I AM THE MOST METAL THING SINCE EVEL KNIEVEL'S SKELETON

WALK ON HOME, BOY

It's come to my attention that there have been some several trillion nimrod fuckholes across the years that have accused me of not being metal.  I know, right??  This is the gravest of injustices that can be leveled at such an unstoppable force of metal supremacy such as myself, so I'm going to take the next thousand words or so to illustrate how little of a fuck I give and also prove once and for all that I AM PURE FUCKING OSMIUM AND YOU ARE ALL LITTLE BABIES THAT I CHEW UP FOR FUN.

Allow me to bullet point every reason you're all fucking idiots.

Lair of the Bastard is a completely valueless hobby.  I don't make a single fucking cent making fun of Wintersun and making Manilla Road fanboys cry.  I've been doing this shit for the better part of a decade when I posted a really terrible review on the Metal Archives for Children of Bodom's Are You Dead Yet?  And ever since then, I've made precisely zero dollars doing this stupid bullshit all by myself.  I am the only full time staffer on Lair of the Bastard, even if that means I don't adequately cover every genre and go months at a whack without any sort of update.  I'm not popular and I utilize a uselessly narrow skillset to amuse myself in hopes that other people might enjoy it as well while also slaving away at a full time job trying to support my diet of red meat and chocolate.  There isn't one single corporate entity on the planet who would even want to sponsor or buy out a blog that's so lazy that it's been running for nearly seven years without ever bothering to make a fucking logo for itself.  Is there anything more metal than losing money on a dumb aggressive hobby in your bedroom?  Yeah I didn't fucking think so.

Lair of the Bastard is bullheaded and stupid.  I'm a dumb motherfucker.  I can properly use words like "obsequies" and "fecundity" but that just means I listen to a lot of Bad Religion.  If you think that the only thing I care about is attention and rageclicks, then why do you think I routinely talk shit about Gorguts and Meshuggah and Overkill and all manner of mega popular metal bands?  Do you think Metal Hammer is banging on my door to get the rights to an article that utilizes the imagery of Iron Maiden chokeslamming Scrappy Doo into a puddle of jizz?  DO YOU THINK THERE IS ONE ADVERTISER ON THE PLANET WHO WANTS TO ASSOCIATE THEMSELVES WITH A DUDE WHO SAYS DIO SUCKED FOR 80% OF HIS CAREER??

Additionally, I've been accused of being both a snotty asshole elitist who only listens to Brenoritvrezorkre and of being an idiotic Nuclear Blast fellating mainstream whore.  Yeah so what, maybe I want to listen to and talk about both popular and underground bands like Metallica and The Black Dahlia Murder?  Did you ever think I could cultivate an audience by talking about something as insane as whatever the fuck I wanted to talk about?  The absolute shittiest way to run a business is to have a fucking identity.  I'm working on a feature that scientifically proves that Protest the Hero is, has been, and always will be better than Gorguts, my own readers hate me and that puts me on the same level of notoriety as motherfucking Burzum and you know it.

And why else would I constantly take low blow potshots at Republican politicians?

IT'S BECAUSE I'M THE MOST PASSIONATE MOTHERFUCKER IN THE GALAXY.

I honestly believe that everything I do directly betters an insignificant genre of music that I've built my entire identity around.  And if I sit idly by and don't use my bully pulpit of immense power and influence to remind everybody that I'm right and everybody else is a fucking retard and some shitty band like Winds of Plague thinks it's okay to make a new album because I haven't called them morons in a few years or Emperor has the gall to release some seminal classics decades ago despite their drummer being a homophobic murderer, an entire genre of music will fucking die.  I am your god damned savior.  I speak from a place of a place of self appointed superiority and if Manowar can build an entire career on that then so can I.  Nothing is more metal than baselessly claiming moral superiority over 100% of the population of the planet.  Nothing is less poser than dedicating an entire editorial explaining how everybody is a poser except me.

And hey, just to throw it out there again, if I didn't want to be poor, I'd just work for an investment firm or be a corporate lawyer because my knowledge of Enbilulugugal qualifies me to do whatever the fuck I want to do.  I chose to do this because I am just so motherfucking generous.  I EAT BONES AND SHIT GHOSTS, I CUM LIKE A CAMEL SPITS, YOU ARE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK AND WITHOUT ME THE ONLY BANDS YOU'D BE ABLE TO LISTEN TO WOULD BE ALPHAVILLE AND SKREWDRIVER.

Lair of the Bastard is offensive to your grandma.  Look, we all know that conservatives are woman hating dingdongs, and the fact that I just said that out loud without dropping an N-bomb makes me a cultural tour de force that should be remembered in the halls of history forever.  Somehow there are a bunch of idiots who think that true rebellion is following jack booted authoritarian types and those people are nimrods but the fact that I openly believe that makes me more of a metallic iconoclast than Varg Vikernes or Tom Araya.  I listen to Napalm Death and Misery Index AND THAT MAKES ME SMARTER THAN ALL OF YOU COWARDS.

The world is awful and the fact that I sit at my computer and spin short fiction about how Donald Trump is a malevolent demi-creature from the Shadow Realm while listening to Dying Fetus basically makes me a Headbanging Malcom X and you should all appreciate how fucking bold I am to agree with a majority of my peers.  Everybody except me is a fucking idiot.  YOU BITCHDICKS AIN'T GOT SHITTITS ON HOW MUCH OF AN ABRASIVE SELF RIGHTEOUS JACKASS I AM AND YOU SHOULD RUN AND FUCKING HIDE FROM THE UNSTOPPABLE TIDE OF UNIRONIC ELITISM THAT FLOODS THE SEWERS EVERY TIME I PISS.

Lair of the Bastard is a forward thinking genius.  I embody the entire idea of progressivism, from the fact that I am a certified race traitor who thinks poor people shouldn't be subjugated as khaffit, to the fact that I think Melechesh is better than Six Feet Under, but that's not what's important.

What's truly important is that I'm a clairvoyant sage.  The landscape of metal has changed since 1970 when we had a whopping two bands to choose from.  I noticed that, I pointed that out, how the fuck can you knuckle-dragging ingrates even compare to me?  I said music streaming services would be a game changer since they offer all the convenience of illegally downloading music with none of the guilt and I was right.  I heard The Browning mix brainless chugga chugga breakdowns with effortless N-TSS N-TSS dance music and claimed they would take a subniche by storm way back in 2010 before they even released anything on a major label and I was right.  I looked at a pattern of 30 years' worth of terrible releases and proclaimed the newest Annihilator album would suck and do you even want to bother guessing how that ended?

Like Nocturnus, Atheist, and Voivod, I embody the will of the enlightened by looking towards the future and disdaining the good ol' days.  Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and nothing is worse that the glut of terrible rethrash bands that resurfaced in the late 2000s to put on a thrasher costume and rip off Exodus and Kreator until the cows came home.  The bands who cropped up in the last decade with the sole intention of ripping off forgotten Finndeath classics while cramming as much mystikal polysyllabic sophistry into their lyrics as possible and dissonant jangledeath doesn't count because I say so but everything else that isn't a completely fresh take on a 47 year old style of music is a worthless void of mediocrity and I am basically fucking Einstein for realizing that.  WHAT COULD BE MORE METAL THAN BUCKING TRENDS BY STRICTLY ADHERING TO THEM?  IS THAT NOT THE MOST SUBVERSIVE POST-POST-POST IRONIC META-STATEMENT ANYBODY COULD EVER MAKE??  I AM AN INTENTIONALLY HOLIER-THAN-THOU PIECE OF SHIT AND THAT PUTS ME AT LEAST TEN LEVELS ABOVE YOU PLEBS.  Myrkur is innovative and Fallujah is the be-all-end-all of forward thinking melodic metal and I will not hear one fact to the contrary.  Gargle my balls.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: LAIR OF THE BASTARD IS NOT A DUNDERHEAD INCAPABLE OF SELF AWARENESS.  Here at Lair of the Bastard, I don't run a fucking bottomfeeding gossip rag.  I don't run poorly thought out bi-annual smear pieces based entirely on hearsay with no word from the accused group to defend themselves.  I don't run articles about how black metal institutions like Inquisition are "probably" Nazis based on a random former Nazi tour bus driver recalling a foggy memory from 20 years ago, a random former Nazi who has been noted for accusing completely innocent bands and/or ones that were unaware that one of their members had since-disavowed Nazi sympathies a decade prior.  I don't find myself completely failing to comprehend how people can change and drop their edgelord childishness when they grow up.  I don't miss the most obvious Sabbath reference since the bridge riff in "I Love the Lamp" on Electric Wizard's new album and scratch my head confused as to why they would reference Sepultura's shitty nu metal album and still unironically claim to be an authority on metal.  I may not endorse every dumb thing GWAR says but I don't clutch my pearls and act shocked when a band that routinely makes jokes about their own founding member's fatal heroin overdose cracks a suicide joke about Chester Bennington in between songs about raping babies and injecting a dinosaur egg with smack in hopes it will murder hippies when it hatches.  I don't help perpetuate the circular firing squad that the internet culture has helped foster by attacking one of the most respected underground metal labels in recent memory because some of their releases are by shitty racist fuckwads.  I don't perpetuate the stereotype that metalheads are both ignorant gobshites AND head-in-anus fart sniffing pompous buttheads.  I don't help expose an actual sexual predator like the dude from Ovid's Withering and then mysteriously delete the article with no explanation even though it's one of the only times one of my "expose" pieces was totally on the money and I actually did some tangible fucking good in the world, prompting rumors that I was paid to keep it hush and doing jack fucking nothing to address said rumors.  I don't take easy shots at Dave Mustaine and Ted Nugent while simultaneously jerking off Machine Head to the point of carpal tunnel simply because I seem to be under the impression that the only prerequisite to assembling guitar notes in such an order that isn't so fucking boring that it accelerates natural death is to simply not be a white supremacist douchebag.  I've never written an impossibly cringey "manifesto" acting like I'm some beacon of truth and justice and a savior for the common dipshit headbanger.

And I'm not incapable of writing an editorial about how I'm objectively superior and smarter and more fucking metal broooo than everybody who doesn't like me without suffocating heaps of self aware irony instead of coming across as a self collapsing vortex of hypocrisy essentially morphing my self righteous verbal diarrhea into a condescending Five Finger Death Punch song.

Fuck everybody.

ONE HUNDRED NATZY SCALPS

Stream of consciousness incoming

Yesterday, A.V. Club, generally a great source of pop culture news with an occasional smartass twist (a natural consequence of being the rare non-satirical entity owned by The Onion), published an article titled "Metal music still has an unaddressed Nazi problem".  It's been making the rounds in my internetical circles for obvious reasons, mainly being that I'm a metalhead who writes and talks about metal all the time and therefore associates with several likeminded people, and it's just gotten me thinking about a couple of things.  So I figured I should impart some of my unearned and unwanted wisdom upon y'all, because there's a lot to address in that article, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna lose my way and get introspective as it goes (I don't outline anything before I write it, sue me).

The most glaring thing about the article that I noticed is that it is either amazingly poorly researched, or the author is so far up his own ass that he's in danger of choking on his own head.  Now, I'm not going to sit here and defend Nazis.  I fucking hate Nazis.  I can't stand racism or anti-semitism or basically any other sort of -ism you can throw at me, I just generally don't talk about my political views here on Lair of the Bastard because y'all come here for metal reviews and fart jokes, but it's the truth.  So the fact that this article lit a fire in me does not mean anything even remotely approaching that Nazis are alright and we as a listenership should just get over it or anything of that nature.  What I'm really getting at is that if you're going to go after the shitty people in metal, you should at least take on a modicum of journalistic integrity and have something resembling an idea of what you're talking about.

The article begins by talking shit about Disma, which is fair.  I think Disma is an alright band but they're certainly not a Nazi/white supremacist band, but they are led by Craig Pillard, who hasn't done much in the way of distancing himself from any Nazi sympathies he may seem to exude.  His Sturmführer project is really hard to defend, glorifying Hitler and his atrocities with aplomb.  Whether or not it's just tryhard edgelord shock value bullshit, it's still not the kind of thing that society at large is cool with, so his involvement with pretty much anything is going to carry the stink of Sturmführer.  I'm one of those people who can separate art from artist, and I realize that's likely a privilege thing, but the fact is that I think Arghoslent riffs extremely fucking hard so I'm going to listen to them, but I'm also not going to get upset if somebody else is going to see the lyrics recanting tales of how awesome slavery was and decide to not support them.  That's their individual choice, so the author saying Disma should suck out farts and die is fine by me.

Where he starts to go off the rails is immediately afterwards when he accuses Profound Lore of having no moral compass, signing bands full of awful people and indicating that they simply do not give a shit about these types of things.  If there were more examples than just Disma (I remind you, a band that says nothing objectionable other than the typical death and morbidity tropes of death metal and simply happen to have an objectionable member) I might understand, but the next band on Profound Lore's roster they go after is... Cobalt?

Wait seriously, fucking Cobalt?  The band that wrote Gin?  The album with motherfucking Ernest Hemingway on the cover?  Hold on, does David Anthony actually know a fucking thing about Cobalt?  Cobalt generally sticks to topics of loss and misery at the hands of war, and I don't mean like "Aw yeah the Third Reich had the right idea invading Poland" or anything of that nature.  Hell, Cobalt has always had only two official members, and from the band's inception until 2014, Phil McSorley was one of them, and he's a source of controversy, sure, but only if you completely cut off the narrative at a specific point.  He snapped after an interview with Andrew Curtis-Brignell of Caïna, where Andrew talked about how the forced misanthropy of black metal was kinda dumb and why feminism and such was important.  Phil took offense to this sort of "USBM friendship scene" as he called it and started spouting off homophobic remarks in retaliation.  If you stopped there, Cobalt absolutely seems like the kind of band you'd want to distance yourself from.  But the story doesn't stop there.  Phil was kicked out of Cobalt almost immediately.  That's not the kind of message that the other member, Erik Wunder, wants the band to be associated with.  So there was an offending member who spewed hateful shit and he was immediately kicked out of the band.  To hold the words of somebody who was kicked out of the band as a result of those exact words against the band is just insane and unfair.

But really, that's not his issue.  His issue is with McSorley's replacement, Charlie Fell of (the inimitably fucking awesome) Lord Mantis.  Oddly enough, even then his issue isn't necessarily with Cobalt, but with the album art for Lord Mantis' third album, 2014's excellent Death Mask.  Let's take a look at this offending art:

Now, in a vacuum, it's not exactly hard to see why this could be offensive.  It's a sickly green trans person, mutilated and bound with a noose falling out of slit wrists inside some cosmic hellscape.  Now, anybody who has been touched by Rin's path knows the school of thought that "art is meant to be interpreted, not understood", but the fact of the matter is that there is a concrete message behind this.  I'll let Charlie explain this in his own words, via a statement he released after a review at nocleansinging brought attention to the perceived insensitivity of the art (emphasis mine):

“The art work wasn’t meant to offend it was made to be a portrait of myself destructiveness as well as my minds eye view of my humanity and sexuality. The last album also featured a transgendered Christ on it and its been a theme in our cover art through out the bands existence. Im not always the best with words and come off a bit crass and insensitive to some people but I have no problems or prejudices with any race, gender (cis, trans or otherwise) or sexual orientation.

“I myself am a jew and work at a gay bar in Boystown Chicago and also was in a relationship with a transgendered woman so I can tell you that the band does not advocate violence towards anyone besides ourselves, hence the noose and the scars and the agony of the figure on the cover. I haven’t had the most privileged life and the bands art is a direct reflection of my own misery and was not intended to be some sort of tasteless shocker"

See how fucking easy that was to explain?  It's not just a shocking "hee hee look at us we're murdering a trans person" shitshow, it's an expression of the vocalist's own hatred of himself and his confused sexuality, a vocalist who is also Jewish, works in a gay bar, and has been in a relationship with a trans woman.  Like, holy shit talk about taking the exact opposite message from something and justifying it with a cherry picked quote from an interview where he's trying to push the mysticism that so many extreme bands inexplicably rely on (this is sort of a side note itch-scratching, but I hate that sort of shit.  Just be like "Oh hey, my name is Steve and I work in a pet store, this next song is about Satanic murder cults", we really don't need to believe you're in a Satanic murder cult in order to enjoy the song).  Throwing Fell under the bus for something he's already explained is fucking inexcusable, and the author and website both owe him an apology.

Keep in mind that very little of what the article has discussed has to do with Nazism up to this point.  It's only been Craig Pillard, who by extension means everybody else in Disma has drawn ire, plus an entirely unfair attack on Cobalt, Lord Mantis, and Charlie Fell for reasons that make absolutely no sense and were already adequately explained.  So this "Nazi problem" apparently has a whole lot to do with... people not actually being Nazis.

From there the article goes on to continue beating the dead horse of Inquisition, based on a story told by a former tour bus driver about the band going gaga over his swazi tattoo.  This one always bugged me because it was a total hearsay report from one guy about a situation from a decade or more prior with no witnesses, initially reported on as total unflinching fact by Metalsucks with the headline "Inquisition are probably Nazis".  Dagon gave an interview later where he explained his rather laissez faire approach towards the hatred of the past and explaining that they initially signed to No Colours Records simply because they were the only underground label of any renown willing to sign them back then, white supremacy be damned.  I'm not going to try to explain away his 88MM project or the association with No Colours, or the promo pics with a Nazi flag (though that one is likely just cheap shock value as opposed to genuine hate, though I can understand somebody not caring about such a distinction) or his defensive interview (which did him no favors by being presented unedited, including all of his pauses and "um"s and "uh"s), but Metalsucks isn't exactly known for being calm, slow, and rational about these things.  Lets not forget the time they went after Destroyer 666 for being racist Nazi pricks based almost entirely on a white wolf being present on a 20 year old album and an after-show anecdote from a fan, running smear pieces for a week before somebody actually had the idea to fucking talk to the band and ended up retracting everything and deleting the articles.  That one is even more confusing considering there are heaps of stories about KK Warslut being a racist dickhead but apparently they decided to focus on something really flimsy and ended up having to eat crow over it.

Next up is the deadest of all dead horses, going after Mayhem for the shit in the early 90s that every metal fan is well aware of.  Yes, the black metal scene had a lot of ugly shit going on, from the church burnings, to Varg Vikernes being a racist neo-Nazi piece of shit who murdered Euronymous (who, by the way, hasn't been in Mayhem for upwards of twenty years now and even gave up on metal entirely (for racist reasons, natch)), to Hellhammer's ugly quotes regarding racism and homophobia (which, again, were eons ago), to Faust stabbing a homosexual man to death (who, again, hasn't been in Emperor since it happened so holding his actions against the band is like me saying Wal Mart is racist because they hired my high school bully as a cart pusher and then fired him after he said something racist), and on and on.  There are tons of great examples of awful, terrible, reprehensible people being involved in classic bands but to trash those bands after dumping members for those exact reasons is nuts.

Lastly, they take on the guitarist of Deafheaven because of Twitter posts from before the band even formed of him using slurs like a regular part of speech.  Yes, he shouldn't have said those things and I'm not going to try to spin it like he did nothing wrong, but the original article that broke that story never asked him for a comment.  It was just "HA HA LOOK AT THIS SOME DUDE FROM A BAND THAT IS POPULAR NOW USED TO CALL PEOPLE FAGGOTS ALL THE TIME BEFORE THE BAND EVEN STARTED AND NOW WE'RE GOING TO AIR IT TO THE WORLD WITHOUT GIVING HIM AN OPPORTUNITY TO APOLOGIZE BECAUSE WE DON'T CARE IF PEOPLE CHANGE HA HA HA!"  And this A.V. Club article presented that article with nothing else, not caring if he had any remorse or even if he tried to defend himself in some sort of terrible way, it was just used as another example of why metal is littered with awful people with no sort of context around it.

What this all amounts to is a ridiculous witch hunt and an exercise in false equivalence.  Kerry McCoy said "faggot" a lot back in the day and Charlie Fell used his art to express self loathing and sexuality in a way that some people misinterpreted, and that somehow makes them equally as bad as literal murderers and people who glorify a regime that facilitated the deaths of millions of innocent people.  Because... they all play black metal?  Because homophobia is synonymous with Nazism now?  I don't even know what Anthony was trying to go for with this article, because it was just a litany of examples of shitty behavior, several of which were presented irresponsibly or flat out incorrectly, with "Nazi" in the title like it somehow tied it all together.  I feel the need to reiterate that Charlie Fell absolutely got shafted in this article and deserves and apology, everything relating to him, Cobalt, and Profound Lore Records is absolutely shameful.


Now, finally moving past the summary of the initial article, I guess what I want to say in response to all of this is that there are a disturbing amount of Nazi sympathizers in metal, the thing is that there are very few, if any, "infiltrators" and people who get away with murder (literally and metaphorically) in metal.  For the most part they're all sequestered into their own little pocket of easily avoidable and hateable niche of NSBM.  Somebody like Craig Pillard helping shape what death metal would later become in Incantation is a huge rarity, and to frame an entire argument around that, sucking in innocent bystanders like Fell into a self-collapsing vortex of nonsense, is crazy and irresponsible.  If the author wanted to make a point about the problem of Nazis in metal, there were tons, tons more rational examples he could have used.  But no, he went for the sensationalist approach of trying to equate Deafheaven with Absurd, and that's preposterous.

Going back into politics, I am personally fairly far on the left side of the spectrum.  I'm all about inclusion and positivity, I just happen to love aggressive, violent music.  I understand there's a cognitive dissonance at play here, and I'd be a total hypocrite if I tried to deny the privilege I have as a straight, white, cis dude who can't possibly be personally offended or attacked by 99.9999999% of the themes present in metal.  But what this article did was irresponsible and inexcusable, and it only makes it harder for people to sympathize with the values its trying to hold up.  I know it's not always black and white, and I'll admit that seeing Richard Spencer get punched in a face was so schadenfreudetastic that I nearly ejaculated hard enough to change the ph level of the atmosphere upon seeing it, but there's something to be said for tone.

What I mean by that is that this way of going about business, attacking anything and everything that could possibly be seen as insensitive without any attempt at actually understanding it, is fucking dangerous and can (and will) easily backfire.  I actually agree with most of the values that sites like Metalsucks stand for but thanks to their sensationalist and oftentimes sloppy reporting, I don't support them.  The general message of Antifa is something I can wholly get behind.  Fascism is awful and needs to be stomped out before it can spread, but shutting down an entire Messes des Mortes festival simply because Graveland is playing or making threats against a venue in Oakland because Marduk is stopping there on tour is fucking nuts.  Marduk uses militaristic imagery but have written precisely zero songs painting Nazis in a positive light, and threatening to attack a fucking venue simply for hosting them and the several other bands on tour and the innocent fans who just want to headbang their troubles away for a night is the exact opposite of what should be done.  That's picking a bad target and utilizing the exact tactics you claim to be fighting against in order to make some idiotic point, and it makes you look bad and undermines the entire message you're trying to spread.  Articles like this aren't going that far, but it's the same idea.  This article picks bad targets and makes a loosely defined point by attacking people who have jack fuck to do with what harmful shit they're trying to highlight, and in turn devastating their own point and turning otherwise rational people against them.  DON'T DO THIS.  IT IS NOT HARD.

You see, I used to be this way.  No, not like the article, but like the bands they're trying to attack.  When I was a kid, I was an outsider.  I was generally a loner who hung out with a bad crowd because at least they accepted me, and when I was a kid I used to say and believe some pretty reprehensible shit.  Sure I became this charismatic stallion later but that was only when I started forging healthy relationships, read a thesaurus, and got really good at dick jokes, but back then I could have been the type of edgelord clownshoe to start a Nazi band because at least I was getting a reaction and wink wink nudge nudge I'd probably totally be okay if we got rid of all the black and gay people.  I wrote an essay when I was 12 about how immigration is bad because soon there will be more brown people than white people in America.  Do you want to know how I broke away from that shit?  I had things explained to me.  My mom saw that paper before I turned it in and said she'd rather I take a zero than raise a white supremacist.  She illustrated why the things I was saying were awful and how I'm illustrating my veiled prejudice without even realizing I had it.  I didn't know I was racist, it all made sense to me, it wasn't until somebody offered a different perspective that I realized that I was actually being a hurtful dickhead to people I had never met.

Am I saying that polite discourse is the truest way to solve the societal ills that plague us?  Not exactly, I know that a lot of people are so far gone that there's really no way to salvage what humanity they previously may have had.  I was saved from being a hateful prick because it was caught and dealt with early.  It wasn't brainwashing or browbeating, it was simply exposing me to a new way of thinking that, ultimately, made a hell of a lot more sense to me once I was introduced to it.  Shit, I wasn't even barred from hanging out with those people anymore, because I was trusted to make the right decisions, and I did.

But, the difference here is that I'm not in the public eye right now.  I'm just some dork on the internet who plays a lot of Final Fantasy and talks about death metal with pointlessly purple prose, so that shit is pretty much protected.  But if somebody had somehow dredged up all that shit I had said more than half my life ago, you bet your ass I'd go on the defensive and probably dig my heels in the dirt.  How dare you try to paint me as a bad person now because I said bad things back then.  How dare you paint me as a bad person because I used to be friends with white supremacist dickholes, despite the fact that I don't associate with them now.  Just like how it doesn't matter that Phil McSorley used to be a major player in Cobalt, because he said awful things and is no longer part of the band as a result.  Just like how Faust went to jail for a reprehensible murder and Emperor did not stand by him, instead forging onwards and creating an identity that had nothing to do with what he did.  Just like how McCoy said awful things in the past but was judged to be a terrible person now without any regard to whether or not he changed his ways.  Just like how Fell did absolutely nothing wrong and found himself dragged through the mud yet again because somebody didn't bother to do any fucking research.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's a divide between retribution and rehabilitation.  Some people do not want to see or give people the chance to reform, they want to see them nailed to a cross because forgiveness is not an option when it comes to something evil.  This goes for the prison system that favors harsh time or capital punishment as well as people who will not buy an Inquisition or Deafheaven record because Dagon has made some terribly poor decisions and said some hateful shit in his youth or McCoy liberally threw slurs around like they meant nothing.  Other people are willing to give people the chance to change, with or without an explicit apology.

Honestly, I'm not going to give answers here, because I don't have any.  I'm posing the question to you and giving you the opportunity to debate with yourself whether or not one way of thinking has any merit whatsoever.  Do you think that things McCoy said years ago remain status quo until he explicitly apologizes for it?  Or do you think he's grown and matured as a person and deserves the chance to move on?  Do you think that Mayhem should not be supported because of all the terrible things that happened with them in the past or do you think that they've sufficiently distanced themselves from them and forged a new identity and do not need to revisit the past?  This is up to you, this part of the rant isn't meant to be soapboxing, it's genuine curiosity on my part because even I don't know exactly how I feel, even though I certainly seem to be leaning more in one direction than the other.  I understand that everything is a spectrum and there are exceptions to everything.  I'm asking the questions and not providing the answers, because I don't have them, only you do.  I can't tell you how to think.

But I can tell you that the A.V. Club article was sloppy and irresponsible, and potentially very harmful to people who may not deserve the vilification.  This ridiculous witch hunt within metal needs to fucking stop, and efforts need to be focused on the chief offenders who are blatantly and gleefully perpetuating hate and violence, instead of people who might have done so a lifetime ago and have tried to leave that behind them.  People like McCoy, regardless of whether or not you give them the benefit of the doubt in regards to growing away from past homophobia, do not deserve to be lumped in the same category as Varg Vikernes and Hendrik Möbus.  That is dangerous and irresponsible.  I keep using the same words because... fuck it's the truth.

And no matter how you feel, there's no denying that Charlie Fell got shafted and misrepresented, and deserves some sort of apology, because that's just fucking tragic.

Jari Maenpaa - His Stupid Fucking Face and the Crybaby Bullshit that Comes Out of It

WHERE ARE ALL OF THE ASSHOLES WHO ARE NOT EATING MY MOUSSAKA

I apologize in advance for writing what is basically a MetalSucks article, but I just can't keep doing this shit.  I can't keep seeing and hearing Jari Maenpaa make shitty excuses for his shitty music while all his good little minions lap it up like ignorant gobshites.  My frustration boiled over today after he posted an announcement on Facebook (you can read it here if you'd like).  Ostensibly, it's just an update for fans.  But when you think about it even medium-hard, it really just exposes him for the narcissistic fraud he really is.  I've gotta rip him apart somehow, and I've already reviewed everything he's touched, so I'm just gonna lash the fuck out and not give the minutest shit how unprofessional it is.  Nobody makes my blood boil like this guy.  So here, an open letter will have to sate my bloodlust for the moment.


Darling Fascist Bully Boy,

Basically, what this statement does is show us where your priorities truly lie.  You want to be a rockstar.  That's the long and short of it.  You seem to believe that your genius is worth more money than Nuclear Blast is willing to give you and is so precious that you doesn't even want them to get a cut of the potential crowd funding pie.  Which, in your defense, you do say that Nuclear Blast straight up forbade you from going the Kickstarter route, but at the same time I really don't blame them.  They've done everything they're supposed to do as a record label, the onus to create lies solely on you at this point.

To start the whole rant off, you complain about your living situation and how that affects your ability to practice and record.  You live in a rinky dink apartment with neighbors, so you can't practice or record vocals or anything of the sort in your apartment.  As such, to avoid bothering them, you work at odd times and yadda yadda.  That's all well and good, but you know what?  Fucking zero other metal bands can record in their apartments.  You think that when it's time for a new Dying Fetus album, they all just get together at John's place, drop trou, and start ripping out some death metal loud enough to piss off everybody in earshot?  What the fuck makes you so goddamn special?  Get in the fucking studio like every other band worth a damn in the history of the universe.  I understand that you want full creative freedom and you feel constricted in a studio, plus I can assume you've had some bad experiences with them.  I understand, every artist should have full control of their work, but the way the cards are falling now, you're in absolutely no position to be making demands.  You work slower than a three legged tortoise, you don't have the ground to start demanding more money for studio time from your label.

I've got to give you credit for something though, this is probably the first time I've ever felt sorry for a major record label.  Nuclear Blast is huge and can absolutely survive without you, but as it stands, you owe them money.  You are in debt to them and I don't feel the tiniest drop of sympathy for you.  You say that in order to craft Time II as you intend, you require more time and money to accomplish it all.  The thing is, you knew the score, they gave you your advance with the full expectation of recuperating that cost with album sales.  The label is refusing to give you more money because they already loaned it to you.  They gave you the money to make an album that you never made, now they're out however much until you get off your ass and fucking make that album.  They're not holding your art hostage here, you are.  Remember when you announced that Time II would come out in early 2014?  Yeah, I laughed about that too, because I knew that was bullshit.  And here, rolling into August, I'm smug as a peach because I was 100% goddamn right.  I kept my mouth shut until May, which is around the time I started reminding everybody "Hey, remember that Wintersun album we were supposed to be enjoying right now?"  Do you know how ridiculous this is?  It's already August in Finland and you haven't even fucking started this new album.  I am utterly floored that your fans put up with this much shit from you.  I don't even fucking LIKE Wintersun and I'm appalled!

The thing is, you can't go crying about the business being against you right now.  Since day one, since the instant you left the starbound Ensiferum to work on your pet project here, the one your heart was truly in line with, you've been consistently failing at doing your goddamned job.  If you turned in your completed work, and Nuclear Blast had said "No, this isn't want we were looking for.  We wanted an album that sounded more like [this]", then I'd be right behind you here.  As much as your unfailing inability to recognize and write to your strengths drives me up the wall, I am 100% in favor of artistic freedom and you should be able to make this album sound however you want it to sound.  But the issue here is that Nuclear Blast hasn't done that.  They've refused to loan you more money and shot down the idea of a Kickstarter campaign because you're the cause of a gushing hemorrhage.  They've put money down on you, and you've given them jack shit in return.  You absolutely can not sit here and cry about the business being unfair when you've proven yourself completely incapable of fulfilling your end of said business agreement.

I'm also not buying your crocodile tears about how you have five albums worth of material written that's just sitting unused because the big bad label is causing issues with Time II.  Ignoring the fact that the only person causing issues here is you, I don't believe for one second that you have five fillerless albums penned.  No you fucking don't.  The first batch of songs for Wintersun's debut were written in 1996, and the album didn't come to fruition until 2004.  I understand you were working with Ensiferum at the time, but Ensiferum has always been Toivenen's band, not yours (as evidenced by the fact that the music sounds pretty much exactly the same regardless of your involvement), and it really just shows that you've always taken eons to write anything.  Five albums have been written since 2006, when you claimed to have written Time?  Yeah okay, I believe that about as much as I believe in the legend of the toilet fairies.  And you claim no filler?  Well okay, no artist is ever gonna say they've got filler songs, so I can't knock you too hard for that, but man you've always been prone to shitty filler songs.  You're good at one style and bad at everything else, Wintersun has a whopping three good songs ("Beyond the Dark Sun", "Winter Madness", and "Sons of Winter and Stars"), and your work with Ensiferum was pretty much half and half.  Hell, the only Ensiferum  album that ever managed to have no filler was the first one they made without you.  You haven't written shit, that's a bold faced lie and I actually feel fucking insulted that you'd even try to pass that one by me.

The bottom line of all this is that you need a studio.  The thing is, fucking book some god damned time at one and finish your shit.  You don't get to own a studio simply because you want it, and no amount of caterwauling is going to change that.  You don't get to complain about the label making money off what you do because, ya know, that's precisely what a fucking label does.  It's almost like you expect to live entirely off your music despite the fact that no metal bands can do that unless you're famous on a level akin to Metallica or Iron Maiden.

Oh wait, there's a post script, I wonder what it says...

"p.s. Should have stayed working in the post office!"

Wait...

You mean...

You're actually not working?

WELL NO FUCKING SHIT YOU'RE BROKE YOU DUMB, EGOTISTICAL BASTARD.  What kind of maniac quits his job before knowing whether or not it's totally feasible?  I'm blown away, struggling to comprehend the thought process here.  Okay, so you quit your job at some point to work on the band, sure.  But surely you didn't just recently quit, surely at some point over the last ten fucking years you've noticed that you're not going to be able to afford the studio time and everything else necessary to complete an album since you don't have steady income.  At no point did it dawn on you that you should probably get a fucking job?  How old are you?  Even I have a job and I'm a fucking idiot.  No wonder you can't afford anything and need to beg the label for more handouts to finish an album you haven't gotten close to finishing after god knows how many years and dollars have been sunk into it.  Ross Dolan and Bob Vigna of Immolation work construction jobs and just take time off when it's tour time, and they're one of the most consistently respected death metal bands still active today.  Hell, Eric Adams (I remind you, the singer for fucking MANOWAR) works a day job.  You do not get to act like you are above Manowar.  You do not get to pretend that you or your band is or has ever been more popular or important than Manowar.  That's just fucking astounding, you want to be a rockstar, seemingly blissfully unware that you simply will not ever be one in the genre you're in.  

There are hundreds, thousands even, just a metric crapload of bands who have less money and prestige than you do that still manage to book studio time and churn out several albums in a decade's time.  This perfectionism of yours is completely killing your band, you're turning this whole charade into a metal version of Chinese Democracy.  I'm not telling you to settle for less, I understand that you want your artistic vision to reach its full potential, and as much as your art disgusts me, I support the notion.  The problem is that you're completely unwilling to work things out for your fans.  Instead you continually drag out this woe-is-me bullshit for years at a time, passing deadlines with no updates and constantly throwing out empty promises.  

And the saddest part is that, come 2020, when Time II is finally released, it'll surely just be another half hearted turd you squeezed out for all your adoring fans to gather around and lick rapturously.

In short, you kind of annoy me.


May the seed of your loin be fruitful in the belly of your woman,
~BH