Metal Jew

Chris Needham Interview

I blogged a while back about the immortal Chris Needham, start of early 90s video diary In Bed With Chris Needham about a 17 year old aspiring metal musician from Loughborough.  The internet has grown the cult of Chris Needham and the video diary can be viewed on youtube. Now a guy called Al Needham (no relation apparently) has alerted me to a great interview with the present-date Chris Needham. It goes into great detail about the diary and his life then and now. He seems a decent guy - self-deprecating and passionate about metal. Read it here.

Update on goth hate crime

I blogged a while back on hate crimes against youth cultures. One of the things I talked about was the horrific case of Sophie Lancaster, the goth killed by a gang in Northern England. Now Vice Magazine has an intriguing interview with Sophie Lancaster's boyfriend, who was also seriously assaulted. The article seems to cast doubt on whether the couple were assaulted for being goths. In fact, it may have been something even more senseless - a killing just for being someone the perpetrators had taken a vague disliking too.

It's one of these impossible questions: would you rather be killed for something than nothing?

Article on Eurovision

I just had an article published on Guardian Comment is Free about this week's Eurovision Song Contest.

Hiding in metal?

I just heard about a book called 'Hiding in Hip Hop' by Terrance Dean that tells of the author's experience as a gay man in the hip hop world and about the secret gay underground within it. It sounds fascinating. I'd love someone to write something similar regarding metal. However, my suspicion (and I may be totally wrong) is that there is barely any gay underground in metal. Not that there's no gay men and women in metal - far from it - but they are mostly isolated from each other. I also suspect that the mainstream gay community is pretty negative about metal and that doesn't help matters...

The betrayal of the legacy of John Peel

John Peel is one of my all-time heroes. Through his show I discovered artists as various as Napalm Death, The Bhundu Boys, The Wedding Present and Grandmaster Flash. Since his death a couple of years ago I have become increasingly annoyed at how his memory and legacy is represented.

The variety of the music he championed was extraordinary, but the 'guardians' of his memory are too often much more conservative. Take the 2007 John Peel day which was celebrated by a host of gigs by new and unsigned bands across the country. Nothing wrong with that, but where was the grindcore, the hip-hop, the reggae, the African music. Glastonbury now has a John Peel stage dedicated to upcoming bands. Again, nothing wrong with that, but the acts are mostly quirky indie bands.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the memory of John Peel is out of step with today's 'narrowcast' culture. Instead of being celebrated for his commitment to heterogeneity and difference, he is celebrated only for his commitment to novelty in one section of the musical world.

My Guardian article

On Tuesday I had an article published in the Guardian newspaper on my experiences and thoughts on having ME/CFS for the last 15 years. Read it here.

The last word on Norwegian black metal?

In three stunning posts, here, here and here, the ever-wonderful Documents  blog muses on Euronymous, the Norwegian black metal scene, transgression, the artist and repression. The conclusion of the second post:

The artist as a creator who desires a society that denies his right to exist, is a paradoxical symbol. An artist embodying the left-handed side of this paradox was murdered by a fellow artist who embodies the right-handed side of the paradox: the drama which unfolded in the Dream Time of Norwegian Black Metal certainly had a "...strange processual inevitability overriding questions of interest, expediency, or even morality" (Turner). The murder of Mayhem's Aarseth by Burzum's Vikernes was not only a tragedy in the Classical sense of the word. It was and is more than that: it is the frozen image of a configuration pregnant with tensions between opposing but interdependent socio-cultural forces, a configuration that was shocked into crystallization into a monad, not by the thought of the dialectical critic (Benjamin), but by the violence of the act.

The conclusion to the third part:

By interpreting the murder as the result of a dramatic or narrative process model, I have hoped to deny Vikernes the authorship of the killing. One might counter that the "author is dead", that there is no need to "kill" him as an author of a murder. But Vikernes as an author still reigns on the internet, in interviews, magazines, in "Lords of Chaos", as in the very consciousness of metalheads. Vikernes still has authority over the murder: in this sense he is an undead author. These three posts then are an attempt to drive a stake through his fascist heart.

These posts are probably the smartest thing anyone has ever written on the early 90s Norwegian black metal scene.

The Documents blog shames me a bit. I'm an academic who has written on metal and transgression, yet my blogging is mostly light-hearted. I simply don't have the time and energy to direct my creativity too far into this blog. I'm glad that there are people around, like the author of Documents, to do so in my absence.

New publication

For all my many Russian-speaking fans, I have just had a chapter published in a Russian publication. Here's the full reference:

‘Sozdanie evreiskogo repa: parodija, pastish, sinkretizm’ ['Creating Jewish Rap: Parody, Pastiche and Syncretism’] in A. Smirnitskaya (ed) Muzyika Idishkaita [Music of Yiddishkite]. Vol. 4.Moscow: MAKS Press, 2008, pp 128-150.

I don't actually speak Russian - it's a translation of an article on Jewish rap that I haven't had time to find a publisher for in the English-speaking world