Thanks for the compliments. Short answer to "why not just forget about all this shit and just live your life while getting wasted and having fun": because putting my head in the sand and masturbating has never gotten me anywhere. We're all in this together. When one of our great Christian leaders starts the next crusade in the middle east, you might find my words useful.

The best part is that we're not scary. We're just not buying the mainstream bullshit, the Christian and secular Judeo-Christian fatalistic ideology, and the international corporate product values system. Other than that, we're just like you! Think about that one.

Letters full of abuse are the last refuge of conformist hipsters trying to appear "different" with their melodramatic bands, railing against anything which they perceive might make change in the social situation that they exploit. In other words, you have a small dick, a small mind, and you're trying to pretend neither is true with "grand feelings" as a certain philosopher would say.

It is interesting however that our most persistent critics are those who run "competing" metal review sites. You tried to rip off the concept I've championed for years of "ambient metal" on your site, and you keep trying to cop my style, but you're still just a poser. And while you waste time writing flames, we're moving ahead and laughing at you.

"Home" is where they love you without requiring you bow down to some imaginary leader in the sky. I think you're wrong... because I worship an equally arbitrary deity, the Universal Space Unicorn. The USU tells me that he's the only god, and that he's the most powerful. Not only that, but the USU tells me I'll go to a place called "Endless Prostate Exam" if I don't start believing in him right away. Not only that, but in the USU's holy book, he says he kicked your god in the nads a few millennia ago. Those who follow the USU are the only righteous ones, and the only people who should make decisions which people of all other faiths should follow. After all, the Universal Space Unicorn told us so.

Thank you. We love having visitors like you.

It's sickening how entrapping "good intentions" have been. Everyone wants to be nice, ready for new ideas, able to judge someone on whether or not they're a scumbag? These ideas have been perverted into morality, "open-mindedness," and egalitarianism, all of which just make it easy for the degenerate elements of humanity to gain power. Fight back: pursue education, social power and status, and honest behavior to the furthest extremes possible and your example will be noted by others. As intelligent people awaken, the uniformity of the social order is thwarted, and their weapon -- doubt -- becomes our weapon of crushing the artificial and senseless social order produced. Never give up hope for change, because change is in your hands.

From: "Brendon Small" <brendon@brendonsmall.com> Subject: hey pal dear person who didn't sign his or her name, great review. a couple things: feel free to hate anything we do. remind yourself occasionally: it's only a cartoon. also you're not the only one who's allowed to like things. other people can like stuff too. there are many things that fall into many categories that may be sub- sected and chopped up and over analyzed by any online know it all 'career hessian' (love the 'career' part by the way- anyone that has to say it. . . ) and we don't care what you say spinal tap was a great movie and it will never grow tired. and what's wrong with wanking on guitar? it took me a long time to learn how to do that. sheesh, is nothing safe from you career hessians? oh you call it slander we call it love- I'm sure we could do this all day. . . i don't need to tell you where our support comes from in the metal community- i'll let you do that research on your own (should you still be frothing and all) and you can hate all of them as much as you hate us. fine with me. hipster? thank you grandpa. haven't been called that yet. you simply writing that article is spreading the word about our low budget crappy show with no advertising. we thank you for that. i'm sure you're a nice guy, now if you'll pardon me I have a ridiculous 'cartoon' to make and underground metal to fear (to a degree). cartooningly, brendon

Brendon is one of the creators of Metalocalypse, a TV cartoon for morons. He wants us to know that "you're not the only one who's allowed to like things -- other people can like stuff too" and doesn't realize that to someone who understands philosophy or just common sense, this is an idiot argument - an evasion. What if I like killing you? How do we both have it "our way"? What if I like dumping toxic waste, molesting kids, etc. etc. -- at some point, there's a line between truth and falsehood and it's not the bullshit relativism that Mr. Small endorses. Our comments are accurate -- he'll forever be an outsider to underground metal because he cannot accept its worldview, and therefore as an outsider looking in, has only negative comments to make about us to make himself feel better. His "support" in the "metal community" comes from arch-sold-out burn-outs Metallica. Thanks for writing, Brendon. In the time it took to read this, you've come to your next dose of AZT. Never forget your AZT!

From: "Devamitra" Subject: Reagan & metal Was Ronald Reagan an influence on 80's heavy/speed metal? I recently watched some 80's movies and remembered something you wrote in the "history of metal" essay, but whereas you focused on the way the heavy metal youth was disillusioned and disbelieving of the government more and more, I got this thought: wasn't the macho / fight against enemies attitude also inspiration?

Thank you for writing in with this perceptive question.

Ronald Reagan was more than a president; he was the symbol of a time, and the attitude of that time shaped speed metal both in strength and self-destruction.

After world war ii, conservative politics began a slow downward spiral as the liberalization of social policy led to liberalization of other parts of society. Liberalization became, in the words of at least one journalist, an endemic trend, because it claimed its pertinence through the vehicle of its currency in a "new era." This trend continued to its apex in the 1960s, when the generation of people who grew up hating the 1950s because it conflicted with the increasingly liberal sentiments taught in schools and on TV, in a fit of pique, created a passive liberal revolution that lasted from the late 1960s through the late 1970s.

The force that changed this was Ronald Reagan, who despite being an american-style conservative (a type of liberal) brought back a hard-hitting conservative rule which aimed to reverse most of the changes of the 1960s. To the children of those hippies, raised on the vestiges of the 1960s as hybridized with the solid economic reasoning and self-centeredness of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the "Reagan revolution" was a terrifying return to compulsory military service, potential nuclear conflict with the Soviets, state-sponsored spying, and an almost Nazi sense of duty and personal sacrifice. That was highly inconvenient. As many people as hate George W. Bush now were afraid of Reagan and saw him as the doorway to Ragnarok.

The single biggest issue that shaped speed metal was the very real threat of an apocalypse, which sprung in the 1980s because of the advances in nuclear missiles and targetting of the 1970s and first days of the 1980s. Before that, nuclear death would have come from a bomber; now, it would scream across the sky and arrive before its sound in a mushroom cloud of thermonuclear heat. While nuclear bombs were always scary, push-button annihilation of other nations became viable in the 1980s, like other conveniences (push-button divorce, fast food, drugs, marketing, telephony and so on). Because speed metal needed to attack a range of issues, it grouped them and nuclear war together, and blamed Reagan for his bellicosity.

One interesting feature of metal in the 1990s was that it entirely refuted this liberal ideology, including the liberal aspects of Reagan. To those who lived through what came after Reagan (and his successor, George Bush senior) through the presidency of Bill Clinton, liberalism had become exactly what ten years earlier it was feared Reagan would: a McCarthyist, totalitarian attitude where views other than the dominant were feared. The problem was that in the 1990s, the dominant views were liberalism, and we had hoped that liberalism would save us from conservatism, which we feared would be the path to a McCarthyist totalitarian state. In the 1990s, we learned that there are many paths to a totalitarian state, and even several kinds of totalitarian state, and so as a means of avoiding that, metal turned toward the organic state (where culture, heritage, religion, philosophy, language and values are shared but not imposed by a bureaucratic, moral or viewpoint otherwise external to life itself). All of this was unknown in the simpler 1980s, when people simply wanted to avoid nuclear war and the police state they saw forming in response to the threats of nuclear war, drugs, hackers, satanists, etc. Speed metal's self-destruction occurred in part because it tied itself to an obsolete point of view that became the oppression it feared from another corner. It debunked itself, and music since then that continues beating the same tired tin drum has exhausted its fan base to the point where they go through the motions but don't give a damn. See Rage Against the Machine's use of Che Guevara as McDonald's style marketing. Left = right = the crowd and human decay, unless it implies a sense of structure like, say, Romantic poetry or black metal did.

It's important to remember that Reagan was a symbol of this time, and not its cause, even if people during the time mistook him for it much like ill-informed people now think removing George W. Bush from office will affect a marked change in our nation's futures. They blame the president in office for the results of much larger trends, and pretend they're wise for doing so. For popular music, Reagan was a symbol of the time, and people pushed back against what they feared was a Nazi/rightist future (as opposed to Stalinist/leftist) by using Reagan and the police state and nuclear war as symbols for all that was wrong, or "intolerant," with society at the time.

The 1980s were a time of flash taboos on both the right and the left. Al Gore's wife Tipper Gore spearheaded an organization, the PMRC, who wanted to ban heavy metal and rap music because of their satanic, often salacious, lyrics. Did you ever wonder why slayer embraced satan with relish? They were fighting back -- not rebelling, fighting back -- against the climate of fear of the 1980s. Slayer found a more elegant and artistically meaningful use of Satan, as other bands did, as the calls for censorship, mostly from the left, went on. The right was busy dredging up its own fears: drugs taking over our children, central american communists at our borders, domestic terrorists and hackers, and most of all, Soviet supremacy resulting in a nuclear advantage.

As it turned out, Reagan was probably right about the soviets, and he managed to crush them only to have Bill Clinton avoid the politically unpopular but historically feasible act of dominating them once their economy had collapsed. Notice the crowd doesn't blame him for this -- they're too busy being trendy and talking about how much they don't like George W. Bush because he, OMFG, started a war, and we all know wars are bad (and never, never necessary). Reagan, as a reaction to the reaction to World War II, set off the reaction to reaganism that speed metal empowered, which in turn became so oppressive in trying to deny realism that it prompted the fantastic, Romantic, idealistic, fascist-realist (and often Nazi) response of black metal. At that point, metal ran out of external targets that were temporal, because now it was playing with the eternal questions of philosophy. That's the point from which it will grow in the future.

Reagan's influence is still with us. Some bands, like Napalm Death, have never stopped blurting out the dogma of late 1980s liberalism, even as their audience comes to regard them as a curiosity. Others, like Queensryche, remain popular for having put into metaphor the fears we all had of those days. More people now are relaxed on Reagan, as they will be on Bush II, because they see how intense a problem potential nuclear conflict really was. We may yet learn not to conflate the leader with the situation in which he or she must rule, but so far, there's not a sign of that in the larger masses.