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Topic: Philosopher says heavy metal is fascism
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infoterror
VoivodFan
Member # 568
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posted July 01, 2005 23:14
    
The purpose of the Fascist formula, the ritual discipline, the uniforms, and the whole apparatus, which is at first sight irrational, is to allow mimetic behavior. The carefully thought out symbols (which are proper to every counterrevolutionary movement), the skulls and disguises, the barbaric drum beats, the monotonous repetition of words and gestures, are simply the organized imitation of magic practices. . . .
--Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment 184-85Metal, indeed, might be viewed as the epitome of popular music's two most extreme dangers: a dehumanizing, de-individualizing techno-mechanization; and a mystifying, irrationalist "retreat" (however illusory) back to humankind's primordial "rhythmic" origins--to speak diachronically about a tension between myth and reason that Horkheimer and Adorno often deal with in a more synchronic fashion. And yet, with the hegemonic ascendancy of industrial capitalism, the twentieth century seems to represent a new "culture-shock" turn-for-the-worse in Adorno's exposition of his ongoing rational/mythic dialectic. When the rationalist in Adorno must speak of a century cursed by Hitler and Auschwitz, it is only understandable that The Dialectic of Enlightenment has, at these points, a very "dystopian" feel to it (Hohendahl 126), and that Adorno's intellectual angst and pessimism are readily transferred from the jackboot to the jitterbugger, from the martial frenzy of the Fascist collective to the fanaticism of the pop-music audience.
http://www.usd.edu/~tgannon/hm.html -------------------- http://www.livejournal.com/users/infoterror/
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shargraves
VoivodFan
Member # 575
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posted July 04, 2005 08:03
That is utter drivel.The second passage isn't even in English. The two charges against metal are both invalid. Has he even heard dance music - a single repeated/sampled phrase - thats cynical fascism for ya! -------------------- Steven Hargraves
Rhythm Guitar in Monstrance
https://www.facebook.com/monstranceofficial
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