Zombie PMRC attacks Morpheus Descends

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During the 1980s, a group of wives of senators and other busybodies got together to form a group they called the “Parents Music Resource Center,” or PMRC. Their intention was to protect children from the dangerous heavy metal, rock and rap music which had sexual, drug and occult themes. After essentially shaming the interesting bands, the group finally used the coercive power of shame to force labels and record stores to insist on warning labels for albums with content that might upset the precious snowflakes and their absentee parents.

Unlike acid-washed jeans and Valley Girl slang, the PMRC unfortunately did not die with the 1980s. It lives on in zombie form through the Parents Music Resource Center appreciation group, which has taken to flagging certain metal bands, zines and labels as hostile to decency, morality and good taste as all metal should be.

Morpheus Descends proved to be the most recent instance of quality metal running afoul of these deranged censors, who feel that the new material from this band will cause “casual sex, drug use, enema fetishism and voting Republican” (PMRC boss Tipper Gore was wife to Al Gore, at the time Democrat senator from New Hampshire). We’re not really sure that people — at least still living people — want to have sex to old school death metal, but as the internet’s “rule 34” implies, any imaginable fetish has already occurred.

This clash between good and evil occurred at the moment when Morpheus Descends released one of the two newly written and recorded tracks to be on their From Blackened Crypts compilation. Check it out below.

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Varg Vikernes (Burzum) facing legal troubles in France and Russia

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Varg Vikernes founded Burzum and contributed heavily to the black metal movement before being jailed in Norway in 1993 for murder and possible church arson, then on his release in the 2000s began releasing the continuation of his prison-years ambient soundscape albums, most recently with Sôl austan, Mâni vestan and The Ways of Yore. Now he faces additional problems with both French and Russian governments.

Almost a year ago, Vikernes was arrested in France for suspicions of violating anti-discrimination and civil rights law there. His trial came up recently and a French court has convicted him and sentenced him to a six month suspended sentence and $10,000 in fines. In addition, Russian authorities seized his web site from June 18-23 because it found the Russian edition of his book Vargsmal violated Russian speech law as well.

While I can’t say that I agree with Vikernes — although I am fond of the first three and last two Burzum albums — in my view speech codes and goody-two-shoes laws are about the most un-metal thing there is. In the 1980s, the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) tried to prevent us from hearing music with lyrics containing gratuitous sexual or occult content, but now thirty years later, our governments are more worried about political speech. It tells us what threatens these governments that they are now just fine with our gratuitous sex and violence and occultism, but have turned their focus to ideas themselves. It’s an odd turn that I never could have foreseen.

For more information about Vikernes and his music, see our interview with Varg Vikernes from May of last year. For his beliefs, you can visit his blog and his website for his role playing game, movie and writings. There is also his official Burzum website and then, for a neutral viewpoint, the Burzum study group’s analysis of his music and beliefs. If you want to help with his burgeoning legal fees, there’s a donation page and his official merchandise page.

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