We’ll know for the first time – if we’re evil or divine We’re the last in line
Ronnie James Dio – the master voice and wonder of evil heavy metal – passed away on Sunday, May 16th, 2010.
I don’t usually care that much when famous people pass away. Everybody dies. Ronnie was suffering from stomach cancer at the age of 67. It was just a question of time. However, he was still the best heavy metal singer out there. His vocals were even better on stage than in the studio. To me, Dio is a true legend and his work has meant a lot to me. I believe the video for We Rock was the first song I ever heard from Dio (this very version), and that was back in 1984/85 on Swedish Television. I caught that on tape and it’s by far the most watched video ever in my home. Thus, The Last In Line is my favourite album, and being the doom fan that I am, I believe that Egypt (The Chains Are On) was one of the first doom songs I ever encountered. The lyrics suit my mental state more now than ever, the atmosphere is pure magic and Dio’s voice is – as always – superior. Check out this amazing version where they incorporate Black Sabbath’s Children of the Sea – another great doom masterpiece.
When the world was milk and honey And the magic was strong and true Then the strange ones came and the people knew
In the land of no tomorrow Where you pray just to end each day And your life just slowly melts away
Maybe one day you’ll be just like me And that’s free But still your chains are on
There’s this common old accusation that ”Jews control the media”. Not quite so. If they were, why would the Israel lobby work so hard to monitor and influence what the mainstream media says about Israel?
However, by looking at mainstream media in the United States, it is clear that the lobby’s perspective is widely reflected there since most American commentators who write about Israel are themselves pro-Israel. The U.S. mainstream media has no Robert Fisk, so to speak. Neither Time nor the Washington Post – arguably the two most influental daily newspapers in America – employs any full-time commentator who even remotely favors the Arab or Palestinian side, or is critical of Israel. As is written in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt: ”The point here is not that these individuals [Fisk et al] are always right and pro-Israel commentators are wrong; the point is that voices like theirs are almost entirely absent from major American newspapers.”
Fact is that whenever something is written about Israel that is not in favour of Israel (in the American mainstream, that is) the lobby organizes letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts against these news outlets. In 2006, CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in the Middle East Reporting in America), one of the lobby’s most energetic media watchdog group, ran full-page advertisements in the New York Times and New York Sun criticizing Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. These ads included the publisher’s phone number and encouraged readers to call and complain. Likewise, one CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets six thousand e-mail messages in a single day complaining that a story is anti-Israel. Many papers, such as the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald, have faced boycotts over their Middle East reporting. The former spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York, Menachem Shalev, once put it, ”Of course, a lot of censorship goes on. Journalists, editors and politicians are going to think twice about criticizing Israel if they know they are going to get thousands of angry calls in a matter of hours. The Jewish lobby is good at orchestrating pressure.”
Huge organizations keeping a watchful eye on anything anti-Israel, dominating the public discourse, is nothing new, and is naturally not only restricted to media. In the early 1980s, AIPAC recruited students to help identify professors and campus organizations that might be considered anti-Israel. The findings were published in 1984 in The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus. This is an ongoing project which still exists today. Campus Watch, a website which invites students to report anti-Israel behavior at U.S. colleges, is probably influenced by the AIPAC project. This site started off by publishing dossiers on suspect academics in an attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars. It’s still up and running, loving the word ”conspiracy theory”…
Note that these aren’t small organizations whose work go unnoticed. These are lobby groups with immense power. To be able to shut up the whole American mainstream media about controversial policies in Israel, you definitely need power. Management by fear.
As for these “last man on Earth”-movies, The Quiet Earth (1985) must be one of the best yet. The first act, where scientist Zac Hobson wakes up in a world totally devoid of human life, is amazing. As Zac gradually finds out what’s happened (the usual story of a science experiment gone wrong) we get to follow his transformation from man in a suite to man in a woman’s dress… and beyond. As he lets loose on a Kurtz-like journey in this empty world – trying to fill it with sense, but ends up with madness – we’re reminded of the chains that hold us down in everyday life. Because what would you do if you were all alone in this world? Keep on enduring the daily grind or explore life further? The scene where Zac talks to God and fires a round of ammo into the face of Christ says it all.
The film sort of loses its magic midway through, but still keeps a very good 80’s kind of pace until the end. If you’re into 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Moon (2009), this is something in between. A must see.
We all know about ”the six million Jews” figure, we hear about that everyday (you hardly have to be a news junkie to catch that). The Holocaust certainly was unique. But so was the extermination of possibly as many as sixty million Africans during the African slave trade, and so was the near-total extermination of one hundred million American Indians. You don’t hear about that quite as often. As for American Indians, this was about the total extermination of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups. When speaking of the Holocaust, we make fine distinctions among the different populations of Europe, but lump ”Africans” and ”Indians” into one single category. Maybe this is one reason why these genocides – which are far worse in terms of sheer numbers of people killed – are being ignored? And of course, the uniqueness of the Jewish people (the People’s Front of Judea!), Jews as the chosen people, makes the Holocaust so much more special and important. This is where the Holocaust religion comes marching in.
If you’re interested in the boundary between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, Defamation ought to be a movie worthy of your interest. It is directed by Yoav Shamir, an Israeli Jew, who also made the amazing Checkpoint documentary. Shamir is interested in non-violence based on game theory. In game theory [quoted from an IMDB review], “the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ states that the only concern of each individual player (or ‘prisoner’) is to try to maximize his own advantage, without any concern for the well-being of the other players. Both players will be tempted to harm the other player even though they would both ultimately benefit more by cooperation”. This pretty much describes the situation in Israel.
Knappt tio månader efter formexperimentet Revelations of the Black Flame (se recension i #62) är 1349 tillbaka med ett verk som blandar det experimentella med det traditionella. Vartannat stycke är mullrande oljudsmörker à la intro och vartannat pisksnabb black metal. Imponerande frenesi överlag, men knappast minnesvärt. Intron fyller sällan någon funktion och att här få sju sådana och sex vanliga låtar känns bara störande. Jag funderar även på om effekten av att lägga sången så frånskilt från övrigt material tillhör det experimentella. Det låter märkligt emellanåt. Jämfört med debuten Liberation (2003) och sylvassa låtar som Manifest och Riders of the Apocalypse står detta sig jämmerligt slätt, vilket är synd på ett så kompetent band. Jag skulle uppskatta om de hittade tillbaka till de mästerliga styckena och det råa ljudet.
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Opeth Blackwater Park – Legacy Edition – 9/10 Legacy/Sony
”Idiot. Sluta läsa omedelbart och spring iväg och tjacka vad som förmodligen redan nu är årets bästa album alla kategorier!” Så löd min fullständiga recension av Blackwater Park i Close-Up #44 för tio år sedan. Ett drygt decennium dessförinnan satt Mikael Åkerfeldt ute i Sörskogen och plinkade på det som sedermera skulle mynna ut i Opeth. 20 jävla år sedan… Vi som avgudar bandet har våra favoritskivor. För mig är det Still Life (1999) som smäller högst, medan Ghost Reveries (2005) fortfarande är en besvikelse. Men betänk då att när Opeth är som sämst är de ändå bäst. Med Blackwater Park hittade gruppen hem på allvar. Ljudbilden klarnade, nyanserna fick större spelrum och gruppen kändes mer samspelt. Den inledande raden ”We entered winter once again” är för mig lika klassisk som när Churchill inleder Live After Death. Det säger en del om hur högt jag håller detta band. Tio år senare kan jag ana en svacka i mitten av albumet, kring The Drapery Falls och Dirge for November, där arrangemangen inte är lika intrikata utan snarare mal på likt mörka mantran. Här känns opeth svagare och lätt apatiska. Att många band har inspirerats av just Blackwater Park torde vara odiskutabelt. Lyssna exempelvis på Deathspell Omega och Hétoïmasia. Mästerverk inspirerar andra mästerverk. Så har det alltid varit inom konsten och Opeth är tveklöst konst för mig. Den medföljande dvd:n är egentligen inte mycket att orda om. 35 minuters runkande i Studio Fredman, ungefär som en utdragen version av Harvest-videon. Ultratönten Steven Wilson kedjekäkar ostbågar och Moonchild-stölden avslöjas. Vi musikdokumentärnördar fröjdas ändå. Att albumet denna gång även bjuder på en 5.1-mix bör få alla audiofiler att knäböja. Omslagsfetischisterna får sig ett nytt omslag. Själv lär jag aldrig sluta dyrka oavsett vilken mix eller vilket omslag som erbjuds.
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Triptykon Eparistera Daimones – 8/10 Century Media (EMI)
Svanesången Monotheist (2006) var inget annat än monumental mysticism. Celtic Frost lämnade tveklöst scenen med flaggan i topp och de traditionalistiska skeptikerna med en kasse sura äpplen att bita i. Tom G. Warrior har dock mer att uträtta på denna gudsförgätna helvetesjord innan Satan sätter punkt. Efter att i årtionden ha stirrat djupt ner i avgrunden stirrar nu avgrunden tillbaka. Triptykon och Eparistera Daimones är en så mörk och tung upplevelse att svart är en alldeles för blek färg att likna det hela vid. När inledande Goetia efter elva minuters briljans avslutas med ett mässande ”Lie upon lie/Mankind shall die” vet jag att detta är rätt. Efterföljande Abyss Within My Soul är krossande doomtyngd personifierad. In Shrouds Decayed lyser upp det kompakta mörkret för en stund. Men bara för en stund. Mörkret sluter sig. Gitarrljudet är så tungt och förvridet att det emellanåt gränsar till rent oljudsmuller (lyssna på nittonminuterseposet The Prolonging). Men riffen finns där, om än djupt begravda i den gåtfulla myllan. Och det finns mycket mer att hämta. När halva skivan avverkats börjar man skönja spår av Tiamat, Fields of the Nephilim och kanske även Nine Inch Nails och Opeth. Det ålderdomligt ockulta blandas med det modernt metalliska och skivan växer för varje omgång. Det är sannerligen ingen enkel platta att ta till sig. Även den intresserade uppmanas att lyssna extra noggrant, om och om igen. Till en början tyckte jag att helheten var aningen seg, men efter tredje varvet lossnade det. Nu dyrkas det här hemma i kistan. Att H.R. Giger återvänder som omslagskonstnär – hans Satan I prydde Celtic Frosts To Mega Therion 1985 – får ses som en njutfull bonus. Vinylutgåvan är således ett absolut måste. Triptykon lirar på årets Roadburnfestival om några veckor och jag ser verkligen fram emot en överdos av smutsig, svart monumentalism. UNH!
Earth Hour makes me sick. It’s straight up hypocrisy, the masses being orchestrated by the media to turn out the lights for one hour once a year. Wow. Big deal. Everybody at the same time: We did it! We love life! Earth Hour does practically nothing but speaks to our bad conscience.
Also, Earth Hour always starts at an hour where all big businesses are shut down. Instead of the big businesses taking responsibility for the destruction of the Earth and shutting down in the middle of the day, the joke’s on us: Turn out the lights on your free time, please, and welcome back to work tomorrow. Work, eat, consume, sleep.
Usually, I’m all for small actions leading to big change, but this, as well as the International Women’s Day and such manifestations, is like spitting in the face of real change. One hour, or one day, and then it’s all back to normal, i.e. the mindless egotistic destruction we always occupy our time with. Mankind will never learn.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals But then how did that other “gloomy business,” the consciousness of guilt, the whole “bad conscience” come into the world?—And with this we turn back to our genealogists of morality. I’ll say it once more—or have I not said anything about it yet?—they are useless. With their own merely “modern” experience extending through only a brief period [fünf Spannen lange], with no knowledge of and no desire to know the past, even less a historical instinct, a “second sight”— something necessary at this very point—they nonetheless pursue the history of morality. That must justifiably produce results which have a less than tenuous relationship to the truth. Have these genealogists of morality up to now allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, that major moral principle “guilt” [Schuld] derived its origin from the very materialistic idea “debt” [Schulden]? Or that punishment developed as a repayment, completely without reference to any assumption about freedom or lack of freedom of the will?—and did so, by contrast, to the point where it always first required a high degree of human development so that the animal “man” began to make those much more primitive distinctions between “intentional,” “negligent,” “accidental,” “responsible,” and their opposites and bring them to bear when meting out punishment? That idea, nowadays so trite, apparently so natural, so unavoidable, which has even had to serve as the explanation how the feeling of justice in general came into existence on earth, “The criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted otherwise,” this idea is, in fact, an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of human judgment and decision making. Anyone who moves this idea back to the beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology of older humanity. For the most extensive period of human history, punishment was certainly not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be punished:—it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator—but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the perpetrator. Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now ineradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence between punishment and pain? I have already given away the answer: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is, in general, as ancient as the idea of “legal subject” and which, for its part, refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trading, and exchanging goods.
