Weathering the Storm as a Republican Metalhead

by Brock Dorsey on February 10, 2018

November 8th, 2016.  Manhattan, NY.  Election night.  I was there.

Wading back and forth between a crowd of suits and red hats gathered outside the Fox News building on 6th ave and a similar group gathered a few blocks north outside the Hilton hotel where the soon-to-be President-Elect was present, I celebrated ecstatically as electoral college results came in showing my favorite politician on the cusp of capturing the presidency.  All of us were over the moon with excitement and bliss, particularly because New York City had seldom presented a place where support of the man the media branded as Hitler 2.0 could be expressed openly.

While walking home and passing virtually every media truck parked for a mile along the road where America’s next President prepared his victory speech, a young NPR reporter excitedly rushed over to me with her microphone and cameraman after seeing the ridiculous “Trump 2020” pins on my shirt.  I agreed to her request for interview and explained why I thought Trump’s non-interventionist foreign policy and realist economic objectives would benefit the country’s middle and working classes.  Admitting her surprise to learn that I was a compliance director working near Wall St. and not the basic redneck Trump voter the media had branded us as, she asked if I was excited about the likelihood of supporting Trump being more socially acceptable now that he was president.  “Yeah” I said “It finally won’t be taboo now!”

We could not have been more wrong.
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Twilight of the CD

by Brock Dorsey on February 5, 2018

The compact disc- the highest quality and most sensible of all physical music formats- appears to be seeing its final days. Last Friday, Best Buy announced that by July 4th, all CDs will be removed from the shelves of the retail giant. What’s worse still, Target is engaged in fierce negotiations with executives from all of the labels that still stock CDs on its shelves and all signs point to the CD’s exit from Target as well.

With a compact disc exodus from retailers coupled with the vinyl-marketing-scheme’s continuance in places like Urban Outfitters, we’re likely seeing a complete retreat of the CD to the deep underground in the near future. But with smaller labels going all in on the cheap cost and high scene point tallies available in tapes, exactly what future does the CD format have?  And what is to come for metal CDs especially?
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Sadistic Metal Reviews: Incineration of 2017 Metal

by Brock Dorsey on January 17, 2018

2017 was a shit waste of a year when it came to metal music.  Yet with a whole generation of useless neckbeard millennials frantically trying to pursue a career in metal journalism via a desperate pursuit of vindication from that $40,000 of communications-degree student loan debt we have hundreds of “best metal albums” lists every year. 

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PCU‘s Dark Forecast

by Brock Dorsey on January 12, 2018

A few times every decade, a work of literature or film comes along that astonishingly predicts the future with unbelievable accuracy.  Back in 1994, we were given a dead-on glimpse of the social climate that we’re currently living in across modern western civilization through a seemingly harmless silly, good times college comedy, as it advertised itself to be. But instead, PCU showed us the world we would be inhabiting twenty years later.

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