Anyone who has been aware of my writing for a while knows pretty well that I’m a pretty huge nerd when it comes to video games. They’re my second love, with the first being music. They’re also the two most expensive hobbies in the world, but that is a whole other subject for some other time. Occasionally, there is an incredible crossover between some form of metal and video games, and I can’t help but give it a knowing wink and nod. Or, in this case it’s a confluence of all sorts of things that just happen to share the same archetypal concept.

The thought for this article began to cross my mind as I wrestled my way through the latest Assassin’s Creed game, which if you haven’t been following the series has basically gone from a sort of Lost-esque conspiracy science fiction to batshit fucking insane within the span of two yearly iterations as Ubisoft (the game’s developer and publisher) attempts to strange as much money out of the franchise as possible.

What is funny about the story of these games is that it has pretty much evolved into the same story told by the Ayreon discography, with its dream sequencer experiments and the end of mankind. Of course, you also have to acknowledge that even though the elements of each story are as fantastic as can be, the bare guts of each one are fairly basic and recognizable. I’ll be analyzing this to some extent while also pointing out the ridiculous similarities between the game series and the concept behind most of Ayreon’s work.

As always this deserves warning: I am going to be spoilery as fuck in the following article. Just a note though, it’s not like you should give a shit. Judging by the latest Assassin’s Creed game, the writing team doesn’t.

One of the more basic beats of the story for Assassin’s Creed is that the whole time you are playing as someone from the past, it is a simulation. They explain that pretty quickly — that the main character of the series (Desmond) is the product of a bloodline of Assassins, and that using a machine called the Animus, they are able to have him simulate his ancestor’s memories through some McGuffin-esque bullshit involving memory being linked to your DNA.

Believe it or not there is actual research being conducted in this field, as people attempt to explain how generations of turtles are able to return over thousands of miles of ocean to the exact place on Earth where they were born, and lay their own eggs there, too. It is also being studied as a way to explain how salmon are able to return to the same river systems to spawn and why other animals instinctively know certain behaviors when they haven’t been taught them. Whether or not any of this DNA-linked memory theory has really played out, I don’t know, but the results of any of this research will be interesting.

For the purposes of Assassin’s Creed’s story (I’m going to be referring to it as AC from here on out), though, it’s basically a really, really, really ridiculous way of explaining away the videogame’s HUD system. I shit you not, as you are playing the game, that little health bar in the corner is basically the same health bar that the main character of the game sees. You’re playing as a guy playing a game, more or less.

SOUND IT

Now, the connection on the Ayreon side of things right now is pretty interesting. The main concept of the Flight Of The Eternal Migrator, Dream Sequencer, and The Human Equation albums are similar to the story of AC. They tell the story of a man who is able to use a machine to relive the memories of those before him through simulation.

Ayreon did it first, but to fault the AC series as if it were ripping off Arjen Lucassen (the man behind Ayreon) seems a bit ridiculous. It is actually a surprisingly common story, with the only real difference being its execution and what the people in the machine are simulating. It is basic philosophy that ties into Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave and even sees some iteration in the form of The Sprawl Trilogy by William S. Gibson and The Matrix films. The characters may not all be reliving memories of ancestors, but the idea of a human in some form of machine simulating a whole world is very common.

When you drill right down into it, only two of the Ayreon CDs deal with the idea of actual human events. The Human Equation doesn’t  explain whether it’s featuring the same character from the first two CDs, or hell, whether any of the events described in that disc really happened in the world Ayreon has built or if they were instead just some sort of ginned-up computer experiment that would enable the person inside the Dream Sequencer (when the events of that disc take place) is able to feel emotions again.

As a sidenote: The whole ginned-up-by-the-computer experiment is also something that AC touches on when explaining how the characters from the multiplayer keep appearing in the single-player aspect of the game. There are a few times when your driver (who does a lot of the explaining about which historical figure is which) can’t explain why some random jester appearing as an assassination contract are part of the memories of Ezio or Altair (the two AC ancestors thus far). She just says there is no trace of them in history and that they appear out of nowhere.

Of course, this also hints at the fact that perhaps all the various Animi (animuses?) are linked together on a certain network, and even though the one being used by the Assassins in the later game is in no way connected to the people who are handling the multiplayer side of things (they say that they are the templars, but to be honest, they’re basically just Bad Person McBadGuy nowadays), every time they log in so that Desmond can relive another’s memories, they are still on the same server.

The original game had the main guy working with the Bad Guys by coercion and using their genetic memory device, but then he learns the truth and runs off with the Assassins, who happen to have their own genetic memory device. Multiplayer is basically the bad guys training legions of people on these devices as their own little assassin avatars.

One of the common themes with Ayreon’s music is the concept of a group of humanoid beings known as Forever, who manage to figure out the key to immortality but at the cost of emotions, basically becoming cold machines who feel nothing. They’re the puppet masters throughout a lot of Ayreon’s work, sending back the dreams that show the cold desolate future to each of the prophet characters in Ayreon’s early discs. Basically it plays out that Forever creates humanity by putting their DNA on an asteroid and crashing it into Earth. This allows Humanity to form and Forever experiences life again through humanities trials and tribulations. Forever begins to meddle in human evolution and gives them the equation of E=MC2 and then teaches humanity how to survive various viruses and bacterium.Then Humanity destroys themselves via Nuclear War on Earth and the rest of the species is left to go extinct on a colony on Mars. Thus, Forever sends these images back to early prophets in an attempt to change things and in a ‘what a twist!’ shocker still manage to fail.

But the idea of beings outside of our own creating us and then meddling in our own evolution is familiar…

Ahhh, hello friend.

Of course, this all ties back into Assassin’s Creed in that they too have something similar. The main thing driving the bad people to make the main character relive his memories is that they are seeking something called the Piece Of Eden. There are many of them but they only need one in order to activate a machine that will prevent the end of the world. Of course, the Assassins are seeking a similar thing because they too have something that will prevent the end of the world.

It has been strongly hinted in the game that the end of the world will be via Solar Flare and that the devices they plan to activate were made by the same people who made the Piece Of Eden. Those people are commonly referred to as” The Ones Who Came Before” and they are a race of humanoid beings who came to Earth and created humanity as slaves, yet altered their evolution by breeding with them. Then the world was destroyed via Solar Flare, while the race of humanoid beings (now worshiped as Gods) and the slaves are at war with each other. Most of this is explained via Assassin’s Creed 2′s batshit insane ending, and then expanded upon by the following two games.

The only changes between Ayreon and the video game series’ work is the method of humanity’s destruction. Hell, you could say that the appearance of all the gods at the end of each game, addressing Desmond, is basically what Forever did on Ayreon’s work, which was try to send messages of a bleak future back in time, with information about how to prevent it from happening.

So the basic gist of both the game and Ayreon’s work boils down to The Ancient Astronaut theory. Fantastic.

Now what does this mean for the future of the series? To be honest, I don’t know. The series has lost two creative directors now for various reasons, meaning that anyone who had any clue what the fuck was going on is probably gone at this point. It has been turned into a yearly franchise, which has basically slowed the whole experience down to a crawl.

You’ll note that the ending of Revelations, which I linked to above, doesn’t even really reveal anything that we didn’t already know. However, this year is supposed to be the big year that the story of the game and real life all converge around the big 2012 Apocalypse event that isn’t happening. One of the things I can try to do, though, is parse out where the story will go from here via my knowledge of Ayreon’s works and one of the more interesting theories I’ve seen.

Still reading?

It seems like a total cop-out when you think about it, but it is highly likely that the main character of Assassin’s Creed will fail in saving humanity. One of the main grounds for my suspicion of this is how much we’ve seen that’s pointing to the fact that very little time remains to prevent anything; Subject 16 (who is later introduced and killed off in Revelations with no fanfare at all) even says so in his prophetic moment during Brotherhood — all of which leads to the theory that I think is interesting from a story standpoint, yet by the same token I feel is a total cop-out.

I’ve seen it written a couple of times across the internet now, and it makes me roll my eyes, but I’m starting to think that Desmond is another avatar for someone else, and that you are really playing as someone else further down the line, after an apocalyptic event, trying to figure out just what the hell happened.

The funny thing about this theory is that it sounds startlingly similar to the story behind the Dream Sequencer albums. The game has hinted a few times that you may in fact be Desmond’s son, who says that he survives the upcoming killer solar flare, but maybe most of humanity does not, and yet somehow perhaps they stumble upon an Animus, and said offspring is reliving his father’s memories as a way to either revive humanity or just get some sort of explanation before he too, passes on.

It’d be depressing as hell, but if you apply the Ayreon template to the Assassin’s Creed story, I think that is probably where they are heading with this. It’s likely, because at this point there have been so many different cooks in the kitchen that all the disparate elements that have made Assassin’s Creed interesting will never be brought together in any sort of way that makes sense.

They’ll really never be able to explain Subject 16 with any sort of satisfying result, or how he was prophetic as all hell in Two and Brotherhood, yet was really just a bit player in Revelations who didn’t and couldn’t explain shit.

It will likely feel like a really heavy cop-out, but that tends to happen when you take a game like this and turn it into a yearly franchise. They’ve been stacking question on top of question in order to make things super-mysterious and have now written themselves into a corner. It is surprising how much the Ayreon idea of Forever and The Dream Sequencer lends itself to explaining away things, even though the method of destruction of humanity is different.

And to be honest with you, none of the games has Mikael Akerfeldt, Devin Townsend, or Jonas Renske screaming at you at any point. And oh yeah.

SOUND IT

And yes Ubisoft, if you are hiring I am looking for work.

~DGR

No, I Wasn't Drawn By Par Olofsson

The dusty wind blew across the frosted landscape with a ragged rasp. A clump of dust rolled by clumsily, slightly bouncing up and down as it traversed the bumpy forest floor (What the heck is dust doing in a frosty forest?!). Birds chirped their last call for their nest mates as the day drew to a close, with the sun turning a red-orange hue as it slowly descended beneath the horizon, disappearing into the ravenous maw of the icy cold night.

Snap.

I Haz Huge Battleaxe

The warrior grimaced at the remembrance of the stranger. He was a disrespectful one, that arrogant youngster, daring to step into his territory and openly challenging him to a duel! If not for his strict adherence to his daily schedule of hunting animals for sacrificial offerings to the Dark One and his meticulous maintenance of the stash of different-sized battleaxes back in his straw hut (And what the heck is a straw hut doing in a frosty forest?!) located close to the edge of the Carpetrug Forest, he would have cleaved the cocky bastard in half right there and then.

But then again, the stinking gunslinger had had the advantage of clear vision and long-range under the brilliant fireball of an afternoon sun…

The warrior finally reached a secluded part of the forest and stopped. He looked around, searching for any signs of life. Strange, he thought. The gunslinger had chosen a morbidly good spot. This part of the forest had such a dense canopy that practically no shaft of sunlight ever reached the layer of ever-decomposing leaves on the damp ground. The humidity level was so high here that even the bacteria responsible for decaying all organic matter could survive during winter and do its work. In other words, this was the perfect place to murder someone and leave him or her to rot into oblivion. Talk about covering your tracks. Damn, this youngster is something after all, the warrior shuddered.

Oooooh, Creeeeepy.

The crunching sound was getting closer. Ten… No, Eight… Six… It was barely five meters away from him now, the warrior concluded. His daily rituals were paying off well. With the blessings of the Dark One, his all-too-human eyes had overridden their feebleness and evolved into all-seeing instruments that could detect even the faintest reflection of a photon off an object he desired to see.

He could make out the svelte gunslinger in the pitch-black darkness, cowboy hat on his head, and two Wild West-era revolvers snuggling comfortably in adjacent gun pouches on both sides of his hip (Again, what freakin’ era is this?! The Viking Ages? The Wild West era?). A faint hint of cigarette smoke greeted the warrior’s nose, causing him to sniffle irritably. He did not handle the stench of burnt tobacco well, for he found it suffocating and just plain unpleasant to inhale. Besides, he would never want to get into that filthy habit of smoking out of the fear of starting a forest fire in his grim and cold leafy dwelling.

“You ready?” the gunslinger drawled, blowing a plume of smoke into the air. He sucked deeply on the expiring cigarette and threw it onto the frosty ground, crushing it with his right boot.

The warrior did not reply. Talking to your enemy would only reveal more information about yourself, and the less the enemy knew about you, the greater the advantage you had over him (and the more the enemy talked to you, the more you would find out about him). This was common sense for war veterans. He had fought in countless wars between the hordes of Hell and the pristine forces of Heaven back in his heyday after all. There was no way in hell this youngling could beat him. By the Dark One’s horns, this hatchling probably hadn’t even seen a real dead body yet!

“Cold, aren’t cha?” the gunslinger laughed. “Well, have it your way,” he continued, shrugging his shoulders. He coughed to clear his throat, and began to recite something off a notebook he retrieved from a baggy chest pocket.

The warrior glared at his soon-to-be victim, thinking up the thirteenth variety of how he was going to cut up the damned gunslinger with his gleaming battleaxe. Its sharp edge had not tasted blood for ages now, and its bloodthirstiness suddenly started manifesting itself in a nefarious aura of hot red.

Ahhh, Fresh Meat!

Flocks of frightened birds took to the air, anxious to put as much distance between the ferocious beast and themselves. The ground vibrated from the sonic shockwave as well, causing the frozen dirt on the ground to scatter and distribute itself evenly across the forest floor.

“… and that concludes the duel contract. In no way am I responsible for any insurance payout or anything of that kind when you’re dead… Oh, what power!” the surprisingly calm gunslinger taunted. He held on to his precious hat amidst the strong gale that was concocted out of the sheer force of the sonic shockwave. He started fumbling around in the pockets of his trousers with the other hand.

The warrior charged. He had been waiting for such an opening. His heavy-duty combat boots clobbered against the frosty ground, leaving footprints an inch deep with each earth-shattering impact. He could feel his firm, black armor of hardened bull hide wrapping his upper-body in a protective embrace, with his knee guards of reinforced Kraken shell (Now a Kraken?! What is this fictional world coming to?!) completing the impenetrable set.

GYAAARGHHHHHHH!!!

“Wait a minute, he can’t see in this darkness,” the warrior realized in belated wonderment. “So what gives?”

In that split second, the duel’s victor was decided. The gunslinger drew out a flare with lightning-fast fingers and lit it up, burning the warrior’s nocturnal eyes. He swiftly grabbed the revolver from his left pouch with the respective hand and unloaded a metal slug into the warrior’s unarmored head.

PWNED

Play Me

(I got sort of caught up in all the year-end Listmania we’ve been feeding you on this site, and am therefore late in publishing this guest opinion piece by Jesper Zuretti of The Binary Code. Check this out and let us [and Jesper} know what you think.  Are we putting too much emphasis on recording quality?)

We Are the 3%: Recording Quality v. Song Quality
a novice attempt at history, psychology, and temptation

Many people hearing music in this day and age tend to put the quality of the recording in the forefront, even ahead of the quality of the composition and music. But how much does the music-hearing individual really understand about the quality of the recording they’re listening to? Should they need to understand anything at all? Should music be over-scrutinized and classified into the depths of genre segregation, with fine-tuning into multiple combinations of classification?

The best part about music, in my opinion, is the freedom you have with it, and yet people are probably pickier about music than they are the food they eat. The history of music proves to us that recording (although it's the conduit to our musical stream) is but a small aspect of music’s place in the entirety of human existence. I’m no certified musicologist (although I’d like to think I am), but maybe we’ll open some minds – just bear in mind that I’m a long-winded typist! Stay with me:

Human beings have been making music as long as the species has existed. The human voice is considered one of the first instruments we ever used to make music. And beyond that, Humpback whales also spend a great deal of time creating music (and by "great deal of time," we’re talking Frank Zappa amounts of time). So it’s very safe to assume that music was being created even before mankind came into existence. On that assumption, if you subtract the amount of time during which humans have actually captured music on recordings from the length of time whales have been on this planet (speculated to be 54 million years), you end up with less than 3% of music’s supposed development time dedicated to recording.

When was the first recording of music ever created? Music history books will tell you that Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville created the phonautograph in 1857. It  was essentially a horn used to capture the sound, which was directly attached to a diaphragm and bristle that vibrated inscriptions onto a hand-cranked cylinder. The song recorded was “Au Clair de la Lune”, a children’s song/story that I’d be willing to bet most children from the 1980’s forward (including me) haven’t even the faintest recollection of.

Now, you can imagine the quality of the phonautograph, as compared to Pro Tools 10 with hundreds of thousands of dollars of outboard gear and analog tape machines. The quality might be different, but does the latter really tell a story, set a mood, or bear a tone in a fundamentally better way? Keep in mind, 1857 was the first time humans were capable of hearing playback music. Since that time, each era of music has had its top-notch producer. A shitty recording in 1960 may very well be the best recording of its generation. With the progress of technology, we need to understand that the quality of the engineering and recording at any one moment may not stand the test of time.

The first time I heard black metal, I was instantly turned off by the lo-fidelity quality of the music. (Mind you, I “heard” black metal; I didn’t “listen” to black metal. But we’ll diverge into the differences between hearing and listening to music a little later on.) The quality of the musical composition, emotion, story-telling, and just about every other aspect outside of the Audiophile’s Guide to Music, were all completely disregarded, based on the final production value of the recording. Same goes for the drone genre: all I was hearing when I first clicked Sunno))) on mp3.com in 2001 was rumbling, low-end, changing pitch every 25bpm meter.

Contrastingly, the first time I heard a band like, say…Meshuggah, the quality of the recording was obviously leaps and bounds beyond something that would have come out of the Inner Circle in Norway. But now, with all of the recording tools we have in our modern musical era, it’s very easy for a band to obtain a “high quality” recording. But as many wise men have said, “You can’t polish a turd.”

Hearing music versus listening to music, what’s the difference? First and foremost, when you hear something, it doesn’t necessarily mean you fully paid attention to the sound. As a matter of fact, we hear things all the time without paying any mind to them whatsoever. This is often the case for the average, common, simple, music-hearing individual. Music to them is in the background of their lives; the lyrics, the creativity, the uniqueness, the meaning, none of that has any effect on what they’re listening to.

Of course, we all can admit that when we listen to music, we don’t always sit in a windowless room with a prospectus of musical rules and regulations, checking off each line as the song plays on. But I tend to give heavy music fans more credit than the average human when it comes to scrutiny.

When you listen to music, you’re doing just that: LISTENING. When your parents yelled at you about things as a teenager, you were just hearing “rarr rarr rarr rabble rarr”, not listening to the advice (most often disguised as demands) they were giving you. Now, as a grown-ass human, you should be able to look back in retrospect and realize that you weren’t listening. You just heard their words, in one ear and out the other.

Now, when a person listens to black metal or drone (and, for the record, I’m not here to convert anyone into black metal or drone fans – they're just often overlooked genres of music), they should hear more than the 4-track tape recording quality. I’m sure there are hundreds upon thousands of reasons why black metal still just doesn’t do it for some folks -- I’m not saying that people who don’t like black metal and drone aren’t listening to it correctly. I’m simply saying that it’s almost border-line teenager for someone to avoid a genre based on the quality of the recording.

I hope I'll be able to delve into this topic a little bit more in the future - so leave questions, comments, concerns, and I'll make sure to keep them in mind with my next guest piece. Thanks for reading!

- Jesper Z.

PS: For those interested in checking out some black metal or drone that have interesting and unique qualities to the recordings, please check out: Xasthur – Portal of Sorrow, Leviathan – Massive Conspiracy Against All Life, Deathspell Omega – Paracletus & Fas – Ite, Meledicti, in Ignem Aeternum, Sunno))) – Monolights & Dimensions.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Check out Jesper and his band the Binary Code @  http://www.facebook.com/thebinarycode , and by all means, if you've got an opinion about the topics Jesper explores in this piece, leave a comment.]

[ANOTHER EDITOR'S NOTE: Jesper and I have figured out that we are pursuing the right career paths, instead of one that requires . . . math proficiency. The correct percentage for this post is not 3%, but .000003%, which is roughly the percentage of the time since whales came into existence that human beings have been recording music. But we're sticking with 3% anyway. Call it literary license.]

Last year, I vented about Christmas — at length — in a post creatively titled FUCK CHRISTMAS. It seems to be getting a renewed surge of web hits this month, which I suppose proves that the sour taste I have in my mouth this time of year needs to be spit out by other people, too. Except this year I don’t seem to be feeling so bloated with hostility that I need to vent. I’ve been questioning myself, trying to understand what has changed.

ME:  So what’s going on with you this year? Are you feeling more charitable, more filled with love for your fellow men and women, more kindly and gushy and huggy?

MYSELF:  Fuck no.  Also, fuck you.

ME:  Well, that wasn’t a very nice answer. Let’s try this again: Have you changed your mind about all those nasty things you said last year about Big Business using Christmas as an excuse to guilt-trip people into spending money they don’t have on presents people don’t need?

MYSELF:  Nope, not at all. This year, like last year, retailers are still acting like a horde of vampire squid, sticking their blood funnels up your bunghole and trying to suck out all the cash you’ve got while pretending everything is happy and jolly. It’s tough to remember the event that Christmas is supposed to commemorate when you’ve got a groping blood funnel up your ass. Also, fuck you.

ME: Okay. Well, are you enjoying the Christmas season music more this year? Is it putting you in a cheerier mood?

MYSELF:  Surely you jest. Did you see this?

I rest my case.

ME:  Huh.  I feel you on that one.  But hey, we still have the Trans Siberian Orchestra:

MYSELF:  Really?  Really?  I’m starting to feel my will to live slipping away.  All this seasonal music blows, including Trans Siberian Orchestra (don’t they get tired of playing that fucking song?), and especially the seasonal music pumped out by bands who want to cash in on the Christmas spirit by selling it. Join the fucking crowd of vampire squid! Me? I’d rather pick up this recently released Misantrof “Holy Fucking Anti Christmas” compilation: 18 bands, over 80 minutes of rancid music, and it doesn’t cost a fucking dime.

HOLY FUCKING ANTI CHRISTMAS, VOL. IV

Also, did I mention fuck you?

ME:  Yes, that rings a bell, I believe you did mention that.  Well look, I’m confused. It doesn’t appear you’ve changed your mind about anything, and to be brutally honest, it seems like you’re just as hostile toward Christmas celebrators as you were last year. What gives?

MYSELF: Hey man, don’t you know me better than that? You fucking should. I mean, you know me better than anyone except my parole officer. I don’t have anything against people who love their holiday traditions. And this has got nothing to do with people believing Jesus was the son of God and died to redeem their sins. Really, I don’t have anything against Christians who use the time to reflect quietly or in communion with other like-minded people about what the day symbolizes. “Tolerance” is one of our middle names, remember? I just get tired of people invoking Jesus’ name as authority for telling me how to live my life every time I turn around.

ME: Yeah, I do know you, which is why I’m confused. If you haven’t changed your mind about all the Christmas-season bullshit, then why don’t you feel the need to spew and vent like you did last year?

MYSELF:  Well, mainly I just don’t have anything new to say. It’s the same old stuff. It wasn’t original when I wrote last year’s rant, and my complaints haven’t become more insightful with the passage of time. Also, I’m doing a better job this year just ignoring all the seasonal horseshit. I think that’s the real recipe for happiness this time of year — just stock up on beer and chow, disconnect the tv, and hunker down at home until it’s over. Never go outside, and spend all day listening to metal until it drowns out all thoughts of what’s going on in the fruitcake world beyond your doorstep.

ME: Wait — does that mean I can’t watch tv or go outside either? I sort of wanted to drive around and look at Christmas lights.

MYSELF:  Go fuck yourself.

ME:  I’m really not enjoying all this crabbiness and the shitty attitude you’ve got.

MYSELF: Hey dude, chill out. You know me. I’m not really feeling hostile, it’s all just an act.

However, we’re still not going outside, and that’s final. But look, it won’t be so bad — I made this tree for us to enjoy while we hunker down and wait for the season to pass:

(Thanks to ElvisShotJFK for sending me the link to the Cthulhu tree photo at the top of the post.)

(A new music video from a Long Island hardcore band called Stray From the Path provoked a discussion last night between me and TheMadIsraeli, and that in turn led the MadIsraeli to pen this post, which raises some interesting questions.  Comments please!)

Let’s take things back a couple of decades . . .

The 80’s.

When I think of the 80’s, I think of three things.  The best action movies, fucking Slayer, and the tape-trading scene.  I’m only 22 and had the misfortune of missing out, so I can only imagine how exciting it must’ve been to get together with some friends, swapping old demos of greats that were to come or underground legends that were never to be heard from again.

From what I’ve heard and read, there was real community there, the manifestation of the love of music through human interaction and true brotherhood, all with a common unifying purpose and affection: The metal.  Really, not just the metal, but heavy music in general.  Hardcore also had its own thriving tape-trading circuit.  So where is this taking me exactly?

Not only does Stray From The Path play tight, chaotic hardcore full of piss, vinegar, and street rage, they’ve also shown that they know how to make you think.  The lyrics of this particular song and the imagery in the video provoked a conversation between Islander and me that got me going on this post.  You can read the lyrics here for reference (they’re also at the end of this post).

Based on the video, Islander and I originally speculated that this song was simply about the evils of piracy, but the lyrics don’t suggest that, and in combination with the images contained in the video, it appears that there really is something deeper in the subject matter of this song: Not a protest against getting music for free, but the idea that the digital age is killing the heart, soul, and community of music, and especially heavy music.

Now why is that exactly?  How could that be?  It is the reduction of art to file size and bit rate.  I can even look at myself and see that digitalization has kind of desensitized me to the true value of music as both a labor of love by the musicians and as an art form.  I just sort of gobble it all up and go through it like a trash compactor because I can do it so easily.  Trying to resist that is part of why I decided to wait ’til release days to finish album reviews.  I wanted to give the albums time to sink in and to give myself time to fully appreciate the music for what it is.  Ideally, I want to have the space to fully capture and understand the essence of the music I’m listening to, something that is admittedly hard for ANY of us here at NCS or any metal blog to do and yet produce enough daily content to keep readers engaged and entertained.

And what has happened to that sense of community epitomized by the tape-trading scene, as I understand it?  It seems that it has become less common for people, either one-on-one or in a larger group, to go over to each other’s apartments or houses to hang out and listen to an album that has just become available that everyone is stoked about.  That kind of in-person sense of community in metal seems to have been undermined by the digital age. People are no longer heading to the record store and bumping into fellow metalheads who are as stoked as you are about whatever new music you’re there to pick up.

Even in the early part of the last decade, before file-sharing and the like REALLY took off, I connected with many people at the local FYE, picking up the new God Forbid or Shadows Fall album at a time when I was in love with first-wave metalcore.  I had good experiences, sometimes having random strangers in my age group with similar musical interests piling into my car with me just to jam that shit the fuck out on the stereo.

It’s moments like these that have mostly died out with the digitalization of music.  I think that phenomenon has also resulted in diminished metal brotherhood. People now have fewer chances or reasons to meet and share music on the streets or in their homes or stores, because it’s so easy to get up in the morning, hit The Pirate Bay, Filestube, Mediaboom, or what have you, and grab what looks good.  That’s reducing listening to music to the equivalent of eating for pure survival and nourishment.  On-demand, costless, rapid consumption of music makes it mean less.

Is that what acquiring and listening to music has been reduced to?  Mere routine?  Maybe it would do us some good to be sent back a decade or more, to live for a while in a different age.  Maybe that would be for the good of metal, to return to an earlier time.  Because really, wasn’t metal originally something above and beyond just the creation of music and the hearing of it?  Maybe, as Stray From the Path proclaims, we really should take it back to the streets.  Maybe we really are essentially slowly killing the art we so love by making it too accessible and too plentiful.  What happens when you become desensitized to what you love?  Do you really love it anymore?  How much does it really mean to you at that point?

I’m not really reaching a conclusion or making an argument here, just asking the questions, because I don’t know for sure.  What I do know is that I love this music with every ounce of my being.  At moments like this, I remember an ex-girlfriend of mine.  The one who got away, you could say, and who shaped who I am today immensely.  She used to carry around an old tape player with her and had amassed a TWO THOUSAND PLUS TAPE COLLECTION.  That was legit to me.  I wonder if all my arguing with her about the modernization of the music industry being for the better was wrong, and that in fact, it’s for the worse.

Lyrics To “Bring It Back To the Streets”

When there was a sickness, there was a cure
Right outside on the streets at the record store
There once were heros that we looked up to
We never thought that we would do the things that they’d do

Their presence is long gone
Disconnected from the world that we grew up on
Nothing will ever make as much of an impact
When you hear these words will they make you react?

When there was a sickness, there was a cure
Right outside on the streets at the record store
There once were heros that we looked up to
We never thought that we would do the things that they’d do

‘Cause if this world is all about digital lives
I can say that I’m ready to die
One time, when you need to be saved
With a kick and a push you can get away
One time, when you need to be saved
You can go and get lost in a mixtape

‘Cause if this world is all about digital lives
I can say that I’m ready to die

Since we can’t live in yesterday
Say goodbye to the past as the world turns grey
Since we can’t live in yesterday
We can look to the future but it’s all the same
This generation has gone up in flames
Because with all hope gone there is no cause for a change
We know it’s inside us all and the world has made it harder
To latch onto the sound of being set free

Disconnected from the world that we grew up on
Bring it back to the streets

Opeth’s new album, Heritage, leaked at some point in the last week or two, I forget when exactly. The official release date isn’t until September 20, but lots of fans have already heard it — and as of today you can now hear the whole thing in a stream at NPR — and flame wars have already begun here, there, and everywhere. Mikael Åkerfeldt has been giving interviews about the album (here, there, and everywhere). Among other things, he has said (here) that although the album isn’t “a massive departure for me and for the guys in the band,” some of the band’s legions of fans may find it “different.”

In the same interview, he said, “We don’t make albums thinking about the fans too much. We have been fortunate to have people who have accepted what we put out so far. Because we were just doing what we wanted to hear and apparently other people liked it too. So I’m hoping it’s going to be the same for this album.” When asked about fans who shout “treachery” whenever a band decides to tread off the path they have beaten, he replied: “Well, they wouldn’t be fans if we hadn’t started as a band. We have fans because we did what we wanted. Our success, or whatever you want to call it, is based on the fact that we do what we want as opposed to doing what the fans want. So it doesn’t apply to us.”

Oh, I beg to differ Monsieur Åkerfeldt! You can’t so easily escape the ire of fans who are already up in arms over Heritage, calling it “boring”, or “lazy” or “70′s prog rock”, or worse. Of course, there are at least as many defenders of the Opeth faith who, while agreeing that it’s “different”, admire the music on Heritage and support the freedom of the band to do whatever it is they did on the album.

I’m not entirely sure what they did, because I’ve only heard the first song that premiered back in July — “The Devil’s Orchard”. I liked much of the instrumental music on the song, didn’t care for the vocals, and decided I probably wouldn’t listen to the song again (after the first four times). But that’s mainly because of my own taste in music. This just isn’t the style of metal (if it is metal) that I want to hear. But I wouldn’t say the song is bad, for what it is. Which leads to a few thoughts and a few questions about “music criticism” and fan response (after the jump).

As I think about it, there are three levels of music criticism, ordered by the increasing amount of effort that each entails.

LEVEL ONE

This is the “sucks/awesome” level. This is the mode of opinion that doesn’t really analyze the music or try to set it within the framework of objective standards (begging the question, for the moment, about whether such standards really exist). It’s an expression of personal taste and preference. It’s the first way many fans react to something they’ve heard.

The typical choice of words is unfortunate, because when you say an album sucks or is awesome, the words signify something about the merit of the music, but the truth is, when most people brand music with those words (and words like them), they’re really not saying anything about the music at all. They’re saying something about themselves. They’re merely expressing whether they liked the music or didn’t.

This kind of opinion isn’t analytical, of course, and it doesn’t really help anyone else decide whether the music is worth hearing, because it’s so rooted in the speaker’s own personal tastes and relative sophistication as a listener. If you don’t know much about the speaker’s tastes or the extent of their knowledge and education about music, then hearing (or reading) them say that the music “sucks” or is “awesome” tells you nothing useful. The debates also get tiresome quickly:

“This sucks!”

“No, it doesn’t! It’s awesome!”

“No it isn’t, and by the way, you suck, too!”

But hey, this isn’t a put-down. People are entitled to their opinions, and really, do you have to put a lot of thought into what you write when you’re just banging away on some message board, or chat room, or Facebook wall (or NCS comment section) late at night? Shit, I hope not. I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage that at NCS. But still . . . if you’re really trying to learn something useful as a reader, you might come away empty-handed.

LEVEL TWO

Now we move beyond the simple, unadorned expression of personal likes and dislikes, and we get into explanations of why someone does or doesn’t like the music. This kind of criticism is still rooted in the speaker’s personal tastes, but at least now the speaker is disclosing something about those tastes as well as something about the elements of the music and why those elements do or don’t appeal to those tastes. Now, at least, you as a reader begin to have a better sense about whether the music might be your thing or not. You might also get a better idea about whether you should put any weight on the speaker’s opinion.

So, when someone says that Heritage lacks the heaviness or the cutting edge of some of Opeth’s previous albums, or bemoans the lack of harsh vocals, or proclaims that it’s a piece of 70′s prog-worship, you begin to get an idea about whether the album may appeal to you, based on your own tastes. But this kind of criticism is still very much a product of subjectivity. It’s a way of saying, “I, as a listener, like music that includes certain elements, and this music doesn’t have enough of them going for it.”

LEVEL THREE

Now we get to a mode of expression that at least makes an attempt to test the quality of the music against objective standards. Here, we find expressions of opinion that the music is good, bad, or indifferent, but attempt to explain those opinions by reference to something beyond the listener’s own personal tastes (unlike Levels One and Two).

The writer or speaker, for example, could confess that they don’t personally like the style of music, but then analyze it by reference to the standards of quality applicable to that style or genre. It could be deemed good for what it is, or bad or mediocre for what it is, because of the sophistication (or lack thereof) in the songwriting, or the inventiveness (or lack thereof) in the instrumental performance, or the quality and emotional expression (or lack thereof) in a singer’s voice, for example. The music could be judged for whether it takes the tropes of a certain style/genre and combines them in a different way, or stretches the boundaries of a particular mode of musical expression to produce something intriguing and new.

This kind of opinion tends to lead to a more engaging discussion of the music, which may or may not be what you’re in the mood for at the moment. I’ve seen debates about Heritage, for example, that produce conflict about whether Opeth is simply re-treading 70-’s-style prog by failing to add anything new to the mix, whether it represents nothing more than a form of self-indulgent exploration of prog influences that have always been present to lesser degrees in the band’s previous output, or whether it represents the band’s use of their undeniable talents to create something noteworthy, even if very different from what people may have been expecting or wanting.

I suppose, at this level of criticism, you might also see discussions about whether it’s right to condemn a band for departing from their more typical style, or whether instead we should recognize that people who’ve been creating music as long as Opeth aren’t going to stay in the same place, and that they’ve earned the right to make music that reflects where their heads are at any given moment, even if it isn’t what their fans want them to do. This kind of discussion really isn’t musical criticism — it isn’t really an analysis of the music itself. But it still seems to fit better here, in this classification, than in Levels One or Two.

And that brings me, finally, to opinions about opinions. Must all music critiques fall into Level Three to be worth the time of day? Is there a time and a place for Level Two and Level One discussions? Is a speaker himself or herself to be judged by whether all they can do (or all they choose to do) is provide opinions at those levels?

If you have thoughts about those questions or anything else I’ve blathered about in this post — including whether you think Heritage sucks or is awesome, leave a comment, won’t you? In teh meantime, I’m going over to NPR to listen to that full Heritage album stream.

UPDATE: Phro’s first comment below suggests another topic I should have included in this post: What do you think of artists who say they create what they want to create and don’t pay attention to what their fans want, even though it’s the fans whose money allows them the freedom to create? Are they being honest when they say such things? And if they are, does that make them scumbags, or awesome?

We all live in two worlds: the face-to-face world, the world of flesh and blood, populated by the people with whom we interact in person on a daily basis, and the electronically enabled world, in which we interact with people we’ve never met. In my face-to-face world, most of the people I know aren’t metalheads. The people I work with and most of my friends aren’t into metal, and don’t have any idea that I have this blog. They’d be terribly confused if they knew.

I do know people in the flesh-and-blood world who are into metal — people I see at Seattle clubs pretty regularly, a handful of musicians, and a few people I’m very close to, but in my circle of friends, they’re outnumbered by people who don’t get the attraction of metal at all. The truth is that I “know” far more people who are metalheads in the electronic world than I do in the face-to-face world, and I’ve “met” most of them through NCS.

The headbangers from those two worlds, as a group, aren’t a statistically valid sample, and I’m certainly not a trained sociologist, but when I think about all the metalheads I know and I throw in the ones I read about, I draw some conclusions about why I’m drawn to them. In most ways, I think they’re like most people. They’re not any smarter or dumber than anyone else — it’s basically the same Bell curve. They’re not any more or less fair, any more or less conscientious, any more or less moral or “deviant”, any more or less hard-working, no more immune or susceptible to pain or joy, no less needing of love and friendship, no more or less heedless of the feelings of others.

Despite the vaunted extremes of the metal scene, I don’t even think most metalheads are any more individualistic or independent than the average person either. Because, let’s face it, human beings are social creatures. We’re herd animals. We need standards and we conform to conventions, and most of us tend to be followers instead of leaders. It just happens that our herd is smaller than the big herds that swarm around us, and our conventions seem alien to the members of those larger herds. Having said all this, however, I do think metalheads are different in certain ways, and those differences are what draw me to them. Yes, part of it is that they use the words “fuck” and “fucking” more often than most people, but there’s more. (after the jump . . .)

The word that’s coming to my mind, to capture that “something” that draws me to other metalheads, is “eccentricity”. I’d probably latch on to a different word tomorrow, but that’s the one I’m going with today. A standard dictionary definition of “eccentric” is this: “deviating from the recognized or customary character or practice; irregular; erratic; peculiar; odd.”

The word I nearly used was “geeky”. I don’t refer to that word in a demeaning way, because I know I’m one of the biggest geeks you could ever meet. The dictionary defines “geek” as either “an unfashionable or socially inept person” or “a person with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest.” That fits pretty well. Really, be honest about this. If you engage another metalhead in a conversation about music, or the latest album by this band or that one, it rapidly turns into an uber-geekfest. But “geeky” still isn’t quite the right word.

When I was a much younger lad, pursuing a degree in “higher education”, I lived in an apartment on top of a liquor store next to a strip club called “The Yellow Rose” and just a few miles down the road from the local chapter of a notorious biker gang called The Bandidos. I didn’t live there because it was my idea of style. It just happened that my step-father knew the guys who owned the liquor store, the apartment was empty, and he cut a deal that allowed me to live there for free.

It was a gross place in most ways, including the fact that everything in the apartment was covered in a fine white coating of pigeon dander, because a colony of pigeons lived on the liquor store roof along with me, and all that white stuff somehow migrated through the fine cracks of the windows. I’ve probably got a coating of the shit in my lungs to this day.

Not a great place to sleep either, because most nights I could hear yelling and beer bottles smashing and fights breaking out in the alleyway between me and the strip club. And, of course, the sound of Harley’s. That was my first exposure to metalheads, or at least metalheads of a certain breed, because that club played a lot of heavy metal on the PA system, and on certain nights of the week, a big chunk of the patrons were fuckin’ bikers.

I went in the Yellow Rose a time or two, for the obvious reasons. But I felt like a fawn in a den of wolves, so I didn’t make a habit of it. I didn’t think of the dudes in that place, the ones whose Harley’s were stacked in a row outside, as geeks. But I do think they were eccentric.

And in different ways, most of the metalheads I’m friends with today, both in the flesh and over the ether, are eccentric, too. They may be like most people in most ways, but the wiring in the brain is just a little bit off-center. A little irregular. A little erratic. A tad outrageous. To varying degrees, an “I don’t give a fuck” attitude. I guess if I had to sum it up, I’d just stick a big label on their foreheads that says: “NOT BORING”. And that’s the main draw for me.

Why did I go off on this subject tonight? I really don’t have a fuckin’ clue. Chalk it up to eccentricity.

Well, enough of this. Time for some music. I tried to think of a band whose music appeals to all metalheads alike, a band that everyone loves, regardless of their genre preferences within metal. I struck out. I’m not sure there is such a band, because metalheads are contrarian and devoted to their own thing, and their thing ain’t necessarily the next person’s thing. So, I just picked this band. Pretty damned influential, and one of my favorites, but I’m sure not gonna claim that all metalheads love them (though I do).

P.S. The artwork at the top of this post is the cover to the forthcoming album by Absu. It is fucking metal, IMO, and it’s pretty, too. So there. The second piece of art is from the new album by The Horde. It’s fuckin’ metal, too. And eccentric.

To recap:

An earthquake of historic proportions hit northeastern Japan on March 11. That triggered a massive tsunami that flooded a wide swath of the Japanese mainland. Millions were left without power, and the loss of power also caused malfunctions at a nuclear plant, which has been leaking radiation ever since. More than 9,800 bodies have been recovered so far, another 17,500 are still missing; the majority of those are probably dead. Even now, more than 600,000 homes are without water, more than 200,000 still without power. Hundreds of thousands remain homeless.

We have a faithful reader named Phro whose frequent comments make me laugh or feel queasy (or sometimes both). He’s an American living and working in the Tokyo area. On March 16, at the end of one of our more widely read posts, called “Our World”, we passed along an appeal from Phro for contributions to the relief effort in Japan. And then, in an update to the post, we explained that Phro had offered an extra inducement: if NCS and its readers could meet or exceed the goal of raising $500 for Japanese relief, Phro promised to do something inappropriate and ridiculous (e.g., wear a maid skirt and dance around akihabara) and send us photographic evidence.

We exceeded that goal — and Phro has now paid off.  (details – and photos – after the jump . . .)

To be specific, through Phro’s good works, we raised $515 for the Japanese relief effort, and when you count additional money Phro had a hand in helping to raise in Japan (and we count here a very generous contribution from Phro’s gf), the total exceeded $800.

Phro is very grateful. So are we. In a world filled with disappointments, including cretins in the U.S. who rejoiced in this disaster, thinking it was some kind of retribution for Pearl Harbor, what Phro did was very cool. To him, and to those of you who contributed and e-mailed us with the amounts of your contributions, thank you. Misery cares nothing for national boundaries, and sometimes, neither does kindness.

We would have forgiven Phro if he had delayed the payoff on his offer to the point when everyone would have just forgotten about it. But he didn’t forget. He sent us photos, with this note:

Ive done it.
Holy shit, that was embarrassing.

A quick note to all who donated:

Thank you for proving that metal heads are both generous and awesome humans! We may be few, but our strength is greater than our numbers. Also, there’s nothing a school girl skirt, fat bass lines, growly vocals, and some tentacles can’t fix.

Phro

And here’s one more shot of Phro and his girl in one of those pirikura booths, with the name of our very own site scrawled on the pic (thanks dude):

As you can see, Phro wisely obscured the face of his gf to protect the innocent, because we sure as fuck don’t have any innocents around here.

In closing, the shit is still flying in Japan, and the people trying to help provide relief are still looking for money. We can’t promise any more ridiculous photos of Phro, but if you feel like throwing a few dollars to that cause, here’s the same link we provided on March 16:

http://seattlejapanrelief.org

Think of our world —  the human part of it. According to the most authoritative current estimates, Earth is populated by nearly seven billion souls.

Now think about the number of people in the world for whom music is a part of their daily lives. I have no idea of the number. But for whatever reason, music is part of what it means to be human. There is historical evidence of music dating back approximately 100,000 years (in the form of Neanderthal whistles made from animal bone), and it surely dates back far longer, before the time when Neanderthals or homo sapiens created any kind of record or artifact that would survive to the modern era.

Certainly, music is not a part of everyone’s life. Some people are literally comatose, and others lead lives that are duller than a pothole of muddy water after a rain. But I have to believe that some kind of music means something to the overwhelming majority of people in the world every day.

Now, think about the number of those people who listen to music they would call “metal”. Suddenly, the number plummets dramatically. Again, I have no idea about the actual count (and no one else does either), but it has to be a tiny percentage of the whole, on a global basis.

Now, let’s subtract the people who call their music “metal” when it really isn’t metal at all (but instead is just hard rock or worse) and the people whose definition of metal means music that hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 80s, or earlier. Let’s get down to the people who listen to the kind of music we cover on this site, and on sites like this one — the kind of music you can’t discuss or even explain to people who don’t already get it.

Again, I have no idea how to estimate the number on a global scale, and no one else knows either, but it has to be vanishingly small — an infinitesimal fraction of a percent of all human beings. (I do have a point, and will get to it . . . after the jump.)

That is our world — a numerically tiny subculture of the planet’s overall population. On the other hand, as few in number as we are, compared to the great global mass of humanity, we seem to exist almost everywhere you care to look. This morning I checked our Google Analytics account — which compiles data about the traffic on our site — and it reports that over the last 30 days alone, we had 17,581 “unique visitors” to NCS from 132 different countries.

Visitors from the U.S. constituted the largest national group of NCS visitors (of course), followed by the UK, Canada, and Western Europe. At the bottom of the list was a single visitor from . . . wait for it . . . Mongolia. (Don’t worry, those Google Analytics stats don’t convey to us any personal information about who is visiting — only the countries where visitors are coming from.)

We had visitors from almost every continent and region you could think of — from Eastern Europe and Russia, from India and Asia, from Central and South America, from islands in the Caribbean and the South Pacific, from Africa and Indonesia, from Australia and New Zealand — and we’re not nearly as popular as some other well-known metal blogs. That blows my fucking mind.

Apart from the widespread location of metal fandom, I’ve learned through working on this blog that metal bands are also spread far and wide around the globe. Many of them are creating music in small, remote places where there is little fan support and huge cultural obstacles confronting this kind of music — but they’re doing it nonetheless. At this site, we try to pay attention to those kind of bands.

Off the top of my head, I can think of only a few parts of the populated world where I haven’t yet heard about a metal band — mainland China and Africa between the Sahara and the savannah come to mind, though I would bet money there are metal bands in those places, even if I haven’t yet run across them.

So, on the one hand, as a fan of extreme music I sometimes feel like a member of an endangered species. On the other hand, thanks to the internet, I also feel like I have brothers and sisters all over the world — people who speak the same musical language I speak, people who get the same charge out of this music that I get from it, people who understand that this music is liberating and emotionally powerful, people for whom this music gets them through the crap of daily life with their heads up, people who feel a sense of belonging to a community because this music exists (and maybe only because this music connects them to others who share similar interests and a similar worldview).

And the point of this post? Just to get off my chest the fact that I feel damned lucky to be a part of this blog, fortunate to have made the human connections that NCS has allowed me to make, and proud to be a part of this world — our world. If you feel like getting anything off your chest today, that’s what the comments are for.

One last thing, a bit off the subject, but maybe not so far off: What has happened to the people of the Tohoku area of Japan — and is still happening to them — is truly horrifying. They need help, and one thing metalheads who care about this catastrophe can do — one thing our community can do for this one, no matter where we’re located — is to give a few bucks to organizations that have the ability to deliver help on-site.

There are many such organizations, but NCS reader Phro (who lives in Japan) suggested this one to me, which interestingly is based here in Seattle where we are. This site provides links for donations. If you’re moved to help, check it out:

http://seattlejapanrelief.org

Okay, enough sappiness from me for today. Tomorrow, we’ll get back to new music, with a little something special in honor of March 17.

What? Did you forget that tomorrow is the anniversary of the invention of the rubber band?

UPDATE!!:

Our buddy Phro, who kindly suggested the donation idea, has provided an extra incentive for NCS visitors to contribute a little money to the relief effort in Japan. Everyone who contributes, either through the organization linked above or through any other relief effort, send me a quick e-mail and tell me how much you gave. Obviously, it’s the honor system, but we trust you not to make shit up about this.

I will keep track of the amounts donated, and if we can meet or exceed a goal of $500 by one week from today, then Phro has promised to do something inappropriate and ridiculous (e.g., wear a maid skirt and dance around akihabara) and send us photos of whatever it is he does.

And to show how really devoted he is to this cause, he’s asking YOU to suggest the ridiculous thing that he will do and memorialize with photographic evidence. He should be afraid . . . very afraid.

So, leave your Phro suggestions in the comments, and e-mail me a report of your donation at:

islander@nocleansinging.com

I won’t use your e-mail address for any other purpose and I also promise to give Phro an accurate tally of the donations. I do many bad things, but at least here at NCS, I don’t lie.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, but the relentless commercial onslaught that is Christmas is not done with us yet — not by a long shot. To borrow what Matt Taibbi vividly wrote about Goldman Sachs, the commercial Christmas machine will continue to wrap itself around the face of Western humanity for the next 30 days like a great vampire squid, “relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” As you’ll see, even some metal bands turn into vampire squids this time of year.

Yes, we need to vent a bit. That’s all. To be brutally honest, which is the only kind of honest we know how to be at NCS, we have nothing original to say about Christmas. Will that stop us from expressing our opinions?  Fuck no!  If incisive original thought were a requirement for NCS posts, we’d be in very deep shit. Lacking any such constraints, however, we will proceed — and you can’t stop us!

You might infer from the title of this post that it will just be an atheistic diatribe against Christianity, but you would be wrong. From our point of view, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian, an adherent of some other faith, or someone who has concluded that God is a myth, that Jesus was just a man, and that religion is for feeble-minded sheep.

Really, it doesn’t matter what you believe or don’t believe: All right-thinking people, Christians or not, theists or atheists, should raise their voices and middle fingers in unison and repeat after us: FUCK CHRISTMAS! (more after the jump . . .)

Maybe you believe Jesus was the son of God and died to redeem our manifold sins. Maybe you don’t buy the idea that Jesus was the son of God, but you still respect how he lived and what he taught before his crucifixion. In either case, it would be understandable that once a year, you might want to pause, remember, and reflect on his birth, and maybe even celebrate it — quietly and humbly.

Good luck with that. Is there a worse time of year than the “Christmas season” for quiet reflection about anything? Every available print, audio, and video media outlet is relentlessly spewing out exhortations to spend your fucking money, whether you have it to spend or not. Almost everything that is said publicly about Christmas is linked overtly or subtly to loosening your wallet, to converting your money into someone else’s money. Even the churches expect better-than-average contributions from their congregations this time of year.

A time for remembering someone’s birth has become, like virtually every other Western “holiday”, an occasion for commercial interests to part you from your money. If a business has got something to sell, this is the primo time of year to sell the shit out of it, even if the person whose birth is the excuse for the money-grubbing was famously disdainful of material possessions. They’ll spend the next 30 days trying to stick electrodes up your bunghole and fire up the voltage, repeatedly, until you surrender and spend yo fucking money.

It really doesn’t make sense. Do you know of any other occasion where we are exhorted to celebrate one man’s birth by giving presents to other people? Lord knows, Jesus doesn’t need the  presents. Depending on your beliefs, he’s either fucking dead or he’s someplace where he don’t need a nice Blu Ray player. We don’t claim any special insight here, but we’ve got a feeling he wouldn’t want a celebration even if he were still alive, much less any presents.  In fact, our feeling is that he would be fucking apoplectic if he saw the materialistic orgy that erupts at this time of year.

Look, we know some people love to shop, to wrap presents, to decorate, to drink the fucking egg nog, and for lots of those people, any excuse will do, and it’s got precious little to do with religion. But if you’re not one of those people, Christmas just becomes a fucking grind in which you feel pressure to give gifts to family members — whether you want to or not, whether you can afford it or not, whether the gift recipients really need or want the gifts, whether there is any genuine reason to do it at this time of year, except we live in a culture that has conditioned us to do it.

And that commercial compulsion is perpetuated down from generation to generation. What we do for children at this time of year — the presents under the tree, the Christmas-oriented entertainment in which we immerse them, etc. — the things we do either because that’s what we think we’re supposed to do or because we like seeing the happiness and wonder that all those things can generate, well, there will be  a reckoning for all that. They will grow up to be just like us — more fodder for the vampire squids whose mantra is: Spend! Spend! Spend ’til it hurts! And if you don’t, you’re a fucking waste of a human being!

It’s almost all bad, and if you’re not a Christian it’s even worse. If you don’t buy the line that Jesus was the son of God, if you don’t even buy the line that there is a god, well then, the “Christmas season” is an annoyance at best and an insufferably obnoxious alien invasion at worst. Except it’s not like Independence Day — you can’t send Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum in a purloined alien fighter up to the mothership and blow the living shit out of it. No, this is an alien invasion that can’t be repelled or exterminated — because we’re doing it to ourselves.

And don’t get us started on the music! The wretched carols you’ve heard thousands of times before, the Christmas-themed pop songs, the “Christmas albums” churned out by performers who just want to cash in — in other words, the absolutely unavoidable deluge of seasonal crap music. No doubt, some artists make Christmas-themed music as a display of faith, but many are no more Christian than your average hyena, and what they’re doing is just hoovering up the dollars.

You think metal bands are immune from the impulse to make a buck off Christmas? No such luck. Mastodon is promoting “a super-limited-edition Christmas t-shirt”, yours for only $18.99 plus shipping. Black Label Society has released a holiday single, “The First Noel”, available for purchase at iTunes. In what has become an annual tradition, August Burns Red has released a cover of yet another Christmas carol (this year, “The Little Drummer Boy”). BEC Recordings has released a compilation called Happy Christmas Volume 5, featuring “fourteen holiday cuts with a focus on more edgy, alternative style of music than what is expected for this time of the year”, including tracks from the likes of Demon Hunter, August Burns Red (again), and Emery. And there’s more, but that’s enough.

You can talk about happy and jolly and ivy and holly and mistletoe and Santa and elves and reindeer all you want, never mind that none of that stuff has anything to do with the nominal occasion for all the fun, but at its blackened core, Christmas is really a frolic for the vampire squids, a march of the drones (thank you Obitus), and we would be better off without it.

There. We’re done. We got that out of our system. Tomorrow, we’ll be our normal friendly, kind-hearted NCS selves once again. Now we have to go think about what fucking Christmas presents to buy for family members. But ringing in our heads while we do it will be this little anthem:

Do you think this rant is off-base?

Do you think we’ve got a toxic case of humbug?

Or do you subscribe to our un-original thoughts about this artificial excuse for commerce?

Speak up!  This is what comments are for!

[UPDATE: One of the comments below reminded us of this video. Yes, this is one of the few pieces of Christmas music we can tolerate. In fact, it’s better than tolerable — it’s fucking great.  And this video never ceases to put a smile on our Scroogy faces. There are even snazzier versions of this idea out there, but the original is still very strong. Trans-Siberian Orchestra — “Wizards of Winter”: