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
It does not matter what I write here because people no longer read articles. They read headlines and summaries, then skim for embedded media. Television finally took over through the computer. As usual, the voters/consumers are their own worst enemy, choosing the dumbest format they can find.
36 CommentsTags: sadistic metal reviews, smr
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
Since the late 1980s, all culture has been crypto: it hides in plain sight, it uses its own language and symbols, and it builds itself against the dominant contrarianism that took over in the 1960s and turned rock into propaganda and advertising.
32 CommentsTags: degeneration, lyrics, melody, metal, music
We talk often here of how form-over-content/means-over-ends thinking has predominated in Late Heavy Metal. That is, people got good at the mechanics but forgot what the music was supposed to express, so now heavy metal is wallpaper to signal anger and partying for normies.
125 CommentsTags: fisting, smr, Transcendence
We write; you complain; everyone else ignores us. Later on, the world catches up, and everyone hides how they read it here first. We call the metal trends by looking at reality instead of social influences, and this makes people feel like the small puny slave power bottoms they really are.
112 CommentsTags: smr
The news filtered down through the grapevine the other day that Yosuke Konishi of Nuclear War Now! Productions had entered into a new venture named Helios Press which will manufacture vinyl records in Brady, Texas. This hopes to serve the rising vinyl market which has not only not fizzled but continues to gain strength:
34 CommentsTags: helios press, nuclear war now! productions, vinyl, yosuke konishi
Times are tough, and tobacco prices are going up, so again people turn to the idea of making homebrews because depending on what you need, these can be mostly as good as the commercial versions for often half of the cost.
16 CommentsTags: pipe smoking, pipe tobacco, pipe tobacco smoking, tobacco
It probably ranks as one of the most enjoyable smokes of my life, but it started with primitive origins as many good things do. Some pipe-smokers noted that you could use a pasta press to make cake presses of your favorite tobaccos, so one was acquired and testing commenced.
21 CommentsTags: pipe, pipe smoking, pipe tobacco, pipe tobacco smoking, tobacco
Let us review how we got here, how things are going, and where we are going.
122 CommentsTags: Heavy Metal, history of metal, sadistic metal reviews, smr, spirit of metal
