Counter-Currents
In Praise of the White Singing Voice:
Getting to “Beyonce” Overload
Julian Lee
Enya
6,701 words
I went through a phase when it pained me to hear my daughters sing.
For a spell their natural voices had became warped. Before it had been their pure, natural voices in the rooms yonder. Now, affectation, artifice, gimmicks. Voices not really theirs. I suffered and worried maybe a little more than I should have. We are more solid trees than that. It turned out they were just going through a phase themselves.
But at that time I developed an allergic reaction to so-called black “soul” singing. It seemed to have invaded my neighborhood and swamped my kids. I ought to say I loathe it. Just for sport let me declare: I hate the dippy stuff.
My feelings probably don’t rise to such quality — to real ‘hate’ that is. More likely I just dislike it. But I needed to propound a good polemic, since plans are stewing. Some now crave to ‘outlaw’ the expression of certain human thoughts and instincts, and even one of my most favoritest of things — Aversion.
Uniquely unprecedented Samsara Busters, they even fantasize about ‘abolishing’ hate — or its expression — as if you can just pave over human feelings. Hate’s closest relation, anger, is as “perennial as the grass” and as human as thumbs.
“What does it mean, Cosmically, to hold a note and let it ring in place? What does it imply to show fidelity to composition? What can we tell about a People that evolves these singing values?”
So is its expression, whether it be coarse or savvy, fortunate or not, and whether it present as virtue or vice. (Some theologians do call it virtue to hate evil.) I want to point out, too, that human hate — when it actually exists — has a cause, and not always ‘ignorance’ or ‘misunderstanding.’ It is more often a response to hurt, injustice, or threat.
Even if it weren’t a fool’s errand to ‘outlaw hate,’ true hate is so hard to find. What they’ll call ‘hate’ will be the lesser things like disdain, aversion, or statements of natural human discrimination. Things like this very article. Truly, the goal is the liquefaction of the human mind.
If you’ve forgotten what ‘discrimination’ actually means — it is time to look it up. It’s how you decide what to do at a four-way stop, which fruit to eat from a bowl of cherries, and which clothes you’ll wear in the morning. Using her precious discrimination, a young lass decides to marry one man instead of another, and listens to one song and not another.
To discriminate is to distinguish differences; what is better and worse. You use the faculty in every kind of decision. We discriminate at all hours — even in dreams. If we didn’t we’d not be human. Without an active, robust sense of discrimination we would lack the functionality of even caterpillars, let alone the fox. Discrimination is the essential faculty at the heart of human intelligence. That’s no new definition of the word, but the standard one.
Who’d have thought anybody would try to outlaw discrimination? It’s as sensible as ‘outlawing’ thought, crying babies, and the rain.
So I was game to cook up some quasi-hate speech as a service to my country. Freedom to think, to have your feelings, and to express them and teach culture to others — these are too sweet to lose. And I aim to bring out some lessons in active discrimination here. Because human discrimination is a very beautiful thing. Now it needs some space; some air. It’s about time. Somebody has decided that Black music and culture is now superior to White. And this inspires a discriminating, taboo-busting trip.
Beyonce was the last straw in my craw, the alarm bell that roused me, the final insult. Now I am submitting a claim of Oppression by Black Vocals. Later we’ll discuss reparations.
Notice the word “soul” above needed quotes. I declare and cry from the rooftops that black music has no particular claim on Soul, Spirit, or the Transcendent. Because my White Soul whispers it.
Precaution: If you are afflicted with White guilt or White self loathing, this article will make you itch and twitch.
Beyond enuf
Black Overload in Media
Four nights ago the “soul” singer Beyonce was unaccountably overexposed at the 2005 Academy Awards. She’s a pleasant enough woman. Appealingly feminine, humble. But her voice and singing style are just more of the same; part of a long procession of truly stereotypical “soul” stylists, and a mediocre case at that. So my question is:
What possessed them to give her four (count ’em) separate songs? Such hegemony by a vocalist at an Oscars is unprecedented, some noted. And on what grounds? It’s not as if she is a songwriter. She does “covers” of other people’s songs. And she doesn’t even choose good material. Thanks to her we have to suffer through the resurrection of 70’s soul-trash like “Love To Love Ya, Baby.” (For that alone she should be banned from the Oscars.) Meanwhile there is nothing exceptional about her voice; you can hear specimens like it at high school talent shows. Then the soul style grates. More than anything these days, the sound of that voice grates me. I mean the sound of the black voice! It’s odd, and always the same. Why should I like it?
There was no White singer in sight for this White nation. Meanwhile half of the “best actor” awards went to blacks, and a lecherous black emcee was selected to terrorize the audience and pull the class factor down by about 95 degrees. Somebody upstairs was having fun with White America.
I see that Blacks are only 12% of U.S. population. But watching T.V. one would guess they were at least 60%. Or that a law has been written prohibiting Whites from being shown outside of the company of Blacks. Hollywood scriptwriters have a new Rule Number Two: “All characters who are strong males, bosses, supervisors, gurus, commanders, or surgery room chiefs — or any kind of superior — must always be played by a black.” Oh yeah — Rule 3 is: “The black must always speak rudely or abusively to the white characters.”
It doesn’t have any connection to real life, and is very insulting to White people. Leaving aside black overcrowding in media, let’s talk about the epidemiology of black “soul” music. Seeing Media canonize Ray Charles — of all people — as a cultural icon, lets me know a little straight talk is in order about spiritual ideals in music. I’m going to be criticizing Black music and singing here. (Just so you don’t think I’m entirely one sided, my own people get some criticism further down.) Now let me crow about the musical goodness and brilliance of my People.
Whites Evolve Different Forms of Music
Roy Orbison’s open throated, soaring voice — melodious and entirely free of strain — epitomizes singing values long held dear by Whites.
If left alone Whites and Blacks evolve different forms of music. White music has many lineages reaching far back into old Europe. Let’s limit this discussion to White Classical music alone. First, our White ancestors in Europe gave us many amazing instruments.
They developed many forms of strings (violins, violas, cellos, string basses), and brasses (trumpets, trombones, French Horns, Tubas, the Piccolo, the flute), and woodwinds (the oboe, the clarinet), and various Amazing Keyboards (The Piano, the Pinafore, the Harpsichord, and Pipe Organ).
This is not to minimize a whole regiment of lesser instruments like the guitar and the harmonica. But using these they evolved that amazing coordinated group effort we know as The Orchestra, and most especially — the Genius Composers (brilliant white men, all) who supply them with richly imaginative, thematically varied and inspired symphonies and scores. To create a great symphony requires a large number of adults who have been especially trained on an instrument from childhood, generally supported by a culture that had evolved the phenomenon of schools and universities.
Brilliant White Men
Everything you hear on a classical music station — from operas to complex symphonies utilizing a myriad difficult instruments — was evolved by White Europeans, right down to the instruments themselves. It is not my view that Black people do not have any unique and positive racial traits. This is not my topic here. My point here is that they are not like Whites. You can observe a lot about the essence of a people by analyzing what they do, and what they create, when left entirely to themselves. Especially over eons.
Take the cello alone. African peoples never produced any instrument to compare with it, much less a harpsichord — or even a dry auditorium where a symphony and audience might pleasantly sit. Standing back of one French Horn are centuries of stable White culture, centuries of White technological creativity, centuries of White industry and economic life. To even conceive of making a piano required first an advanced civilization with much technical knowledge, numerous manufacturing skills and amazing capital equipment.
Given these amazing instruments it still remained for players to master them with years of training under accomplished teachers, in dignified and formal schools, walking upstairs to furnished rooms with windows, showing up on time day after day in that Nordic work ethic, sitting inside of beautiful buildings with heat — and the rest — all to master an arcane thread in a work by a Mozart, or some other subtle genius.
If there is a symphony today in Africa, it is because Whites brought it there, and it would have to be staffed by White players. Leave aside the instruments and turn to playership. Blacks have long been exposed to violins and cellos. But how many virtuoso instrumentalists, in the classical traditions, have emerged from among Blacks? It can be argued that even to play these instruments according to White standards — or even to follow orchestral sheet music — is a racial capacity. (See Hilary Hahn, below.)
Two White Composers (Just Two!)
Ludwig Van Beethoven is one of the world’s greatest composers, a German, and a Brilliant White Man.
Peter Warlock was a modern classical composer and White Man — an Englishman. Warlock had no musical training. Yet by his early death at 36 he left a large body of masterful music having the same complexity, subtlety, and creativity as the earlier White composers. His “Capriol Suite” is deeply visionary and transporting — true soul music.
Philip Arnold Heseltine, a.k.a. Peter Warlock
Conductor/composer Constant Lambert wrote in 1938:
Warlock’s music was of its own special category. . . . It would be an easy matter for me to write down the names of at least 30 of Warlocks songs which are flawless in inspiration and workmanship. It is no exaggeration to say that this achievement entitles him to be classed with Dowland, Mussorgsky, and Debussy as one of the greatest songwriters that music has known.–From the “All Music Guide,” Dave Lewis
Finally we have to mention White music itself. Listen to an opera by Wagner, and wonder: Where do these White Men get this stuff? Watch a classical art channel all night long; you’ll see nothing having any corollary — material or aesthetic — in historical Africa.
Are there any black classical composers in our lofty classical genre? Or even in the ballpark? If so, I have not heard of them. Are there even many great black songwriters in pop? O.K. Stevie Wonder is a great pop composer. But that’s about it. Certainly the media-vaunted “Prince” does not rate, nor the absurd Rick James. Their stuff is insipid and annoying. The self-named “King of Pop” — Michael Jackson — never wrote an exceptional tune in his life, and he gets hauled into court for copyright infringement.
Andrew Lloyd Weber, a great modern Composer in the White theatrical traditions.
Stand any of them next to a Paul McCartney or an Andrew Lloyd Webber. Has “the king of pop” ever written a melodically brilliant “Eleanor Rigby” or a “Jesus Christ Superstar”?
After listening to some good symphonies ponder what blacks create for music today when left to themselves. Ask yourself if you don’t like White music better than the atonal bellowing, criminal lyrics, and ham-handed digital assault known as “rap” and “hip hop”? Compare it to a soaring run by Andrew Lloyd Weber and ask yourself: Which is the real “soul music”?
NOTE: Some great composers and songwriters have been Jews, the chief racial adversary of Whites.
One fine day I found myself moved by the orchestra on a classical music channel, and then a piece from the opera Madame Butterfly, and I realized: An orchestra is a very White thing, and so is an opera, and so is a cello. And this is the music of White People! It’s the music of your White ancestors, and it carries their intelligence, their dreams, and soul.
I began to grow in appreciation of my own race, and realized I had not been appreciating it at all. I saw that I had been led; I had been brainwashed from youth. But the sublime, unendingly creative music that I heard there was enough to convince me to feel proud of the White Race, and to realize we were spiritually unique.
It can be argued that to play these instruments beautifully and according to White standards — the violin, the cello — is a racial capacity.
And then I found that it is considered stunning for a White to have any racial pride. If you are White you are not supposed to think that Whites have anything special about them. Or, you are supposed to assume that whatever we have, other races must have them too. Or more likely, you are supposed to be ashamed of your race — as many young White people now are because of the media message. What could my four White daughters think when the only singer featured at the Academy Awards is a black “soul” singer? It must mean they should try to be sing like her, even look like her…
Whatever American Black music may have been originally — and I don’t say that I know — what we’ve come to know are its admixtures with White forms. A cross-fertilization has created a few interesting things, like New Orleans jazz. But left to themselves the two races create their own music, and they don’t have the same vocal approaches. When you see black actors in Porgy and Bess singing with an operatic tone, know that that vocal style was trained into them by White teachers.
Black and White Voices Sound Different
I can usually tell a Black from a White over the phone, not by accent but voice tone. Also I can tell a white singer from a black sight-unseen, again from voice tone. So it seems that white voices are different from black voices acoustically. Whether this is from biology or environment, I do not know.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer Greg Lake (center) has a sonorous, open voice that is is probably untrained, but a fine specimen of natural White vocal sound. Good Sample Songs: “Trilogy,” Take A Pebble,” “From The Beginning,” “The Sheriff”
But you can’t fool the ear. The sound of the White voice is instinctively more attractive to me. Why shouldn’t it be? The White voice has resonance in my memory and genes, and maybe lifetimes of White mothers singing me lullabies, and fathers giving me advice, and association with other White voices. And the White vocal style somehow resonates with values that are a part of my White DNA.
I note that a White can learn to sound like a Black, as in the case of Britney Spears. Also a Black can learn to sound like a White, as in the case of Nat King Cole. If left to themselves, however, the two races evolve different voices.
Listen to Roy Orbison sing and then ask yourself: Has any other racial group generated that kind of voice or vocal style? The pure presentation of the note, the unwavering sustain, and the open-throated tone shimmering with heart and subtle longing? The answer is no. Roy Orbison is considered great in White culture precisely because he so beautifully exemplified core White singing values.
There is no black ‘Roy Orbison,’ no oriental ‘Roy Orbison,’ no East Indian or Asian ‘Roy Orbison,’ and no Native American ‘Roy Orbison.’
The singing style of Andy Williams exemplifies natural White ideals for the voice. Never strained even at higher ranges, his voice floats out of him like smoke from a chimney. His voice is tinged with joy, and achieves a beautiful tone.
If a non-White ever shows up singing like Roy Orbison (a thing that has never happened) it’ll be because they were heavily exposed to White singing and strove to master that sound. But it is not a natural emanation of other races.
This is not to say that other racial styles don’t have their charm. I enjoy the East Indian singing style with beguiling and subtle melodic inflections. Asian styles of singing are completely unique to that race, as were the Black singing styles out of Africa. Of the races, the Asians have come the closest to evolving singing values similar to those of Whites, in terms of sweetness of tone and pure sustain. But the Asian lexicon contains sounds and musical values that are unknown to the White. I posit that differences in music/singing are caused by differences in psycho-spiritual orientation inherent in the races.
Spiritual Lexicon of the Voice
The various possible styles of the human voice actually represent a spiritual and moral lexicon:
- A strained and broken up voice makes a statement of recklessness, excess, and pathos.
- A shouting, atonal style conveys brutishness and a rejection of the aesthetic.
- The singer who carries an actual melody — as compared to grunts, shouts, and wails — affirms the spiritual aesthetic that is music itself.
- A cultivated, disciplined voice speaks of self-respect, self-discipline, work, and intelligence.
- A pure tone implies chastity and honesty, innocence and restraint.
- A forced voice that strains bespeaks impetuosity and impatience, bullheaded youth and the eternal green yokel.
- A distorted growl conjures a drunken brawl; dissolution, unrestrained anger.
- A light and breathy sound telegraphs femininity, innocence or childlike qualities.
- Deep, firm voices in men bespeak manliness, fatherhood, strength, and authority.
- A vocal style that constantly shifts about — to the point that melody is obscured — stands for waffling, laziness, freneticism, and hype. A “shifty” vocal style represents a “shifty” approach to life. I have to note that is a trait of so-called black “soul” singing. (I distinguish this from the vocal music of India which, though containing subtle dips and trills, holds to a well defined melody.)
- The ability to evenly hold to one place in a melody, on the other hand, speaks of the ideals of self-control, fidelity, focus, and strength.
Young Virginian Hilary Hahn is already one of the world’s violin masters. She displays the Nordic manual dexterity, combined with the rich White musical sensibilities enshrined in classical music itself. Think White People are not special? See and hear this Violin Goddess — and get Religion.
A voice can be chaste or dissolute, economical or wasteful, spiritually inspiring or carnal and debasing to the mind. Whenever anyone sings they are representing some kind of human value through singing style. A beautiful and original melody enlivened by a chaste and disciplined voice lifts the human spirit. Add meaningful lyrics, and it can connect us to the Transcendental within. As far as I’m concerned, this is the real “soul music.”
The White Singing Values
To understand the values of the White singing technique, you would only need to sample some voice lessons from the many voice coaches (almost all of them White) who have been teaching in Europe and the U.S. for centuries. Following are four singing values they promote.
- White singing strives for an open throated tone. To achieve this a singer learns to support his voice consciously from the abdomen, providing foundational strength to the final voice.
- It is a high value not to strain the voice, but to let it flow out in a pure, undistorted way.
- High value is placed on the ability to hold a note in one place, as the melody may demand, without having to resort to vibrato, force, or the dippy little melodic gimmicks so common in black singing.
- The White singing ethic strives for the development of beautiful, full tone. A beautiful tone is rounded, rich, and undistorted, carrying more frequencies of the voice. It lacks strain and is based on the training of not just the throat, but that entire underlayment of diaphragm, abdomen, and lungs. It is a holistic effect, and carries ‘soul’ — the real thing.
The beauty and power of the human voice has been cultivated by Whites, even as they cultivated the world’s finest architecture.
Tone can also be improved through training. Tone is of first value, then control, execution, and lastly style. Black singers tend to be long on style and short on execution and tone. I am going to add one of my own values here that may be obscured even in the White tradition. It is a divine gift when a singer’s very voice touches the soul. And this is effected most by the singer’s own inner virtue. You might say the singer’s “good karma.” A singer with inner spiritual beauty or wisdom transmits it through his voice. A singer’s own moral condition is one of his most important qualifications.
A good singer makes it sound easy; he soothes and uplifts. When he takes you to dangerous vocal terrain he carries you through safely without losing control or finesse. A great singer evokes sublime feeling more by containing a vital voice with chaste control, than by unrestrained emotionalism and excess. Just as poetry gains power when it whispers to you between the lines; a singer touches you deeper through hidden reserve than by dumping everything on the table.
This takes discipline and cultivation and powers in reserve. And this is a statement of the values of our ancestors. To sing this way requires the development of a physiological understructure and a skillful use of the lungs and entire body, so that the voice finally “floats” out in a relaxed way, even in higher ranges.
“This style of singing embodies the spiritual values of discipline, inner structure, and strength. At its best it conveys wholeness, purity, and fidelity.”
When a singer builds that understructure he is able to go soaring and take us along. For some it’s a born gift. Others cultivate it through training. But that style of singing — developed over eons by our White European ancestors — implicitly conveys the values of those ancestors. This manner of singing embodies the spiritual values of discipline, inner structure, and strength. At its best it speaks of wholeness, purity, and fidelity.
Limiting this discussion to the voice, I won’t even attempt to discuss broader musical values of the Whites, such as the high value placed of melody itself (something increasingly missing from Black offerings, which appear to be in a state of degeneration). I never thought I’d find myself publicly criticizing Black singing. But the fetish shown by our media handlers in pushing Black ‘artists’ upon me — and my daughters — had be backed against the wall.
An Analysis of Black Singing
Here I’ll also not mention “rap” and “hip hop,” which is barely music and generally features shouting as opposed to singing. Here I’ll comment on the cases where Blacks get involved in singing.
In black singing lazy trills and gimmicky gasps often stand in for vocal discipline. Affected emotional histrionics substitute for genuine spiritual impact. Tonality remains undeveloped. To me, the black voice in its natural state reminds me of the sound of a bleating calf.
This vocal tone rules with the black singers today, tinny and uncultivated. There have been resonant black singers — Nat King Cole has been mentioned. But guess who his influences were? Who was he aspiring to sound like? White men. He patterned himself after the White crooners of his time. Radio listeners thought he was White. Was it not grand that Nat King Cole was able to receive that influence from White crooners and give us a sonorous, melodic voice? Lou Rawls, another black singer, almost came close. But both voices owed much to cigarettes. (It’s an old trick for giving yourself a husky voice not really yours. Both died from lung cancer.) As for Rawls, his tone was a little menacing. Did either of these even approach the saintly, spine-chilling timbre of an Andy Williams? Or the edifying sonic clarity of a Wayne Newton? In my ‘White Soul,’ no.
Nowadays, Black singers don’t sound the least bit like Nat King Cole or other contemporary Whites. Nat tried to sound like the White singers. One can turn on a classical music channel and see black operatic divas, too. Again, they have inculcated a musical discipline created by Whites. Today Blacks no longer aspire to break in on a White standard. They are avidly sold to the wealthy White audience just being themselves. So they are evolving their own music increasingly cut off from White musical influence. Musical influences had become a one-way street. Whites (like Britney Spears et al.) take their influence from the Blacks. Blacks seem to take little influence now from whites.
But is this a good thing? Does today’s Black music enrich White music, or degrade it? I believe that the White musical tradition is the richer, loftier tradition and that Black influence now degrades that. I assert here that White music and vocals are beautiful, lofty, and precious. As for me if I had to choose, I’d rather hear White singing.
Today our ears are swimming in a genuinely black vocal style that is a cliché at best, invasive at worst. The newly sainted Ray Charles (now inexplicably hyped as a “cultural revolutionary”) is a fine example of the strained sound achieved by any fool attempting to sing. To hear this tone at its prime, listen to any Rastafarian or “reggae” singer out of Jamaica. They all sound the same — like bleating calves. That’s how it is when you sing without White vocal discipline, foundational technique, or even effort.
Today’s “soul” singers indulge themselves endlessly with fast 16th notes. These are exhibitionistic departures from the melody that covers up a basic lack of discipline and vocal prowess. Putting all those wriggles into your line is the lazy and juvenile.
Ray Charles, Newly Prescribed Musical Hero for a White Nation
In 2005 our media handlers appointed the vocal bleater Ray Charles as the new musical hero for Whites. Media proclaimed him a “Legend,” “a Cultural Revolutionary,” “Pioneer,” “Visionary,” Lord of Kosher Hype, Soul Messiah, Chief Growler, Prime Howler, Supreme Brotha, Mainman, Holy Father, Ed Sullivan Show filler, contestant on Hollywood Squares.
(But did he write one damned song that was any good?)
It’s like a boy hopping every corner with his skateboard, or popping every bubble on some plastic packing. It’s easily learned. I could do that stuff as an amateur singer at 16. These undulations are basically a parody of emotional feeling originating in the black southern churches, an affectation. But they tend to weaken the melody, and are no substitute for genuine emotional transmission.
Fast 16th notes, brassy tone, superfluous histrionics. Whitney Houston has long been considered as the premiere female ‘soul singer.’
The undulations serve to obscure the fact that the singer has not mastered a more difficult and central aspect of singing — holding a note and letting it ring out with beauty. White singing places a high value on the ability to hold a note in a pure and attractive way, without strain. There is also a value on fidelity to a melody. What does it mean, Cosmically, to hold a note and let it ring in place? What does it imply to show fidelity to composition? What can we tell about a People that evolves these singing values? Why did our European ancestors develop this singing ideal rather that the shifty convolutions of “soul” singing.
“Soul” singers commonly blare out high notes like a brass horn. This is supposed to represent vocal power and emotion. But a voice is spiritually powerful when we can sense its inward strength, set within restraint and inner girding; when you sense the singer isn’t using all he’s got, though giving you a lot. The principle is seen with power amplifiers. A stereo amp with more wattage than it needs — “head room” so to speak — provides less distortion, greater musical purity, and more dynamic range even at a low volume. Soul singers do not cultivate the abdominal undergirding that brings out the beauty of the human voice.
A fine singer can emit a sustained note, soft or firm, without strain or wavering, then end it smoothly without that cheesy gasp so annoying in modern black singing. That’s real control. If you asked Ray Charles et al. to just hold a note sweet and clean — without blaring like a horn — they’d be stumped.
The young singers of today who imitate these people are losing out on the potential of their voices.
Pathological White Singing
The Who’s Roger Daltry could scream in tune very well — for a few years. It didn’t take long for his voice to be shot. In reality, sustainability is part of White wisdom.
Now I’ll make some stout criticisms of my own race. If Whites listen to this criticism, it will only help them greatly. Over the past several decades there have been many White singers who do NOT manifest the above vocal values. However, it can be argued that the decline of these ideals has been through foreign influence, and fomented by a breakdown and derangement of White culture.
A voice that strains and breaks up in places has some theatrical and emotional value. But carried to excess it is simply ugly and deadens the soul. It has led to a form of singing that became a white forte, that of the heavy-metal screamer. Let’s analyze that vocal style.
Heavy metal scream-singing had its genesis in the untrained effort to sing at higher ranges, without consideration for the spiritual possibilities of tone, or even the longevity of the vocal chords. Higher ranges have always been a part of white singing, and we used to call them tenors.
In the 60’s certain White groups — most notably the Beatles – deliberately strained the voice into high ranges, absent any technique, to achieve a raw emotional provocativeness.
This approach was actually pioneered by Black singers of the time, most notably Little Richard. In time the singer’s voice (while it lasts) takes on a raspy quality that adds more emotionalism, with a suggestion of anger or aggression.
Whites became the masters of heavy-metal screaming because they are the masters of technology — and the intimates of the social damage it brings.
This effect was what they were after. An example of this sort of voice was the singer for “Nazareth,” who had one hit called “Love Hurts.” Heavy metal singing represents these trends at their ultimate conclusion, fostered further by the loud heavy metal guitar. The screaming, distorted vocal style was an inevitable sonic corollary to the obscene volume of the metal guitar. Any form of music that actually damages the human body (in this case the hearing) has to be classified as pathological, negative.
Heavy metal screamers represent for us Mars-like masculinity and bombast. This bellowing, throat-splitting approach conveys the very vibrations of anger, excess, aggression, and ignorance — even violence. Lead singers for bands named AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Quiet Riot, and many others exhibited the style. These raging vocals became favored by young American White males in the 1980s onward. It speaks of their emotional condition.
Aggression, anger, and pain are seen on the face of Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden) as he ‘screams in tune.’ With this forced singing style the voice is ruined within a few years.
Whites became the specialists with this sort of tamasic music. (That’s a Hindu word for ignorant, dense, destructive.) Whites tend to be really good, or really bad. This is one of those cases.
And the blame can’t be laid at the feet of Blacks. It is part of a spiritual darkness that has beset Whites from many sources, and some of the sources are their own — especially White technological obsession, perhaps the greatest fault of the White race.
The White Race is the master of technology, just as they’ve been the masters of a few other things (like beautiful architecture). It comes from the Nordic ancestral need to be highly organized and technologically competent to survive the harsh northern climates. This strength is also one of our great faults as a race. Whites never meet a technology they don’t like, and fail to recognize the extent to which technology damages culture and produces alienation; or the basic fact that technology never solves the problem it is meant to solve: The problem of duality and suffering.
A Bruce Dickinson album cover. The fish looks like him when he sings, a perfect image for the brute aggression tone of heavy metal singing.
With technology the duality always shifts and takes more complex forms, and meanwhile society becomes damaged. We can see this clearly in the development of loud rock music. Young people go to “concerts” and actually come away hearing damaged and less able to enjoy any music. The music itself — now amplified by White technology — became the cause of profound loss and damage to the very ability to experience art.
It is because technology is the forte of the White Race that they have specialized in producing this ugliest form of “music” and vocalizing, that of heavy metal. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer — cited above for beautiful White melodic sense and good singing, was periodically blighted by egregious ear-shattering techno noise. I lost some of my hearing at an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer concert.
So Whites became the masters of heavy-metal screaming because they are the masters of technology and the intimates of the social damage it brings. All in all it comes from: (1) White rage and emotional pain — especially that of young men emotionally abandoned by their families and their fathers, and (2) The unfortunate White obsession with machines and technology, and (3) living in an increasingly isolated and technology-driven world that Whites have themselves produced. It is a pathological form of singing — one that actually destroys the voice and can’t be maintained more than a few years — and not a part of White cultural roots.
Who taught John Lennon To Scream?
John Lennon and Chuck Berry
John Lennon was one of the first White singers to strain for higher ranges, deliberately letting the voice become distorted and rough. (And he did it very well.) Later this evolved into the extreme approach found in Heavy Metal. Lennon had a lot of inspiration from Elvis Presley, and both Lennon and Presley took inspiration from black entertainers Little Richard and Chuck Berry.
But White culture had help from other quarters in developing this style. Angry young men like to hear angry music. Music publishers music — many Jewish — exploited the feelings of generations of young Whites and gave them music that both reflected and stirred the bad feelings. This fascination for such extreme singing and sound tells us that young Whites have a lot to be angry about. Meanwhile, it got a big boost from Blacks directly.
John Lennon, an early early and very influential White “screamer,” stated that he was copying black entertainer Little Richard, a flamboyant and original rock’n’roll screamer of the 50’s. Meanwhile, the Black guitarist Jimi Hendrix is regularly cited as the foremost pioneer of ear-shattering metal guitar music, with stacks of Marshall amps that could reduce your hearing in a nanosecond.
Enya, of Ireland sings in Celtic musical traditions, with shades of Gregorian Chant, in a chaste voice brimming alive with classic White singing ideals. Best Albums: Watermark, Shepherd Moons, The Memory of Trees.
To get in touch with our ancestral voices, listen to singers like Enya, whose Celtic influences and chaste style are primordially White. Listen to the great crooners like Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, or Andy Williams. Or take note of a Donovan record, such as his rare gem “Sutras.” From these you won’t hear strings of furtive triplets. You won’t hear those annoying Michael Jackson Gasps. (That obnoxious aspirate device used to close a note in “soul” style, and giving a subliminal suggestion of the panting sounds of sex.) Just listen and enjoy some beautiful open throated singing, White singing.
Our nation used to be filled with the sound of such voices. Why do we now swim in jive and rap? How did that happen? Blacks only make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, but it’s clear that 100 percent of us are supposed to like this crap. Our children hear it every which way they turn. It pains me to see so many young white female singers sinking into this slovenly style. Did you know that Britney Spears sang with a beautiful, ringing White voice when she was young? But then she, like my daughters, was over-influenced by black singing till today her voice is a frequency-fragment of what it was.
Donovan, of England, is a fine example of natural White singing. Melodious and unforced, his is the gentle, courtly vocal style evolved by centuries of English troubadours. His recent and rare album, “Sutras,” is a masterwork of simple, yet original and affecting melodies.
How did it happen? Simple: Media Overexposure. Somebody up there has decided this should be the music that our children grow up knowing best. The fact that it is so heterodox to the spiritual heritage of those white children may be a reason it is foisted upon them.
All of White America had to settle for the overwhelmed Beyonce at the Academy Awards. There were no great singers at the Oscars this year, and whites were conspicuously absent. Yet those are the singers who would speak to the soul of White America.
The Race War Heats Up
This is all a puzzle unless your understand that there is a Race War going on. The war has been going on for centuries. The two big players are Whites and the Jews, as always. It’s a quiet war now. Only Jews remain engaged. And they are winning.
A basic strategy is to convince Whites — especially children — that there is nothing special about their race, their heritage, or White cultural values developed over millennia. This is done partly by omission — simply ignoring White things. Going further, White history and White things are actually portrayed negatively. So White children become not only unaware of their unique racial heritage, but despisers of it. It may never occur to them that there are unique positive qualities in the music Whites have developed, or in White people. As the final blow, you take blacks and feature them instead of White culture — in a White nation — and let them progressively supplant it. White racial self-awareness and self respect dies, White culture dies, and is profoundly downgraded (from a White point of view) by gradual replacement by the Black consciousness.
White children come to view Blacks as actually better, desirable. After all, they are the famous ones. I believe now that the promotion of Black music and culture over White is done by Jews, who dominate and control most of our media now, as a way to humiliate and marginalize Whites, and to diminish their positive racial self-awareness. It’s a Stealth Race War, a war of the mind, and Jews have been orchestrating this covert war for too long now.
Source: http://whiteid.com/In_Praise_Of_The_White_Singing_Voice.html
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58 comments
Well – I find WN icon Saga’s singing really dippy and affected. That’s what really spoils her music for me.
As for the “racial capacity”, a great deal of today’s best cello, violin and piano players are Asian (Chinese and Japanese).
I agree that Lee overstates his case here and there, but mostly as asides. I think the overall essay is quite compelling. I particularly appreciate his ability to describe differences of voice without resorting to arcane jargon. Most music listeners are “naive” about technical music and performance terminology, although we all can hear the differences. Lee manages to communicate subtle ideas in naive language. That is a real gift.
I understand that what’s called “heavy metal” (or whatever terms are now in vogue for loud, aggressive, distorted guitar with smashing heavily compressed drums) is well-appreciated by many young pro-Whites. One thing about it is that it expresses the warrior spirit for young men who don’t get to express themselves as warriors much any more. I appreciated it myself when young. However, it is only one strain in the White musical universe. The question of hearing-damage (esp. at concerts), and the trashing of a great many singing values, has to be stood next to whatever other value it has. The younger people always have their special talismans that are often jarring to the older ones. The bottom line for me are these scenes: 1) A young a young man in an auditorium who will leave there with hearing loss, being less competent as a man, perhaps incompetent to hear fast, whispered instructions from his comrade in intrepid, noble doings late at night? and 2) The young woman in the same auditorium who some day will not hear her baby stir in the next room, all because of that one rock concert. When I see those pictures, such music has to take the 2nd tier and will not be my sacred cow. The hearing — and all basic human health and competence — is precious for any race.
— JL
Terrific piece. Thanks.
Will listen to Enya and Donovan’s “Sutras” on this recommendation.
Julian Lee, meet Lasha Darkmoon. Better days are coming.
What a grand and inspiring article! Rather than pompously trying to ‘add’ anything to it, let me just just recommend supplementing it by looking at the bigger picture through the chapter on popular music in Evola’s Ride the Tiger [written during the ‘beatnik’ era but still relevant, as it deals with principles] and his comments on Aryan character vs. the ‘operatic’ Mediterranean man in Men among the Ruins.
No mention of Morrissey? He epitomizes current White, vocal and musical genius/talent and serves as a great counter example to the vapid, negroid pop music swamping the airwaves.
You want “soul”? Try Albinoni’s Adagio or Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater.
For pure, triumphant delight in existence, try the Alla Marcia from Sibelius’s Karelia Suite.
Whimsical, playful, lightness of being? Anitra’s Dance from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite.
I could go on and on. Classical music, white music, is incomparably, achingly beautiful.
Thank you, Julian, for your excellent essay. I remember reading it once before several years ago on your inspirational website, Bliss of the Celibate.
I must say that during trying times I am partial to a Hayden concerto or a Bach fugue, as nothing else expands my mood or restores my sanity more wholesomely or profoundly. I have no musical talent to speak of, am deaf in one ear, and have only an engineer’s training. But I “know” the beauty and grace of White Men’s music when I am in its presence.
THANK THE GODS that Julian has pierced the bubble of insanity which decrees that “Authentic White Music” is heavy-metal screaming! Thank the Gods that someone has finally taken up this topic. I hope to hear more from you on this Julian: we NEED more about our own music and the underlying racial psychology which made OUR music so beautiful.
Also, you’ve just cost me some $$, dang it! Now I have to go buy a bunch of Enya albums. Just listened on youtube, for the first time. Sweet, sweet stuff. Black “soul” has NOTHING on Celtic SOUL.
This was an exceptionally great piece! It was able to articulate things I believed, things had only felt but could never put words to, and reveal things I was ignorant on. I agree a lot with it, and with Mr. Lee’s comment about heavy metal/harder music having some validity for white youth in a “warrior” sense. I love classical music and the white voice, particularly the kinds like Enya and other traditional Celtic/Norse/Italian type voices. I very much understand Julian’s critique of the harder music but I also appreciate much of it. Interestingly, I have always needed their to be melodies in it though, which is why I love pagan/folk metal so much (incorporating traditional instruments, themes and folk melodies). The same goes for harder music incorporating orchestras (like the band Therion) and classical music.
I have known about and had a lot of respect for Julian Lee for some time now, but I had never seen this piece. In fact, I didn’t even know about his/this WhiteId.com website, I was only aware of his celibacy.info website. Even though I don’t agree with him on everything I find what he says resonates with me a lot, much more than with most. Julian and I share many of the same sensibilities spiritually, racially, politically, and musically as it turns out.
I would love to see more of his pieces featured on Counter-Currents. I think his articles would be right at home here.
The reason popular music tends to be simple and repetitive is that it was largely popularized through the radio. That means that a person could turn on the radio in the middle of the song and still enjoy it, where if they only listened to the last few minutes of a symphony, they’d lack context. If there’s going to be a style of music which replaces pop music, it will have to be something that could be enjoyed in the commute to work or a noisy subway. A large part of the stylistic elements of popular music is that popular music is generally not the kind of music a person who sit down and focus their attention upon.
Great article. Enya truly is a good singer. Another great example of white voices are Celtic Women. They use Irish melodies and imagery in their performances, so their music could be considered primordially white as well
Julian deserves a tip for this article. A generous one.
He’s capably covered the damage that today’s popular “music” has done to our culture, so we don’t need to rehash that. Just a word of caution to our kindred:
Black Metal has its uses (I suppose). The topics covered in the songs (war, revolution, fighting, struggle) seem to speak to our younger folk, and the musical style seems fitting for the subject matter (I guess). Before we claim it as an integral part of our culture, though, it might be wise to trace its lineage back to its source. As one who is “ancient of days”, I’ve had the advantage of witnessing the day-by-day devolution of American popular music from the WWII big-band era to the present. You’ll be bitterly disappointed when you find out who Black Metal’s great-great-great granddaddy was. (Hint: it wasn’t Wagner. Or even Stravinsky, although I’m getting on thin ice there.)
Critics use a wide spectrum of terms to describe Black Metal (not all of them laudatory), but there’s one adjective that’s always conspicuously missing from their appraisals: beautiful. Not even its most fervent, rabid, raging fans (sociopaths excluded) would call Black Metal “beautiful”. Before granting it too exalted a position in our cultural architecture, ask yourself this question: Will people be listening to this stuff a century from now? Bach’s Mass in B minor is 262 years old and is still performed hundreds of times yearly in the U.S. Do you seriously believe that anyone (sociopaths excluded) will be clamoring for Black Metal in 2273?
Back in the late 50’s and early 60’s, before the darkness fell over our nation, there was a strong (but unfortunately short-lived) revival of the European and American folk-song traditions. THESE are the musical roots of our people, songs and melodies that we’ve carried with us from generation to generation, continent to continent, for hundreds of years. They’re beautiful, and they’re dying, along with our magnificent classical heritage.
Philharmonic orchestras in the U.S. are closing at a faster rate today than at any other time in our history. According to a recent article in the New York Times, only ONE country in the entire world has shown an increase in the number of its metropolitan orchestras during the last decade: China.
So much for Aryan cultural superiority.
What’s the solution? Well, fortunately (or unfortunately) we don’t need to come up with one. The current musical squalor will be cleansed, along with much of our other cultural pollution, in the rapidly-approaching immolation of Western civilization. That makes it crucial for us to preserve our original folk and classical musical traditions in order to plant the seeds for their revival. Encourage your kids to learn an orchestral instrument (or the piano, at the very least). Take a music appreciation course at your community college. (REAL music. Classical. Folk.) Keep our musical traditions alive through the coming winter. If we don’t, nobody else will.
Except the Chinese, of course.
And don’t forget to leave Julian a tip.
Found an interesting old book: “The Marxist Minstrels: A Handbook on Communist Subversion of Music”. The Folk Revival was thoroughly innundated by Communists except for some of the real blue grass singers who found a wider audience for the first time.
Just a word for the Blacks: There is alot of very beautiful choral singing in Black Africa – and this is both Christian and pre-Christian. No cheap emotionalism here. Their traditions are rapidly degenerating now even in Africa.
Gee, Jaego, thanks for warning us about the commie folksinger menace to the Republic. In the interest of public safety, I guess I probably should have mentioned that the Bavarian Illuminati secretly financed Wagner. And that Bach was an excommunicated Rosicrucian. And that every current member of the London Philharmonic is either a Freemason or belongs to Opus Dei.
Good advice for the black population too; I’m sure they’ll take it to heart. Everyone knows that Counter-Currents is considered required reading among the African-American community.
It’s really reassuring to know that we’ve got folks of your caliber on our side.
I suspect that the lurching, wailing pop and jazz with their affectations and gimmicks, and the unspeakable rap, are not necessarily inherent but a sign of dissolution of a people. We don’t judge white music by the screamers of rock nor should we judge what Africans can do if left to their own devices, as Jaego says.
Take the blacks away from big cities, let them be all by themselves, away from technology they didn’t invent and are not suited to, and in time I think they will return to the beautiful singing that is now going to the dogs even in Africa.
I’ve heard some heartbreakingly beautiful traditional African choral music and I know what you are talking about, Jaego. I don’t mean the arranged-for-us-to hear, theatrical versions all fixed up by the record companies. I mean unaccompanied songs sung by kids in African villages.
Jaego, you are right, of course, that much of the American folk scene from the 30s on was wrapped up in Communist organizing and propaganda efforts. And as for Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel, well, their folk is not our volk. But it would be a mistake to focus on the blood-sucking ticks and ignore the big white dog underneath. There is a vast body of authentic European and American folk music. In San Francisco a couple of months ago, the western part of the city (which is heavily Asian now) suddenly seemed as white as Montana as vast crowds showed up for a bluegrass festival. For me, a little bluegrass or Irish folk goes a long, long way. But I still appreciate the white communitarian elements of it.
RE: Black Metal: I like a lot of the people who like it, and I am sympathetic to the philosophical and political views of many of the musicians and fans. But as music? Its ugly. And the signing? It sounds like demons trying to cough-up the world’s biggest hair ball. And the thing is, I like a lot of hard rock.
Bluegrass in Frisco? Truly amazing! For Bluegrass, (being a genuine form of White soul/folk music), to draw a crowd like that, at that location, shows that either there is a gnawing hunger for a musical and cultural medium that these attendees were seeking (as an expression of implicit White identitarian, original ‘American’ music), or, all of the country folk and ‘hill-jacks’ from far and wide came out in force. Maybe it was both, but I can’t imagine that the average culturally corrupted West coast Anglo-White would be that big of a curiosity seeker, to come out in bunches to gawk at, or listen to something that most of them condescendingly refer to as being – old fashioned, ‘redneck’, and ‘twangy’.
The antecedents of traditional string band American music springs from the Keltic musical culture of the British Isles, of course, so it would be natural for many Anglo-Whites to have a heartfelt, compelling attraction to it. That that many of them showed up in San Francisco, of all places, tells me that something is stirring in their racial souls. Ganz gut, and let the melodies of Appalachia rip!
By the way, a really great article Julian, much appreciated.
Great article. Here are some more good vocals …
Fishermen’s Friends – South Australia
Cookie Rankin – Fare Thee Well
Mary Black – Song for Ireland
The High Kings – The Parting Glass
Julie Fowlis – a Scottish Gaelic song
Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh – an Irish Gaelic song
Hilary Hahn is great too.
Interesting comments here.
I have always been amazed at how little information there is out there about the singing voice. You have “Bass Player Magazine” and many magazines for guitar players, but seldom is the singing voice, in its widely distinctive forms that we hear in pop music, discussed. The vocalist is the spiritual core of most music.
This question started for me when, as a young man hoping to sing and be a musician, found I could not sing as high as most of my musical heroes (starting with Lennon/McCartney, etc.) This was a common experience for many males, because the range of singing was climbing up, up, and up. It used to be that our folk music (the music the people knew and participated in), feature ranges that the average man could sing. So I have pondered this long. It turns out that should a man want to sing higher (whether for good or for ill) there are techniques and disciplines he can undertake to bring that about. But the quality of the singing voice — it’s attitude, and spiritual and aesthetic content — is my real fascination. And it’s simply little discussed. The fact of some newscasters blowing out their voices through overuse — such as Chris Matthews, Rita Cosby, and Alex Jones — also fascinates me. I have observed this same trend in average young women today, having these raspy voices from overuse. Often this is because they have jobs that demand that they talk a lot, or it is simply in their nature to talk a lot, or both.
I am also fascinated by the fact that it rarely happens that White Americans break into song together, all of them knowing the same lyrics to any song, especially one of heartfelt value to them. To me this is a sign of cultural degeneracy, and I see it as technology-wrought.
The real inspiration for that article was, indeed, watching an “American Idol” (way back) and seeing that EVERY WHITE SINGER was trying to sing in the black fashion, with the black stylistics (which find to be of the nature of affectation) and even tonality. (Described in the article.) It was like a body blow to me.
I have noticed here in my town of Portland that the White kids prefer, in fact, the White singing voice. It’s all tacit, unconscious, and not understood. But in the coffee shops they are always playing singers who sing. Voices that ring. Sustained-note singers. One example would be, in fact, the Portland band “The Shins.” It’s just clear-toned, singerly singing and it’s what, in fact, carries more soul for Whites. I have also noticed a style the past 10 years that is highly feminine, and this seems unremarked. This is where a female is singing in a very gentle, intimate, motherly way like early Nancy Sinatra. Yet these singers are favored by the “edgy” crowd. It’s like a subversive outcropping of femininity. There is also a platter of bands featuring a female singer who has a decidedly feminine sound, but a toughened voice. (From strain and overuse.) A great example of this is a band called “Metric.” (That band also features very chiseled melodic and chordal structure, which is a European musical trait.) I think that there is a fascination for the toughened voice. However, the unstrained, pure, flowing voice was once considered a benchmark in singing for us. How did tough, harsh and broken voices come to dominate our musical landscape? (Think Rod Steward, Kim Karnes, etc.) And what does it say about us? What makes them fascinating? One thing about them is that once the natural pure voice is lost, it often can’t be regained. There was probably a time when Rod Stewart can actually sing (just as with B. Spears). He got that voice through forcing it to sing where it didn’t want to go, as well as by drinking alcohol. So why did the masses find that voice fascinating?
I have added a bit to the original article, here:
http://whiteid.com/In_Praise_Of_The_White_Singing_Voice.html
That is, some analysis and differentiation of “heavy metal” voices. Basically, there is the “sometime strainer” who keeps his basic singerly voice. Early Lennon/McCartney are the watershed example. Next, the high-ranger who tries to keep a masculine tone. As a strainer example I cited Ian Gillen of Deep Purple; as a disciplined example, Gary Puckett. The 4th type I label merely the “screamer,” because that’s basically what it is. So we can easily see these 4 types. The first type (sometime strainer) is barely even noticed today because that sound is now endemic.
Once these interesting dimensions of the voice are pondered within the White musical lexicon itself, the whole idea of Whites trying to sound like blacks, or that the black singing voice is somehow iconic — becomes absurd.
For me, the great wrecked voice of our time is Marianne Faithful’s. It is a voice of a world in decline, which is why she gravitates toward the popular and art songs of the Weimar Republic as well as contemporary pop composers. I think she is a genius, by the way, even if she is a genius of decadence. She speaks the voice of our time authentically. There is greatness in that, no matter what one thinks of our times.
Great essay.
The only time I went to a painfully loud concert I took along a pair of earplugs, the kind that is a little foam rubber cylinder that you twist and stick in your ear. I could actually hear the music better with them than without them. I suppose the loudness without them caused distortion in my eardrums. I suppose the distortion and discomfort may be part of the experience, but it’s a part I can do without. I’ll save my ears to hear Beethoven better!
Hearing the voices:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xlUkpqvHWw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlKNQBOeQqQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjRXIiZ8bs0&feature=related
Seeing the faces:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KvrbYZB2vY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRobryliBLQ
Very good essay…and what westermann said. Am sending this on to three of my sons.
Re Hilary Hahn and her ilk (youngish classical musicians, mostly Asian, White and Jew, all promoted like crazy by the record companies). I see them as robots compared to the older generation now gone (Yehudi M. & Bronislav Gimpel just for starters). It’s artistic decline through soulless, excessive technical perfection.
Iranian: As much as I like WNists who listen heavy rock I feel an insurmountable abyss with them every time I learn in threads like this that they like rock, heavy metal or even old folkloric—as in Covington’s podcasts—music. This is because I learnt classical music before I was born—literally, since my mother used to be a piano concertista and throughout her pregnancy I sensed/listened the piano through my mother’s womb. And my father was a composer of classical music (when I was a small child some of my dad’s orchestral pieces were played in New York).
My first love, still as a small child of four, five or six, was Mussorgsky and Stravinsky. Alas, musically and sexually, in today’s culture I feel like Lot in Gomorrah.
I hate monkey music as much as I hate degenerate sexual mores that are driving our race straight to the path of extinction. In fact, like Hegel I believe that if music represents the Geist then the degeneracy we see every day on the streets, on TV and Hollywood is faithfully represented in the spirit of that music. For example, the Neanderthal spirit I see every day among the beaners is faithfully represented in their salsa antimusic.
I don’t know if “billions will die”, including the beaners, during the coming convergence of catastrophes (though like Lot I wish their cities burn under Heaven’s fire). But my educated guess is that, after the end of the world as we know it, there will be a resurgence of traditional sexual mores and, with it, a thoroughgoing repudiation of both violent and perverted Hollywood along with all pop music after the 1960s that “sound like demons trying to cough-up the world’s biggest hair ball.”
I don’t own a TV. But presently I happen to be at my parents’ and dared to turn their TV on…
Bad decision. I cannot believe it.
In History Channel there’s a documentary about present-day cannibals (not in tribes: in our civilization). There’s a Danish guy that thru a liposuction he made meatballs from his own flesh. He designed the label for the cans containing his own flesh and… considered it a work of art. The artist invited people of the sophisticated society in Copenhagen, the documentary claims, to share his anthropophagic feast in an elegant dinner.
I didn’t finish the documentary half an hour ago. It was revolting and sickening. Those who have stomach to own a TV set might want to watch the whole documentary (before I turned it off it looked like the artist’s friends would eat his meatballs).
So for some western minds relapsing into cannibalism is now considered breaking away from all these old Western prejudices: the latest example of Avant-garde in some circles of Denmark, the country I so much idealized in my youth?
But my litmus test to see whether a specific westerner is a Gomorrahite is not cannibalism. It’s what I said above: music and sexual lifestyles of the millions. No, I don’t claim purity. After the abuse I suffered as a minor I did stupid things. But after I pulled my soul together, like Lot I only want to escape from this biblical city even if I don’t believe in god.
As much as I like WNists who listen heavy rock I feel an insurmountable abyss with them every time I learn in threads like this that they like rock, heavy metal or even old folkloric—as in Covington’s podcasts—music.
Those “old” folkloric songs in Covington’s podcasts are the songs sung by a people who held their culture together, and successfully won their independence against an invading tyrant. My kids love them instinctively, they sing to their souls it seems to me. It’s to me heartening to know that X-factor negrofied Judeo-Yank music hasn’t destroyed their being, and it never will, because our people’s song is genetically coded into our soul.
And when the album that stirs my young boys, inspires them to flights of engineering fancy in Lego or short hand written stories with pictures, that articulates that which is suppressed at school, and constantly in Judeo-Yank TV culture saturation bombardment is Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, then I know we are saved from the abyss.
Pat: I wholeheartedly agree with you. You know, I said that my father used to be a composer. But he abandoned composing classical music when he had to earn a buck. He taught music to children and his mantra is that folk songs are paramount for the spirit of a culture. Yes: there’s a gulf from legit folk music and what I call “Neanderthal music”: the music for whiggers, niggers, and beaners (the mexicans).
Nonetheless, when I wrote my above posts I was in soliloquy mood. To put it simply, I am stirred when I listen some music of Wagner (e.g., Parsifal), which means that musically I’m closer to the Third Reich than to the coming Northwest Republic. I simply cannot feel American folk music because Lot has no nation, and no folk music can stir the stateless individual.
In another CC thread I said that the music I most identify with is the (atonal) Lux Aeterna by Ligeti, especially the compasses that Kubrick chose for the scenes of desolate moon landscapes with a floating bus en-route from Clavius to Tycho. Why that cinematic vision expressing the most extreme form of solitude describes me? Because that’s the way Lot feels in Gomorrah: There’s, literally, nobody around: not even the blue sky visible in central Antarctica. (However desolate among the ice, the lone scientist in his post at least sees the blue color of the sky, meaning that there must be oxygen somewhere out there in the planet—plants, life.) In contrast, in 2001’s moon landscapes on the ground there’s not even that: only a black sky and, without atmosphere, no shades: only black and white abyssal desolation.
However, when I manage to escape Gomorrah (no single soul here) and meet WNists in the flesh, I’m sure I’ll feel at least some genuine comradeship for the first time.
I think you are touching on something very important here: even though we are alienated from our times, we are children of our times. We are alienated from the modern world, but a lot of modern art speaks precisely to that alienation.
Pat Hannagan’s comment — “Those ‘old’ folkloric songs in Covington’s podcasts are the songs sung by a people who held their culture together, and successfully won their independence against an invading tyrant” — reminds me of the following remarks made by the late Jane Jacobs:
“Ireland is almost miraculous in not having sunk into a Dark Age. The conquering English, especially during their brutual invasions, massacres, and oppressions under Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell, treated the Roman Catholic Irish as an aboriginal people to be cleared from the land for benefit of the conquerors. Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death devastated Ireland for centuries; its population dropped from nine million to two million in the mid-nineteenth century, partly as a result of famine but also because of English seizure of Irish lands and forced emigration, But during all these ordeals, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were never joined by the fifth demonic horseman, Forgetfulness. The Irish stubbornly remembered who they were and what they valued, and refused to lose their treasured culture. They accomplished this marvel largely through the fragile medium of song. Their songs prevented them and their progeny from forgetting what they had lost. ‘Every Irish song is a song of protest,’ a lawyer in western Ireland told me when I asked him the meaning of a plaintive, haunting solo he had sung at a feast. The Irish suffered civil war and utter contempt from the English, who tried to convince them in every way possible that they were innately inferior. The Irish also suffered terrorism throughout the late twentieth century, much of it self-instigated or self-inflicted; but they never gave up on themselves and the culture they valued.
“Song is an extremely effective way of passing a culture down through the generations. As we all recognize, memorable songs and poems that we learn when we are young stay with us into old age. The emotional powers of the arts — authentic arts, not official propaganda — are obviously central to every culture. England now has the lowest productivity of any country in the European Community, while the Republic of Ireland has surpassed it. So much for English assumptions of Irish (or Italian or French) inferiority.” (Dark Age Ahead [New York: Random House, 2004], pp. 172-173.)
Westermann: Beauty Is even if done by Blacks. The ability to appreciate other cultures is part of uniqueness of the White Race. That it has been used against us is another story. I would not wish us to become less just to satisfy the need for action. Blowing up little Black Girls in a Church didn’t help our Movement – quite the contrary. Such things are beneath us and we only injure ourselves by doing them. Pretending that Negroes have no artistic ability is just more WN BS – just like pretending that the women of all other races are ugly. We should marry and procreate within our own Race because it’s the right thing to do – and yes, because it will makes us happier than the alternative.
You don’t believe in Conspiracy? That the Enemy has infiltrated our Media and Entertainment? Or you believe that somehow Folk Music is somehow different, too pure to be so infiltrated? You are wrong on all counts.
I think you are replying to straw men here.
For those interested, here are a few links to the kinds of music I mentioned before:
Therion is a Swedish “Symphonic Metal” (sometimes called Opera Metal) band. From Wikipedia:
Therion – Son of the Sun
I have wanted to make a video for this song incorporating concepts from Evola and possibly Devi for some time but I do not want to break copyright laws nor have I had the time to make it.
Other good songs by Therion:
Call of Dagon
Voyage of Gurdjieff (The Fourth Way)
Melek taus
I also like the Folk/Pagan Metal band Agalloch out of Julian’s hometown of Portland, although this doesn’t have much to do with this article as the vocals would likely be considered to be in a degenerate style. Here is a beautiful instrumental song that has no rock elements in it (it does have piano, and a number of other instruments though).
Agalloch – The Misshapen Steed
As for classical music, I have always loved Bach. It was very powerful for me to read what Miguel Serrano said/insinuated about the (spiritual/Hyperborean) knowledge that Bach and particularly his “The Art of Fugue” could impart.
His Brandeburg Concerto is also an intensely beautiful, spiritual masterpiece, and is mentioned by Miguel Serrano as well.
Though I have an eclectic taste in music, I freely admit the superiority of classical music, like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, etc.
Some classical covers by Therion,
4th movement of Dvořák’s 9th:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfSfK8AkGVo
Verdi’s ‘Anvil Chorus’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7sFH_Pjeug
Wagner “Notung! Notung! Neidliches Schwert!”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FatyE4uS3E
Also, as Black Metal and bluegrass have been mentioned (not in the same breath, until now), here’s some trv kvlt banjo (fast forward to 3:20)! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDveAcqmiYg
Thanks Morgan! I have just started watching the first link and it is spectacular (even though I prefer the original, I really like Therion’s version too)!
Honestly, the only album by Therion I own or have listened to is Sirius B. I have been meaning to listen to more of their music for a long time but I haven’t got around to it. Now I know there is a lot more well worth the time, thanks again!
This Black Metal bluegrass sounds very intriguing! …even if I can’t promise I’ll like it. I am very picky about my Black Metal. It can’t be all noise, if you know what I mean. I need melody, and every Black Metal song I like (or any metal song for that matter), with some notable exceptions, either includes more traditional instruments or beautiful vocals. As noted, there are some notable exceptions to this rule. There are certain “hard” sounding bands I really like, such as Hatebreed (great to work out to) and other more or less similarly ideological bands/songs (I’m thinking of a few straight edge songs). I’m not exactly proud of liking some of these songs, but I’m not going to pretend I don’t like them either.
This essay is valuable because of the main argument. The illustrations are just that: illustrations. Julian could have picked other illustrations and made the same point.
There is, furthermore, more to music than classical music. And if Julian had confined his examples to classical music, his argument would have become far less accessible to readers and thus his article would have far less impact. More people know Roy Orbison or Any Williams than Elizabeth Schwartzkopf. That’s elementary.
Beyond that, focusing on classical examples would have made this article far less authentic, because obviously his musical interests range more toward popular and folk than classical.
You make many valid points, even though they are beside the main point. That said, you are still being a pompous ass. If you would get over that, you would contribute more of value.
Is there any connection between Heavy Metal and Wretched Refuse?
Black Metal must be understood in terms of family resemblance. There is no shared aesthetic designator that encompasses manifestations of the genre. What unites Black Metal is ideology, not aesthetics, as argued in the clever essay below; subversion of the liberal egalitarian worldview alongside an implicit or explicit proposal for a different set of values to replace them.
http://pwnt.co.uk/bm/
And contra what a poster from above said, for many of the genre’s greatest masterpieces, to call them “beautiful” is apt, in the more traditional sense, and not merely in the acquired-taste sense of finding Beauty in what superficially strikes us as being tainted by “ugliness”.
Some contenders include the elegantly textured Far Away From The Sun by Sacramentum, Summoning’s minimalistic and expansive Dol Guldur and Graveland’s pompose and belligerent Creed Of Iron.
I agree with what you are saying, this has occurred to me over the years and bothered me at first, but the fact is, we are a degenerate people. Music, this beautiful music of degenerate composers (except for Bach, maybe), and even more degenerate performers, helps us with our deepest problems in ways we don’t even know are happening. We just know we feel satisfied when we hear it. We are maybe left just a bit less infirm and insane.
Passively taking classical music in – this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given our unsound constitutions. Getting a good massage is also supremely passive and look what it does for you. Self massage is the way it used to be, a very long time ago, when people didn’t even have written language.
DIY still exists in some places and homes. I recall being invited to a Ukrainian Christmas Eve “Holy Supper”, held according to the Julian calendar. During the meal, most of the participants (born in the old country), quite spontaneously and without any announcement to the rest of us, sang old Christmas songs in their mother tongue, right at the table, in harmony. I was just speechless, it was so lovely.
Well, if various white pop singers have been ruined by imitating black sylizations, I can think of some black composers who have elevated themselves – and music – by “imitating” white modes of musical construction and expression. There’s a couple of early 1950s piano sonatas by George Walker (#s 1 & 2), for instance, that blow away most of the dodecaphonic, Jewized crap being produced in this genre at the time by whites.
Wonderful article! It is with great regret however that I must agree with those WN musicians that use non-white, non-melodic, ugly music to reach out to white young men drowning in the gales of anti-white hatred. Society is so corrupted that classical music seems for most young men to belong to another planet. The forces of corruption have “promoted” classical music to such an elitist status, that it has no influence whatsoever in society anymore.
Long gone are the days when Verdi was able to stir up a fervent nationalism with his opera music, and when his name itself became a revolutionary acronym for “Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia”. Even the revolution that led to the separation of Belgium from Holland was sparked by an opera.
I still hope though that the great military songs and marches from Germany may play a role. Those marches still have an immediate, manly appeal, but should also have the capacity to be a bridge to one of our race’s most valuable treasures: classical music.
As a professional classical singer I could also write an article about this theme for this website, if there is any interest.
Yes, I would be very interested in such an article.
I second that. I would be very interested to read it.
This is a one-question test (Pass/Fail).
In the Tracks window, #1 is highlighted. Click the Play icon, relax, and let the tracks go automatically down the list in order (about 27 seconds each).
Question: Which one doesn’t belong?
http://www.brisa.com/WEIssE_WEIHNACHT/topic/Search_Results/shop_art_id/472/tpl/articledetail
White Christmas?
Sure fits in, don’t it. Move over, Pretorius.
Wonderful article!
It is with great regret however that I must agree with those WN musicians that use non-white, non-melodic, ugly music to reach out to white young men drowning in the gales of anti-white hatred. Metal music may also fulfill a similar function to Ligeti’s music for Chechar: express their feeling of alienation in this society.
Society is so corrupted that classical music seems for most young men to belong to another planet. The forces of corruption have “promoted” classical music to such an elitist status, that it has no influence whatsoever in society anymore.
Long gone are the days when Verdi was able to stir up a fervent nationalism with his opera music, and when his name itself became a revolutionary acronym for “Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia”. Even the revolution that led to the separation of Belgium from Holland was sparked by an opera.
I still hope though that the great military songs and marches from Germany may play a role. Those marches still have an immediate, manly appeal, but should also have the capacity to be a bridge to one of our race’s most valuable treasures: classical music.
As a professional classical singer I could also write an article about this theme for this website, if there is any interest.
Thanks for this – very illuminating and very nice to see.
My prediction is that the various strains of “metal” lead singers are going to evolve more toward the operatic male voice. There is truth to the phrase “It’s all been done.” Our fathers and grandfathers have already tried to sing high-voiced. There are ‘ways’ to do it.
Though my forte and chief interest has not been classical music, I am well-capable of being moved by it and find it to be a fathomless sea. The material I wrote on classical was an attempt to describe a White man’s discovery his own heritage, and innate ability to appreciate it; not an attempt to write heady analysis of classical which is beyond my cultivation. Not that I don’t love Grieg, but I wish the nun back in 7th grade had chosen some kind of dream-spinning Pastorale instead of the gimmicky and ponderous Pier Gynt Suite when endeavoring to expose us kids to more classical music. I would have gotten interested sooner.
Most times if I’ve been spine-tingled by the male singing voice was listening to somebody like Brad Delp. But more often, an operatic tenors. People go to music to get their “spines” tingled in various ways. That means: To feel their spiritual intelligence awakened. Indeed, the bests composers, artist, and singers awaken that higher intelligence in men and women. It is felt as rarefied emotion and it is felt in the spine, no knowing why. Listening to one of these operatic tenors, it seems clear how this happens: That voice is full of both emotional fervor and discipline; both feeling and manhood, both higher aspiration and humanness, self-control and passion. It seems that the spirit behind it is the very spirit that births wild and beautiful cosmoses. It is inevitable that all of the values that went into creating the male operatic voice are going to come back and we are going to hear men like that singing in the various metal contexts.
For me, Delp is the only rock singer who manages to deliver the kind of spine-tingling effect of someone like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdTBml4oOZ8 (Pavarotti singing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxdiJ74AL5Y&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL2E6275804E52D3E2 (Domingo singing Puccini’s “E lucevan le stelle” from Tosca)
“As a professional classical singer I could also write an article about this theme for this website, if there is any interest.”
I am sure interested. I love all discussions of the singing voice.
A lot of music is conditioning. I find that everybody becomes deeply attached to certain music that they heard at special times of their life, especially younger and formative times. Whatever that music was, there’s a nimbus around it for us, because at that time it became our portal to the transcendent.
An older person hears the stuff younger ones are entranced with and says “Wat?” (Like me even at 19 when a band called “Kiss” became popular with kids a few years younger.) Yet I know now (when these personal perspectives crop up) that they are communing with “The Self” through that. Just as I did with my “portals.” Then if you disparage that music it’s fightin’ words and they’re ready to brawl in the gutter with you over it!
In reality, the experiences we had in association with the music, plus that window into our own Self, is what we are attached to. Just like vague memories of various blue skies of childhood seem to remind us of ancienter blue skies in more luminous places. And even when lying on that hill at 7, it was really the ancienter places that made that moment ring. Music is a window into something transcendental within ourselves; we’re really remembering other things through the music. But we love whatever first opened up those windows, and the special times we lived in.
Some of the bands I used to listen to when I was a teen embarrass me now that age lets me step back and see them with different eyes. Or, I’m amazed how certain recordings listened to sound now. One of my favorite old rock songs at 17 was called “One Eyed Trouser Snake Rhumba” (I can’t help the title) by marginal British band “Humble Pie.” I listened to it the other day after, maybe, 30 years. I thought, “Man, that thing was harsh sounding” and I was slightly ashamed that my band used to assault the kids with that. The ears and spirit of a young man are different than the old. Yet the things we loved in youth are redolent with the magic of that window-on-the-Self that music opens in us, and a particular window in time. It’s as if that particular window of time echos onto the timeless.
Whatever we loved when we were young, we still have a savor for it when old. Thus it is that those who expose our children to various things, as our children grow up, take control of the direction of our culture. They literally decide what our children are going to like and revere. In age, one begins to appreciate more the satvic things (in Hindu terminology, the more refined things, the higher things). And he wants to expose the young of his race to those things, for whatever seeds may come later. Perhaps then comes a day that parents and children love the same things. Over Thanksgiving I played some of my favorite “old songs” on the stereo for my kids, and read some old favorite poems I’d never managed to read to them when they were kids. One bit by Robert Loveman went like this:
“What to a man who loves the air
Are trinkets, gauds, and jewels rare?
And what is wealth or fame to one
Who is brother to the sun”
And for the music I didn’t play them “One-Eyed Trouser-Snake Rhumba.”
I see the point on a coarse level but the comparison is really taken way too far. Count me out on this kind of puritannical overzelous crap. White race is at its best in part because of its wide range of adaptabilities. The ease of whites at adapting to all kinds of different musical idioms speaks well to our creativity. Let’s not intellectually fetter ourselves with these kinds of reactionary tastes.
Anyhow heavy metal is a direct channel from Wagnerian musical drama. As clear as day at least if you appreciate Wagnerian musical drama. Probably the Italian bel canto types might have said all the same stuff agaisnt Wagnerian dramas as this author says of heavy metal.
Including and especially the business about vocal volume. Now lets get this straight. One can sing loudly, correctly, and wihtout damaging the voice. There are no louder singers than the Wagnerian tenors and sopranos. If heavy metal dudes hurt their voices its because they dont sing right. It has nothing to do with the race of anybody or racial temperaments or whatever. ITs a purely technical matter.
It’s disturbing to me that you would think things like this. Any of you. I’m disgusted to share a race with you for all of your thinking. Yes, classical musical music is beautiful and it’s a part of our history, but we don’t live in a homogenous country and our music shouldn’t be homogenous. You praise white people, and white musicians, but you don’t think about the ones most talented who aren’t, in fact, white. Where is your mention of YoYo Ma, if you’re going to praise classical music so much. A lot of Rock and Roll music is derived from blues pieces created by the black community. And clearly none of you sing. You should check out the Chicago Children’s Choir to better your minds about things. You’re opinions are grotesque and I’m embarrassed to share my race and complexion with all of you.
The feeling is quite mutual, Michelle: we regard you as grotesque and embarrassing; and, worse, hateful toward your own people, and no doubt perfectly in approval of our genocide. No doubt, you’re one of those NeoMarxist/Leftist tools who thinks Emma West should suffer all manner of abuse–mental, physical, even sexual, but that it’s okay for Blacks and Browns in Britain to do DEGREES OF MAGNITUDE worse to Whites in public than utter some profane yet perfectly understandable and reasonable comments coming from an indigenous woman surrounded by encroaching invaders. Do scurry off, your totalitarian, autogenocidal horse manure is most decidedly not wanted here.
Thank you for this article. It made me realize that there are many people who prefer different music than I; some relate to smooth, quiet vocals, whereas others prefer harsher ones. Opera and rap: two different genres; can they possibly appeal to the same person? Yes, they can.
White equality: never thought about it, but I now realize it makes sense to some. Is it fair to make the descendants of some suffer for their ancestors mistakes?
This is supremely disgusting and wrong. Julian Lee, this racist bullshit might cost you a job one day. Hello, 2020.
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