David Burke

Fat as a Shark by ACCEPT (body positivity)

As metal 'takes over the world', 'grows up' and 'gets legit',
it finds there is no Other to be,
that there is nothing behind the veil of radical alterity except ourselves having gone behind to see.

The drudgery of art is repressed through sublimation.

Not just the labour of creation, but all the hurry up and wait, sycophancy to scene darlings and pointless admin.

To consider these while appreciating a work is to dissolve any trace of aura, and the veil between consumer and producer.

screenshot of Instagram from the dyke project. It reads: Phone and email blockage 12pm - 5pm Thursday 12 December Tell Wes Streeting: Drop the puberty blockers ban! Parliamentary office number: 020 7219 6131 Constituency (Ilford North) number: 0203 475 7901 Email: wes.streeting.mp@parliament.uk

TODAY: phone & email blockade organised by the dyke project on wes streeting between 12pm and 5pm. everyone should be able to find some time today to send an email or make some phone calls. mass involvement is key

phone and email script available here: bit.ly/3ZyWGQ5

insta post: surl.li/cahdyn

These academic writers, enough with the romanticism already! So many articles where [insert popular music culture] is the 'answer' to a social problem - ain't that convenient?

Seeing bands I love doesn't change me enough / rolls over me like a new rug / neither side wholly recognised

the impasse takes action's place / I try to read the singer's face / inscrutable, nothin belied

But I know what you did / and what I've got coming / the band played on / and kept on numbing

What's Left of Metal authors confirmed, including:

@benburgis.bsky.social Melissa Vincent @tcoleswords.bsky.social

And more - 13 papers in total (had to be). Edited by myself and @mikerwatson.bsky.social.

Thank you everyone who submitted. We're aiming for a late '25/early '26 publication.

We should attack our own sites of enjoyment. Regarding self-critique, they are our blind spots.

Discover how to enjoy not enjoying. Not this "get comfortable with getting uncomfortable" - it still implies comfort.

Just get uncomfortable. This is basically the Ethic of the Real (Zupancic).

I say it every year: Spotify Wrapped and AOTY lists are a neurotic response to the postmodern cultural superego, which commands that you ENJOY.

The administration and quantification of enjoyment is profoundly dispiriting to me.

Don't "just enjoy it", find a better way to enjoy than doing stats.

Pissing and changing the lyrics of the Foo Fighters song to My Urine

Quality is a necessary but insufficient component of culture in an attention economy.

Constancy of content however, that's what gets results.

It was always like this ofc - but in the past institutions (e.g. labels) mediated it. Money talked more.

Now you have to talk too.

Talk like the money.

Who made my ironic reactionary mate Zohar so woke?

Expanding the range of additional instruments Absent Signifier bring to our gigs, so the audience can join in.

Got a melodica last week, two tin whistles (C and D) arrived this morning.

Gonna get some metal kazoos next.

FREE METAL IS VERY ANNOYING.

Due to being a) an academic and b) more of a Communist than an Anarchist, I am announcing my full and continued collaboration with the Homework Inspection Corps

writing is reading one book and three articles to achieve one subordinate clause

The trend of making "uplifting" or "hopeful" extreme metal is a sign of its normalisation.

In some cases this is welcome, beautiful art with good ethics etc.

But the overall effect is not merely to "castrate" metal's transgressivity, but to reduce it to art therapy - something with a use-value.

I think it's notable that all of these examples are easily received by hegemonic white masculinity, they all reify that grouping as being normatively cool and fun.

By contrast indie or extreme metal highlight how "ordinary guys" are actually weirdos and greebos.

Being an august man of letters really takes it out of you

Metal is getting more normal everyday.

Harshes and blasts on the telly, AGAIN?

Victory for the left is, in Stirner's terms, a spook.

Don't worry about winning, which would allow the left to rest - the left is never completed, so winning permanently is a Utopian fantasy.

BORN TO LOSE.

I feel like the undying legacy of the Rat Pack (divorced dad rock of an older era) is involved too

What bands count as such

The ambiguity caused by out-of-court settlement is the means by which artists like MM, Michael Gira, Tool etc. achieve plausible deniability from their fans POV.

It doesn't look innocent at all if you pay attention. But if you don't, the case recedes from view, allowing a RESUMPTION OF CONSUMPTION.

Researching and reporting my story about how truly horrible Facebook has become genuinely rattled me, and changed how I looked at the internet permanently. It's important to understand how messed up they are.

www.wheresyoured.at/killingfaceb...

Apps would need to be public property to have that affect perhaps

We need the kind of people who (used to) run public utilities to run popular apps. The kind of people who are content to keep something going so you can take it for granted. The problem is that social media doesn't actually need the constant disruption that tech people love.

Renaming drinking to Wetting the Entrance, renaming pissing to Wetting the Exit

My favourite listen of this year (shouted out of my car window the most) is Hit the North by the Fall.

"Those big big wide streets
Those useless MPs
Savages... (Hit the North!)"

The ambiguity is masterful. Absent Signifier do a ruined cover (Shit the North) with no ambiguity. Track 2 on bandcamp.

The work of critique is never done, and never will be.

Plenty heinous acts happen at home. As Zizek inverts Hannah Arendt, it is not the banality of evil we should worry about, but the evil of banality.

Rage, rage against the ever-dying light.

There are even Orthodox and Progressive movements of Satanists.

No faith properly sees how their schisms are the motion of Spirit - an argument between folk producing new culture. Most often people seem to double down at a schism, become more convinced of their rectitude.

Scission be my god...