Why metal and SJWs are natural enemies

by Brett Stevens on October 22, 2015

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The casual observer seeing how metalheads and SJWs, who descend more from crustfund punk and emo than metal, might ascertain that the two groups are radically different. This observer might even note how many of the “tryhard” types are in fact thinly-disguised SJWs. But at first appearance, the reason for this separation will be misunderstood.

An average person will see metal as wild and lawless, like a combination of the Wild West and medieval Europe, where SJWs are more like modern Europe: very morally righteous, sensitive and inclusive. This difference separates metalheads from SJWs, but it is not the primal reason why the two are different. It serves as a guidepost to that end however.

Black Sabbath launched themselves during the height of the hippie period. At that time, the popular narrative that people told themselves was that history from the Napoleonic Wars to 1945 was just one big mistake, and the way to defeat it was love, through people power and pacifism and universal acceptance. Apparently none of these people studied history or they would have known how frequently this trope comes up, and how it usually ends! Black Sabbath saw through what these hippies were saying an argued it was more of the same, and that humanity was in denial of reality and has been choosing various “human realities” instead of actual reality, to its doom.

In human experience, our most common error is self-delusion. When that is discovered, we usually choose another self-delusion. The classic example is the alcoholic who runs into the arms of a tent revivalist, and becomes addicted to another set of false promises. Another is the woman who flees her marriage only to find out years later that the new boyfriend she chose is a lot like the last husband. Voters run from one party to another, as they go from one cell phone company to another, thinking that “the other guy” might have answers. And he never does. The reason why is that he is also selling an illusion, because only illusions sell.

This leads us to why metal is different from rock and why it is the natural enemy of SJWs: metal is against illusions. SJWs want you to pick one illusion over others, but metal points out that whatever is popular is illusion and is wrong. We need some other way of looking at the world than what “most people” want to believe is true about it because it makes them look good, feel important and think they are unique. Humanity is basically a large organic machine for producing lies, and every group wants us to substitute their lie for the dominant lie, but all of these lies have their root in the same idea: that what we feel, judge and emote is more important than reality itself.

Look at politics. It is a wasteland. As notorious shock realist author Tom Wolfe once wrote in a letter to a friend:

The Republican Party as now constituted is obviously too stupid to survive…. What is to be done? Of course, that was Lenin’s line and the only lucid one he ever wrote. The answer is nothing. America’s position is unassailable. We are the imperial Rome of the 3rd Millennium. Our government is a CSX train on a track. People on one side (the left) yell at it, and people on the other side (the right) yell at it, but the train’s only going to go down the track. Thank God for that. That’s why I find American politics too boring to write about. Nixon is forced from office. Does a military junta rise up? Do the tanks roll? Give me a break.

Let us separate “rock music thinking” from “real world thinking.” Not in the way that our great-grandparents did, where rock was bad and work was good, but in the manner of people who recognize that popular music is entertainment which pretends to be profound, but is the opposite of art which explores profound subjects through realism. Entertainment wants you to think it has all the answers, but ultimately it is a social phenomenon, like chatting up a girl near the keg at a frat party. It says what flatters its listeners. It wants them to think they are profound, interesting, vivid, heck… it wants them to think they are the stars on the stage… because that sells rock music, and lets all these musicians and labels and journalists keep up the nice cushy lifestyle instead of the job managing a Target or 7-11 they would have had, had rock not come along.

Rock music thinking is advertising. It wants you to think that you can be all the cool in the world for just this one next purchase, whether a tshirt or CD. It needs to offer you highly dumbed-down and simplified ideas that make you feel like you are in control of the world. Why get into the nuances of international politics and millennium-long analyzes of the health of empires? Just say “love is the answer.” All the people will flock to that, not so much as they are idiots — although most of them are — but because they are self-deluding. They want that easy, convenient answer because it makes them feel in control.

SJWs are part of rock music thinking. They have gone from “love is the answer” to “tolerance is the answer,” forgetting that like so many Utopian quests this one will involve denying human nature and human needs, and as a result will require increasing degrees of force to make it work. They also ignore the somewhat banal reality that people mostly do not like each other and tend to associate in groups of people like themselves as a barrier to the broader world. In consequence, what SJWs preach is illusion just like the other illusions. Look at them all.

The public conservatives in this world are arch-dumbshits who think that if they adopt liberal ideas about equality, but keep industry and war going on, we will somehow turn out OK. Their great fiction is that if you just go to a job and spend all of your life there, and then manage your affairs responsibly, society will somehow follow your lead. Actually, they never think that far, because they are dumbshits, as mentioned above.

Liberals also fit in the dumbshit category. They think that if every person is just “free” and “equal,” society will magically self-organize into a permanent Burning Man of love and happiness. They ignore the fact that most people are inveterate liars who avoid the truth compulsively, and that what makes happy societies is forcing those stupid fucks to obey reality instead of their own neurotic, fruity minds. Liberals also like to give away things for free, taking from the useful and giving to the useless and spending themselves out of money, at which point their societies collapse. Europe and the USA are about to collapse from this phenomenon. More dumbshits.

Nazis — and I really don’t want to get into splitting hairs about who’s a fascist, a neo-Nazi, a white nationalist, a racialist or just a bigot — are also in the arch-dumbshit camp. They are SJWs of the far-right. Where SJWs think that tolerance is the answer, Nazis think that intolerance is the answer, and that if we just remove the mud races and Eternal Jews everything will be OK. This ignores the problem that most white people are stupid as bricks and dishonest as whores, and that our society needs a redesign from the top-down not bottom-up. I think Nazis more resemble Communists than they want to think. They are right in that diversity has never worked throughout history, but wrong in who they blame, which joins them in the dumbshit camp.

The far-left might be even stupider. None of them realize that the ideas they are chasing are from 1789 and 1867, but go back even farther to the religious fanatics of the 1500s. They are claiming very old and debunked ideas as a “new way” that will somehow magically avoid all the problems that human society has known since the dawn of time. If we all just went vegan, listened to posi-techno, and gave everyone free money, they think, all causes for conflict would be eliminated. But life is a cause of conflict because that is how it negotiates change so that the more realistic prevails over the self-deluding. Humans don’t want to be reminded of that, because it points out that Darwinistic natural selection (DNS) might take our lives at any moment if we delude ourselves, yet self-delusion is our nature. I see the far-left as overgrown children trying to pretend life is not happening to them.

Libertarians are like Nazis: extreme dogmatics who do not realize the leftist roots of their own philosophy. The idea of the free market I get and support because it allows better products and services to become available without some bureaucrat giving them the rubber-stamp. In fact, the libertarian idea of replacing most of society with a market has merit. The problem is that then we’re back at conservative anarchism where we assume that magically, the tiny group of people doing the right thing will win out over the self-deluding herd. Ain’t gonna happen. Libertarianism is another form of voting where the good people neutralize themselves by never, ever stooping so low as to tell others what to do, and then the masses roll right over them on their way to the Budweiser, light cigarettes and sugary cheeseburgers.

I’m not sure there are any other philosophies in politics worth considering. Anarchism is fun because in small groups, people who know and like each other can collaborate, but it falls apart after that. Communitarianism and distributism and all those other hybrids are ways to try to make socialism work within some kind of cultural context, but those fall apart because the idea of getting free stuff beats out any conditions placed on it. Traditionalism is interesting, but it’s basically Nietzsche for Christians, which makes it less useful, and the idea that religion can substitute for the structure of society — which is generally culture, leadership and religion, informed by economics — is laughable in itself. Same for Rastafarians and atheists I suppose.

Delusionists want to ignore the obvious: this world is hell. We have made a disaster out of civilization and are leading ourselves to collapse. There is no escape from the end, at least until we stop our fundamental error, which is assuming that delusion can substitute for realism, which is just like the alcoholic insisting that he’ll be OK if he only drinks clear liquors, or the tent revivalist telling you that all will be okay if you just believe and ignore the world around you (including the hand in your pocket). Humans tend toward self-deception because it flatters us that we are in control. Politics reflects this with many varieties of denial.

The point I make in insulting every political group that I can think of is this: metal wants to end human delusion, and everyone else wants their type of human delusion to be “validated” by everyone else. This is why metal hates SJWs; SJWs are apologists for our current society because they believe that with just a little tweak to our delusion, we make make the illusion work, when metal reminds us that we are the new Roman Empire falling because we have introduced too much internal conflict and lack a shared purpose. You can only have a shared purpose if you are focused on reality, and as human societies grow and become wealthy, they empower their people to deny reality and become self-deluding. Metal wins over all these silly varieties of illusion.

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On writing negative reviews

by Brett Stevens on October 20, 2015

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Back in the days of information scarcity when metal fans found bands through fifteen-generation tapes and xeroxes of pasted-together fanzines, I made the decision to focus on bands of quality. People needed more than anything else a shopping list when they wrote to Wild Rags or Relapse with an order form; as Relapse mailorder grew and essentially became the center of the underground mail order scene, the copywriting got more exuberant and people became even more confused. They needed solid information in the form of “reviews” that actually assessed the material and came up with solid reasons why it might be worth listening to for more than a few months. Looking down a list of of releases with two-line descriptions that ended with “it’ll tear your head off!” gave people nothing, and in the limited hours they had for finding new metal, they needed descriptive writing that could show them what stood out above the rest.

For that reason, I wrote positive reviews and ignored the bands that did not strike me as interesting enough to hear for repeated listens over the years. As Karl Marx reminds us, time is money and conversely, money is time, exchanged by working hours for what can then be spent. Money spent on the wrong bands damges fans. It also damages the health of the scene. Worse, it creates a Darwinistic negative effect where bands are rewarded for slapping out some haphazard or soulless material but getting a good cover, signing to the right label, or having solid promotion, and then getting rewarded for this mediocre content but good marketing. Quality reviews enforce natural selection on metal where the best rises.

Over time the market shifted. With the rise of big metal magazines which would cover the underground, and then the internet, there was no longer a shortage of information. The opposite problem presented itself: we were literally drowning in information. Magazines published thousands of reviews, most of which described some of the surface attributes of a band and then praised it as the next best thing. Internet websites emulated them and became cheerleaders more than critical voices. People now had so many options that they needed not only a list of things to look out for, but defenses against the hype and promotion. They needed solid reasons why some bands were just promotion and aesthetics with no content.

I wish that during this time I had written more critical reviews. I should have been shouting from the rooftops that the first Opeth was warmed-over hard rock made in a cryptic pseudo-progressive format to give basement dwellers some reason to think they were more “deep” than their friends. I should have screamed at the first Slayer to deviate from their unbroken quality, Divine Intervention, and pointed out that the band would have kept its old audience and new by not imitating the past, but keeping up the quality and compositional style of the past instead of going toward vocal-driven hard rock. I should have called out every band of the two types that make metal fail, the false-authentic “tryhard” bands that imitate the surface of past greats, and the “open minded” bands that borrow from old genres and call the hybrid a new thing. But I was stuck in the old mode of trying to find the good in a stream of so-so.

The problem with this approach became obvious over time: there were few gems, but a constant stream of news, and by dropping out of that news stream, I failed to comment on what people were seeing on their screens and pages. They needed guidance from experienced hands who could say, “Nope, seen this before — it’s Bruce Springsteen riffs tricked out as jazz rock with some metal flourishes.” Or, equally important, to ask why it was that a band sounded exactly like Celtic Frost or Blasphemy but the songs had none of the personality and variation of those bands. With the information overload, metal needed mean voices to provide counter-arguments to the excuses and trends offered in the promotions.

For this reason, in the latest incarnation of this site we launched the sadistic style of writing metal reviews. We take the highly-hyped and show why it is hollow, empty and meaningless. The point is not the band itself, but the series of tropes used by labels and magazines to sell this band. If they claim it is open-minded, we need to show how it is merely an imitation of the past in an older genre than metal. If they claim it is trve, its utter lack of ideas and simultaneous aping of the past needs to be revealed. People need mental weapons against the onslaught of advertising coming from both big media and thousands of little over-enthusiastic blogs.

Those of us who write do so — if we are good — to convey some kind of information, usually the type of learning one gains with experience. We can peer beneath the layers of production, marketing, trendy chatter and hype and get to the real question: is this music interesting enough to listen to for months and years, instead of another passing fad? This helps keep metal healthy by ensuring that the good releases get rewarded and the bad forgotten. For many years, I failed you all in this capacity, and I hope to rectify it with well-placed cruelty laying bare the essence of this music.

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“Can Latinos be Nazis?”

by Brett Stevens on October 9, 2015

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Speaking of performances quietly cancelled because of perceived political views of the band, the Phoenix New Times brings us a hilarious story about SJW-induced panic over political incorrectness:

The bands’ members are mostly of Mexican descent , bringing up the question, can Latinos be Nazis?

The headliner, Nokturnal Warfare, is a Los Angeles-based group describing itself as a “nican tlaca black metal” band, a reference to a nativist Mexican pride movement. It might seem counter-intuitive for Mexican radicals to associate themselves with neo-Nazis, but there exists an offshoot of national socialist black metal (NSBM, a.k.a. Nazi metal) that has melded with certain strains of Mexican pride movements. A Spanish-language NSBM label called Pagan National Socialist Organization includes bands that feature hybrid images such as swastikas made from Aztec symbols.

The storyline is the same: show is booked, SJWs find some incriminating imagery on Facebook and swarm together in a Tumblr hive, promoter cancels show but is afraid to say why. Then we run into these ludicrous questions about whether these guys are actually Nazis considering that they are not white and not German. The hilarity accelerates:

On the band’s use of swastikas: “The swastika we use is the Mexica, better known as the Aztec swastika. It symbolizes the sun, primarily the sun war god Huitzilopochtli who was the supreme god of the southern native Mexica. … The swastika IS a Mesoamerican sacred pagan symbol. All because the third Reich uses it doesn’t mean we use it the same.”

They do sort of have a point. Swastikas show up in American Indian culture and the related Mesoamerican cultures, much as swastikas show up in Japanese, Finnish, Korean, Indian, Buddhist and Hindu imagery. Before the second World War, swastikas were common in American advertisements, including for Coca-Cola. This ruins the idea that a swastika has to mean whites hating non-whites. Even more, it calls to mind the question: if any group has pride in itself, does that make them Nazis?

Such questions are beyond the scope of this article.

What is within its scope is the problem metal faces with SJWs: they find new meaning in life by destroying the art of others. Their goal is not to expand meaning, but to collapse it into two categories. Either you agree to bleat the SJW orthodoxy, or you are an enemy of the state, an ideological dropout who should be treated as a mental patient. The hypocrisy of it is that most SJWs are white trust-fund babies who went to expensive colleges to learn this stuff, and now use it to assuage their deep inner doubt as they labor on in utter failures of lives.

This brings to mind other times SJW ideology has collided with reality, such as when bisexual Turks troll around with Nazi and racist imagery just to provoke the sheer stupidity of the herd. The SJWs are the herd; they are being trolled in the classic sense, which occurs when people poke at the sacred cows and taboos of an uptight group knowing that the group will lash out in hilarious ways. This is not much different than the Church of Lucifer opening a “church” in a tourist trap or metal bands using themes of war, eugenics, Darwinism, disease and apocalypse to momentarily stir their audience into brief glimpses of something like thought.

In the meantime, another show is cancelled and SJWs attempt to sweep the band under the rug, terrified that somewhere out there the rest of us might make up our own minds. With SJWs, like with Nazis and Stalinists, you either say the right thing… or you must be destroyed. It’s not surprising that metal continues to clash with these intolerant, small-minded and bigoted SJWs, exploding into the conflict we call “Metalgate” because it reflects the same attempts at industry takeover by SJWs as we saw in GamerGate. As with the gaming industry, SJWs have failed to take over metal, and are now fighting a rearguard action to try to save their fractured sense of self-esteem.

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Maryland Deathfest organizers confirm Disma removal from California Deathfest for SJW reasons

by Brett Stevens on October 9, 2015

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As reported previously, the California Deathfest (produced by Maryland Deathfest) has booted death metal band Disma for alleged un-PC associations. The organizers of the Maryland Deathfest refused to answer queries by our journalists and others about the reason why Disma was booted.

And then, they publicly denied it:

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Unfortunately for them, a metal defender confirmed that the dismissal was politically motivated by reaching out to vocalist Craig Pillard (Incantation, Disciples of Mockery):

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His statement read:

they removed Disma!
with no announcement to make us look like the assholes

yes, its true the liberal agenda pc assholes got to the promoter of those shows and we removed Disma which is a not affiliated with any political group at all… but it only helps us for people naturally will get drawn to us more because of this now… thanks for your support for Disma

At this point, the Maryland Deathfest organizers began backpedaling about their reason for refusing to make a statement:

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As they tell it, you see, it was not because they did not want to make a statement, but because in some imagined division in our mind, we — and the others who wrote to them — were not “journalists.” Never mind the hundreds of death metal, black metal and heavy metal bands who see us that way, or the work we do. This was a convenient lie for them to escape accountability. As word of Pillard’s statement spread, however, the retreat and backpedaling began in earnest.

Even worse for them is the fact that this issue has come up before with Disma. SJWs complained in Austin, and Disma was yanked there, too, despite there being no evidence or clarification that Craig Pillard is actually involved with any of these political beliefs. Even more, since Disma has a guitarist of Jewish heritage, it is highly unlikely and even laughable that the band would have any political leaning.

No, this was a witch-hunt, pure and simple. It makes SJWs feel powerful to force the world to bend to their ways, and when they can use guilt as a weapon and force others to obey the voices inside their own heads, they almost feel validated. Almost, because they keep doing it again and again. As Metalgate has proven, SJWs are not the most successful, good-looking, intelligent or competent people, which is why they form an angry mob. The people who could not make Onward to Golgotha get an almost sexual thrill from taking down those who could.

This is why Metalgate exists: to defend artistic expression from the small-minded nanny society witch hunters. Here is Pillard’s statement from the last time Disma was witch-hunted by SJWs after their Walter Mitty style cube jobs:

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“To the less than one tenth of one percent of the bleeding hypocritical liberalists and to anyone that actually cares, this is my first and final statement; Disma-in no way, shape, or form, has any significance to the ideas of project Sturmfuhrer. On my part alone, the solo projekt known as Sturmfuhrer was a musical and social experiment in the extreme; its purpose was not meant for your pleasure, but for your pain. If I have offended anyone, then it has fulfilled its intended purpose. I do not belong to, or associate with any ideological group in any capacity. To penalize the collective band known as Disma, would be hypocritical and absurd. Thank you for the extra press! – Craig Pillard”

Beef, its whats for dinner!!!

Like many metal musicians, Pillard pushed the boundaries of what is socially acceptable in order to make a point. He was not making propaganda, i.e. music that tells you to think a certain way. This was an artistic statement. But SJWs, bored and lonely in their successless lives, always seek new targets. To give them a sense of purpose. To make them feel important. Even to convince them for a few moments that they are actually good people, instead of mediocrities with the moral caliber of a boiled clam. And Maryland Deathfest gave in, then lied about it, and then lied some more, all to protect this tiny group of people who have never created any metal worth listening to.

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Brouwerij Affligem – Affligem Dubbel (2015)

by Cory Van der Pol on September 29, 2015

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What sort of beer would you want at a metal gig? Strong, savage perhaps, but flavorful. What about a metal gig with keyboards? There you might have Affligem Dubbel, a tasty and strong double-fermented beer with a fruity and spicy undertone that is less extreme than found in most Belgian ales. It pours in a thick medium brown stream with minimal head, and immediately presents the scents of a rich beer. In flavor, it is mostly a darker sensation with mostly a malt flavor, some bitterness from spices (coriander in a blend unique to this variety of beer) and as it spreads and warms on the tongue, a fruity flavor like apple and pear baked together with a citrus topping. Alcohol flavor melds smoothly with the beer and is hardly detectable, melding into a strong caramelized flavor with a pleasant aftertaste of molasses. If you want a comparison to more familiar beers, consider this a richer and denser German-style version of Newcastle Brown Ale as made by Belgium corporations… err, Trappist monks (the first hipsters to popularize the beard). At 6.8% alcohol, this beast provides enough of a dose in a single 750ml serving to satisfy the metalhead who still wants to remember the show. Affligem Dubbel succeeds at making a beer for daily enjoyment, which is a process of understanding how flavors meld to make a satisfying beer experience, and its wide availability suggests it is geared for a market other than the foodie-style novelty crowd. It does not yet rise to the level of an iconic taste like many of the best-loved beers, but presents a solid middle ground which incorporates the Belgian style without going over the top. While many of the nu-Belgian style coriander-and-citrus beers are outright disgusting, this one is worth the time and fighting through the burly men with long bears and tattoos who are buying IPAs at the beer counter.

Quality rating: 4/5
Purchase rating: 3/5

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Malevolent Creation – Dead Man’s Path (2015)

by Gabe Kagan on September 22, 2015

Malevolent Creation - Dead Man's Path (2015)

Malevolent Creation has been in my listening backlog for many, many years on the strength of a few tracks from Retribution. I never got to them, because I was constantly distracted by trendier bands (brands). When I first acquired Dead Man’s Path, I theorized that since the band’s been around for nearly 30 years and retains some of its original members, this was not going to be a major stylistic departure from those past works lest long-time fans abandon them in droves. The flipside of this, as evidenced by my experience with similar types of recent releases such as Repentless, is that I expected that regardless of the final quality, I expected a streamlined version of MC’s past style.

My listening throws this into question. Malevolent Creation’s early works tended towards the ancestral end of death metal, with obvious speed/thrash metal roots poking out of an otherwise standard monophonic, dissonant approach. Dead Man’s Path recalls something of this, but as predicted, it turned out more conventionally musical, with more consonant melody and a denser production (out with Scott Burns and in with Dan Swanö). Add in a somber march of an intro, and a renewed emphasis on vocal patterns, and you have a release that has definitely streamlined itself. It doesn’t rock the boat much, and it does still pass the aesthetic litmus tests that define death metal, but the production and packaging isn’t particularly interesting to write about beyond its most basic qualities.

Unlike most of the bands that take this approach, however, Malevolent Creation does a good job of applying their musical practice to write better songs. To my understanding, they were never a particularly complex act, and most of these songs rely at least in part on obvious verses and choruses. However, good use of tempo and rhythm shifts in particular keep things from getting too skull-crushingly obvious and predictable. The band members also showcase enough compositional awareness to move integral song elements around between tracks to obfuscate the formulas a bit. I would personally have liked to hear more variation in riff styles, as some of the songs here (“Corporate Weaponry” in particular) suggest that such could be successfully incorporated while retaining the strong points of the band’s approach. That, however, is a small flaw in an otherwise very solid package.

To be fair, I was not expecting the strengths of Dead Man’s Path to be so covert, but they are the sort of elements that take some time to properly dissect and understand. However, this makes it a more valuable and perhaps integral work than most of what passes through the review queue here.

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The differences between politeness and political correctness

by Brett Stevens on September 19, 2015

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When our society fell apart, we lost politeness. In our modern view, politeness consists of validating other people whether they deserve it or not, especially if what they are doing is stupid or destructive. “It’s all good, man,” is the refrain of our time, inspired by our hippie grandparents.

Politeness originally evolved as a way to disagree without making it personal. With its replacement, Political Correctness (PC), everything is personal. Under politeness, you could disagree vehemently with a fellow citizen and then go on your way and still be friends. With PC, you have no reason to disagree with him unless he is bad — which used to be reserved for pedophiles, rapists, thieves and the like — but being un-PC is reason enough to consider him bad.

Members of the cult of PC will drop friendships with people who disagree with them. Where an impolite person would be simply shunned, in the PC mindset the only way to lose someone is to make them out to be a villain or enemy. They achieve this status by failing to universally validate all of the people they encounter. Dislike of someone’s behavior is considered dislike of the person themselves, and reason enough to exile the person who dared notice the bad behavior.

Consider this conversation:

Person 1: You’ll like Sally, she’s nice.

Person 2: Everyone here is nice.

Person 1: Yeah, but I know Sally.

Person 2: Why do you hate most people?

Under politeness, it was understood — and this is too complex for PC people — that saying Sally was nice was a way of vouching for her. But PC does not allow you to selectively approve of anything. Either it is all good (“, man”) or you are an enemy who targets some people by the simple act of not approving of them. In the same way, PC people demand that you relinquish any personal preference or opinion other than a positive one.

Person 1: I really like tech-deth.

Person 2: Which bands?

Person 1: Oh, anything, really. All of it is good.

Person 2: I only like Shove This Microphone Into My Rectum.

Person 1: Only? There’s a lot more good than that. Lighten up, citizen. Expand your calm.

Politeness allowed people to converse on the basis of exchanging information. This meant that an answer could be reached, or at least viewpoints could be fully articulated and people could mull it over later. Under PC, the right answer is always the same answer: everyone is right, we just really like one answer (but the others are fine, too, not that there’s anything wrong with that). It is essentially an agree to disagree for all debates, factual questions, logical questions and preferences.

Person 1: Incantation is the best old-school death metal band.

Person 2: Naw, I like Death better.

Person 3: We all have our preferences and all of them are good.

Person 2: That’s just your opinion, man.

Needless to say, PC is the defense of people who are underconfident in their beliefs. If they honestly thought that being a slut, being a hipster or liking stupid music was acceptable, they would not be trying to force you to validate it through universal acceptance. They would be instead proudly liking what they like and would be able to articulate why. PC replaces the need to have a why (or facts, or logic) for any belief. Instead, they simply regard everything as a subjective preference …except… when someone has a negative preference, then they gang up on that person and wreck his life.

When we shifted from politeness to PC, we lost the ability to have principles and get to a right answer at the end of a discussion. Instead, everything is now a Facebook wall: people spouting off about whatever they encounter, hoping to appear different enough to stand out, with nothing being wrong but also nothing being right, and so nothing is decided and nothing is acted upon. In this state of entropy, we sit decisionless and await some fortunate apocalypse which will deliver us from this utter tedium of being alive.

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Skepticism – Ordeal (2015)

by Gabe Kagan on September 18, 2015

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Our previous editor got his hands on some version of Ordeal and was not particularly fond of it; in particular he criticized it for being “self-referential” and lacking in well thought out composition. In doing so he cast a great shadow over my hopes for this album, but one I could not even acknowledge until I had listened for myself and determined whether or not his criticisms were accurate. It was a very persuasive argument in the mean time; the very title of the album, the fact it contained two rerecordings of previous Skepticism tracks, the gimmicky recording technique, and so forth come together to predict validity without actually being sufficient indication of the contents within.

Actually listening to the album immediately put me into mind of one major lesson I derive from my own personal review efforts: I respond more quickly to music that reminds me of my own efforts as a musician, and Skepticism with their funeral doom style is the antithesis of myself. While my experience with the band’s previous efforts is limited, their particular take on the subgenre is still interesting on some level, as their overall choice of tonality and instrumentation seems to absorb all the doom and depression one might expect and replace it with the musical equivalent of barren, but sublime natural landscapes – mountain peaks, desert canyons, and so forth. That’s the ideal, at least; given that Ordeal‘s sloth makes it superficially resemble ambient music, and that plenty of both metal and ambient musicians turn towards Earth’s ecosystems for inspiration, it seems a reasonable goal. Still, something deeper and more fundamental wasn’t clicking, and in an attempt to more quickly absorb the structures of this album into my mind, I turned to pitch-shifting algorithms.

While playing Ordeal at three times its intended speed ended up making everything sound daft, it helped to reveal the underlying structures of Skepticism’s music. It turns out that, at least from a mathematical perspective, these compositions are definitely janky, as they are full of sudden shifts to subtly different material at odd intervals. In a style as slow and orderly as this, that seems a poor fit and makes for anything but an organic approach. This exercise also suggested, rather more sinisterly, that Skepticism’s compositions are perhaps assembled at a higher speed and then stretched out as necessary to create longer tracks. While I can’t confirm anything about how the music was constructed, I would not be fretting about it so much if the end result was not held back by its own awkwardness, and if the laggardly tempos didn’t make appreciating any musical moments a chore.

Since the rest of the band’s discography is at least superficially similar to this, I can at least extend Skepticism a hearty congratulations for making me doubt the value of the rest of their discography. That, if anything, is a (dubious) honor, but hardly one worthy of praise.

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Elitism is Darwinism for heavy metal

by Brett Stevens on September 12, 2015

If you are a false, do not entry. – Sarcofago

Elitism gets a bad rap because it has been appropriated by hipsters to justify their interest in low-quality but obscure bands. The obscurity of those bands makes them rare, which makes them valuable in a social situation, as you can always one up someone else by suggesting something more obscure, connoting greater knowledge, experience and “being in the know” on your part. This is the inverse of elitism however which is a simple formula of quality > quantity, which hipsters confuse with simply measuring by quantity alone in order to find the least popular and equate it with the highest quality.

Inferior substitutes replacing quality originals is after all a trope if not the defining feature of what happens over time in our society. A good idea becomes edgy, then hip, and so a dumbed-down version is made for the masses to democratically share in the hipness, at which point declining quality (dumbing down) destroys whatever made the idea important in the first place. One needs look no further than the progression of Metallica from their second album to their fourth to see this in action. Over time, the complexity and intensity erodes and is replaced by a friendly, vapid and appearance-based substitute. The story arc of black metal shows this most clearly, moving from an outlaw genre that upended all rock and pop conventions to a pale imitation in the form of indie rock with incomprehensible screaming.

It is no wonder the hipsters want elitism misunderstood. It would eliminate the entirety of hipster bands by pointing out that, instead of being quality because of their rare quantity, they are impostors and pretenders. Poseurs, if you will. Then again, what defines hipsters is the formula appearance > reality, so that entire genre of people are by nature poseurs, scenesters, day-trippers, tourists, pretenders and the like. Elitism offers cynicism with hope: that by raising our standards, we can raise quality. World-weary observers may note that this has something in common with the theories of Charles Darwin, which held that better adapted creatures reproduce more and thus over the years their traits predominate; on the other hand, traits which are not used die out. Cynicism by itself leads to a dark place where nothing has value, but cynicism with hope leads out of the confusing harangue of nonsense that most people rationalize themselves into liking, and shows instead a chance to clear the clutter, value the good, and spend life on more meaningful pursuits than what is new or obscure.

Darwin gave us a warning, however. Humans now control the index of selection, and so if we value the wrong things, those will predominate over other traits and exclude those traits. For example, in black metal it became fashionable to like the novelty of hybrids with indie-rock, and those sold more as a result, and this displaced most of the original material. In turn, the originalists attempted to preserve their music through exaggerating its external characteristics, which led to self-parody and low quality. Elitism is recognition of what our ancestors could have told us: most people, most of the time, are engaged in useless or stupid activity in order to appear important. The self-importance of the individual is the death of humanity, perhaps, but it certainly forms the death of music. One needs look no further than a thread of favorite bands where each user busily types in the most obscure bands he can think of in order to appear wise.

Misanthropy has long been a trait of metal. Compassionate misanthropy would be much like cynicism with hope, or a recognition that most people are busy with the useless, but that some are not, and if we value those good, we get more of the good; on the other hand, if we ignore them, they die out. Darwin would nod and smile at this implementation of his theory. Unfortunately for humans, only some — those with the intelligence, experience and honesty/aggression to pursue the truth — can articulate the difference between gunk and glory. These are opposed by the rest because these tastemakers will point out the the Emperor has no clothes on at all, which invalidates the posing and posturing of the majority. This in turn renders the hipster, scenester and try-hard irrelevant, and they fear this and as a result fight hard against any quality > quantity assessment, which leads them to try doubly hard to find the obscure but mediocre and champion it as the apex of the genre.

Majorities however determine the order of the day. They have more money and in democratic societies, political power; their misery is that by “winning,” they self-destruct by replacing quality with inferior substitutes. The last twenty years of heavy metal reflect this anti-Darwinian approach and quality has declined proportionately. Even record labels find that following the most recent trends — the way to success in a mass society — has stopped working for them as consistently as it used to. This intensifies the desire to replace quality with quantity, especially by claiming that a small quantity or being ironic, different, unique or contrarian signals quality. On this point, hipsters join with the bourgeois mass consumer marketers in the same theory, and through two different pathways, produce the same inferior result.

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Slayer – Repentless (2015)

by Gabe Kagan on September 11, 2015

Slayer - Repentless (2015)

It probably bears mentioning that I consider Hell Awaits to be Slayer’s peak. While it could’ve used a larger recording budget, it showcased some of the band’s most elaborate and well-written compositions. The band didn’t generally follow up on this approach on later albums, but you can hear the lessons applied on the rest of Slayer’s classic ’80s material, and therein lies a lesson. At their peak, Slayer had obvious songwriting formulas, but were able to go build more elaborate and memorable works due to their solid understanding of song structure.

Repentless is Slayer’s 3rd attempt to recapture something else of that era. The production standards are admittedly better (although Slayer generally had good producers working for them in the past as well), but everything else is the stereotypical speed/death assault that the band helped pioneer. Paul Bostaph and Gary Holt serve as adequate substitutes for the departed Dave Lombardo and the deceased Jeff Hanneman (R.I.P), carrying on general stylistic trends without rocking the boat too much. That this is a commercially viable endgame for popular metal bands is something I expect to be one of the major themes of my tenure here at DMU. Even now, though, cracks are showing in the war ensemble – Tom Araya’s vocals are a major stylistic weak point on Repentless. His shouts have become more “extreme” and insistent in recent years, but his ability to vary his vocal techniques has all but collapsed. This album’s prosody is the worst casualty yet, as he delivers these monotonous shouts in unvarying rhythms; the effect is essentially the same as shouting nursery rhymes into a megaphone from your neighborhood rooftops.

Araya’s weaknesses are particularly damning on an album that relies so heavily on vocals to retain the listener’s attention, especially when everyone else on the recording is so competently unremarkable. We live in the age of self-referential Slayer, a long darkness that our learned scholars perhaps debate the duration of in their moments of distraction. Repentless is essentially a more formulaic version of previous Slayer albums that themselves were a simplification of their own predecessors. It’s very likely that the songs here sound marginally more like classic Slayer than those on Christ Illusion or World Painted Blood, but their unwillingness (or inability) to expand on basics renders them ultimately pointless. I can’t fault the band for continuing, though; previous recordings, while underwhelming, more than satiate an omnivorous fanbase who will probably go back to Reign in Blood after a while.

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