Gravetemplar, you're doing that thing again that I just accused you of doing a dozen posts ago: rejecting literally any comparison between dead people and anything else. This means that your position revolves around death being a state that is SO sacred that it can't be compared to anything else, but you have done nothing to persuade anybody like me or Osore why death should be beyond comparison. You're just relying on a circular argument saying "It's fucked up/immoral" with no teeth or value behind it. If your position is "death is bad" and you can't even articulate why, you're not going to convince anyone of anything.

I've noticed that if I make two posts, you ignore the first one (which usually completely refutes whatever argument you had at the time) and home in entirely on the second one, which is usually me responding to somebody who's said something else, and then the cycle repeats. So I'm not making any more posts in this thread, or responding to anybody else, until you respond directly to this one right here and try to prove that you are capable of making a non-worthless argument that explains why death is a uniquely bad situation that can have its own set of arbitrary rules of respect.

Guys please, stop fighting over corpses

Welcome to the archives, it doesn't work like that! You set up a thread where people could "debate", and the goofballs here love nothing more than a fruitless, completely empty "debate". It's a sophists sparring session, and it happens in almost every thread.

You can't stop it now. You can abandon the thread to the sophists, but you don't have any control. Sorry!

I kind of regret reading this thread. Finding out about this band Fluids sent me down an extremely dark rabbit hole. Kind of shook.

Manny Calavera approves.

I said that the manner in which some people were advocating for corpse rights was becoming absurd, which is a different statement than the one that you're putting in my mouth. If you're going to criticize my posts, then you should actually read them. I'm definitely not saying, "A corpse has no feelings, therefore anything goes!" But this business of treating a corpse like it's still living and has feelings, and like it's part of an oppressed class, is kinda absurd. It's really the living that matter in this scenario.

So, what if someone wants degrading pictures taken of their corpse? What if they want those pictures to be used for financial gain? Does his consent matter? Or is a corpse so sacred that his highly immoral requests should be denied?

But is it the potential harm or is it the action itself that is immoral?

I mean what if the nude of the ex-partner is an extreme close-up and there's no way of anyone ever identifying who it is? I'd say it's still immoral even if there is no potential for harm. But I guess that's the difference between utilitarianism and moral philosophy. To me, it's the fact that someone is taking a private photograph of someone else, without their consent, and is profiting off of it. So even if it's a medical autopsy photo, the use is supposed to be for medical purposes only, not to sell somebody's music. That's what makes it exploitative in my mind.


Don't get me wrong, it's not particularly a hot-button issue for me either. And, personally, I continue to listen to some bands who engage in this kind of unethical behavior. I mean I wish they didn't do this kind of thing, but it's not unethical enough for me to not listen to it. We all have different tolerance levels for this kind of shit.

If the ex-partner can identify that it's a picture of themself, even if no one else can, it might still feel like a violation. But a corpse is never going to feel violated because it discovered an image of itself on an album cover. Its loved ones might feel like it's a violation. But that's why some amount of context is needed. For example, if the picture is really old, or if it's a john doe situation, I doubt we need to worry much about the family. And the corpse certainly isn't going to care. It's the difference between caring about the living and attributing feelings to a corpse. The latter is a bit absurd. And some people are equating grave desecration and necrophilia with photographs of a corpse, which is also a bit absurd.

Is it unethical for a band to profit off of images of someone's corpse? Like I said, some amount of context is needed. But, sure, I'll grant you that it's probably unethical in the majority of cases. I don't know if we disagree there. I'm just not particularly worked up about it.

I gotta tell ya's.... I sort of tried to stay away from message boards for a long time. Insidious fucking shit, I says. Gets in the way of my life flow, the things that matter, the here and now.
I lurked this board for years before finally deciding to be a part of it....

Man.... I fucking regret it. Aside from learning of one band Im happy to know, I dont think anyone has ever really connected back with me. Thats cool, Im a big boy.
It's just that between that lack of connection and the obvious fucking sociopaths on display very often, I just dont know why I keep coming back.

Seriously have to consider repurposing my time away from this site.

In this thread: people questioning the respectfulness and taste of a band called Pissgrave.

Please. You are acting like these bands are making hundreds of thousands of dollars. That isn't and never will be the case.

I think it's just a matter of ethical perspective. If you're coming at it from moral philosophy instead of utilitarianism, it's not question of potential harm, but the ethics of the action itself. Why is it that most countries will not harvest a corpse's organs for donation if they opt out (or fail to opt in) for an organ donation program? No one is harmed and some people actually benefit. I don't think it's just some religious choice or people ascribing feelings to a corpse. I think it has something to do with consent and some concept of ownership of one's body in perpetuity. And that in itself is an interesting ethical question to think about.

And I don't know about the other posters, but my examples of necrophilia and desecration were extreme examples where moral stances are a little clearer. I did not intend to imply that a photo of a corpse is comparable. I do get where you're coming from. It is definitely a rather minor but still unethical action--misuse of a photo of a corpse. So yeah, I think we agree, we were just coming at the point from very different perspectives.

Well I mean Carcass sold at least 200k albums according to wikipedia. So, yeah, it's rare, but it does happen.

Dingdingding, the thread has a winner.

Pissgrave aren't nearly good enough to be mad/defensive over.

Oh, erm, it seems this thread isn't about quite what I expected based on the title...

I appreciate Forteresse using a picture of Joseph Allaird (1873-1947) on their album cover, as it led me to discover his music.

You raise some interesting questions. Definitely food for thought. But if the argument boils down to, "It's unethical because it's unethical," then I don't know what to do with that. I need to hear some sort of reasoning.

I recall seeing an album cover by a band called Last Days of Humanity. It was an image of a mutilated/rotting slab of meat. There was no face in the image, and the slab of meat was barely identifiable as a human body. Now, I'm not saying that this particular album cover is representative of all album covers of its type. And I'm not saying that the band took ethics into consideration when they selected such an image for their album cover. But, in this specific example, who is it really hurting? Is it distasteful? Upleasant? Nasty? Yes. Absolutely. But is it some outrageous breach of ethics and morals? I don't know. I don't think so. But my point is that I'm not willing to paint every album cover with the same brush, or make any black and white judgements.

Just despicable, huh? I'm sure that's positive feedback for those who designed the cover., would most likely thank you for the appreciation

Using actual dead people on the cover that could have living family members who knew them that could possibly come across it is just childish. I mean yeah, if you want to be looked at as a 12 year old edgelord..... sure. Go ahead. Be as "offensive and shocking" as you possibly can. There are no rules. However lines of taste regarding stuff like that are something I personally won't support. What if that was your mother or sister on the cover of that album? I have very, very loose standards for death depiction and dark humor, but, even for me this is crossing the line. It's whatever though. You aren't going to stop it. Edgelords gonna edgelord.

Using a picture of my corpse as your album cover I require 1% of the album's revenue to be dropped on my grave in cent coins.

I think the reason why people claim that it's unethical because it's unethical is because the answers cannot be found on the plain of reason. They simply pertain to feelings, and it's something mutually agreed upon that everybody isn't at ease knowing that his body will be soiled in any way after death. Yes, the deceased has no sensory abilities to draw pain, shame or anger from. I personally think it's an innate feeling of fear in the face of death which begets the wish to keep one's bodily integrity intact after death; in other words, a sublimation of the wish to live forever. This thread spirals into fruitless nihilistic or holier-than-thou sparring just because the arguments aren't to be found on the rational plain. They lie deep in our subconscious. A good reason why I claim this is that desecration of corpses in any way is a taboo regardless of religion, faith or culture. It's part of our unsounded vast dormant subconsciousness.



Edgelords this, edgelords that. Metal was built by edgelords, the trailblazers of most genres were edgelords. In the 70s you would consider Black Sabbath edgelords. Then you would consider Maiden's Sanctuary to be crossing the line and so on. Simply brushing them off as edgelords is really not an argument.

Wrong.

Don't just go "wrong" on people. Elaborate. Which part of the post do you take issue with?

I'm having issue with the obvious factual mistake being made. It does depend on religion, faith and culture what's considered taboo and what isn't. HeathenBear obviously haven't read my previous post in this thread where I brought up the vastly different culture of cannibalistic tribes in the picture. Even when we look up at the genealogy of morals, it is obvious that taboos change with the changes of cultural lifestyles and (mass) religions (sacrifices of corpses for gods would be a suitable example).

I might have forgotten about it before making my post, Osore, so sorry. I have to agree I'm pretty ignorant on cannibalism and how widely it is (or was) spread, but I find it wrong not only morally (deontologically), but also from an utilitarian standpoint. First, it would make people there is something to gain from killing others just for the sake of it. Second, it would make diseases spread from "prey" to "predator", any diseases affecting the eaten may affect the one who feasts.

Some traits are common from all humans and some fears are widespread just because the human collective subconsciousness maps them as fears. Take spiders, for instance. It's not something built by western culture. Spiders aren't especially frightening from an objective standpoint, yet it's a very common fear, one that doesn't even hold a candle to how overwhelming the fear of one's own death is - a fear which turns itself into fear of death, human corpses and interacting with them. There are universal taboos and you can't deny it. Killing your own mother or raping a corpse for instance.

Cannibalism is still present, albeit scarcely.

I would rather say that we share death anxiety and/or will to live. I'm not sure absolutely everyone is afraid of death (unless you take subconsciousness), it has personal and temporal dimension. I remember reading about surprising death anxiety decline in people as they become increasingly old, which means most of them find the way to cope with approaching death. We probably use coping mechanisms, and it's a nice hypothesis about emergence of religion, namely, that it came from our fear of the unknown; in the past that included unexplained natural phenomena like earthquakes, and now it mostly applies to our fear of/difficulty to comprehend the magnitude of time, past and future, and to come to peace with the fact that this world existed long before us and that it will last long after we turn into dust. Sometimes I feel what I call death anxiety moment or existential angst when I briefly feel the absurdity and horror of the fact that my mind is forever gone after I die (I'm an atheist). I've said briefly because my coping mechanism quickly turns on and I loose the feeling. I even consciously rely on reason by comparing death to an eternal sleep: we shut down our (self-)consciousness every night when we fall asleep.

Fear of spiders is one of those adaptationist/panglossian explanations in sociobiology which sounds nice at first, but actually lacks evidence. There are even counterexamples of cultures who eat spiders and aren't afraid of them, apart from people who keep them as pets. Fear most probably evolved as an adaptation in our phylogenetic ancestors, but the objects of fear (like snakes and spiders) probably did not. I think it's the safest to assume animals learn to be afraid of something, rather than having images of predators imprinted in their genes.

I could bet that if you could make an experiment, take 100 human babes and raise them in an environment in which people are necrophiliacs, they wouldn't consider it taboo. There are people who kill their mothers and rape corpses, like you said, and some of them think it's right, regardless of what we think. Some of those people have mental health issues, but that doesn't deny the fact their morals are different and valid/complete (assuming their ability to empathise isn't pathologically damaged). If you want to find the most widespread taboo, that would be incest - the majority of us think it's wrong.

Moral values are based on cognitive, emotional and voluntary components - we think about moral subjects and process information related to them, we have some feelings directed to them and we have the need to act certain way (or not).
I highly recommend the book The Emotional Construction of Morals by Jesse Prinz, which I have quoted on this forum 3 times. I haven't read the first part yet; I'm sure it's good, judging by the second part.

This all boils down to whether you are moral relativist or not. I think those supposedly universal morals are deception of mass cultural values which work as global trends. There are a lot of people who think universal moral facts exist (and are always true) and they cannot comprehend the existence of another person who thinks differently because their moral feelings are making them blind. I think we can all agree that morality is context dependent, which has been elaborated in previous posts dealing with corpses. The point is, you decide for yourself what's wrong and right depending on facts and feelings you have, but beware, it's true only for you. It can be frustrating because in society we need to agree upon some stuff in order to make laws and be able to punish the ones who don't follow the herd. Sad, but functional - saves us from murderers, thieves etc.

I always felt that metal was good at pointing things out the world has hidden somewhere to not talk about, especially when singing about death, autopsies etc. I feel people are so scared to look or speak about death and suicides etc. that all has to be covered up instead of facing the truth, the maybe darker side of the world, which is still something that really happened, every day, why are we keen to not see it? I deal with murder victims on a daily basis which makes me a bit used to it, but I am not really against using these pictures, albeit the photographers of these pictures are a bit respectless for putting it on the internet. Mainly because these images are all easy obtainable from the internet, so the chances that these are seen by relatives don't really increase by using it as an album cover to be honest (maybe 0,1% increased), these pictures don't come from medical textbooks or anything just rotten dot com or similar sites. In fact I think there is some beauty in the true face of death. Though I do think it is fine to have unrecognizable pictures of deceased bodies, the Pissgrave latest has such specific teeth (not only for a forensic odontologist) combined with the shirt, that makes it easy for relatives, if any, to recognize him. Similar to the debut.
The death child is actually one which has been in newspapers and a case study often depicted in many forensic textbooks, and with good reason, so I actually feel it has some homage/beauty to the case.
The carcass covers are actually from 70's and 80's autopsy textbooks (don't recognize them all) and is a sort of collage, most pictures have the educational rights to be used however in these years there wasn't to much of waving rights by relatives etc.
There was a question about the Devourment cover from molesting the decapitated, that is actually a piece of art Joel-Peter Witkin and I even believe the band has bought the rights (Joel-Peter Witkin, makes art to also face you with the darkside of the world).

Yea.

This argument and all the other arguments this message board has and will always have are completely meaningless once you leave it.

There is a whole lot of Justified Rage going on here most of the time.

Those cent coins are gonna light up your ferryman's eyes in the Otherworld.

I'm hoping to live long enough for robotics to advance enough that I can have a little robot Uncle Scrooge swimming through the cent coins on my grave.

I was thinking the other day about the way people use this kind of imagery with different intentions. The three bands I was thinking about were UNDERGANG, PISSGRAVE and FLUIDS.
UNDERGANG have a kind of humorous take on death and gore a lot of the time, and because it's in cartoon form it isn't really too confrontational.

Then PISSGRAVE present extreme distortions and mutilations of the human body without comment and the images are fascinating in an abstract way, as well as inspiring curiosity about what must have occurred. I think in general it's useful to acknowledge that Western society desperately avoids taboo content like this, useful to be reminded in these stark ways that humans are fragile. If you do something stupid crossing the road, you could end up being that kind of splatter on the ground. You can use it to prod yourself out of comfortable ways of thinking.

Then FLUIDS tend to foreground actual suffering. "Caught", off the Exploitative Practices record, is a tough listen but I'm here for the intensity. However, desensitising yourself to extreme death and gore content can be a kind of self harm. I follow their twitter and some of it is gruesome as hell. I remember a video of some guy who had pissed off the wrong people being held down and getting the last scraps of his genitals bitten off by a dog. Eesh.

lol. Comparing Black Sabbath and Maiden to Joe Schmoe with underground gurgle goregrind band #8794 because they depicted a dead body on the cover of their album. This is your metric of measuring artistic development and pushing boundaries? Hilarious. Those bands aren't doing anything that takes talent with those album covers. Just trying to shock people as much as possible.

This is the year 2020. You aren't going to shock anyone anymore with that kind of crap. Just make certain people sad when they see their family member in a horrible state on your shitty album that sells 4 copies.

I beg to differ, I don't believe in the theory you seem to believe in, that society inseminates us with its rules and we are born a blank slate. Of course, many things we consider ethical are subject to relativism and culture, but humans are not only bound by common appearance, nutritional needs and other physical functions. They are bound by a mental collective which expresses itself regardless of the place on earth. I gave you examples of a few taboos, and yes, incest may also be added. Same for fears - just an example. Mythology is also an interesting subject, there are patterns in it everywhere. Each civilization has had a solar/pantheistic phase, a polytheistic phase and they seem to have common ground regardless of never having met.



This makes it sound like you see everything as black and white. Is there no middle ground?



Animals don't learn to be afraid of something, because it may be too late to learn if this were the case. Same for labeling other animals as "prey". Maybe you noticed that feathers arouse the interest of every cat, even of a cat who has been inside an apartment for its entire life, because a cat is genetically programmed to associate feathery things with prey.



Exactly, some of those people have mental health issues, and that's why we shouldn't consider them a paragon of virtue or a prime example for a specific culture. These individuals have always been ostracised and punished in every society for a reason - the deviation is too high and goes against the grain of innate morality.

Don't get me wrong, I liked most of the points you made in this thread, and I expected more people to think like you rather than like squeamish moralists. I don't claim using dead people as covers to be immoral, and even if it were, what goes against the mores of the world at large is merely tongue in cheek for extreme metal... which is supposed to be transgressive and challenge the norms.

^ I'm not for a blank slate and extreme/communist take on social constructivism neither. I only think we should be aware of the nature/nurture dichotomy being false and trying to think about adequate evidence for our seductive hypothesis (like the one with cats and feathers). It's obvious that we can learn a complex language while other animals can't because our genomes, and consequently our phenotypes, differ. Just like with fear, we are born with predisposition to acquire speech, but if we miss the critical period, it becomes almost impossible to learn it properly. In other words, brain needs adequate environmental stimuli in order to develop properly.
Finding specific set of genes and making reliable evolutionary models is not possible yet because there are too many of them involved. Also, brain structures have overlapping functions, which is why you can't point out certain "area for feathers" in cats. When it comes to language, it's easier since we know about Broca's area and Wernicke's area.

Why do you think "morality is innate"? I don't want to sound like a broken record, so I refer you to this thread: https://forum.metal-archives.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=128143&start=40. There are a lot of philosophers and scientists who share yours or mine views, so I guess we could end up quoting different articles and disagreeing. XD I can see you falling for contemporary evolutionary psychology, and perhaps Cosmides' modularity theory.

I would like to separate myself from tabula rasa once again by pointing out that we can't make other animals like us precisely because our genomes differ. There was a psychologist who raised a newborn monkey with his newborn son and after some time monkey couldn't follow a child in his mental development.

My personal favorite example of corpse desecration being widely accepted is the civilian population of Milan stoning, dragging, then hanging upside down the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress after the partisans that executed them dumped them on the street.

As for my opinion on the original topic, It's basically the same as my opinion on A Serbian Film - shocking or grotesque imagery with no emotional weight behind it is artistically lazy and bankrupt and it can easily descend into unwitting self-parody. It's a cheap way of getting notoriety.

Eh bit of a first page-worthy post here (I can see the convo has moved on), but I'd just like to add that doing this sort of thing for shock value has been done to death(!) and honestly, it just makes me roll my eyes. I don't particularly enjoy looking at pictures of corpses, and if you're putting them on your album cover then it feels like overcompensation to me.

There are exceptions - the Carcass b-sides album being an example of that, but realistically I ripped it to mp3 ages ago and haven't actually looked at the cover in probably 10 years. I don't need that shit in my life. And the goregrind bands are just so much worse, both in quality of music and intensity of those album covers.

In short, shit idea and imo you have to be at least a bit of a weirdo to be over the age of 16 and find it cool.

How about using photos of dead nazis as album covers?

That's one of the rare unforgettable facts from usually boring history classes, I love the brutality of that sweet revenge. Are you familiar with a novel The Monk?

I was 16 when it came out and I remember people being outraged and it got quite popular in school - a lot of curious teenagers went to see it. I've seen it only partially a few years ago, just to get the idea of how it looks, but I don't see a point in torturing myself for 104 minutes. I think these two academic papers are going to give the real food to my brain cells: 1 2. I would call this film ''meta'' because you can interpret that ''cheap brutality'' to get something meaningful from it. I don't think they were so stupid to make it just to shock people, more to ask ourselves why we are shocked and to contemplate on gruesome stuff that happen in real life, and so on.

Sounds like a good idea for new Marduk's release, or better, some anti-war album.

Best use of dead people as cover art has been in Cultus Sanguine's records.
Nothing gruesome, just post-mortem photographies from the Victorian era, so, sure, there are dead kids, but they are fully dressed and in some cases even posing, since those pictures were a way for the families to keep a memento of their beloved departed.

Actually I think A Serbian Film is really good on paper and people only complain about the lack of emotional weight because the actors as so Z-movie level godawful.