Lemmy: ‘Hip Hop Is Not Music’

While we love Motorhead, this needs commentary:

Never one to mince his words, Motörhead front man Lemmy Kilmister recently shared his views on the state of modern music with Atlantic City Weekly. When asked to express his thoughts on hip hop, the metal legend had the following to say:

“Why should I do that when it’s not music… There’s nothing creative about doing that [rapping] over music someone else created. They go out and take John Bonham’s drumming. I don’t call that music. You think they [rappers] could come up with sounds of their own, even some basic sounds and they can’t do it. Sad.”

Lemmy: ‘Hip Hop Is Not Music’

Not to offend one of the gods of metal, but:

  1. We disagree: we think hip-hop is music. It is organized sound; it uses rhythm primarily, but also incorporates some melodic snippets. That it is borrowed and requires less musical ability is somewhat irrelevant. Compared to Beethoven or Mozart, who could improvise structured pieces with ease and even re-configure to change the emotional direction of the piece on the fly, we’re all just about that untalented and derivative.
  2. The bigger point is that type of music determines the audience it attracts, and says a lot about them. People who like hip-hop are blockheads. They’re the same blockheads who were listening to disco in the 1970s, techno in the 1980s, grunge in the 1990s and nu-indie in the 2000s. They follow the trend because it’s “different” and have zero clue that the trend is actually just the latest manifestation of the same average stuff that people always chase. Hip-hop isn’t revolutionary; it’s no different than rock, if you replace the guitars with samples. Same song structures, roughly the same topics, even the same type of person producing it. These guys aren’t out there committing crimes and accidentally having musical careers; they’re committing crimes as a calculated status boost for their musical careers. They probably played first violin in high school band. It’s about the money.
  3. Populist music sucks because it chases trends and thus has no depth. It’s all appearance, nothing under the surface. But that’s what is called for. If you want music many people like all at once, it has to be similar to other things they already like but so they don’t feel cheated, it has to appear to be “different.” You win the multi-million dollar lottery if you take yesterday’s songs and make them seem fresh and exciting today. Whether that music is rap, rock, techno, indie, emo, screamo, disco or hip-hop, it’s all the same crap. Metal is the exception.

Sensible people know that elitism in music means you value quality over quantity. If you want quantity, you chase trends and get more of the same old crap, tricked out to be new. If you want quality, you are very careful about what you listen to and keep the best around. This however means you’ll never be trendy, which is why metal is inherently elitist: we don’t want to be part of the trends not to be “different” like hipsters/poseurs, but because we want higher quality music so we have a more intense experience.

If you want to know why rap, rock et cetera are incompatible with metal, that’s a good place to start your thinking. Lemmy is kick-starting the process to warm over a little tepid controversy to sell Motorhead’s 415th album, which is due out next month and is titled The Argle-Bargle of the Whatdumacallit or something similarly gnomic.

No Comments

Blaspherian CD, tshirt released and shipping

In a tribute to the first Immolation album, the new BLASPHERIAN CD Infernal Warriors of Death sports a scene of demonic conquest over angelic realms. That will probably be tame in comparison to the music, which from the two tracks leaked so far, is punishing old school death metal in the style of INCANTATION, DEICIDE, OBITUARY and IMMOLATION.

Deathgasm Records now has the CDs and tshirts in stock and is shipping them as orders come in.

No Comments

Jeff Hanneman of SLAYER has necrotizing fascitis

Medical misfortune has befallen thrash metal progenitors Slayer once again. Guitarist/founding member Jeff Hanneman reportedly underwent emergency surgery on his right arm late last month. He was diagnosed with having contracted necrotizing fasciitis — kind of sounds like a Slayer song, actually — a rare yet serious infection also known as flesh-eating disease. – Exclaim

Hope he gets through this intact.

No Comments

Massacra – Enjoy the Violence

Know how to kill! Nothing is rarer, and everything depends on that. Know how to kill! That is to say, how to work the human body like a sculptor works his day or piece of ivory, and evoke the entire sum, every prodigy of suffering it conceals in the depths of its shadows and its mysteries. There! Science is required, variety, taste, imagination… genius, after all.

 

… So spake the lyrically impassioned and thoroughly blood-splattered master torturer from Octave Mirbeau’s exploitative allegory ‘Le Jardin des Supplices‘ — a work often regarded as the French parallel to Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ in its mutual objective towards smashing the moral edifices of Western civilization and exposing the corrupted, putrefying soul beneath. Framed in this excerpt is a rational, eloquent and yet sickeningly grotesque declaration of sadism as a fine art — or even a manifestation of divine love — which so happens to mesh very excellently with the more measured methods that Massacra had undertaken for their second opus Enjoy The Violence, an album that has historically competed with its predecessor Final Holocaust for total lordship over the death metal world. While the ivory sceptre is generally awarded to the debut by merit of its raw, inexorable and blindingly brilliant riff-saladry, an equally convincing case can be argued on behalf of Enjoy The Violence — a sophomore effort in the greatest sense of the word. No longer does songwriting resemble frantic tornadoes of jagged phrases, bewildering developments and hazardously unhinged instrumentation: here we find Massacra, having done their thorough “research of tortures”, limiting their machinations of aural infliction down to a choice but variegated selection, with all parts oiled, honed, and sharpened for excruciating efficiency.

Markedly fewer motifs are employed — a few even resurface on multiple songs — and yet it is this very spareness that imparts such character and memorability unto each composition, along with a newfound, almost cinematic command over tempo, texture, voicing and atmosphere. In addition to the familiar Destruction-esque, adrenaline-rushed thrashing fare, songs of pure death-doom are introduced, serving to showcase both the band’s ability to stage ominous and imposing dirges in the grandiosely operatic tradition, as well as the most tasteful musicianship yet to be wrought by the Duval/Tristani guitar duo and even percussionist Chris Palengat. Bassist and co-vocalist Pascal Jörgensen, whose efforts were unfortunately somewhat smothered by the crêpe-flat production on Final Holocaust, now rises to the status of an eminent narrator, complete with audible basslines and a dictatorial roar that bears with it the all the glorious and savage atavisms of the Gallic warrior spirit. A richly imagined, brutal and at times sardonic album, Enjoy The Violence is very much Massacra’s second masterpiece and — like the aforementioned Mirbeau — speaks to the undercurrent of murder and pillage that flows blackly through even the modern, safe, and plastic societies that have pleasantly stultified us in this age of oblivion.

You take pleasure
In using violence
It’s in your nature
Psychopathic sense
Psychological conflict
You’re under my influence
You can’t repress your instinct
I incite you to violence

-Thanatotron-

 

No Comments

Tags: , , , , ,

ANUS trolls desecrate Gojira website

I was looking over the user comments on one of our blog posts (mainly because they are often hilarious) and found this:

please i kindly ask of you to stop vandalizing our Gojira guestbook, you are welcome to our site for information but please refrain from more hate comments that are signed as members from this website.

sincerely
the Gojira staff

They’re referring to events like this (JPG, 77k).

According, ANUS has composed an official statement:

Dear Gojira,

Please understand that none of this is personal. You are probably very nice people and we would enjoy having a beer or two. But life is not about getting along with everyone. It’s about picking the right answers out of the pool of every answer, and using that knowledge to get better. Always forward, ever upward, and all that.

We encourage our users to vandalize, degrade, sabotage, guillotine, desecrate, corrupt, hack, immolate and sodomize any Crowdist information, which we can define as:

  • A partial truth. It takes some aspects of a situation and makes them “represent” the same situation, like symbols or social gestures, and so obscures the breadth of the situation.
  • It is populist in the oldest sense of meaning pandering, demagoguery, and “little white lies” that we tell in social circumstances when we’re not outright bribing people by saying nice things to them. It’s like talking a girl into bed.
  • It passively assumes a superior position. These thoughts need some reason why you would adopt them instead of common sense, so they pretend to be intellectually, morally, socially or empathically superior.

Gojira exemplifies Crowdist behavior. Your songs are written like indie-rock converted to powerchords and played with periodic violence, but you do not understand the metal spirit, its way of writing riffs, its song structure or imagery. Although you may be nice guys, you are (sadly) imitators and corruptors of the metal tradition.

Therefore, we encourage all users of this website — and any other website — to have fun vandalizing your Guestbook and/or rectums. Instructions:

  1. Go to Gojira’s website.
  2. You will find there a picture of a skeleton surrounded by dots. Click on the dot to the furthest right, at the 3 o’clock position on an analog clock.
  3. At the Guestbook, either (a) endorse freedom, democracy, liberalism, effete passivity, anal sex, miscegenation, watersports, incest and Gojira or (b) feel free to point out that all indie-rock bands who pretend to be metal, but don’t understand metal, are poseurs. Some indie rockers came into metal and made metal. If people bitch that we are too kvlty, just point out that we hate Krallice as well (they are also nice guys).
  4. Allahu ackbar!

In conclusion, I am sorry I cannot help you. But in the cosmic drama, we are on opposite sides, and all we can do is play our roles well.

Sincerely,

ANUS Administrator
“If it dilates, we want in.”

Maybe this will clear up the confusion. It’s worth noting that our trolls have completely demolished our own blog post comments, but they’re still more amusing than anything you’ll find on TV.

130 Comments

Tags:

Blaspherian “Infernal Warriors of Death” pre-order available now

Blaspherian (ex-IMPRECATION, INFERNAL DOMINION) make Obituary-styled Deicide/Incantation-inspired old school death metal that has gone for an early Immolation aesthetic on their newest album, Infernal Warriors of Death.

You can hear a sample track from Infernal Warriors of Death here:

The label is printing the CD for release soon, but you can pre-order now, which isn’t a bad gig considering how reliable Deathgasm Records has been over the past decade or so.

No Comments

Burzum – Fallen

With luck, you can hear the samples above, and draw your own conclusions. Mine are: Varg correctly understands the new black metal audience, which is to say he recognizes that they cannot tell the difference between three random droning chords and well-composed music. So he’s cashing in, because he just got out of jail and needs some way to pay for himself and his future. Unfortunately, in doing so, he has done something very stupid, which is let a highly visible minority (black metal fans) speak for his entire potential audience (all who like good music) and by doing so, he has let his bitterness obliterate his talent and instead of making a series of quality albums that will sell for decades, he has pumped out the droning crap and now has ruined the Burzum name and will find that people ignore this stuff after another few years. Short-term thinking at work. Sorry to hear life is so bad for you, Varg. Maybe you should reconsider who you consider your friends.

No Comments

Glorious Times 2.0: New and Improved

We finally got our hands on a review copy of Glorious Times here at the HQ, and the verdict is in: much improved over version 1.0, but still a niche product, so those of you who want Death Metal History for Dummies will need to go elsewhere.

Glorious Times does a supreme job of immersing you in the culture, the music and the feel of the era without having to shape your mind with a narrative. This is both its strength and weakness. Compiled entirely of first-hand statements from musicians and writers from the era, the book lets you make up your mind and read for whatever interests you. This was I think a mature decision, because the writers recognized the niche nature of this material.

My co-editor, Kontinual, and I differ on the importance of this book. I see it as a compilation of primary sources; he, rightly, points out that it’s for a niche and not ready for mainstream consumption. I don’t see these two views as incompatible. Glorious Times is a primary source, and will be in for future academics and journalists, but right now it’s us nostalgia freaks who are checking it out.

And therein lies its strength. While the editors could have conducted interviews and comped statements together into a summary, imposing order and assessing data, that would have produced a linear perspective. Instead here you get the history told by as many people as wrote in for the book, which shows us how people differed in their approaches to this music, and yet also, where they converged. No linear narrative can show the same breadth.

Fans of the music, as opposed to academics and journalists, will find that like other legendary metal docs like Are You Morbid?, Lords of Chaos and Until the Light Takes Us, this book enmeshes us in the atmosphere of the time. You get to hear all about tape-trading, the personal lives of musicians, how people got into the music, and the decisions they made with their bands and lives. You don’t get the kind of clear but oversimplified summary that Sam Dunn peddles in his Global Metal (my personal favorite of his movies); instead you stagger into this strange land where gnarled figures emerge from the mist and tell you their story in riddle and rhyme, then leave you to drift onward along a hazy road. If you want to know what it was “like” back then, this type of book is your best guide.

Detrators will point out the weaknesses that correspond to this strength. They will also say that the layout is amateurish, which was true on 1.0 but is mostly fixed for 2.0, at least to mainstream rock book standards. Detractors will say that the lack of an editorial voice means that the contribution from band members are somewhat random, and that depending on this volunteerist attitude among subjects means that the bands that didn’t make it outnumber the important ones. While these criticisms, as are those of my co-editor Kontinual, are valid, they miss the point: this book is not here to offer an overview, a history or an ideological statement. It’s here to give you the feel for the time, and to provide rich primary source material for those who will research it in the future. I hope someday someone makes the sequel to this, in which they interview all of these bands for two hours each and then assemble the statements, but that would lose much of the atmosphere and require a larger staff and budget than any old-schoolers have at this time.

When we look back on any time, we tend to measure its information by what it would mean to us now. We are looking at single facts at a time, and we interpret them as they would fit into our current lives and technology. When we look at ancient Sparta, we are repulsed by aspects of their warrior culture that in our society, would be cruel and unusual. To them, these “repulsive” aspects were a matter of pride, and what shaped them as much as we are shaped by our pride in not being like Sparta. Understanding early death metal is a similar matter, in that our technology and society was so different back then that we cannot place many of these “facts” into context. We need to see them in their original context, and by seeing that social backdrop, understand the atmosphere before we start trying to pull facts out of it. Glorious Times keeps this atmosphere intact and, while it may be a niche for death metal nostalgia buffs at this point, for the future it is the first serious record of the early years of death metal’s genesis.

4 Comments

Tags: ,

Necrodeath – Into the Macabre

What is life? A mechanistic-deterministic reaction cycle of alkaloids, proteins and nucleic acids? A quantum spell of randomness or the whim of a willing god? Certain purposefulness, subtle intentionality and synchronic magic that leaks through the cracks of everyday reality seems to invite both mystical speculation and transcendental philosophy but elude a fully satisfying rational explanation. The brain-melting reaction to existential, eschatological and essential questions such as the existence of sin and afterlife was both more rational and nihilistic (plus masculine and lofty) in the death metal of Protestant countries of Europe (and USA), while the South European and Latin American manifestation was feminine, instinctive, intuitive and categorically destructive of the social place of human in the cosmos.

The sensual Italian attack in Into the Macabre, enveloped by the scents of leather, sweat and blood, is by no accident a bastard brother of the proto-war metal invocations of Morbid Visions and INRI, while the technical details show that the necro-warriors spent years studying the works of Slayer and Destruction. Most of all, Into the Macabre is an opera of rhythm, of intense vocal timings, stampeding blastbeats and onrushing chromatic and speed metal riffs which warp under the extremely analog old tape production into ambient paysages of ghostly frequency, much like the evil and infectious “Equimanthorn” of classic Bathory. Songs like “Necrosadist” seem to have the structure of a grotesque sexual orgy where each consecutive part tops the previous in volume and hysteria, with short breathing spaces in between to capture and organize the listener’s attention. Like the aforementioned Brazilian albums, Into the Macabre is one of the cases where music is about as far from an intellectual exercise as one gets, into the catacombs of a devil/alcohol/glue-possessed teenager’s brain but for the discerning and maniacal old school death metal listener there is no end to the amount of pleasures, revelations and evil moments that make it seem some transcendental guidance indeed dwells at the shrine of the unholy mystic.

-Devamitra-

1 Comment

Tags: , , , , , ,

Classic reviews:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z