A dramatization in the style of Lovecraft (hopefully)

I saw the "No Guns Allowed" sign, but didn't care. I had a license to carry, and no pot-smoking hippy was going to put up a sign and keep me out. I opened the door, and walked inside. Enemy territory. Would they know? What would happen if they saw that most hated of tools, the bringer of death to this world, The Gun?

"Hello!" One of the hippies said cheerfully, unaware of the horror that had just walked into their presence.

"Good morning" I replied, knowing that this was anything but. This was a morning that would cause screams that would echo through time, screams normally reserved for Elder Things.

I walked over to the wall of DVDs. They were alphabetical, and not sub-divided by type or genre. Typical of hippies to know only one way of organizing things. I'd stopped by the shop to find a rock documentary, but it wasn't there. Probably too loud and angry for the store owners to handle.

A dilemma presented itself. I could stop by the music selection, I'd been looking for a certain Collective Soul album, but one of Them was there, and they might not have it, either. I could destroy this man's sanity by my very presence, and yet it might be a waste of my time. Perhaps I should leave immediately?

I decided to risk it. This lesser creature was not worth worrying about, and could easily be replaced.

I sauntered over to the bins and found that these, too, were only sorted alphabetically. The store's selection was actually decent, and I grabbed several other albums that I had been looking for.

"Have you found what you're looking for?"

I glanced over at the hippy that had spoken to me, and he suddenly appeared to be sweating slightly. He tugged at the already-loose collar of his polo as I politely responded "Yes, thank you."

Realizing I had a limited budget, I walked past the man towards the front of the store. I heard him collapse behind me, giggled gibberish pouring from his mouth. The overwhelming horror of The Gun had taken his sanity by sheer proximity, even without him being directly aware of its presence.

I made eye contact with the hippie that appeared to be the manager, and indicated with a nod that I needed to pay for my goods. He directed his remaining subordinate to the till, then began clawing his eyes out, whispering formless words of horror at what he had just seen.

I glanced down, but my heavy jacket was still concealing The Gun. I wondered what he had seen, clearly simply being a Bearded Man could not cause that kind of reaction, but shook off such idle thoughts as I approached the register. I had more important things to do than ponder the inner workings of the hippie mind.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" the cashier shrieked as he began biting his own lip off.

"Yes, thank you."

"Would you like a bag for this?" He shrieked again, I barely avoided the spatter of blood that came with this question, his lips were tattered, and he now appeared to be chewing on his tongue.

He held out the receipt to me, but I declined, not wanting to risk contaminated hippie blood in my car. Suppressing a smile, I walked to the front door and paused to put my sunglasses on, which gave the now-eyeless manager time to cheerfully giggled out the words "Have a nice day!"

"You too, sir" I replied, knowing that the rest of his life would be marked by nightmares of this day. I pushed the door open, smiled at the sunlight that streamed in, and left the store.

******

Author's note: This was written entirely as a writing exercise (because H. P. Lovecraft is the man), dramatizing a completely normal trip to a record store. No hippies were hurt in the making of this story, nor during the actual events that took place.

The moral of the story is that those signs are pointless, and stop absolutely nothing from happening. I'm a nice guy, and that sign might as well have said "no germs allowed" for all the actual effect it had on me. Guns go wherever the people who carry them want to take them, and as long as people are willing to walk past the signs, the signs don't matter.

Holy unBlack Metal

I'm sitting in the maintenance office of the MAF hangar in Maseru, Lesotho. There's no work for me to do, so I'm listening to Frost Like Ashes on YouTube. They're an unBlack metal outfit from St. Louis, if I remember correctly, and the current song "Adorers of Blood" is a wonderful praise song in the style of Black Metal. Before "Adorers of Blood", I listened to "Hardest Rocking God of All Time" by Grave Declaration, another unBlack metal outfit.

If anyone asks what I'm listening to, I'll downplay and dodge the question. I certainly won't try to explain unBlack Metal to a group of missionaries that thinks David Crowder is the hardest rock allowed at work. There's just no way to understand unBlack Metal without understanding Black Metal, and Black Metal is something I just don't talk about with strangers. Well, not unless I want to scare them off and make them think I'm Varg Vikernes' biggest fan, anyways.

There isn't a genre of music that's created more controversy than Black Metal. People think pop music sets the standard for shocking and bizarre behavior, but nothing ever done by a pop star has come close to the things done by black metal musicians. Lady Gaga and Madonna subverted Catholic imagery for their music, black metal musicians (and their fans) burnt churches down. Gangsta rappers boast about killing their rivals, black metal musicians have actually done it. There's no compromise in black metal, it's explicitly pagan. Explicity anti-Christian.

Black Metal isn't simply a genre that one listens to. Black Metal, in it's original form, is a lifestyle. The first wave of black metal didn't simply show up on the charts, it announced itself with a multi-year spate of murders, suicides, and church burnings. It's ideological music in the purest sense.

The fact that most people have never heard of Black Metal is simply due to the relative obscurity of the genre, as it's a tiny and extremist fringe inside the perpetually fringe world of heavy metal, but the fact remains that black metal is the razor's edge of music. It's way past "this album sounds too processed"  is a criticism and into a world where "(this album) is the aural equivalent of having your throat slit in one smooth motion" becomes normal. It's not "easy listening". It's not "soothing white noise".

When it comes to Christians listening to music, if there's any one genre of music that we were probably supposed to avoid, that we should have left alone, it would be black metal. It is hands-down the most vile, sick, and evil genre of music ever created. So, naturally, Christianity invaded it in the early 1990s, because we will allow no pit of darkness to remain unlit.

Black metal has always been about the message. And not in the cheeky way that Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin played around with dark imagery, but in an explicit way, where the message in the lyrics was played out onstage, and in the lives of the band members themselves. UnBlack Metal retains the look (minus the sacrificed animals and most of the blood), the sound, and the intense, message-first lyrics, but has swapped out the lyrics for Christian ones. 

Personally, that makes it just about perfect to me, because I'm sick and tired of ever-fancier versions of "Jesus Loves Me" that somehow still manage to be repetitive, technically simple, and theologically empty. Yes, Jesus loves us, but that's a small portion of what Christianity is about, and I want music that reminds me that to be a Christian is to be at war with Darkness.

There's a hell of a lot more to fighting that war than just remembering that Jesus loves us. Let's go kick some ass.

HAIL CHRIST!

A Cacophony of Sex

I have a confession to make, and coming from a guy that loves Holy unBlack Metal, this is one hell of a confession:

I don't hate Miley Cyrus' song "Wrecking Ball." I kinda like it.

But there's a story attached to this that brought up some interesting thoughts:

I don't think it's possible for a modern netizen to be unaware that Ms. Cyrus has a new video for her song "Wrecking Ball" that's risque. There's some nakedness, some tools, it's basically porn. I haven't bothered to look up the video and watch the whole thing, I saw a bit of it while I was waiting for a pizza at a mall here in Maseru, and decided that it probably isn't good for me to see the whole thing. I'm not going to link it.

At that point, I hadn't actually heard the song, as far as I know. I don't listen to pop music when I can help it, and the radio station at work is normally set to a classic-pop station out of Mozambique, so I only rarely hear the new stuff.

So a couple weeks later, with the batteries on my MP3 player dead, I'm listening to the work radio and I hear this song on the radio. My ears perk up because it's well-sung and seems soulful compared to the usual variations on the theme of lust that come over the airwaves. The singer sounds like she's sorry that she screwed up a relationship and hurt the guy, but is slightly defiant in that she gave it her all.

The line "I never meant to start a war" intrigued me, so after the second or third time I heard the song, I made a mental note to google the lyrics when I got home.

Turns out, that song is "Wrecking Ball'.

Simply looking at the lyrics, some girl decided to insert herself into a guy's life, it went badly, and though she tried to save it, it fell apart. Simple enough, and the way it's sung makes it somewhat sorrowful, but perhaps not repentant. It would not appear, lyrically speaking, that "wrecking ball" would be by any stretch a complimentary term. No, instead the girl's a wrecking ball, and is sorry that she wrecked something.

But pop music being what it is, new pop singles must have a video to accomany them, otherwise...well, who knows. I don't know the business, and I'm fairly certain I don't want to understand how pop music works.

So a video was filmed, and in part of it Ms. Cyrus is sitting on a wrecking ball naked, and then a little later she's licking a sledgehammer, and that's all I want to know.

The problem, from the perspective of a philosopher who pays attention to such things, is that the song's message does not match the video's message. While the song that's dubbed over the video (nobody actually sings these days) talks about how the girl screwed up and damaged everything, the singer is portrayed as an hyper-sexualized wrecking ball who glorifies her destruction of the building that represented the boy or the relationship, I'm not sure which.

So which is the real message? Admitting that she screwed up and didn't mean to start a war, or sexually reveling in the destruction she caused?

There's a word for music in which parts clash with each other: Cacophony. It's the antithesis of "Symphony", in which all the parts work together.

I don't know, and perhaps I don't want to know, what exactly is going on with Ms. Cyrus. I don't generally follow celebrities, nor do I have a particular taste for pop music, so all I know is that she used to be a fairly decent girl, and is now a slow-motion train wreck. From what I can tell, society is waiting for her to crash and burn so that we can mourn the loss of her talent instead of trying to save her before that happens.

What I do know is that there's something very wrong with society when it's perfectly acceptable to accompany a sad song about a relationship gone bad with a video that glorifies and sexualizes the destruction of that relationship. I mean, I've seen an outcry from the usual "we're DOOOOOOOOOOMED" crowd that thinks (falsely) that we're the most decadent civilization in history, but what bothers me isn't the decadence, it's the discord between the lyrics and the video.

Have we really fallen so far as a intellectual society that nobody bothers to understand the message anymore, and focuses instead on the sounds and the visuals? Because to me, that's exactly like focusing on what's on the cover of the book and not even bothering to open it to understand the message.

Folks, if that's what we're doing as a society, we're doomed.

DOOOOOOOOMED!