OUR WORLD

 Mosh Pit  38 Responses »
Mar 162011
 

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.) Continue reading »

FUCK CHRISTMAS!

 Mosh Pit  53 Responses »
Nov 302010
 

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 . . .) Continue reading »

HARDCORE HYPOCRISY — STRAIGHT-EDGE

 Mosh Pit  19 Responses »
Nov 222010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we have another guest post from our Midwestern correspondent, BadWolf. This one has the potential to ignite some heated commentary, pro or con, so don’t hold back. After all, “ignition” is our middle name (or one of them). So please let us hear from you!]

I feel a great deal of the time bloggers put an excessive premium on the music itself as art.

This makes sense, we are music bloggers, after all. But there’s more to metal than just the song or the album; there is the all-important live experience. Maybe bloggers sometimes ignore the live aspect of metal because it’s more difficult to share via the internet, or maybe because it’s just plain expensive at times.

Regardless, the live arena is where metal was born and what keeps artists afloat. It’s where the musicians we love get the money to make the music we love. And it’s also where metal as a community subculture congregates. Today I want to talk about those two aspects of metal.

But first, let’s talk about hypocrisy for a minute. Not the band, the phenomenon.

Pretty not-metal, right? A professor of mine once told me the first adjective she associated with metal music was honesty. Black metal purists clamor on and on about ‘trve’-ness. We, as a community, put a premium on truth (this has something to do with the endless sub-genre debate, methinks).

So what do live shows, the metal community, and hypocrisy have in common? Straight-edge. That’s what they have in common.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

ON TASTE . . .

 Mosh Pit  19 Responses »
Nov 132010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s guest post is from Timbus, the guitarist, back-up vocalist, and co-founder of NCS favorite, Nekrogoblikon. He has some thoughts about musical taste and what it means to be open-minded . . .]

Sometimes people are just walking piles of bullshit. In fact I bet half the people you see day-to-day are made solely of poop. It’s really horrifying. I wonder if they know? Probably not. They’re all stomping around *splunch* *splunch* “I’m so smart!” *splunch* *splunch*. Their footsteps probably make that noise. That’s how poop walks. Probably. Maybe one day some dude will try to talk to them and quickly determine that the human being they’re interacting with is really just sentient excrement. Then the dude will sit back and go “Ohhhh, I see what the problem is. We disagree because you’re actually just made of poop.” I think that doesn’t happen very often though.

People can bullshit just about anything. You’ll hear stories all the time about how either people bullshit the government or the government bullshits us. Or maybe it’s a job. Or maybe it’s Enron. Or maybe it’s Osama Bin Laden, I don’t fucking know. The entertainment industry is definitely made up 90% of poop. But so are the consumers! So it’s ok!

Have you ever asked anyone “What kind of music do you like?” or “What’s your favorite band?” I’m a musician. Music is such a big part of my life that relating to other people is much easier if I can find common ground musically. So, naturally, I ask those questions of people I meet. Sometimes I get really interesting answers. Sometimes I get a response that’s more like “Oh I just listen to radio” or “I watch MTV” or some other mainstream response. Those are fine! If you’re not really “into” music, and you just listen to whatever’s on your local rock station, that’s totally chill. Hey, I like eating out a lot, but I don’t really care about the particulars of how my food was prepared, just as long as it tastes good. Not everyone is a musician or even a music nerd.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’s NOT MUSIC (No. 9): THE SCROTUM EDITION

 IQ Subtraction, Mosh Pit, That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  16 Responses »
Jul 142010
 

I don’t read the daily newspaper near as much as I used to.  At some point I realized that the daily news could make me feel good or it could make me feel bad, but there was almost nothing I could do about it. So without ever making a conscious decision, I subconsciously decided that I could better spend my time taking care of my family, enjoying my friends, and battering myself with massive amounts of metal.

So, basically, I became one of those jaded, self-absorbed people I used to detest.

But every now and then, without any rhyme or reason, I’ll check out the daily paper here in Seattle — which I did yesterday. And I found so many ass-ripping stories that if I were a religious person, I’d think the gods were sending me a signal — that it’s time for another installment of “That’s Metal!”, where we write about shit that provokes that exclamation, even though it’s not music. Not quite the magnitude of the burning bush, but still, enough to get me pounding the keyboard.

Most of today’s installment isn’t about “metal” things that inspire admiration. It’s mainly about people who engage in brain-dead activities that remind us of stage-divers who end their acrobatics with a face-plant into the concrete. You wince, but you still gotta throw some horns in honor of the sheer insanity, while also hoping that those people don’t turn out to be breeders.

And to top it off, our daily news involved stories about scrotum damage.  Admit it, there are few things better than scrotal humor, except possibly vaginal humor.  And as a bonanza, we found some vaginal humor, too.  (yeah, all the details are after the jump, of course . . . .) Continue reading »

MULLAH SPEAKS AGAIN (it just gets worse)

 Mosh Pit  2 Responses »
May 152010
 

Iran is a culturally rich country and heir to one of the most ancient civilizations on earth. Unfortunately, it’s currently being run by lunatics.

A few weeks back we were so gobsmacked by the pronouncement of a senior Iranian cleric (a mullah) that we put up a post about it (here), even though we had to strain to connect it up with metal. The pronouncement in question, by Kazem Sedighi, was that women in Iran who dressed immodestly were causing earthquakes. Turns out that Sedighi was just getting warmed up. Here’s the latest bit of lunacy, as reported in this morning’s Seattle Times:

“A prominent hard-line Iranian cleric elaborated on his claim that promiscuity and immodest dress cause earthquakes, saying Friday that God may be holding off on natural disasters in the West in order to let people sin more and doom themselves to hell.

The cleric, Kazem Sedighi, sparked widespread derision with his pronouncements in a prayer sermon last month that women who don’t dress modesty spread adultery in society, in turn increasing earthquakes.

In Tehran’s main weekly prayer sermon on Friday, he defended the claim but added some further explanation on why some places are hit more than others.

(the article continues after the jump, if you’ve got the stomach for it . . .) Continue reading »

PARENTS

 Mosh Pit  11 Responses »
May 152010
 

I suppose this topic is sappy, and sappy isn’t metal. But maybe it really is. You be the judge. And if you conclude this is just too much emotional tripe, chalk it up to an excess of tequila

What motivated us to write about parents (besides too much tequila) was our recent piece on an awesome KC band called Ares Kingdom and some messages we received in response to it. In addition to praising the music, we praised the album art — the kind of thing that many bands do poorly, and that’s often lost in our download culture when it’s done well.

The album art on the Ares Kingdom release is truly inspired, though you’ll never see what we mean unless you fork over the dough to buy a CD. As we explained in our review, the 16-page booklet that comes with the CD is a montage of historical artwork by many artists (including the cover art, which was created by Joseph Pennell in the last year of World War I), and the lyrics are written over the top of the art in beautiful silver calligraphy.

We read the liner notes too quickly and wrote in our review that the calligraphy was done by this band’s awesome guitarist Chuck Keller. That appears to have been an error, as was pointed out by a comment on our post by Splash.  According to the comment, it was done by Chuck’s father. And that (along with the fucking tequila) made us think about parents.

We don’t know Chuck Keller, or his dad. What we do know is this: We don’t deserve our parents. We don’t “earn” them. They are who they are, and we are who we are. If they love and support us (as appears to be true of Chuck Keller’s dad), that’s a gift, for which we should be fucking thankful. If they fail to understand us, or worse, if they undermine and damage us, it’s usually not our fault, though we so powerfully take our cues from them that we think it is. (more of this after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

SLACKER SUCKFEST

 Mosh Pit  5 Responses »
May 062010
 

I’m so fucking bummed I can hardly see straight, and if I don’t get it off my chest, I’m afraid my eyes will stay crossed permanently.

My day job took me and one of my co-workers (he uses the name Ullr when he comments on this site) to Oakland yesterday. We finished what we had to do and we had the whole night to kill before our return flight to Seattle this morning.

To celebrate Cinco de Mayo, we ate some awesome Central American food, including grilled, endorphin-inducing serrano peppers, and pounded down some tasty margaritas with chile salt at a place called Tamarindo, and then Ullr got on his iPhone to see if there was any live music we could hit up.

And what a fucking bonanza he found! The Evisceration Plague Tour was scheduled to play at Slim’s in San Francisco, with the doors opening at 7:00. If you don’t know about that tour, it’s a sick line-up: Cannibal Corpse, 1349, Skeletonwitch, and Lecherous Nocturne.  And it was only 6:30 when Ullr stumbled across that bonanza. What could possibly go wrong? Lots, as it turned out. (more of this suckfest saga after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MULLAH SPEAKS (and we spew)

 Mosh Pit  2 Responses »
Apr 212010
 

This news item in yesterday’s paper caught our eye. Under the headline “Iranian cleric: Promiscuous women cause quakes”:

“A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear immodest clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

“Iran is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric’s unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

“‘Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,’ Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.”

You may ask, as we did, “What the fuck?!?” But wait, there’s more — and we’re going to connect up this lunacy up with Iranian metal, too!  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

COAL SHIP CLUSTERFUCK

 Mosh Pit, Off Topic  No Responses »
Apr 072010
 

We thought it was time for an update on The 70,000 Tons of Metal Cruise.  We’ve had so much fun with this thing (e.g., here and here) and are just counting the days until January 2011 when it limps back into port at Miami with chaos in its wake.

But just as we were checking the interwebz for updated info last weekend, we came across a few other stories about coal and China that gobsmacked us. They’ve got nothing to do with metal, and they’re only tangentially related to “70,000 Tons of Metal.” Actually, even “tangential” is stretching it. About the only connection is that the first story involves shipping clusterfuckery, and we suspect “70,000 Tons of Metal” will turn into a clusterfuck, too, though in a fun-loving, binge-and-purge kind of way.

So, before we give you an update on “70,000 Tons of Metal” (which we really will do), allow us to vent a little about those gobsmacking stories we saw.

First Item: According to this report, a large Chinese freighter carrying 72,000 tons of coal (not 70,000 Ton of Metal) ran aground late Saturday on a section of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The Shen Neng 1 crashed into the reef at full speed a few hours after leaving the port of Gladstone, Australia, on its way to China. When that happened, it was nine miles outside its authorized shipping lane, according to Australian authorities. And those same authorities reported that the ship is in danger of breaking apart.

So, what’s the big deal, you may ask? You’re thinking that coal doesn’t leak. True, but a ship this large carries a shitload of fuel — 1,000 tons of it, to be more precise. (read on after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries