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Even self-help writers hate the Hipster

Thursday 29 January 2009 at 10:02 am Gratifying to see this:

here are a couple types to watch out for:

3. He's heavily invested in his "persona." We all know guys like this. Richard is the crazy life-of-the-party guy! Then there's Jon, the sarcastic intellectual. Dean is heavily influenced by 1940s gangster style; his clothing is all vintage, and his apartment is like a time capsule circa your granny.

While these dudes might be appealing, they rarely get real. Richard may be charming, but being around someone who's always "on" is exhausting. Jon may be the smartest guy you've ever met, but he can also be the cruelest. And Dean? Well, he's hot, but he spends so much time looking back, how can he possibly look towards the future?

CNN

Beware of these types in metal, too. Richard's only into metal from weird places, like Nigeria and Utah! Jon may know everything about ultra-raw black metal, but he doesn't seem to find the good in any of it. Dean? Well, he's busy promoting his band, which sounds totally generic, while harshing on Immortal for "selling out" -- on Pure Holocaust.

The hipster is anyone who is directed outward for inward affirmation. You need to know your own self-worth because you have a spine and do what's right or what's beautiful or what's powerful. If you can't do that, you'll become a hipster, hiding yourself in a camouflage of "fascinating"|"unique"|"weird"|"funky" outward stuff so you don't have to look into your empty soul and hear the echo of a dropped pin.

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Interviews with legends

Tuesday 27 January 2009 at 4:20 pm So... I don't know how we got this lucky, but the gods (and the gods of metal) have been good to us.

Beherit and Master both have new interviews on the Interviews page.

I hope you enjoy. I never thought I'd talk to such luminaries who -- unlike artists in every other genre but classical, for me -- live up to the legendary status they maintain.

Have no idea what I'm talking about? View the Beherit and Master review pages.

METALLICA fulfills promise to displeasure of former fans

Wednesday 21 January 2009 at 08:32 am LOS ANGELES - In the wake of increasingly insipid albums and unprecedented overexposure for Bay Area quartet Metallica, many former fans have realized to their horror that the band's 1983 promise to neither stop nor quit has turned from a blessing to a curse.

"Man, when 'Kill Em All' came out, I wanted that band to last forever," recalls ex-Metallica supporter Dave Lathrop, "That song 'Whiplash' was like a covenant between the band and the fans -- 'we'll never stop, we'll never quit, 'cause we're Metallica' -- that they'd always be there. Who knew that they'd actually make good on it?"

Metallica, who have repeatedly maligned their valued legacy in metal music with songs such as "Ain't My Bitch" and a squishy sonic turd on the "Mission Impossible 2" soundtrack, continues unabated and are currently in the middle of a new tour in support of their obnoxious new album, "Death Magnetic." With no reported plans for the band to retire, original fans of the band's pre-1990 releases are despairing of ever seeing an end to it all.

"I know what they said," states former fan Jim Dooley, who has hated Metallica for the past 18 years, "Yeah, 'Cause we're Metallica', I got it. So when are they going to fucking stop already? Christ."

by Consvming Impvlse

MASTER tour dates 2009

Tuesday 20 January 2009 at 06:54 am

What is a hipster

Wednesday 14 January 2009 at 07:02 am

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of "counter-culture" have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the "Hipster."

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization -- a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" -- a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Ad Busters -- Hipsters: The Dead End of Western Civilization

Ad busters doesn't mention this, but there's a simple pattern:

Normal, healthy people pick music they want to listen to.

Hipsters pick music to make themselves look good.

A hipster is defined by this reversed cause/effect, and this is why they parallel our society: like people looking for political handouts, they are justifying themselves to others instead of acting as they know is right.

In metal, the hipster is the person always trying to be different, to pick music that is brainy or "authentic" (simple), the person spreading trends and fads. Instead of being an authentic fan who picks the music he or she thinks is best, the hipster is using the music as adornment to conceal their ordinariness.

What's the damage, you ask? Hipsters bloat genres with people who don't understand them and, in the ensuing confusion, pick the lowest common denominator. So heavy metal returns to rock, death metal returns to heavy metal, folk becomes punk, and so on.

Healthy societies work from cause to effect. We need an empire, so we build it (cause) and then it appears (effect). Dying societies work from effect to cause. We want an empire, so we create the appearance of an empire (effect) and hope it will show up (cause). This is why old black metallers fear trends, hipsters, fads and mass media like the plague: they promote this unhealthy psychology.

In the postmortem over humanity's failure, our new reptilian overlords will discuss this issue, and conclude that humans had two modes of thought: a healthy forward-thinking one, and a negative and sick backward-thinking one. The hipster, like every other form of decay in our society, is backward thinking.

Metal is currently awash in hipsters because hipsters use something called irony to disguise their low self-esteem. If they're listening to IRON MAIDEN, it's because they find it amusing -- not because they believe in it. In fact, they believe in nothing except what others believe in within their social group, which makes them always right. If someone makes fun of them for liking IRON MAIDEN, they can always claim their enjoyment is ironic. It's a race to the bottom with the hipster, because believing in anything but illusion and evasion makes you a target, so they believe in nothing except "ironically," and that's how they infiltrated metal.

In the same way hipsters find trailer parks quaint and amusing, they found death metal and black metal intriguing. It was untamed, unsocialized material, and a threat to everything the hipster stood for. So they assimilated it, and moved in by taking positions in the community. Start buying metal, or selling metal, and others depend on you. From that they branched out by using the hipster tactic of focusing on the external. "Well, this could be more unique if we added a flute..."

When you focus on the external, and don't pay attention to the fundamental quality of music that distinguishes it, which is how well it communicates, you end up norming the music. Structurally, it becomes all the same, but externally, it's all tricked out in motley so it appears "different" and "new." But the real name of the game is not being different, but being the same so you are universally accepted, while having enough adornments that you stand out in a crowd... just like the hipster.

We've seen this steadily increasing in metal since 1994 or so, and it was helped by some in metal who would rather leave a bad legacy with a full wallet than the inverse, such as Death and Cannibal Corpse. It will reverse, but only as soon as metal bands and fans start communing on the idea of forward-logic instead of backward, negative logic.

The Failure of Revival - Pt. I

Saturday 10 January 2009 at 10:30 am DEATHEVOKATION - The Chalice of Ages

"Old-school death metal." What do the claims of revival amount to in this case? A confused conglomeration of tried-and-true technique; everything but the kitchen sink that 1988 through 1993 made use of, plus the whole aesthetic, with none of the unifying spirit. Too many backward glances with no actual thought to show for it. Musically, this is the simple plod of Leprosy-era DEATH at its core, melodically and rhythmically -- or is it the massive wall of early GRAVE? The doom-tinged meanderings of ASPHYX? Whatever the flavor, this fails to show even a hint of having learned something from the past, and is fundamentally BORING besides.

I forget -- what is it they keep saying about not learning from the past?

The spirit of metal must evolve

Wednesday 07 January 2009 at 11:31 am Note these micro-symphonies:

Metallica - Orion
Burzum - My Journey to the Stars
Metallica - Call of Kthulhu
Asphyx - Depths of Eternity
Dismember - Override of the Overtures
Atheist - An Incarnation's Dream
Therion - The Way
Hellhammer - Triumph of Death
Rigor Mortis - Six Feet Under

People think they want what they don't, because they are trying to find the appearance of what they want and not the underlying structure.

When people say they want simplicity, what they really want is organization. It's why "My Journey to the Stars" works even though it's "complex" in theory -- complex means having a central idea that is simple and clear, and then manifesting it in different forms so people can compare them like metaphors and see the abstraction. (The dumbass variant of this is the Dark Funeral play riff at fret n, then play it at fret n+1).

The role of art is to be a silent philosopher, meaning that it does not make explicit but gives us a clear spiritual commandment and its corresponding aesthetic from which to work.

There's too much of a causal malfunction: man A does something, and man B sees the results, and tries to work backward toward the cause. The genre doesn't understand its own spirit and aesthetics (the cover of the new Kreator is a brilliantly stupid manifestation of this).

But there's still room for someone to translate the spirit, aesthetics and organization of classical music -- narrative motives -- into death/black metal. That's the real ground to conquer. Whoever does that will be initially unpopular, like death metal and later black metal were, but later acknowledged as a hero. People can't put into words what they want. When shown what they want, they will initially resist it because it doesn't "look like" or "sound like" what they want -- people in 1990 "wanted" simpler, catchier, groovier speed metal, and that movement went nowhere.

Similarly, now they claim to want the fusion of black metal/shoegaze/Blink 182/speed metal that is popular, but no one really seems to love it. There is still great room in this genre for those who can conquer.

Why cultural revolutions are superior

Tuesday 06 January 2009 at 08:46 am If you've got eyes, and a functioning brain, and the kind of warlike disposition that likes to put things into functioning order, you know: this society has become calcified, and stopped striving for abstract goals, preferring instead to divide up the material wealth among its people in ever-tighter circles of bicker.

One example is the arts. Genres stop producing more than a handful of really great objects, and produce instead many thousands of "OK - it'll do" ones. This happens because as soon as something starts succeeding, all the people who want part of it but could not produce its greatness rush in to divide up the material wealth among themselves. This pattern happens over and over again.

To be a good metal band, you need to make lots of MySpace friends, cultivate buddies in labels and magazines, and make music that sounds roughly like everything else. That will get you success, temporarily, but not greatness. Your work will fade away because there is nothing abstract -- a pattern that can be applied in any time -- about it.

It's the same with writing. Get your MFA, make buddies in the literary magazines, and crap out another story about a lost person with a dark hidden secret who discovers some external way of facing this past, and is forced to become aware and finds uplifting happiness. Easy? Yes, it's a formula. Profound? No.

There are parallels to this in film, where you must do the indie circuit with some dark, edgy and depressing movie that everyone agrees is profound but no one wants to watch again. Academia? Find some trivial idea and make it seem like the key to the universe. Now you're a success.

When an individual of sound body, mind and disposition sees this, the temptation is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, declare anarchy and burn all previous work. Anyone who thinks more than a step ahead of themselves knows why anarchy fails: by destroying the idea of order, along with the dead order, it reduces society to a lowest common denominator, and almost always restores the type of abuse it complained about. This is why revolutions fail. It's why France went from feudal aristocracy to crass commercial oligarchy in one generation. It's why the people in Cuba, despite a revolution, are still earning $17 a month. It's why the United States went from complaining about freedom from Great Britain to having its own Alien and Sedition acts to suppress dissenters within a handful of decades. Entropy occurs and the solution is not more radical entropy.

There is an exception afforded by civilization: a cultural revolution.

These can take the form of art, philosophy or even customs. Their aim is to change the abstract goal of a society, not its methods. They work because when the underlying assumptions are changed, the way people aim their current methods changes. Over time, the methods evolve toward a greater state of organization and effectiveness as a result.

Black metal and death metal are an artistic revolution that was first obscure, and now is big. One reason we struggle here to find the best is so that we preserve its legacy accurately and deliver a realistic portrait of what its artists believed. The practical reason for this is so that a cultural revolution can occur, subverting old and dead paradigms and replacing them with more realistic -- more adapted, for you Charles Darwin fans -- ones.

If you think our reviews are harsh, think about why. You have one life. You have limited time. If not now, in the future. You only have time for the best. You don't need filler; you need music and art that drives your spirit to greater heights. You don't need "uplifting" or "realism," which are basically two sides of the same coin (feeling strong emotion through delusional easy answers or negativity encouraging you to do nothing). You need a battle cry.

It's the mission of this site to preserve, nurture and encourage the best of that battle cry so your time is rewarded and you can participate in the greatest change of civilization in your time. We see no reason to bloviate over the failings of the past, or over the mixed fortunes of metal now. We see a point in holding high the best of past and present and looking toward the future.

Join us.

Heavy metal misrepresented in media

Friday 02 January 2009 at 9:48 pm

The problem with heavy metal, Malcolm says, is that the mainstream media misrepresented it for years.

"Every time the mainstream media used to cover it in the 70s and 80s, it was done from the point of view that 'this is weird, we don't understand it, we're going to go away not understanding it but we're going to present it to you anyway,'" he says.

Heavy metal was painted as the dark preserve of working class men who wore denim and leather and were, for the most part, sexist. That's even before you take into account accusations of devil worship and Satanism leveled at the genre by Christian activists in the 80s.

CNN

Our modern society is spotless and clean, technology and fair, even and balanced. We don't need this insurgent rush of naturalistic emotions and this affirmation of power. We want no power! We want no imbalance! We want everything to exactly the same, so we can control it and keep it away from us. Heavy metal... that's dirty, it must be for losers.