Counter-Currents
Scott Walker in 1969
4,276 words
I’ll Have a White Rock, Please: Implicit Whiteness, Aryan Futurism, and the Godlike Genius of Scott Walker
“Was listening to this during a rocket attack at DaNang Vietnam in 71 . . . what a rush . . . after smoking 3 bowls of Thai Stick. Still get a rush to this day at age 64 . . . there was teeth, hair and eyeballs all around my barracks but we survived.” — YouTube comment on “Jim Dandy to the Rescue” by Black Oak Arkansas
Over the last year or two, the value or usefulness of popular music, and rock in particular, to the struggle to renew White Consciousness has been subject to debate. These discussions have made important points, but too often they suffer from a lack of historical, and perhaps metaphysical, data. In this essay I will examine some of the most interesting of these recent online discussions, and suggest how they might profit from a little re-orientation in the light of such White musical pioneers Varg Vikernes and Scott Walker, as well as the writings of Julius Evola and Alain Danielou on music from the Traditionalist point of view.
The Woman Question in White Rock
In “How About Some Good Old Love Songs From Alleged ‘Right Wing’ Groups?” Andrea O. Letania – proprietress of the “Neo-Fascist” pop culture blog Once Upon A Time In America, whose title alone makes me want to call her a comrade — calls attention to an important issue — “Given that the main point of popular music is to appeal to the opposite sex, how can right-wing rock appeal to most ladies out there?” — and raises some interesting questions, but too many questionable assumptions prevent her from making any real headway toward a solution.
First, she seems to think that the “right wing” milieu is characterized by a love of Metal. This may be broadly true, especially among groups that either themselves or by their music cause the mainstream media to have convulsions, and hence get lots of press, but arguably the most characteristic, and interesting, current is composed of the small but deeply loyal tributaries making up what’s been called alt-folk, or apocalyptic folk, etc., [1] which are hardly male-only when it comes to performers, audience, or even distributors (hello, Jane Elizabeth!). For more on this “scene traditionalism,” see the articles on Mark Sedgwick’s blog here as well as Josh Buckley‘s comments on the same blog:
One would expect that a music-based subculture would consist of music groups with an identifiably similar sound. This is certainly the criterion for defining music genres like bluegrass, rhythm & blues, or country/western. Yet the vast majority of (alt.folk groups) play wildly divergent styles of music. (“Euro-Paganism, One or Many”)
But let’s look at Metal itself. Letania finds it either impossibly ‘hard’ or else given to “kitschy mythic airs.” As for the latter, I thought girls liked stories of castles and unicorns. And anyway, it’s hardly any more “monotonous” than rap (and considerably less vulgar and misogynistic, quite a trick for music that supposedly appeals to adolescent boys) or the olde-tyme moon-June-spoon songs our great-grandmothers sang around the parlor piano (while the men, I guess, danced to John Philip Sousa marches).
However, Letania is exactly correct that “a rock band is supposed to do both, which is why even the toughest rock bands have songs ranging from hard to soft.” But this hardly sets aside metal. Indeed, metal was arguably created, as a genre, by Led Zeppelin, and Zep is arguably still the greatest metal band, not so much for any specific musical or lyrical accomplishment, as for its ability, as Michael Hoffman [2] emphasized, to rock both hard and soft equally well. In this quote, he states Letania’s whole thesis quite well:
Classic Rock inherently has more potential for acid allusions, because it includes the entire range from Heavy to Soothing, whereas Pop is limited to Soothing, and Metal is limited to Heavy. This is why Led Zeppelin ranks at the top of Rock history: a broad command of the full range of modes. That’s why Pop and Metal have a harder time becoming Classic. Pop has the advantage of being acceptable in public. (“How popular is mysticism with pop music?”)
Hoffman even seems to grant Letania’s dichotomy, but this is because he, like most general culture critics, can’t be bothered to consider “popular” bands that are popular precisely for their willingness to include the infamous “power ballads” to keep the chicks happy.
In fact, when it comes to the ladies, Metal, despite its media image, has historically had more than a little appeal. Though “hair metal” is universally disparaged today, its continued existence reminds us that heavy music, as well as such “gay” attributes as long hair and spandex attire, can be chick magnets, as they were in the dreaded 80s.
Or, since Letania speaks highly of Southern Rock, consider Black Oak Arkansas. White skin, long blonde hair, and white spandex jeans, but it’s not Ann Coulter! The chicks love Jim Dandy! And forget about “don’t ask don’t tell,” Jim Dandy’s qualifications are on display for all to fall down in lust or despair.
What happened? Rather than disparaging Metal as such, we would be better off looking for the cause exactly where “alleged ‘right wing’ groups” would suggest: the Judaic-Negro conspiracy that, in defiance of market demand, took White rock off MTV and force fed rap and its no-hair, no-ass “aesthetic.”
While the boys stayed loyal and metal flourished under the radar (who sold more records, the Stones in 40 years or Metallica in 20? Metallica, of course), the girls seem to have swallowed the whole Britney-and-rap cocktail. One might speculate that the girl’s preferences reflect a greater conformism, or susceptibility to media brain washing, but I suppose that would be sexism.
Varg Vikernes
From her description of what’s wrong with metal, I can imagine Varg Vikernes would pretty well sum up her image of the Worst Alleged Right Wing music. Yet, Varg may have the answer she seeks. While Letania wants soft but “rockin’” music with romantic lyrics, Varg has questioned the appropriateness of “guitar based” music entirely, when it come to White people. The music he’s been releasing from his prison cell — how romantic is that? — sounds like nothing other than what might just be called Aryan New Age, and what could be more female-friendly than that?
The Rhythm Question and the New White Age
Letania wants softer music, Varg to get rid of guitars altogether. But what if we got rid of shredding guitars and pounding drums – how would we rock? This leads to another question: does White music have, or need, rhythm? And what does it matter?
Discussions of ‘implicit Whiteness” in popular music — such as Kevin MacDonald here — tend to gravitate toward heavy metal and country rather than “New Age” music, for obvious reasons; while all three are reviled, only “New Age” is associated with hippies, yuppies, boomers, and other left of center types.
Yet consider this discussion of “New Directions for ‘New Age'”:
But even though Woods sees new-age music as a universal force for change, the fact is that the audience is limited by age (mostly baby boomers), race (mostly white), and class (mostly middle and up). Consider, for example, this definition of new-age music offered by composer-producer Steve Halpern in Patti Jean Birosik’s book The New Age Music Guide: “Perhaps the most striking aspect of new-age music is its use of rhythm — or, more accurately, its lack of it.” This characteristic alienates vast numbers of listeners for whom rhythm is the thing — not just African-Americans and Latinos but people of all origins.
I ran across this while trying to save my lazy White ass by finding whether someone had already typed up for me that quote from Halpern’s fine Introduction to said book (an ancient tome from 1989, which, like other culturally scorned material, is easily found for a buck or two).
Although intending exactly the opposite, the writer correctly ascertains the obsession with rhythm characteristic of the primitive negro mentality. And of course, by “people of all origins” he means “formerly White people who have been brainwashed by MSM and modern society in general into a grotesque over-valuation of one, small, dispensable aspect of music, the better to reject their entire culture in favor of an alien simulacrum.” As the White college student famously said, “We don’t have any culture.”
Contrariwise, the author is unable to appreciate Halpern’s intriguing and bracing embrace of the idea of “no rhythm” (and he, for his part, would be horrified by my identification of it as “implicitly White”; note his name).
Although I’m sure Halpern is as PC as the rest of the New Age audience, his discussion explicitly denigrates rhythm as a primitive and backward element (“Cro-Magnon man pounding on skins and bones”), and explicitly welcomes the modern technologies that have enabled new instruments, and new uses of old instruments, without the “slave[ry]” of “the time machine.”
The surely accidental association of rhythm and slavery is both accurate and, in this context, rather piquant. It’s like the railroad foreman in Blazing Saddles demanding that his workers sing “a good ol’ nigger work song” and reminding them that “when you was slaves, you sang like birds.”
Need one point out that, here again, the science and instruments are White creations? Halpern’s techno-positivism would fit very comfortably in the late, great Alisdair Clarke’s notion of Aryan Futurism.
Of course, it’s really just a question of emphasis; New Age music doesn’t lack rhythm — an Amazon reviewer of the Windham Hill 20 year anniversary sampler complains that it “has some rythmic [sic] and percussion pieces that are actually gnarly and you want to hit the skip key on your CD player if you are looking for relaxing and meditative music” — it just isn’t interested in it, and prefers to emphasize more important elements.[3]
As well, if it weren’t part of the PC catechism to praise negroid rhythm (while the author of the quote above would tear out his own tongue before uttering the phrase “natural rhythm,”) we might point out that the much-vaunted “jazz” music of the negro is largely in basic 4/4 (as the (possibly) Judaic hipster Dave Brubeck observed long ago, thus creating a profitable niche for himself), while “[c]Rap” music is even more primitive, merely amplifying said 4/4 “beat” to ear-splitting and gut-punching levels — again, thanks to the White man’s technology — while also eliminating melody, which is usually “sampled” — viz, looted — from White rock or pop (a technique already used by jazz, where the compositional resources of oh-so-advanced “be-bop” rarely got beyond stealing the chords of a Gershwin song and then wailing away).
What’s at issue here is not rhythm (seriously, did Mozart lack rhythm?) but that amorphous thing (without which “it don’t mean a thing”) called “swing.” Self-hating White critic Robert Palmer observed in his notes to the Ornette Coleman box set that European imitators of “free jazz” were boring, because they lacked what American negroes had learned as entertainers: how to swing. As we have pointed out here, this “swing” is by no means any kind of “natural rhythm,” but a particular entertainment device, which Louis Armstrong had to teach to Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, despite their being “the finest musicians in Harlem.”
In short, a mere bit of early 20th century show business mumbo-jumbo, easily discarded by anyone interested in serious composition.
The pioneers of hip-hop, perhaps because not writing self-hating essays but actually working with White technologies such as turntables, had more appreciation of the “non-swinging” Europeans than Palmer. Afrika Bambaata famously said of Kraftwerk that they “were so stiff, they swung.” He paid tribute to them in the style of the negro, by imitating — or again, looting — their work.
Still, a lesson for all those pitiable “wiggers” who are, in fact, just a more literal minded component of the general demoralized White society: the negro will never respect an imitator; he will, however, be compelled to admire the sheer audacity of those who either ignore him, or loot with alacrity and joy of Viking raiders.
Varg Vikernes on the Music of the Future
Speaking of Vikings and other Berserkers: this evolution in the direction of Aryan Futurism is not beyond heavy metal itself. No less an icon than Varg Vikernes, the imprisoned, church-burning Godfather of Death Metal, has explicitly rejected all “guitar-based” music as “implicitly negroid” and thus inappropriate for a White movement:
The guitar is an European invention, just like the synthesizer. However, the music played on guitar is mostly nigger music — and that goes definitely for all metal music.[4] I have nothing against guitars, as you might know a lot of classical music is played on guitar. If I would make any more guitar music it would be classical music. So, it has nothing (or better; little) to do with the instrument in itself.
I guess I have been a bit unclear when talking about this, until now. Anyway, what I explain above should clear things up for you. I categorize music like this; Aryan music (European classical and folkmusic, as well as some other more electronic music); Alien music with Aryan lyrics (like all these Viking-metal bands, Oi-rock and the like) and; Alien music with alien lyrics. As simple as that.
His most recent work embraces keyboard, synthesizers, and other electronic methods — perhaps due to their availability in prison, since even Norwegian prisons have their drawbacks — producing what might well be called “Death New Age” (although “Black New Age” might be more accurate, it might have paradoxical implications in the light of our discussion here).
The Genius of Scott Walker
The conceptual movement away from rhythm — or at least “blue eyed soul” — to more purely Aryan modes of music making can be found in exemplary fashion in Scott Walker
Walker’s reticence — in typical fashion, his “comeback” included contributing a song for a Bond film which was so depressing it would up over the end credits — could be seen as an exaggerated form of the noble Aryan’s traditional self-composure, as Baron Evola has outlined it, in contrast to the hysterical, show-off Mediterranean type so typical of “show bizness.” [6]
Anyhow, I was led to link the two by a couple of odd lines from Scott in the recent film biography, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
[When hiring a session sax man Scott points out] “It’s not going to be a funk session”
[Scott explains that he never lets the studio musicians he hires see the whole arrangement, only their own parts, because] “I don’t want them getting together and ‘grooving.'”
Reticence, loathing of “show business,” use of high-technology to make music on his own terms, and an abhorrence of “grooving” and “funk” mark Scott as a true Aryan Artist, his uncompromising self-exile and technological experimentation not dissimilar to Varg Vikernes’ prison life and music.
And as already pointed out, this disdain for the easy appeal of “funk” in combination with a penchant for technological sophistication has nothing to do with a lack of rhythm or physicality when appropriate; in the film, we see Scott installing and painstakingly testing out — with his fists — a slab of beef in order to produce just the right beat; the scenes where Scott somewhat impatiently instructs the “percussionist” how to get the rhythm he wants by punching the slab just right are priceless.
How perfect that the track being recorded — “Clara” — was inspired by a childhood viewing of newsreel footage of the bloody fate of Mussolini and his mistress; one piece of post-war “let’s all hate the Nazis” propaganda (and a rebellion, as Baron Evola pointed out in the same discussion of “Mediterranean Soul,” of the Italian slave mentality seeking vengeance on the man who attempted to lift them to a greatness they were no longer capable of in spirit) that doesn’t seem to have had the intended effect on this Aryan spirit.
Alex Kurtagic on Black Metal
My suggestions that White audiences should embrace and extend something that might be called White New Age should not be confused with similar but reactionary and retrograde views promoting some kind of “neo-classicism” based on certain tendencies among the neo-folk and even Black Metal genres.
Prominent Alternative Right cultural critic Alex Kurtagic’s essay “White Noise” at TakiMag[8] is excellent, though mainly for representing another neo-pagan incursion into the online “conservative” media. On its own merits though, it’s useful mainly for identifying what’s wrong with the Right’s take on “white music.”
Kurtagic starts off with this accurate view of the current situation:
Most of mainstream Pop nowadays is African-American in either origin or derivation, even if the musicians playing it are not. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find even a nanosecond of music in the charts that is quintessentially European in its sensibility. The fact that music derived from African-American creativity has come to enjoy maximum visibility in contemporary mainstream culture, however, says more about the policies of corporate record labels and the mass media of news and entertainment than it does about the quality of music originating in the European soul on either side of the Atlantic. This music is alive and well, I am happy to report, thriving purer and truer than ever, aloof from—and completely ignored by—the brainless and banal MTV sausage factory.
Then he asks, “what does this music sound like,” and there the fissures begin to appear.
Lumping together “several genres worthy of examination: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial, and various forms of extreme Metal, including Black Metal, Folk Metal, and Viking Metal,” Kurtagic describes them as lyrically reflecting “a decidedly pagan and neo-Romantic sensibility, emphasizing—always to a harrowing degree—dark emotion and obscure mysticism” and musically as “quite complex, drawing extensively from Classical and traditional Folk music, with varied and layered instrumentation, expressionistic riffing, elaborate orchestration, an epic sense of melody, and scintillating musicianship.”
He sums things up thusly:
Black Metal artists may be called “conservative revolutionary” in so much as they advocate putting an end to the liberal order, by revolutionary means if necessary, and instituting a new dispensation founded on conservative principles. (Of course, the term “conservative” must not be understood here as having anything to do with the Republicans).
Indeed. Then why does it all sound so much like a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored concert of Judaic manned and directed orchestras?
The problem with these genres of Metal, in fact, is exactly this combination of truly “traditional folk” with the sounds, ideals and musicianship of what Kurtagic and others take to be some kind of essentially Aryan High Musical Culture — Kultur, if you will — which is actually a long dead, though still apparently controlling, post-Renaissance bourgeois taste.
Rather than “putting an end to the liberal order,” these soi disant “pagans” fall to their knees (as Nietzsche described Wagner in composing Parsifal) before a Romantic image of “inspired” conductors, overblown and overstaffed orchestras, garish “temples of music,” and female-faint inducing “virtuosos” (usually Judaic), shared by both Left and Right but in fact largely a creation of the judaic owned gramophone business and the German-Jewish “refugees” from the same Kultur-stratum that produced Adorno and the Frankfurt School.
Baron Evola noted in Ride the Tiger that all this bourgeois rubbish had deserved to be scooped up and chucked out long ago, and that the only danger had been that the younger generation, seeking — rightly — more authentic musical experiences, had been steered not to their own indigenous music (as Bartok, for example, tried to do) but rather to the sub-rational world of primitive negroid music which produced jazz and its descendants: the “beat” music Evola discusses and eventually Kurtagic’s Metal.[9]
Another Traditionalist, Alain Daniélou, himself an accomplished musician trained in authentic Hindu teachers, established the inferiority of Western “classical” or “art” or “serious” music, based as it was on the Greek’s misunderstandings of tonality, in comparison to integral musical systems such as the Indian and Chinese, in his Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on Consciousness
The whole development of Western music, its increasing “complexity” and instrumentation, which the Metallers seem to ape, is really just a desperate attempt to compensate for the meager, and increasingly inadequate, expressive possibilities of this misbegotten system, while a Mediaeval Indian musician, as Daniélou notes, could make rain appear by sounding the correct notes!
Paradoxical as it may sound, it is precisely the lack of expressiveness in this “scientific” and “evolving” system that has led, on the one hand, to the constant development of bigger forces and wilder “effects” from Bach to Brahms (Kurtagic‘s “elaborate orchestrations” and “varied and layered instrumentation”), with more and more “romantic” virtuosi and “genius” conductors, (his “scintillating musicianship” to provide “expressionistic riffing”) finally burning itself out with Strauss (who needed a wind machine!) and settling down with the dour, unpopular — and Judaic — serialists (whose musical language, Colin Wilson pointed out, was good for expressing only confusion and dread); and, on the other hand, to the attraction, among both audience and composers, to “primitive” music that seems, correctly, to be far more expressive and meaningful.[11]
Daniélou tells the story of an Indian during the early Raj, who tried to imitate “Western” music; he got together as many instruments as possible, and had them play as loudly as possible, all different lines at the same time! An “emperor’s new clothes” moment for the much vaunted Western “harmonic development” as well as a nightmare recently reproduced, to much fanfare among White “sophisticates,” by the negro jazz cacophony called “Free Jazz.” And is it not indeed the experience of the performance of one of these Metal bands?
By promoting the combination of negro-derived “beat” music and putrescent Klassical Kultur, Kurtagic and Metal are short-circuiting again the legitimate hunger of the White population for its own traditional expressive folk music, as well as de-legitimizing new Aryan technical and musical explorations, such as those of Vikernes and even New Age. He is in fact embodying, in one simultaneous stance, Adorno’s successive Frankfurt School plans for fomenting Communism by first promoting Schoenberg, then when that failed, concocting a new, “sophisticated” form of jazz.
Of course, it’s all a question of tactics. No one is unsullied; “to live is to collaborate” (Burroughs, Nova Express). If Vikernes is right, that all guitar-based rock music is negroid in inspiration, and Daniélou, that Western “serious” music is a dead end, one still can, and must, distinguish that which is entirely harmful to Whites (most pop music) and that which, perhaps due to its lyrical content, is relatively positive (Metal).
Since the beginning of the last century, the White race has been trying to dig its way out from under the Wrong Turn of the Renaissance. Some of those paths, such as the embrace, by both “serious” composers and teen agers, of “more soulful” music in the form of negroid rhythm, have been further detours. At this point, we need neither more soft ballads nor more neo-classical flourishes. An authentic White music should proudly embody our race’s unique characteristics — a Futurist focus not on the telluric mire of primitive “rhythm” but the transcendence of time through technological innovation.
Notes
1. See Christopher Pankhurst’s “Music of the Future” where David Tibet is compared to Schubert.
2. The entheogenic researcher, not the Holocaust revisionist, although the coincidence is . . . intriguing.
3. For a pro-White discussion of those elements, in the vocal context, see Julian Lee’s “The White Voice in Rock & Pop” here.
4. An echo of Spengler, who said in 1932 — when you could say this in a book published by Knopf and favorably reviewed in Time — “Nigger music and jazz dances are the death march of a great civilization.”
5. The definite biography is still Jeremy Reed’s stalker classic, Scott Walker: Another Tear Falls
6. See Men Among the Ruins (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002), Chapter 14.
7. A 2006 film by Stephen Kijak, featuring interviews with such illustrious fans as David Bowie (who might be called Scott Lite, having chosen a series of rabidly shifting stage personae rather than seclusion), Brian Eno who helps connect us with our New Age/Ambient theme), Marc Almond, Ute Lemper, and Jarvis Cocker.
8. White Noise (October 19, 2010)
9. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003
10. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1995.
11. See the discussion of ‘bent’ and ‘blue’ notes in Julian Lee’s essay, although he fails to see their significance as Daniélou does: “The success of African American music, with its ‘blue’ notes so alien to equal temperament and therefore so expressive, is not due merely to fashion. It shows the need for an understandable musical system, for logical and true intervals that can remove the veil of inexpressive insipidity which temperament spreads over even the most impassioned movements of the greatest symphonies.” [op. cit, p. 16].
13 comments
Great stuff, as usual, sir.
Traditional Southern music has not lost its Aryan roots. It is not all banjos and Scottish jig-dancing, either! This cover of “Carolina in my Mind” by Alison Krauss and Union Station is powerful beyond belief. Crystal clear, angelic vocals, simple arrangement, and all-around excellent musicianship.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83w8SkdJtPM
Emotion doesn’t need a drum track.
Since our music has been relegated to the sidelines by our eternal foe it has lost access to the ancillary aspect that makes ‘the scene’ attractive to our better halves. Fashion designers work for Britney, not for Karpatia.
The quality of the music, the hardness or softness, and even the rhythm are largely unimportant compared to the insatiable desire to feel pretty and new.
Anyone know a neo-fascist fashion designer with a taste for folk metal? Perhaps John Galliano?
RedC,
I plan to examine the role of fashion in my next contribution!
I don’t believe for a single second that “Andrea” is a female.
If certain songs from the German Youth Movement are played fast and loud, with several guitars playing at once, it … rocks!
Brass bands and marching bands use plenty of rhythmic drum playing and are not derived from Negro influences. Sousa’s Washington Post is a good synthesis of Classical Music and rhythms found later in 20th Century pop music.
In Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man, he talks about the obsession with Time in art and philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th Century. It seems like this heaviness of time found its most popular expression in the pop music of the late 20th century, with the rhythmic drum beats. Perhaps once this obsession with time goes away, music without drums will become popular again. Although rock music was tempered with ethereal guitar playing, cathedral organs and singing in a more authentic voice. Rock’s greatest anthems sound like a march, while the singer performs a confession or a prayer.
I think the trick of the Jews (and white liberals) was to convince people that rock music was implicitly black. All black music sounds like a rip off of what whites invented, if you really think about it. For a good discussion of this, see the previous article called The White Singing Voice… (link above under “You may also like…”).
The best rock music of the 20th Century was high quality, sincere and genuine, spoke to the times and lifted the spirit. Hardly a Jewish invention. It may have been the sound of cultural degeneration, but if so, degeneration never sounded so good.
It’s not good to get hung up on what forms the art takes. The expression is what counts and whether it’s coming from an honest place. Most art provides a picture of what already exists in the culture, good or bad.
Just for the sake of being different from most women I want to let you all know that one of my favorite bands is Rammstein and a new one that I like is Hansel und Gretyl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfn5hzzzAbc&feature=related
I know several women who like this and it sure beats the heck out of all the crap on the radio.
April,
I am in the process of writing an article on Rammstein. I think they are amazing.
I will look into Hansel and Gretyl.
Thanks!
Greg Johnson, if you haven’t already you may want to look into a book titled ‘Menace in Europe’.
It was written by a Jewish Neo-conservative and features a whole paranoid fearful chapter about Rammstein.
http://books.google.com/books?id=KwUVSZqtqMQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=menace+in+europe&hl=en&ei=MYPXToPqJMWdiALIwu3bCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Oh yes, that one is RICH. Takes me back to the days of reading Leonard Peikoff’s THE OMINOUS PARALLELS: Jewish forensics and verbal sheen wedded to sheer hysteria.
Two points:
1) With respect, the discussion about “white women and metal” seems a bit outdated or uninformed to me.
For the past twenty years – since the beginning of the 90s – large numbers of our white daughters have found the kind of metal that speaks to them. It goes by a lot of different names – gothic metal, symphonic metal, nu metal.
Evanescence is a good place to start. From there: My Dying Bride, Lacuna Coil, Type O Negative, Within Temptation, Nightwish, Tristania, Flowing Tears, Paradise Lost, The Gathering, Sirenia – I could go if anyone wants me to.
Yeah, there is a healthy amount of extremely heavy and extreme, more “male” metal bands thriving out there, but there’s plenty of “in-between”- not too hard, not too soft – metal bands doing just fine. Our white daughters in both Europe and the US have found them and support them.
2) When we see white rappers making outright fools of themselves aping hip hop, or when we see crappy exurban metal bands like Insane Clown Posse, Korn, Limp Bizkit, etc. adopt the worst sort of black underclass posturings, then I absolutely agree that there’s something to be said about consciously trying to make a kind of pure “white music” by rejecting the tyranny of hip hop’s relentless 4/4 beat and going further, even rejecting any use of the guitar in a post 1950s rock ‘n roll sense.
The thing is, while rejecting rhythm and rock guitar is an interesting politically-inspired gesture, I’m skeptical about the need to go that far.
Here’s how I see it: We can draw some pretty simple lines. Whites just shouldn’t rap. It’s embarrassing. It doesn’t come from our culture, we shouldn’t imitate it. It always sounds affected. It’s whiggerism and it should be rejected. It’s the music of the multicult underclass – and this should be very sharply defined as distinct from the white working class, such as it is. Once you go multicult, we don’t want you back (until you reject it completely).
We can run through a list of other styles that just aren’t white and which we shouldn’t bother with. I predict we’re gonna see some whites interjecting themselves into the latino hip hop melange. Look, they don’t want us there, and we shouldn’t want to be there.
Really, all we need to do is keep doing what most of us have been doing. Making white rock, white alternative/indie music, white punk, white metal, white pop, white techno/electronic dance music etc.
The drive to do something overtly political like Varg Vikerne’s repudiation of guitars has its place, but in the end we don’t need to be that extreme. Any music we make will be “white music.” The truth of our biological existence is proven by our particular cultural expressions. No one else can make our art except us. All we need to do is continue to make art.
James, you are nothing if not vigilant in guarding against the bourgeois mentality, particularly as it slithers among traditionalists (including perhaps myself), and that merits our thanks. Your references to Danielou’s textbook – which, I might as well admit, I first discovered through your blog – are also apropos. I’ve read his book through twice, returned many more times to particular diagrams, passages, and chapters, and despite being myself a decent amateur musician with previous grounding in music theory, I still haven’t managed to digest it. All I know is it’s important.
Danielou’s point, if it’s allowable to reduce his thought this way, is that intervals need to be accurately tuned to have their true effect, and that music is the science of using the right scale at the accorded time.
But Danielou himself did not dismiss classical music the way you do in this article. Contrary to how you portray it, his story of the early Raj who attempted to imitate Western classical music by making as much noise as possible is meant to illustrate Indian incomprehension of what were, precisely, the unique merits and possibilities of complex harmony. It’s true, of course, that ultimately he assigns traditional modal music a superior rank – and he’s right to – but his judgements are more nuanced than you want them to be.
For one, the unequal diatonic scales used today in period performances of post-renaissance ‘high’ music are at least accurate – though limited and otherwise problematic – by Danielou’s standards. That much can be said for and against such music; calling it irrelevant or putrescent, tout court, is hardly how Danielou went about it.
How about metal, new age, and alt folk? What trends within these genres are working to meet Tradition’s standards? And please, no mention of “lyrical content” or how they make you feel !
Graham.
Goood to hear from you! If, with your musical background, you find AD’s treatise heavy going, perhaps I should admit that I find the theoretical sections impenetrable, and realy mostly on his ordinary language explanations.
Interesting you bring up early music practice. Marco Pallis was not only an early Traditionalist and friend of Guenon but also a figure in the early days of what later became known as “the early music revival” as part of the Consort of Viols. His essay on The Metaphysics of Musical Polyphony is a defense of the spiritual ‘correctness’ of polyphony, and you would find it an interesting alternative to AD. It’s available at the World Wisdom Books website.
Another musician-traditionalist, John Taverner, has written about the decisive influence of Stravinsky on his music, from his very youth, which should make Greg happy; and has a youtube video discussing the spiritual greatness of Mozart. It is one thing to allow that a sufficiently great spirit can produce great works within a ramshackle musical tradition such as the Greco-European, but of course another to suggest we plunge right into it; this is also what Vikernes seems to be saying; some ‘guitar based music’ can be healthy and helpful, but what needs to be developed is a more authentic alternative. This may also be related to something Coomaraswamy says about Western Art; traditional art had a shared language among all classes, while modern art produces works of idiosyncratic genius that can only be appreciated by a self-selected ‘elite.’ Hence, high vs. low culture, pop vs. ‘serious’ music, etc, distinction largely unknown in Traditional cultures.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.