Reading is funda-metal

Adam Collins-Toruella from Pesanta Urfolk is in Lux Interna, a dark/drone Americana band.



They might not be metal per se, though Pesanta is kinda a metal label. Metal's edges are blurrier than ever. Which makes the old saw "I listen to anything but metal" (PDF) a little harder to pull off. That paper is about social constructions of identity through musical taste — basically, by not listening to metal you're saying that you're not like one of those poxy fules of lower-class economics and combat boots.

That's supported by the class implications for omnivorous music listening. I've long held that petit bourgeois have either the money without the taste or the taste without the money; I fall into the latter, I hope.



Every search engine's a critic.

Christoffer Relander does in-camera "double exposures" that stand out through strong black and white composition.

These are the twist-tie warriors I always wanted as a kid.

Running out of post titles before running out of free music

Self-titled stoner blues rock from Ufesas. Pretty good when they're Monster Magnet, but kinda cheesy Gov't Mule moments too.

Gloomlights by Airs is fuzzy noise-gaze from SF.

Airport Lights vol. 1 by Ktroneb is wub-wub-wub analogue space rock.

The Burl, The Earth, The Aether by Ice Dragon is pretty self-explanatory.

War of the Giants by Axxicorn is also epic metal.

Gangs, drugs, metal, punk, what?

I stumbled onto this short item on a gang shooting in South LA. I was curious about the gang, and it turned out to be The Defiant Ones, a black motorcycle club that started in the '50s.

Trying to find more info on them, led me to a flickr set of the 1982 LAPD gang handbook.

One of the weird things about the handbook is that they say that the white gangs mostly label themselves as "stoners," e.g. Downey Stoners, La Mirada Stoners, Paramount Stoners. So, I start googling for some of those, and run across a 1985 article about Fight For Freedom, some white punk rock gang, which sounds pretty hilarious.

In there, they quote credulously from Gregory Bodenhamer, who apparently ran a program called "Back in Control." Though in the article, he's fairly sane, it turns out that Bodenhamer thought that kids needed to be depunked and demetaled, and ran some crazy brainwashing camps in the '80s, which this rambling blog entry connects to the PMRC, Focus on the Family, the evangelical DC prayer group called The Family, and Hilary Clinton. Bodenhamer is also quoted in this goofy article about druggy metal heads.

You got gore in my Satanism!

Three brief guides to metal subgenres (or "What's the difference between black metal and death metal, anyhow?")

It's almost pretty, that death metal

Negative Plane's Stained-Glass Revelations