Zadok wrote:
Thought this was a good piece:
Quote:
While this abundance has fulfilled my metal dreams, it has been accompanied by a strange sense of deflation. To some extent this is because dreams fulfilled are almost always disappointing. There are also good reasons why abundance does not necessarily satisfy. The ease of finding what was once obscure takes away the pleasures of anticipation, of discovery, of searching things out. The fact that metal music is no longer found exclusively in physical media removes much of that precious ‘aura’ that can accompany physical art objects. Demo tapes were exciting and mysterious objects because one had to ‘work’ to track them down. In the 1990s, I remember hearing rumours that there was a Pakistani metal band who had released a demo, something that seemed impossibly obscure and exotic at the time. I tried and failed to track down their tape, but I did track down others from faraway metal lands like the Phillipines and Peru and there was always a delightful frisson when tapes from distant lands finally arrived in the mail. Today, there isn’t much frisson to googling something and finding it. Stripped of the aura, rare and obscure metal recordings become much more mundane.
http://souciant.com/2013/11/too-much-metal/I think I'm being published in a book that this guy is editing. Regardless, dude read some Walter Benjamin and completely missed the point. Digital reproduction, the incessant proliferation of music into digital format that makes all of it accessible all the time, does negate any of the aura that it might have once had. But eliminating that aura eliminates the barrier between artist and audience. Mass proliferation equals mass participation. I could post my buddy's crust punk band here and y'all could listen to it, despite them being a 30+ gutter punk, an alcoholic and a grad student in history. That's pretty fucking cool.
http://coelacanthmetal.bandcamp.com/As for that multiculturalism essay, the Laina Dawes book that he cites seems really good from what I've read of it. His claim about Sub-Saharan metal is wrong though. Bands from Uganda, South Africa, Madagascar, the aforementioned Botswana and Zambia all get mentioned when discussing African metal. I think there is also a comparative element. Metal as being a part of the culture industry competes with other parts. Metal markets to same the dispossessed youth as rap does. The market of alienated youth is a divided market; black kids tend to listen to rap and white kids if they don't listen to rap or alt rock, they listen to metal. It isn't that raced individuals are missing from metal (the audience of that Absu show in DC a few weeks back was half hispanic); it is more to blame that black folk when affluent enough to participate are going to different shows. There is a reason that Anthrax, Body Count, Public Enemy, Slayer could cross genre lines at the time and that's because they're effectively hitting the same demographic of pissed off youth. Now, twenty years later consumer choices are more constitutive of folks' identities, and rejecting what you don't "like" is as much a part of people's listening as it is enjoying what you like. I think that kinda closed the possible bridge there from early on. It is still crossed sometimes, but to claim that nu metal represented that moment is fucking stupid. Nu metal was a marketing of that original spirit and sold back to us. I might write a response to this article because I have this dude's email.
