More on this thing about Disma, Chaos In Tejas, and Nazi metal

I spent most of yesterday and the night before researching, emailing, and learning about Nazi skinhead heavy metal. As you might imagine for a dude named Solomon*, this is a scary world to look into.

I wrote about it for CultureMap, because three of the bands announced on Friday as playing the Austin music festival Chaos In Tejas have Nazi skinhead ties. (Two of those bands, Black Witchery and Disma, are still on the bill. The band who was outright and explicitly an “openly anti-Jew” act was removed after other bands on the bill threatened to pull out of the festival.)

The story’s out there, and it’s getting read, which I’m glad about. But I’m still really upset about it. I told Timmy Hefner, who books Chaos In Tejas (and who is mighty pissed at me today, it seems), that this is bigger than his festival, and it is. In fact, that’s what I’m so frustrated about.

I could give a fuck about Black Witchery, for the most part — they are a very small band playing to a very small audience, and if they are happy to release material through a Nazi label, well, aside from this particular gig, they seem to be experiencing the sort of career that one might expect. That is to say, they’re an extremely marginalized act who seems to play mostly to people who have no real problem with Nazi skinhead bands (as evinced by the countless posts on forums and message boards that cry, “Who cares about politics, I just want to hear some cool bands!”). Nazi skinheads have rights, too, and I would never suggest that they ought not be allowed to play music to and for one another.

It’s Disma that I am really bothered by. They play death metal, and death metal bands very rarely have any chance of breaking through to the mainstream. For some reason, though, Disma is pushing to be that very rare exception. They’re on a respected metal label — Profound Lore — and their album debuted with an NPR stream, which is usually reserved for, like, Conor Oberst and The Roots and stuff like that. They took slot #5 on Pitchfork’s Top 40 Metal Albums Of The Year. They haven’t played very many shows outside of New York, but their last one was at The Cake Shop, which is a respectable venue, and they’re likely to play legit clubs when they tour.

And their singer, Craig Pillard, had a side-project called Stormfuhrer and if you click his name back there, the link is to an interview where he talks about the greatness of Hitler and the wickedness of the Jews. The album, by my understanding — I opted not to listen to it! — features a bunch of samples from speeches by Nazi leaders, and the CD is definitely decked out in swastikas.

But wait, you say, that interview is from 2002, and he changed the name of Stormfuhrer to Methadrone a few years ago! And while it is true that people are capable of having deeply troubling pasts, while also changing and becoming good people, there’s no evidence that Pillard has done so, aside from the fact that he’s playing in a non-Nazi band right now that made a good record.

But he did re-issue the Stormfuhrer record last summer, and — in an absurdly cowardly gesture — opted to keep his name off of it on the Internet, while putting his name literally on it by signing each copy by hand. Not, typically, the move of someone who is ashamed of his Nazi past.

Instead, it’s the move of someone who is flirting with mainstream success who doesn’t want to jeopardize it, but who also declined to be interviewed about his background for the CultureMap story, and who clearly is proud enough of his Nazi past that he’ll sign his Nazi record.

Which is so aggravating for two reasons: One, what a cowardly fucking thing to do. If you’re going to make Nazi music, then own it, dude. If you’re proud of the shit you’ve said and produced, and of what you believe, then take that shit on. Doing it under the table — and letting your bandmates speak up for you — is pathetic.

But more importantly: It’s clearly working. I mean, I am going to assume that NPR had no idea that Pillard was endorsing his Nazi record at the same time they were promoting Disma. It’s possible, based on a statement that Disma member Daryl Kahan sent me, that his bandmates don’t even know. Timmy from Chaos In Tejas knew about his past, but told me that he was under the impression that he’d put all of that behind him.

And that is not good enough. If you’re making Nazi music, your playing opportunities should be restricted to playing some white power shows in a basement somewhere. Even if you have a non-Nazi band too, your platform should not be elevated. If four of the guys in the band aren’t Nazis, and one is, then they should find a new fucking singer. It’s not that hard, really — in this type of music especially, creeping white power and anti-Semitic views are insidious, and they need to be taken seriously. There are tons of talented people who’ve got nothing to do with Nazis, and it’s super easy to just work with them instead.

A music subculture that has a history of racism and anti-Semitism needs to be especially cautious with who it invites in. Excusing Craig Pillard because the band he’s currently playing in doesn’t openly express the same views as his previous project, which he was still endorsing last summer, opens the door to a lot of ugliness. Ultimately, it says that a little bit of Nazism is okay, as long as you keep it away from the stage. That’s nowhere near good enough.

It’s not about Chaos In Tejas, or NPR, or Pitchfork, or the Cake Shop. It’s about so many people turning a blind eye to this because the band is hot.

Maybe they didn’t know — but if that’s the case, share the story and help me tell them. This is not okay.

*I’m not Jewish, but my family on my dad’s side is, and I have personally encountered enough people who don’t like Jews who didn’t consider that a distinction worth considering that it makes me nervous.

Did Childish Gambino deserve today's brutal Pitchfork review? →

So, minutes after I posted the thing about Childish Gambino here, it was decided that it’d be worth expounding on more fully on CultureMap. Give it a read, unless you’re really and truly sick of the guy 100% (which is understandable).

He defended his work’s misogyny with comparisons to other artists and half-hearted deflections (“It sometimes can be crazy and misogynistic and unfair, but so is life,” he insisted, and his publicist pulled him away to take care of a quick stage task as I started asking a follow-up). He generally seemed uncomfortable with the line of questioning. On Camp, he’s opposes it more overtly: “You better shut your mouth before I fuck it,” he raps to a critic who claims that she “wrote about rape culture” in the song “Backpackers.”

It’s weird. A guy whose stand-up material is thoughtful about a culture that can be tough on women is not someone that I’d expect to threaten to mouth-rape people who are critical of the misogyny in his music that he personally acknowledged when I asked him about it.

Pitchfork's review of Childish Gambino's 'Camp' →

Every attempt Glover makes to present himself as an inside operative confounding stereotypes about mainstream rap rings totally false. In “Fire Fly”, he brags about the ease of scoring college gigs and college girls (while rhyming “LSU” with “molest you”) and then complains: “No live shows because I can’t find sponsors/ For the only black guy at a Sufjan concert.” Bullshit. OK, look: I realize that there’s a chance some kid will hear that line and feel validated, and you know, the last thing we need is an armchair cracker like myself relating contrary anecdotal evidence about the demographics at Sufjan Stevens’ last concert. So let’s just look at the facts: Jay-Z and Beyoncé could be seen at Grizzly Bear shows in 2009, Justin Vernon has a free pass to jump on any track he chooses, and producers spent the year sampling Beach House, the xx, and Tame Impala. How does Glover explain Drake? Is he “crazy or hood,” or just a half-Jewish, former child actor from Toronto who’s already sold 600,000 copies of Take Care while signed to Lil Wayne’s record label? I mean, sub-major hip-hop isn’t a post-cred, post-racial utopia by any means, but I can’t think of another time when there were more options for listeners of just about any race or background seeking to identify with rappers on a non-allegorical level. I just have to assume Glover has completely ignored the success of Lil B, Main Attrakionz, Curren$y, Kendrick Lamar, Odd Future, Danny Brown, and especially Das Racist when he meekly moans, “Is there room in the game for a lame that rhymes/ And wears short shorts and tells jokes sometimes?” It’s the perfect summation of Camp: preposterously self-obsessed, but not the least bit self-aware. Tell me that ain’t insecure.

The last paragraph of that review is pretty fucking devastating. It kinda hits at every insecurity Glover reveals in his music. I’d imagine that a person could laugh off a 1.6 rating from Pitchfork as proof that the site is pushing an agenda (though ask Travis Morrison how easy that sort of thing is to shake), but having someone say: “Here is proof that this carefully-constructed persona designed to prove ‘realness’ is not only fake, but also completely irrelevant for these specific reasons I will lay out below” has to sting.

We’ll see if the review has any lingering impact on the Childish Gambino act. I think it’s one of the more interesting stories of the year, generally — how he’s blown up, but how there doesn’t seem to be a lot of place for that to go. People ate up his set at Fun Fun Fun Fest last month, but there’s such a strong element of novelty to the Gambino thing that it seems like it really could be punctured by a mean, accurate review from Pitchfork.