Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts.
Before we talk about music, there are some things that must be said. These adjoin each other because life is one continuous whole: the life that generates the art that nourishes us also generates the politics which vex us. Art in these periods retains its worth by that nourishing, a connection not just to joy but to rage and despair and every ugly thing we might otherwise keep down. As John Lydon once said: Anger is an energy.
Elon Musk threw a sieg heil. I am autistic too; I can confirm that we aren’t stupid and we know what the most rightly reviled gesture in modern Western history is. Furthermore, the executive order signed by Donald Trump declaring all trans healthcare for people under the age of 18 is a fascist endeavor. The use of the anti-female genital mutilation act to stop any act of early transitioning including puberty blockers (which were developed and prescribed prior to their use in trans healthcare) is a fascist endeavor. The stated use of the Parental Kidnapping Act to punish parents fleeing to sanctuary states to seek aid for their children is fascist. And it is not just fascist but in specific a Nazi endeavor. Of their fabled book burnings, the first ever carried out by the Nazis was of the archives of the Institute of Sexology, a queer and trans health clinic in Berlin founded in part because the first successful modern surgeries that were the precursors to current gender-affirming care were done in the 1920s in Germany.
The anti-porn law tabled in Oklahoma is fascism, an attempt to legally create a category of “degeneracy,” a purely Nazi concept, in which can be lumped anything deemed pornographic. We must always be mindful when they come for pornographers and sex workers because, as a marginalized labor body, they become unwitting canaries in the coal mine of legally defining undesirables and degenerate acts. Current laws on the books in some states treat books for children that merely feature queer characters or show loving queer relationships as pornographic. This is what people mean when they say you must stand with sex workers. You may turn their nose up at their work, and thats a separate conversation, but the efforts to legally constrain them are the testing ground for broader laws used to sweep up any group or generalized act deemed against the standing order of the fascist ideal. It is not incidental that the foretold act of conservatives, fresh off of repealing Roe v Wade, would come for Oberfell, the decision that legalized gay marriage across the nation, next. The stated desire for a challenge came from Idaho this past week.
These things come on the heels of the efforts for militarized mass deportation of immigrants. I had an argument with someone on Facebook, a friend to be clear, about whether this constitutes genocide. These deportations are massively racialized and predicated on language of the inherent criminality, violence and deceptiveness of the deported body. This is the first act of every recorded genocide, save the ones where the domestic violence was more immediate such as in Rwanda. These groups are a proving ground to test the limits of what will be allowed, carried out against people deemed unprotectable by the executive branch but also cosigned by the malignant passivity of the American people. Standing up for these groups is not a matter of quietly thinking it in your head. It is about, most importantly, clear and direct action. But secondarily it is about clear and unambiguous statements of support. Every company that scrapped DEI programs, programs which it should be noted are also the precise ones used to employee wounded veterans, the disabled and the differently abled either by accident or by birth, are preemptively bending the knee to a fascist culling of undesirables.
All of this on the heels of a two-fold attack on the federal body, first an illegal full stoppage of appropriated funds as determined by Congress, a power outlined directly in the Constitution as being held by that body and no other, a stoppage that would have ended everything from Medicaid to Social Security payments for the elderly to all federal research grants and second with a still-active offer for every single one of 2 million federal workers to take a severance package so they can be replaced by loyalists. The stoppage of funds, mind you, was stated to have an exception for groups found via audit to meet political and ideological positions amenable to the executive branch. This is, in plain language, a loyalty test to an autarch.
Organize against this. Organize immediately. Organize offline. If our ethos here, in a lowly metal column, is to table no abusers or politically iffy artists or labels, the very first element of these are Nazis. Elon sieg heiled twice, a name meaning “hail victory,” immediately after saying “This is what victory feels like.” No mirth today. No pasaron.
That said, you will notice a shift in the music selected this month. There is more grindcore, more frantic and dystopian music, more experimental work hinged on venom. These are the things which tie us eternally to art: every fragment of myself has been encoded somewhere by someone. The undead legions of heavy metal do not die. Blood howl? How fitting.
— Langdon Hickman
