Poverty is the Price for Metal Stardom

The Talk:

Every metal musician needs to have “The Talk” at some point or another and for some of you, this will be that moment.  In the world of metal, “The Talk” is the soul crashing, dream obliterating conversation where one learns the valuable lesson that you can’t get rich playing extreme metal.  It’s heartbreaking and defeating but better learned sooner than later.  And since a young ambitious musician isn’t necessarily considering the logistics, lifestyle goals, etc. of their future before they drill on that pentagram neck tattoo, I want to make sure readers of DMU are abundantly clear on what to expect on the financial front when engaging in life as a touring musician.
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Metal-Archives’ Marxist Mania

Article contributed to Death Metal Underground by Richard Sullivan.

Western civilization is currently gripped in a culture war unlike any that preceded this one. You may ask what makes it so different than the others, considering the West witnessed a similar one of its kind back in the late 1950s with the emergence of the New Left. Arguably, there’s never been a real difference in the left’s rhetoric. For as long as anyone cares to remember, white, heterosexual, “cisgender” men, who maintain the “capitalistic, racialized, cisnormative patriarchy” have always been at the center of their ideological attacks. The only thing that has changed has been their ability to have said rhetoric heard beyond the confines of university lecture halls. It was rare to encounter an enlightened™ human™ bombarding you with vitriol and threats of violence – because you failed to recognize the intersectionality between race™, gender™, and sexuality™ – outside a gender studies class. Of course, these things still occur, but with greater frequency, and to the point where a flash mob of overweight, hipster beta males twerking in tutus in a school’s atrium is viewed as them just “expressing themselves”, but, more boldly, as an act of defiance against conventional norms of masculinity.

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Dark Economic Truths of Underground Metal

Recently many of the other “metal” websites, blogs, publications et cetera have been doing articles about the business side of music industry. Unsurprisingly none of these articles had the testicular fortitude to address the ugly reality of the underground metal economy as they are written by either slaves to the machine itself or losers who genuinely believe that they have “careers” in music which heavily depend on acceptance by the community. Since the Death Metal Underground staff bow to no masters social or corporate, we are in the rare position give you the truth in its rawest form. So with absolute disregard for the powers that be in metal, let’s take an honest look inside this machine to see how it really works.

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