Almost all revolutions begin with the idea that what you have known is wrong, and an alternative exists that although unproven will bring about a better world. The hangup is the word “better” — does it mean pragmatically (short term) better, realistically (long term) better, morally better, more profitable, more individualistic — and this detail bedevils the most adventurous of plans.
33 CommentsTags: blasphemy, censorship, Nihilism, obscenity, sodomy
Time comes like waves, and your wave bounces off the shore and then heads out to sea while others follow it. You stay on your path, but now there are many more paths, and they may coincide with yours briefly, but you have to pursue your destiny, which is what the underground has done as metal bloats around it.
45 CommentsTags: adversary, bob burns, cursed productions, death metal, ed finkler, jack botos, jules seifert, metal curse, ray miller
Life philosophies differ across the Bell Curve. In the middle, where the big bucks are, people want to avoid unpleasant thoughts about their status in the world; on either end, people know that their role is not what most idealize and, as a result, have accepted their limitations (left) or duties (right).
57 CommentsTags: censorship, fisting, free speech, say FUCK for FREEDOM, smr
This site started from a number of text files designed to promote quality metal over commercialism, the process of dumbing down art so that it can have a wider audience along the Bell Curve, and grew to resist assimilation, or the absorption of metal back into rock ‘n roll as a flavor instead of a genre on its own.
10 CommentsTags: assimilation, commercialism, punk, rock 'n' roll, slayer, Speed Metal
Part of the fun of being a metal historian, as writers about metal tend to become looking back at the evolution of the art form, is to pick apart threads of history and then look where they converge. These points are horizons, and in each are many paths, some still unexplored.
35 CommentsTags: black sabbath, cream, Heavy Metal, jethro tull, king crimson, proto-metal, the stooges, tony iommi
Metal died of democratization like everything else in the post-1990s world. Thanks to the internet, globalization, and mass media, nothing could remain obscure or beyond the reach of the hipsterized cultureless grey race masses for long.
76 Comments
Northern Indiana resonant death metal band Adversary remastered and reissued its first album, The Winter’s Harvest, with new cover art and liner notes for those who are interested in the interstitials and nuanced crevices of the death metal organism.
17 CommentsTags: adversary, death metal
Our first indication that the world had a hidden underlying order was the Poisson Distribution, which showed us that what we saw as random was in fact ordered and somewhat pre-determined, as if Plato and Prometheus had triumphed over B.F. Skinner and Jéhováh.
104 CommentsTags: blaspherian, death metal, imprecation, nuclear war now! productions
Classic innovative death metal band Demlich will ride on vinyl and CD again with the 2025 reissue of its classic Nespithe, joining a flurry of post-1990s interest in this once-overlooked but essential slab of death metal weirdness.
15 CommentsTags: death metal, Demilich, svart records
American beer got a lot of flack, but that reflects the situation forty years ago. Now, a number of independent breweries make great beer, and as in everything else, if you avoid the normie product designed for cultureless desire zombies, you can find some good stuff.
57 Comments
