The manly men at A Voice for Men do love their manly music! You may recall the asskickingly asskicking asskickery of “Go My Own Way,” the A Voice for Men anthem, as performed by Jade Michael and the Fuck Their Shit Up Singers Crew. And the “red pill honesty” of Slumberwall’s emo-folk (but totally not wussy) meditation“The Hatred of Women.”
Now, in a post with the dopily macho title “The weekend’s here. Swagger, brothers. Swagger,” AVFM contributor Skeptic presents a new video from his band Dark Star Disco.
No, it doesn’t quite match the terrible grandeur of either of the earlier MRA anthems. The music is utterly unexceptional testosterone-heavy rock-tronica that sounds like it just escaped from the nineties. And it’s 15 minutes long. But Skeptic is quite proud of it, nonetheless. As he describes it, in phrases as clichéd as the song itself:
We are sonically in your face – wall of sound — chainsaw wailing guitar, piercing electro synth and pounding rock rhythms.
Skeptic contributes the guitar – sorry, the “chainsaw wailing guitar” – to the sound. He apparently prefers guitars to women, as they don’t talk back:
I strut on guitar and love it. Nowhere do I feel more alive. Swagger.
I’ve been playing guitar for many years – self-taught. Swagger.
My guitars have helped me cathart during times of feminist insanity more times than I can recall. I truly don’t know how I would have made it this far without playing guitar. For my guitar doesn’t make maddening “man up” BS demands and treat me with misandry as a disposable utility.
The video, even less original, consists of pilfered stock footage of an assortment of putatively manly things, starting with, yes, a missile. (Oh, hello, Dr. Freud1) Let’s let Skeptic describe his creation:
It’s chock full of images men can relate to – a guided missile, eagle and cheetah hunting, jet aircraft and a high powered motorcycle at full throttle, runway dance swagger, military teamwork and bravery, high tech playfulness, raw wilderness, cutting edge scientific research, urban spaces constructed and running at full tilt and moving at a blistering pace into a future city of lights. It’s what men do. It’s cram packed with stuff feminists shit their pants over – unapologetic swaggering masculinity.
I dig it. It’s ballsy.
Just so you know, the “runway dance swagger” in question refers not to a fashion model shaking his or her stuff in a runway show, but to some dude doing a little victory dance on an runway for, like , airplanes.
Of course, Skeptic is making some assumptions here. We don’t actually know the gender of all those flying the planes (or driving the cars, or riding the motorcycle like an asshole) in the video. For the sake of argument, let’s just assume they are all male.
But the cheetah? Either Skeptic thinks all cheetahs are boy cheetahs, or he thinks that girl cheetahs sit on their fat asses eating cheetah bon bons and living off of Cheetalimony. In fact, of course, both male and female cheetahs hunt for their food. That ballsy swaggering masculine cheetah in his video may well be a gal.
If there are any stray misogynists reading this post who are unwilling to accept that female cheetahs can hunt, skip ahead to 1:30 in the video below to see one cheetah mom chase down a gazelle just like the cheetah in Skeptic’s video.
Here, a female cheetah faces down three hyenas to protect her cubs.
In other words, female cheetahs are badasses. So are male cheetahs.
Skeptic is just a plain old jackass.
If any of you actually listened to Dark Star Disco’s little masterpiece, or any of the other songs I linked to above, and need to clear your ears of all that manly man stuff, might I suggest “Crochet,” by Kathleen Hanna’s side project Julie Ruin?
Option two, I think, two moogles, going on the evidence! 🙂
I despise “man up” in the same way as “grow a pair” – the assumption that bravery, stoicism, and all the “superior” behaviours or feelings are masculine, and that anything else is womanish and weak. Here’s a suggestion, MRAs: go fuck yourselves. Yeah, not the first time you’ll have heard it and not the last.
Now if we’re talking about what this hateful, whiney brigade really need to do, it might be just “grow up.” Being stuck at the Terrible Two stage of emotional maturity isn’t impressive, fellers, it’s not impressive at all.
Monty Python is ‘lame’? Or was that just badly written?
Cannibal Corpse is just terrible. Musically and lyrically. I used to like ultraviolent imagery in songs but nowadays I try to stick only to songs that use it to condemn rather than glorify.
Example:
@00mpal00mpa
You’re very right about them not really counting as a metal act, but I don’t see anything “progressive” about The Darkness. They’re a retro-rock outfit – bits of AC/DC and Thin Lizzy and Queen and what have you – and the sort of thing that would’ve been considered at one point to have some level of overlap with heavy metal (they’re roughly as heavy as, say, Saxon) but you’d certainly call hard rock or somesuch these days.
Prog rock has humor? Someone tell Yes, Rush and ELP. Humor is what that noodling needs.
@hellkell
Well, you could argue Frank Zappa’s a prog rocker, and though I don’t personally think he’s anywhere near as funny as he aimed for, he certainly went for humour. Ditto Primus, kinda.
Gong are more recognisably prog-rock and certainly self-aware at some level. If we let in prog-pop groups, 10cc, Sparks, and Supertramp are all more light-hearted than not most of the time, to name the first groups that come to mind.
Slapp Happy too while we’re naming prog-pop groups!
Didn’t we already figure out that oompaloompa was one of our revolving door trolls?
I must have missed that.
The thing about grotesque lyrics is that it’s like Steele and “vile” – if you hear it often enough it starts to blend into the woodwork. So if you listen to lots of OMGEXTREME metal, after a while it’s like, yeah yeah, dripping entrails, mm hmm, rip out the beating heart – sure, whatever. It’s not just that it’s juvenile and kind of dumb, it’s that after a while it’s boring because your brain just tunes it out.
@CassandraSays
But medical-textbook lyrics are fun! It’s not as if you’d pick them out while listening unless you’re very good at that. It’s good to see bands who find an interesting way of getting around the way they get boring: in the brutal-death-metal stakes I admire Nile particularly for at least picking a consistent schtick for their ultraviolence. They seem to have a bit of a credibility problem for not being quite raw enough or being too commercial or w/e, but seriously, the sweep-picking riff in this:
(I’ll admit the sub-Pantera whammy-bar opening’s a little cheesy)
See, if I want metal + unintentionally hilarious, it’s all about the folk metal. Have you ever seen Finntroll? Much like the medical textbook stuff, it’s funny because they’re so damn serious about it.
Actually, here’s a page that tells people how to dress like a folk metal person. Why you would want to do so I’m not entirely sure.
http://www.steffmetal.com/fashion-for-metalheads-folk-metal-fashion/
The fashion still isn’t as funny as the lyrics, though.
See, I associate folk metal with crypto-white-supremacism* and a well-meaning but socially awful and slightly creepy friend who gets way too much into Eurofolk stuff and thinks drinking mead rather than beer/goon wine/alcoholic sugarwater/vodka/whatever is something that makes him interesting rather than just being a choice of drink and ugh I can’t really explain
Any Euro-folk/pagan/neoceltic/neonorse stuff just doesn’t sit well with me for reasons I can’t quite explain and understand are irrational. It’s a type of taking things too seriously that doesn’t quite work for me, though obviously other people love it.
I do really like Korpiklaani though.
*Funnily enough, I can take black metal with actual neo-nazi links quite easily without feeling that way, just making sure not to financially benefit the creators.
But if we’re on “unintentionally hilarious” and “awkward teens trying to be cool in a way that’s a little painful to watch”, Saint Vitus’ “Dying Inside” just came on on shuffle over here… 🙂
Not sure why Jethro Tull are getting counted as folk-metal there, either.
Not very related, but I remember reading somewhere that a lot of Indian people got annoyed at Ian Anderson for stealing his flute-playing stance from a Hindu god or somesuch? I tried to learn an old fife I inherited for a bit and standing like that was about the only thing I could figure out how to do consistently.
I can’t stand the stuff, which I guess is why I don’t feel bad about mocking it. Don’t know much about the social dynamics of it, but can’t say I’m surprised that the nationalism/fascism connection kicks in. It’s the taking too seriously thing that makes it funny, though. Especially with Celtic stuff, since that’s my cultural background and when Americans start playing with it then it often gets a bit awkward.
Speaking of songs that give (well, me, at least) that little moment of embarrassed recognition of a younger version of yourself…
BTW, what’s goon wine? When I hear goon I think hockey goon, which is creating an odd mental image of a dude in hockey pads and a Viking hat drinking mead out of a horn.
Thanks for that site too…Good “what am I reading” stuff. It’s really unusual in a way I can’t express… Really doesn’t hit any of the typical metal-site buttons in any way but colour scheme somehow?
Probably just not very tr00 or something.
Yeah, I like her, she’s very into metal but not obnoxious about it, and she’s funny.
@CassandraSays
The Celtic thing’s odd. I have a few friends who have red hair and play up the Celtic connection despite being roughly as Celtic as any other Anglo-Australian, which is to say fairly but with no real connection.
“Goon” is the popular name for the cheapest Aussie way to get drunk by far, cheap wine in a 4L cask. There are several party games involving inflating or hanging this cask, and it also makes a nice pillow. Usually designated “fruity lexia”, with the resulting drunkenness called “fruity dyslexia”.
Just realised the url of that site. That’s fantastic.
This post is even funnier, and a good illustration of the earlier conversation about needing to really love something to mock it effectively.
http://www.steffmetal.com/fashion-metalheads-death-metal-fashion/
The Celt thing gets even funnier when the people who’re really super mega into it don’t read me as a Celt, because I have Welsh coloring (think Catherine Zeta Jones) and apparently people here don’t know what Welsh people look like, and then they get confused and annoyed when I’m all, wait, you know that bit of mythology you just babbled about is totally made up and not at all authentic, right?
At least it’s a fairly harmless culture to make things up about.
Hey, it worked for Tolkien and making stuff about based on Finnish mythology…which I suppose makes Finntroll kind of meta. My usual reaction to most folk metal bands is basically “who gave Gandalf a Fender?”.
Most folk metal would work a lot better if packaged in the same amateurish sub-Tolkien kind of daggy drawn Midwestern fantasy artwork you’d get circa 1st-edition AD&D or contemporary Dragon, now that you kinda-sorta mention it…
It already is kind of like an old Monster Manual come to life. Needs more dragons, though.
Exactly! Remind me to credit my instrumental contributions as “Rods, Staves and Wands” if I ever start a folk metal group.
And title the first album “To Hit Armor Class Zero”.