On a superficial reading, the last post might seem like an ode to gatekeeping: “let’s keep our passions among ourselves,” in short. It wasn’t. It was an ode to the pursuit of the spirit of things and an invitation to eschew everything that is proposed by the masses. It was an invitation to search for the magic that was inherent in the activities we love and that united generations dispersed around the world before they became public knowledge. It is not about hiding, but placing, contextualizing and not watering down.

Those who know me know that I have no interest in hiding anything of what little I know and have collected. If that were the case, I wouldn’t even be writing in this blogzine. If someone shows enthusiasm for something on which I believe I have some expertise I am pleased to help swell the ranks of this legion. As I daily discover new things that interest me and thank the disseminators for sharing their knowledge. I am getting interested in cocktails and historical fonts right now, to say, and it is wonderful that there are thousands of more or less technical or informative papers on these topics.

The sick gatekeeping is that of insecure people who think that having bought a Sepultura CD in 1996 grants them some form of authority in the genre. These are people who have always been in the shadow of those who were really active and have suddenly found themselves with a lot less hair (I would say by the way that I am not wrong if I assume they are 100% male) and 25 years of militancy in the genre that for some reason should qualify them as veterans (“tell me three song names of the band you have on your T-shirt”) which they are NOT. They are not even now that they have jobs, a few hundred CDs and can browse Discogs from their smartphones, let alone back in the day. They were lucky that in 1993-1994 when the Black Metal phenomenon exploded and most of the extreme metal bands were under 30, the gatekeepers back in the day were still lost in Hard Rock, because if they weren’t, recruit training course bullying would have passed them by too.

I genuinely don’t conceive stupid gatekeeping, it doesn’t really emphasize anybody. Making people think you were tapetrading when you know full well it wasn’t true (and how many I hear today who betray themselves in the details-“a scovà gli infami’ so na spada”, cit.) I can even understand if you can’t find recognition as an old man, but leveraging the younger generation to inflate your ego, that doesn’t serve shit.

At the end of the day, those who do this kind of operation are driven by the frustration of not being in their twenties anymore, of seeing new generations (and a lot of pussy NONE of us had foreseen) enjoy endless technologies and availability of documentation, and in the past few years even several essays on the subject that help to bring razor-level clarity to the most minute details of any corner of the underground. Masking all this with a spirit of altruism is just an exercise in style. If you didn’t do your homework when you were supposed to, you’ve missed the train, and no 5-figure collection will make up for the fact that even today you have nothing to say. The world is progressing, technologies are expanding, and even extreme metal has come to the crossroads of interdisciplinarity just as has happened in so many other disciplines. If one knows how to adapt, the challenges of the new era can expand what has been before on fronts never imagined.

There are, indeed, big problems inherent in the new model, in my view primarily that perverse and demented desire to insert moral and progressive lessons inside of everything, but the opportunities that open up are immense and exciting. Fortunately, music remains an intimate concept of personal enjoyment; no fad can really undermine it at its root.

I was sweeping the floor this morning, picking up the hair of three giant dogs and one fluffy cat reflecting of the state of misery in which we live or will live. Same old middle-aged talk in short. Between passages I caught myself thinking how fertile the soil of necessity really is, in short, scarcity of means at first sends you into crisis mode, but it is when you are starving that your metabolism speeds up and your body becomes much more effective in fundamental needs. Boxing grass does not grow in the garden of the wealthy, they say. Coming out of the dichotomy misery = ugly, abundance = beautiful the new perspective reveals that even absolute deprivation actually hides unthinkable opportunities. The ecosystem of even the most barren desert under a microscope reveals a multitude of organisms capable of coping with extreme temperatures and lifestyles. To the keen eye, billions of bacteria are hard at work. Reptiles, insects, fungi live and multiply in the environment.

Then, when you adapt to an emergency mentality, after a while even the idea of abundance begins to change and that sandwich full of sausages and onions makes you crave it in a completely different way. You no longer want to shove it in your stomach, you want to taste it slowly and get a good feel for the flavor of the mince and spices. Then you are surprised by a thought you never imagined. That maybe you don’t even need to eat it all anymore and maybe half of it you can even give to a friend, or others who are hungry.

Living “without” then leads you to stop looking at the “with” with the same eyes.

This applies to everything from personal relationships, to financial stability, to music and entertainment. It is the evolution of yesterday’s discourse, that gonzo way of shelling out by accumulating and showing off that has become typical of our genre can only be the result of a bulimia now out of control, a victim of the clusterfuck mashup that occurred with the advent of the Internet.

It is, as always, grognard talk, which I am, but I still think it’s time to go back underground and recreate little ecosystems within this big mass of shit a bit like it used to be done in the 80s/90s before certain genres born in the mid-90s made everyone believe that they too could have the experience of that “alternative” spark that united people from all over the world through a real passion. And let’s be clear, this applies to music, to writing, to illustration, to role-playing. Everything.

Which then, is also why even historic labels are making piss poor choices to try to pick up what they had abandoned years ago. I know them. I see. AND I JUDGE. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, the lack of consistency creates situations that ring as false as a 3 euro coin, getting out of one’s identity may bear some fruits, but they are not the fruits of necessity, but the rotten fruits of opulence.

Selecting, believing, reflecting remain the cornerstones for the production of TRUE works both by the artist and by those who are in charge of promoting them in some way as we fanzine editors or small labels do.

Consistency only lives and bears fruit when you do things right, with attention rooted in the things that matter. A genre that is born out of a fascination with the morbid and anger, the discomfort of Man, can only live in that dimension. Use this music to show off and the result can only be crap.

As with all true things in this world, there is a contradiction in terms that makes Death Metal and its satellite genres something three-dimensional in my opinion. It’s kind of like when you bring two sheets of paper together on a table and they curl up. I have never hidden how much I appreciate as a fundamental element of the genre it being rooted in adolescence, both from the point of view of aesthetics and the very way of conceiving a piece of primitive and muscular music that draws energy from a fascination with the morbid. It will come as no surprise, that the genre was created and had its fullest expression in a completely spontaneous way all over the world (on the silly paradox of accusations of being a racist and not very inclusive genre we will get to in a future post) by the fertile pimply energy of teenage boys and reached all and I mean – all – the compositional and message peaks through the hands and throats of people who were unlikely thirty years old. Don’t think that I am here criticizing a genre I adore above all others, on a primal level people have been eating and fucking since forever and I don’t see anyone so far getting tired of it (although there is some counter-message in the air). One can play and create Death Metal even after the age of 30, as long as one maintains that spirit of enthusiasm of youth. This is music that maintains you young. There are also the experimentalists, such as the jazz musician of The County Medical Examiners, but of course, these are special cases that reinforce the concept.

It is a matter of recognizing in his freshness of thought and his exclusively hormonal passion the creative matrix that leads one to smell blood, hate, and dead things.

Acknowledging, however, the pulsating core of the genre does not mean that I accept that it should be approached in a cheesy or, worse, demented way. I’ve never had much sympathy for groups like Lawnmower Deth or Spazztic Blurr, then later early CSSO with the Japanese comic books on the cover, crap like Akercocke’s fancy suits or that whole world of groups at Gronibard. There’s more than one reason why I’ve never gone to an Obscene Extreme show, certainly one of them is that I can’t stand people in their underwear doing ballets dressed as Pokemon. That kind of American movie dementia just doesn’t work for me in this context. I mean, it amuses me OUT of Death Metal. The arrival of the Internet and Social Networking has meant the arrival of an iconoclastic wave made up of memes designed specifically to desecrate a genre of which very few have a clear vision. There are excellent cases, such as Birdflesh and Macabre, even the early Carcass had a morbid ironic streak, but the Gabibbo and Tenerone on stage, I’m sorry but it really tired me beyond tolerance. That is, it has tired me for well over 20 years, well over.

The truth is that Horror and Death Metal once again prove to be one and the same. The humorous and goliardic vein of ’90s horror fucked it all up as the arrival of the Internet brought the generalist audience first through the Black Metal beachhead (more identifiable and manipulable for tabloids) and then to all the other genres of the extreme underground with the advent of the Internet. It was not a random happening that the best horror of the 1980s was that of Fulci, Bianchi, Soavi, etc. To find some decent horror once more, even outside the more underground market, we had to wait some twenty years, and in the end it is not surprising that today we are left with extraordinary almost self-produced realities even in the world of gore and splatter, somewhat the equivalent of gorenoise as far as music is concerned. This kind of irreverent humor is annoying not so much because it comes from people who entered this world more out of boredom than interest as because it tends to be totalizing. It seems that NO ONE today is allowed to pretend a project created to be taken seriously. It amazes me to read that some people think this genre must be gonzo crap to laugh at, just because this is the post-2000 geek culture that has opened all the drawers and made everything available to everyone.

At the root of the topic, metal must be primitive and RAW, and just like every beast, should not possess “self awareness” as mentioned in Don’s quote at the beginning of the post. It may be a bit counterintuitive to bring an adolescent soul to life with a pretense of seriousness, but it is the contradiction that makes these genres potentially inexhaustible.