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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#Metalgate: MetalSucks Reaffirm Themselves as Social Justice Warriors and Leftist Apologists by Misinterpreting Metal Lyrics

axl rosenberg anime

Axl Rosenberg (Matt Goldberg) of metalcore blog MetalSucks recently reaffirmed his website’s social justice warrior stance in an editorial entitled “Stop Saying Politics Have No Place in Metal”. Rosenberg points out that Tony Iommi’s guitar tone was a direct result of the  socioeconomic circumstances of his upbringing but incorrectly assumes that Black Sabbath’s lyrics were written by Ozzy Osbourne’s even rougher childhood when they were in fact primarily written by Geezer Butler who was obsessed with the occult, the work of Aleister Crowley, and horror fiction and films. Rosenberg then uses the lyrics from “War Pigs” to attempt to show that Black Sabbath had strong political undercurrent. All dedicated fans of the band know that the song was originally titled “Walpurgis” about the Witches Sabbath on Walpurgis Night and the label forced them to change the title as they thought it too overly satanic. The anti-war lines are just expressing that politicians and generals sending off young men to die for only the benefit of the leaders in the rear is evil too and actually reflects popular opinions of World War I as much as Vietnam. Attempting to attach any political significance to these is preposterous.

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Metalgate news – Phil Anselmo wavers on racist statements

Phil Anselmo put a sour taste into the mouth of Dimebag Darrell and Pantera worshipers worldwide by making some white supremacist signs at the end of Dimebash 2016. Much to my amusement, he immediately backpedaled and insisted that these remarks were his idea of a joke. Like most of these incidents, the importance is not so much in what Phil Anselmo actually believes, but in how the people around him react. As a general rule, you people have overreacted. For instance, the good folk at MetalSucks (always a bastion of… well… something) struggled to reconcile their simple belief that racism is bad with their other simple belief that Phil Anselmo’s musical efforts are worthy of their time and attention.

Here at DMU, we’ve learned to deal with the fallout of our idols’ actual, provable crimes, such as the arson and murder of the Norwegian black metal scene to the point that we’re perhaps desensitized to thoughtcrimes, especially since we can’t yet peer into Anselmo’s head and accurately determine whether he’s a racist, or trawling for attention, or some combination of both. What matters is that we don’t jump to conclusions based on the unknowable. Besides, we have enough evidence of Anselmo contributing to Pantera.

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