Hipster alternative rock band Bolzer was decried for their low-self esteem fueled blow up at Death Metal Underground’s damning review of the preview track from Hero by Old Disgruntled Bastard, the writer of one of the few readable metal blogs, on Funbook:
Even the communist, social justice warrior, metalcore and nu-metal website MetalSucks called Bolzer “hipster metal”, noting the track “I AM III” was “super hipstered out”. MetalSucks defined “hipster metal” as:
When you use the term “hipster metal,” it’s usually to refer to metal with a lot of post-rock and/or experimental music elements incorporated into it. But for me, hipster metal isn’t a sound, it’s a state of mind (MAAAAAN), where the chic aspects of metal’s hipster-appropriate underground movements are combined into a genre that isn’t quite metal proper. It also helps if the band is primarily loved by art kids who transcend metal rather than, you know, metalheads.
MetalSucks noted about Bolzer that:
More so, I don’t know anyone who likes Bölzer who is a diehard metalhead; the only people I know who really dig this band seem to be fashionable almost-metal kids who think the album stands out from metal at large due to the daring choices the band makes (are you a hesher who likes Bölzer and thinks I’m wrong? Comments get posted below).
Despite this, nu-metal and djent fan Emperor Rhombus liked the song, which will not please fans of black metal, only the current whiny hardcore and crypto-indie rock paraded about by whore record labels and shills to overweight, sexually non-binary (sic) millennial leftists. Only Korn lovers and cargo-short fetishists like Emperor Rhombus who spent the ten years from 1998 to 2008 exclusively listening to Limp Bizkit and In Flames will eat up Bolzer’s Hero. Will the social justice warriors and National Public Radio suddenly hate it “musically” when they discover that Bolzer, the currently en vogue “lumbersexuals” now that the “Cascadian” movement seems to have run its course, have sun wheel and swastika tattoos? Will their condemnation be fueled by Bolzer’s skin being adorned with Germanic pagan esoteric symbols or the album actually being a boring cash grab that’s less coherent than the two stretched out black ‘n’ roll EPs? Let’s find out!
Tags: alternative rock, Bolzer, hipster bullshit, MetalSucks, Old Disgruntled Bastard
Haha lumbersexuals damn
that quadruple-swastika is p cool, admittedly
“Let’s find out!” actually got a laugh out of me this time. The British-style humor is working for you, Daniel – repeat something til it becomes funny.
Good on ODB too, his posts are one of the four good things left of facebutt.
I thought it came from Varg’s YouTube videos. Either way, I pretty much always want to find out so it gets a click from me every time.
It does fart boy, that’s the joke
Cool tattoos, but shitty music by log fuckers in smelly flannel from goodwill.
Goddamnit who gives a fuck about the tattoos. The reason he has the tattoos is so people will see them. They mean nothing to him other than money, just like the music he makes. Wake the fuck up. Jesus, act like the eletists you are and reject this refuse for all he represents.
Make metal great again, ban all posers.
The 1980’s attitude of being true and “killing the poser” should return.
We need it.
Did any metalhead make excuses for the pseudo metal of the day? Did metal magazines claim that glam metal was true metal like Iron Maiden and Slayer were?
No.
And today, we need that attitude more than ever, because the public has noticed metal, and are turning it in to just one more facet of the mainstream trash culture that true metal is not a part of.
They already killed hardcore punk by turning it in to emotional hardcore. May they never kill metal.
Hear, hear.
Did metal magazines claim that glam metal was true metal like Iron Maiden and Slayer were?
Iron Maiden has had a major label deal since 1979 and with the exception of one album, all their release since then charted in the UK top ten, 5 of them at #1 (and achieved comparable success in other countries). That’s as ‘mainstream’ as it can possibly get.
So?
If Dismember suddenly became massively popular, would it stop being true metal?
No, at least not the good records.
When I casually name a band, I always refer to its good music.
“Darkthrone” is the first four, not the last four.
The facts are such that Iron Maiden debuted at #4 of the UK top ten and Dismember certainly didn’t. The makes the former a (persistent) top ten band but not the latter. Speculations about what could … if … would are generally useless. A conclusion one could draw from the facts would be that an attempt to save ‘true metal’ from a public which noticed it is futile — this ship sailed thirty years ago.
Popularity does not automatically guarantee quality. Every one here understands this.
But do you understand that it also doesn’t automatically guarantee a lack of quality?
Only the nature of the music itself, not any reaction to it, can be used to judge its value.
Agreed. Iron Maiden, Priest, Black Sabbath, Slayer, etc are widely consumed by the masses.
Although I don’t think Rainer was trying to say that they suck, just being ‘autistic’ as usual. No homo.
I didn’t write anything about this.
However: For the special case of ‘popularity’ that is “producing hit record after hit record”, it’s necessary to employ a musical style which is compatible with what “lots of people” like and that’s what they’ve been taught/ conditioned to expect, IOW, what’s familiar to them. And Iron Maiden certainly does that: They’re basically a hard rock musical troupe, firmly planted in the I-IV-V territory people are familiar with, with slightly edgy but never really disturbing phantasy stories as topics and musical-styled vocals with strong singalong chorusses as center. That’s the kind of stuff people who like to style themselves as ‘progressive’ (or ‘hip’) like to decry as primitive and below them but it sells. They’ve become a bit more experimental in their old age as popular taste has evolved: Speed of Light starts with a variation of the Enter Sandman riff.
Whether or not this quality is true-anything (for some definition of anything and true) is an academic question: It’s undeniably there. And it really doesn’t appeal to everyone. Not only because it causes induced currents in nose piercings and other attire (or attitudes) people like to decorate themselves with as a matter of defining themselves in opposite to something but simply because not everybody ticks like this: I emphasize with the (fictional) narrator of “To Walk The Eternal Fields” and understand him because he’s (somewhat) like me. But the “Charge of the light brigade” story behind ‘the tropper’ just leaves me cold: This part of the universe is not for me and were I trying to enter it, things wouldn’t go well.
Daniel, y’all have really been reading to much into the Bolzer thing.
“their low-self esteem fueled blow up” consisted of:
“Hahahaha, life can sometimes be very sweet indeed. It is good to know our music has succeeded in luring the troglodytes from the safety of their hovels.
Your presence is appreciated, you shall stoke the pyres of advance!”
Hardly a blow up; more like a gentle pushback against your insults.
Meanwhile, the DMU published a massive article around that quote:
https://www.deathmetal.org/meta/bolzer-blow-up/
It was weak of them to even acknowledge DMU’s record review, but y’all appear starved for dramatic conflict by hounding and hounding this band.
LMAO everybody get a load of the butthurt Bolzer fan!
You’re right.
True, it’s not a blowup. It is, however, a fine display of the classic aristocratic elitism of the cultural left. (troglodytes being a dogwhistle for rural poors, boorish commoners, etc)
I think DMU needs villains like Gojira, Opeth and recently Bolzer. Not a knock agaist DMU or any of those shitty bands, just how it seems to be. So there’s a bit of scavenging for scraps of drama and gossip..
All this hipster business is making my head hurt. So originally in Portland, hipsters didn’t call themselves hipsters. Then, after they came to be known as hipsters, they stopped acting like hipsters to avoid the association. After all, the whole point of being a hipster is to be different, and you can’t be different within a collective. Now, hipsters are calling themselves hipsters? Are we even sure these are the same people, and not just an epithet for metrosexual males?
Are you from Portland? I’m curious what the metal scene is, there.
Try as I might, I can’t stop myself from visiting this wretched site and reading its hateful, moronic comments. Chalk my weakness up to be being akin to those who rubberneck at traffic accidents, but from a sociological perspective. I’ve listened to metal almost exclusively since I was 11 in 1988 and now at almost 40 years of age, I can’t fathom how one could wrap so much of their self worth up in what other people do or do not listen to. Hey, we all go through our elitist phase, but good god fellas, find something a little more meaningful in life to direct your passions toward. Like physical self improvement, educational or employment advancement or starting a family.
The only way to change the world (and more importantly yourself) is to bring people into it and teach them to be better than you were. It certainly isn’t by complaining about some beardo fad metal band that no one will care about in a couple years. Also, it’s one thing to be a genre fascist, but a lot of you guys take that bit too far and are actual idealogical fascists, which, however you want to couch things in terms of railing against status quo and political correctness, is just plain creepy and reprehensible.
There’s a lot of promise to this site and some of the writers are quite good. The run on sentences and blisteringly ridiculous pedantry needs to be dialed back a bit, but some of the content here is a welcome respite from the party line nonsense of places like MetalSucks and Decibel. I guess what I’m saying with this is stop trying so hard and focus more on championing what you like instead of lambasting that which you revile.
You MUST be new here, sir. It’s not enough to LIKE something — you’ve got to prove that it’s superior and best!
oh and NARRATIVE.
Otherwise it’s stupid and fit only for Top 40 or NWN/Funbook SJW ‘bestial’ ‘war metal’ bands.
^^This.
There seems to be some sort of cognitive fallacy at play here sometimes.
The more bands an individual/s trashes, then the more discerning they appear to be, and thus their opinion is perceived to have more value.
There’s some good content on this site sometimes, I’d love to hear more recommendations of stuff to check out. Isn’t that why we enjoy listening to music?
I’d love to recommend more good stuff but the promo cue is mostly trash. I actually hate writing SmRs and am terrible at it. Make better metal so I can write better articles.
Matt does make some good points, but that trashing comment doesn’t really hold water as a good deal of past SMRs are credited to ‘Staff’ and then there was that weird positive and/or constructive criticism one from Brett about a month ago. Regardless of who the individual happens to be, elitism does serve a vital purpose in all art as it promotes quality over quantity. I understand what you mean, but in a way those are recommendations in that they represent what is undesirable in current metal and thus what isn’t valued here. Let’s not forget the endless comparisons to superior bands as well. Of course, this all hinges on how much power you attribute to DMU as some sort of gatekeeper.
Recommendations of stuff to check out will/should be predominantly OLDer stuff.
Like: https://www.deathmetal.org/metal/
I don’t mean to be glib in writing that. DMU has a good overall mentality: almost all the best shit has already happened, and there are seriously declining returns to continued metal artistry. Niggas were mining every thread within metal, during the ’80s/’90s, such that it’s increasingly difficult to strike gold. At least, NEW gold.
Then again, if you want to see live metal, then it’s good that guys are still trying, I guess.
One of the only A+ bands is Sammath.
Problem is for them that “championning what you like”, while claiming that metal died in ’94 becomes quiet problematic over 20 years later. Either they go the Fenriz way and uphold rehash stuff just because it stays true to its roots, or just praise the 2 good releases in each year and flame the rest.
Also, for the bit about founding a family and getting a job, this other ’94 gem may apply to the case :
I can’t get a girl
‘Cause I ain’t got a car
I can’t get a car
‘Cause I ain’t got a job
I can’t get a job
‘Cause I ain’t got a car
So I’m looking for a girl with a job and a car
Don’t you know where you are
Lost in Amerika, lost in Amerika, Lost…
Hey…….. man, we like, can’t all get along, do… You dig? Daddy………….o
Here are some things I currently like (this is subject to change and comes with no warranty wrt “intellectual suitability” for anyone’s mental yardstick):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyNNHHRzY7I (skip to 09:00)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv4jsrTWoGQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRESibK4goQ
http://serpentslair.bandcamp.com/track/mortui-vivos-docent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNJ0UIuhaOY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4Fn0OGfvQU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3gVRi72Qr8
https://humanserpent.bandcamp.com/track/starving-void-upon-earth
While this is a spare-time activity of mine, I do maintain that it’s more worthwhile than either »sport« or trying to get on with other people, especially female people, 24×7.
You should also give people some slack: It’s easier and less risky to reject things, especially publically, than to embrace them, more so if someone else already provided (more or less) good reasons for rejecting them (Boelzer sucks, no questioning here).
Who said anything about getting along with women? Raising a family has nothing to do with that. I recommend weightlifting for fitness. It is a solitary pursuit when done correctly and has nothing to do with the idiocy or “sports”. I will definitely check out your recommendations as I’m always on the lookout for more lifting and avoiding my wife jams.
The delicious irony is, DMU seem much more hurt and invested over this. I guess their words cut deep. Hang on, aren’t you against people who have hurt feelings? Massive identity crisis on this site and complete lack of self awareness.
“I like people who weren’t captured.”
Bolzer still sucks, but unless they actually post something that’s outrageously salty, let it go so you stop looking like the MetalSucks fags (which is a sentiment I hate to agree with but it’s true). Keep on promoting quality metal and shitting on the crap but stop it with this fake feud garbage.