When traveling in California, you will encounter the Nice Guys and their good guy badges. They specialize in avoiding conflict with everyone and framing everything they want as a social need, not a personal one.
Nice guys always want you to be passive and go along with the flow, which means compromise and delay, because Nice Guys are interested in the party on the beach or in the loft, not getting anything done.
The problem with Nice Guys is the resulting benign neglect. To them, conflict is bad and therefore, it is acceptable to let problems accumulate, so long as the social environment is not disturbed.
To really be a good person, you have to pass the test: are you willing to do something that is inconvenient for some, so that the civilization + nature as a whole improves?
If not, you are not a good guy; you are just a manipulator, using others to conceal your own bad or stupid actions so that you can keep being selfish.
Consider Nice Guy Eddie Lee Mosley:
Eddie Lee Mosley was the son of the late Robert Lee and Willie Mae Mosley. He was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Eddie was a child who really wanted to learn. Unfortunately, due to a discovered learning disability, he was unable to finish education in public schools. Slow learning programs were not available during that time. Eddie later continued his education and training through the Job Corps. He is best known for having a “servant’s heart.”
What brought the most joy to his life was when he was using his hands to create, work, and bring things to life. He loved gardening and landscaping. Eddie could grow anything he planted as if he had a green thumb. He enjoyed odd jobs around the house, such as painting, cleaning, and even cooking. He was always eager to help and didn’t mind working, whether for pay or as a volunteer.
With a servant’s heart, he always attended to the needs of others first. Eddie loved his family and dressing nice. To past time, he would go fishing and did not mind giving away whatever he caught. In other words, Eddie did not want anyone to have a sad face around him. It brought joy to him to make someone else’s day and put a smile on their face. God blessed him with a love of sharing.
Isn’t that sweet? God loves him. Now get ready for the high colonic of raging realism as you see what Eddie Lee Mosley did when he was not planting a garden with a giving heart in the eyes of God:
Although he has never taken the witness stand, Eddie speaks a simple defense born of the streets.
“They takin’ advantage of me ’cause I ain’t got no understandin’ and I ain’t got no education,” he says when asked why he is in jail.
On July 22, 1987, Eddie Lee Mosley is indicted by a Broward County grand jury for the murder of Emma Cook and Theresa Giles.
“Some people will throw out figures like 25 to 30 murders and 200 to 300 rapes,” Allen says. “We’ve tried to concentrate on the ones we’re sure of, and all I can say is that it shouldn’t have gone on as long as it did.
Read the whole thing; it is a “wild ride” as the hipsters say. There are two realities here: a retarded gardener with a giving heart who loves God, and the retarded serial killer who was so primitive no one suspected him.
Check out the assessment from his psychiatrist:
Spencer agrees that Eddie is no calculating, cunning criminal. His portrayal is more instinctual and more chilling.
“I just mean that he happens along like a shark swimming through the water, and when he comes across something edible, he eats it,” Spencer says.
The fundamental human failure may be cherry-picking, or selecting the data that matches what we want to see, and filtering the rest (as Kant told us). People exist in different mental worlds:
Researchers at Dartmouth College and the University of California, San Diego, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), had 61 people put on virtual reality headsets and freely explore 100 immersive, 360-degree scenes, places like airports, auto shops, and public pools, while eye-tracking recorded every glance. Two people looking at the exact same scene often looked at very different parts of it, and those differences were not random. Each person’s pattern held steady, showing up again across completely different environments and across testing sessions days apart. Each viewer, it turned out, had a personal way of exploring the visual world, a stable “attentional fingerprint.”
One broader idea, which researchers say has been studied little, is that each person moves through the world with a private map of meaning, a set of priorities about what things are and how they connect, quietly steering attention from the moment they step into a new place. Where the eyes land depends less on what stands out in a scene and more on what already matters to the person looking.
As you may know from the nihilist writings strewn across the internet, people have “mental maps” of the world and only update them when something goes wrong. We live in worlds of ourselves.
These worlds are little bourgeois bubbles where we focus on what concerns us personally (individualism) and ignore the whole and the need for a realistic approach that improves quality (arete) in an approach known as transcendentalism. Emerson wrote on this, liberals abused it, conservatives hate it, and everyone else tries to turn it into an ideological imperative.
But in reality, you are either focused on the task of life for its own sake, or you are working for yourself, usually within the context of peer pressure and a mutually-reinforcing social group, so that it benefits you through a system known as Crowdism.
Metal rose when it was transcendental, and failed when it became individualistic.
***
Tours
HYPOCRISY — Mass Hallucination North America 2026
08/10 — Toronto, ON — History *
08/11 — Montreal, QC — MTELUS *
08/12 — New York, NY — Gramercy Theatre
08/13 — Cleveland, OH — Agora Theatre *
08/14 — Chicago, IL — The Vic *
08/15 — Minneapolis, MN — The Fillmore *
08/16 — Omaha, NE — Waiting Room
08/18 — Denver, CO — Mission Ballroom *
08/19 — Salt Lake City, UT — Metro Music Hall
08/21 — San Francisco, CA — The Warfield *
08/22 — San Diego, CA — Voodoo Room at House of Blues
08/23 — Los Angeles, CA — The Novo *
* Special guest to Dimmu Borgir
KATAKLYSM’s co-headlining North American Summer tour with SIX FEET UNDER and openers WORMHOLE
07.08 US Detroit, MI @ Sanctuary
07.09 CAN Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace
07.10 CAN Montreal, QC @ Fairmount
07.11 CAN Ottawa, ON @ Overflow
07.12 US Worcester, MA @ Palladium
07.13 US Hamden, CT @ Space Ballroom
07.14 US New York, NY @ Gramercy Theatre
07.15 US Bensalem, PA @ Broken Goblet
07.16 US Raleigh, NC @ Chapel Of Bones
07.17 US Jacksonville, FL @ Albatross
07.18 US FT. Lauderdale, FL @ Culture Room
07.19 US Orlando, FL @ Conduit
07.21 US Houston, TX @ Scout Bar
07.22 US Austin, TX @ Come And Take It Live
07.23 US Lubbock, TX @ Jake’s
07.24 US Farmington, NM @ Lauter Haus
07.25 US Phoenix, AZ @ Nile
07.26 US Los Angeles, CA @ 1720
07.27 US Fresno, CA @ Strummer’s
07.28 US Berekeley, CA @ Cornerstone
07.29 US Roseville, CA @ Goldfield
07.31 US Portland, OR @ Hawthorne Theatre
08.01 US Seattle, WA @ El Corazon
08.02 CAN Vancouver, BC @ Rickshaw
08.04 CAN Calgary, AB @ Arrowhead
08.05 CAN Edmonton, AB @ Starlite Room
08.06 CAN Saskatoon, SK @ Black Cat
08.07 CAN Winnipeg, MB @ Park Theatre
08.08 US Minneapolis, MN @ Skyway Theatre
08.09 US Madison, WI @ The Annex
08.10 US Covington, KY @ Madison Theater
08.11 US Chicago, IL @ Reggies
***
News
Autopsy just re-issued their classic Mental Funeral, which is sort of a death-doom hybrid on the heavy metal and prog side of death-doom:
One of the early breed of US death metal acts, Autopsy formed in 1987 in San Francisco. Drummer/vocalist Chris Reifert had gained initial recognition with Floridian genre pioneers Death & his participation on the classic debut, ‘Scream Bloody Gore’ before this new morbid creation was birthed. Autopsy released 4 albums on Peaceville Records in the early part of their career – beginning with the legendary debut, ‘Severed Survival’, in 1989 – before disbanding in 1995, with members going on to become the stalwarts of sickodelia in Abscess.
Autopsy triumphantly & officially returned from the grave after a 15 year hiatus with the 2010 EP, ‘The Tomb Within’. This was followed by the release of the band’s fifth studio album, ‘Macabre Eternal’ in 2011, as the group celebrated a new era of popularity & creativity. This reverence continues to this day as Autopsy itself nears its 40th anniversary, & still features the longstanding core trio of Chris Reifert, Eric Cutler, & Danny Coralles.
‘Mental Funeral’ was Autopsy’s second studio album, originally released back in 1991, & is rightly hailed as one of the greatest death metal albums of all time with its unhinged & uncompromising collection of odes to brutality & depravity, wrapped up in its highly distinctive raw, organic production.
‘Mental Funeral’ was recorded at Different Fur Studios in late 1990, with engineering work conducted by Ron Rigler. The iconic artwork appeared courtesy of Kev Walker, who had already provided the (at the time) controversial cover for Autopsy’s debut, ‘Severed Survival’.
This special 35th anniversary double-disc edition of ‘Mental Funeral’ contains remastered audio courtesy of Greg Wilkinson at Earhammer Studios, & includes a special bonus commentary disc, with Chris Reifert, Eric Culter, & Danny Coralles all sharing their recollections of the writing & recording process for the album, & its inspirations.
DISC 1
1. Twisted Mass Of Burnt Decay (02:14)
2. In The Grip Of Winter (04:08)
3. Fleshcrawl (00:41)
4. Torn From The Womb (03:18)
5. Slaughterday (04:02)
6. Dead (03:18)
7. Robbing The Grave (03:52)
8. Hole In The Head (06:03)
9. Destined To Fester (04:34)
10. Bonesaw (00:45)
11. Dark Crusade (03:54)
12. Mental Funeral (00:36)DISC 2
As above – with Commentary
It is sort of funny how metal has diverged into two industries: (1) reissues and demo releases of the past, and (2) new stuff that is fungible like water from the tap that people “listen” to on streaming services while scrolling social media, watching a movie, and playing video games.
Speaking of re-issues, Absu just reissued some of their demos, for people who want to hear the same four songs three times plus five other tracks:
We are proud to announce the re‑edition of the seminal 1991 ABSU demo recordings, “The Temples of Offal” and “Return of the Ancients,” now presented collectively as ABSU – The Temples of Offal/Return of the Ancients – Remastered 35th Anniversary Edition (ATMF CD/LP 2026).
This definitive edition commemorates the origins of one of the most visionary and historically significant forces within United States death and black metal.
The label expresses profound honor in collaborating with ABSU and in honoring their enduring legacy. The recordings have been newly remastered from the original cassette/DAT sources to augment their sonic impact while preserving the rawness and primordial energy characteristic of the original sessions; no contemporary sterilization has been applied, only an amplification of their ancient power.
New cover artwork, evoking the occult essence of the early period, has been created by Monica Mey (Sanguis Et Serpens). Layout and design responsibilities were undertaken by Equitant (Equitant art) and Francesco Gemelli, ensuring a presentation commensurate with this milestone.
Remixing and remastering were performed by Equitant at Agurak Studios, accompanied by detailed liner notes authored by Proscriptor. Production is limited to 500 LPs (gatefold edition: 250 black vinyl and 250 silver vinyl) and 500 CDs, each accompanied by a sixteen‑page booklet containing lyrics, photographs, and original artwork by Equitant.A T-shirt limited to 150 units has been made to celebrate this event.
The ancient temples thus ascend once more…
Remastered LP version: includes
The Temples of Offal – Demo II: 1991 (3 Track Original Mix), The Temples of Offal – Demo II: 1991 (3 Track Rough Mix), Return of the Ancients Demo I: 1991 (4 Track Alternate Rehearsal Version) & Immortal Sorcery – Early Rehearsal Version (Azathoth: 1990)
Remastered CD version: includes
The Temples of Offal – Demo II: 1991 (3 Track Original Mix), The Temples of Offal – Demo II: 1991 (3 Track Rough Mix), Return of the Ancients Demo I: 1991 (4 Track Original Rehearsal Version) Return of the Ancients Demo I: 1991 (4 Track Alternate Rehearsal Version) & Immortal Sorcery – Early Rehearsal Version (Azathoth: 1990)
It might make sense for labels to design CDs for listening again. It is nice to have every copy of an Absu song, sure, but you will not pop it in for enjoyment. That is the gold standard of art, enjoyment and wisdom.
Instead, make a compilation of the best versions of everything in a sensible order so that people can listen to it like an album. Anything else is a nostalgia exercise that goes on the shelf and then into the dumpster when the ex-wife throws all your stuff out in a fit of pique.
Note on ex-wives: get a prenup before you marry, but after if she asks you for something big (paying for education, new car, going to work in an office with hunky dudes). Marry for reproduction. Beware of “love.”
Is love a lie? No: I love my cat. I love many people. Love is concern for the best outcome for everything, and we love people for contributing to that. But most people misunderstand it either as pity or lust, and create horrors by doing so.
Every co-dependent relationship in the world is based on pity. Every vapid marriage starts with lust, and turns into resentment (see previous sentence). This is not transcendental love, but selfishness disguised as ordinary lies like altruism, empathy, tolerance, pluralism, pacifism, and organized religion.
When you say you “love” old school death metal, you mean that you love that which gives to the genre, expands it without losing continuity with its roots, and delivers a quality listening experience.
If you are a real Nice Guy who loves metal, make your re-issues listenable like an album. If you re-issue an album, drop the tracks that suck. Quit sticking demos on the end of the re-issue; do not make people listen to the same songs twice or three times just for completion. Re-issue the albums, then put out a demo CD and a live CD if you must, but only if it offers something the albums do not.
We might say the record industry died from a lack of love for its genres. But, careers were made out of pumping out crap, hyping it up, and then moving to a new job with a fancier title.
***
Speaking of labors of love, Lilou and John dropped a new one:
They are trying for a new sub-sub-genre of “folk metal.” Can it work? Yes, but folk has to abandon its uniform chord progressions, and the metal has to be atmospheric without losing its metalness.
We are in the early stages of that, but the band already has imitators. Statement from Lilou and John:
First, we have always been vanguards.
For example, after we had begun combining fashwave-inspired music with Lilou’s vocals in 2019, it took about a year for several artists in the White Art Collective to start doing the same thing.
We have always been like that. People go where we go, perhaps not always because we lead their way, but because we often see stuff before others do.
Freedom and integrity is at the core, and even if we see the whole point of making sure people know we were first in a few areas, we just don’t like people enough to put any energy into it. We once did and all we received was envy, cancellations and idiots lamenting we didn’t respect tradition or some such nonsense.
Adding to that is the difficulty to even brand us as anything but “nearly indescribable,” as you put it yourself once. Next album (Thistle Tapes, on July 10) is a vocal-focused, one-acoustic guitar album of 20 songs about European mythology, literature, and history, elevating Shere Khan to his rightful place as the real hero of Kipling’s story.
We just wouldn’t know how to honestly present ourselves, with the variety of sounds and themes we have delved into. Folk metal is good, but limited. The closest we could perhaps get is some kind of darwinistic, capitalistic, psychological, mythological, vocal-based, Starship Troopers, Andrew Ryan, Ayn Rand, Me Ne Frego-style sub-emotional, curious, creative, eccentric, mixed-up, distorted, plebeian mongrelrock by two crossbreeds who just despise anything resembling virtue-signalling. (Our informal motto is “beauty, darkness, death,” running through every release after we dropped out of the culture war thingy after Iconoclastic.)
That being said, we think it’s a great concept this band has going, and it seems as if they put something deeper into it. It is fun to see that creativity and sincerity still has a place. Also very flattering that you thought about us in relation to them.
Not being the greatest fan of folk music or of Venom, one of their inspirations, this writer must trust their assessment. In any case, above all else, if you wanted some expansion in metal, this band is not like anything else and have their own vision, personality, and content-communication to their music. They are their own people and they do not care if you do not like it.
***
If you have not heard yet, we rebooted the metal forums on a neutral third-party site known mostly for its spree killer manifesto archives.
***
Warning – Watching from a Distance: one-riff songs with pretty good riffs based on a mashup between Candlemass and Skepticism are there as a canvas for the vocals, which sketch out a simple melodic repetition, making this album exciting for the first listen with utility dropping off radically upon repetition of listening. Melodies follow the post-Morrisey hipster-crooner pattern.
Cryptic Shift – Overspace & Supertime: another fraud, with a bunch of fancy guitar noise and quirky tangents before jumping straight in to DBC/Obliveon-influenced speed metal which has too much NWOBHM influence and not enough UKHC influence, resulting in some pretty standard heavy metal, allowing the label to pimp the same early 1980s stuff again in warmed-over form.
TodoMal – Graveyards of Joy: more indie/emo/rock pretending to be metal, this band is as smarmy as the Barenaked Ladies but works some guitar in within the background despite being formless and pointless, which makes this the equivalent of listening to Muzak through a TikTok filter and concluding that you have heard the new Wagner and he proclaims a Reich of Empty Edginess upon the RedditEarth.
Perennial Isolation – Crimson Iconoclasm: Millennials cannot code, and whatever generation released this turd cannot write black metal, which they interpret as blast beats plus generic melodic hooks and lots of wide-open vocals over open interval slow riffs, but once you realize what it is, you see this as a technique and not an artistic creation. It is produkt and nothing more.
Ill Tidings – Seeds of True Rebirth: at least this tries to stay true to black metal, but mixes in too much Motley Crue and Rites of Spring to be credible, resulting in music that is both saccharine and predictable, making it time to escape the boring churn of what is not so much consumerist product as the average of the aggregate of human reasoning, which is to say edgy soft mediocrity. Hop in the fucking ovens pal.
Finsterforst – Still: at least this is musical, but still this is the kind of bouncy stuff that nu-metal introduced, and you have to wonder about them doing this for twenty years, other than to say that these are the guys who go to a job and fail at everything important but show up everyday and so get promoted to management at fifty and hang out for fifteen years before retiring, because no one can listen to this except in a rotation of boring music.
Ka’aper – When Gods Walked The Earth: dudes, this sounds like everything else. Pantera and Dimmu Borgir hybrid choruses, and Linkin Park slash Darkthrone verses, but this ends up in a big cycle around not saying what needs to be said, where black metal was known for saying what was obvious but almost universally denied. If I wanted this shit, I would just listen to Rob Zombie while letting a teen tranny mixed-race midget prostitute blow me.
Teratum – Ordnance of Spiritual Warfare: guys, this is the same wacky packages speed metal that we drove hours to avoid back in the 1980s, but now with black metal vocals and melodic death metal tropes, which makes this even more boring because it tries so hard to hide exactly how empty it is inside, just like your average bourgeois middle class moron grilling on the lawn he mowed at 6:00am on Saturday so he could out-compete his neighbors.
Purging Iesous – Atheos: wow, the deathcore/nu-metal/indie/emo crossover we were all looking for, this band is predictable as shit independent of its era, meaning that this sounds like guitar practice from people who have no idea what they are trying to express, thus falls into mixed (diverse!!1!) genre tropes and fades out as a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing because it was all signaling to Reddit midwits.
Tarfödd – Skyfall: more singsong black metal bullshit to make me think it is still 1996, but newsflash, the voters showed their anal cooter submission and the Clintons won, so now society is wrecked, and this sentimentalist nonsense which loops around an idea without ever making a point has about as much utility as a broken microwave oven with a SAVE THE WHALES bumper sticker on it. Fuck off!
Sojourner – Gateways: I listen to metal to get away from this smarmy shit, with carnie vocals over a lot of drama without much thought put into melody or structure, because it is the human generic average, and that is always not only mediocre but pointed away from any of the good parts of life toward the stuff that is safe for a group of sweaty mouthbreathers to agree upon in their circular arguments and confirmation bias. Utter garbage for retards.
Grabunhold – Frostheim: maybe those guys back in the 1980s were not just football-headed bigots when they talked about clobbering poseurs, since this band is a bourgeois poseur fraud, a paint-by-numbers melodic black metal take that is rehashing the bad old days of 1994 instead of the more productive previous three years, with no real aesthetic or communication, just going through the motions like a Millennial day job.
Occult Master – “Isle of Leper”: at least this Candlemass-clone band is musical, meaning that the parts relate to each other in some way that intensifies listening, but it is still fairly boring because it is basically nostalgic past-worship by those who probably were not even alive when Candlemass was at its peak, which makes this like a tenth-generation photocopy, fuzzy on details and formless.
Coprolith – Putrescence: why were both Soviet rock and Christian rock so boring? The answer is that they were propaganda and therefore avoided inner conflict, which meant that they followed a means-over-ends approach where they fit into the procedure, checklist, and aesthetics of what they were doing but never developed a struggle for clarity in their art, since they assumed the ideology or religion was the only content needed. This is a good attempt at reviving 1990s Infester, Gorguts, and Incantation style thunderous death-doom, but it is based on fitting riffs into aesthetics, not developing a contrast leading to greater clarity like all great bands since Hellhammer, Bathory, and Slayer did. A for aesthetics, C+ for content.
Perennial Isolation – “Crimson Iconoclasm”: it is painful to be right all the time, but the internet turned into daytime television and black metal followed the path of late hardcore, namely a lot of bands that sound very similar because their songwriting is all technique and no thinking about communicating anything to the audience but participation, and this egalitarian impulse ensures that like in publishing, movies, etc we have lots of favorites that win many awards and are considered the most groundbreaking thing ever the week they are released but never become favorites because they are empty like the individualistic human soul. This band sounds like all other black metal bands from the current period because they are writing the same tropes the same way even if they change up the aesthetics a little bit, including the obligatory emo passages and dramatic gothic vamping. The genre has become self-parody.
Verdun – Abyssal Womb: a cross between 1980s emo and tuffguy metal, this release somehow combines all of the worst aspects of the underground into one boring and ponderous plodding passage of “sludge,” which means slow hardcore with metal stylings but no riff shapes, so you end up immersing yourself in boredom while you text while watching another exciting episode of some Netflix show about lesbian paraplegic mercenaries and then conclude you did indeed, hear something, but then you forget and go on to streaming something else that is equally forgettable. All is equal, like in heat-death. Zzzz.
***
It might be said here that while competition is useful and conserving the useful seems wise, lowercase-c conservatism and inward-looking competition are a form of erosion.
For example, every social media site wants to be TikTok now. When I go on Twitter these days, I see the algorithm prioritizes short videos over text or links, which means a dumbing down.
Hint: if China invented it, it is probably not good for you!
***
When it comes to considering the morass of sadness that is post-’94 underground metal, it is interesting to note that real decay does not show up looking like a demon, but an easy answer.
There’s a lot of stuff that is hard to argue against, meaning that there is nothing glaringly wrong, just a lack of the big thing done right. That is, it expresses nothing other than form/ula.
It has become strategic, or designed to manipulate by having trendy quirks and flair, but because it is empty, it is addictive. The audience is driven by wanting to be metal (in various forms) and so becomes uncritical.
Blackmetal since 1994 has been looking backwards from the outside: if any release succeeded, whatever techniques that band used get added to the checklist of what is required for future bands.
Yes, labels drive this in an urge to be “competitive” but the fans drive it as well. If something is trendy, they expect that, and this is why genres trap musicians. They have to uphold genre more than anything else.
Black metal surged ahead not because it threw out the rules, but because it formed a clear expression, and therefore the rules up to that point became optional and much of the calcified encrustation of tropes became obsolete.
That was the first part of its cycle, an arc heading upward from obscurity to brightness, but now we are in the part that falls from that apex back down into obscurity, maybe to restart out of sight.
At this point, black metal has more rules than most genres. There has be raw Satanic anger, but then emo and indie riffs, some death metal pounding, hardcore-style formless riffs, and lots of droning.
If you toss together Mastodon, Cannibal Corpse, Opeth, Ulver, and Gojira into a blender, you get modern black metal. The decay may have begun with Satyricon but others took it much farther.
Original black metal communicated a mindset (precursor to a folkway) very clearly, even if through obscure means, but modern black metal tries to emulate that mindset through aesthetics.
It is entirely backward-looking, a form of lowercase-c conservatism and competition with the industry success stories that has no room to move. There is a logical reason why bands who are not incompetent are still failing to make anything enduring.
Content and aesthetics mediate each other (a Burroughs pyramid or Pynchon feedback loop). The content emerges from the goal, and the aesthetics are there as support. When this is inverted, content evaporates.
Too much focus on aesthetics reverses the flow and the music becomes disorganized, which naturally musicians patch over with genre tropes and inclusions from other successful genres.
Musicians, after all, want careers more than anything else, like everyone from bureaucrats to skydivers. And what is lost is the sense of a connection to life outside the black metal genre.
Metal music has chosen heat-death, or the condition where every choice is the same as any other in outcome, leading to paralysis.
The same disease has gripped the movie industries as has taken literature and music. That is: lots of awards, lots of “firsts,” and nothing sticks to the wall because nothing expresses anything of relevance.
In the same way, religion is dying in the postmodern era because it rejects the physical world in favor of an unseen promised Heaven and its order where natural life is inverted into humanistic perfection; this is not relevant to people living life, so they are walking away.
The arc follows this progression: at some point, society stops looking outward to acquire, and starts looking within to manage, and then needs distractions to avoid how fatalistic this process is. Everything accused of being nihilism, satanism, narcissism, or capitalism is just this fatalism based in individualism. When a quest becomes a job, it will be done badly; that is the point of The Odyssey, getting out of job-mentality as a means of escaping passive self-negating hubris and then being able to creatively formulate goals against adversity.
Any art or wisdom needs a focus on the union of the inner self and the world as a whole (the whole is the goal), or it simply becomes socializing and manipulation.
In the same way, in spirituality, the goal matters more than the method. One of the Episcopal priests I knew enjoyed Slayer. His point? “I read Milton, too.”
***
News of the Dethroned, Sodomized, Fisted, and Reported to HR
What does it look like to be assimilated? For starters, the system sees your genre as having utility instead of having a value in itself, like living to live well or doing things for the sake of excellence:
A discussion between advocates of the metal community and the city’s public health officials will hear the current global research on the positive links between heavy metal music and mental health.
Powell, 27, who has a diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, said the music had allowed him to better process emotions, enabling him to control anger an deal with sadness.
“The music made me feel seen,” he added.
The music has no value in itself, but because it makes him “feel seen,” he treats it like a twice-a-day pill or exercise routine: this is individualism in the wild. He wants it for its utility to his personal drama.
Speaking of the tropification of metal, consider the Highway to Hel bus:
Coach operator FlixBus has announced the return of the 666 bus service to the Polish seaside resort of Hel.
It resurrects the controversial so-called “Highway to Hel” bus journey formerly run by local company PKS Gdynia.
Religious conservative groups fiercely opposed the “satanic” association of 666 with Hel, so in 2023 the number was changed to 669.
Conservatives should ditch religion and focus on culture/genetics instead. That makes life better, where religion merely sows division. But I digress. Organized religion is just incipient bang-utot in an abstract form.
Speaking of conservatives, the Stupid Party had a little tantrum over outrageous provocation recently:
Reason’s Christian Britschgi wrote in a 2022 review of a GWAR concert that the show included “beheading a rambling Joe Biden, dismembering a MAGA hat–wearing January 6 conspiracist, performing an onstage plunger abortion, severing Vladimir Putin’s nipples with an axe, and killing Xi Jinping while demanding he fork over some General Tso’s chicken.”
Band that make fun of everything are sorely needed now, since the entire entertainment and media landscape tilts Left and has become a tone-deaf tin drum.
Speaking of the decline of entertainment-media, it seems that the death of pop is continuing apace:
A study published in Scientific Reports analyzed the lyrics of hundreds of thousands of English-language songs, drawn from two separate datasets, one covering 1960 to 2010 and another tracking Billboard chart hits through 2023, to measure how the moral character of popular music has changed over time. Expressions of moral “vices,” things like harm, cheating, and rule-breaking, have climbed sharply, while expressions of moral “virtues,” like care, purity, and loyalty, have fallen.
Vice categories, including Harm, Cheating, Subversion, and Degradation, all rose over time. By the study’s models, Degradation changed by roughly 52% in the larger dataset over the study period, Harm climbed about 49%, Cheating rose nearly 48%, and Subversion increased by around 41%. In the Billboard data, the jumps ran even sharper for some categories: Cheating rose about 71%, Degradation roughly 62%, and Subversion around 50%.
Virtue categories largely declined. Care, which captures empathy and concern for others, fell about 24% in the larger dataset and 30% in the Billboard set. Purity, tied to themes of spirituality and sanctity, dropped as well. In the larger dataset, researchers reported that their models explained a large share of the variation in moral scores over time, with release year and artist gender among the main factors they accounted for.
This should surprise no one: when individualism is introduced to any new form, it eventually takes over and ruins everything by making it about me-first thinking that deprecates reality.
In this sense, it makes the same mistake that Christianity did per Nietzsche: by discarding the apparent world, it made the world of the spirit irrelevant. Art killed itself by pandering to its audience (again).
As part of the same decay, music has become more rhythmic and less related to melody, harmony, and structure over time:
Bad Bunny’s success is not only down to his charismatic performances or engagement in social activism for Puerto Rico, but also his catchy use of rhythm.
Rhythm can be defined as the musical duration or timing properties of music. Many rhythms derive from human speech patterns and are also linked to movement, including dance (as suggested by numerous studies on embodiment).
The “catchiness” of a rhythm has the potential to make or break a song. And it’s not just in recent pop songs, but across classical, jazz and global musical styles.
Dunno anything about this Bag Bunny guy, but music in general is based more around the rhythms of emphatic speech, which tends to evoke outrage and smarmy passion more than, I dunno, life as a whole.
On the other hand, religion may be failing faster than art, simply because of the Jesus-to-junk-food pipeline:
Encountering subtle reminders of God in daily life can make people more likely to choose unhealthy junk foods over natural options. A recent study published in Psychology & Marketing suggests that spiritual cues create a subconscious belief in divine healing, which lowers a person’s dietary self-control. These findings highlight how psychological safety nets can unintentionally encourage risky eating habits in consumer decision-making.
The dark side of “Jesus take the wheel” is a lack of belief in personal agency in understanding reality and making choices that lead to good outcomes there. Now do the NHS, since people use medical care instead of eating healthy food and taking a walk.
Either that, or they could run a pub for Samuel Smith’s excellent lagers, porters, and pilsners.
***
Wisdom from Hendrik:
Of course there have been and still are gay men and lesbians in (Black) Metal, but they generally don’t make their sexual preferences the topic at all and treat it as discreetly as befits a private matter. And that is the exact opposite of this so-called “LGBTQ” minority, which upon closer inspection almost always turns out to be just trannies – because with them it’s exclusively about their messed-up sex life.
Just look at projects like Feminazgûl; they practically scream their pathologically neurotic feelings of inferiority out loud – and on the one hand that has absolutely nothing to do with Black Metal, because it’s nothing but excessively lived-out (but on most part imagined) victimhood, and on the other hand it immensely annoys everyone else when they are confronted in such a shrill and blatant way with the deficits of other people. Black Metal is not about any of that, period!
This is the same attitude that prompts resistance to shrill Christkarens who want censorship:
Leaders at The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion rejected a township official’s proposal to try to censor profane and sexually explicit performances, citing free speech in a statement that was echoed by the township’s attorney on Thursday.
Sekula-Gibbs said she considered some of of the lyrics heard at the pavilion to be “hate speech,” although she did not offer specifics on which artists or which lyrics she was referring to.
“I dare say if there was a band that cursed Muhammad, or cursed Islam, or cursed Jews or cursed Blacks they would say absolutely not. But because it curses Jesus, and God and Christians, the church and the pope, that’s art,” she said.
We accept life as it is. That means gays exist, people smoke drugs, most people are dipshits, and people from different groups are not going to get along. It raises a good question: why are more metal bands not mocking Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Ba’hai in their lyrics?
Burn all the houses dedicated to rejecting reality.
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Let us leave with a final reminder of how metal has become the new disco:
This past weekend Tuska (“Agony”) set an all-time attendance record, drawing some 66,000 people to the Suvilahti gasworks area over three days.
The article features lots of pictures of attention-getting behavior from people who see this music as a social event and lifestyle, which allows them to justify their previous lifestyle choices, more than an artistic genre.
Alert fans will note that this is another example of what Tom Wolfe described as the fiction-absolute, or the narrative story people tell themselves that justifies them as “good.”
To the Crowd, everything is bread and circuses.
Tags: Black Metal, eddie lee mosley, fiction-absolute, good guy badges, LGBT, Nihilism, sadistic metal reviews, smr, thomas pynchon, tom wolfe, william s. burroughs
