Life philosophies differ across the Bell Curve. In the middle, where the big bucks are, people want to avoid unpleasant thoughts about their status in the world; on either end, people know that their role is not what most idealize and, as a result, have accepted their limitations (left) or duties (right).

Most human activity consists of the fiction-absolute as describe by Tom Wolfe, basically a rationalizing of our current position as the best possible option that we could have had. This comforts the mind and makes it feel stable, since human minds shuttle between order and disorder based on the stories we tell ourselves.

We can trace the fiction-absolute through the rise of the middle class:

Here we have Darwin and his doctrine that in 1859 rocks Western man’s very conception of himself…

The bohemians were artists plus the intellectuals and layabouts in their orbit. They did their best to stand bourgeois propriety on its head through rakish dishabille, louder music, more wine, great gouts of it, ostentatious cohabitation, and by flaunting their poverty as a virtue. And why? Because they all came from the bourgeoisie themselves originally and wanted nothing more desperately than to distinguish themselves from it. They seldom mentioned the upper class, Marx’s owners of “the means of production.” They seldom mentioned Marx’s working class, except in sentimental appreciation of the workers’ occasional show of rebelliousness. No, as the late Jean-Francois Revel said of mid-20th century French intellectuals, the bohemians’ sole object was to separate themselves from the mob, the rabble, which today is known as the middle class.

Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a “fiction-absolute.” Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world — so ordained by some almighty force — would make not that individual but his group…the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.

People are ruled by appearances. If they can avoid seeing reminders of what makes them doubt their life choices, they “feel” a sense of mental stability. To that end, they cherry-pick what details of life they will allow themselves (and others) to notice.

They handle these appearances through proxies — tokens, symbols, words, images — that give humans a sense of power over reality by lumping it into non-hierarchical categories that can then be manipulated by these symbols. Human individualism creates a need for symbolism.

This follows the human tendency to use means-over-ends thinking because it does not require agreement on goal, which is a difficult thing for humans to do. If we agree on one dimensional-categories that are handled 100% by some method, then we do not have to look into the harder stuff.

Avoiding the difficult and focusing on the repetitive is easier for human minds, therefore like heroin, overeating, or gambling, creates a sense of mental comfort in those individuals. They seek to avoid bad thoughts about scary things like death, disease, war, insanity, crime, and the “demonic” or tendency of life to serve up bad in proportion to good.

Humanity is ruled by what-ifs. That is, we are constantly fearing potential bad things that are both (a) unlikely to happen and (b) avoidable. It is like we assume a permanent present tense where something happens to us (paranoia) and then there is no chance to stop it before it becomes horrible.

Consumerism, democracy, socialism, Christianity, and peer popularity provide us comfort from what-ifs by asserting symbols/methods in their stead.

The problem with voting is that people will always treat it as a lottery. They vote for their own concerns and miss the big picture (individualism) but also have zero commitment beyond the vote, which they treat as a sportsball game. They cheer if their team wins, and if the other team wins, they change the channel.

We can characterize Leftists as individualists and realists as concerned with order. It may be a question of self-confidence: the realist believes he can get what he needs for himself without a problem, but is more concerned that his group will self-destruct, where the humanist, dualism, and/or Leftist is most concerned with his own desires and mental comfort.

We rebel against the anti-nature/antirealist wing of humanity because we see that they will wreck everything we are building and endanger those we care about. To us, the world gets ugly if the things we value are destroyed for no good reason. To them, life is terrifying and comfort is needed.

Jobs make symbolism and method into a way of life. This stultifies the intelligent but rewards the other four-fifths of the Bell Curve with freedom from lack of mental comfort. Repetition, obligation, transaction, and equality all satisfy the human need for control.

Metal, on the other hand, strikes out for the zone we cannot control: death, chaos, occult spirituality, disease, war, and predation. It gets us out of our comfort zones and forces us to wake up to reality like a Zen master’s slap to a student who has become too abstract and forgotten that reality is real.

Much of what we fight about in society concerns our error correction methods like free speech and the ability to deal with dissent, controversy, and criticism. Free speech does not exist to talk about the stuff people agree on; it exists as a check and balance to the hive-mind groupthink.

Right now, free speech is under threat in the US, UK, and EU from both Leftist parties and Christians who want to ban “antisemitism.” While hatred of Jews and support for Palestine seem insane to me, they always ban insane stuff and then expand the definition later.

Recently crazy people were arguing for a ban on advertising. At first, it seems smart: advertising as we know it right now is terrible, but “advertising” too is a symbol and category. That category can be expanded for example to include the promotion of unpopular ideas.

If you think this is untrue, look at blasphemy laws. Across the board they were created to avoid allowing people to insult certain religions, a variation on “hate crime” laws. Soon this expanded to include criticism of religion generally, and now, we have people in jail for social media posts:

The comments came in the wake of the knife attack on a Southport dance class on July 29 in which three children were killed, and in the midst of false claims the attacker was an illegal immigrant.

Connolly’s post, which she later deleted, read: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all I care…’

She later added: ‘If that makes me racist, so be it.’

While her expression was edgy, the opinion — diversity has failed, remigration must become mandatory — is a legitimate check and balance on the diversity crisis in the UK. Otherwise, group opinion would ignore what has become a crisis.

The same disease infests Germany, where criticism of rape became a hate crime:

A woman in Germany has been found guilty of a hate crime and sent to jail for calling a man who was given a suspended sentence for his part in the brutal and prolonged gang-rape of a 15 year-old a “rapist pig”, reports Freddie Attenborough for The Critic.

Maja R, a 20 year-old from Hamburg, sent the direct message to one of the perpetrators who attacked the teenage girl in a local park in 2020, after his name and number were leaked on Snapchat.

“Aren’t you ashamed when you look in the mirror?”, she asked, before calling him a “disgraceful rapist pig” and a “disgusting freak”. Maja R went on to suggest that he “couldn’t go anywhere without getting kicked in the face”, but then quickly added: “[L]et’s hope you are just locked away.”

It has also come to the USA, where teens are arrested for unkind but legal social media posts:

Folks may not know that Connecticut has a hate speech law, possibly under the completely correct assumption that the First Amendment prohibits the federal government and states from enacting them.

Nevertheless, a 16-year-old white high school student in Fairfield, Connecticut, has been arrested and charged with “ridicule on account of creed, religion, color, denomination, or race” for a Snapchat post where the teen displayed a picture of a black classmate and reportedly captioned it with a racial slur and racist comments.

We may not like their speech — I do not — but if we do not defend it, the list of what will be banned will only expand. For example, consider how libel/defamation law has expanded to include criticism of politicians:

After Robert Frese posted a nasty Facebook comment about a police officer in 2018, police obtained a warrant to arrest him. This was the second time in six years that Frese was charged with “criminal defamation.”

Frese does not live in Russia, China, Iran, or another country notorious for oppressive speech laws. He lives in New Hampshire, which criminalizes the act of purposely making a false statement that exposes someone “to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule.” While Americans typically associate defamation with civil lawsuits, in which the alleged victim sues the speaker for money, many are unaware that, in some states, defamation is a crime that can lead to fines or jail time.

Also in the USA, anti-blasphemy laws were commonplace once:

Laws banning blasphemy, specifically related to Christianity, were prevalent throughout the states around the time of America’s founding, even though most states had their own free speech and religious freedom protections in their state constitutions.

We revoked most of those using a method, deferring to the Constitution, but in defense of a solid goal: if we ban blasphemy, soon the token “blasphemy” will expand to include criticism of religion generally, at which point even religions cannot internally discuss their issues.

In the same way, if we ban pro-drug speech, soon talking about the health effects of marijuana — good, bad, or indifferent — could become illegal. If we ban anti-abortion speech, soon discussing the health effects of abortion will become illegal.

Free speech may be the most important thing one can fight for in any age. It is the first thing suppressed. The human tendency to see the world in one-dimensional categories allows us to try to exclude categories that make us feel discomfort, and so that is a frequent failing of human civilizations.

Metal is a “say FUCK for FREEDOM” (old ANUS slogan) kind of genre, back from when FUCK was an important swear word. Now maybe it is blasphemy against Christ, ethnic slurs, gender IQ differences, locations on alleles of harmful mutations, how to hack AIs, or just criticism of government.

Whatever it is, say it loud and say it proud, upset those who need being upset, and recognize that you are helping humanity overcome its natural tendency to run away from the most important issues in order to focus on trivial ones.

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The Overmold – The Overmold: back when Dada artists first made music from an intersection between comedy and fraud, it was refreshing, but now it simply seems cynical and rootless, in this shovel-ready music which relies on avantgarde tropes to try to make progressive post-metal out of guitar practice with the dig, scrape, scoop, and heave rhythm of shoveling horseshit slowed down to the glacial pace of the thinking of people who pretend to like this stuff.

Disfuneral – In Horror, Reborn: like avatars, every year another Swedeath clone emerges, and all make the same mistake of focusing on technique from the impact end rather than the cause, namely that the Swedish bands wanted to construct spaces for an atmosphere and they did so with certain types of riffs, but cloning those riffs makes ponderous songs of wide intervals used on fills to shore up bouncy chromatic riffs.

Tenebrae – Loss: bog-standard doom metal that leans more to the heavy metal side (pentatonic melodies) than the death metal side (chromatic architectures) and therefore, is both rockin’ along like an AC/DC album but cut from such familiar cloth that it is hard to want to listen again, since not only is there little variation from The Idiot’s Guide to Candlemass Clone Bands but there is barely any personality, even if nothing is incompetent.

Symbiotic Growth – Beyond The Sleepless Aether: butt-normal post-metal with frenetic keyboards added and a few gimmicky breaks in song structure comprise this album, so they call it “progressive” and give it a Thomas Kinkade or Dave Eggers level “deep” title, but there is no reason to listen to this because it has no actual internal tension or development and so goes on like random wallpaper in a glory hole perforated toilet deep in Gary, IN.

Glorior Belli – Glorior Belli: this is the best of the post-rock/emo/late-model-black-metal fusion bands and it is easy to listen to but you would never reach for it again because these riffs complement each other like the little figurines Boomer women put in curio cabinets and collect wherever they vacation, probably to commemorate having slept with the cabana boy, who hummed better stuff than this while he was skimming the pools.

Labyrinthine Heirs – Labyrinthine Heirs: hipsters from Austin make groove-oriented avantgarde rock with underground metal flavoring, but miss out on the nuance of the artform, so it is like watching a parody try to explain itself to a schizophrenic research scientist, and it is hard to keep from laughing when the band shrugs after an extended detour and goes back into basic rhythm riffing to keep the conformists non-conformists comfortable while they sip their PBRs.

Wald Krypta – Disenchantment: you want to like them so much because they nail the aesthetics, but these are songs about nothing except external observations of the black metal phenomenon, falling into easy emulation without anything motivating the songs more than the “my share too” mentality that eats up societies and genres like marijuana edibles accidentally left out during a birthday party for one of the kids shortly before jailarity and FAFO intervene.

Node – Canto VII: band tries to combine death metal tremolo riffing with chanty speedmetal that has “industrial” influences in the sense of the slower techno with harsh-voiced ranting that was popular in the 1980s, but the vocal-led composition makes these boring because beyond texture, there is nothing here but a change in rooms in the same house.

Dolorian – Dolorian: post-rock/post-metal began with cool stuff from Jesu and other bands who wanted to transfer black metal atmosphere to hardcore and indie rock, but now it means nu-metal in a different form, basically rock where you pick the chords (with heavy reverb) on the verses and then hammer a few power chords in the chorus, but you are still revisiting the same old ground that is old because it is obvious and trivial.

Soerd – Keldrikojast: black metal now is like getting a Microsoft, Amazon, or Cisco certification: you did all the required steps, got all the parts right, and luckily you are guided by the questioner giving you prompts instead of having to conceive and build something from the ground up to meet a real-world needs, so nothing holds together except a vague sense of 1990s nostalgia and droning 2020-era emo music carefully hidden behind aggro aesthetics.

Infection Code – Culto: somewhere in that liminal gap between speed metal and death metal, along with Necronomicon and Merciless, lurks this band, who use chanty verses and more death metalesque flowing choruses to make music that is listenable but tiring, mainly because it insists on circularity in order to hold its parts in balance, but still more interesting and organized than most of what flows across this desk.

Svnth – Pink Noise Youth: one hopes for post-metal that lives up to what Jesu did, but instead we lots of singing over sweeping formless guitars, basically normal rock re-heated with cheese and a loose packet of Fire sauce from the back of the kitchen drawer added, extra emo smarm and manipulation doing nothing for it, while songs emphasize hand-waving distraction then a return to the churning, weeping, wheezing tired old 1960s rock sound dressed up as futuristic television soundtracks.

Alien Weaponry – Te Rā: more modern metal nonsense — verse vocals from hardcore, riff styles from heavy metal and death metal, chorus vocals from emo and gospel, rhythms from Living Color and Spyrogyra — makes some cheesy songs that go nowhere because they are so busy emoting or techniquing that they forget a song is formed of its parts coming together in balance.

Dödsrit – Mortal Coil: get to the point; these songs wander around melodic tropes that are essentially self-reinforcing without conflict and then come to a sudden end because there is no point to be made, no unique experience or notion to express in song, only a wallpaper of never-ending black metal themed emo which is more aggressive than most but just as contentless and pointless as your average post-metal band.

Upgrade – Upgrade: do you want tedious wandering jazz mixed into your avant-garde grindcore with rock and progressive influences? if you made it to that point, you probably think this adds depth, but the end result is pieces which exist as backdrop for musicians to emote, and because this is discoordinated, offer no experience other than a general aesthetic distraction from life in a drone swarm of clichés and oppositional defiant disorder tics.

Lucifer’s Child – The Illuminant: despite all the pretense, this is a good solid album that sounds like Judas Priest played at Gorgoroth pace, and while the songs follow variations on a typical format, they at least hold together and have contrast enough between the melody and phrase of verse and chorus riffs to keep themselves going with internal pressure.

Svartsyn – Vortex of the Destroyer: when Evilmusic first came out, we championed this band for being better than the majority of what was out at the time, but black metal had already transitioned from presenting poetic-epic mythological-historical situations to trying to saturate its audience in a repetitive atmosphere like doom metal, and this new album does the same with nearly shapeless riffs serving the emphasize return to a state rather than conflict.

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In my view, metal needs to go where rock and pop cannot: writing melodies, which adds a dimension onto popular music, which is otherwise rhythm music based on fragments of the scale re-arranged into “chord progressions” to harmonize with the vocals.

Jazz almost went there, but was focused more on improvisation; only pop and selected ambient like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk went there. Projects like Lord Wind and the Burzum keyboard albums similarly began writing non-linear melodies on top of angular riffs.

The idea of through-composed music like metal gives a power to expand itself because it can use more than a couple themes and can in fact invent a depth of layers of themes playing off each other, allowing for even more flexible song structures.

Perhaps the final statement of Ancient before they let the light take them, Trolltaar expanded its repertoire beyond structuralist riffs with melodic elements to actual development of melody, making it an overlooked EP but a fertile starting point for future metal, although hopefully more in the style of Onward to Golgotha than atmospheric black metal.

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As a final note, for the human species to develop further, we need to loudly proclaim “Fuck Your Feelings” to everyone. Life will damage you, insult you, mock you, and rage against your hopes and dreams. Only you can decide whether to let that hurt you.

Tags: censorship, fisting, free speech, say FUCK for FREEDOM, smr