I Think I Hate In Flames New Record

I love In Flames. I stuck by them as greasy haired metalheads decried their "nu" influences. I think they were, and still are, one of the Gothenburg greats. At The Gates, Dark Tranquillity, In Flames. Don't ask me to put one of their heads on the guillotine. I fucking won't.

But I think I hate this new record. A lot.

Per fucking che? Initially, Siren Charms is set upon by a dark fog of misplaced identity. Are they metal? Are they adult contemporary something-or-rather? What is this phantasmagoria?

At times, Anders sounds like a cat who's tail's just been stepped on. There's a bit of that chest puffery unsheathing their twin melodies and what have you, barely scraping over metal's red line.

On the main, they've been listening to too much Philly C era Genesis and Depeche Mode. Its as if they rushed to record before their synapses cooled off. Even so, I couldn't believe when my beloved Angry Metal Guy gave it 1.5/5.

AMG and his crew, to their credit, are the most trustworthy horde of reviewers (I think that's the collective noun for metal scribes) on these deep dark Internets. They give the European and American scenes a fair shake. Their articles don't require a Masters degree in English to understand. It's intelligent, honest and insightful stuff. 99% of the time, they're bang-fucking-on.

So why did I balk reading the review? Probably because I bought the album. Yeah. I actually shelled out money for it. Before I even heard it.

I fought so damn hard NOT to listen to a pre-release promo ahead of my Peter Iwers interview (which you'll read in Hysteria Mag in the near future.) I succumbed to defeat. Upon first listen, it had potential for its hooks to slowly dig under my skin. As time went on, the hooks never came. I only grew out of it.

Suddenly it hit me. Driving up a straight road, no cars in sight and at the speed limit, this album wasn't making the trip any more enjoyable. It was flat like the endless bitumen I rolled over.

The asshole metalhead in me wants to declare them D.O.A. The rational rock fan ponders if I'm being a "dude or a dick." They're the live band I want to see every time they come to town, and I'll even pay a sky-high Trivium tax to stand front and centre. Can you judge a band by their shitty albums? If they release shit like a monkey on laxatives, sure. If a band puts out ONE album considered a genre classic, they're likely standing with the top 1% of bands ever. If a band can manage TWO or THREE? Your argument is invalid. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Hate the game and not the player; hate the album not the band. I don't need a crew lashing me to a mainsail to resist this record. But god damn I'll tear those binds free to see them play it.

My Resistance is Useless

It was important that I met my Hapkido instructor, Ken. He texted me after three or so reschedules to meet him at a little café down a tree-lined street. I entered the faux-vintage butcher shop, finding him underneath an old wooden staircase, slurping down pumpkin soup. It was strange to see him in “civvies” instead of his black and menacing gi. Tufts of chest hair were escaping the top of his grey shirt.

“How’s it goin’,” he said. I replied with something phatic. He wiped the corner of his mouth with a napkin and took a deep breath.

“The ting is Tahm,” he spoke in brusque Irish, “you’ve got your orange belt now.” His next words were placed carefully.

“You’ve hit a plateau, I t’ink. Ye can make it to black belt but you’ve got t’ push harder.”

His words hung in the air for me. There was praise in there, but I thought it microscopic. The criticism loomed as high and wide as skyscrapers. We talked some more and as we waded through diet, exercise and new techniques for training, a wave of realization crashed on top of me.

My entire fucking life was plateauing.

His words weren’t one scrawled tag on a distant corner of a wall. It was like a building sat with more windows broken than not, cracking at the foundations. No hint of collapse, mind. It all seemed fine, but it wasn’t great.

The nucleus of my being lies with words I write. I’ve been doing it since I was a child, whether I acknowledge it or not. I keep green and black striped books filled with nonsense and dreams of movies that would never get made, let alone make sense (I don’t think anyone would pay to see a convoluted sci-fi version of Ocean’s Eleven.)  It all sort of flowed out of me until it all got deathly serious.

It didn’t get “deathly,” let alone “serious.” It just did in my head.

Of late, I noticed editors expressing displeasure with my work. “I’ll be honest, I don’t understand this,” said one. “This is so weighed down with poetry it doesn’t work,” noted another. “Your copy’s crisp but not concise,” scolded one more. I saw a few snide comments on my overzealous use of adjectives.

So I clicked through the jungles of Amazon for tips. The Art of Writing, by my childhood hero Ray Bradbury. Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I cracked open my Writing for Journalists and Subediting for Journalists again. Help! For Writers. Choose the Right Word. My confidence felt so shaken I had forgotten everything I’d learned. Maybe everything I learned was bunk anyhow. I felt boxed in and shut down.

But the cardboard box flaps were taped up by my mind. I was the one holding the masking tape over my own mouth, not someone else. On the verge of giving up, I arranged to see my shrink, Geoff.

I entered his office on a warm day. Outside, yellowing leaves of trees began to flutter to the ground. I sat on his sleek, modern rocking chair and blurted, “I don’t think my writing is any good.”

He stared. He stared some more. I looked around his room at his chipped wooden bookcase and wallpaper made of degrees and certificates. We both bobbed back and forth in silence. He was still staring at me.

“I dunno,” I murmured, “maybe I’m not being honest enough.”

He flashed a smile; a seasoned poker shark would have been at pains to see it. He earned his $120, right there.

A few weeks back at my men’s support group I said the same thing. “I don’t think my honesty is where it is. I’ve been holding shit in that doesn’t need to be.” A couple of years ago, I was losing friends faster than investors did money in BlackBerry. I didn’t care, because I was fucking honest. I wasn’t pretending, I wasn’t faking, and it was all 100% genuine. I was climbing heights I never dared climb because I dared to speak my mind. For the past year I’ve been zombie-walking through life. I’ve not felt the bone-quaking fear of telling the truth.

I’m not going to get shit right. I have to let that go. I’m really afraid of getting it wrong. My face will be lit for hours by a bluish MS Word page with nothing on it. I’m 730 words in and it’s taken me less than an hour because I’m not bullshitting myself. I triple-check every fact and figure that goes into my work; nothing is unverifiable or false there. This is my headline: no one can engage with my writing because it’s coming from a bullshit place.

People are bullshit detectors. They’ve been ferreting out bullshit since the dawn of time. You can see corners of eyes wrinkle and arms fold when people are hissing virtues of snake oil and carbon taxes. I feel like a fucking fraud hitting “send” on my shit of late because its trying to be something it’s not. “I wish I could be more like X,” I secretly wish to myself. “Then I’ll finally be great.” What the fuck for? Let X be X. I have to let me be me.

Salieri was all pissed off Mozart stole praise that was “rightly” his. Why? Because his soul was dog shit. It’s the whole reason he confessed to a priest, framing the entire fucking film. Salieri was fine being Salieri; he just had to accept the gifts Mozart bestowed to him and move the fuck on. Same goes for me.

It’s been two weeks since Ken told me what I needed to do. I hung up a punching bag on my rickety veranda, scared shitless it’ll collapse on me if I take too hard a swing. I go to the gym more often, eat less shit and run, run, run. But what about pushing that which is most vital to me, my writing? There’s no black belt for writing. I’m gonna aim for Grand Master anyway.

Are we Goebbels' stepchildren? (and other journalistic conjectures)

When the ethical standards of the media slip we expose ourselves to ruin. So we're told. In Melbourne on February 12, inventor of the World Wide Web (W3) Sir Tim Berners-Lee alarmed us to the fact a tweet can travel faster than an earthquake. Someone in the epicentre of a seismic shift underfoot can alert others faster than the quake can travel itself. If you have five followers under an eggy avatar with a handle of @ahzzzopll001 and you offer nothing but FREE BEATS BY DRE then your tweets aren’t going to have much impact. But if you have thousands, millions of followers and may broadcast your message through airwaves, optic fibre and print to countless more one's noblesse oblige on integrity increases exponentially. Have we learned anything from Goebbels’ media manipulation in the electronic media’s infancy or have we all become his stepchildren? (Oooh, how deliciously evil)

Have Lies, Will Travel

Goebbels' once wrote that “[t]he English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” The big lie today is that the internet is so vast and interconnected the transmission of big lies would be caught, debunked and refuted before their virus’ deadly payloads had a chance to inflict any real damage. We’re thinking in what McLuhan termed the rear-view mirror with little inclination to look forward. But are reporters really lying?

In 2010, American Apparel marketing director and media strategist Ryan Holiday fell victim to this new craze of divesting oneself of accusations of unethical conduct by reporting in a time-honored yet disingenuous way.

Feminist website Jezebel, a masthead of Gawker Media, posted a claim by staff blogger Irin Carmon that American Apparel’s new nail polish contained hazardous material. Holiday was asked for comment after the post was live. His company’s official refutation was published as an addendum once “dozens of other blogs were already parroting her claims.” Despite Gawker Media's shoulders aching from the ideological barrow they push, their conduct insofar as it pertains to ethics finds itself in a strange loop.

The email contained in the report – that nail polish ought to be removed from shelves and that someone (in management? Operations? It’s unclear) mentioned the product could be considered ‘hazardous material’ in a conference call – is the report. Ms. Carmon could argue that the public was unaware of said email and Ms. Carmon was bringing it to light. On higher level of abstraction, not reporting the leaked email may have caused more harm than running it without attempting to confirm the presence of hazardous material (not the contents of the email, which are self-validating, provided it was not doctored.) Fact checking may have unreasonably delayed disposal of the product, leading users into harm. So which approach was ethical? One, the other, both and neither. It’s like Schrodinger meets William Randolph Hearst.

We can take rightful umbrage if this story was incomplete - that is, if it they were reporting one level up on Hayakawa's abstraction ladder, i.e., that the nail polish indeed contained hazardous material. Jezebel and Gawker Media could have conducted a chemical analysis, consulted with experts, interviewed manufacturers or actually waited for a response from American Apparel before running the piece. But none of this was ethically necessary insofar the scope of the report is concerned. In terms of reporting this story – the wider publication of a "damning" email and what may have been said in a conference call – their obligations to ethics were mind-bogglingly internally consistent. However, the entire head-scratching episode superficially resembles a variant of investigative reporting instead of “blogging” (which I will expound upon later.) The former relies on external sources to confirm or refute claims. This so-old-it's-new style is akin to what I term publicity driven journalism, as opposed to 'traditional' news journalism.

The ethical functions in publicity driven journalism

Any form of journalism that does not rely on the independent verification of more than one source to make a substantive claim could be reliably dubbed as publicity driven journalism. Publicity driven journalism is usually publisher-backed, industry recognised and profit-driven. As broad categories, these include but are not limited to entertainment, sports, technology, lifestyle, Gonzo, opinion and criticism. Opinion and criticism do not ethically require sources to make claims. Entertainment journalism such as music journalism may blur the distinction between opinion and fact; however pieces such as interviews only require one reliable source (i.e., the interview subject) to which their own conjecture is reported as the fact. (“It’s the most accessible yet heavy record we’ve ever done”, “We’re going to take it one day at a time, but we’ll definitely trounce our rivals.”)

Its ethical obligation is to not misquote or misrepresent the conjecture–bearer as a matter of public record. This is constrained by the tripartite model as described before – publishers will not come into disrepute by disseminating copy riddled with falsity, the industry will delegitimise any publication that does so and profit margins will decline as advertisers and the subjects of the copy (artists, products, etc.) withdraw their business. We now live in an age where conjecture-as-fact, not event-true-to-fact is the standard for what's reasonably assumed as ‘credible’ journalism online. (See what I did there?)

Gone Bloggin’

Blogs, short for weblog are part of an amateur journalist or diarist tradition. Even the first blogs or “webdiaries” had no ethical constraints placed on them; conjecture-as-fact informs its process and output. For example, the Drudge Report could reasonably print a headline “Is Obama a Maniac?” in which one of his opponents described him as “a maniac.” Moreover, tabloid magazines print stories which might appear “patently untrue” such as “Is Prince Harry of Wales a Nazi?” – The story itself might be a “source” overhearing a conversation in which Prince Harry of Wales is alleged to have uttered Nazi sentiments. “Is Kate Middleton an alien from outer space?” and etc. The fact itself is derived from the initial conjecture. (Even though the headline sure as shit isn’t.)

When mastheads such as The Times or Daily Mail manoeuvre themselves to drive up pageviews, drawing on their reputation as event-true-to-fact tellers using this new online conjecture-as-fact model, the entire ethical framework for truth in reporting be it amateur or professional ought to be called into question. But if we’re bombarded by tweets and blogs generating 2.5 quintiillion bytes of new information each day, who has the time to say “Hang on a minute?” It's precisely what we must ask ourselves now when we read almost anything online. The unadorned truth does not go viral, not any more.

Facts aren’t being discounted; they’re just being reframed, and most of real reporting isn’t actually reporting in the traditional sense. Is it ethical? Technically yes. Does it make us prone to manipulation, as if we were sired by propaganda and popular enlightenment? If we look backwards to look forwards, we may as well be.

Updated: Go Australia! Here's an example from national broadsheet The Australian, half consumer panic and half free publicity regarding one (one!) software developer's claim Google Play might be passing on user details to vendors after app purchases