Metal: A Headbanger's Journey is an amazing documentary, directed by Sam Dunn, that talks about the history and the legacy of heavy metal. It is an amazing presentation for both metal heads and non metal heads as well.
"It's a negation of the world that's handed to you. It just says, "You know what? This daily ass existence of this boring high school and this dead end dairy queen job... just, No! This is something that's mine, and that i own, and fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."
- Tom Morello, Rage Against The Machines/Audioslave
"First time someone who knows nothing about the metal scene, the first time they see on of our album covers or something like that, its going to shock them."
- Alex Webster, Cannibal Corpse.
"Unfortunately, the ignorance of republican, puritanical, old thinking is... they see a mosh pit and it's violent. That's all they see. And of course, pits can be brutal places. But at the same time, I'd rather have kids in the pit working out the stuff they have to go through in their lives, rather than hurting other people with no optimistic ends."
- Corey Taylor, Slipknot/Stone Sour
"Why has heavy metal been consistently been stereotyped, dismissed and condemned? It's become clear to me that metal confronts what we'd rather ignore. It celebrates what we often deny. It indulges in what we fear most. And that's why metal will always be a culture of outsiders."
- Sam Dunn, Director Metal: A Headbanger's Journey.
"For young people its a place to belong, where you can experience other possibilities and transcend everyday life in a very glorious way."
"... and its purging. I think metal performs that task; that sort of 'letting-us-get-rid-of-a-lot-of-tension'. Its a catharsis."
"People in their own way have different releases. Its something other than your mundane life."
"For metal heads, good, beauty and truth, is up there on stage."
"Is heavy metal a sacrament? For some people it is. It keeps kids alive. If it gives them a sense of transcendence, then i believe it is a spiritual force. I believe it is a pipeline to God"
"Ever since i was 12 years old, I've had to defend my love for heavy metal against those who say it is a less valid form of music. My answer now is that you either feel it or you don't. If metal doesn't give you that overwhelming surge of power that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, you might never get it. And you know what? That's ok. Because judging by the 40,000 metal heads around me [here at the Wacken Metal Festival in Germany], we're doing fine without you."
- Sam Dunn, Director, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
Disaster Area
So my band has released a demo album. And I've heard that some people I've given the cd to found the cover and the lyrics on the inside leaflet disturbing. There is no hate filled, or gory meaning intended. You also have to realise that the album is a political record. All three songs on the cd have political thought behind them.
"Eyes of chaos" is based on the Hyderabad blasts that took place sometime ago and the blood bath that it was. "Nothing Remains" is based on the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The cover page has a really simple meaning. Basically, the norm is that backward countries are breeding grounds for terrorism; that undeveloped, and uneducated settlements of people are the cause for terrorism and pain and war and suffering. This can be seen in the way the US claims that Pakistan has become a country that harbours terrorists; in the way that the US became really wary when they thought Iraq possessed "weapons of mass destruction".
But as most of you know, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. Saddam Hussein was executed by the Americans. The Mujahideen were created by the Americans (who wanted them to fight the Soviets during the cold war era).
Osama Bin Laden, Al Zawahiri and his Mujahideen were supplied with weapons by the US government. They were responsible for the shooting down of 149 Soviet helicopters, 89 fixed wing aircraft, and 274 tanks; all between the winter of 1987 and the spring of 1988. And all with the help of the Stinger Missiles supplied by the Americans.
The reason the Mujahideen became what they are now is the simple fact that after spending 4 billion dollars on supplying them with weapons, the Americans refused a 4 million dollar budget for building schools and shelter. When the Afghan people came back from fighting the Russians in the tough, Afghan environment, they found themselves abandoned by their benefactors. What do you do once you have created a group of warriors and supplied them with some of the most advanced weaponry money can buy? Is it not your responsibility to teach them right from wrong? If you're going to leave them out in the cold, armed with dangerous armaments then you sure as hell cannot expect them to grow up to be normal, sane, and regular people.
This is what the cover page of Disaster Area is about. What was once a fledgling country, underdeveloped and poor, has now become a haven for terrorists, not by any fault of their own, but by our so called "advanced" and "developed" countries. Money, Knowledge, Advanced Technology (which is the book shown on the cover) has destroyed and mutilated what could have been a beautiful land, if natural progress and nature had been allowed to take their own course and time. It has ravaged countries like Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and is slowly beginning to seep into the other parts of the world.
The lyrics inside the album cover is an extension of the same idea. It is not what we, as a band believe in. It is what we believe the thought process of a Mujahideen, or holy warrior, is. We do not endorse it, quite the contrary, but we hoped that lyrics would explain what the thinking is of a person who has been given a dangerous weapon, who has not been taught right from wrong, and has turned around to realise that he has been deprived of this right by his benefactors.
What does he do?
He is lesser than a child, and suddenly he has been given this amazing power and has not been taught responsibility.
What does he do?
His mother and sisters have been raped by his enemies in front of his eyes. His brothers have been blown apart by shells.
What does he do?
And still, he is sent out to fight for a cause that his not his. He is doing someone else's dirty work and is paying the price for it.
What does he do?
"I swear I will not dishonour my soul with love.
But offer myself numbly,
As a guardian of hate,
As a messenger of pain
As an architect of war."
This is not us. This is not Ston'd. We do not, in any way, subscribe to this way of thinking. I hope you have understood, and hence pity, the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and other places who have been made to move out of their line of natural development. Hopefully by now you have understood what this album means, what the songs mean, and the reason for the aggression behind it.
In the words of Texas Senator Charles Wilson, "These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world... and then we fucked up the end game."
"You are the cause, I am the effect
Created in hatred, a noose for your neck."
~ D. Randall Blythe
Lebensraum
Foraging for land,
And the wealth of the deceased.
Blood spilled on the wall twice,
Once for you and once for me.
The floods of the masses
The unceasing tide
Breaking all binds bound to a life of our kind.
War sells and blood is the fee
An unceasing tribute to hypocrisy.
The fires will rage and the spirit will burn,
Wait and watch, and play your last turn.
The dice will be rolled and the numbers shall fall
Of no consequence will they be for they doom us all.
The father cries for his son,
And calls for the Atonement,
A string of foul words,
With which we are all broken.
Lebensraum
Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the the Crime of Genocide:
"Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group, as such; killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to member of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group"
Lebensraum: A word coined by German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species' natural impulse to expand its territory in it search for not just space, but sustenance.
The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her conquest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus landed in America. The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial expansion" cost 10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia.
"Those who escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others ran through with their rapiers, so they were quickly dispatched, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice...."
- The Massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut, 1636.
"We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire... hacked, burned, set on fire... we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards didn't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it... I have just one last wish... let me be sentenced to death... i don't care if I'm hanged... just give me two days before my hanging and i will go and have a field day in Juhapura, where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay... I will finish them off... let a few more of them die... at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die."
- Babu Bajrangi, one of the major leaders of the Gujarat Genocide, recorded during a sting operation.
Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician and poet who made the mistake of campaigning against Former Chief Minister Modi in the Rajkot elections, was publicly butchered. In the words of man who took part in the savagery:
"Five people held him, hen someone struck him with a sword... chopped off his hand, then his legs... then everything else, after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they had piles and set him in fire... Burned him half-alive."
The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, PC Pandey, was kind enough to visit the neighborhood while the mod lynched Jaffri, murdering 70 people, and gang raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi was re-elected, Pandey was appointed Gujarat's Director-General of Police. The entire killing apparatus remains in place.
"Denial is saying, in effect, that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide." - Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty years of Denial
Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Christopher Columbus day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90% of the original population (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with small pox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him).
In America's second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was "legal" at the time. The US has also refused to accept the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg - which killed hundred and thousands of civilians - were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. The argument here is that the government didn't "intend" to kill civilians.
Since the end of WWII, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions of course, of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10% of its population).
None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts.
"The question is how much evil do you have to do in order to do good?"
- Robert MacNamara, whose career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to being the architect of the Vietnam war, to President of the World Bank - now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home, in his comfortable country.
Waiting On A Cross Road
Waiting on a cross road,
Cold.
My dreams in a paper bag,
And life.
Waiting for rancidity
Of horrible shape and sickly beauty.
No blindness, no clarity
And every moment as long as a life age.
A hand grips me hard,
And guides me through fields of warmth.
It whispers,
As the blindness begins to dissolve,
"Stay your beating,"
Night returns hand in hand with the cold,
A mask clatters onto the stone floor.
The deformed beauty beholds me,
Keen, piercing eyes
And a half formed smile
Skin painted with mastery
And a malice, once unveiled, unbending.
Lady Death has arrived.
Beyond Dreams
Mistake not our silence for submission
For it is not normal evil
That stops continuity.
There is beauty in chaos
Look at the heavens
And remember it,
For its haunting song echoes
From places beyond time,
And beyond dreams.
The cold down your back
Like a drop, on a winter morning,
Is like pain unremembered.
It is the prelude to infinity.
Its been an amazing weekend. For me, and for the band. It has, infact, been so amazing that the event have not fully settled in, and an odd feeling of elation, mingled with disbelief surrounds the entire band I think.
It all started this friday. Well, no, it actually started way before, with the Kingfisher October Fest. Our band got into the finals there and was invited to play in the main fest in Palace Grounds. It was an ok show, nothing phenomenal. But the result of us getting to play was insanely phenomenal.
We got a call later on. From Kingfisher. They told us that they wanted to interview all the bands that had played in the october fest. This so called "press conference" was to happen at a pub call On Da Roxx, on Brigade Road. So we went there, Expecting nothing.
On reachin there, we found the place half empty. The guys from Inner Sanctum were there. There were also a lot of small flyers advertising the Sepultura concert to happen the next day. So there we were, chilling out and just relaxing. There was free booze and food so everyone was happy.
There were a lot of rumours going around that Sepultura themselves were to make an appearance. We just laughed it all off. Sepultura come to some Bangalore pub? Yeah, right!
Then the press started pouring in. And not just one or two newspapers or journals, but a whole lot of tv people as well. And then we started wondering if so much media was really necessary for the eight or so bands that played in the October Fest. Then some foreign guys walked in. Now we were really wondering what was happening. I happened to see the big alphabet "S" written on the back of one of those guys and it looked vaguely familiar. I just realised what it was and i turned back to the entrance, and in walked Andreas Rudolf Kisser, Paulo Xisto Pinto Jr., Jean Turrer Dolabella, And Derrick Leon Green. In short: Sepultura.
What followed is really hazy. All I can remember are photographs, hand shakes, screaming, autographs, Karthik, our drummer, hugging Mr. Green. It was almost like a dream. And especially for our band, because we are hardcore sepultura fans. We even cover Slave New World by them.
(Ston'd with Derrick Green of Sepultura)
So that night was the start to the most amazing weekend of my life. We left the pub and drove home under a torrential cover of rain. We may have got wet, but we were on fire more than ever for the next days concert.
Saturday morning dawned. It was only then that we realised that we ourselves had two concerts to play that day, after which we would have to head for the sepultura concert which we thought of as the grand finale.
There was some difficulty getting to the venue of the Campus Rock Idols Prelims. Blame the traffic and bad directions. It then turned out that the venue was an old Sanskrit Institution. Weird. The stage was too small but the acoustics were pretty neat in the hall.
We were the fifth band to play. Then we got a call for our other guitarist. He said that he was still in class and would not be able to make it. All of a sudden we were a little nervous. Actually, very nervous. I had not been able to attend practice sessions as i frequently as i would have liked to, owing to the unbearable torment that this year is.
So we get on stage. I would honestly say our show was sub-standard. I hit the wrong buttons on my pedal, altering my guitar tones and making it sound real weird. But what was done was done and we had no time to think of it, because we had to run to our next show. It was a charity show in an all girl school.
So we scooted off to the school. We found Vibhas, the drummer of Spitfire, hanging around there and fighting with the sound engineers. Apparently the school had given a sum of thirty five thousand bucks to the sound guys and they turned up with equipment worth less than eight grand.
The organiser (I have to add at this point that she was HOT) was almost in tears. She was running around trying to get everything organised. A couple of my friends from school showed up and i was hanging with them.
The show started very late, and that was a problem because we had to go for the Sepultura show in another couple of hours. The show, by the way, was, in a single word, phenomenal! The sound was horrible, and the acoustics in the auditorium we played in were disgusting for a metal show, but the crowd more than made up for it.
I mean, an all girls school. What do you expect?
Then we had another problem but that was quickly solved. We didn't have a place to dump all our equipment but a colleague of my father generously offered us his office to keep the instruments.
So we threw all our instruments in the office and shot off for the Sepultura Concert. We thought we were really late but we arrived to find Brahma playing their last song.
We somehow managed to get front row positions. What followed was the most incredible onslaught of aural sensation.
(Sepultura LIVE!)
The concert was a little rough. Rough meaning that some of the guys from the jam room got into a big ol' nasty fight. It ended up with Rajesh knocking out someone with a square punch on the nose and Kiran getting hit thrice on the face, consequentially losing a tooth. He did nothing to retaliate though, the gentleman that he is.
We also then realised that we had got through the Campus Rock Idols Prelims. And that we had to play the finals the next day.
Sunday morning dawned, bleak, cold and sore as hell. No one had the energy to do anything let alone play a concert, after last night's show. We jammed half heartedly and then decided to chill out for sometime before pushing off for the venue.
We got to the venue really early. Karthik picked our slot and it turned out we were playing eighth... we would be the last band on stage.
The competition was tough. The bands on stage had a good reason for being there. We on the other hand were pretty nervous. So finally after all the bands finished playing, we got on stage. While our vocalist was getting his water organised, I grabbed the mic to talk to the crowd.
"How you guys doing? Bangalore, make some noise for yourselves!"
(Screaming)
"Aw man, it's been such an amazing weekend for the band. We've had a lot of shows to play these few days. First of all, take a look at yourselves. You guys must be the greatest audience we've ever played for!"
(Screaming)
"Also, we got to meet some very special people this weekend. Has anyone heard of Andreas Kisser? Derrek Green?"
(A few people cheered)
"Sepultura?"
(Amazing roar from the crowd)
"Yeah! This first song is a tribute to them! Hope you guys have fun!"
And we were off. We started off with Slave New World, a cover of Sepultura's song. What followed was one of the most amazing performance i think the band has ever played. Everybody got all their parts spot on and the band sounded extremely tight.
We were feeding off each other's energy on stage. So much that Sudhir, our usually quiet guitarist, was screaming his lungs off on stage. It was brilliant.
We got off stage, ecstatic and thrilled. We didn't care if we did not win, for we knew we had played one of our best shows and that is all that mattered to us. Hugs, hand shakes and screams were flying all around as we got on.
Then there was the long wait as the headlining bands finished their sets. Galeej Gurus from bangalore were great, but Sceptre, from mumbai, were a disappointment.
Finally they were done. The judges were called on stage. They gave the usual speech about how great every band was, and what a tough choice it was to make. No one believed that. We all knew for sure Illuminati were going to win, and we actually thought we would be coming in at second place.
Anyway we won third place. Which meant we got a trophy and all but did not get through to the south zone finals. Illuminati, as expected, came in first, with a chennai based band called Nervereck coming in at second. That was a little sad, but we didn't really care that much.
So we headed back home. Sore, tired and amazingly happy and satisfied with these last few days. And even now, as I write this and try to wring out the memories of those few days, it seems to be fading. Maybe the memory of the events will. I know the memory of the feeling never will.
