Cynicism

A poll released Sunday night in Israel showed that 81 per cent of Israelis favoured the action being taken against Hamas, but only 39 per cent thought it was likely to be effective.

From The Globe and Mail.

Be still my beating heart

From an interview with Cannibal Corpse in the current issue of Decibel:

"We played the birthday party for Elijah Blue, Cher's Son," [George "Corpsegrinder"] Fisher tells me with a grin. "It was at Johnny Depp's club...It was pretty crazy. Cameron Diaz was in the front row the whole time throwing up metal horns."

That was unexpected.

Hammer Smashed Face:

Heavy Metal Fail

Though I suspected it nearly from the start, I didn't fully realise that Mark LeVine knew not what he was writing about in Heavy Metal Islam on page 78 when he writes he "still couldn't tell the difference between death, doom, black, melodic, symphonic, grind-core, hard-core, thrash, and a half dozen other styles of metal". It's really not all that complicated--for instance, grindcore is fast, doom is slow. And LeVine is supposed to be an academic, for fuck's sake (though in this book he's posing as a really shit Bernard Henri-Levi with a guitar), so it really isn't unreasonable to expect that he'd do at least basic research on his subject.

In any case, I was about sixty pages late in figuring out that LeVine had no clue. Maybe because it was the start of the book and I was being open-minded and giving it a chance, I missed the significance of this passage:

[Sheikh] Anwar [al-Ethari] responded, "I don't like heavy metal, not because it's irreligious or against Islam, but because I prefer other styles of music. But you know what? When we get together and pray loudly, with drums beating fiercely, chanting and pumping our arms in the air, we're doing heavy metal too." (p. 15)

Which is his opinion, and he's quite entitled to it even if he couldn't be any wronger, but LeVine takes it up in the next paragraph ("The difference between the two forms of metal--playing and praying") and runs with it throughout the book. I should have returned the damned thing to the library right then and there.

LeVine's combination of not knowing anything about the aesthetics of metal and not being able to usefully differentiate between heavy metal and religion lead to the following:

The difference between them [metalheads and the Muslim Brotherhood] is in how they respond to this situation [discriminiation]. While Marz [guitarist for Egyptian death metallers Hate Suffocation, now Scarab] wants a space to be left alone, Ibrahim [no last name given, but "an editor of the official website of the Muslim Brotherhood"] argues, "Here's the thing I know: If I fight for just myself and my rights, then I'll never get them. Only if and when I'm ready to fight for everyone's rights can I hope to have my full rights as a religious Muslim in Egypt." This is a radically different approach to politics from the one that has traditionally existed among Islamists in the Muslim world, who haven't been very interested in the rights of other oppressed groups in their societies, particularly those that don't follow their conservative views on religion and morality. It's also quite different from the depoliticized metalheads, who have given up on the idea that their struggle could be society's. Yet giving up on society is precisely what has made the metaliens' music so dark and their sense of possibility so narrow. (p. 93)

This comes in a bit of the book where LeVine sits someone from the Muslim Brotherhood down with a bunch of death metallers. LeVine notes, with some puzzlement, that as soon as the MB guy introduced himself that "they started fidgeting in their seats and glanced around the room uncomfortably" (p. 90). A couple things of note here:

-Just because both metalheads and the Muslim Brotherhood "are both searching for an alternative yet authentic identity to one offered by the Mubarak regime" (p. 91) doesn't mean that they have anything in common. Throughout the book LeVine tries to build bridges between disparate and sometimes conflicting groups (in the Israel/Palestine chapter, he half-seriously suggests that a "hard-core, oriental-tinged, rap-metal version of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall"" (p. 138) might actually help along the peace process), he doesn't actually listen to, or care about, what the individuals themselves want. Metalheads are absolutely right to be wary of god-botherers, even if they dress themselves up as moderates.

-The "metaliens" music is dark because it's metal. You don't play metal in a major key. Also, this passage: " ...the metalheads are using the "ritual" of playing or listening to music as a way to cope with the stress they face as a marginalized group in an oppressive society. When Egypt's metaliens describe problems such as loneliness, alienation, or having little hope in the future, I don't see a psychological issue so much as a social and political one that can't be expressed politically because of the country's patriarchal, highly authoritarian political system" (p. 80). Except for social and political systems, and for that matter, psychological explanations, have little to do with it. Scandinavian metal--also dark! Metal from Quebec--also dark! Metal from Florida and Latin America--also dark! And, for fuck's sake, as if loneliness and alienation aren't a part of the human fucking condition. Moreover, playing or listening to "dark music" isn't necessarily related to "giving up on society" or having a "narrow sense of possibility". Maybe it has to do with being impressed with metal's often breathtaking levels of musicianship. Maybe it has to do with metal just moving some people in a way that other styles of music can't (the Costa Rican band Acero put this brilliantly: "Jazz and classical don't seem bad to me/But they don't make me explode/Salsa or merengue I don't want to hear/Only metal makes me fly"). Again, if LeVine spent some time before writing the book listening to metal, hanging out and talking to metalheads, reading about it, or whatever, instead of holding to dumb myths about metal and the people who listen to it, he wouldn't come up with this shit.

Mechanical Reproduction

From The Book Design Review's look at the best book designs of 2008, via Will at A General Theory of Rubbish. Will also links to a copy of the essay--which is worth reading if you haven't before. I'll probably give it another read because I haven't read it in a few years.

I like the design of the Zizek book as well.

Yes, I agree that listening to the Magic Numbers and David Gray is torture

Story here.

Heavy Metal and the Avant-Garde, Part 2

I wrote Part One a long time ago and can't be arsed looking for it. From an interview with Enslaved's Grutle Kjellson in the September/October 2008 issue of Zero Tolerance magazine:

Though some may consider it blasphemy, this writer has always seen the potential for transition and similarity between prog, avant-garde, and black metal to be quite seamless. Grutle counters, "Hmm. Well, both are underground, of course. They're sub-genres, sorta in opposition to 'established' musical genres. I mean, metal--at least nowadays--is avant-garde music. It's not commercial, like it was in the '80s. It's a subgenre of rock 'n' roll, the way I see it." There seems to be a similar sort of refusal to compromise with both styles, however, as well as a lack of rules and/or boundaries as to what you can do with them. "There are a lot of rules in metal though," responds Kjellson. "Or at least, many bands think there are and compromise all the time!"

This might be relevant to future postings, especially if I can finish that Heavy Metal Islam book and explain at length why Mark LeVine not being able to distinguish between thrash and death metal is actually significant. Then again, in the spirit of this blog, I probably can't be bothered writing the piece.

I don't think that Enslaved are particularly "avant-garde" (whatever that means anyway--I think in the context of metal it has more to do with being influenced by Pink Floyd than it has anything to do with Stockhausen or Xenakis), but they're a good band regardless who have managed to incorporate a really interesting melodic sensibility to their black metal. This video is also neat:

The Celtic Frost theory of metal writing:

The quality of a book about heavy metal is directly proportional to the author's familiarity with, and love for, Celtic Frost.

Therefore, Ian Christe's overview of metal, The Sound of the Beast, which features Tom G. Warrior himself sounding off on Celtic Frost and a variety of other topics, is an excellent read. There's maybe not much new in there to metalheads, but it has enough anecdotes to make it a pleasure to read.

Meanwhile the author of Death Metal Music, Natalie Purcell, is clearly familiar with Celtic Frost, but she variously describes them as being Swiss, Swedish, and English in the book (they're Swiss), and consequently the book is a mess.

I wouldn't be surprised if Heavy Metal Islam's author (and all-around egotistical douchebag), Mark LeVine pulled a blank expression if you mentioned Celtic Frost to him. After getting the impression that LeVine had not a single clue about his subject, he outs himself on page 78 by admitting that he "still couldn't tell the difference between death, doom, black, melodic, symphonic, grind-core, hard-core, thrash, and a half dozen other styles of metal". Which begs the question why he wrote a book about heavy metal in the first place--or couldn't even be bothered doing the research beforehand. I don't know if I can be bothered finishing the book.

Obligatory YouTube:

"Circle of the Tyrants"



"A Dying God Coming Into Human Flesh"

Ways in which Canada is slowly becoming the United States

"Socialist" is apparently now being bandied about as a term of abuse by the Tories.