Second hot take: thrash fans are the worst thing about thrash.

Some of the stupid shit he said five 6 or 7 pages ago




Nuff said.

Straight edge is for boring losers. Also, I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek there smartass.

I never realized that thrash fans were still so divided until I started browsing here. I mean these bands are all from the 80s... at some point we have to let it go

Wow I can't tell who's lamer: LongHairIsSoFuckingCool or the people seriously trying to debate him, yikes I'll take his stupidity over all that shit

And I kinda lold over the "open minded" metal fan opinion, that's too fucking epic

what's unfortunate is that so many of them missed a pretty crucial element of Exodus' songwriting: they actually write choruses for their songs

I mean I'm legitimately a fan because Among the Living/Spreading the disease are just killer albums? You are aware you can be a fan of a band and totally disavow their more shitty/weaker era of music, right? Their first four albums are loaded with killer tracks like Medusa, A.I.R, Soldiers of Metal, Caught in a Mosh and Belladona's voice is honestly the best in terms of singing ability especially in comparison to Hetfield and a joke like Mustaine. They were successful but are kind of overlooked in comparison to Slayer/Metallica but they're just a great band with top knotch musicians, and this is coming from someone that loves black/death metal/deathcore/hardcore.

I've been a fan since I was 14

Completely agree with this. Honestly the main thing that puts me off thrash as a genre is thrash fundamentalists saying ridiculous shit like "Arise was the first step towards Sepultura going jumpdafuckup" or "Metallica sold out on RTL because that record has a ballad" (someone actually said this to me once), and generally shitting on perfectly good metal albums just because they happen not to be 100% thrash all the time.

I guess I'm a loser then, for not wanting to risk getting an addiction (knowing full well I have an addictive personality with certain things).

I can live with that.

Experimenting with drugs is all fine and dandy (I personally don't regret it, for the most part), but there are multiple logical reasons as for why someone would prefer to stay away from drugs, or just stop altogether after a while of taking them. LongHair is just childish.

There's a lot of stupid one-up-manship in metal as it is, but thrash is kind of the posterchild for that. At some point it just degenerates into socially inept metalloids saying stupid shit to impress their fellow smug cavemen, it's exhausting and never goes out of style for some reason, as if the average diehard thrash metal fan never grew out of their teenage years.

Mind you, this is not directed towards people who just happen to love the music, more so dumbshits who make fast riffs and lyrics about nuclear winter into their entire identity.

The posts about how lame thrash fans or "metalloids" are have truth to em, but yeah, I think pretty much any fandom like that is going to have its elitist, over the top kinds of mindsets, the people who hate anything else, etc. It's just with the territory.

Which metal sub-genre has the worst fan base in your opinion? And why?

Well that's what I'm saying, you can find annoying fans in any subset of any kind of fandom. I don't even know if there is one specific one that's worse.

Black metal fans are the worst. Source: I am a black metal fan and I consider myself pretty annoying.

For me, the only black metal fans I've ever found annoying are the brainless nsbm fans who want to make people think that bands like Der Stürmer are good.

Same here. The people who unironically find Der Stürmer or Aryan Terrorism good need their brains checked or something...

I've always avoided listening to Aryan Terrorism because I know it's going to be awful and I don't want to lose the respect I have for Varggoth and Saturious as musicians.

Yeah, cause the big issue here is obviously "playing in a bad black metal band" and not "being a nazi piece of shit".

Are these unpopular opinions in the metal community?

They certainly aren't popular enough.

Nah, I know perfectly well that Varggoth and Saturious are nazi shitheads and as persons I have no respect for them whatsoever. But I do consider them to be exceptional musicians and I hold a lot of the music they have made in high esteem, so instead of wasting my time listening to a NSBM band like Aryan Terrorism, which I don't have to listen to know they are fucking shit, I'd rather listen to their work on Nokturnal Mortum, Finist or Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra which are worth listening to despite their shitty ideology.

Edit: Typo

This has probably been mentioned but the fact that black metal is so obsessed with image IMO is kinda lame. I suppose you get this when you travel down the rabbit hole in the most extreme niche genres, brutal death metal can be way to concerned with Misogyny, Hardcore way too concerned with looking tough, but the whole black metal look at me i'm "klvt" i'm "grim" to me is overly lame. I thought it was cool when I was 13, but now in my 30's they just come off as extremely childish and pathetic. The exception being bands who dont take them self too seriously like "immortal". And before people start totaling hating on me I do enjoy quite a few bands who are guilty of this image, 1349, Marduk, Behexen I listen to fairly regularly.

Another thing Keyboardists in metal. I'm all for how it adds to the music on the album, but when I saw Fleshgod Apocalypse a few years back to me the keyboardists just looked so akward and out of place. Perhaps it was just that guy imparticular but man it just made me cringe lol

Substitute any genre for the word "thrash" in this sentence.

I figured that's not what you meant, but something in the way you phrased this rubbed me the wrong way. It's not you specifically I was "targetting" with that comment, but rather the fact that nobody in the last few posts brought up the main issue with nsbm, which is not the bad quality of the music, but the racism, bigotry and hatred oozing out of it. NS black metal is a political tool, made to promote an ideology, and the music itself often sits in the back seat as the main goal is not to write the next musical masterpiece, but to promote an hateful ideology. Black metal fans who insist on defending nsbm bands on the quality of their music, especially those who insist that it's all about the music and not the ideology come off as quite shady to me, as there are hundreds if not thousands of black metal bands without the shitty politics, pulling off the minimalistic/raw black metal style better then all nsbm bands.

Musicians with crap ideologies who want to make good music, often try to distance themselves from nsbm. Bands like Nokturnal Mortum and Peste Noire come to mind. Even though their ties to the scene are obvious, and their shit views are made pretty much public, these bands refuse the nsbm tag. They are still terrible people, mind you, but even they seem to understand that nsbm is not good music. Bands embracing the nsbm tag are always garbage, both musically and ideologically.

As for the opinion you voiced earlier:



I strongly disagree, for similar reasons to thos I expressed in this post. A lot of black metal fans tolerate fascists, neonazis and other bigots in their scene, far more then other scenes, which is why I feel very uneasy with the scene. I, as many other metalheads, are actively trying to make the metal community more inclusive and safe for lgbtq folks, people of ethnic minorities, women, etc., and the black metal scene is a big thorn in our side. I've heard so many people making excuses for far-right ideologies in black metal, either by playing down their implications (using euphemisms like "nationalists" to describe ethnic ultranationalists or white supremacists) or by willful blindness.

I love black metal, really. But at this point, I only really feel comfortable to shows with bands who outwardly take a stance against bigotry, like Enslaved, Panopticon or Wolves in the Throne Room. I'm not saying that bands who don't take a public stance are accepting or tolerating it, but some of them really do.

I think the main fact why that particular aspect of the conversation was being ignored (or at least by me) is because mainly my initial comment was talking about my experience with black metal fans who are annoying has been only with those who have a view of black metal extremely underlined to the National Socialist ambit, thus adopting the mythologized belief in stupid mantras like "extreme music for extreme people" or "bad people does good music", and therefore taking the stance that all NSBM is good. This idea is obviously only shared by Nazis or Nazi sympathizers so my comment was a way of saying that the only black metal fans I have found annoying are the Nazis. But of course I have to clarify that this comes from how I personally perceive the whole Nazi thing in the scene, I'll try to explain myself: Despite the fact that all my life I have considered myself a leftist and for several years I have participated in platforms and local campaigns to make society more inclusive for women, queer people and ethnic minorities, listening to nbsm never made me have internal ethical debates, I think the reasons for this is because I started listening to it in my teens when these issues did not concern me so much and because my contact with the metal community has been during all my years in it exclusively through the internet, I don't know anyone in my territory who listens to black metal, I've hardly been to concerts in my life etc and therefore I haven't really seen the consequences of NSBM in the minority communities that they try to introduce in the metal community, besides I've always ignored in the internet itself many of these questions about NSBM.

So largely because of that (and because I grew up in a pretty left-wing nationalist environment) I have a perception of NBSM where I can completely ignore the ideological question and just focus on the musical value of those bands, and divide the genre into "good nsbm" and "bad nsbm" from a musical perspective, which is why I don't usually have problems listening to bands like Fanisk or Fullmoon. I don't think that looking at it the way I do is the right thing to do, and in fact in the last few years I have put restrictions on listening to certain bands when I found out they were nazis, for example with Infester, but the other day I felt like listening to Kroda for the first time (who look like supremacist ultranationalists) and I did it without hesitation. But well, I think I am rambling, maybe there are parts of this that have not been well explained and that I am willing to try to explain again if you point them out to me.



In this I completely agree with you, but once again, it is very clear to me that the only black metal fans that defend these bands above all else are Nazis, and although I also agree that all NBSM releases are political and propaganda tools I also believe that some of them can have artistic value, "The Birth of a Nation" is a heavily propagandistic film and has to be taken into account when talking about it, but at the same time it has provided an artistic value.



I don't really know how to answer this, because, with the example of Nokturnal Mortum, yes, they have distanced themselves lyrically from National Socialism, but they still participate in NBSM festivals and as far as I know, in their concerts in clubs they only allow entry to white people ( AS OF TODAY) so I think that even if they don't like it, they are still NBSM. And Peste Noire I have no idea but a guy like Famine who has clearly admitted to being a speciesist and I don't think he has moved away from NBSM.


Yes, and I'm the first one that when I discover a new black metal band the first thing I want to know is if they are potential nazis or not, and of course I will value very positively if they make public to be against bigotry, but unfortunately that won't make me prefer WITTR over NK musically, because I simply enjoy the music of the second ones more.

No, I do understand your point. Again, I insist on the fact that I was not targetting you specifically, but rather that I wanted to bring light to issues I have, not so much with nsbm, because these are quite obvious, but rather with the tolerance that the bm scene has for the presence of fascists, white supremacists and ultranationalists in the scene. This has more to do with live shows and promotion of bands and albums online, in physical media and whatnot. Now of course, I don't think we shouldn't talk about these bands. To me that's like saying we shouldn't be teaching kids about Nazis because some might adhere to the ideology. No, I'm more concerned with the actual impacts of actively promoting nsbm or tolerating neonazis at metal events. You listening to Kroda on your own doesn't have any much of a repercusion.



I agree. La sanie des siècles by Peste Noire is a black metal masterpiece, in my opinion. Regardless of Famine's political views. To connect this to what I was arguing earlier, my issue is not so much with aknowledging the importance of controversial/problematic pieces of art, but with people downplaying the issues with these pieces of art. If you did a screening of The Birth of a Nation, skinheads throwing sieh heils in the audience or shouting racial slurs wouldn't/shouldn't be tolerated, and it should be made clear right from the get go that the screening has educationnal/historical purpose and that you do not condone the views expressed in the movie.



No, you're right. By their actions, they are clearly aligned with nsbm, but both bands reject the nsbm tag. It's a detail at that point, so I don't really think we need to dig into this too much. Both bands are clearly problematic.



Nokturnal Mortum's 2010 release is a fantastic record, indeed. But I've personnally lost interest in listening to it because of how despicable the musicians are. I'm not saying that everyone should do the same as me, but that's just how it is for me. That's just like how Dave Mustaine's attics have lead me to want to listen to Megadeth less and less, even though I love the music.

I agree with what you said and I'm sorry if it seemed that I have defended myself as if you had attacked me, I wanted to give my personal vision alluding to my experiences and how I perceive it. With respect to what you said, It also has happened me with several bands but I think it's impossible that it happens to me with Nokturnal Mortum because they are my favourite band lol, although I share what you said with Megadeth for example, in the last two years I think I've only listened once to "Rust in Peace" and nothing else.

And when has metal excluded those people? At least in my environment, that has never happened.

This suggests such a disconnect from the very core of the art that I simply cannot understand. It's like collecting nazi propaganda leaflets for the layouts and the lettering or adoring the draughtsmanship of a racial caricature.

I don't know about in your part of the world, but here in the U.S., back in the 90s and early 2000s, most metal fans vociferously saw the rap genre as the enemy of metal when it started gaining more popularity. Most visible metal musicians being white, the vast majority of visible rappers being black. It was like a white culture attack on black culture when black culture was just trying to become visible. And have you not heard of that white power "joke" that Phil Anselmo used to do on stage not even that long ago? There's also footage of him on youtube performing in the 90s (I think it was with Pantera) where he interrupted his own performance to go on a tirade against rap and how we must preserve white culture. The huge metal community backlash against nu-metal when Korn Limp Bizkit etc al became big, for most of the complaining metal fans did was because they don't want rapping and DJs in their metal (my personal gripe was lame guitar playing.... Rage Against the Machine basically proved you can have a real good rap/rock/metal band)). Any documentary style TV show you'll see about the 80s metal scene retroactively will tell you it was supposed to be a man's thing, and female musicians were often not welcomed and also often not taken seriously even when they had serious chops. Women were just supposed to be backstage having sex with the band, not playing on stage. When Rob Halford came out as gay in the late 90s, the reactions I saw the most form people I knew, people online, and even other huge metal musicians in music/guitar mags were basically of the "I still love Judas Priest, but it sucks Rob's a f*g," "I still love Priest but we don't need to know about any of that, if you want to suck a dick, suck a dick, but I don't want to know about it." (that one is a paraphrasing a quote from Tom Araya I saw in Guitar World magazine back then). And despite what we might want to think, at least in this country there are still a LOT of anti-LGBT metal fans around that think Trump was the best president in their lifetime and Obama was the worst and believe all the stop the steal bullshit, all muslims are terrorists bullshit, etc.

I don't always agree with Forever Underground, but this time I do agree that you can value the music and not the political message.

I sent a review a couple of times criticizing the communist lyrics of an Argentine RABM album and it was rejected because I just didn't focus on the music and because I only expressed my feelings about the content of the lyrics. Communism and Nazism are the same shit, they are not very different. Why so much bias and favoritism on one to the detriment of another?

Communism and Nazism are not the same. That kind of shit is so fucking disingenuous.

I think you have mistaken the purpose of my message. I already gave an example with the film "The Birth of a Nation" which despite being pure racist propaganda used some cinematographic narrative techniques that were highly influential in the history of the seventh art, when I say that some propaganda pieces have an artistic value I mean things like that.



lol no

I think you can appreciate music done by shitty people, but so much of the discourse around this just slides into apologizing and diminishing what they did.

edit... and I mean there are individual examples of art done by terrible people that is quite stunning, like Rosemary's Baby or something. But there are far more interesting and plentiful pieces of work done in the service of positive ideas and good causes. I find those more interesting to talk about and defend.

Y'all must be on the pipe thinking Anthrax sucks. The first three albums are classics and For All Kings is the best thing any of the Big 4 released in the 21st century.

Kids these days.

Sorry, but I do it from my worldview as an Argentine and because of the background we have with Che Guevara. Obviously it may differ from the worldview you have from the Anglosphere. But both nazis and communists were intolerant and misogynistic, I dare to say that left-wing dictatorships were crueler to homosexuals than right-wing dictatorships. That includes Cuba.

Strangers in the night is the best live album
Iron fist is better then Ace of Spades
Flotzilla is the best instrumental
I HATE no place for disgrace
Love Hurts is the best ballad
Lars Ulrich is still a shitty drummer
Hardrock is Metal and vice versa.

I mean whatever governments in history did, the actual ideologies of just random people who believe things are not the same with these things.

It's really not a stretch to believe that you can separate art from artist or that the value of art can outweigh the value of the art's ideology on a personal level. Hell I think it's required to be able to do so in at least some respect if you want to be a fan of extreme metal (everybody on the planet knows Varg is a nazi piece of shit but I don't lie and say that Hvis lyset tar oss isn't the closest thing to a perfect black metal album I've ever heard). However, if you do make that choice, you are gonna have to own it and either find a way to reconcile your beliefs with your enjoyment (assuming there's a disconnect, I imagine it's not a problem if you're also a nazi piece of shit) or just admit that your values aren't exactly internally consistent. The approach I take is case-by-case but usually leans towards just not bothering with music made by shitty people. Like I said, I'll still consider myself a fan of the first few Burzum records because the music itself isn't really about the awful shit Varg believes, plus his early work was so influential that it's surprisingly easy to disconnect the guy who made it from the music entirely because it feels like something much larger than him. On the flipside, I think the music Arghoslent plays is extremely cool and worth pursuing, but my ability to reconcile the music with my beliefs died years ago since the themes are so abhorrent and so integral to the complete package and I won't listen to them anymore, instead opting to find bands that sound similar and hope a group of people who aren't horrid racists take up their sound and finally separate it from them. So there are two bands with the same problems that I both think are good in a vacuum, but one of them I can justify listening to while I can't with the other one. Maybe this doesn't make sense to you and in that case I'm just gonna have to admit that my values aren't always perfectly consistent. *shrug*

It's a delicate tightrope that everybody approaches differently, it only really becomes a problem when people who don't care at all get really fucking pissy when people tell them what I said above or just call them out for promoting horrible shit. You might think it's the other way around but I assure you it's not, that's just confirmation bias on your part. One skim through any thread about Inquisition will show you that the fans of the nazi pedo are way way more invested in getting people to listen to them than people who aren't fans of the nazi pedo are in making sure nobody does.

Okay, that particular historical example I can accept, but that one exception doesn't apply to shit like Finist.