Engine

HEAVY METAL HIPPIES

Part 2: The ENVIRONMENT

In my last installation of Heavy Metal Hippies I attempted to explain why vegetarian/veganism is a normal thing in Black Metal because that music is all about hating humanity and loving the things that humanity kills and disregards. So it's only natural that Black Metal takes up the cause of environmentalism.


The above picture depicts a member of Wolves in the Throne Room who are well-known hippies. Much has already been said about this idea so I now refer you to a blog post called Environ-Metal: Where green is the new black, the name of which I swear I did not intentionally rip off. But rather than blather on endlessly about BM bands that are hippie environmentalists, I suggest you read that little blog post. If you are unwilling to read that much, a short recap is basically that Scandinavian bands pioneered the idea with songs like "Into the Mighty Forest" by Satyricon. And, as tends to happen, subsequent metal bands took up the cause with more intensity.

My personal musical taste has gravitated me closer to the USBM hippies like Agalloch (Oregon) and Panopticon (Kentucky). Here's some of their stuff:

Here's a nice little Agalloch tune called 'Our Fortress is Burning...II - Bloodbirds' from their Ashes Against the Grain album. It's lyrics don't begin until halfway through the song and they aren't nearly as overtly environmental as some of their others but you get the point.


When I think about metal environmentalism I like to imagine eco-terrorists who bomb ski lodges and put huge nails in trees so that loggers will have their chainsaws backfire on them. Now that's metal. But, like all good environmentalists, Agalloch are against this sort of extreme activism. Here is a Q/A quote from an interview making them sound like the peace-loving hippies that they are:

Are you warning against abuse of the Earth - perhaps there's a closest Greenpeace activist within you?
JWW: You don't have to be a member of Greenpeace to admire nature. On the whole, I can't stand those activist groups, they repeatedly do unnatural things in the name of nature.
Haughm: In Oregon a couple years ago, we were having a lot of problems with 'eco-terrorists'. These fanatical environmentalists would do things like burn down SUV dealerships and logging sites in an attempt to make a statement. Though their hearts are in the right place, their actions did absolutely no good and just put a stigma on environmentally conscious people. Actually, It's quite similar to the Norwegian church arsons of the early 90's...

Panopticon is a band that now lives in Kentucky and they recently released an album appropriately title 'Kentucky' that deals with the atrocity of strip mining the Appalachian mountains for coal. Like all hippies should, they bemoan both the environmental effects of blowing off mountaintops with dynamite and the detrimental conditions to which miners are subjected.

In case anyone doesn't know or remember, there was a major explosion due to questionable mining practices at Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia in 2010 where 29 miners died.


And it's good to remember why we need this coal. Very few people care, but Panopticon do. Hippies!


These things drive Panopticon to write songs like this one, which I love:



That's probably enough heart bleeding for now but remember, fuck people and their endless appetite for non-renewable natural resources. Peace

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.