I couldn’t have said it better…

Ahahaha!  You may have heard this philosophy before but not like this:

Final Revelation, by Bolt Thrower

Songwriters: Jo Bench, Gavin Ward, Karl Willietts, Martin Edward Kearns, Barry Thomson

Born to suffer, through a lifetime of darkness

Controlled by fear, held deep within your mind

As your mind reaches a distant point

Your soul beyond all pain

You shall realize all that has occurred

Were illusions formed from within your brain

You now know the truth, your mind is now set free

You have broken the chains that enslave all of humanity

Perceiving, life’s reality

An insight to man’s destiny

A coherent existence, comprehension you cannot deny

A meaningless persistence, confirmation you cannot defy

We follow without thinking, as our life passes us by

This newly acquired knowledge, clarified as we die

In this kingdom of the mindless

We are born to suffer

Be Good

A friend forwarded this magical video to me the other day.  So I took a break from my hardcore to have a listen.  It made me smile.  I’m not a jazz fan but this one nabs me with its simplicity.  It’s called “Be Good.”  I love the way Gregory Porter’s dressed.  This whole video — it’s so me! — as my friend pointed out.

Don’t bang it so hard

I shaved my head again.  But when listening to death metal sometimes, I think, gee, it’d be nice to have some damn hair.  I had head-banging hair a few years ago, albeit not the long, straight kind – I like saying ‘albeit’ — hehehe. The last time I went to a concert was in ’09.  I loved seeing head bangers whipping their hair around.  I got into it, and two days later – whip-lash.  I couldn’t believe it – such pain from that shit.

The cool thing about banging my head at the concert was that my hair was such that I didn’t need to keep fixing it.  It was relaxed and wavy.  There’s no affectation to banging my head because I’m possessed, I’m not doing it, the music is.

Sometimes when I’m playing chess or blogging on my computer and a song I love comes on that impels me to move around like a maniac, I have to make sure that I don’t hit my head on the edge of my desk.  It would be embarrassing to die this way or even to knock myself out.  I’m intense when I like a piece of music.  Don’t’ get me to standing up thrashing around.  It’s damn dangerous.

I’m cool with being near bald now though.  It works the same for head-banging only I don’t get hair in the eyes, nose or mouth.  While it’s sexy to have hair doing it, I never want to become a cliché.  When I went to the Obituary concert, I refused to wear all black and black eye-liner, etc.  My friend didn’t either, thank goodness.  I do like dressing that way once in a while, but subtly.  I was death metal even before I knew what it was, so I don’t have to try.  I’m born this way.  It was inevitable that I would gravitate to it.  This cute guy I knew called me ‘Rock ‘n Roll’.  I’ve also been called Tasmanian devil and a human doing (as opposed to being).  So you can see why this kind of music would appeal to me – it’s compatible to my inner-vibration and to my tendency to muse delicately on death and all of its aspects and manifestations – what the fuck did I just say?!

I realize after all these years that I should probably not try too hard to do anything because I tend to have too much concentrated energy, which causes imbalance.  If I tried to be rock ‘n roll it might not work.  Rock ‘n roll, hard rock and heavy metal led me to hardcore, and I’m still in allegiance to it.

So what I want to do generally is ride the wave.  But sometimes old habits emerge and I thrash at the waves, pulling myself under, as the common metaphor goes.  Here’s another one:  As long as I don’t bang my head too hard I won’t get whip-lash.

No mama, I don’t want to go to hell!

Does anyone know if I could have unwittingly made a pact with the devil by singing a snippet of a refrain in a death metal song produced by Satanists?  I just wondered.

Quite a few years back I bought albums by Deicide and Morbid Angel.  A few years later, I was influenced by what people said about vibrations and such, bad ones, so I got superstitious and threw them away.  And silly me I didn’t know they were Satanists.

On my Pandora radio station the few songs they play by Satanists I really like.  Without me knowing who the artists are at first — if I hear the song from another room, I’m thinking wow that song’s tight!  And it turns out to be devil worshippers.  I guess that’s the way the devil works — his shit is always tight.  For those who don’t know, he’s all about appearances and the corporeal.

I’m not a devil worshipper.  I happen to have an unconventional relationship with God–it’s personal.  I’m an observer of life and all its elements.  I like to face them.  When I was nine I wrote a story examining the mystery of death and God and Satan.  This is just me.

They had this monk in Italy who sang metal.  He was old as shit too.  Reminded me of me.

So I don’t like the devil.  I just hoped I didn’t make an unwitting pact because I sang to this Deicide song that has a very infectious chorus.  I’ll bet most people would have a hard time not singing this one.  The chorus sounds like little demons waving their hands to and fro in the air while singing.  It’s so cute.  I used to do my leg lifts to it before I threw it out.  But it comes on my Pandora from time to time.  I still sing the chorus though.  I guess I realize in the back of my mind that if I had made a pact with the devil, my life would be a hell of a lot better than this.  Doesn’t the devil give you everything you want?  Hahaha!

Ooooh look a black cake

 

Image courtesy of Pam’s clip art

Some people assume I’m angry because I listen to death metal.  The intense, primal expression of death metal helps me experience my feelings cathartically and I am released from the bondage of anger.  I like it for dinner music or during ‘romantic’ interludes.  While the music allows me to feel peace, it is music that I use to release anger.  So that means that I do have anger issues.  But I’m also known as laid back, gentle, kind, sexy — what?!  Also someone told me that listening to this music causes negative vibrations.  Bah.

‘Easy listening’ music parading as jazz gets my goat and puts me in a very dangerous position.  It makes me want to stab myself in the ears with sharpened chop sticks.  So I say we should moondance because it’s my birthday.

Summoning happens to be black metal however…

I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to kill you

I wrote this inspired by the Cannibal Corpse phrase above:

You violated.  And you’ll know how big a mistake you made when I’m done.  You’ll be a bleating peasant, on your knees.  I’ll rip the meat from your arms with my teeth and pull out your hair strand by strand.  I’ll tie you with wire, smash your toes with a mallet and have rats nestle with you in a tub filled with bloody piss.  I’ll pull out all of your teeth and dangle you from the 50^th floor.  You’ll be fired from your job because your boss will believe every lie that I tell him about you.  I think of killing you in ways where you’ll live for a week before you die. You’ll want death.  But I won’t do it – you’ll die on your own from the torture.  I’ll cry with you then snatch my hand away and laugh at the snot on your face.  In that dimming light you will regret.

Fake Jazz and Fake A** People

A jazz trio played in the garden where I work.  They were the real deal, not one of those easy listening, ersatz jazz groups you hear in elevators and hospital waiting rooms.  I’m not a jazz fan but the few pieces I like are hard core and abstract.  I went home and tried out some jazz on Pandora.  I inserted a Theolonius Monk station right above my Obituary death metal station.  I listened for a few minutes before inserting a John Coltrane station right underneath that.  I listened to that for a bit.  Nah.

I felt like a pretentious bourgeois wannabe listening to it.  Ironic since this music started out as edgy and was created by oppressed black people.  I relate to death metal more than I do to jazz.  I get the feeling that some people listen to it because they think it’s what sophisticated, intellectual, or middle-class people of a certain age are supposed to listen to.  I know there are genuine enthusiasts but I wonder about the rest.  I appreciate the great jazz artists, but these days I think a lot of people attach it to the complacency of the “good life,” while it used to be associated with the avant-garde and artists or people who were on the edge.  I don’t want to get into politics so I won’t elaborate on what I think is wrong with the concept of the “good life.”   People can create a cocoon for a moment in time but there’s always some threat hovering over it.

As a black person, dirty road house blues music does it for me.  It’s the music I relate to.  These people remind me that the good life is a fucking illusion.  It reminds me of my forefathers in the strain and toil of the cotton fields.  I appreciate the beauty in every group.  I just love the pathos of being black and I appreciate being part of the African Diaspora.  So my rejection of jazz for the most part has nothing to do with me denying part of my heritage or whatever.

Life is life and sometimes while life is being life you still have to do shit you don’t want to do, like dishes, laundry, vacuuming.  There are job decisions I have to make.  And at my age it’s scary, but I don’t have any choice.  As soon as I finish reading the proof copy of my book I have to get on with this task.  This is why I’m moving slowly as I alluded to in previous posts.  I’m afraid of what’s on the other side.  And oy gevalt — I have oral surgery issues!  Though I have insurance it still means more pain and more money.  It’s overwhelming.  So, to aid me in my day to day tasks when it gets rancid, I listen to my death metal station on Pandora as I wash dishes, throwing them from the sink to the dish rack, angrily.  The music makes me feel like I’m not alone in my existential mire.  I’m not always like this, but, hmmm….  I wonder.  Maybe I’m just angry because the people who run the good life won’t let me in.  Eh?

Lurch

Lurch was the first death metal artist.  Mortician sounds suspiciously like him — and here I thought they originated the incomprehensible hardcore ditty.  They were influenced by Lurch!

Check out Lurch:

Did you see me in there doing the Watusi?  So you’re not easily fooled — it isn’t me.  I just relate to Wednesday.  When the first Addam’s Family movie came out, three people said I reminded them of her, with her adorable blasé morbidity and light musings on death.

I understand that people can’t take my elevator music.  I listen to death metal as background music, dinner music, romantic music – it relaxes me.  But for those who dare, check out similarities between Lurch and Mortician.

While they don’t rock the harpsichord like Lurch, I like the driving, inexorable rhythm of this song.  Mortician usually opens with a snippet from a grade Z horror movie before getting into their industrial juggernaut.  I see haute couture models stomping the runway to this — it’s avant garde fashion show music!  If you don’t listen to it, take my word, Mortician was, like, totally inspired by Lurch:

Crazy Old Aunties Deserve to Die

I walked to an ad on the train platform — a picture of an old woman with smeared lipstick, spiky drunk hair, holding a glass of liquor and a cigarette.  She wore flashy clothes too young for her wrinkled personage, and she was dancing.  The caption:  Crazy Old Aunties Deserve to Die.  Why I’m of this ilk.  I’ve written about it mmm hmm, in this blog.  Crazy ‘ol Auntie Sandee, the middle-aged death metalist, alcoholic.  Me and the poor old woman in this poster — people just don’t understand!  The ad was an off beat anti-smoking campaign.  Generally they were saying people make excuses when it comes to smoking.  But I quit smoking — quit the same time I quit drinking.  Considering the circumstances it was a wise decision.

A long time ago Crazy ‘ol Auntie Sandee went to the bar and met a boy quite a few years younger.  From the Canary Islands.  We talked and talked and talked.  He leaned over and in his Spanish accent said, “I want to kiss you.”  Yeah, yeah, so I made out with him in the bar loosey goosey, whatever.   All I remember is waking up alone to discover that I had apparently had safe sex with someone. Twice. I threw the condom wrappers away and went to work, recalling vaguely saying the night before, ‘Oooo, that’s niiice.”

A day later I get a call.  “Hello Sandee.”  It was the Spaniard!  “I have no idea what happened here the night before.  Why don’t we meet at the diner so you can tell me what happened and then I can see what you look like too.”  I recalled a handsome young devil but I was drunk.  I needed to know.

He was a handsome young devil on some kind of a work visa.  He would be leaving in a month.  He was studying to become a lawyer — I had sex with him.  In a blackout.  I wasn’t present, wasn’t there, didn’t get to experience this because I was in a blackout.  This made no sense.  I stopped drinking immediately.  Crazy ‘ol Aunties do indeed deserve to die when they deprive themselves of being present to experience having sex with handsome young men with European accents.

Dismember me

Gee Whiz!  I tell some people I’m a death metal enthusiast and they think it’s 80s hair metal music.  No, I’m afraid I don’t do 80s hair metal.  However, I do listen to a lot of old-school death metal.  I have a Mortician, Obituary and Nocturnal Dominion station on Pandora.  The music on either of these stations has similar elements to these primary groups.  Pandora has introduced me to a lot of new groups as well.  Pantera and Metallica are soft compared to this music, besides they’re also commercial.  Death metal can be progressive and very arty.  It’s nihilistic and iconoclastic with morbid undertones.  That’s so me.  It’s not a bad thing.  It’s severe and inaccessible to people who have certain musical expectations rhythmically or lyrically, etc.  Some of the lyrics are brilliant.  Some of the lyrics are vile and would be considered offensive for various reasons.  (I don’t listen to neo nazi black metal or far right metal.) Some lyrics don’t make sense but I don’t care, just as long as they’re screaming and beating me over the head.  I tend to glaze over what they’re saying in these cases because the abstract elements are too essential.  I was always into metal — except for those 80s hair bands.  I started with Led Zeplin, Black Sabbath, et al, but in the eighties I gravitated to independent stations and started listening to a segment called “Hell Hole,” and I was in Heaven.  The music was punk, death metal, gothic.  I never looked back.  I just like it hard.  What can I say?  I do listen to other music but death metal is church music to me.  The primal elements help my rage.  There’s also humor in this type of anti-music.  The screaming and growling is so refreshingly absurd.  I’ll be old listening to it.  I came home from the traumatic dental experience in excruciating pain and it so soothed the angst of the savage beast: