… or in punk parlance, “sellouts” amirite?
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Well, I"m not making any assertions in those questions… I do agree that the origins of punk are much less white than the scene eventually evolved into. It seems like it’s a similar process to what happened with rock, yeah? And we can’t ignore that very real white power movement that morphed out of punk, either. But that can be driven by the mass media, as you suggest.
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And Megaran.
Metal gets my vote. Even black metal is white.
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This is a wildly unfair characterisation, but metal always struck me as goth for nerds who were afraid of appearing gay.
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To me metal is very reminiscent of classical in that it is primarily focused on pointless virtuosity. Solos that are hard as fuck to play but that don’t actually sound that good. It’s the music of those who don’t know what to do with their time.
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Well, except metal predates goth by a good decade or so.
Speaking of which, how white is goth? I’ve known some non-white goths, but it seems to me a pretty white subculture - sometimes even actively so. Thoughts?
- Google “goth image”
- Take first hit
- Sample colour from circled area
And the answer is: #ffffff
Literally white
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I ran across this article this weekend, which speaks to some of this:
Why am I not surprised?
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I have known quite a few black punks, goths, and metalheads. Even though they are still not a huge part of the demographic.
Has nobody actually mentioned polka yet?
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White white white white white. Undead pallid white.
Back in my goth days, the closest thing we had to a non-white person was one Westernised Indian girl.
Goth was prog meets punk meets New Romantic. Bowie crossed with Floyd crossed with Duran Duran, heavily spiced with fast-burn junkie.
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I’m inclined to agree, though my music scholarship is neither deep nor broad.
I would love to be turned on to some black metal bands metal bands that are largely black.
God knows the talent is there. Out there somewhere, even if they never cross my (admittedly low-wattage) radar. Lloyd Grant sure blew my wig off when he joined Metallica onstage for their 30-year reunion, playing with them for the first time since he played on their very first demo.
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I understand – I wasn’t trying to say that, either. I was just offering counterevidence.
Absolutely – and so many other genres. Horray for #whitepeopleappropriation as usual.
This is true, and unfortunate. Of course as a counterexample, there have been (very positive) black power movements morphing out of punk as well (see also Afro-punk).
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There was Suicidal Tendencies as well. There were a ton of hispanic punks at my HS.
I think Metal, esp. Speed Metal/Death Metal and various other subgenres were the whitest I know of. Now I pay minimal attention, but I doubt things have changed much.
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Well, that strikes me as unnecessarily reductive and dismissive. There are, if anything, too many subgenres of metal, and there’s definitely a lot of weedly-weedly-wee wankery going on in a lot of it. There’s a reason why I’ve known who Yngwie is and have heard a bunch of his songs but have never been moved to buy a single record from him.
But not all high-technique shredding is devoid of soul and feeling. I’m not enough of a scholar to offer up a bunch of counterexamples, but there are definitely some musically affecting moments I’ve heard from the likes of Tipton & Downing from Judas Priest, Vivian Campbell in his days with Dio, Angus Young, Dimebag Darrell, Mustaine, Hammett, and even those chuckleheads in Dragonforce.
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My metal scholarship is shallow, too, but Sepultura would be a reference point, from Brazil.
For fun, though, cruising Wikipedia:
Black Sabbath: white.
Black Rose: white.
Black ’n’ Blue: white.
Black Widow: white.
Black Death: all African-American, formed around 1977.
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Do we have to limit “genres” to music… because I was just talking about “white nonsense” movies with friends and we concluded that “mid-life crisis man saved by young vagine” is the epitome of “white nonsense” genre.
(Do other ethnicities have mid-life crises like white men seem to? I have never seen or heard of it, at least not on film…)
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There do seem to be some very common heterosexual white guy ways of having one…
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