The World Is More Complex Than We Think

[Sukerkin]

I couldn't decide whether to put this link in the B&G or here in the Study. In the end, because the inherent material has political and religious conotations that might come out in subsequent posts, I decided that here was best:

http://www.ironmaiden.com/index.php?categoryid=8&p2_articleid=1010

I find it most heartening to read that Metal, like many forms of music, can transcend boundaries of all sorts.

I wonder what specific issues are being faced by metal fans in Islamic countries? Especially the girls, with the somewhat overtly sexual 'image' of rock chicks?

 

[exile]

One of the greatest disservices that psychology in the mid-20th century did for us was to try to convince us that the human mind is a blank slate that you can inscribe anything you like on with repeated cycles of punishment and reward, as though we were all just bipedal pigeons—something which the old Bolshevik regime, with its 'New Soviet Man' tried hard to implement, among with many other dictatorships. It can't be done, and this story about heavy metal as a kind of language of dissent, in places where symbolic behavior is everything, is a perfect example. You can't permanently turn people into mouthpieces of a particular creed. We're not social insects, even though we sometimes, maddeningly, act like it. The Middle Eastern states are some of the most repressive on earth, but what's happening here is exactly what happened with rock music in the pre-Glasnost Soviet empire, when Boris Gribenshikov and other heroic (there's no other word for it) young musical dissidents and rebels laid the foundations for a political community of resistance through rock.

In the end, I believe, no one can turn us into automata programmed with reactionary religious, social or political doctrines. We're better than that, and this kind of story is just one more illustration.