I had seen this linked all over the bookface but hadn't actually watched until now. I like it! Seems to have a lot more to do with industrial/EBM than metal per se, though. Those synths!
Babies are pretty metal. Angry, screechy, droning, relentless, hardcore.
I liked this song OK. The Asian metal scene is weird and incomprehensible. Why isn't there a Mishima themed Shinto/Samurai metal?
I never knew death metal could be so . . . kawaii.
God bless you, Japan.
The Japanese in the title is "Gimichoko".
That was fun. I must be miscalibrated because I didn't find it very weird.
4.2: This Mongolian folk metal is probably praising ancient war crimes, but it's catchy.
Wouldn't Cookie Monster vocals have actually been appropriate here?
9; Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Baby Metal.
I'm sure I saw a Youtube clip of a metal song about Kinder Eggs a long time back.
Anyway:
Fear of the Dark (Chocolate)
Christ, that is catchy. Since the cure for earworms is to complete the melody, I suspect these pop composers are deliberately including unresolved fragments in their songs. Even better if the fragment lends itself naturally to repeating.
Is this the music thread? My number 1 all time guitar hero is acting like a dick again.
I have this really old-fashioned theory of art that views it as an expression of emotion, which makes it harder for me to separate the art from the artist than other people. With all these dickheads running around, am I going to have to adopt a more "death of the author" kind of worldview to enjoy any kind of art in the future?
4.2 is a good question!
I liked this comment from the Tokyo Damage Report ages ago:
this was my first ever Japanese black metal show. Like all 'first times' there were surprises. The most surprising thing was, that it happened AT ALL. This is not a popular genre here. Also surprising: pretty much only nerds like it. A lot of short hair in the audience. A lot of glasses and backpacks and foreigners with pasty internet chatroom faces. Not like a punk show where the fans are pretty much as hard as the bands. The Japanese bands have this nice, '14 year old rocking out in his bedroom on haloween' quality, which make it kind of silly and yet honest at the same time. Plus, cloaks, cloaks, cloaks! Other east asian black metal bands (i.e. taiwan's CTHONIC and korea's OATHEAN) incorporate 'traditional, pagan' east asian instruments and melodies into their metal in an attempt to reconcile the contradictions of playing what's essentially white power music. They're like "well, we hate christians and modernity too, and we are also trying to reclaim the old gods of OUR countries too, so therefore there is a place in the black metal ideology for us."
This was japan, though, so there was none of that.
There is also such a thing as Tibetan glam rock.
The Asian metal scene is weird and incomprehensible
I'm pretty sure we can count on bob to show up and explain it to all of us.
The skeletons remind me of Les Têtes Brulées -- I can't seem to find a late 80s early 90s concert video, and must therefore pronounce the Internet a total failure. Log off and power down, friends.
4, 14:
Why isn't there a Mishima themed Shinto/Samurai metal?
I agree that you'd expect there to be, and why did the dog do nothing in the night? Interesting that there is a bit of a reaction, in this form in Korea and Taiwan but not Japan.
The images are there, in anime for instance, so full-blown romantic nationalism is somehow repressed in the forms you'd expect it to take, like Metal. They obviously read these symbols differently, and perhaps don't feel the need to bring it home, domesticate it that seems natural to us.
Why isn't there a Mishima themed Shinto/Samurai metal?
I have an impression consistent with 19: that overt expressions of nationalism/traditionalism/right-wing irredentism have been compressed into particular spaces in Japanese public life -- i.e., that, as much as a certain rough coalition might dismiss foreign complaints about the PM visiting Yasukuni, public opinion would not be all that enthusiastic about somebody trying the Mishima-as-rock-star thing.
I like how it's logically deducible from first principles, independent of any visual or aural evidence, that this must come from Japan. It's a new example of a synthetic a priori truth.
One of the biggest bands in Taiwan is Chthonic, who are nationalistic and history-based but also very anti-war. Winning multiple Golden Melody Awards is pretty impressive for a band that sounds like Cradle of Filth and has snappy song titles like "Forty-Nine Theurgy Chains".
overt expressions of nationalism/traditionalism/right-wing irredentism consist largely of old guys with truck-mounted loudspeakers parking in random places and making loud speeches to the annoyance of pretty much everyone else. Mishima's not popular among the mainstream; I got the impression that people thought he was a nutcase, and that his books were unappealing (and stylistically Western, as opposed to, say, Kawabata's).
Not like a punk show where the fans are pretty much as hard as the bands.
In my limited experience, this was true in Japan to the extent that the bands weren't very hard. The Blue Hearts, for example, were superficially punk but played tuneful poppy stuff. At the one show of theirs I went to, the only punks were loutish American servicemen who were crashing into Japanese fans with enthusiasm that looked a bit too much like racist hostility.
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I have a serious question, if not a very interesting one: what does "project manager" mean? What does one do? Does it just mean "I am not a fuckup and can do stuff" or is it actually something specific?
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24: It's an actual specific job. PMs are responsible for tracking everyone's progress, keeping track of deadlines, and coordinating the various groups working on a project. (Among other things.) How come?
No real reason. I read a lot of job ads and whenever I read "project manager" I wonder because it sounds like "Thing Doer."
We had a couple of project managers for clients once. It did seem to be a real job that was quite separate from being an engineer but it also seemed that there was not always a very good selection mechanism for making sure that the engineers who got the project-manager jobs had the exact skillset you need to be a project manager as opposed to an engineer.
I've done project management as a primary role. It's a pretty interesting, tricky job with a lot of moving parts that is often done (in software) by numbskulls. In construction it's really serious, and very difficult, somewhat akin to a line producer on a big movie.
Project Dinosaur Flies in Boston. 30 years ago.
A manager of any abstraction is usually a people manager as well, so the job comes with all those management-skills pitfalls as well as the question of how well you deal with implementing plans in the real world. I tend to confuse projects, products and programs. It all seems really context dependent.
On 13: yeah, one of my favorite musical artists, who seemed by ALL accounts like one of the kinder and more enlightened human beings on the planet, killed himself last year and left a wife and two relatively young children. I check in with the FB fan group from time to time and his widow often shows up to post things. She is just so sad; was clearly still head over heels in love with him after 16 years of marriage. This isn't the sort of thing Jezebel would ever hassle anyone about to rack up pageviews, but man, this poor woman seems so much more miserable and damaged than Kim Gordon is.
I feel like I reached a point of enlightenment about it on the train the other night, of really understanding how people can make bad decisions after good ones and move from a position of moral strength to one of weakness, how complex the interdependencies are between something like the art you make and something like the actions you take in your personal life, by no means mostly-congruent or mostly-dissociated. It was lovely and I forgave the world its sins. I think I've forgotten most of it again. I was a wise and good person and then mysteriously became an ignorant asshole again, wonder of wonders...
I don't know what to tell you except a) don't hate Thurston Moore and b) if you're using him as a shorthand/rebus for any kind of virtue, stop. Guitars, anyway, are completely indifferent to virtue and vice, until your cigarette sets the headstock on fire or such.
The University of Alaska Anchorage has a department of Project Management (part of the engineering school). It's in the same mall where I go for my Yup'ik class, so I walk by it all the time.
Also, many of my cow-orkers have "Project Manager" as an official job title. It's pretty accurate as a description of what they do, which is managing construction projects funded by grants from our agency.
I was kvetching with a friend about job listings and interviews and the fact that everything is made out to be so fucking specific and un-generalize-able. Don't apply if you haven't used this recently invented piece of software that you could be trained on in five days! I think I've been passed over for a job closely related to what I did for the last 6.5 years and my gut hunch is it's because they asked if I knew much about specific dual diagnosis programs in the area and I had asked around and come up with some names of regular programs but had to answer "no, I don't" about dual diagnosis programs.
32: Yep. One more sign of how it's still a buyer's market for labor. Thanks, recession.
4 isn't actually true; most metalheads do actually have a sense of humour (even if it's on the level of posing for your band's album cover with the brainmatter of your late bandmember still covering the wall behind you) and aren't offended by this.
Also \,,/\,,/
30.4 and .5 are wonderful. Don't think nobody's reading.
this poor woman seems so much more miserable and damaged than Kim Gordon is
Oh, Kim's better off without him. We totally want mom to get custody of is in the divorce.
This is, their solo careers have totally followed the directions they were going in the band. In Body/Head Kim has taken on all the avant-garde aspects of Sonic Youth, while Thurston and and Chelsea Light Moving gets more psychedelic. This definitely creates a Lennon/McCartney problem where they were musically stronger together than apart.
In construction it's really serious, and very difficult, somewhat akin to a line producer on a big movie.
I'd really like to figure out what the (PBS?) documentary/show was that followed the construction of a building in lower Manhattan (IIRC). It really brought home the challenges of getting all the right stuff there in the right order. It was excellent.
my kids like this OK-ish, but still not as much as metal vocaloid tunes from gumi or ren kagamine or IA or hatsune miku dark. this last is not a flavor of chocolate but a better, lower range for vocaloid 01, who tends to 'sing' TOO HIGH. the girls think this babymetal is a little bit novelty act. I want the suits the band has got on. and to teach that 8-year-old how to air guitar better.
28, 37: The proper (or lack thereof) appreciation of project management on the IT side of our biz has been one of my grinding axes lo these past 20*+ years. Actually, the business system/application deployment side has gotten much better it (we do very little "software development" per se), but infrastructure still often struggles. I still have too many discussions along the lines of "The fact that Farnsworth is the subject-matter expert in the area means he'd be a great technical consultant to the project, or even lead technical resource, but he is the absolute wrong choice to be the project manager."
*The frustrating/ironic thing was that as a heavy manufacturing company we had a lot of the quite serious kind of project management expertise within the larger organization. For instance, I had been part of an extremely logistically-complex in-place upgrade of a half-century old manufacturing facility. So you had all the major construction stuff plus all of the how to minimize impact on production during the transition aspects. It led me to write a short paper twenty years ago for the relevant VP describing "The Global Information Factory." The whole punchline was "therefor treat the systems upgrade with the same level of seriousness as you do plant upgrades". He mentioned it positively at some gathering I was at, but I did not see it reflected in his behavior and decisions so i don't think it worked. But as I said above, it has improved, if unevenly.
Inspired by this post, I listened to part of Black Sabbath's eponymous debut album last night by way of a sociological/historical investigation. I made it about 4 songs in before I gave up. Just too ridiculous. Amazing that something like that created such a durable genre. And I *like* a lot of metal. It just happens to have silly, incongruous roots, like a goth in Minnesota.
All of that said, my experience of "project manager" jobs as advertised is that they vary significantly in the level of sophistication (and credentials) expected. But on one level it all bois down to "make sure shit gets done correctly, on time and on budget, when you aren't the one doing the actual shit (nor do you usually have the actual shit-doers formally reporting to you)". Credentials can be either generic, such as from the PMI (Project Managment Institute), or industry-specific--here is a UC-Berkeley extension program for construction.
Can you say "Gantt chart"? Sure you can.
I am finding the interleaving of comments on project management (which is pretty much anti-Metal) and Metal to be faintly amusing.
35: thanks, I'm touched.
36: yeah, I am going to see Body/Head in a few weeks and wasn't impressed with the tune I heard. (Incidentally: anyone else going to be there, by any chance, or otherwise in Knoxville/knowledgeable about same?) I can't tell if you're being dismissive with the line about mom and custody, but of course. My point was more to sympathize with your conflicted feelings than to preach about them being misplaced, but I can't handle tension and resolve it with sententious babble as quickly as I can.
op: first time tragedy, second time farce.
for some reason reminds me of sleigh bells version of dance punk.
natilo: were you stoned? I think you might be better able to appreciate how fucking awesome sabbath is if you had been stoned. wicked stoned. falling out of your damn chair sideways stoned. thai stick stoned. or maybe you were stoned, and you weren't able to make rational judgments about how fucking totally awesome sabbath is? being as how you were too stoned to know right from wrong and shit, but just stoned enough to know that the entennman's chocolate cake that has white marshmallow frosting and then chocolate cake crumbles on it is the absolute shizznit? I'm just throwing ideas out here. no, f'real, it's kind of like 'inagaadavida' had spawned a huge important musical movement--you're a little like, 'this? really y'all? this?' because its not like you can take ozzy seriously exactly. but then...fuck that, man, sabbath rules. I think one of the main things preventing my conversion to halfordismo is his heretical adherence to dioism.