Tall Rob

Photo of an abandoned Boston Market. The “t” in Boston is damaged, so it appears to read “Boson Market.”

I don’t know why we have to fund the Large Hadron Collider at CERN when you can get the same subatomic particles for cheap at the

Photo of an abandoned Boston Market. The “t” in Boston is damaged, so it appears to read “Boson Market.”

I don’t know why we have to fund the Large Hadron Collider at CERN when you can get the same subatomic particles for cheap at the

Photo of the front cover of Tonight it’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics by Bill Peel Appropriately, there is an illegible logo above the title of the book. Inside is a bookmark from Torn Light Records in Chicago, where I bought the book second-hand.

You don’t need to know much of anything about Communism or black metal to engage with the book. Not sure if the logo says anything…

Shout out to Torn Light Records of Chicago for having this book on their shelves. Great shop!

www.tornlightrecords.com

The coldness of the genre is reflected in the inability to do work or the disinterest in the world at large. Rather that combusting with kinetic energy like thrash metal or speed metal, black metal makes a point of displaying its power, its "puissance," through inaction or stillness or coldness (p. 123). If still waters run deep, then imagine the everflowing stream frozen. There is a lot of power there (as distinct from energy) but it lies still. Black metal band members are "dominating capitalism by freezing its flows. They work by remaining useless, non-productive, insufficiently profitable. We should ask ourselves what has been gained through our supposedly productive activism, and if we shouldn't join black metal instead, by turning towards non-productivity" (p. 123). Allowing ourselves to lay fallow and become useless might lead to new growth in our decay that helps to bring a new world into being.

Closing paragraph of my review of Bill Peel’s ‘Tonight it’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics.’

Here, I reflect on the idea of ‘coldness’ Peel explores with regard to black metal and Communism.

thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/03/toni...

The chapter on decay was interesting in that it reframed the usual way that black metal bands look at decay. They see it as a form of death or a long for a return to a "supposedly ancient, traditional moment" (p. 69). In this way, the yearning for decay is a desire for the world as it is to be undone. To accelerate the downfall of society so that we can live more simply once more. You know, RETVRN type shit. That's gross (culturally). What's also gross (well, also, culturally, but in a different sense) is that decaying fungi can be a source of new life, mutation (p. 64). The idea of flourishing. The possibility of life's construction.

Some thoughts on the chapter about ‘decay’ from Bill Peel’s book Tonight it’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics.’

thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/03/toni...

Bill Peel wrote a book exploring the affordances black metal (as a genre of music and associated scene) has to teach Communists about certain social practices. Yes, I was confused, too, when I first saw the book. Those practices include distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness, and heresy.

Review here:

YouTube video by Marla Standing-Owl B.G.K. - Arms Race - A Dutch Feast...The Complete Works Of Balthasar Gerards Kommando

Keeping this thread going with songs rattling around in my head each morning…

B.G.K. (Balthasar Gerard’s Kommando) with “Arms Race”

‘This world is ruled by demented old men shaking hands all day long

Stop the arms race /
Not the human race’

There are even books like this one (my review linked below) that bring together theory with a topic (in this case, black metal) that couldn’t seem farther from Marxism on their surface. The book is ‘Tonight It’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics’ by Bill Peel. A very interesting book!

Instead, Peel focuses on the elements of black metal as a genre that might provide affordances for socialists to consider including in their worldview. The five chapters cover the ideas of distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness, and heresy. Each includes an explanation of the term as it relates to black metal, certain bands or songs or movements in the genre that exemplify the term, and discussion of ways socialists might interpret these same ideas for their own ends. In a sense, a reader does not need to have any familiarity with the music of the scenes Peel covers. A more engaged stance on this book would leave a reader with ideas of how to rethink their engagement with socialist politics. If you wanted to learn more about RABM bands, you'll be let down; however, you might learn a little more about Deleuze & Guattari, Nietzsche, and Marx as you read.

The book does mention that there are bands in the black metal scene that resist its overtly fascist elements.

Yet, that’s not its focus. Distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness, & heresy are the modes of being that Communists might learn from black metal.

thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/03/toni...

Photo of the front cover of Tonight it’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics by Bill Peel Appropriately, there is an illegible logo above the title of the book. Inside is a bookmark from Torn Light Records in Chicago, where I bought the book second-hand.

You don’t need to know much of anything about Communism or black metal to engage with the book. Not sure if the logo says anything…

Shout out to Torn Light Records of Chicago for having this book on their shelves. Great shop!

www.tornlightrecords.com

Bill Peel’s book “Tonight it’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics” is a response to a question few have asked: what can Communists learn from the social practices of the black metal scene?

There’s quite a lot!

Read my review of the book in this week’s installment of The Tall Rob Report.

YouTube video by Vinylist70 Upright Citizens - Bombs of peace

Might as well add “Bombs of Peace” by UPRIGHT CITIZENS:

“I'm fed up with East and West
They always just waste their breath
And we will die in atomic heat
When we don't stop what we don't need
Stop their bombs of peace”

Add some music to your day…

Listen to “Heartbeats” by The KNIFE and the read what I had to say about it.

YouTube video by The Knife The Knife - Heartbeats (Official Video)

This video is pretty great, too!

thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-...

Add some music to your day…

Listen to “Heartbeats” by The KNIFE and the read what I had to say about it.

ESPN notification: ESPN 2m ago FIFA to "monitor developments" in Iran following the outbreak of military action by the U.S. ahead of 2026 World Cup

An imperfect measure of the seriousness of this action is which apps tell you about it. Dreading a push notification from a banking app.

…

#iranscam

“It’s a bunch of fucking shit, man…”

YouTube video by Kenpachi Zaraki United Mutation - Final Solution [EP] (1983)

He doesn't know what to say /
He doesn't know what to do /
If things are gonna get worse /
Might as well use the nukes

His public image /
Has lost its touch /
He can't wait for the bomb /
He wants it so much

YouTube video by migh The Possibility of Life's Destruction- Discharge

Can you hear the sound /
of an enormous door /
slamming in the depths of hell? /
The possibility of life's destruction

Can you hear the cries of pain /
the mournful sound? /
The possibility of life's destruction

Months later, you'll be working an office job that has a building-wide intranet where other nerds can share the MP3s they have added to their work computers. You can only seed five listeners at a time, so if you have a cool music library, others need to call dibs on it fast or they will be unable to share your bounty. Most users have created screen names, but others keep the generic First Name Last Name's Library as their identity. You can learn a lot about a person through what they're willing to share of their music collection publicly. You'll get a warning when you are signing off for the day that will let you know you are cutting someone off if you close your connection while a user is still active. We've all been on the other side of that disconnection. Given that these files are from various sources, you'll get the usual improperly tagged metadata during your searches. You would never be so careless with your own files. That annoyance won't stop you from checking out "Track 01" by The KNIFE on a colleague's account one morning in the summer.

Part of exploring this song and the place it holds in my memory involved describing the way we shared music via “streaming” over the corporate intranet at that job.

thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-...

Screenshot of an iTunes Player from 2009 showing “Heartbeats” by The KNIFE having been played 448 times and the live version 92 times.

One measure of “favoriteness” is that I played it incessantly once it came into my life. Here’s a screenshot of my iTunes Player from the job I had at the time. I could easily spend whole afternoons with this two-song playlist on repeat.

Weather’s nice.

Reposting a blog about “my favorite song” and exploring what that phrase means.

It’s not a springtime / nice weather song necessarily, but it fits the mood this Friday at 4PM when it is nearly 60°F in the greater Chicagoland area.

I dunno, I had to do an appropriate amount of backtracking to make sense of the sentence before powering up my comprehension to 100% its meaning…

This is not how meaning-making works, as the article makes clear. But it *is* the thought process of people who claim that AI will write books or interpret text. They mistake getting questions correct on a multiple-choice test about a book for genuine insight about the text.

LLMs are designed with an orientation to writing that is based on the idea that the one true meaning of a text sits “like a prize at the bottom of a cereal box” because that is how programmers view reading, intelligence, comprehension, etc. They think a text’s meaning can be reduced to data.

This is an excellent job of explaining *why* AI-written papers fall short of providing thoughtful analysis. LLMs don’t have experiences & emotions & motivations to draw from. As Parker states in the portions I’ve highlighted, this “idiosyncratic thinking” is how we make meaning from text.

Absolutely! I’ll be standing back to back with you on that hill so you don’t die alone

YouTube video by sieslik87 Handsome - Dim The Lights

And HANDSOME isn’t too bad either. First time I became aware of the greatness of Tom Capone.

Unfulfilled, by Quicksand from the album Quicksand

Easily Tom Capone’s most famous band. “Slip” is an all-timer LP for sure.