Opinion of a Different Kind of Dude Fest

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

I didn't vote in the poll because the concept of this festival is good but I'm sure the music is mostly awful.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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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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.
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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.