So last night, one of my chums wrote me an email asking what doom metal is and who are its most notable practitioners. That's like asking a NorCal hippie swine what reefers are and what are the best types. So, I thought I'd share the result with you Latewires. Also, c'mon and chime in if you've got some wizardy insight. Freshman remedial doom academy is in session!
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DOOM 093 - 3 credit hours
Doom metal is a genre defined by ponderously slow tempo, low despairing tones, and a dire atmosphere. In doom metal, virtuosity is of low importance compared to the ability to send chills into the listener. Black Sabbath are generally credited with founding the genre. The lyrics in doom metal (as you may have guessed) are usually cartoonish verse concerning the end of the world, the complete absence of hope, depression, profound abandonment, war, the occult, demonic topics, drug abuse (cannabis in particular), along with Dracula, goblins, witches, barbarians, and other filmic monsters.
The most significant practitioners of doom metal are :
1) Electric Wizard : paradoxically the most important and most cartoonish of the post-Sabbath doom bands. Their "Dopethrone" is flawless and the ultimate touchstone of modern doom metal.
3) St. Vitus : Genius, kickstarted the modern doom movement.
5) Sleep : The most prominent and wonderful figures in "stoner doom"
5) Goatsnake : Catchy popular doom
6) Trouble : Influential Christian doom from the '80s
7) Celtic Frost / Triptykon : Avant-garde bizarre doom metal
Candlemass : Unintentionally hilarious but undeniably accomplished epic opera doom
9) Corrupted and Boris : both great Japanese experimental doom bands
10) Sunn0))) and Earth : the endless drone doom, slow beyond belief
11) Cathedral and Pentagram : more classic early doom
Newer bands I like include the most excellent Witchsorrow, Acid Witch, and Salome. (19,815)
There's a thundering hailstorm in Phoenix today, sending drops of frozen hate clattering across the skylight and beating the life out of weak trees. On the outskirts of my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of something white and jagged -- the future.
Life as a human right now is akin to having woken up inside the chute of a woodchipper. We may not even recall how we got inside the woodchipper in the first place. The one thing that is clear : the inevitability of the blades.
A feeling like saws chewing into my neck. The sounds of weeping just outside my door. And a cold light knife into my pupil reminds me : This is a world divorced from hope.
When facing a suffocated reality of nonexistent future, what do you do? Here are some options :
1) Lie down and wait quietly for the ice weasels to come. 2) Cry until you're too tired to cry any longer, then die. 3) Fight until death. 4) Put on heavy metal records and rock out for as long as possible.
Now, I don't know which of these sounds most attractive, or which you, the reader, may already be doing. I choose option #4. Here's why :
* Metal music is brain floss. * Metal music improves blood flow to the face. * Metal music is not a norm. * Metal music has no sympathy for your suffering. * Metal music remembers when you were only an animal. * Metal music hasn't heard about your regrets, but it can drench them in molten @#$%^& * Metal music will survive long after the Universe is toast. * Metal music recognizes your true form and can restore it if lost. * Metal music connects you with that aspect of youself that you forgot about. * Metal music is truth erupting from a sea of lies.
There's no future. But with metal music, the present can be made to rock. In these bleak and doomed days, everybody looks for help. Some go to shrinks, some watch TV, and some try in futility to numb the pain with drugs. Well, you all are welcome to your 'cheese' heroin, 'lean,' and amphetamines. I'm an Earache man myself. (47,144)
It's time for a kind of lead-in to Dr R_e's series on nutrition, self-maintenance, and poison foods. Except this piece has little to do with medical science, and much to do with the sheer comedy of pathos that is the vegan movement.
If you want to know about the roots and history of the vegan movement, you can read it on Wikipedia or watch a pair of elephant seals in heat. Suffice to say that people decided to start talking about how they were 'vegan' after it was discovered that bees have feelings. Well, really, it was when 60s rich kids realized that a lot of people who didn't eat meat -- vegetarians -- weren't in it to make a political statement or even to oppose animal cruelty, but just for health reasons or even because they didn't care for meat. Hell, these kids said, these so-called 'vegetarians' aren't even into ahimsa or the wheel of karma! "Hypocrites!" they yelled. "How would you feel if you were a chicken and some huge two-legged villain came into your home each day to steal your eggs?!" When it was pointed out that eggs are, like, chicken period and not actually chicken babies, the newly-minted vegans moved on to vilify the cruel exploitation of bees for honey, the slaughter of bugs for shellac, and numerous other little murders that humans abet daily by buying products derived from animal use.
And so it went, with a certain percentage of each generation's upper-class twits being attracted to veganism as a really effective (and, thanks to $6 packs of vegan jerky and really expensive fake cheese and hot dogs, not to mention plastic shoes) expensive way to annoy their parents. The veganism-as-irritant tactic grew more desirable as the years wore on : imagine trying to irritate your mom with your punk-rock tapes --- when your mom has the Stooges' second album on her iPod as workout music?
Veganism is not a health movement, not even putatively, but the very thinness of the average vegan causes many outsiders to believe that the diet is a health-based one. In point of fact, all teenagers, Comp Lit students, and noisy hippies are skinny, and veganism is more an accessory for these bony hipsters than the cause of their morphology. Veganism's reliance on highly processed foods (such as the aforementioned pseudo-dogs and their TVP-based ilk) for protein pretty much tanks any claims to health. When vegans find out how TVP is made (hint : hexane!) they get pretty mad, but since they don't want to eat beans and other legumes and worry that nuts will make them fat, they continue to chomp away at their Tofurky and other chemical treats, smug in the knowledge that no animals were harmed in their production -- unless one counts the vegan itself!
The moral position of veganism is untenable to the point of laughability. Since the avowed point of veganism is to avoid doing violence to any animals or insects ('ahimsa'), and uncountable numbers of voles, squirrels, birds, aphids, snakes, centipedes, worms, groundhogs, and thousands of other types of beast are killed daily by the normal practices of conventional vegetable farming (especially when one factors in the clearing of farmland), the vegan loses before he even begins. Of course, the smart vegan will subsist solely on gathering wild plants while walking veeery carefully. Show me a feral vegan, though, and I'll show you what in Phoenix we call a 'crust punk' and bet you five that he eats McDonald's when he thinks nobody is looking.
All these points are old saws. I'm parroting them here to disabuse the Latewire reader of the notion that the jerk kid in the dirty hoodie with 'Fifteen' on his iPod and a mouth full of vitriol for those who use honey in their tea has any real clue what's going on. Vegans as a group care little for what's in their food as long as it's not animal-related; they'll happily gobble down preservatives, hydrochloric acid residue (ni hao, Bragg's Liquid Aminos!), and bleached flour. Half of them chew aspartame-laced gum and the other half swill energy drinks that have enough man-made chemicals in them to start a war.
The road to food consciousness, and on to food security, starts with knowing what is good to eat, and what is not, and being aware of what is in your food so that you can avoid the bad stuff. Vegans miss the mark by making food choice into a banner for political egoism.
If you want to avoid the Roman-tragic fate of the vegan, cut down on the badgering moral rhetoric, turn that pack of soy ham jowls over, and do the first thing one should always do, just like GZA said : read the label. (60,441)
Candlemass : Unintentionally hilarious but undeniably accomplished epic opera doom
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