Opinion of a Different Kind of Dude Fest

[Frozen Sky Ever Why]

I guarantee you'd never see a metal fest with such a progressive goal.

It's not like there are a ton of socialist/communist metal bands or anything

(note: I'm listening to Rammstein right now, a German industrial metal band who has a song in which the lead singer repeatedly says in German "my heart beats left" and refrences a marching song by Bertolt Brecht)

Do they promote such SJW type things? Would any metal band ever challenge concepts of masculinity?

I feel like the whole wide wonderful world of female-fronted metal bands and visual kei bands with deliberately ambiguous gender presentation not only answers this question but makes it a whole lot stupider than it would initially seem to somebody who's ignorant about metal.

How does this challenge concepts of masculinity?

Also I just can't imagine a metal band ever including an insert like this in one of their records:



or any metal lyricist willing to call out himself for sexist behavior like in this song. Because this is EXACTLY the type of stuff that I saw people on metal forums make fun of in their "haha let's all laugh at those PC idiots in hardcore" threads that I saw reported on some of my forums all the time...

LOL at those people being "ignored" in society. Those people control society, anyone criticizes them it's considered hate speech or harassment, meanwhile they say everything they want about anything with no repercussions because they are "oppressed"

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

LOL at those people being "ignored" in society. Those people control society, anyone criticizes them it's considered hate speech or harassment, meanwhile they say everything they want about anything with no repercussions because they are "oppressed"

Certain high-level academic and political contexts and socially liberal subcultures do not constitute 'society'. In the greater part of this country and among the greater part of its people things do not work that way.

[Cory]

Certain high-level academic and political contexts and socially liberal subcultures do not constitute 'society'. In the greater part of this country and among the greater part of its people things do not work that way.

Oh c'mon. These people seriously believe that being a "plutocrat" gives you less inherit privilege then being a working class white person. It's nonsense.

[Beet]

Social justice people are the last to be above being criticized, since they're always criticizing each other, often in very harsh ways, with community dissolution and self-destruction being the result. For a group of people whose purported values (and rhetoric) are supposed to be rooted in compassion, I've seen them do more damage to one another than any outsider could have done. That's why I eventually had to disassociate myself from the whole social justice thing despite agreeing with them on many of their ideals.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Certain high-level academic and political contexts and socially liberal subcultures do not constitute 'society'. In the greater part of this country and among the greater part of its people things do not work that way.

Oh c'mon. These people seriously believe that being a "plutocrat" gives you less inherit privilege then being a working class white person. It's nonsense.

Yes, I know. What I object to is ShadowOfTheWave's apparent belief that people who think this way are the ones in power in most places.

[they don't love you like i love you]

I guarantee you'd never see a metal fest with such a progressive goal.

It's not like there are a ton of socialist/communist metal bands or anything

(note: I'm listening to Rammstein right now, a German industrial metal band who has a song in which the lead singer repeatedly says in German "my heart beats left" and refrences a marching song by Bertolt Brecht)

Do they promote such SJW type things? Would any metal band ever challenge concepts of masculinity?

I feel like the whole wide wonderful world of female-fronted metal bands and visual kei bands with deliberately ambiguous gender presentation not only answers this question but makes it a whole lot stupider than it would initially seem to somebody who's ignorant about metal.

How does this challenge concepts of masculinity?

1. I've never heard of this band before and the music isn't good enough for me to care about them.
2. Women don't have to 'challenge concepts of masculinity' in the hyper-specific way that you seem to be talking about. That's one of the things about being a woman. If the metal community is as overwhelmingly testosterone-poisoned as you think it is, the fact that this band has a female lead singer is challenging concepts of masculinity. You're essentially saying that you know more about what constitutes an appropriate 'challenge to concepts of masculinity' than the women in metal bands, which could be true, but the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it with an analysis more trenchant than tumblr buzzwords and quasi-Maoist 'confessions' that remind one uncomfortably of Dogma 95.
3. You've gone from asking if any metal bands challenge concepts of masculinity to basically insinuating that every metal band has to in order for you to be willing to concede that it's possible. You made a ridiculous absolute statement, asking a question that even granting that metal tends to be a depressingly macho subculture is so broad as to be ridiculous, then moved the goalposts when somebody answered it seriously.
4. Kagrra, is a fun band.

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5. That kind of direct, painfully earnest disclaimer for one's own irony generally functions as ass-covering for doing the irony poorly. Honestly, I'd be with the metalheads in making fun of this, only in my case it'd be for its form rather than its content.
6. It also reads like an excerpt from a Dr Bronner's soap bottle.
7. The real reason why this argument is stupid anyway is because well-adjusted people would concede that a band, or an artist of any kind really, can have politics that deviate from anodyne third-wave-feminist-influenced American social liberalism and still be worth paying attention to. The Kinks are one of the best bands to come out of the sixties and they have lyrics that tend to imply traditionalist conservatism, of all ideologies. Fyodor Dostoyevsky had pronounced antisemitic tendencies, and was a great writer. Who knows what the people who built Kinkaku-ji or Fushimi Inari thought about The Issues? Who cares? I'm not willing to throw my lot in with Harold Bloom and say that politics and aesthetics are mutually irrelevant, but there's more to aesthetics than politics just as there's more to politics than aesthetics.

I also think you perennially underestimate the extent to which death/black/extreme metal and the type of music that you listen to sound similar (in their unpleasantness) to people who aren't into them.

1. Yeah but they sound like pretty typical metal to me.
2a. So then Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalaea are challenging the obvious machismo and masulinity in the hip hop community?
2b. She's hot. And that's probably the main reason of her appeal.*
*Yes I will not deny that this is also true of many women in hardcore and indie bands. Yes, this includes the woman who was the main organizer of A Different Kind of Dude Fest.
3. I'm talking about on this level. For example look at the Bratgirl insert again. Now if they just were two girls and one guy, that wouldn't be all that atypical, but I don't see any metal band even with female members writing such SJW style tracts. Why is that?
4. No clue who that is.
5. I don't own the record (though I could dig up plenty that I do own with similar inserts), so I don't know the full context, I just took it from somewhere where it was being mocked for the extreme PC and Tumblr-before-there-was-Tumblr style. But I find it weird that you of all people would ever mock something for THAT.
6. I don't know what that is.
7a. Same band I linked to actually had a song attacking EXACTLY that type of attitude: Palatka - Taco Bell Has Nothing To Do With Hardcore

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7b. Don't know if you clicked on the original link, but probably about half the songs from that band are self-depreciating in that style, though not so much in a Maoist way rather than that the lyricist was like "I have all these flaws in me that come from the pollution of our mainstream society and I have to not let them overtake me", attacking more mainstream culture than himself. But metalheads seem to take more of an ubermesch style attitude toward themselves, I can't imagine any thinking that way or writing such songs...which brings me back to the point: why? Why is this thinking found in basically one one style?
8a. That doesn't mean they have anything in common. Completely different origins, styles, influences and history toward creation...etc. There is basically no overlap between that and the metal scene.
8b. That's kind of foolish since I can differientate between different types of unpleasant sounds. I can even tell the difference between country, hip hop and metal. OK kind of dumb example there, but I can also tell the differences between various types of metal too.
8c. Something that I think such people miss is that the vocal styles in metal and this music are completely different, I can not stand the gutteral death metal style vocals or high pitched screeching of black metal, and honestly that would ruin it for me even if I liked the music. I'm aware that hardcore-style screaming is no better for many people (and in fact "I don't mind the music but I can't stand the vocals" is a pretty common criticism of some bands I like I've heard from people outside the scene), but you can't deny there's a pretty big difference between that and metal style.
8d. This sort of attitude is actually a big reason for the metalhead/hardcore kid rivalry in the first place, people don't like something they like being lumped in with something they don't, think of the attitudes toward R2D2-style (non-)"emo" from people into real emo...and you get the idea. People who write proto-Tumblr buzzword filled lyrics and inserts don't want anything to do with death metal and all of its violence and misogyny filled content, and metalheads don't want anything to do with uber-PC proto-SJWs.
8e. This song is pretty "brutal" in style and musical content (blastbeats galore)...but these are the lyrics:

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So death metal.

[Torie]

It sounds like a most positive and entertaining event actually.

[Mopsus]

Would any metal band ever challenge concepts of masculinity?

One of Boris' most well-known albums is named "Pink", which also happens to be the most prominent color on that album's cover. How many hardcore bands can say that?

[they don't love you like i love you]

Would any metal band ever challenge concepts of masculinity?

One of Boris' most well-known albums is named "Pink", which also happens to be the most prominent color on that album's cover. How many hardcore bands can say that?

Obviously not hardcore but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_Day_Real_Estate_(album)

[Mopsus]

Would any metal band ever challenge concepts of masculinity?

One of Boris' most well-known albums is named "Pink", which also happens to be the most prominent color on that album's cover. How many hardcore bands can say that?

Obviously not hardcore but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_Day_Real_Estate_(album)

If I'd brought up Sunbather, that would have been a valid response. However, what I'm asking for is a well-known punk/hardcore/post-hardcore album named "pink".

Come on, man. If you can't beat metal on this, you'd might as well just concede that it's more progressive on the topic of gender.

[they don't love you like i love you]

That involves a color. Not gender.

I can understand being a herb who supports this stuff...but traveling to another city to do it and talk about it in some kind of conference? Who has time to waste doing that?

You do realize it was mostly a music fest right? About 90% of it was probably just drunk people moshing and having a great time.

[Mopsus]

That involves a color. Not gender.

It involves a color that's associated with gender.

[Deus Naturae]

You do realize it was mostly a music fest right? About 90% of it was probably just drunk people moshing and having a great time.

Oh. I can understand that, even if it's still really stupid.

Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of hip hop?

[they don't love you like i love you]

Hate it.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Only answering a few of BRTD's points because I've lost track of either the point he's trying to make or my interest in the subject for the rest of them.

2a. So then Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalaea are challenging the obvious machismo and masulinity in the hip hop community?

Nicki Minaj kind of is, actually, as I understand it? Iggy Azalea's actively awful for other reasons so it doesn't really matter whether or not she does.

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If I come across as 'extreme PC and tumblr-before-there-was-tumblr' I'm clearly doing something wrong, because while I share most of those positions that style really rubs me the wrong way. Either commit to irony or don't do it. If you're committing to sincerity and earnestness, don't try to do irony. If you're really committed to doing both for a legitimate artistic reason, make an effort to avoid using one as some sort of retraction of the other.

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[/quote]

Again, I'm not arguing for an apolitical approach to art. That almost always ends up in practice being strongly reactionary. I'm saying different politics can be grudgingly respected in art (if you insist on not extending non-grudging respect). You don't have to buy into 'Deep England' thinking to think The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is a great album. You don't have to have a strong, inadequately explained, chauvinistic preference for Eastern Orthodoxy over Catholicism to think The Idiot is a great novel. Neither do you have to ignore the fact that you disagree with aspects of these works' politics in order to appreciate them. It's true that some works have politics that are so objectionable that they overwhelm whatever artistic merits the works may have, and a lot of metal falls into that category for me much as seemingly all metal does for you, but if your threshold for that is 'deviates the least bit from my own politics' then you're, honestly, going to have problems getting around in the world.

Art is communication. It's not wise to communicate only with people who already agree with you.

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I can tell the difference between different types of metal and between different types of hardcore, but there's a particularly unpleasant type of metal and a particularly unpleasant type of hardcore that sound very similar to me, and I know I'm not alone in this.

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That's a good point. I'll have to listen more closely to these sorts of things (when I encounter them; I don't go out of my way to seek them out).

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So death metal.
[/quote]

I get why these scenes don't like each other and I'm not saying they should like each other, I just think you go too far with this, and it falls into a pattern that you have of living within a very narrow feedback loop that exacerbates your tendency to confirmation bias and honestly damages your capacity for personal growth. This is especially worrying to me because as somebody with a stable full-time job and friends who share your interests you're actually one of the most well-adjusted people on the forum otherwise.

This is also something of which many metalheads are guilty, and if I were debating this with one of them I'd be considerably less respectful precisely because their politics are usually a lot worse than yours.

[they don't love you like i love you]

Imagine what the alt-right would've thought of this had they been around then.