White Rock

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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.

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‘s curious trajectory from Pop Idol to reclusive “genius.”[5] Born in Ohio, Walker had achieved a “big in Europe” kind of superstardom as part of a Righteous Brothers knock-off act called The Walker Brothers (they weren’t named Walker or even related).  He then, well, walked away from it, living in seclusion for decades, releasing a handful of albums, musically avant garde and alienating, lyrically obscure and tortured, that might be works of genius, either as serious music or else an elaborate post-modern “fuck you” to his fans, sort of  Lou Reed via Andy Kaufman.

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.[7] I mean, odd from the rhythm-worshipping, bongo-beating perspective of today‘s critics:

[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.[10]

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 (London: Creation Books, 1998).  Although outdated by Scott’s recent “rediscovery” by the hipsters, and by no means even aware of the Aryan motifs outlined here, it nicely conveys Scott’s ability to captivate and obsess his fans, even a man some have called England’s greatest living poet; which is probably why the fans hate it.

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].