News of the Censorship – September 17, 2015

by Brett Stevens on September 17, 2015

As long as there are human societies, people will attempt to control the information that goes out to the group. People can be easily manipulated, especially in groups, and that creates both a fear of unnecessarily incendiary material on the positive side, or subversion of the dominant paradigm and narrative on the dark side.

Here’s what happened this week with censorship and the response to it.

  • Angela Merkel wants Facebook to censor dissent on immigration.

    Former East German politician Angela Merkel, now the putative head of the European Union, has made the statement that Facebook should censor racial commentary including speech against the recent immigration surge into Europe:

    Politicians and celebrities have voiced concern about a rise of xenophobic comments in German on Facebook and other social media platforms because of the refugee crisis.

    “When people stir up sedition on social networks using their real name, it’s not only the state that has to act, but also Facebook as a company should do something against these paroles,” Merkel told regional newspaper Rheinische Post.

    The problem with this of course is that it includes both the rude and cruel speech of those who fling racial slurs, and those who merely mention the issue and possibly critique it. Merkel did not say “ban racial slurs”; she argues for the banning of “racial commentary,” which in theory could include this post. She reveals her East German roots with this one.

  • Reddit censor Ellen Pao fails to appeal failed gender discrimination suit.

    Former Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, who tried to implement the banning of controversial content by topic and not texture (such as slurs) on Reddit and was partially successful, was working at Reddit after being fired from a law firm which she was suing on the grounds of gender discrimination. They said she under-performed; she said they discriminated against her. Most suits of this type get settled to avoid publicity, which means that many people get a payout for simply bringing the suit. The firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, fought back instead and won. Pao appealed and was widely hailed as a hero by SJW journalists, even as she was acting on Reddit to shut down any speech on certain topics, even if factual, logical and polite.

    Ellen Pao is dropping her appeal of the gender discrimination suit she lost against her former employer, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Pao sued KPCB in 2012, claiming that women were not given fair consideration in the male-dominated workplace. She also said that a male colleague with whom she had an affair unfairly cut her out of e-mail correspondence and upper management did nothing about it. She was fired soon after filing her suit. After a bruising month-long trial in which her personal character and work performance were repeatedly brought into question, a jury of six men and six woman ruled that there was no evidence of gender discrimination.

    The failure of her appeal means that Pao is out for the legal costs of her initial suit. This shows a court (and jury) spanking down such spurious suits by not only denying her victory, but also forcing her to bear some of the cost of making the accusation. This perhaps reveals the amount of damage such unnecessary profiteering has cost firms.

  • Cartoon exhibit fights back against censorship and terror

    Pittsburgh City Paper reports that a cartoon exhibit is fighting back against censorship and threats to speech in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Jyllands-Posten cartoon fatwa, and a shooting at a “Draw Mohammed” cartoon contest in Texas which seems to have been designed to provoke Muslim fundamentalists. The exhibit touches on many issues related to free speech and free expression:

    Slinging Satire: Political Cartoons and the First Amendment, curated by Rob Rogers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoonist and ToonSeum board president, courageously takes on civil rights, racial inequality, terrorism and the impact of art on politics.

    The provocative exhibit features digital prints donated by 20 renowned artists from newspapers and online publications across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe.

    The most striking part of the exhibit is “Je Suis Charlie,” a tribute to those fallen in the Al Qaeda attack at French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo this past January.

    It is unlikely that this event will be popular among the extremist set but it aims to re-establish certain liberties taken by writers and artists in the past that are currently threatened by censorship or violence from many sides.

  • Gentleman’s barbershop fined for not cutting woman’s hair.

    In a desire to provoke denial and create a sense of personal injury, a woman entered a barbershop which advertises itself as specializing in the cutting of men’s hair, was as expected refused service, and has now invoked Government to force us all to be nice precious snowflakes who get along with each other. Never mind that barbershops for men have existed for centuries much like their female counterpart. The state imposed its demands with an investigation:

    Now, the business is at the center of a heated debate after owner John Interval was fined $750 for refusing to cut a woman’s hair.

    She filed an action with the state’s Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs.

    That agency imposed the fine for gender discrimination after a state investigator visited the business and interviewed Interval.

    This continues a habit in American and European law of forcing people to serve every other conceivable customer, even if illogical, and limits both their speech and free expression in how they run their businesses. While this is being argued as a victory for freedom, in fact it deprives people of freedom to operate a business for a specific clientele.

  • Charlie Hebdo could be sued after mocking refugee death.

    No stranger to controversy, and recovering after the slaughter of most of its upper staff by extremists, French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo faces a new foe: government. According to its detractors, the magazine has crossed the line into full-on racism, which is illegal in France despite being a matter of free speech:

    But barrister Peter Herbert, Chair of the Society of Black Lawyers and former vice chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, was among many who said Charlie Hebdo had overstepped the mark.

    Mr Herbert alleged on Twitter that the magazine was a “racist, xenophobic and ideologically bankrupt publication that represents the moral decay of France”.

    He added: ‘The Society of Black Lawyers will consider reporting this as incitement to hate crime & persecution before the International Criminal Court.’

    This will have chilling effects for speech as the definition of racism expands at the convenience of government and media. It seems ludicrous on its face to assume that criticism of someone who is of another race must naturally be racist, instead of assuming that they are being treated just like anyone else, since Charlie Hebdo somewhat ineptly mocks everything and anything.

  • SJWs attack RPG-style games, causing companies to adopt censorship policies.

    RPGs are for hardcore nerds who love Dungeons & Dragons and related games. SJWs however insist that everyone obeys their maniacal doctrine… even when those people are already obeying it. A game called Tournament of Rapists aroused SJW ire, but apparently no one read anything about it, because in the game players battle these rapists, SJW-style. SJWs could not be bothered to do the research and attacked, causing at least one company to adopt an official censorship policy:

    Steve Wieck, CEO of DriveThruRPG, issued his final response to the controversy on Tuesday. In a long blog post, they explained that they had come to an agreement with the publishers of Tournament of Rapists, and that the title would be removed from the store.

    Wieck also announced a new policy on offensive content, whereby RPGs reported as offensive would be screened on a case-by-case basis. Wieck announced that he would be the “final arbiter” of what was deemed to be too offensive for the store, and informed readers that he would “err toward including content, even when it challenges readers and deals with sensitive issues, so long as it does so maturely and not gratuitously.”

    This continues the assault on free speech in games on the basis of “moral” grounds known as Social Justice, which apparently holds that everyone must tolerate and pretend to like everyone else at all times, or you are all very racist. As with other forms of speech restriction, this plays right into the hands of governments and corporations who wish to find a way to restrict criticism of their immigration, H1-B or other policies.

  • The Supreme Court has made it harder for local governments to crack down on political advertising.

    You know those political signs that pop up like mushrooms or exhumed corpses on lawns during election season? One local community regulated them, and the ensuing lawsuit made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled that not only was there nothing wrong with the signs in question, but that local governments did not have the power to regulate advertising of that nature.

    From the New York Times:

    Though just two months old, the decision has already required lower courts to strike down laws barring panhandling, automated phone calls and “ballot selfies.”

    …The key move in Justice Thomas’s opinion was the vast expansion of what counts as content-based. The court used to say laws were content-based if they were adopted to suppress speech with which the government disagreed.

    Justice Thomas took a different approach. Any law that singles out a topic for regulation, he said, discriminates based on content and is therefore presumptively unconstitutional.

    On the surface this appears a win for free speech, but may experience pushback as it ties the hands of localities to stop nuisance behaviors like panhandling and automated phone calls. Time will tell whether the court is accountable like elected politicians are supposed to be, or if this type of restriction is permanently gone.

There’s our roundup for this week of juicy censorship and speech rights related stories for you. Hang tight for more anarchic fun in the weeks ahead.

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Blood – Christbait re-release coming on September 28th

by Gabe Kagan on September 17, 2015

Blood - Christbait (1992)

Vic Records is rereleasing Blood’s 1992 album Christbait on September 28th. This German death metal/grindcore act received some praise in the old archives for successfully adding some conventional musicality to a standard formula. In that regard this is similar to how Carcass and Napalm Death expanded their sounds on Symphonies of Sickness and Harmony Corruption; Christbait is similarly more intelligible and elaborate than Blood’s previous work (although still fairly simplistic) while retaining much of its intensity. Newer bands would do well to learn from these examples if they want to create works of similar quality.

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Uncensorship is still censorship

by Brett Stevens on September 16, 2015

censorship_is_like_being_buried_alive

Twisted Sister vocalist Dee Snider, who famously spoke at the PMRC-induced Senate hearings regarding obscenity in music during the 1980s, recalled the era with a warning toward our current time of the dangers of what we might call “uncensorship,” or the use of “soft” pressure to eliminate speech that is perceived as dangerous:

Sadly, the aftermath of the debacle was even worse than I feared. Our First Amendment constitutional right to freedom of speech had been eroded, yet the average record buyer was apathetic. The most typical comment about the sticker was, “Now we know which records to buy!” The music consumer just didn’t understand how that sticker would be used against them. (And used against them it was.)

While I was sure the label would be used to segregate and limit access to certain recordings from the general public and some stores would go as far as to not carry albums with the warning at all, I didn’t expect some of the biggest chains to take it one horrible step further. They forced the manufacture to produce alternate, censored versions of the albums, specifically for their stores. The average adult or young-adult record buyer (and even parents buying them for their younger kids) had no idea that the album they were purchasing from Walmart had content either “bleeped out” or completely removed. The “stickering” of recorded product wasn’t giving the buyer the knowledge to make an educated choice, it was being used to decide for the record buyer what they could or could not listen to. This is the subversive nature of ultra-conservatism. If they can’t manipulate you overtly (through the passing of laws, regulations or restrictions) they’ll do it without your knowing it’s being done to you.

The history of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) showed us an important pattern: by creating mass fear, people can compel even large corporations to essentially censor their material. As Snider points out, stickered albums quickly became second-class citizens, much like controversial speech on the internet today is flagged as “offensive” and removed or quietly hidden on social media. This happened not through laws but through actions of the market once they realized that a large enough group of people would complain.

We have seen this before. Think about how American buildings rarely have a 13th floor, not for any logical reason but the perception that thirteen is an unlucky number. Or the Great Vaccination Debacle of 2013. People, like a herd of cattle, can be stirred into terror by a few loudmouths. Companies fear this. For that reason, they bow down to any group that can show it has victim status. With the PMRC, the victims were children. Now there are more groups — gays, ethnic and religious minorities, women, neckbeards — in whose name an outrage can be fabricated.

This misses the point of free speech, which is that what we do not want to hear is often what we should be hearing. Not always, since nonsense is perpetual within humanity, but often. History is full of examples of good ideas being shot down because they were unpopular or offended some group, even if that group had relatively little power in society at large. Make yourself a victim and you can force others to pay attention to you. That means that you can tell others what they cannot say be implying that they are mean, cruel, extremist, fundamentalist, bad, whatever. In fact, we often need opinions that scare us and the irascible, ornery people who promote them.

In Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (2010), Barbara Ehrenreich maintains that getting rid of all of the “negative people” in your life is a recipe for disaster: “What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the ‘negative people’ from one’s life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it’s probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank’s subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company’s overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who ‘brings you down,’ and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality. The challenge of family life, or group life of any kind, is to keep gauging the moods of others, accommodating to their insights, and offering comfort when needed.”

Just as ecosystems become less resilient, and more fragile, when you reduce their biodiversity (by eradicating species), epistemic communities become less resilient, and more fragile, when you reduce their intellectual and ideological diversity (by eradicating radical ideas). Numerous studies have demonstrated that the only thing worse than thinking through important political matters alone, is thinking through important political matters amongst people who share all of your assumptions. We need to be exposed to challenging unorthodox ideas on a fairly regular basis. But social media (and search engines like Google) are making it easier and easier for us to silence radical voices (by dismissing them as “trolls”), and retreat into homogeneous online echo chambers.

The problem for us now is that we live in a time ruled by commerce, not governments. You buy your music from somewhere; you find it through some search engine, on some streaming site. What happens if Google receives a few million complaints about Satanic or un-PC music? Or if Bandcamp does? Or Facebook? These large corporations fit into a role a lot like that of government because they are the sole providers of a service valued because everyone else is using it. Sure, you could hunt down a Facebook alternative, but it has 1/10 of the people there. So you go to Facebook. If they decide, based on complaints by a small angry group, that what you are trying to say is “bad,” then you will not be heard.

In the same way, free speech has become a mockery as the amount of information has risen. The question now is not whether you can publish your free speech, but whether it will find an audience. The people who control that audience — now a “big six” of corporations — can decide at will to censor your content through a process called uncensorship because it is not direct censorship like through a government, but it silences voices from reaching the audience they need nonetheless. Companies react to complaints even if they do not represent what most people want or need, simply because small highly vocal groups can create a media frenzy and cause a tacit boycott of those products.

We already know there is reason for concern when companies merge and one of the parties has a strong political agenda:

Rupert Murdoch has just bought a controlling interest in all of National Geographic‘s media properties. The move turns the long time non-profit into a for-profit media corporation in the process….Murdoch has famously not been quiet about his denial of climate change. National Geographic gives grants to scientists… so, is anything going to now change with the focus of National Geographic‘s organization?

If we worry when a media magnate who opposes global warming buys a science magazine, we might worry as well about companies that do not have an explicit agenda, but can be manipulated by people who have an agenda and a voice, such as the one that victimhood bestows. We already have worries about corporations and their control of information. This can be most challenging when their control intersects with the ability for an audience to request removal of information anonymously, as happened with Google in Europe:

The Guardian protested the removal of its stories describing how a soccer referee lied about reversing a penalty decision. It was unclear who asked Google to remove the stories.

Separately, Google has not restored links to a BBC article that described how former Merrill Lynch Chief Executive Officer E. Stanley O’Neal was ousted after the investment bank racked up billions of dollars in losses.

Anonymous complaints — or complaints by anonymous groups — can tear apart public information. If, as is the case with Google or perhaps Bandcamp, most of the public uses a certain service, this means a loss for us all. This “uncensorship” means that a group of Offended Victims™ can easily yank down any data they find fails to support their point of view. Even more, they can destroy anyone who fails to agree with them, even bringing major media outlets to obey the raging herd:

Nicole Arbour, the YouTube personality whose “Dear Fat People” video sparked a massive online backlash, has been fired from an upcoming film she was working on…

“‘Dear Fat People’ is an unfunny and cruel fat-shaming video that guises itself about being about ‘health,’ ” Mills said. “It’s fat-phobic and awful. It went on for over six minutes. I felt like I had been punched in the gut.

“I’m gay. I was bullied a lot as a kid,” Mills added. “I am no stranger to ridicule and loneliness.”

When a large corporation finds itself under assault by victims groups, the best strategy is to find another victim, which is what this producer is doing here. Most likely the higher-ups had a conference, decided that they did not want to risk alienating the plus-size audience, and dispatched this little guy to remove the problem. Our future under corporate information control resembles this situation more than we know, and thanks to “uncensorship,” can silence us without even the recourse that Dee Snider had back in the 1980s.

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Suffocation working on new studio album

by Gabe Kagan on September 16, 2015

Interview video sourced from Metal Wani

The legacy of Suffocation continues, at least in some form, as the band is currently writing material for a new album, possibly to come out some time in 2016 if all goes well. Suffocation’s recent works have lacked the strong organization of their 1990s peak, and it seems unlikely that this one will be a significant improvement. However, a fiscally successful album release may lead to a new cycle of touring, and possibly a chance for our readers to see the band perform some of their old classics in a live setting. An actual review of the as-of-yet unnamed album will probably show up on this site closer to its release date.

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Margaritaville Brewing Co. – Landshark Lager (2015)

by Cory Van der Pol on September 16, 2015

LandSharkLager

When a friend and I hit the local liquor shack and saw these hanging out, I was skeptical because of the hip name. Marketing and quality tend to work in inverse proportion to one another. Then again, a new brand has to fight hard in this over-populated beer market especially with all of these idiots buying hipster IPAs.

As we walked in the door, I finally connected “Margaritaville” with that guy who made the funny music. Not really a fan of country, or of entertainment, I felt my spirits sink. This was probably just a commercial con and we bought into it (for $4.99 for four sixteen-ounce beers, roughly the price of half a Starbucks latte downtown). “Ah, what the hell,” I said. “How bad can it be?”

The surprising answer: not bad at all. This is a well-designed product and as part of that, Margaritaville Brewing Co. has included quality beer. The name is cool; the logo is cool; I hate cool because it means an avalanche of tools who buy stupid stuff and drive the good stuff off the market, or into niches where it is hard to get and far more expensive. But the beer is good. The short review is that it is like a sweet, natural-tasting and high alcohol (4.7% ABV) version of Corona, with the kind of harvest time sweetness that 1664 has. This is a beer for drinkers and not people who like lite beers and lite cigarettes. You can actually put yourself into giggles and drooling with Landshark Lager, which immediately makes me appreciate it more as a beer designed to beat back the idiot beers from the beach scene or wherever people drink Corona, probably the same place they smoke Marlboro Lights and eat fat-free Ranch Dressing, both of which are proof the Communists won back in ’54 and they just never told us.

This is a thin beer with no alcohol taste, but like the best of the pale lagers it captures the yeasty and bready flavor of beer, just gently and hidden behind sweetness. I am not the world’s biggest sweet beer fan, or sweet things fan, since those belong in childhood with candy and people saying things like “it will all be all right” (obvious mental cotton for cuck beta bottoms). You can pour one of these and enjoy a beer that reminds you it is a beer, not just a wine cooler with suds, and the increased alcohol makes it fit in with the powerhouses of any well-stocked pub. Beer has been knocking up the ABV to compete with wine, which is now the preferred tipple of the average yuppie wannabe and so has hit the optimum price points, probably because some idiot in Congress regulated it less in exchange for hookers ‘n’ blow from a lobbyist. Either way, this beer is refreshingly free of hipster marketing that tries to be cute and artisanal (pronounced “artist anal”) even if it has mainstream branding and appeal. Especially at this introductory price point, it’s worth considering for casual drinking.

Quality rating: 4/5
Purchase rating: 3/5

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Even Barack Obama disagrees with SJWs

by Brett Stevens on September 15, 2015

barack_obama

They called him a secret Muslim, and they called him a crypto-Socialist, and those may or may not be true, but even America’s most liberal president thinks SJWs are bunk:

Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, “You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.” That’s not the way we learn either.

It would have been even better if he expanded the scope of his comments beyond college to the everyday life, watercooler talk, casual discussion, public debate, politics and even The Blighted Internet. We either can talk about anything, using polite language and structured argument, or we become an echo chamber. Polite language means that you use synonyms for the angry words you might want to use; structured argument means offering fact and logic instead of emotion and impulse. With those, we can have any conversation and, as our society plummets downward into chaos, clearly we need to.

This extends to me. Metal is offensive because it rejects social pretense. It wants to talk about everything you fear, the spectres that haunt your dreams, the yawning emptiness of death below, and the thought that maybe — just maybe — Charles Darwin was not wrong and we still live in times of strife, predation, extinction, warfare, violence and parasitism. Metal trusts nature more than humanity. It looks at the big picture, tens of thousands of years and the world beyond our immediate locality, and it does not care if old Aunt Mabel (or even little sister SJW Susie) is offended. Reality is reality. Human pretense contradicts reality and must be destroyed, whether that pretense is hippie-yuppie 1960s love-jive, yuppie-consumer 1980s job propaganda, hippie-consumer 1990s peace out palaver, or even 2010s special snowflake individualism. Reality is greater than humanity. Metal is the messenger of that idea, and it will never be flattering to the herd, therefore will always be opposed when found in its whole form.

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Septic Flesh – 1991-2003 (2015)

by Gabe Kagan on September 14, 2015

Septic Flesh - 1991-2003 (2015)

Floga Records is releasing a box set of Septic Flesh’s first era in cassette format. While this box-set is limited to 300 copies and the format is somewhat obscure, much of the content included is of high quality, as Septic Flesh’s early discography is one of the high points of Greek underground metal, measuring up to such luminaries as Rotting Christ, Varathron, and Necromantia.

Septic Flesh began their career playing rough death metal, but even on their earliest demo (Forgotten Path) showed signs of the melodic, atmospheric sound that would become their signature. The abrasive death metal elements would remain for some years, but the band’s heavy keyboard presence, an emphasis on consonant guitar leads, and elaborate compositions make for a a more contemplative experience than, for instance, the generally more aggressive American metal acts. Septic Flesh’s first full-lengths admittedly suffer from flaws in their production that detract from the possible intensity they could reach (like the use of a weak drum machine), but they still capitalize on the band’s ability to create ethereal soundscapes in the context of metal. Mystic Places of Dawn and Esoptron in particular are masterpieces of this style, effortlessly integrating this into the admittedly declining quantities of death metal that this era showcases.

Later albums in this collection showcase the band reaching simultaneously towards higher heights of orchestration and problematically trying to secure some gothic metal money. This niche became enormously popular in the mid-90s despite being so wide as to encompass similar acreage of musical ground. Septic Flesh never discarded their ability to write melodic hooks, but after 1995, they were quick to simplify their style and write more accessible, less cavernous songs. These changes become strikingly obvious on Revolution DNA, which trades in the mythological and occult themes of previous works for sleek, shining futurism. That the band manages to retain their melodic prowess makes it serve as a functional and adequate work of pop music, but it is truly a low point of the compilation. The band’s previous overtures towards the mainstream (primarily in the form of operatic vocalists) were spun off into their own project (Chaostar), and Septic Flesh was arguably sundered. In recent years, partially represented on this compilation’s finale, Sumerian Daemons, the band has embraced the great simplification of their past, albeit overlaid and decorated with modern metal technique and an orchestral presence, creating music that in its strengths resembles that of mainstream film music filtered through the extreme metal mold. The new Septic Flesh is a much louder and brutish beast, separated from the atmospheric voice it was born with, but hints of the past permeate even the band’s latest releases to give it strength in its darkest hours.

1991-2003 is excellent as a historical archive and a collector’s item, at least for those few who value compact cassettes. It is probably entirely useless outside that niche, although it’s always possible that a similar box set may come out in a more accessible format. In addition, like other comprehensive box sets, it comes with its share of chaff and filler. Individual albums by Septic Flesh should not be too difficult to find, though, and some of them have even been reissued with new artwork and bonus rarities. The early full lengths are certainly worth the listener’s time.

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Stratovarius – Eternal (2015)

by Gabe Kagan on September 12, 2015

Stratovarius - Eternal (2015)

Have you ever listened to a metal recording and realized it was trying to be all things to all people? Eternal is like that. One of the most recent additions to the ‘European’ school of power metal, I impulsively jumped into this album before realizing, with a start, that my understanding of this subgenre basically ends at 1992, before the genre became the hyperactive, instrumentally maximalist Goliath it is today. Whoops.
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Cynic abruptly tears itself apart

by Gabe Kagan on September 11, 2015

Promotional artwork from Cynic's homepage

Rock and metal bands have a terrible habit of destroying themselves in dramatic conflicts. On Thursday, Cynic’s official Facebook page announced a breakup in the middle of a touring cycle. Perhaps not the best way to go about such a split. Recently, though, guitarist and vocalist Paul Masvidal claims (again, through Facebook) that neither he or the band’s bassist (Sean Malone) were involved in the decision to split. Whether or not each side is able to work out their differences is unclear at the moment, but this seems like a poor way to go about the business of ending a musical project, or otherwise changing its status.

Controversial reformation career aside, I personally owe Cynic a great deal for Focus, as its diverse aesthetic palette and jazz inflections gave me a gateway into extreme metal that I otherwise never may have found. Their later recordings, though, have done little to pique my interest and are unlikely to gain many fans around here. Perhaps this breakup is merely recognition that taking jazz, metal and metalcore and mixing them together produces a slurry that no one wants to drink.

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