#metalgate came about as a reaction to the growing intrusion of social justice dogma into heavy metal through journalists, bloggers and indie-metal bands. All of them share the same basic ideology, which is a demasculinization of society and forced conformity to political correctness. This is not merely 1990s style political correctness but a rigid ideology which goes in search of victims to defend, which gives power to those who follow this ideology.
At this point, the situation has passed into comedy. Noted mincingly PC blog Boing Boing posted a picture of a kitty that makes a gentle iteration on a well-known joke, which is that if we are choosing our identities and denying the obvious physical reality, why not choose anything? Satire includes the helisexual, the A-10 Thunderbolt and was even satirized in left-of-Pravda The New York Times.
Let’s face it: people think it is ridiculous, and therefore both funny and provocative in that “neighbor playing ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ on repeat at 4am” way, that people “identify” as something which they are physically just… well, there’s no gentle way to say this… not.
This however provokes ire from the SJWs, who see the idea that you cannot arbitrarily choose your sex as being an attack on the idea of transsexualism. While it may be indirectly so, it seems more that what is being attacked is the idea of arbitrary identity of all forms, and the attackers are laying into the method of transsexuals asserting themselves, while not making a comment on transsexualism itself (neither attacking nor approving).
The blog in question backed down, cowered and apologized in response to this blatant Mau-Mauing. What else could they do? They have done it to others for almost a decade, so turnabout is fair play. Their statement:
We’re sorry for this offensive tweet. Its transphobia was unintentional, but the hurt it caused is our responsibility
Perhaps represents a high-water mark for SJW intrusion into Western culture. When you cannot use a kitty to make fun of a stupid method that some people are using to force you to validate their life choices, without necessarily commenting on those life choices, the days of the legalized witch-hunt are here.
Tags: comicgate, gamergate, kittygate, metalgate, political correctness, sjws
This is really getting ridiculous…
I identify as an anus.
Awesome kittens.
We wants moar SJW articles please !!
It’s way better than the classic “Kontinual Adventures” on the old Anus blog!!
Brett: Did you ever read “Kontinual Adventures” on the old Anus blog???
Only Schrödinger’s cat is true.
It’s true and false at the same time.
Metal used to be about creativity, power, cryto-artistry and the bringing dream-like qualities into reality. Now it”s a bunch of autists endlessly arguing over why ‘x’ album is objectively better than ‘y’, when really both are pretty damn good and stylisticly they’re aren’t a
sorry foolz, my damn trigger finger again lolz
that last part’s meant to read “…and stylisticly they aren’t even a goddamn straight mothafuckin comparision”
I just cut my old Sodom Obsessed by Cruelty patch into pieces in a fit of rage after seeing some rapper wearing an appropriation of the artwork on some fashion shirt in a photo shoot today. Almost certainly printed by some hipster being cute.
I don’t fucking care if people think it’s silly, but Obsessed by Cruelty abstractly means a lot to me, and seeing the cover art that symbolizes a record that at times served as an escape from the very culture that ALL RAP and POP music represents – mindlessly transformed into another meaningless graphic WITHIN said culture- made me snap. I despise the all consuming bloated plastic incubator of cancer that is pop culture, anything I enjoy get’s invaded by their ideology or eventually twisted to fit into it’s framework (I don’t even LIKE video games but have empathy for the comic and games fans that have already been robbed/invaded). It’s as if nearly every form of music is compromised and any venue of expression is diseased by their probing grubby fingers. Having an image that was filed in a section of my brain labeled “things I like” just blotted out in one instant; is like having some drooling lobotomized obese mutant stab a orange hot soldering iron into my neuro-tissue. It truly seems as if the human world and all of it’s contents are being forcibly homogenized into one meaningless grotesque numb ball of shit. Even crude old record covers aren’t safe.
You are allowing others to control what you love. That’s unfortunate.
This.
OP, your passion is a good thing but you’re doing yourself a disservice by being so influenced by other’s perspective and how they might relate to you through advertising the same album.
The way to disallow others from controlling what you love is to fight back when they try to invade it.
Your initial reaction was a good one: rage. Symbolic acts are normally the ones with most impact. In this case though the only person who who experienced the symbol was you. Even that doesn’t make it impotent it just means it only effected you alone. You realised this yourself, once the anger had subsided, which is why you posted what you did – so at least some people know about it.
Don’t worry though because you’re certainly not allowing others to control what you love. You just did something rash, like everybdody does at times. Never stop getting angry when the souless-ones try to stake their claim on you and yours. That’s what the rest of society now does.
Maybe next time just think on, if the Erinyes allow. Contact the rapper and abuse him. At the very least.
You have quite severely misread me.
I think he meant to respond to Burning Hell.
Yes, it was responding to Burning Hell. The newest reply always automatically appears at the bottom of all the other replies, yes? Is there a way to stop that happening and place your comment directly under the one you are responding to?
Yes but if you replied to the OP, your comment would be inset just inside OP’s post rather than inside Brett’s post. You have to choose specifically the post you want to reply to or your response will be nested incorrectly.
You should have cut it up because that album is boring as fuck. I’d much rather listen to Deathrow or even other Sodom albums like Agent Orange or In the Sign of Evil.
Yeah but the cover art is cool as all get-out.
I’m fully aware of how utterly retarded the description of my reaction and action regarding the Obsessed cover is- the very idea of an adult human being in modern society feeling anything intense about a bloody skull picture from a record full of broken English is comical. Destroying something like an old patch attached to memory- to me is a forward thinking motion; a sort of sacrifice and death of nostalgia.
Ephemera related to heavy metal serve as ritual pageantry for my mind when I put it into the “zone” of becoming feral to give voice and urgency to the material I create so I have to view “Heavy Metal” as this series of processes and actions moving inward and then outward against “the world” (in a Vietnam war sense)- a kind of ecosystem that is both personal and dependent upon it’s interaction with “the world”. So the process of creating is the action of defense.
I’ve been working on my own material with music and visual art in isolation for years and allowing it to evolve outside of the public eye; the frustration I’ve had with communicating the subject matter of said material which deals with the actual unseen nature of reality itself has forced me into areas of thinking that are purposeful but appear highly irrational as far as the creative process is concerned.
The current distortion of language and symbols makes articulating ideas and having them understood severely difficult, and sense I’m immersed in information that at some points seems to defy being described through spoken or written language (at least in English); I have to entangle visual, aural, and linguistic forms into a structured “readable” mass which may even require me writing a skeletal guide to follow it for the listener.
To be clear, this is NOT the same as the more abstract creation of an aesthetic/vibe typically employed by a band; I’m actually attempting to communicate through the recordings very specific information that is of severe importance to those who can comprehend it- and another layer of abstraction/unknown remains beyond that. So some of it is arranged in a statement + question format. I am fully aware of how pretentious and asinine the above probably sounds to most people, but the subject matter is so involved and bizarre that this is the only sufficient manner I can find to actually communicate some of it, and I’m avoiding over complicating it where it need not be.
This process has modified my thinking so that I’ve gone from being mildly annoyed by things like shoegaze bands calling themselves “black metal” or ironic appropriation of symbols and graphics, to going into a frenzy of rage – because everything is rendered so ambiguous. It’s symptomatic of a generalized retardation of our already flawed human system of communication – so that at this point I can’t even tell if some cretin wearing a t shirt for an old record even listens to the music. Who could have imagined white rappers wearing Burzum shirts etc?
If it’s all “just music” -how can I possibly feel that the subjects I’m confronting are being communicated in an appropriate fashion? Despite my confidence in what I’ve created which is highly inaccessible at this point, I doubt I’ll release anything. I don’t want my sincerity to be engulfed in other people’s lies.
Whatever you are creating, should you choose to expose it, would be first on my list of current things to experience.
Sounds intense. I’d be interested to hear what you’ve worked on. Drop a link here if you want; I’ll check back.
Wait, wait , wait here…
Look dude, as much as people go on and on about the herd on here, you don’t really understand how they work, so you give them too much credit as being some sort of menace. You got mad because some rapper had the Sodom album cover on his shirt? Dude, he and anyone else who would buy and wear that shirt will probably only wear it for a short period of time and then they won’t wear it again. In general hipsters are the same way, they are into things for a short period of time, and then they ditch it for something else, as a matter of fact, hip hop culture stated the current hipster/scene culture? How? Look how black dudes wear sports gear all the time without being fans of the team or even playing sports, they wear it because the logo looks cool, just like some white kid will wear a Motorhead or Bathory shirt because the logo looks cool. I remember years ago when EVERYONE would wear that Led Zeppelin tour shirt, EVERYONE wore that damn thing and now I don’t ever see anyone wear it…I’ve seen it so much, I don’t even pay attention to it anymore because the herd will take anything and everything just for a short period of time like that, that’s what they do…Focus on what you have going on and forget the herd, they are being sheared of their wool and cut up for cooking by those like me… ;)
In this case, the sports shirt comparison is mostly correct; there are a number of shirts out now that just flat out steal graphics from underground bands with logos removed and replaced with hip hop slogans. The “ironic” appropriation though seems to be a combination of critical theory/post modern crap and punk derived sarcasm. Primary reason I posted it at all, was that I was taken aback by my own reaction after attempting to ignore them for so long. Some of this shit is also derived from skateboard “mash up” junk and this glut of talentless “graphic design” students.
Ignoring them will just make it all more ubiquitous. The reaction to the H&M thing was a start, but combating the parody/mash up culture will require some other reaction. Search “Burzum Gunplay” and read the description going along with the shirt that combines Burzum art with the name of some especially obnoxious rapper and they make it CLEAR that a lot of this is an ATTACK; a snarky passive aggressive attack, but still an attack.
THIS IS A CULTURE WAR.
Here’s the description they give: “These Gunplay X Burzum shirts arrived at The Space Cave when momsthedestroyer was here visiting. You ever try and explain the history of early Norwegian Black Metal and current Miami Trap Rap to a 50+ year old black woman in five minutes? It’s really fucking difficult. Most likely you’ll never be put in this position, but have a concise explanation of the shit planned when you wear this shit. Maybe just go with the lowkey “I just fuck with Gunplay man, I don’t know shit about no Burzum“ when the old lumberjack looking cat with shitty tattoos runs up on you asking you to explain your shirt. When lil homie that thinks Rick Ross is the second coming of Black Jesus asks where you got the Gunplay shirt, put him on to some black metal. Maybe homeboy raps and he’ll do a freestyle over Daudi Baldrs about coke and white bitches. Black metal trolls on the internet will instantaneously explode at their computers. It’ll be grimm as fuck.”
Look man, here’s the rub. Black people have been doing stuff like this FOREVER, okay? In the 90’s they used to wear shirts with Looney Tunes characters dressed up as gangsters and thugs. Then they would wear shirts with the same Looney Tunes characters wearing MLB team clothing backwards dressed like thugs and gangsters. Black guys used to wear Nascar jackets with Dale Ernheart and Harley Davidson shirts too. Nowadays, I see Black kids dressing like punks and metalheads and they don’t even listen to or know anything about that stuff or even like it. Why would they wear these things? Because they are things that White people like/part of White culture and they think that if they wore these things, they would be better than all the other Black people and then White people would accept them, or they want to antagonize White people by “ruining” White culture. Either way, Black people do these things to get the attention of White people. Why do you think in rap music they steal White music to use in their beats? It’s the same thing. The hipsters started doing it as well because in the early 90’s White kids were told that to be cool, you had to copy Blacks, and so they started doing it but with different things. That’s why I told you that you just need to ignore it and focus on your music because that’s what hipsters/posers/Black people do, they’ve ALWAYS done it and it has nothing to do with you, or Metal or even White people. Black people are this way from listening to Martin Luther King…
So yeah, I see these “Gunplay” guys are a bunch of White guys so I do feel like a bit of a moron, but my point still stands. All this stuff that White people are doing now with them stealing band logos and whathaveyou they got from Blacks, Blacks were doing that a long time ago…These Whites do it because they feel like they can’t fit in with White culture so they see how Blacks are always antagonizing White culture, so they are doing it now. That’s the real reason why White people are liberal, they don’t like their position in White culture, so they try to use minorities to attack it.
Astute analysis. If I were a black kid, my tshirts would have Thelonious Monky, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Marcus Garvey, Chinua Achebe, Thomas Sowell, Ralph Ellison and Idi Amin on them.
Has this changed? It’s more general than that however: to be cool, you do what is different, and that includes the exotic both domestic and foreign. This is why hipsters and the left are one and the same, since both groups are anti-majoritarian. They love gays, transsexuals, minorities, Muslims, etc. not because of who those people are, but because they are not the majority in hipsters’ home countries.
Bret, you said that if you were Black, you would wear shirts with those people on them, there was a fashion trend years ago with black kids wearing shirts with Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and Marcus Garvey on them, but it was a fashion trend and it died out, then Black dudes were walking around listening to rap music while wearing Motorhead and Led Zeppelin shirts…I went to a mall once and saw a shirt with a picture of Lemmy on it in the window a hip hop clothing store, it was surreal and it made my stomach turn, and this was almost like 8 years ago…I go on the internet and I see these Black girls that are desparate for White guys pretending to be into Metal so they can go to concerts and poach on White guys, because they think Metal White guys are unwanted by women or something…If you ask me, the majority of Blacks should’nt really listen to Metal, just like White people shouldn’t listen to Rap…Metal addresses the White world and Rap addresses the Black one…
But back on topic…Blacks do this because they listened to MLK. MLK pretty much told them that because they are Black, they will never amount to anything if they don’t try to be White. All the crazy things they do are to try to get on in the USA, which is a White country. People like to say that there are race problems here, no it’s really a Black/White liberal problem, the fact that Blacks don’t make their own stuff and try to force their way into everyone else’s stuff and blame others for not having a foundation that they alone should of created for themselves, and the White liberals who profit of the misery of Blacks and everyone else…
As far as White liberals, it’s what you said and also the fact that if you take out those minorities, they would be near or at the bottom of the USA society. So they want minorities around to prop themselves up but they and alot of minorities don’t realize is that they don’t matter all too much in White society. That’s why liberals and SJWs and whatnot only attack White people and their stuff, they don’t care about what minorities do…Plus, they look at White music like classical and they can’t get into that, so instead they start rapping because it’s easier…
These processes of assimilation are 100s of years old, the current particular manifestations are all a part of the same organism. Hipster/SJWs are facilitators within the process pulling outliers into one mass with the participants interacting on the level of a bacterial colony in a state of conflict/consumption and expansion.
In other words the people in the Majority are simply a few steps behind the terminally diseased people who are more “Progressive”. I think we overstate the importance of what we can observe in sociological/theological/political terms when the reality is much more dire and in line with biological death of an organism and involves elements not immediately observable in reductionist terms.
“I’m actually attempting to communicate through the recordings very specific information that is of severe importance to those who can comprehend it- and another layer of abstraction/unknown remains beyond that.”
Doesn’t sound asinine to me, mate. Sounds like your attempting to create Art.
Whether it’s pretentious or not depends on whether those are your real goals (and you have the comprehension yourself) or if really you just want to impress people. I’d tend to think, from what you’ve written, it’s the former. You sound like you’re trying to make sense of the being immersed in “information that at some points seems to defy being described through spoken or written language” that is our lot as humans. When I was younger I thought if I understood the language of Nature, mathematics, then I would have the answers. Don’t worry if you don’t find absolute answers.
What Philosophy have you read? If you’ve not read much I’d be more than happy to email you a good introductory reading list and some PDF’s to get you going. Personally, I’d advise a chronological approach – many people try to start reading Nietzsche before they even have an understanding of the metaphysics he was rejecting. You might at least find some consolation from knowing that the greatest minds in history have also asked the same questions that you do, and failed to find answers, too.