CLICK BAIT

 Mosh Pit  23 Responses »
May 062014
 

I got your soft serve right here.  Dig in!

You know what “click bait” is, don’t you? You can’t spend any time web surfing without running into it. It’s like a dog turd on the sidewalk, except with ice cream on top to disguise the turd. It’s a way of writing headlines for web posts that will lure people into clicking through the links so the web-page proprietors will get more page views and earn a few extra nano-pennies of advertising. The headlines are always way over the top and sometimes downright false or misleading — the old bait-and-switch in the internet age.

I’m sick of seeing them on Facebook, even though I know what they are and never click on them. Well, almost never. I seem unable to resist any headline that includes the words “nude” and “Scarlett Johansson” in the same sentence. But maybe I’m being too moralistic.

I’m starting to see other metal sites use click-bait headlines. Maybe we should, too. Maybe people have become so inundated with this shit that if you don’t tell them whatever you’re writing about will make them cum immediately, they’ll figure it’s not worth their time. While we don’t advertise or make money from anything else we do, we do get a lot of psychic gratification from our traffic numbers. So maybe it’s time to join the crowd. Continue reading »

DOES METAL GIVE A SHIT?

 Mosh Pit  51 Responses »
Apr 292014
 

In some quarters, Jef Whitehead’s cover to the new album (Death Mask) by Chicago’s Lord Mantis has stirred up controversy — including in the comment thread to our own review of the album, where the band’s Charlie Fell joined the conversation to provide his own response to the controversy. Of course, controversy and metal aren’t strangers. In fact, one might argue that controversy is at the heart of metal. In fact, one might go further and argue that metal really doesn’t give a shit (and shouldn’t give a shit) about social agendas, political issues, or trying to move society in one direction or another.

That seems to be the general point of a short but potent piece by our fellow blogger Full Metal Attorney that appeared yesterday. In that piece, with the title “Metal Doesn’t Give A Shit”, he uses the controversy over Whitehead’s cover as a jumping-off point for an opinion piece in which he responds to the claim that metal should become “a truly counter-cultural resistance against mainstream society” — and I quote in part below:

“No, I’m sorry. Metal doesn’t care. Metal is horror films, snuff films, shock jocks, and pulp in music form. It has no higher purpose, and no social agenda.

Metal isn’t left. It isn’t right. It’s up yours. Dee Snider didn’t dress up like a woman because he was “ahead of his time” on queer issues, he did it to piss people off. Continue reading »

NOW HEAR THIS

 Mosh Pit  50 Responses »
Apr 202014
 

(We welcome guest writer Alex, the co-founder and chief editor of Metal-Fi and an audiophile who has been listening to metal for more than 20 years. The following piece provides a detailed introduction to “The Loudness War” for metal lovers who don’t know about it, but should prove to be an eye-opener even for people who do.)

Metal is supposed to be loud. Extreme metal is supposed to be even louder.

Suffice it to say, for many years I was a religious zealot when it came to the above doctrine, especially when I was in the company of people who I knew despised the genre. Many of these “civilians” treated it as simply noise, and my volume habits would only help underscore that belief. But it was through my volume fervor that over the years I started to notice something, namely, it seemed that my metal collection was gradually sounding worse, i.e., each successive new release I bought would sound worse than the prior one. What the hell was going on?

…

The fact is most headbangers never heard of the Loudness War until the release of Death Magnetic. Continue reading »

THE GEEK WORLD OF METAL

 Mosh Pit  74 Responses »
Apr 192014
 

You and your metalhead friends.

(photo credit: Rob Macinnis)

It’s time for some hard truth (I’m not stupid — I save the hard truth for Saturdays because our audience drops on Saturdays). The hard truth is that you are most likely a big fucking geek. I can say this with confidence for four reasons. First, you can read. Second, you are reading a metal blog. And third, in all probability you are a metalhead. I’ll come to the fourth reason in due course.

Actually, the third reason is the biggest clue. I haven’t conducted any kind of scientific study, because I am not a scientist and studying sounds like work. Instead, I base my conclusion on years of first-hand observation. And what I’ve observed is that most metalheads are big fucking geeks. Not all, mind you. Some are career criminals. But even the ones who look like career criminals usually aren’t — down underneath their scary exteriors, they’re just geeks.

I suspect this conclusion would be greeted with disbelief by most people in the straight world, i.e., the people who look away quickly and increase their speed when they drive past the outside of a metal venue, because they think we’re ALL career criminals. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? And if perchance you don’t, I’ll assemble some of the evidence. Continue reading »

THE GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF METAL

 Mosh Pit  12 Responses »
Apr 142014
 

Sólstafir — photo by Gediminas Bartuška

(In this post Andy Synn voices his opinion about the most important unifying factor in all great metal.)

Ok, so, hyperbolic title aside, this is an issue I’ve been thinking about for some time.

The question of why.

Why I love the sound and fury of metal. Why I love certain bands and not others. Why I love this genre, over any other. What it is, beneath all the noise and chaos and bloody-minded catharsis, that truly connects with me.

In many ways it’s something instinctive. Or at least it feels that way. Sometimes it seems like there’s no rhyme or reason behind it. Yet it’s also something that seems ripe for analysis and self-reflection. Something that says just as much about me as it does about metal.

So, in pseudo-analytical fashion, I’ve been attempting to identify some sort of underlying factor that contributes to my love of metal as a whole. Something that explains my love of the genre in its varying forms, from the live performance to the recorded art, and something which explains why it stimulates me not only to wax lyrical about the genre here at NCS but also to create lyrically in two bands of my own.

Something vital.

Something fundamental.

And that something is simple.

Passion. Continue reading »

COLLEGE ESSAYS, METAL, AND COMPARING FRUIT

 Mosh Pit  36 Responses »
Apr 112014
 

(NCS contributor Leperkahn shares with us the essay he submitted with his application to the college he will be attending this fall.)

I believe I’ve mentioned a few times here before that I’m still a high school senior (if you didn’t know, now you know). Thus, in the fall of 2013 I was more or less engulfed by the college application process, and the multitudes of essays that go with many applications, especially for those colleges that decide admission “holistically” (i.e., most of the ones I applied to). Most of their prompts are exactly the same, and evoke nothing but boredom and annoyance, such as the “describe an experience in which you had to come back from failure, and how it changed you” drek.

The University of Chicago, however, does it right, offering by far the most interesting (yet difficult) essay questions of any college I’ve heard of. The prompts an applicant had to choose from were as follows: Continue reading »

THE LATEST EXTORTION FROM FACEBOOK: AN ADDENDUM

 Mosh Pit  22 Responses »
Apr 052014
 

I’m feeling a bit hammered this morning, because I got more than a bit hammered last night (I have a bad habit of throwing caution to the wind on Friday nights). The silver lining to the cloud in my head is that I’ve found it’s best to write about Facebook when I’m already feeling miserable.

Last month I made myself miserable by exploring recent reports that Facebook had begun tweaking the algorithms they use to determine what users will and won’t see in their Facebook news feeds, reducing the reach of Page posts to 1-2% of the people who have liked those Pages. This appears to be a not-so-subtle effort to incentivize Pages to pay Facebook in order to reach more of the users who follow them.

After I published that rant, a reader named Katy sent me a link to a video, and the video is what prompted this addendum. It makes me want to spit. To be more precise, it makes me want to hawk up something nasty from my lungs and spit that, because garden-variety saliva just doesn’t adequately express my combined feelings of disgust and depression. Continue reading »

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF REVIEWING METAL

 Mosh Pit  30 Responses »
Apr 042014
 

I think about this subject a lot. In fact, I think about it every day. Although I usually don’t manage to review an entire album more than two or three times a month, I write almost every day about individual songs that I’ve heard. I tend to do that quickly, but even then, mixed in with trying to put sentences together in a near-frenzy, I’m thinking (fleetingly) about what makes a review of music worth reading.

I don’t have a single answer to that question. And even the many answers I’ve thought of aren’t all ones I feel capable of following, because I’m a self-taught amateur and I know my limitations. But I thought I’d spill some thoughts about the subject in this post, as much to provoke discussion by readers and other writers as to help myself in a continued groping for some kind of mental synthesis.

I think about what makes a good review from two perspectives, and they don’t exactly line up with each other: What’s fun to write, and what’s useful and entertaining to read. This is why there are so many different answers to that question with which I began: what’s fun to write varies with the writer and what’s useful and entertaining to read varies with the reader. It’s hard to make yourself and everyone else happy.

I know what I enjoy reading. I want to get a sense of the music’s sound and the skill of the songwriters and performers. I want to know something about the genre, and something about the band’s history and interests, if I’m not already educated about those things. But I’m almost equally interested in the skill of the writer. I want to love the prose as much as the anticipation of what I might hear. If a review is dull and drab, inarticulate and deficient in lively turns of phrase, I’m unlikely to go back to that writer a second time. Continue reading »

AGE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC PREFERENCE

 Mosh Pit  56 Responses »
Apr 012014
 

(Guest writer Andrew Rumbol delivered unto us this interesting discussion of psychological research that attempts to identify the effects of aging on tastes in music.   Of course, there’s a metal angle to what he has to say… and invitations for your comments at the end.)

An interesting piece of research came out near the end of last year, from the department opposite the lab I work in. You can read the official press release here (which also links you to the primary research paper, if you’re interested in nerdy things like their sample selection or standard errors):

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/the-musical-ages-of-modern-man-how-our-taste-in-music-changes-over-a-lifetime

This group of psychologists undertook two cross-sectional studies (looking at a group of people that varies in one particular aspect, but is similar in others such as ethnicity and socioeconomic status), to investigate how people’s music tastes change throughout their lives. They found a striking trend: our music tastes pass through 5 distinct ‘dimensions’ – intense in adolescence, contemporary then mellow as early adulthood progresses, sophisticated in middle age, and finally unpretentious. I’ll discuss these results in more detail later – but, being both a scientist and a cynic, I was curious to find out how (and how precisely) these categories were defined.

So, a brief history on the psychology of musical preference: Continue reading »

THE ART OF STREAMING: A GUEST ARTICLE BY BYZANTINE’S CHRIS OJEDA

 Mosh Pit  19 Responses »
Apr 012014
 

(We welcome Chris “OJ” Ojeda, frontman of West Virginia’s Byzantine, with an eye-opening guest article about the economics of music streaming and what fans can do to increase band revenues. Despite the April 1 posting date, this is no joke.)

Hello friends and audiophiles. This is OJ from the band Byzantine. I want to spread some information that I have been wanting to tabulate and disseminate for some time now. This information is based on 1 topic only: Legal Music Streaming and the Amount An Artist Gets Paid.

Before I get into the hard numbers of this topic, I want to make clear that I am completely bipartisan on this issue. I do not feel that legal streaming has ruined my band’s chances at being a top-tier money-earning act. We have attempted to do that all by ourselves and I am completely fine with that. I also do not feel that legal streaming has afforded my band or myself any luxuries. The figures I have compiled will back that up. With that being said, I have to admit I am very grateful to be spreading this information on my band because it means two very important things:

1. At 39 yrs old, I still have a band, and that’s pretty awesome.
2. A small number of people actually listen to our band and that’s even more awesome. Continue reading »

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