Metal theorist and critic Old Disgruntled Bastard unleashed an accurate tirade at the “gentrification” of metal, the process by which hipsters, journalists and indie labels wear down the extremity of metal to make it more like shoegaze, jazz, emo and alternative rock. He says:
People need to look inside themselves and find out why they listen to this music in the first place. If you don’t have a raging fire inside of you regardless of age or sex, if you don’t have real demons in your past or your present, if you don’t share anything more than a surface fascination with the topics the music talks about, then what the fuck are you doing here? Beyond flowery words and pretentious descriptions and the need to pose and be accepted into a group, beyond simple enjoyment on a musical level even, this is extreme music for a reason, and it has nothing to do with having the world delivered to you like comfort food on a platter.
Kill the gentrification of metal or you’ll kill metal itself.
In every society, there must be some regions which are reserved as frontiers. In these, the normal rules do not apply. They are both anarchy zones and, by necessity, the type of self-managing places found in the Wild West and feudal Japan. A code of honor regulates the warriors who apply discipline when needed to an otherwise lawless place. These societies are not easy to live in like the big cities, but they offer fewer rules and no dominant social attitude about what is the “right way” to do things. For people who think society is mostly held together by human pretense of how good and moral people are, when people are in fact mostly selfish, these areas keep the herd at bay.
Heavy metal takes the form of these societies. It has no rules other than a code of honor and “no city rules.” We aim to choose another path. As a result, metal celebrates all the things that society aims to deny, starting with death and consequence and stretching further to extreme fears like apocalypse and disease. Metal should be scary and an outsider to human settlement. It gains its power from its flexibility to think without first worrying how that will look to others, or potential customers. As one of the few cultural free spaces, metal is naturally a target for various ideological and religious groups. If they take over, its spirit dies, and the music will fade out as well as people flee the collapsing ruin.
Tags: censorship, gamergate, gentrification, metalgate
The man you quoted is being denied going to a Demilich show by a “socially conscious” promoter. Social disease in full effect. The gears of the Vice-Wave gentrification machine keep churning on… Real world political power on a small stage, just as your rationalizations for bands later albums suggest Brett Stevens.
Too much… Far too much power has been given to our immature species but who allowed the Biohazard fan-boyz to set the rules? Is it altruism among the genetically non-competitive spiraling out of control, such as what can be seen in juggalo fest? These people have mistaken freedom for power. They believe it is their righteous reward, but there is no posing without the poser. That poser has abused his right to freedom. Does someone like that deserve freedom? Should someone like that even be given a soapbox to argue for their freedom? The promoter has abused his right to freedom! He doesn’t deserve to be free!
To the promoter:
I don’t know you, but what I have is a particular set of skills: skills which I acquired through a very long career of sodomizing poser asses with my penis. Skills that make me a rapist to people like you. If you let Old Disgruntle Bastard go see Demilich, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not rape you. But, if you don’t, I will find you, I will rape you, and I will give you AIDS. I don’t have any AIDS symptoms because I inherited the Delta-32 gene, but you didn’t and you will die a slow AIDS related death that brings great shame to your friends and family. Thank you for your time.
Yeah, they want an English style garden tea party which friends and girlfriends can attend and socialize at without fear of contact with undesirable elements while pretending to listen to the soundtrack of the evening, Demilich. Of course, this official reason is only a front.
Tea parties are better for commerce. What would be best for metal is a more inclusive community, because surly critics are often the best guardians of what attracts the others in the first place.
But nitwits have money too, and there are more of them, so most promoters want to make “safe spaces” for the nitwits.
Don’t forget that a nitwit and his money are soon parted.
Everything is falling apart at once.
This society — the West: Western Europe, USA and antipodeans — has become hell. Ugly, neurotic, miserable, boring, tendentious, and trivial.
People are scrabbling for power in its absence. Democracy produces figureheads, not leaders. Consumerism produces mediocre margin-optimized products, not reliable consumables.
Marlboro Light replaces Five Brothers. Budweiser replaces Sam Smith. Plastic boxes replace grand architecture. Indie-rock replaces metal. If this is “democratization,” count me out.
I agree Brett, Marx was right.
“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Well put.
Likely why people that are into underground metal will have wildly different political views from the mainstream. From Anarcho-Monarchism to Social Darwinists to Racial Separatists to Aggro-Communists. The “Wild West” idea for music really is perfect in describing the state Metal needs to reside in to stay artistically relevant. Hipsters would rather “agree to disagree” and secretly sabotage everything they find disagreeable.
The type of person heading underground has a different philosophy of life, including what is important. This in turn informs politics, art and lifestyle.
Hey brett, do you like thrash bands:
The Accüsed
Attitude Adjustment
Mega Mosh
Crumbsucker
Ludichrist
Dr. Know
Are they better than Fearless Iranians from Hell or Dead Horse?
There are two questions there:
1: I don’t know if I like thrash bands. I do not listen to many anymore. I have found thrash like DRI, Cryptic Slaughter, early COC, Fearless Iranians and Dead Horse inspirational in the past.
2: No, except for Attitude Adjustment, Mega Mosh and Crumbsuckers which I have not heard and do not remember, and Dr. Know which was ambivalent.
It makes sense that Old Disgruntled Bastard was banned. Through painstaking research I have been able to gather information on the commandments that must be followed henceforth by Metal concert goers
1. Strictly no moshing. All concert goers must stand around while maintaining 1 arm distance from everyone else. Failure to comply with this will result in a lifetime ban.
2. Head banging is allowed, but as long as it does not disturb the 1 arm distance policy laid down in Metalliquette no. 1. Failure to comply with this will result in a lifetime ban.
3. Drinking is allowed only if it does not get you drunk. At the first sign of drunkenness, which could manifest in either wanting to mosh, or the need to headbang with a modicum of energy, you will face a lifetime ban.
4. Please check with management on the topics that are allowed for discussion, and the opinions that can be expressed. Failure to comply will result in a lifetime ban.
5. Please note that as soon as you step within the premise, you are entering a world which is devoid of anything resembling the fundamental rights of speech, thought or action. Do as we tell you, and not as you want. Failure to comply will result in a lifetime ban.
Good metal concerts nowadays are: quinquagenarians kicking ass on stage by playing some music they wrote in the ’80s or early ’90s, folks in their 30s and 40s old moshing and headbanging, and younger kids with a beer in their hand, their stupid, empty stare focused on the annoyingly bright screen of the phone they’re using to record videos or take pictures to share on facebook, just so that the day after they can tell their friends – some of which are right next to them – how “cool” it was.
And those are the good ones.
This seems to be the situation. The only reason those old guys are hanging around is that what has come since has been mostly insufficient as a replacement. That’s not a good sign.
Back in the days, when music was discovered via the tape a friend of a friend got from some obscure person, there were some important factors that contributed to the growth of metal:
1. Urban myths that tended to make things tougher than they were (e.g., within my metal clique, the story of Varg vs. Euronymous escalated to the point to which “Varg chainsawed Euronymous’ body and kept the parts in his refrigerator”).
2. Everyone wanted to play music that was faster, harder or more aggressive than the bands they listened to.
3. Getting a record deal was really hard and recording music was expensive.
The mass-printed magazines first and the Internet later caused the death of many legends, consumer technology made it so that one could record an EP with just one laptop, a cheap audio interface and a few cables, while the effort of labels to reduce costs while putting out marketable products caused a radical change in the attitudes of wannabe musicians: whereas before the only way to get to a record deal if you played metal was to stand out from the rest (being more extreme, essentially), now the easiest way is to be formulaic and predictable and, as many articles on this site point out, to hide the lack of originality behind a layer of randomness.
I don’t think the original death and black metal bands were just concerned with being more extreme in the tangible, musical sense, ie faster, heavier, more aggressive. They were also extreme in the sense of unbounded creativity, refusal to follow musical convention even within their own respective genre, and exaltation of thought and behavior considered “dangerous” or “evil”. DM/BM were frontiers in every sense of the word.
Wow, where are you living? I’m going to move there. The best one can hope for where I am is having maybe 3 persons actually staying inside to watch the band that didn’t come with the band to the venue. Most are outside drinking and smoking while discussing their daily Facebook argument to the same people that were party to said argument earlier in the day. Live music these days is little more that a living jukebox and treated worse. At least a jukebox has the respect given to it that the venue will pay the royalty fees required for the music played on it. Down here, You’re lucky for a band not having to pay for water, and if they don’t, it is because they only give you the cups the roaches and rats have crawled all over to drink from.
Seems commensurate with the quality of most metal these days. No point in listening intently to something if you will only be disappointed.
That sounds SJW-friendly too. Add a mandatory People’s Enlightenment speech on SocJus topics at the beginning of each set and you’re good to go.
What’s with the picture of the Ogdens building?
Rough, surly tobacco that has resisted being made polite, fancy and inoffensive.
I had now clue they were still going. Me nan used to work for Ogdens. I was just surprised to see a local building.
This is right, I mean, remember the first time you heard metal, all the vices inside you woke like fucking hair caught in an electric field. Metal is the realm of the extreme, it shall always remain the realm of the extreme. Metal will never die though, unless they burn every metal album.
I think you need to elaborate on your idea of feudal japan and the ‘self-management’ of these places, doesn’t management pre-empt having somewhat of a dominant social attitude? How would management take place otherwise? Communities will have to work around an idea.
I think there is an overriding fear amongst a lot of the articles on this site of ‘there will be a terrible day where metal has been destroyed’ but I genuinely cannot imagine that. As the publics ‘understanding’ of metal and its inherent fringe concepts through a particular methodology (capitalism, sjw’s etc) increases, that very recognition of it amongst those wishing to preserve its true spirit will change its journey away from that methodology and will if anything, open up new extremes that metal can feed off. If it is that metals extremity is now fully understood by the masses, then its time to let those ideas die and come up with new ones.
No. The social attitude defines or refines the goal, and management works toward that.
Not destroyed, but replaced by an inferior substitute. Think mainstream beer replacing the traditional better varieties if it makes it clearer. Think of how many family restaurants fast food drove out of business. Substitution, not outright war, is the game here.
What are you afraid of?
This is a very popular notion. Instead of continuing what makes us who we are, invent “new” ideas to replace any consistency with the flavor of the week. No thanks.
I find my agreeing wih Brett here on the last point. Ahw oideas making metal are metal is the same that they were from the beginning, only made more clear to followers and promotoers of music, we do not tnedd to cange ideas if ideas are what make matls metal. death is best, not life, kill false, uphold true, this alone is metal, it make it any way, death black thrash grind, but its always same way. live in abyss, were can you go? You live in abyss, abyss is all around. No nwe ideas for metal, metal is abyssal. bad type I nkow!
Hi ARA, why are you posting under a different user name? We all know it´s you c’mon.