SACRED CAUSES - read and repost
I blogged this yesterday but I did it right before Myspace had some problems so I don't think it came up as a blog at all....I'll try again
I am moved today to blog after reading Michael Burleigh's "Sacred Causes". An extraordinary book by all accounts. A provoking look at religions influence and interference over the 20th century, blessed with a razor sharp and insightful view of the world Burleigh doesn't suffer fools and doesn't mind slaying a few sacred cows. I would recommened you all read it if you can.
Chapter one deals with the immediate aftermath of the Great War and the tone fit's almost seamlessly to the concept of To The Nameless Dead. Musing over the influence and place within a greiving society that had lost almost 10 million on mainland Europe of memorials and cenotaphs . He talks of the traffic whizzing around the Arc De Triomphe, the pace of modern life squeezing the sacrifices of our ancestors out of our conscience. The romanticism that the memorial can embody, when the reality is mud, shit, lice, blood and blood letting on a scale that we cannot even imagine. Something I definitely try and avoid when writing lyrics, not massaging the details in favour of a sanitised and safe version of our history. Some of the same thought process' were in action on my travels through Europe and America over the last decade. The concept of the unknown soldier, memorials to grief and sacrifice that we seemed to ignore, their message lost. Their warning not heeded.
Recently I was visting a new museum in Dublin in Collin's barracks, dedicated in part to the contribution of Irish men and women to the Great War and World War II. A museum I would recommend if you are visiting here or live in Ireland and haven't had the time to visit. Irish museums often seemed a hastily cobbled together affair but this one is succint and excellently laid out. However one moment definied my visit and forced me to reflect upon my own mortality more then any other. You can access a database, enter your family name if they have served during WWI and II and within seconds get information on their place of birth, age, regiment, and more significantly place of burial. Stark and cold I got the names of my great grandfathers brother who had died in the Somme. Aged 18. Other relatives who had served in other regiments, born streets apart. Moments of clarity, moments when you know your place better in the world, when whatever you consider to be hardship in your life almost trivial.
I have my detractors from both the left and right, people who make assumptions based upon hearsay. People who baulk at the subject matter of Primordial. Consider my constant mantra that we are Art and not entertainment somehow arrogant and self serving. Only in a society as rootless as this, as fat and bloated on decadence and celebrity, 3 minute culture could people be so shallow. I am not naive enough to believe that music is the instrument of change it once was but I am proud to go against the grain and believe me the mainstream metal scene needs bands like us. Making a stand in our own way, warts and all and of course privy to the most human collapses and failures now and again but at least bare in our honesty. To me at least, anything less would be a disservice to a relative who died in the blood, filth and shit nearly 100 years ago. This is one of the few ways I can speak for him and speak for his kind. For your kind if you scratch the surface of your history...the concept is universal.
"that is about appalling, superhuman exhaustion, about water up to your belly and about mud, dung and repulsive filth. It is about moulding faces and shredded flesh and corpses that do not even look like corpses anymore, floating on the greedy earth. It is this infinite monotony of miseries, interrupted by sharp, sudden dramas. That is what it is - not the bayonet glittering, like silver or the bugle's call in the sunlight !" Barbusse
It may sound trivial talking about Metal after that but that is my medium, Primordial is not my soapbox, I am not a preacher but I have to try and say something about my relationship to the world. If/When I have children and they pick up a copy of TTND in 15 years and see what it was I spent such a great portion of my energy and waking moments on I know I can be proud I tried to say something...could I say look my children in the eye and say I wasted my opportunity writing about angels, unicorns or zombies ?.....
It's often I look with dismay at the state of the modern metal scene, calculated and plastic, little different to corporate boy and girl bands. Of course I am not naive to ever believe it was that different but it was wasn't it ?...there is a grain of truth there. Surely it cannot have ever been so damn safe, so toothless and hollow in the mainstream ?. Where is the adrenalin rush, the violence, aggression, darkness, the filth and blood under your fingernails. Making a stand albeit often a reactionary one but honest just the same against society ?. Maybe we have no more want in the first world and metal is just another coffee table accessory for musical hobbyists who treat everything in terms of irony and self aggrandisement. Drowning in a slew of female fronted gothic slush and perfectly coiffured and tattooed scenesters straight off the factory line...
It may sound like an irony to be blogging such a rant on myspace, which is often the very root of the non linear and instant nature of many of the kids into Metal now. Who have no more interest in finding out the roots and history of the rather average bands who profit most it. However it would be somewhat pointless me using a sword when a gun is in the next drawer right ?.
The real honest metal being made out there today is in the underground, just look for it, don't get fed the party line without thinking. If you are starting a band, look into your own history, your own culture. Don't become Meditteranean or Pacific Vikings, run aground on the shores of convention and your own stitled imagination. Open yourself up and make a stand for something...you may never get another opportunity.
Vae Victis
Nemtheanga
"have you news of my boy Jack ?
Not this tide.
'When d'you think that he'll come back ?'
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide...
'Oh dear, what comfort can I find ?'
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did no shame his kind -
Not even with that blowing, and that tide.
R. Kipling
- 'A cold wind it is blowing, through the Graves it is blowing...'