Almost all revolutions begin with the idea that what you have known is wrong, and an alternative exists that although unproven will bring about a better world. The hangup is the word “better” — does it mean pragmatically (short term) better, realistically (long term) better, morally better, more profitable, more individualistic — and this detail bedevils the most adventurous of plans.
30 CommentsTags: blasphemy, censorship, Nihilism, obscenity, sodomy
Metal died of democratization like everything else in the post-1990s world. Thanks to the internet, globalization, and mass media, nothing could remain obscure or beyond the reach of the hipsterized cultureless grey race masses for long.
76 Comments
Some months ago, longstanding Houston record shack Sound Exchange moved from its second location in the Montrose to the new, hip and old-school East Houston neighborhood off Milby Street.
71 Comments
Romanticism — erupting in literature, art, politics, and architecture — may have been the original notion that humanity went too far into modernity, which we might describe as the society that has become successful enough to restyle the world in its own image.
52 CommentsTags: alt.fan.goat, objectivism, postmodernism, Romanticism
Some civilizations have public viewings of the dead; some bury them as soon as possible under cover of night. Some have wakes, others solemn commemorations. Human death rituals take many forms but they all serve to fix a discontinuity, to knit a past that cannot continue with an unknown future.
72 CommentsTags: assimilation, authenticity, commercialism, commercialization, conformity, entropy, Heavy Metal, non-conformity, selling out
Were you hoping for happy Christmas greetings? Of course not!
11 CommentsTags: abrahamism, agnosticism, antichristmas, atheism, christmas, jul, metaphysical dualism, monism, Satan
When you start writing about metal, you rapidly find that metal connects to lots of other stuff. Not just by lyrics and imagery but by sound alone, since listening to metal seems to shape consciousness toward viewing reality differently than what The Herd wants: oblivion, free stuff, nudes, and donuts.
36 CommentsTags: ptsd, sadistic metal reviews, smr
When this site was started, back as an FTP server growing out of USENET and before that a collection of BBS g-philes, the paucity of information about underground metal was an issue. Now we have too much underground metal and too much information about it, almost all of it bad.
42 CommentsTags: aesthetics, ethics, genre, robert fripp, sadistic metal reviews, smr
We know there is broad cynicism toward religion here; after all the Abrahamic (Islam, Christianity, Judaism) religions seem awfully simple and emotional. However, there is a whole world of spiritual belief out there which is not metaphysical dualism, neoplatonism, or universalism.
77 CommentsTags: christianity, golden dawn, h.p. lovecraft, j.r.r. tolkien, magic, Occultism, Paganism
Writing about a dead genre can be exhausting. You search through ten thousand bands looking for the few that grasp what the genre was always about — its newer incarnations are meaningless — and despite enjoying this, find that the good is drowned out by the mediocre.
103 CommentsTags: art, Black Metal, Heavy Metal, Satan, underground metal
