I’m utilizing my
liberal internet pulpit today to spew my opinion about the current situation
involving the death metal band Disma and the controversy surrounding their recent
removal from the 2015 California Death Fest in Oakland this year that features
genre heavyweights Autopsy and Impaled converging with the more punk oriented
stylings of Infest, Despise You, and Extortion among others. Since I expect to
be written off by many in heavy metal’s inner circle as an “internet warrior”
and a “pc fascist such and such,” let me just say that in no way am I
advocating for the censorship of any artist, ever. If death metal bands
continue to want to write albums about eating rotting feces and torturing this
and that… go right ahead, I happen to own many a Mario Bava film and can appreciate
a good horror story. My current beef with metal isn’t that it’s apolitical
because, let’s face it, it always has been. Metal fans by and large enjoy the
fact that, despite the extremity and shock and awe associated with their music
aesthetically and lyrically, it really doesn’t have much to it that politically
polarizes its fan base. In this fantastical realm of escapism you don’t have to
confront the fact that gender roles are fixated and rarely ever substantively
challenged, it just doesn’t get addressed. Iron Maiden is praised for being “well
read” on the wars of history but, fret not, there are no acts discussing the
military industrial complex or actual, real life tragedies like that going on
in the South Sudan. Those limbs, the limbs of children at the hands of warheads
supplied and paid for with death metal tax dollars, those aren’t the kind of
images you’ll have to deal with. Is death metal the only genre that ignores
these realities? Absolutely not. Can critiques be made even within hardcore punk for not
only apathy but blind irony when the trust fund crust punk hops a train to
Portland to live on an anarchist commune until his dad’s credit card expires?
Absolutely. So why am I picking on metal? It’s not that metal has no answers to
society’s problems. It’s that it doesn’t even welcome questions or dialogue.
Behind the veil of this extreme subculture is, by and large, a ton of
conformity and conservatism. Nothing illustrates this more than the current
situation involving Craig Pillard and his band Disma.
Aside from being in
Incantation, Carnage, and now Disma, in the late 90s Craig Pillard formed
Sturmfuhrer. While this may sound like a cool mountain in eastern Europe, it’s
actually honoring the name for the paramilitary rank of, you guessed it, the
Nazi party. While Pillard isn’t the first metal guy to obsess over Nazi imagery
and brush off his anti-semitism by weaving it into some juvenile critique of
Judeo-Christian theology, he’s probably the most well known American musician
to do this and, unlike his European peers in Absurd and other bands, he’s in a
pretty successful band. To be fair, Disma lyrically does not contain any
similarities lyrically to his former Rock Against Communism meets Burzum meets
Romper Stomper at a KKK Rally band. Disma is just a death metal band singing
about what death metal bands sing about…death stuff, you know? Sick stuff.
Zombies and hell and other stuff that isn’t real. One thing is real though,
this dude’s world views. Don’t take my word for it though, here’s him telling
you himself:
But hey, I’m sure this dude is a really nice guy who
just had a phase where he was obsessed with Hitler and blamed everything on
Zionism. You know, I myself had a pretty wicked Summer crushing HARD on
Mussolini. It turns out that he’s not sorry at all for these views and recently
in the last year has re-released this band’s material.
So
fast forward to what’s going on now. What does this all have to do with Disma?
Well, Disma is fronted by a racist, anti-semite. “No dude you don’t even know
him he’s not eve…” yes he is, he harbors horrific views about race and Judaism.
That’s fine, bands are free to have anyone they want in their bands and are
certainly free to say whatever they want, but you can’t have it both ways.
Maybe you can in the world of metal, but not in the real world, the world so
many of them seem to want to avoid. If you have a Nazi sympathizer, yes…even
the Nazi you had budweisers with and talked about Pungent Stench with, even
that Nazi sympathizer…if you have him in your band, don’t expect people to want
to play nice with him and pretend like he isn’t who he unapologetically is. Don’t
dismiss the outrage over intolerance as some kind of “oversensitive pc
occupation of your culture,” because it isn’t. Racism sucks. Anti-semitism
sucks. Maybe start asking some other questions like, “why are the only
political people I tend to see in extreme metal extreme right wingers?” “What
is the correlation between historical criticisms of Judeo-Christianity and
right wing politics?” “How have the philosophies of Nietzsche and others been
hijacked and purposely distorted to fit certain right wing agendas?” I love me
some death metal. Before I was a PC college liberal sissy hardcore kid sellout
I used to jam quite a bit of death metal. I’m not going to write off death
metal fans as stupid, most of them aren’t. By and large they are some of the
more level headed people I’ve ever met, dare I say even more so than many I’ve
met in the punk subculture. However, the trend of running away from the
socio-political and cultural issues that plague their scene only reinforces the
stereotype that they either aren’t equipped to discuss these things or are just
too lazy to address them. Either way, I’m glad Infest is still playing.
But what do I know? I’m just an internet warrior
anyway.
- Joe
- Joe