Metal-Archives’ Marxist Mania

Article contributed to Death Metal Underground by Richard Sullivan.

Western civilization is currently gripped in a culture war unlike any that preceded this one. You may ask what makes it so different than the others, considering the West witnessed a similar one of its kind back in the late 1950s with the emergence of the New Left. Arguably, there’s never been a real difference in the left’s rhetoric. For as long as anyone cares to remember, white, heterosexual, “cisgender” men, who maintain the “capitalistic, racialized, cisnormative patriarchy” have always been at the center of their ideological attacks. The only thing that has changed has been their ability to have said rhetoric heard beyond the confines of university lecture halls. It was rare to encounter an enlightened™ human™ bombarding you with vitriol and threats of violence – because you failed to recognize the intersectionality between race™, gender™, and sexuality™ – outside a gender studies class. Of course, these things still occur, but with greater frequency, and to the point where a flash mob of overweight, hipster beta males twerking in tutus in a school’s atrium is viewed as them just “expressing themselves”, but, more boldly, as an act of defiance against conventional norms of masculinity.

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Bill Steer Admits Making Arena Rock

Bill Steer, the guitarist of sell-out grindcore legends turned butt rock turkey Carcass, did an interview with hipster social justice warrior rock website Vice Noisey last week where he ranked Carcass’s albums in order of his favorites. Bill Steer admitted that Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious was pretentious death ‘n’ roll instrumental wank and that continuing in that style would not have provided any future for the band so they started writing heavy metal for arena rock fans on Heartwork as only about three hundred people at every big show Carcass played actually liked death metal at all. Bill Steer finally dropped all pretense of Carcass’s later material being traditional heavy metal and admitted it is actually written as arena rock in order to please the most people.
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Onward to Golgotha: The Deepest Death Metal

Incantation‘s debut and best work, Onward to Golgotha, remains the deepest death metal album I have ever experienced a quarter century after its release as of today. With material (“Unholy Massacre” and “Profanation”) dating back to the initial founding of Incantation by guitarist John McEntee and drummer Paul Ledney, Onward to Golgotha was a record influenced as much by Bathory and Beherit as it was Morbid Angel and Autopsy.

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Deeds of Flesh Posts “Studio” Video

Deeds of Flesh posted a new video log to Youtube documenting how they are recording the guitars for their upcoming album. If you suspected that techno metal was recording in the bedrooms of pudgy action figure collectors with guitars directly digitally reamped into Cubase and Protools, you were right! Deeds of Flesh of course don’t pay for a real studio! This shit’s digital! The same chair and computer used for jerking it to BangBros is used for recording brutal tekdeathgrind! Guitar wank and actual wank in the same place! Hopefully Deeds of Flesh sidelines their recent ‘core tendencies to improve on the promising Portals to Canaan.

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Black Metal, Nihilism, and Heresy

I. Degrees of an Allegory in Black Metal

Black metal, as any art, spans not only the musical, but the ideological as well as some kind of social component. Those who claim its flag range from popular musicians dressing up, to occult panderers playing at magickians, to extremists, to individuals that society would consider degenerates. There are more groups that could be mentioned but that we do not need to mention explicitly. Needless to say, all of these groups have a very different understanding of what black metal is, and what their seminal exponents such as Quorthon intended or what his work represents, or should represent, once it was out of his hands.

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Homebrewing FAQ

A cultured human being should pursue a good hobby. It’s somewhat more interesting if said hobby involves a mild vice or foible. The hobby should also develop skill and produce a satisfactory end product. It should make the person somewhat unique amongst a group of peers and allow them to develop camaraderie with their fellow hobbyists. It becomes a Schelling Point so to speak.

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The Ivory Tower’s Troikas

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New York University professor Michael Rectenwald was put on paid administrative leave for his controversial Deplorable NYU Prof Twitter account that exposes how the Ivory Tower uses social justice warring and identity politics as methods of social control. His reprimanding proved him right.

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Write-in Campaign: Swedish Death Metal Belongs In IKEA

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The leading representative of Swedish industry around the world, Ikea, sells furniture of styles from a dozen nations. It has a housewares section, a full-service cafeteria, a donut shop and a grocery store. You can pick up electric lights, tools, houseplants and home decor there.

But conspicuously absent are the most important items from Sweden in recent memory: Swedish death metal and black metal.

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