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.
52 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.
72 CommentsTags: assimilation, authenticity, commercialism, commercialization, conformity, entropy, Heavy Metal, non-conformity, selling out
Apparently emerging from a podcast done by lead writer Mike Schiff, this documentary concerns the parallel lives and interwoven fates of heavy metal music and horror films, making a good case that people who do not buy into society’s nonsense tend to choose a path where power is more desirable than safety and popularity.
15 CommentsTags: alice cooper, anthrax, documentary, film, Heavy Metal, horror movies, iron maiden, king diamond, megadeth, metallica, mike schiff, the ramones
It does not matter what I write here because people no longer read articles. They read headlines and summaries, then skim for embedded media. Television finally took over through the computer. As usual, the voters/consumers are their own worst enemy, choosing the dumbest format they can find.
36 CommentsTags: sadistic metal reviews, smr
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
Famous for its death metal stickers in the bathroom and behind the bar, Cecil’s Pub has been a watering hole for professional alcoholics and amateur tipplers alike for four decades, but has lost its lease and is moving on.
30 CommentsTags: beer, cecil's pub, houston, texas
Since the late 1980s, all culture has been crypto: it hides in plain sight, it uses its own language and symbols, and it builds itself against the dominant contrarianism that took over in the 1960s and turned rock into propaganda and advertising.
32 CommentsTags: degeneration, lyrics, melody, metal, music
As the world continues to burn itself through human arrogance, we turn to metal because we need a voice of an apocalypse that we would like to make triumphant. In destruction of the weaker, the stronger stands revealed. But first we have to remove the weak metal, which is why we have SMRs.
26 CommentsTags: Black Metal, clones, control, death metal, Nihilism, ramones, sadistic metal reviews, smr, social darwinism, sodomy
