ON SCAPEGOATING AND HOW HEAVY METAL IS HARDLY AS EVIL AS SOME FOOLS MAKE IT OUT TO BE A LOOK BACK IN TIME

   This blog begins with a question and I already have the answer: IS HEAVY METAL "EVIL?" The answer is A RESOUNDING NO. I have listened to King Diamond, Candlemass, Stormwitch, Running Wild, Mercyful Fate, Judas Priest,and the simple fact is this is good music with arcane and intellectual lyrics that may speak of Satanism, but Satanism also is not as evil an idea as you may think if you hear Mr. Diamond's argument. Essentially King Diamond is warning us of the horrible past and present of true evil done in the name of organized Christianity. I was scapegoated throughout school and continue to be sought out and abused for what I will come right out and tell you is that I am a highly intelligent individual in the stupidest most corrupted country in the world Amerika and it's about time the rest of the world smacked our face and threw us head first down a flight of stairs. I mean no ill towards certain Americans, but the intelligent worldly people in this country have always taken two roads if they are good: they either join the Armed Forces (Especially the Marine Corps), go to work for a leftist organization, or back in the glory days of the musical subject at hand and the indie rock of today go off and put good music into action.
        The whole idea behind heavy metal began in the late 60s and early 70s mainly in England, but now let us take a good look at that era, an era that I'll make the argument produced THE MOST EVIL, FILTHY, SICK, AND CORRUPT MUSIC IN THE WORLD IN THE WRONG HANDS. Wouldn't you know it Amerika would be the country sick, violent, murderous, and disturbing music came from by fakes and scumbags exploiting the psychedelic era and turning what was a brilliant and revolutionary time into a time as lopsided as there ever will be in history except the 90s. It began with the bad side of the 1960s as there was no decade more tumultuous. The Vietnam War cost over 50,000 American boys lives during the long, drawn out tragedy and some really truly evil and horrible things were done to the Vietnamese by Americans and also by factions within Vietnam and later Cambodia. People took to the streets by the thousands in the protest movement and there was always the feeling of darkness and misery in the air as those same thousands could on the male contingent find themselves drafted and sent off to Hell. Some bands became immersed in political protest in fact many did, but let's just look at how many times that it wasn't protest it was an excuse to write about murder and violent death. Things got so bad by the early 70s that a certain sicko band called Bolder Damn who were no good and had no talent produced a "song" called "Dead Meat" where in live performances the band's singer would be mutilated and covered in blood. That sick album has had numerous reissues and the most recent of which when I finally heard it sent me into Hell when I freaked out over it. Fuck you Bolder Damn!
    In stark contrast Alice Cooper was always, especially when it was meant for the whole band not just Alice the frontman, violent onstage, but done with a sense of real fun and zaniness and Alice turned out to be a band of brothers led by a strangely named entertainer who still puts on amazing shows of performance art. Alice (I.E Vincent Furnier) is now in his 60s and will not stop. He has a dream and a vision and the band shared that dream and vision. Also in very stark contrast all of Black Sabbath's songs are warnings and graphic depictions of both a fantasy netherworld and the bad side of the 60s and 70s done in a creative way. Fast forward to Iron Maiden and The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal that was the spark that led to the most creatively brilliant time in music when music was actually having some more equilibrium.
      I know you're gonna say I'm trashing the 60s. No. it's my favourite era as is the 70s, but at the same time that I highly value the best music of that time I have no time and no place for the hacks and slime bags who turned the 60s into both not just the best, but also the worst era ever for music. In Amerika what started as feeble and stagnant with pathetic bands supposed to guard "us" from The British Invasion soon turned into the death obsessed violent, murderous, and sicker than sick disaster of what happened when the people who were spitting in the face of the hippies began to make albums smugly placed to put them into a quick jump on and off the bandwagon. Let me just say that when I was living in the 1960s in the 1990s I had learned from the previous heavy metal peak era that some people have no shame at all and were arriving in droves playing what I call "thrash and trash." Truths must be faced about even some of the most hardcore metal. I mean Dark European Metal. The genre is wider than you think. Bands from Europe were writing message and lesson songs and in fact the best of these bands were great storytellers who were channeling into a kind of childhood nightmare world that had its beginnings and peak in the progressive era which began with bands like Genesis who like Alice Cooper had an outlandish frontman in Peter Gabriel. I found myself hearing one horrible American record after another from what were termed as "psychedelic" albums and I began to get really pissed off with American "psych" and there still are a handful of favourites in what is otherwise an overflowing veritable Wal-Mart of shelves full of vomit!
    Music was always better overseas than here. In the psychedelic era, however, the split between some of the best music ever created in the history of America and the very worst was so wide that most people who were part of the counterculture knew when they were being taken for a ride and the bad bands were business executives on a corporate venture. All you have to do is look at how few of the truly evil albums were even done by a band. Case in point are two very disgusting individuals who got together on several projects by the names of Lor Crane and Jay Zimmet. The New York based pair's first piece of vinyl horror music and an evil vicious homicide on vinyl is the sickest record ever recorded in the entire history of music. In 1968 an album on a not-even-rock label Phase 4 by a nonexistent band called Stonepillow by the album title of ELEAZAR'S CIRCUS came out and at the same time the other sickest most obscene and twisted record ever made by a bandwagon jumping bunch of prissy fools known as The Strawberry Alarm Clock WAKE UP IT'S TOMORROW was released. Both these albums are obsessed with death, murder, violence, mutilation, terrifying for the sake of nothing but to be horrible and mean spirited imagery, and in the title track of "Eleazar's Circus" a room full of death, misery, disease, and decay is what the circus is!!!!! Strawberry Alarm Clock come right out and urge the listener to commit suicide in the opening track of WAKE UP IT'S TOMORROW  "Nightmare Of Percussion" and then there are such charming tracks as "Curse Of The Witches" where every female in his family is burned as a witch until again the theme of suicide as a "good thing" is addressed. Did any British bands or European bands ever make albums this sick? NO. What should have turned into hunting down and imprisoning the bastards behind this never happened. Instead, fast forward to "Beyond The Realms Of Death" by Judas Priest we have a song that is meant to be a tragic storyline and powerful look at someone so sick they never can cope with life gets years later turned into a court case. I saw sights as evil as boxes and boxes of records being burned when I was a kid and the PMRC led by pigfaced Tipper Gore got away with their true evil by having large warning stickers placed on nearly all records only within the genre of hard rock/metal. I don't think I need a crystal ball to tell you who really is sick and deranged here.
      In England in the 80s a lot of bands did write occult lyrics and other dark themes, but the art behind bands like Witchfinder General was like that of a fine master painter diligently working on what would be a musical equivalent of something you could stare at for hours and always find something new and special in it. Let's also go back to the 60s and bring up The Bee Gees, Pink Floyd,  UK Kaleidoscope, and the best music ever made is there. I never had a problem with most of the British and European bands especially as the songs are often fables and lesson songs. Witchfinder General were a band who unjustly were persecuted until there was nothing they could do but split because of poor sales. Also, Iron Maiden used enough biblical allusions in their lyrics to practically rewrite the so-called "Holy Book." One of the bands outside metal who sported a genius lyricist and musician who will be a legend up there with Shakespeare himself is The Police and Sting. Sting would spend hours and hours meticulously crafting haunting melodies and catchy vocal lines inspiring everyone from Diamond Head the Gods of Heavy Metal to Duran Duran another high minded band. With the swing towards the far right both in Britain and Amerika and disasters like Operation Banner (The Troubles In Northern Ireland) where thousands and thousands of British young men died there was bound to be menace and depression in a lot of music, but British bands had a different way of dealing with it. Some American bands wrote myriads of protest songs (Fifth Angel, Queensryche), but the most rapidly maturing era of music the 1980s belonged to love song oriented American and Canadian AOR/Pomp and solid British Rock.
    I was just a kid then, but I knew a lot and I learned fast. Of course, I also learned about the fake styrofoam headed American Bible Belt and other disturbing right wing movements and whilst the country was swinging to the right faster than you could spell the word "WRONG" I became further and further leftist in my beliefs and more and more radical. I'm proud of a lot of what I accomplished then. I couldn't have done it without these supposedly rank and vile artists like Ozzy Osbourne, Diamond Head, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and so on. Ozzy got the brunt of really bad press, but so did Triumph and every other band from Canada and Canada wasn't metal most of the time unless you really wanna stretch hard rock bands like White Wolf and Sword into the heavy metal idiom. There were bands in Amerika like for instance Overkill, Savatage, and a lot of names whose subterranean sound had me drooling. Yes, I have been called a "Devil Worshiper!" What nonsense. To go back to the rancid days of the 1990s grunge came out and its evil effects along with the evil of sick in the head nonsense that replaced true heavy metal was never acknowledged for how dangerous it was until the horrible Columbine School shootings. This disaster happened and continues to happen because of the fucking Second Amendment. Shame on us! So you may ask me why do I have NO FRIENDS IN AMERICA? Because America has more stupid people than any other country in the world and more RICH STUPID PEOPLE. Over the years violent outbursts and rebellious behavior from me have been pretty commonplace and I'm glad to say that I always defend myself and my beliefs. I remember all those times we drove around in the car blasting the Hell out of Diamond Head, Aerosmith, Dokken, Saxon, UFO, Black Sabbath, and Ozzy with Randy Rhoades. Don't tell me that's evil. The drinks are on me and they don't cost anything and they aren't even alcoholic. Feel like taking a sip? I suggest you do!