To celebrate our 100th episode, we sink some beers and chat gatekeeping. We hope you get no enjoyment from this whatsoever.
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Hate Meditations 
Hi, As always a very insightful podcast (and I usually hate podcasts)! First a disclaimer – I’m actually a huge Pantera fan. Sure I love my classic death metal and but I do find space for groove metal there too. Child of 1990s and all that jazz. Anyhow some of my thoughts:
Gatekeeping is a critical function in any human endeavour but it’s one that’s no longer acceptable in a society that preaches extreme tolerance and acceptance and where moral relativism has destroyed any concept of something being better than something else. Gatekeepers are in many ways keepers of original core values associated with a movement. Without these values, movements degenerate to the lowest common denominator or simply disintegrate. Indeed even from a political perspective, the Australian Labor Party and Blair era British Labour Party adopted a valueless “broad church” that embraced ideas that were completely opposite to any kind of socialist thought. Now people in a lot of west are voting for right wing types who bizarrely promise some sort of return to prosperity for working class. Extreme metal always had “political” values or even a form of theology. Extreme metal was always anti-mainstream. It wasn’t left or right wing in the traditional sense – in some ways it was extremely libertarian and in others extremely conservative. Now modern extreme metal has been made mainstream and lost any sense of value. I’d say this is due to a number of factors: 1. Many metalheads are their 40s and any youthful fires has been burned by largely comfortable western class living they obtained as they get older. 2. Younger metalheads are growing up in a valueless consumer society with an emphasis on hyper individuals. 3. Adoption of moral relativism as the defining cornerstone of western culture. This moral relativism then translates to a focus on extreme tolerance and acceptance. From a metal perspective this is why so much mediocre metal is now praised. Criticizing music for faults is now viewed as negative “haters” and viewed as unwelcome. 4. Digital technology has arguably removed all value from music. Music is now largely free not just in terms of dollar value but the time and effort needed to find the music. And from the creator’s perspective, anyone can now make “professional” sounding albums with professional covers for next to nothing using cheap software. Hence hundreds of albums released each year that sound exactly the same. At the same time we’ve seen the rise of online fanboys and haters, who love/hate music without any thought as to why. People with legitimate criticisms are dumped in the hater category or marked as intolerant. There is indeed some truth to the saying “tolerance is the last virtue of a dying society.” From a metal perspective, tolerance/acceptance of everything means the genre is degenerating into irrelevance as every cookie cutter album is glorified as “best album since classic album X.” At some point people will switch out and the genre fades into obscurity. Maybe that’s a good thing though…
Jason’s issue with verse chorus structure is strange as it’s always been in extreme metal since it was invented by Venom, Metallica, Celtic Frost etc. One thing they did well in the old days is write memorable extreme metal. Even death metal acts like Death, Autopsy, Morbid Angel and Entombed wrote memorable and dare I say, even catchy songs often rooted in traditional music structures (eg listen to Zombie Ritual by Death or anything off first two Autopsy albums or Deicide’s Dead By Dawn). Anyway I’ve prattled on long enough. Keep up the good work, Denis from Tasmania
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Excellent insights right here. Liberal subjectivism is poison to art. As you pointed out, it levels everything down to the lowest common denominator, to an indistinct gunk that’s interchangeable with anything else.
But this situation is not unique to metal.
Next to nothing new has emerged in music since the dawn of the internet age. If anything new has emerged, then surely it has emerged independently from the internet. (Sam Kriss’ article “The internet is already over” drives this point home far better than I could, but I will not attempt to link to it here, as my last attempt to include a link in one of my comments was unsuccessful, for whatever reason.)
Music during the internet era has only managed to combine references to pre-internet genres, which initially resulted in a handful of entertaining enough fusions, but it has ultimately culminated in a whittling down of everything to an indistinct, interchangeable gunk. (For examples, look up hyperpop, Sematary, NEOPUNKFM’s “What Is ZoomerGaze?” or almost any hyped “metal” band since at least the 2010s).
Unless or until the online era of neoliberal capitalism is surpassed, this predicament is unlikely to change.
As for me, I’ve stopped listening to anything released later than 2013 or 2014. This might seem outrageously reactionary or contrarian to most people, but I can’t stand anything that this “late e-capitalist” epoch has produced. I hate Bandcamp releases with mockup “J-cards” for cover art. I refuse to waste a second of my already bleak tenure in Samsara as a human listening to a simulacra of something that was once alive. It feels like larvae eating away at the rot in my soul. I would gladly choose Buckcherry or Five Finger Death Punch over Erythrite Throne.
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In terms of listening I am in the same boat. I tend to gravitate to the 1980s and 90s with 2006 being a cut off of sorts.
PeriodicallyI try new music but then usually end up wondering why I bothered and scurry back to the past.
Modern metal is no longer art nor social statement. It is a throwaway product.
Yet somehow metalheads relish this as a good thing. “Hey I brought Slayer sneakers and Fleshgod Apocalypse pasta and brough Amon Amarth album 15 that sounds same previous 14 Amon Amarth albums.”
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