Uppity hipster Big Tech monolith PayPal recently informed Moribund Records that PayPal would be restricting its account for content-related violations. (more…)
12 CommentsTags: big tech, censorship, internet, moribund records, paypal
Soymetal Dies As True Metal Rises
As predicted here, the takeover of underground metal by late hardcore tinged substitutes has failed. This music, which we might call “soymetal” because it appeals more to the emo hardcore audience than the feral and realistic traditional metal one, took over because after the underground fizzled in the hands of NWN/FMP impersonators, labels found a new audience in whiny millennial SJWs. (more…)
11 CommentsTags: Hardcore, hipster metal, indie metal, internet, judas priest, metal sucks, metalcore, Satan, sjw metal, sjws, soy metal
MP3 Codec Killed Off
The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits has killed the MP3 codec it developed in the late 1980s. All licensing programs for MP3 related patents and software they have developed have been terminated as of April 23rd. Fraunhoffer states that the MP3 codec will be replaced by the improved AAC ones and MPEG-H.
11 CommentsChina Bans VPNs
The People’s Republic of China banned the virtual private networks that hundreds of millions of the 730 million mainland Chinese citizens connected to the internet use to bypass the Communist Party’s “Great Firewall” and obtain truthful information. The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced this crackdown on the use of unsupervised internet connections earlier this week. The Ministry said they would be monitoring all mainland internet service providers, content deliverers, and data centers for “illegal information”. Communists once again are attempting to be thought police as otherwise they would not be able to maintain power.
9 CommentsTags: censorship, china, communism, internet
Trump Appoints Corporate Stooge to Head FCC
President Donald Trump, who nixed his predecessor Barack Obama’s transfer of American wealth to rice paddy waders for the benefit of plutocrats through the Trans Pacific Partnership, followed Obama’s example and appointed a corporate stooge for the telecommunications industry to head the Federal Communications Commission. Ajit Pai replaces the retiring Tom Wheeler who was head of both the the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association which both previously lobbied on behalf of large telecommunications providers against net neutrality, one of the founding principles of the internet. Ajit Pai sat on the board and has opposed all regulations and rulings in favor of consumers, supporting the right of internet service providers to censor and throttle content to their customers’ connections.
13 CommentsTags: barack obama, censorship, donald trump, fascism, fcc, internet, internet drama, net neutrality, politics
Comments on the internet
Sometimes, after a long day of seeing the utterly moronic, cruel and pointless comments that people type on the Internet, I have this dream.
In this dream I see a white panel van driving around town. It’s an old Ford Econoline from the 80s with sticker letters on the side that say FLORIST. It takes the out-of-the-way streets and the byways, circles around the areas that will not make it onto a postcard or the front page of the newspaper. In other words, it moves unnoticed among the rest of us… people like you and me. It drives slowly, its engine muttering and exuding a smell of hot oil.
This is the Eugenics Van.
Inside the cabin, the radio crackles with a new message.
“123 Maple Street, Unit Four. Some guy keeps posting Nickelback lyrics and unwarranted criticism to YouTube.” The driver looks at the navigator and they exchange nods. The EV picks up speed and halfway crosses town to the address.
A knock at the door rings out in unit four. “Just leave it outside,” croaks the voice of a bloated moron.
“Flowers for you sir,” says the person at the door wearing a khaki uniform with FLORIST embroidered on the name tag. He makes his voice nasal to seem meek and submissive. “Need your signature sir.”
He hears grumbling and cursing within as clothing is pulled over resisting flesh. The door opens and a standard modern lumpenperson stands there. The florist hands him the flowers, which are made of soft plastic. “What the?” says the dufus, but that’s all he says, because the florist has whipped out a silenced Ruger .22 and shot him through the eye.
The bullets are hollowed and filled with a potent neurotoxin which causes the retard to contort and flail as his central nervous system is eaten from within. The florist picks up the flowers which have bounced when they were dropped and punted by the spasmic death of the imbecile. He waves to his partner in the van who arrives, also wearing a florist uniform and carrying a rug.
They roll up the dufus in the rug, then search the house for a suitcase. They pack it with the wallet, phone, personal effects and enough clothing to make it appear that dufus has gone on a short trip. Then they take the rug and suitcase down to the van and throw them in the rear.
Once a day, the EV drives to a funeral home on the outskirts of town. There it backs up slowly to the incinerator and deposits a few dozen bodies. The foreman shrugs and pulls the lever, dropping them into the flames. The ash is crushed and scattered on the roses at the far side of the cemetery next to a rest stop known to be frequented by truckers looking for glory holes.
The cops get called to the idiot’s house and declare him missing. His family wail and flutter their tiny forearms lost in oceans of fat but since they are dysfunctional, it is assumed that this idiot is just another person lost. The file goes onto a shelf and idiot goes into the statistics. The EV is long gone, moved on to a new city.
Society goes on its merry oblivious way. Outside of its notice, the EV drives slowly through the everyday streets of our cities, stopping wherever stupidity disrupts the pursuit of life. It filters humanity of the useless so people who have a purpose in existing can finally catch a break and not be forced to constantly ignore the imbecilic among them. Somehow its victims are forgotten, unnoticed or ignored and absolutely nothing of even remote significance is interrupted by their absence.
34 CommentsTags: eugenics, idiots, internet, youtube comments
How the internet changed heavy metal
Many of the old school metal fans observed how the rise of the Internet coincided with the death of the underground and its replacement with the “funderground.” They opine how one-click access to music removed much of the challenge of finding music and created a culture of casual acceptance, not aggressively finding and hoarding quality material. There’s truth in that, surely. But there are other effects as well.
For example, easy access to music limited the emphasis on quality. When you buy music with limited funds, you tend to care about the best and/or cutting-edge material only. When the cost of trying out a new band is nothing, the tendency is to listen once and then file it by aesthetic category. “Sounds about like regular death metal. I need something different, maybe with a flute or jazz licks.”
Two more subtle effects occurred as well. First, the Internet in its post-AOL incarnation become fundamentally a social place. Metal on the internet became regulated by this social influence because the people talking about music on the Internet did so from a social outlook. They wanted to meet other people, and the music was secondary to that. As a result people began searching more for the ironic and music with novelty, leading to a rise in hipster-metal and related forms.
Second, the Internet made basic information about technique and style easily available. Learning how to write death metal no longer required listening, learning and working with other bands, zines, radio, etc. The user could visit a forum or any number of blogs and get a quick overview, which encouraged people to migrate over from other genres and adopt metal technique to the composition used in those other genres. This was not so much a genre mashup as an extraneous genre disguised as heavy metal.
With those two factors, emphasis switched from the music itself to the music as a “flavoring” to be applied to something else. Whether social flavoring, or a way to dress up those post-punk slash lite jazz hymns that your band had been kicking around for a decade, metal became the outlet for those impulses. The tendency of our media and society to see metal as “rebellious” made it a natural target because just about everyone wants to be different these days, in other words, rebels against the normal way of doing things.
In theory — which sometimes corresponds to reality — this would precipitate a focus not on the outward aspects of metal but its inward attributes, like spirit, compositional style and content. That day may come, but now that’s a much harder sell. It’s easier to dress up the same crap, push it down the line and produce it from your desktop, then spend all of your focus on the social and surface appearance aspects of the music. That’s how success is made these days.
17 CommentsTags: appearance vs structure, Heavy Metal, hipster, internet, lite jazz
How the internet ruined metal
A common sentiment expressed by “diehards” (or as cynics call them “tryhards”) is that the internet ruined metal. It was a paradise before, they say. You bought zines, traded tapes, bought from small labels, and everything was pure and innocent. The demon of convenience and commerce had not yet reared its ugly head.
With the internet, it is said, all of that ended because it became easy to acquire a band by just typing the name into a search engine. There was no commitment that way, the story goes. People became accustomed to everything being easy and no longer cared about quality. They stopped going to shows and “supporting the scene.” Underground metal became armchair metal.
While I don’t doubt there is some legitimacy to those complaints, I offer another view: what made the internet kill metal was that it turned the process of being a fan inside out. In the old days, you picked bands you liked. Now, you pick bands to make your online personality look good. When someone asks a question about a type of music, you want to have something unique to answer with.
The result is blog posts and threads on forums which are dedicated to “being different.” You get zero scene cred for stating the obvious top ten, and that list can be found anywhere, so people are now craving bands that are more obscure. But the problem is that wanting something for a trait unrelated to its content means you no longer care about quality. Thus quality has plummeted as people seek novelty.
For the aboveground metalheads, this novelty-seeking manifests itself in the same trends that black metal talked about. This week it’s shoegaze; next week it will be “industrial black metal” again, or maybe punkish black metal, or ironic ABBA covers by grindcore bands, who knows. For diehards, the novelty-seeking is obscurity bias: a desire to dig back in the vault and find something that no one else knows about, then make it your favorite band ever.
The point is that no one is a fan anymore. Fans decide what’s good and celebrate it. But hipsters and scenesters have a different approach. They look for ways to make a name for themselves. “That’s my man Bill, he’s an expert in Seattle drone metal.” This is why there are ludicrous genre names in the post-internet arena, and why the advice you get on metal from the internet is almost universally garbage. It’s hipsters being hip, not people talking about quality or relevance.
The internet has made us all into hipsters. To get people to pay attention to your online profile or blog, you need to invent something “important” whether it’s there or not. You to find novelty either in the past or the present. The last thing you’re going to do is offer up some honest opinion. It’ll never get you Google AdWords dollars. It’s not unique and different enough for the social environment the internet has to offer.
Diehards need to quit complaining about the internet. It has had no different effect than moving all of metal into a dense, high social and cosmopolitan city like New York City would. City culture has always rewarded the “different,” which is why cities have always had hipsters. Bands struggled against that culture, not succeeded because of it.
What’s ironic about this whole situation is that complaining about the internet is another way of being “different.” That in turn serves to conceal the fact that since 1994, metal has produced little worth writing home about. Why has that been, you wonder? The black metallers told us: when hipsters appear, trends arrive, and then quality leaves the hall.
7 CommentsTags: different, hipsters, internet, novelty, scenesters, trends, unique
Defending metal before the internet
The Internet grew out of 1960s DARPA projects and has been with us a long time. Most of us however only began to explore it after September 1993 when AOL began mailing out all those free disks that allowed anyone (and they meant, Satan help us, literally anyone) to get on the internet. After that, the Internet became public property.
But before those times, in the days of the late 1970s through early 1990s, the BBS was king. Someone would set up a home computer on a second phone line, install and configure (or hand-code) some software, and then send out the word to others friends on their own BBSs. People traded files and wrote messages to one another, both private (email) and public (forums).
During the later days of that phenomenon, a user named Starmaster opted to defend heavy metal against accusations laid against it in a text-file known as Heavy Metal: The Untold Truth, translated here from the raw text file:
Intro:
They say it is devil music. They say it is Satanic. They also mention it being the source of many teen-age suicides. Why, do you ask? Well, this file is hopefully going to bring that point to light. Finally, just when you thought everyone was against you, you have found the truth in Heavy Metal: The Untold Truth.
We, the listeners of heavy metal, have been called many a thing. Metalheads, headbangers, pieces of scum. But, why do people continually call us that? Is it because we are a minority among other listeners of music? Is it because they think we deserve it, because we refuse to listen to “their” music? Whatever the reason, for two decades now, people are still believing that everyone who listens to heavy metal is Satanic or something along that line. Have psychologists proven that striking a chord on a guitar with distortion causes the mind to turn into an uncontrollable atmosphere of evil thoughts? I think not, and the reason many think they way they do is because of the lyrics to the songs.
The lyrics are often portrayed as the root of the evil in heavy metal. One might call it is the root of all evil is in the music that the children listen to. The lyrics themselves do not imply anything such as Satan worshiping or suicide. More times than not, the lyrics sing about the cold harsh reality that befalls us all in this world. Destruction, corruption, and many things pertaining to the real-time life of people are what cause these rumors of heavy metal. Megadeth for example sing about the destruction of the planet and the corruption and manipulation of a person’s mind. Why would “normal” people listen to the horrors of real-life, when they can live in a fantasy world created by Debbie Gibson?
The harsh reality portrayed in Metallica’s tape And Justice for All is another example of the manipulation and corruption of a politician’s mind. The lyrics often speak of revolution also, such as in Queenryche’s tape Operation: Mindcrime. They imply, “Why should we have to live in a world ruled by those who can afford it, when we could be living in a much better place?” If you have read any of Metallica’s, Megadeth’s or Queensryche’s lyrics, you’ll know where I am coming from.
Another coincidence that is often blamed on heavy metal is suicide. Think about it this way. When real-time life hits you through a song, and you’re not prepared for it, you might just say fuck it, and go off the deep end. People need to be more prepared to face reality when they turn on Megadeth or Nuclear Assault.
The music itself is often and crunching to the mind. One might call it noise, but to those of us who understand it as music, it often resembles the lyrics in many ways. A good example of this is in And Justice for All. When listening to this tape, the music often prepares the listener for a cold and harsh representation of life. Such as in “One,” the intro with the helicopter puts the listener in Vietnam. The music then turns from a sad, painful melody into a hard, cold, highly distorted melody that depicts the character’s hatred toward life. This is a remarkable example of what the music part of the songs is all about. It is to set the mood. Want to live in fantasy? Go listen to Milli Vanilli. Set to take a first class ticket tour through real life? Listen to Metallica.
Slower music sets a nice pace for the slower, less knowledgeable minds. One might call a headbanger “dumb,” but nine times out of ten, the guy will survive the onslaught of political mindgames better than the smartest “normal” person would. It is much harder for a “headbanger” to be brainwashed by politicians because of the music he or she has listened to for years.
If you are a metalhead, read carefully the last few paragraphs. It is the true reason heavy metal, acid rock or whatever you call it, came around. To make people aware and to keep people from being brainwashed into mindless cyborgs that revolve around one who can afford the company. Believe me when I tell you that heavy metal is not all the noise that it seems to be; it is much more than that. It is a way of life to many.
From: Starmaster… To keep those who want to be knowledgeable full of knowledge. And to keep the pricks, pricking.
While this piece may have been written by a non-professional and inexperienced writer, he or she makes some good points. Let’s look at some of the highlights:
- The lyrics sing about the cold harsh reality that befalls us all in this world. This is not protest music, where people complain, or idealistic music, where they sing about what might be. It is descriptive music that portrays the world in a way people cannot see through the fog of consumerism, politics and socialization.
- The lyrics ask, “Why should we live in a world ruled by commerce, when we could be living in a much better place?” This paraphrase cuts to the core of the underground metal argument: as soon as money shows up, our priorities shift from reality to money and bad results come of that.
- [The music] often resembles the lyrics. He makes a good point here. Metal’s harsh riffs are often shaped into song by the lyrics, and the two work together. It is as if the music is a delivery system for the lyrics, like ancient Greek theatre where music and drama were used to convey essentially philosophical messages.
- [A headbanger] will survive the onslaught of political mindgames better than the smartest “normal” person would. This is the actual theme of the piece: politicians/money preach obliviousness and most people choose that path because they’re afraid. Metal is for those who want to go beyond and result the false world created by politics, money and popularity.
- And to keep the pricks, pricking. This one is up for grabs. If you have a plausible interpretation, post it in the comments.
For what it was, a single text file uploaded onto a BBS somewhere in 1990s America, this document covers a wide range of topics and has a fairly depth-seeking thesis. Perhaps metal was stronger when more people thought like this.
4 CommentsTags: BBSs, Heavy Metal, internet, metal, metal history, metal theory
