www.anus.com/metal
2004-12-02 18:41:10 UTC
Metal Cult, or Metal Christ?
Way back in grade school, before you hit the age of sexual competition
and thus get more rigorously socialized, one of the more exciting
things to do is spend the night at a friend's house. This means you
get spoiled by well-meaning parents, can order pizza with all the
toppings, and spend the night watching scary movies on the DVD player.
At that time of life, it's pretty cool, although once you've moved on
to bigger things it seems like a parody of a really bad party. Who's
got the ranch dressing potato chips, indeed.
It's conventional, among nice families, to keep this charade going
until noon or later the following day, mainly because that's about how
long it takes the caffeinated soda pop and sugar foods to wear off,
meaning that all parties are tuckered out and need to be taken home
and shoved onto a sofa with homework "for your own good." This is a
kindness extended between families to each other, allowing your
parents to actually have a night alone while you're rampaging at some
other kid's house. Of course, if you spend Saturday night with a
Christian family, or Friday night with a Jewish one, it means you're
going to some kind of exciting religious service in the morning.
Back in those less preference-enabled times, I'd go along to Church or
Temple with my friends and wonder at the death denial of adults. There
were great things about church - mainly the music, but I also liked
the weird little tasteless wafers at communion - and Temple had its
moments, mainly the times when they'd bring out the big old scroll of
Hebrew writing and chant in languages I didn't understand. In general,
however, to young Spinoza Ray it seemed like adults getting together
to agree on an excuse why we don't actually die, and to answer at
least two questions along these lines before saying something blithe
like, "Fluffy is in heaven with God now, and can chase cars every day
and is always happy."
What I remember more than anything else was the expectation going into
these religious services. There were the smells of adult clothing,
perfumes, foods, alcohol and the flatulence and dyspeptic belches of
the usual healthy specimens, mostly older, who cleave to churches like
AIDS patients to retrovirals. But more than that, there was a subtle
kind of excitement: it was an event, and there was an expectation,
whether Jewish or Christian. You were going to a place of higher
authority to receive wisdom, and it was to be a cathartic experience.
Recently, in my wandering through the smouldering ruins of the metal
community, that being all people who create or appreciate the
non-radio metal of our world, I was amused by how popular the term
"cult" remains among those who are metal. We're a pure metal cult! and
Only metal is true! and I swear allegiance to metal! and other comedic
statements of this sort are common, like a dinner opera about
patriotism. These people are apparently oblivious to how disturbingly
true their use of this term is.
A cult in my definition is any belief system that posits an Official
Dogma and reinforces it, while sequestering all those who do not
accept Official Dogma as outsiders. It's a precursor to bureaucracy,
and in the case of Christian cults, at least, it's about like filling
out a triplicate application. Do you believe in the father? (check)
Son? (check) Holy Ghost? (check) Heaven and Hell mythos? (check) And
are you willing at this time to sign an eternal contract to this
effect?
In churches, people surge to the front of a large building while music
plays and people in costumes perform ceremony to distract them (note
for our alert readers: Judaism is much similar, but Christianity is a
more familiar example for most North Americans, and since the two
share most beliefs in common). There they take refuge in the
comfortingly familiar nature of religion; you have been through this
ceremony before, and you know what will happen, and at the end, your
own expectation of receiving catharsis carries you through to that
conclusion. Basically, it's a lot like LSD: you find what you
expected.
Rock concerts and metal concerts are very similar. You sanction the
ceremony by paying money, thus you have reason to believe you are
accepted unless you perform heresies, such as fistfights or too much
covert marijuana smoking behind the fat guy standing up front. People
in uniforms herd you into a place where people in costumes perfom
onstage, playing music you have usually heard on CD. Even more, for
those who are lost, every song no matter how convoluted at some point
returns to the constant drumbeat, usually snare, which builds cadence
and interrupts any thoughts you were having between beats, which are
the loudest single element of the concert.
The metal cult, like the rock cult, is based in the idea of catharsis.
You go to see some band you have heard before, and after having the
music affirmed, you go away with some brilliant insight like "They
really can play their instruments" or "That vocalist vomiting blood,
fire, semen and feces was spectacular!" It's not rocket science. If
you're a musician, you can feel ever-so-elite by watching the band
members play and pulling from it some observation about how well the
guitarist frets or drummer hits the middle of the goddamn snare twice
every second. No one is left out; if you had $5 in your sweaty little
hand when you went in the door, you were given the communion, allowed
to join the cult, and ushered on out into the surprisingly cool and
unsweaty night.
Baptised in beer, perhaps intoxicated yourself on a range of exciting
substances, you even have a chance to double affirm your belief by
buying tshirts and CDs, and can even talk to the band members, who
periodically deliver such benedictions as, "This is another song about
fucking the dead - I want to see you fuckers tear it up in the pit!"
Conventional academics like Deena Weinstein periodically set aside the
Chardonnay (all academics are drunks, drug addicts or perverts) and to
observe what an indoctrination this ceremony is, and how it affirms
membership in a group. She might as well say "...membership in a true
life-hating metal cult!"
Surprisingly, black metal was a counterinsurgency opposed to this.
Initially, bands like Burzum and Immortal eschewed live performance,
since as they correctly observed, hordes of idiots would show up
expecting everyone to accept them purely on the basis of having (a)
found the venue (b) being aware of the band and (c) the benighted $5
in sweaty fist. Burzum's composer was vehement about it, and to this
day you can find credulous teens everywhere buying $20 live bootlegs
of a band that never played live (but since it's $20 and not $25, it's
a "good deal" - you get an extra $5 to go to another stimulating
concert).
Much maligned, mocked and parodied, the "No mosh, no core, no fun, no
trends" attitude of these early bands was a way of ending the
religious service, an inclusive event, and turning instead to an
esoteric event. The difference between exoteric religions like
Christianity and esoteric religions like, say, Advaita Vedanta or
Buddhism, is that in exoteric religions you have to show up and affirm
Official Dogma, and then you get sent home with a stamp on your
triplicate form, which esoteric religions are best summarized as "the
truth reveals itself in varying degrees to those who seek it."
Christianity and rock concerts are birds of a feather that give you a
100% guarantee that everything's okay, and then convince you to turn
off your mind so you can do something useful like enforce Official
Doctrine on other people. They are the ultimate populist religions,
and by that nature they must assert that everyone is equal because,
lacking an entrance requirement, they've already made it fact. If you
can make it to church, or find the rock club with your $5 (donations
are always welcome at church, too), you're one of the Chosen and can
feel better than other people for your non-achievement.
One of the reasons I separated out Christianity from Judaism as an
example, earlier, is that Judaism is controversial because it is
simultaneously a religion, a culture, and an ethnicity. Whether Khazar
or Ashkenazi, you're a Jew if you have any of those three attributes
(bonus points and free instant coffeemaker for all three). Among the
black metal community, there are those who feel Judaism is the great
downfall of Indo-Europeans, and they wish nothing of tolerance for it.
I'd like to take time here to praise some aspects of Judaism. Its
emphasis on education, for example, is admirable, and far exceeds the
Christian dogma that if one believes in God, it's okay to fail at
everything else in life because it doesn't matter - what matters is
the world after this one, which like a credit report, is absolute and
binding and more important than whatever goes on here in our misery of
animal existence. Its racism and cultural supremacy is beyond
questioning, and has kept the Jewish people alive and functional
through thousands of years of wandering through other peoples'
countries. In fact, until Christianity sedated Europe, Jews never had
a homeland, and at this point are as European as they are
Semitic/Mongoloid.
Christianity has selective praiseworthy aspects as well. As Arthur
Schopenhauer pointed out, its only significant difference from Judaism
is a classic Indo-European trait that can be found among the Aryan
sages of ancient India, that being "quietus," or an inner spiritual
calm and contemplation to discover the blessings of this world. If
you're Arthur Schopenhauer, or Meister Eckhardt or Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and thus possess not only a genius IQ but an introspective
desire for truth and beauty, this will occur to you. The remaining
99.99% of Christians should simply admit they're following non-ethnic
Judaism, and cease feeling superior to Jews for having a martyr who
gave his life because we're dirty little animals who fornicate,
murder, embugger and thieve from each other daily.
One reason I can't ever be a neo-Nazi, besides my ethnic Scottish
heritage which includes pre-Jewish Semitic Gaelic blood, is that they
didn't act on this crucial difference, in part because in Germany the
Christians had already slaughtered anyone with a desire to resist
Christ a thousand years before. In my mind, Jews are an invading
culture and I have no problem drawing a sword against them, men women
and children alike, to drive them back into the middle east, where
they may have to actually stop feeling superior to their Abrahamic
brethren and make peace with the Arabs. Not my problem. But, I feel
the same way about Christianity: if you're not Eckhardt, or
Schopenhauer or Emerson, I recognize that it's my duty to draw a sword
against you, man or woman or child or dog or AI, and drive you out of
Indo-European lands before you destroy what's left of our culture.
However, I've come to realize that "No mosh, no core, no fun, no
trends" is also part of this same militant desire which will come to
any sane Indo-European who undertakes quietus long enough; rock music
and metal are the same cult as Christianity and before it, sickly
Judaism and its wheedling, whining culture of the lowest common
denominator enshrined as benevolent love. For me, to love a culture is
to defend it against its enemies, with emotional detachment and not
the "hate" to which modern neo-Nazis masturbate in America History
X-inspired fantasies. If you thought "the Holocaust" was bad, wait
until you see what will come - and it is inevitable - when the current
culture collapses and warlike people like me clear out bad
Indo-European DNA, including Christ-worshippers and people whose sole
contribution is to be "members of" some rock-music-based "cult." Man,
woman, child, and of course fat record producer scheming over cocaine
and harlots in the back room, shall all face the sword - without hate,
but without mercy, either.
With this revelation in mind, I have to ask modern metalheads who
claim to hate stupidity and Christianity (and, of course, you cuddly
stuffed NSBMer teddybears in your genuine NSBM tshirts and Nazi
fetishist wear), why are you partaking in the same culture that you
abhor? There are people among the rockers who are of noble
countenance, and among Christians too, and I'd welcome these people
into any future Indo-European society (Jews are ethnically excluded,
along will all other non-Europeans; you have your own countries, go
there and preach about your ideals and we'll see how "superior" they
indeed are). But for the most part, rock and roll is a failure at
escaping Christianity. If anything, it's a new form of Christianity
that is even more accepting and less informative on the esoteric
issues of spirituality, philosophy and comportment.
For this reason, both metalheads and neo-Nazis are ignored by their
more studied peers. After all, who wants to get dragged into the same
quagmire that has afflicted Indo-Europeans for the past millennia,
albeit in a new form and with new products to buy? Advice to future
rockers, metalheads, and the like: design your music and your career
around something other than the glorified church service that is your
modern metal "cult" concert.
December 2, 2004
http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/metal/
Way back in grade school, before you hit the age of sexual competition
and thus get more rigorously socialized, one of the more exciting
things to do is spend the night at a friend's house. This means you
get spoiled by well-meaning parents, can order pizza with all the
toppings, and spend the night watching scary movies on the DVD player.
At that time of life, it's pretty cool, although once you've moved on
to bigger things it seems like a parody of a really bad party. Who's
got the ranch dressing potato chips, indeed.
It's conventional, among nice families, to keep this charade going
until noon or later the following day, mainly because that's about how
long it takes the caffeinated soda pop and sugar foods to wear off,
meaning that all parties are tuckered out and need to be taken home
and shoved onto a sofa with homework "for your own good." This is a
kindness extended between families to each other, allowing your
parents to actually have a night alone while you're rampaging at some
other kid's house. Of course, if you spend Saturday night with a
Christian family, or Friday night with a Jewish one, it means you're
going to some kind of exciting religious service in the morning.
Back in those less preference-enabled times, I'd go along to Church or
Temple with my friends and wonder at the death denial of adults. There
were great things about church - mainly the music, but I also liked
the weird little tasteless wafers at communion - and Temple had its
moments, mainly the times when they'd bring out the big old scroll of
Hebrew writing and chant in languages I didn't understand. In general,
however, to young Spinoza Ray it seemed like adults getting together
to agree on an excuse why we don't actually die, and to answer at
least two questions along these lines before saying something blithe
like, "Fluffy is in heaven with God now, and can chase cars every day
and is always happy."
What I remember more than anything else was the expectation going into
these religious services. There were the smells of adult clothing,
perfumes, foods, alcohol and the flatulence and dyspeptic belches of
the usual healthy specimens, mostly older, who cleave to churches like
AIDS patients to retrovirals. But more than that, there was a subtle
kind of excitement: it was an event, and there was an expectation,
whether Jewish or Christian. You were going to a place of higher
authority to receive wisdom, and it was to be a cathartic experience.
Recently, in my wandering through the smouldering ruins of the metal
community, that being all people who create or appreciate the
non-radio metal of our world, I was amused by how popular the term
"cult" remains among those who are metal. We're a pure metal cult! and
Only metal is true! and I swear allegiance to metal! and other comedic
statements of this sort are common, like a dinner opera about
patriotism. These people are apparently oblivious to how disturbingly
true their use of this term is.
A cult in my definition is any belief system that posits an Official
Dogma and reinforces it, while sequestering all those who do not
accept Official Dogma as outsiders. It's a precursor to bureaucracy,
and in the case of Christian cults, at least, it's about like filling
out a triplicate application. Do you believe in the father? (check)
Son? (check) Holy Ghost? (check) Heaven and Hell mythos? (check) And
are you willing at this time to sign an eternal contract to this
effect?
In churches, people surge to the front of a large building while music
plays and people in costumes perform ceremony to distract them (note
for our alert readers: Judaism is much similar, but Christianity is a
more familiar example for most North Americans, and since the two
share most beliefs in common). There they take refuge in the
comfortingly familiar nature of religion; you have been through this
ceremony before, and you know what will happen, and at the end, your
own expectation of receiving catharsis carries you through to that
conclusion. Basically, it's a lot like LSD: you find what you
expected.
Rock concerts and metal concerts are very similar. You sanction the
ceremony by paying money, thus you have reason to believe you are
accepted unless you perform heresies, such as fistfights or too much
covert marijuana smoking behind the fat guy standing up front. People
in uniforms herd you into a place where people in costumes perfom
onstage, playing music you have usually heard on CD. Even more, for
those who are lost, every song no matter how convoluted at some point
returns to the constant drumbeat, usually snare, which builds cadence
and interrupts any thoughts you were having between beats, which are
the loudest single element of the concert.
The metal cult, like the rock cult, is based in the idea of catharsis.
You go to see some band you have heard before, and after having the
music affirmed, you go away with some brilliant insight like "They
really can play their instruments" or "That vocalist vomiting blood,
fire, semen and feces was spectacular!" It's not rocket science. If
you're a musician, you can feel ever-so-elite by watching the band
members play and pulling from it some observation about how well the
guitarist frets or drummer hits the middle of the goddamn snare twice
every second. No one is left out; if you had $5 in your sweaty little
hand when you went in the door, you were given the communion, allowed
to join the cult, and ushered on out into the surprisingly cool and
unsweaty night.
Baptised in beer, perhaps intoxicated yourself on a range of exciting
substances, you even have a chance to double affirm your belief by
buying tshirts and CDs, and can even talk to the band members, who
periodically deliver such benedictions as, "This is another song about
fucking the dead - I want to see you fuckers tear it up in the pit!"
Conventional academics like Deena Weinstein periodically set aside the
Chardonnay (all academics are drunks, drug addicts or perverts) and to
observe what an indoctrination this ceremony is, and how it affirms
membership in a group. She might as well say "...membership in a true
life-hating metal cult!"
Surprisingly, black metal was a counterinsurgency opposed to this.
Initially, bands like Burzum and Immortal eschewed live performance,
since as they correctly observed, hordes of idiots would show up
expecting everyone to accept them purely on the basis of having (a)
found the venue (b) being aware of the band and (c) the benighted $5
in sweaty fist. Burzum's composer was vehement about it, and to this
day you can find credulous teens everywhere buying $20 live bootlegs
of a band that never played live (but since it's $20 and not $25, it's
a "good deal" - you get an extra $5 to go to another stimulating
concert).
Much maligned, mocked and parodied, the "No mosh, no core, no fun, no
trends" attitude of these early bands was a way of ending the
religious service, an inclusive event, and turning instead to an
esoteric event. The difference between exoteric religions like
Christianity and esoteric religions like, say, Advaita Vedanta or
Buddhism, is that in exoteric religions you have to show up and affirm
Official Dogma, and then you get sent home with a stamp on your
triplicate form, which esoteric religions are best summarized as "the
truth reveals itself in varying degrees to those who seek it."
Christianity and rock concerts are birds of a feather that give you a
100% guarantee that everything's okay, and then convince you to turn
off your mind so you can do something useful like enforce Official
Doctrine on other people. They are the ultimate populist religions,
and by that nature they must assert that everyone is equal because,
lacking an entrance requirement, they've already made it fact. If you
can make it to church, or find the rock club with your $5 (donations
are always welcome at church, too), you're one of the Chosen and can
feel better than other people for your non-achievement.
One of the reasons I separated out Christianity from Judaism as an
example, earlier, is that Judaism is controversial because it is
simultaneously a religion, a culture, and an ethnicity. Whether Khazar
or Ashkenazi, you're a Jew if you have any of those three attributes
(bonus points and free instant coffeemaker for all three). Among the
black metal community, there are those who feel Judaism is the great
downfall of Indo-Europeans, and they wish nothing of tolerance for it.
I'd like to take time here to praise some aspects of Judaism. Its
emphasis on education, for example, is admirable, and far exceeds the
Christian dogma that if one believes in God, it's okay to fail at
everything else in life because it doesn't matter - what matters is
the world after this one, which like a credit report, is absolute and
binding and more important than whatever goes on here in our misery of
animal existence. Its racism and cultural supremacy is beyond
questioning, and has kept the Jewish people alive and functional
through thousands of years of wandering through other peoples'
countries. In fact, until Christianity sedated Europe, Jews never had
a homeland, and at this point are as European as they are
Semitic/Mongoloid.
Christianity has selective praiseworthy aspects as well. As Arthur
Schopenhauer pointed out, its only significant difference from Judaism
is a classic Indo-European trait that can be found among the Aryan
sages of ancient India, that being "quietus," or an inner spiritual
calm and contemplation to discover the blessings of this world. If
you're Arthur Schopenhauer, or Meister Eckhardt or Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and thus possess not only a genius IQ but an introspective
desire for truth and beauty, this will occur to you. The remaining
99.99% of Christians should simply admit they're following non-ethnic
Judaism, and cease feeling superior to Jews for having a martyr who
gave his life because we're dirty little animals who fornicate,
murder, embugger and thieve from each other daily.
One reason I can't ever be a neo-Nazi, besides my ethnic Scottish
heritage which includes pre-Jewish Semitic Gaelic blood, is that they
didn't act on this crucial difference, in part because in Germany the
Christians had already slaughtered anyone with a desire to resist
Christ a thousand years before. In my mind, Jews are an invading
culture and I have no problem drawing a sword against them, men women
and children alike, to drive them back into the middle east, where
they may have to actually stop feeling superior to their Abrahamic
brethren and make peace with the Arabs. Not my problem. But, I feel
the same way about Christianity: if you're not Eckhardt, or
Schopenhauer or Emerson, I recognize that it's my duty to draw a sword
against you, man or woman or child or dog or AI, and drive you out of
Indo-European lands before you destroy what's left of our culture.
However, I've come to realize that "No mosh, no core, no fun, no
trends" is also part of this same militant desire which will come to
any sane Indo-European who undertakes quietus long enough; rock music
and metal are the same cult as Christianity and before it, sickly
Judaism and its wheedling, whining culture of the lowest common
denominator enshrined as benevolent love. For me, to love a culture is
to defend it against its enemies, with emotional detachment and not
the "hate" to which modern neo-Nazis masturbate in America History
X-inspired fantasies. If you thought "the Holocaust" was bad, wait
until you see what will come - and it is inevitable - when the current
culture collapses and warlike people like me clear out bad
Indo-European DNA, including Christ-worshippers and people whose sole
contribution is to be "members of" some rock-music-based "cult." Man,
woman, child, and of course fat record producer scheming over cocaine
and harlots in the back room, shall all face the sword - without hate,
but without mercy, either.
With this revelation in mind, I have to ask modern metalheads who
claim to hate stupidity and Christianity (and, of course, you cuddly
stuffed NSBMer teddybears in your genuine NSBM tshirts and Nazi
fetishist wear), why are you partaking in the same culture that you
abhor? There are people among the rockers who are of noble
countenance, and among Christians too, and I'd welcome these people
into any future Indo-European society (Jews are ethnically excluded,
along will all other non-Europeans; you have your own countries, go
there and preach about your ideals and we'll see how "superior" they
indeed are). But for the most part, rock and roll is a failure at
escaping Christianity. If anything, it's a new form of Christianity
that is even more accepting and less informative on the esoteric
issues of spirituality, philosophy and comportment.
For this reason, both metalheads and neo-Nazis are ignored by their
more studied peers. After all, who wants to get dragged into the same
quagmire that has afflicted Indo-Europeans for the past millennia,
albeit in a new form and with new products to buy? Advice to future
rockers, metalheads, and the like: design your music and your career
around something other than the glorified church service that is your
modern metal "cult" concert.
December 2, 2004
http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/metal/