and pooping.

Perhaps life is not intrinsically sacred, but should be.

Inherency: life either is or isn't sacred.

Nihilism: I will it to be sacred, because this is a choice.

If you are in the majority on any particular issue, you're lucky, because your opinions are shared by many.

However, change occurs from the outliers, which means that if you're in the majority you've chosen a viewpoint in decline.

We here are in the minority: we view metal as art, with something valuable to say; everyone else views it as either party music, or "serious" profound pseudo-intellectual stuff that bleats NPR talking points.

People in the minority viewpoint should work together so they achieve effect on the world.

Otherwise, they become marginalized and hateful, and turn on others without a purpose.

I'm glad to see some of the bad behavior of this forum receding. I'm hoping that people will overcome their drama and join or rejoin us.

In the meantime, we have a standard of behavior to uphold, and a lot of work to do.

A big "thank you" to all who have helped -- you know who you are.

Interview: Karl Spracklen of the International Society of Metal Music Studies

"Heavy metal is an important part of modern culture and everyday life, so studying heavy metal enables us to understand both of those things. For me, the interesting thing about heavy metal is the tension between metal’s strong sense of being part of a non-mainstream subculture, and metal’s place in the industry of modern pop and rock music. That’s because I’m essentially a sociologist. Other heavy metal scholars might be interested in the way the music is constructed, or the meaning behind song lyrics, or the history of the scene, or the use of heavy metal as a philosophy or ideology of life. Heavy metal is just a subject field, a lens, through which we can think about problems in other academic diciplines." - Dr. Karl Spracklen

Read More Of... Interview: Karl Spracklen of the International Society of Metal Music Studies

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/Page.aspx?pid=1478

This is sort of the original nexus of bird cams. I suggest we ham this one up; more affection for birds can't steer humanity wrong.

Dunno. Even some of the down 'n' dirty metalheads in my experience have been pretty insightful. Metal is an assertive and "broad view" spirit that makes one into a sort of weird zen master when it comes to seeing how puny and delusional humanity is. Good luck living with that shit. It could drive you to drink(*).


* - drug of any kind not advised by me personally, except pipe tobacco and sugar of course.