Fuck the Christmas spirit, today’s Lemmy’s birthday. It’s been 6 hours of slamming one Motorhead CD after the other on the tray, blasting it to the loudest of decibel and gulping cheap whiskey held on to nicotine stained fingers till the neighbor complains and the cops show up. This shit gave me tinnitus.
It’s freakishly amazing how channeling Motorhead turns especially in the winter that usually has me listening to Doom, Noise, Drone, Power Electronics, Dark Wave and alike. You know.. cheerful rainbows & pony stuff (More like rainbows and pony fell into colour saturating vat of redundancy stuff). The thing about Motorhead, besides the intelligent, belligerent, indifferent undertones is the fact that it managed to be no-bullshit, non-label oriented, genius music that did whatever it bloody well pleased. Motorhead’s music is not demarcated or categorized by label. It’s not Blues or Rock or Post-Diddly-Delta-Blues-Rock-n-Roll-Strip-Club-Carbohydrate-Metal. It’s Motorhead. And it’s the opposite of your bullshit.
Whilst I do consider myself a niche–driven person who tries to appreciate the diversity and progression within a sub-genre like Craft, Typhon or Thou Shalt Suffer did within the Black Metal sound. But to label it solely to use that label as the sole selling point & then to call that music as better than yours is a gimmick. It’s a ploy. It’s a plunder of art. It’s mediocrity. Something that immediately reminds one about the yawnful elitism in art. Or yawnful elitism of the Indian Metal Scene.
Jesus fucking Christ, where do I begin? Kidding. This ‘bullying’ is so unidirectional and boring that it might remind one of Amy Schumer’s stand ups. Therefore, using one aspect or one sub-culture around one band as a poetic device would serve the purpose of trying to understand about this elitism.
It all begins with the Internet. Before the Internet, record stores provided the three-dimensional turf necessary for big nerds to have huge arguments over tiny things. Today, Internet provides the platform to fat has-beens or that-40-yo-dude-dressed-up-like-20-yo-thrasher-from-bay-area to bully little kids in India who listen to Behemoth or Linkin Park because all these fat infallible idols of impeccable musical taste were born listening to Exmortis. The elitism & bullying generally started with arranging shows, making fun of young kids, having a coterie of gentlemen not allowing other kind of music to surface in their shows. But that was in the past far, far away in a distant fat galaxy. Today, there’s an array of War/Battle/Cancer Metal aficionados throughout the country that have things pushed to an abysmal threshold. The one name that certainly has managed make some Noise is Tetragrammacide. It would be sufficient to describe the horrid, deluded and boring culture that manifests around this one.
Tetragrammaton literally means four letters in Hebrew that phonetically mean J, h, w, h or spelled individually Yod, He, Waw, He and used for Adonai and HaShem, God of Israel.* Add 1 tbsp of cide. There you have it, terrible music.. uhm, I mean Tetragrammacide. They make Black/Noise music driven by fourth wall attitude towards other music, art & culture and therefore, use it to rebel against. Logical fallacy that arises from the Tetragrammacide culture is; either you like our music or you don’t get it. Now we don’t need Orod to circumvent this fallacious logic and help us realise ‘What if we get it? What if we get what you’re trying to say, but what you said was..terrible?’
There’s no true harm in recognizing the possibilities of releasing terrible music. And that’s the good part about some of the music that has been berated or excoriated by critics or nihilistic existential crisis stricken loud mouth jerkoffs like me: Good music can either be good or bad.
But the truly tragic form of repugnant music is the one that stems from pretentiousness and the grandiloquence that surrounds it. If the music aspires to deliver then the music is just what it is: Music. But if you’d try to sell horseshit as gold in the beautiful flee market that is Metal music community, then people would recognize it. And the fact that it expires quicker than a rabbit gets fucked or the expiry date on the ad nauseam Dadaism, res ipsa loquitur.
Also Read: Video Review: Demigod Releases Official Lyric Video for ‘Whiplash Motif’
Now, for the uninitiated, Black Noise has been here since decades. Exmortis’ first release Descent Into Chaos (1988) serves as a proto for the sound of this sort of Metal infused Power Electronics. It was further escalated by It and All’s Abruptum that had some terrific source material in its Evil EP (1991) for both Drone and Noise. Merzbow shall most definitely come to mind. For those who want to get into this sort of music shall most certainly find quality in what I consider to be the kind of music that T’cide tries & fails to deliver:
- 1.Wold – L.O.T.M.P
- Nyogthaeblisz – Apex Satanist
- Deathkey – Doctrine of Intolerant Hatred
- Sutekh Hexen – Larvae
- Black Mountain Transmitter – Black Goat of the Woods
- Intolitarian – Deathangle Absolution
- Gnaw Their Tongues – anything by them
- K.F.R. – Goat
- Knelt Rote – Trespass
- Damaar- Triumph Through Spears of Sacrilege
- Ungfell – Totbringaere (spelt with phonetics)
But some of the contrarians in the Metal music find gold in horseshit. And that’s where the 1599/- Hoodies, receding hairlines and the embarrassing Kali Mata poses come into the picture. Literally. I mean you can see people doing that shit on the Internet.
Any person that might listen to Teitanblood to Turisas that have their fair share of rudiments associated with Sodom‘s magnificent In The Sign of Evil/Obsessed by Cruelty or the other spectrum of bands that have their fair share from Beherit’s Drawn Upon The Moon & Blasphemy’s Blood Upon the Altar demo would acknowledge that they are chaotic and coherent in their narratives. Even noise driven Bestial/Black/War/Speed/Gaze/Death sub genres have their sound beautifully constricted in a bind that has somewhat minimal focus on atonality but rather a muddled way of playing rhythm, which I fucking love. But the problem isn’t emblematic sound that has been consistently funneled into a niche that people love. Much like the Black/Death niche that Necrovore, Maggoty Corpse, Bloodspill, R.A.V.A.G.E., Necrodeath, Sepultura (Morbid Visions) spilled into bands like Mortem, The Chasm. And much like Rottrevore’s Fornication in Delirium and Disgrace’s Inside the Labyrinth of Depression spilled into Undergang and alike, sub genres have always been relevant for this one reason.
But what distinguishes the worship subculture of War/Bestial/Battle Metal is not the absurdity that other sub genres share but the inherent in-group behavioral pattern that they share. If you do not talk about bands in terms of demo, you are a false. If you do not possess a Blasphemy hoodie, you are a false. If you do not have a minimal of four ‘hails’ and ‘!!!!!!’ in your poorly constructed sentence that would make P.C. Wren and H. Martin stab each other in their graves, then you are a false. If you think Tetragrammacide is borderline contemptuous boring try-too-hard music which tragically fails like the Grateful Dead and tries to sell sub-standard music in a scene with no competition, then you are a false. The point remains: If you do not behave in the manner that the peer-reviewed war metal manual has designed, you are a false.
Now, where I come from, that’s authority. Where I think from, that’s bullshit authority. And from what I remember, that’s Madonna music wrapped up in encapsulation of complex, stoic, prosaic array of jargons and argot that would make me close my eyes and imagine I am jerking off. I think that’s the creative process where such a self-indulgent form of music derives itself from. But it’s not just this bullshit. Head over to the Doom Metal community and… well, you have a twisted mass of burnt decay. Not.. in a good way. But I’m not gonna get into people that really don’t understand when to shut up. A community that derives amity by making fun of a musician’s suicide because they did not validate that buddy’s music. I really cannot expect that from a bunch of dudes that think India is a high school and that they’re a bunch of jocks who would bully little kids because those kids did not suck up to the jocks. If you really do think that you need a culture to define your behavior, your out-group interaction (as sociologist Émile Durkhiem said in The Rules of Sociological Method waaay back in 1895) or validation: You are a jackass.
By all means, I do not approve or promulgate the bearded, behenchod-ridden, OBEY cap (somebody needs to see Carpenter’s They Live (1988)) dominated most Delhi culture either. I promulgate individuality and logic in trying to be you. Sartre in 1944 and Hunter S. Thompson in 1958 would say that you strive to be yourself and that all great men gather from community but thrive on individuality. The final straw that led me to break this camel’s back was Jonathan Meades’ speech in Royal Academy of Arts in London upon the gulf of art and arts, about the hypocrisy of real art and the ambiguity of real quality. He used “The Murder” by Paul Cezanne as the paradigm for his speech and went on to cite Bosch, Cruickshank, Burra and Yeats. He quoted Anthony Burgess who said “Art must be dangerous. Once it has ceased to be dangerous it is no use.” Which is what elitism in Indian Metal Scene is trying to do with sub-standard bands & people, it is making it safe.
So, reader, if any 40 y.o. douche from the ‘subcontinent bullies you because you haven’t heard Bastardator, Demon Bitch, Malokarpatan, Toxïc Death, Rust.
Tell them you have heard Aura Noir, Typhon, Havohej (if you haven’t then what the flying fuck are you doing with your life? Go ahead and do it.)
Or! Tell them what Lemmy did a million times to a million different people over a million glasses of Lemmy:
‘Too bad no magic,
I’m afraid you’re merely tragic.’
