Romanticism — erupting in literature, art, politics, and architecture — may have been the original notion that humanity went too far into modernity, which we might describe as the society that has become successful enough to restyle the world in its own image.
37 CommentsTags: alt.fan.goat, objectivism, postmodernism, Romanticism
Some civilizations have public viewings of the dead; some bury them as soon as possible under cover of night. Some have wakes, others solemn commemorations. Human death rituals take many forms but they all serve to fix a discontinuity, to knit a past that cannot continue with an unknown future.
71 CommentsTags: assimilation, authenticity, commercialism, commercialization, conformity, entropy, Heavy Metal, non-conformity, selling out
Were you hoping for happy Christmas greetings? Of course not!
11 CommentsTags: abrahamism, agnosticism, antichristmas, atheism, christmas, jul, metaphysical dualism, monism, Satan
When you start writing about metal, you rapidly find that metal connects to lots of other stuff. Not just by lyrics and imagery but by sound alone, since listening to metal seems to shape consciousness toward viewing reality differently than what The Herd wants: oblivion, free stuff, nudes, and donuts.
36 CommentsTags: ptsd, sadistic metal reviews, smr
When this site was started, back as an FTP server growing out of USENET and before that a collection of BBS g-philes, the paucity of information about underground metal was an issue. Now we have too much underground metal and too much information about it, almost all of it bad.
42 CommentsTags: aesthetics, ethics, genre, robert fripp, sadistic metal reviews, smr
We know there is broad cynicism toward religion here; after all the Abrahamic (Islam, Christianity, Judaism) religions seem awfully simple and emotional. However, there is a whole world of spiritual belief out there which is not metaphysical dualism, neoplatonism, or universalism.
77 CommentsTags: christianity, golden dawn, h.p. lovecraft, j.r.r. tolkien, magic, Occultism, Paganism
Writing about a dead genre can be exhausting. You search through ten thousand bands looking for the few that grasp what the genre was always about — its newer incarnations are meaningless — and despite enjoying this, find that the good is drowned out by the mediocre.
103 CommentsTags: art, Black Metal, Heavy Metal, Satan, underground metal
Back in the 1980s, praising Satan or even talking about Him in any context other than condemnation put you in the middle of the culture wars. Unable to talk about demographics, conservatives backed themselves into the corner of fundamentalist religion and saw Satan everywhere.
96 CommentsTags: bad, bob larson, evil, good, humanism, luciferianism, Satan, Satanism, slayer, spin
Alternative rock got a bad name in the US because it was basically not an alternative, and just mixed a little metal and punk into Morrissey and Bruce Springsteen, making the whiniest genre ever created. These days we laugh about “alternative facts,” but maybe alt-rock had something to do with this.
136 CommentsTags: alternative music, alternative rock, progg, progressive music, progressive rock, Sweden
It should strike you as funny that humanity, Western Civilization, and metal face the same problem in parallel: steady decline from having lost of sense of goal because they lost a sense of the why behind the goal after the sense of the transcendent also eroded.
23 CommentsTags: death metal, smr
