#maybe it was specifically like 'latine heritage month shows' or something but

[comas-are-for-sleeping]

wait also NOTE: i fucking LOVE that there is such a growing group of rep now, like u said podcasts (i.e. tma the beloved??? or at least the fandom idk??? where did the poc fanart come from like is that canon is it hcs) and like COMICS (like squire and the well etc!!!) and just. SO many things dude!!!! and los espookys as well!!!! it's just so cool that there are so many things now

Yes!!! Things are happening I am so excited for the future!!!

Steven Universe trailblazer? hmm

[marcoshassanlevy]

In January 2001, Deftones played Hard Rock Live in Mexico City, selling out three dates. Half a year before, they had released their third album, White Pony, an album that dared to go places heavy music had not gone before and served as an excuse for them to visit Mexican territory—the biggest band from the nu metal genre at that point to do so. Inside, the crowd devoted themselves to the music coming from the stage; singer Chino Moreno spent the first couple of songs singing from the middle of the crowd, moshing and crowd-surfing with the band and losing his shoes in the process. Many fans had been waiting for this moment for years, but for every explosion of distortion that prompted the crowd in slam-dancing motions, every one of the songs from their latest album—overall lush and slow-moving—was greeted with screaming singalongs. For all the Mexican fans present in those three nights, they were their band playing complex introspective music that erupted in the heaviest riffs possible. The future of heavy music was quiet, dissonant, and seductive, and young fans were all for it. Twenty years after the release of the album, it remains a milestone of guitar music.

In many ways, Deftones’ importance to nu metal is gigantic, but nu metal’s importance to Deftones is almost null. Formed by vocalist Camilo “Chino” Moreno, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, bassist Chi Cheng, and drummer Abe Cunningham, Deftones debuted in 1995 with Adrenaline. The band soon shared a friendship, influences, and musical sensibilities with Korn, who themselves began their recording career the previous year. Together, they synthesized a mixture of metal, hip-hop, and alternative music that inspired legions of bands that soon infiltrated the mainstream. While Korn put their effort on eye-grabbing videos and catchy (if impossibly heavy) songs, Deftones expanded their sonic palette with 1997’s Around the Fur. By the time White Pony was released, the genre had become a presence on MTV’s TRL and radio, popularized by Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, and Kid Rock–who all exploited the worst qualities of the music. Instead of trying to capitalize on their pioneer status of the genre, Deftones decided to break with the tag altogether.

Nu metal’s huge popularity owed its ability to sell anger to a young audience, but this proved to be its undoing. Korn made their mark by singing frank, straight-forward lyrics about abuse, sometimes dramatized with throat-destroying screams and heavy-as-shit breakdowns—a model soon adopted by most nu metal practitioners. Anger at abusers and figures of power were sometimes coupled with rage against vulnerable groups like women and LGBTQ people, weaponizing hatred and intolerance in the process. With White Pony, Deftones broke away from anger. Sure, they could still play downtuned riffs with the best of them and Moreno’s screams were some of the most intense in the game, but they were not pronouncing words of hate or retaliation. Deftones showed a new level in which feelings could be expressed in a more nuanced way without sacrificing excitement in their music.

Just a year after Limp Bizkit hit it big with a song called “Nookie,” White Pony tapped into a hedonistic energy that had been absent for much of the history of heavy metal, doing away with juvenile humor, clichés, and predatory and abusive language. Moreno could play a seductive and often submissive figure in his lyrics while the music reflected the sentiment through layered, dimly-lit hallucinatory elegance, which was contrasted by atmospheric (if crushing) power chords in the choruses and aided by the incorporation of turntablist and keyboardist Frank Delgado. Album opener “Feiticeira” is the prime example of this, setting the mood right away, while “Digital Bath” searches for desire in dark corridors. Lyrically, “Change (In The House Of Flies)” taps into both Kafka and Cronenberg while evoking an Eyes Wide Shut mood in the video, (also worth noting: the b-side to the single release was a cover of Sade’s “No Ordinary Love”). The voyeuristic “Passenger” is sung in a duet with Tool/A Perfect Circle frontman Maynard James Keenan, a car sex fantasy that gives us implied homoerotism without it being cartoonish. The BDSM fever dream that is “Knife Party” finds it’s pleasure through dissonance, climaxing with guest vocalist Rodleen Getsic channeling Diamanda Galás, who performs an opera of shrieks and moans into probably their most virtuosic moment on record. It’s not that the band forgot their roots, though; songs like “Korea,” “Street Carp,” and “Elite” (the latter which earned them a Grammy award) were some of the heaviest in their career.

After its release, White Pony hit big commercially but didn’t cross into 7-digit territory like Korn and Limp Bizkit were doing at the time. Hearing potential in the album’s slow burning closer “Pink Maggit,” their label commissioned the band to record another version of the track. As far as attempts to cash-in go, “Back To School” is probably the best outcome; it’s one of the few rap rock songs that are still listenable in 2020. “Back To School” is a flex, a way for them to tell their contemporaries how rap rock should be done at a time when so many newcomers were trying their luck. Deftones, the OG’s, sent them “back to school,” yet it’s anything but aggressive. The lyrics read as a reaffirmation of self-worth. It’s not angry at all. Maybe that’s why it didn’t top the charts.

While the sound of White Pony was multilayered and their lyrics abstract and evocative, fans could still get a primal kick out of their music. It invited fans to invest themselves into something deeper which could be a reason why it has been so influential ever since. The mainstream rock style that replaced nu metal in the charts, mid-00s emo, took many notes from White Pony; future metal festival headliners like Mastodon were also listening to their arty infusion of heavy riffs with melody. It kicked open a door for newer metal and hardcore bands to incorporate music that was previously deemed not heavy enough to belong in the genre; and in recent years, their sounds have found their way to Soundcloud rap and modern trap.

For Latinx fans, Deftones showed them that you didn’t need to be white to be innovators. White Pony introduced the band to a wider audience in Latin America, although the band never fully embraced their heritage. Speaking to NPR in 2016, Moreno said, “[When we formed], the majority of the kids in the neighborhood weren’t into rock and roll or skateboarding, so we kind of came together, and as we grew up together we realized there was nothing really like us; not in our neighborhood, not in our town […] Early on there was [sic] a lot of people who would always bring up our race and say things like, ‘You guys are Mexican dudes, and you’re playing heavy metal. Is that weird?’ [Laughs] I never thought it was weird at all, but I guess from the neighborhood standpoint we were the only kids doing that. I just figure that music is universal, or at least it’s always been that way to me. But I definitely did feel like we were doing something that was our own.” This is exactly why Deftones resonate with their Latinx fans. Many other kids were the only ones with similar interests in their neighborhoods, and they showed them that they also could play music that was challenging and far-reaching and that you could also skate to it. White Pony remains a massive album because it recognizes the universality in the specifics, that pretentiousness can be reeled in to express honest emotion.

White Pony has also kept Deftones an active and beloved band. It cemented their sound that has allowed them to release brilliant albums in the past two decades and remain on the touring circle. Unfortunately, they lost Chi Cheng to a car accident in 2013, but have soldiered on with former Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega. They even started their own festival called Día De Los Deftones, which could mean they are ready to show some pride in their roots.

When people talk about nu metal, Deftones are the band most people tend to agree on. In a few months they will re-release this record with a companion remix album called Black Stallion and are working on new music, still inspired and breaking down walls. Still conjuring fever dreams of horses in the house of flies.

Wednesday, June 24, 2020 at 9:37 AM EDT

[theliterateape]

Meetings with Mayonnaise and White People

by Don Hall

There’s no question that following WWII Communism was a legitimate threat to the United States. Global positioning of military, spies on both sides, nuclear domination was at stake. It was a scary time. Intertwined with the anger and fear was a pernicious thread within that, in response to the national angst, in turn poisoned the reasonable fear with demagoguery. Born from that was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

There is no question today that the time has come for the United States to deal fairly and effectively with the demonization and wholesale deprivation of black Americans in our country. Both the stories we hear and the data we parse through is a damning indictment of righteous laws written only to be enforced by the bigots who fought so hard against them.

It is hard, however, to see a cause so fundamentally right and long overdue be intertwined with demagoguery.

You’ve recommended Robin DiAngelo’s book on white fragility but you haven’t read it, have you? You regularly use the terms “systemic racism” and “anti-racist” but you haven’t waded through any of Derrick Bell or Ibram X. Kendri, amiright?

When it comes to Critical Race Theory, I was an early adopter. I dove into Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well in 1997. At the time I thought it was interesting but flawed and good red meat philosophy for the college campus.

By 2016 I was twice divorced and living with an avowed anti-racist activist whose godfather was 1960’s radical revolutionary Bill Ayers. I saw America and specifically white Americans as fundamentally racist.

Following the third of three blow out breakups with her I had what was to be my final mentoring lunch with The Moth’s resident Latina storyteller.

“Racist is a term that includes anyone benefitting from a racist system,” I mentioned as the conversation turned to Chicago’s history of gentrification. “Bigotry is individual but all white Americans are racist by definition.”

“Even you?” she asked.

“I’m white so, by definition, I’m racist. I don’t think I’m a bigot, though.”

A month or so later, after coming to the fact that her own personal insecurities and need for a following had sent her head first into a path of radical indoctrination, I unfriended her on social media. All hell broke loose. She had people call and text me with threats of violence. She manufactured several fake Facebook accounts, had them engage her real account with insults, and then claimed I had created the fake accounts. She posted a video of her emoting heavily over the fakeness of my friendship.

One of her most potent missives to her following went something like this:

Don Hall is a racist! He even admitted it to me!! He is a confessed racist!!

I should’ve seen it coming.

Now, if this were the fifties, the HUAC could’ve branded me a communist or at least a communist sympathizer.

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” 

“No, sir.”

“Have you ever read the works of Karl Marx?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you ever attended a meeting with communists?”

“No meetings -“

“Parties?”

“Parties...?”

“Yes. Meetings with alcohol. And communists.”

“...yeah...”

This guilt-by-association thing was the most damning and pervasive aspect of the HUAC and led to blacklisting, careers destroyed, terrified citizens quickly falling to their knees in supplication and naming names to avoid the stigma of being labeled a Commie.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines McCarthyism as "the political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence." No one subpoenaed by the HUAC was ever convicted of being communist but a fair number were fined and jailed for refusing to play along. With the definition of who was or was not a communist being so open-ended and ill-defined, only those who either declared their fealty to anti-communism or named names were spared.

My guess is that if Senator Joseph McCarthy had had a Twitter account, his damage to the individual lives he publicly destroyed would’ve been a thousand times worse.

Mind you, the #BlackLivesMatter organization has very specific goals and outline them clearly. The Racial HUAC does not include them or, I’d suggest, the vast majority of those out there in protest.

Several arguments today, in the McCarthyism in Blackface, do their best to minimize the damage done. 

There is the thread that claims that those who are publicly accused of racism who then are fired from long-held jobs are just fine. Losing a job isn’t the end of the world, it is argued. I’d argue you go back and stream “The Front,” “Trumbo,” or “Good Night and Good Luck” and tell yourself how fine these people have it.

There is the claim that, in these sorts of cultural shifts, there is always some collateral damage. The term “collateral damage” comes from the Viet Nam conflict as a way to dehumanize and minimize the killing of non-combatants (also a dehumanizing term meaning “innocent people”) and accidental destruction of non-military property. The idea of there being collateral damage in the current culture shift is nice and abstract unless you are the collateral being damaged.

The troubles with our current cultural push is in exactly the lack of specifics and false justifications. Mind you, the #BlackLivesMatter organization has very specific goals and outline them clearly. The Racial HUAC does not include them or, I’d suggest, the vast majority of those out there in protest. While these protests represent a tiny slice of the population (polls suggest that the serious majority of Americans trust the police force and have no interest whatsoever in abolishing it; they are more in tune with the idea of substantive reform) the effect of these marches are showing some measure of progressive gain.

The RHUAC is motivated to upend the power dynamic completely and their means is in a definitive lack of specifics.

Structural racism is both quantifiable and data-proven. Organizational bylaws, economic measures taken, the laws of the land. Corporate hiring practices, diversity initiatives, and funding of public schools. These are structural and we can fix these things.

Systemic racism means that everything in the system of society is racist by default. It is racism in the gaps much like God’s will is divinity in the gaps. Prior to the Enlightenment, when someone couldn’t explain why something happened or offer proof one way or another, it was boiled down to Divine Providence. The Will of God.

Today, when something cannot be explained in terms of racial disparity, it is boiled down to systemic racism. White people are racist so anything that demonstrates a different outcome from black people (and strangely absent from disparities between Latin and Asian people) is, by default, racist.

For example, a common stereotype is that while white people generally prefer mayonnaise, black people generally prefer mild sauce. No big deal. Maybe it indicates that whites are more bland in their condiment choices while black people like things a bit spicier. Under the Derrick Bell theory, this is due specifically to white supremacy. How? Who the fuck knows aside from any difference between whites and blacks is automatically racist.

OK. You didn’t read any of Bell’s work. Here’s a quick breakdown of a few central tenets of his worldview:

Critical Race Theory believes racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction and therefore has its advocates look for it everywhere. He posits a theory called “interest convergence” which states that reforms in the supremicist system are only created for black people when they also benefit white people thus no reform instigated by whites is to be trusted.

According to Bell science, reason, and evidence are a “white” way of knowing and that storytelling and lived experience is a “black” alternative. Pointing out logical exceptions to that lived experience is a sure sign of systemic racism.

As I wrote earlier, it’s a rather brilliant narrative frame. The RHUAC doesn’t have to define any behavior as racist or not because everything is racist when white. Everything. 

“Are you now or have you ever been a racist?” 

“No, sir.”

“Have you ever attended a meeting with white people?”

“Sure —“

“Parties?”

“Parties...?”

“Yes. Meetings with mayonnaise. And white people.”

“...yeah...mayonnaise...?”

“Are you white?”

In the 1950s most Americans were easily manipulated by the fear of Communism. In schools, children learned to “duck and cover.” The Red Scare was pushed on national media and the blind terror of bucking the system and refusing to play along with the game of public accusations of subversion was too great. This was a threat to the American Way of Life, they were told. Commies could be your next door neighbor, they were told. And they believed.

Today we are faced with another manipulation that far too many right thinking people are buying — that “white” equals “racist” without regard to behavior. To be white is to be fully complicit which is both ludicrous and horrifying to consider. There is a cult mind at play with racial hucksters driving an unrelenting academic campaign to grab power through money and influence. No subpoenas necessary, no Congressional hearings.

I grew up watching the movies about McCarthy and his crusade. I’ve read the manifestos of the zealots behind the Red Scare. I’ve read the theories behind the White Scare. They’re too similar for me.