BenMech
student of the d'eh
Congratulations Jim. My condolences to Sanna.
And yeah, now I think I recognize who Dave Burns was/is.
And yeah, now I think I recognize who Dave Burns was/is.
What's happening with LotFP!
- Thread starter Jim LotFP
- Start date
Occam's Razor said:best wishes from my side - is it going to be a traditional "white wedding"?
bah. She's got a red dress.
Jim LotFP said:
I found my email explaining how I got from $ to Scum, from August 14:
"Well this is very simple. I got into heavy metal post-Nirvana. The verdict was in, and the sentence of obscurity was just starting to be served. All the talented stuff was obscure and unknown, all the popular stuff was awful.
... Korn and the followers made it worse, as they weren't "our music" but were considered "metal" by the media outlets pushing them. Once again, "our" music was being held down, but there was hope that heavy metal was just one breakthrough away from revolution...
... Napster and its followers is what caused the $ rant in #27. Cash was needed to fund this revolution, and if all the kiddies were just downloading and never buying, well, they're stealing our revolution out from under us... and I still think it's stealing. Even if record labels are scumsucking leeches, I think I'd lose my right to bitch about them if I became a leeching thief. I still think that the musicians should benefit from those enjoying their work, and not be panhandlers on the street asking for a few pennies after the fact.
... and my stereo just turned itself on in the other room... that's pretty weird.
Anyway, the real turning point came when stuff started getting on MTV... and concerts started selling serious tickets... and I realized, it wasn't because people were coming around to heavy metal's line of thinking... but heavy metal was going out of its way to dumb itself down in order to move on up. Record label signings (and droppings) became pretty obvious...
Then I moved to Finland for three months, the land of "real metal", and saw exactly how things worked when heavy metal was just another form of pop. Opening up heavy metal to the masses won't make the masses heavy metal, it just drains heavy metal through a strainer of mass marketing. So the RPG went on the back burner because I just had to write about this shit.
So... popularity and flowing money was a great idea and still would be if things could be done with honesty and integrity... but on the edge of yet another mass upswing of heavy metal popularity, it's pretty obvious that's not going to happen, so hell with it.
Are the dots connected?
"
DBB
Member
- Dec 20, 2005
- 370
- 1
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Twilight Odyssey was number two for me. Deceased’s flawless blend of the best elements from Supernatural Addiction and Fearless Undead Machines was too much for any band to surpass on the Burns 2005 list. Slough Feg and the Rev. Biz. are certainly no slouches either.Jim LotFP said:
This will actually work better for me. What you have read in rough draft form has been polished, tightened and sharpened and would be ready to go after one last obsessive-compulsive read through in a vain effort to catch every small error. But I spent five hours paint-priming three large and complex windows today and did a lot of thinking and the concluding section is going to a bit more involved than I had envisioned it.Jim LotFP said:
The added time will also give me an opportunity to add some extraneous information that I feel did not belong in the article to the notes/citations and some time to think about whether I want to include a couple of brief points that I have been on the fence about throughout the process. Most importantly, the time will place some distance between what I have written and let me read it with a new set of eyes in a week. So the delay is a blessing in disguise as far as I am concerned.
Like I told you a week ago, there was part of me that didn’t want to write this. When I was sitting there staring at the wall thinking during the writing of the first section I thought about dropping the project and off of the face of the earth and just going back to being a passive consumer of heavy metal—but decided against it because I really do believe the next couple of years will be heavy metal’s moment of truth and it is time to fight like goddamn hell right now (much more on this in the article’s conclusionJim LotFP said:
). Plus I was listening to Those Once Loyal at my smoking post outside the apartment this evening and taking a bit of a mad-old-school-death-metal- infused joy at the fact that a lot of people have absolutely no idea what is coming down the pike.
Jim LotFP said:
If this doesn’t do it—I don’t know what will. There are a significant number of people out there who just want instant gratification and could care less about any larger issues and are beyond hope or redemption. But I also think that many people are ready to think about the issues I raise as well as many of the points you made in Scum. This seems as good as a point as any to thank you for nudging me in the right direction with your writings—I could not have wrote what I did without reading your work. HAIL AND KILL!!!
Jim LotFP said:
Congratulations!
Like a ship that's built for destruction.BenMech said:
I'm a metal man of construction.
And I'll fire my cannons, one by one.
DBB said:
I tried to get people on the German Rock hard board into Scum and a discussion about these things...hopeless cases, totally ignorant and mostly naive and blinkered in their fanboy-ism...predominantly smug half-time-metalheads anyway for whom imetal means to go out in the evenings, get drunk and listen to consensus-music, thinking themselves to be oh-so-subversive and individual...
DBB
Member
- Dec 20, 2005
- 370
- 1
- 18
I don’t know if I would be as harsh on people. It is incredibly difficult to sort things out sometimes, and I’ve been fooled, bought into hype and made poor decisions about metal. It is just such a damn mess. There are no metal media outlets (English language at least) out there presenting any kind of arguments about metal or definitions of what things mean and people take their cues from the environment in which they are immersed.
During much of the 90s it was incredibly difficult for me to find new metal albums that I really enjoyed. There was hardly anybody in the small city where I lived listening to metal, I had no car for many years, and when I did run across someone who was into metal it was of the death/gore variety that is not my cup of tea. I would go into record stores and there would often be a meager metal selection (many did not have a metal section) of a lot of stuff that wasn't of interest based on looking at the band name, artwork, and song titles. Metal Maniacs (it did get much better, of course, and certainly helped) was the only magazine available, and I would pick it up now and again, read through it, go out and buy two or three albums based on a description and be absolutely disgusted after I plunked down my money and found that it sounded nothing like I was led to believe. I would break out selections from the significant number of cassettes from the old days I still had to tide me over and cherished the occasional purchase that did not disappoint.
This, coupled with the events that turned my life upside-down and the periodic bouts of financial hardship accompanying them, made metal seem like something that was there inside of me but not there at the same time. I guess I was late getting onto the Internet for philosophical reasons, but when I did, I began to slowly find more and more metal that seemed to stir the passions of old instead of exasperation and disgust until it snowballed into something that became a large part of my life again. I was just happy at this development and was not motivated to really question things due to the fact that here again was metal all around me after so many years in hibernation. Now, after all these years I found myself writing about metal and it has forced me into taking a long, hard thoughtful look at things and made me realize that heavy metal is still a genre existing at the margins despite the overall health of what passes for metal and moved me to act—or it could be called a resurrection of the rabid, fighting spirit that animated me when I was full of the metallic piss and vinegar of youth. But metal has always been a prominent musical thread running through my life that was never lost or forgotten and over the last seven or eight years has become thick and strong again as the genre has managed to stake out a new lease on life, and I would hate to see it pared down again by the impulses and ideas I explore in my article. It is strange looking back at it all, but the past eight months or so of writing has changed my outlook and made me feel more invested in metal and a part of something that is similar to the feeling I had when I corresponded with bands about shirts, demos, etc. back in the late 80s and very early 90s.
Well...enough ramlbling for now I guess, everybody will get their fill of that soon enough.
During much of the 90s it was incredibly difficult for me to find new metal albums that I really enjoyed. There was hardly anybody in the small city where I lived listening to metal, I had no car for many years, and when I did run across someone who was into metal it was of the death/gore variety that is not my cup of tea. I would go into record stores and there would often be a meager metal selection (many did not have a metal section) of a lot of stuff that wasn't of interest based on looking at the band name, artwork, and song titles. Metal Maniacs (it did get much better, of course, and certainly helped) was the only magazine available, and I would pick it up now and again, read through it, go out and buy two or three albums based on a description and be absolutely disgusted after I plunked down my money and found that it sounded nothing like I was led to believe. I would break out selections from the significant number of cassettes from the old days I still had to tide me over and cherished the occasional purchase that did not disappoint.
This, coupled with the events that turned my life upside-down and the periodic bouts of financial hardship accompanying them, made metal seem like something that was there inside of me but not there at the same time. I guess I was late getting onto the Internet for philosophical reasons, but when I did, I began to slowly find more and more metal that seemed to stir the passions of old instead of exasperation and disgust until it snowballed into something that became a large part of my life again. I was just happy at this development and was not motivated to really question things due to the fact that here again was metal all around me after so many years in hibernation. Now, after all these years I found myself writing about metal and it has forced me into taking a long, hard thoughtful look at things and made me realize that heavy metal is still a genre existing at the margins despite the overall health of what passes for metal and moved me to act—or it could be called a resurrection of the rabid, fighting spirit that animated me when I was full of the metallic piss and vinegar of youth. But metal has always been a prominent musical thread running through my life that was never lost or forgotten and over the last seven or eight years has become thick and strong again as the genre has managed to stake out a new lease on life, and I would hate to see it pared down again by the impulses and ideas I explore in my article. It is strange looking back at it all, but the past eight months or so of writing has changed my outlook and made me feel more invested in metal and a part of something that is similar to the feeling I had when I corresponded with bands about shirts, demos, etc. back in the late 80s and very early 90s.
Well...enough ramlbling for now I guess, everybody will get their fill of that soon enough.
DBB said:
Problem is, here we have heaps of media, but no alternative. It is all the same, like dozens of Metal Maniacs type of magazines, if you know what I mean. It is easier to buy the glossy things with the free samplers and dvd (recently in Rock Hard) that feed you the standards. Good small zines are few and far between and do not get much attention.
Passionate statement of yours anyway, I'm not old enough yet to have experienced that many ups and downs in metal. Still, they have a feature in Rock Hard where they look at an issue from ten years ago retrospectively. It's often the case that I think "Man, it was a better time for music back then when I bought that issue"...guess I'm getting old, too
.Looking forward to your article, really...!
DBB said:Well...enough ramlbling for now I guess, everybody will get their fill of that soon enough.
I just received the final draft.
Now the boring part: Editing for spelling, grammar, and whatever else (without trusting MS Word's little green and red squigglies). Then sending back suggested corrections for approval (I expect there to be very few). Then creating a pdf. Then formatting it for html and uploading it to the site. Then formatting it for the board here.
It's just before 2pm Finnish time now (is that properly called Eastern European Time?), I wouldn't expect it to be online in any form until this evening my time. But start sitting at the site hitting 'refresh'.
This is SO COOL.
18428 words, not counting footnotes. And I figured out what ibid means. That rules.
Jim LotFP said:It's just before 2pm Finnish time now (is that properly called Eastern European Time?), I wouldn't expect it to be online in any form until this evening my time. But start sitting at the site hitting 'refresh'.
Well pish. Looks like the formatting and having it ready will be a bit longer.
