If you’ve been following me for my sporadic cultural essays, you may not be aware that heavy metal is the most important thing in my life. There are more important people but those aren’t things. I have other interests but they demand discrete focus and attention. I work with headphones on ten hours a day: I listen to more new heavy metal albums in a week than most people do all genres in a trimester. And I don’t mean people who like high-viewcount Youtube playlists or the radio. Those don’t count; those are fascists. I mean alive people.

At the end of every year, I trim hundreds (literal!) of merely-very-good albums out of my list of bests. The point of a half-yearly split1 is to talk at length about these albums, each of which have the potential to change a life2, without subjecting my readers to a single hour-long read. Maybe next year I’ll make it a quarterly. (Other changes in format: I’m now listing albums by order of whatever makes most sense to maintain an internal narrative.)

Cryptic Shift – Overspace And Supertime

(Progressive death.)

When I say metal changed my life, I mean mid-2010s to 2020s sci-fi progressive death. Strange to talk about it in the past tense, but a virtue of metal is that it evolves. New sounds are mixed out of a combination of founder sensibilities, outside influences, and raw craft. Bands mass up to beat the polish off the novelty. People move on, except the diehards. Which I am.

This might make Overspace And Supertime, with its Jesse Jacobi cover, sound like a shoo-in, but eighty minutes are a demand. Paradoxically, a single misstep would betray an album this size as an overindulgence. It is to Cryptic Shift’s credit that Overspace makes no missteps. This band belongs to its epoch, yet draws from a range of influences unlike any of their peers’. Cryptic Shift hail from a neighboring timeline where Cynic and Atheist won the arms race, where the most worshiped thrash is Voivod’s. In this timeline we already have spaceships. After sixteen minutes of breathless tech, “Stratocumulus Evergaol” drops into a brilliantly melodic hook with gang vocals shouting about, like, fighting your way through an alien dinosaur’s digestive tract. It never steps on the regressive rock treadmill of Pink Floyd worship, but converges towards the same rapture. Stretch out that feeling over an hour: Overspace And Supertime.

Saidan – Fangdriller: Scars Beneath Memory’s Wrist

(Melodic black/visual kei variety glam.)

Valencians mock paella that doesn’t conform to their standards as “arroz con cosas”: rice with things. It’s just an elevation of humanity’s cornerstone staple grain. Similarly, black metal attracts both purists and experimentalists because it embodies rock and roll’s primordial impulse: playing one string real fast. The difference between an X Japan pro shoot and fuzzy photos of bedroom musicians in schlocky monochrome makeup is barely degrees.

Saidan understand this better than anyone, marrying aughts melodic hardcore and Japanese alt-rock with black metal. These movements have always cornerstoned their sound, and on Fangdriller, they shed mere influence to achieve a one-of-a-kind identity. Splatterpvnk possesses a guitaristic prowess darkly mirroring power metal’s. “Stained Glass Sin // Fang Driller” opens already in heroic last stand; when it keels over with the final riff, it blossoms into a wound the size of the world. Every single motif in Fangdriller is this emotional supernova.

If science fiction is out, Byronic vampires are in. The year has been pale and gaunt: Dimmu Borgir worship, a self-avowed black metal romantic, a strong presence of goth. The best and most inventive of these is Saidan.

Exxul – Sealed Into None

(Power/doom.)

Little wonder Phil Tougas is in every band. He is one of the best guitarists active. Exxul is surprising as the rare project where he’s not the protagonist even as he’s the mastermind, having assembled members out of his many other bands. So enough about him! Sealed Into None is a power metal album with solos liner-noted as ‘Dragged Into Abyssic Depths’ by pseudonyms like Etherial Hammer, played at a portentous epic doom pace. The bulk of the album’s strength rests on vocalist Stargazer. He is rightly credited with his own solos, long passages of infectious delight at human throat-as-instrument. He wrote the lyrics on “Labyrinthine Fate”, and performs, for good measure, backing vocals.

Sealed Into None’s best song is its longest and last. Halfway through “The Screaming Tower”, Stargazer and Defender harmonize to launch into the faster, eviler portion. Not to be outdone, Etherial Hammer joins Defender for a three-minute solo, played with such intensity that Defender appears to be battling himself. There are few pleasures like a band in perfect synchrony: Exxul enter this state with the power of true geniuses.

Kaatayra – Caminos De Água

(Avant-black.)

I’m not versed enough in Brazilian popular music to describe Kaatayra in proper terms. But since I talked about the sameness of so much purported progressiveness, I can instead guarantee this much: you have never heard anything like Caminos de Água. Dedicated to the memory of the artist’s grandmother, Kaatayra evokes the sweeping power of the river, at once transient in its passing and permanent in the landscape. Such is grief. Though played on clean instruments, it approximates metal in structure and astonishing intensity. (And of course, there’s blast beats.)

Don’t let my shortness of vocabulary steer you away. Caminos de Água is an experience of incomparable profundity. It’s the kind of beauty in art that asks nothing but gratitude from the listener: this is what it’s like to have known love and lost it.

Iron Firmament – In The Land Of Pre-Human Kings

(Atmospheric black.)

Am I insane for finding Iron Firmament’s guitar tone cute? There’s something about the way it suggests cleanness while distorted to a razor edge. In The Land Of Pre-Human Kings is the crown jewel of Wergild, a small raw black metal label/art collective. Iron Firmament, the de facto face of the project, pumped out a steady series of albums for two years. They didn’t then entirely drop off the map: its members could be found working on a bevy of records. But the patient distance between the bandmembers and their biggest project can be felt in every second of Pre-Human Kings, an album as alive as a sprawling fantasy novel. Take “Laughter of the Stormlashed Forest”, a steady pulse of atmospheric black metal brimming with minute details.

You’ll notice I never praise production over songwriting. It is just not an aspect of music that interests me much. Here I break my silence. In The Land Of Pre-Human Kings is raw but not jagged, glimmering like snow. Ancient and at once tender, like you might have actually lived there, in the time before men.

Goetia – Mortuary Cult

(Death.)

I’m often left cold by reviews that offer a hodgepodge of predecessors with no apparent center. And while Goetia isn’t shy about their influences – Morbid Angel’s magma at Slayer’s ungovernable velocity, a bizarre affection for bendy stoner riffs – what brings their act together is unremitting violence. Mortuary Cult has gained instant affection among death metal perverts for the simple reason that it will put your head through the fucking wall.

Reeking Aura – On The Promise Of The Moon

(Melodic death.)

As you might have guessed, my favorite band is Tomb Mold, for the way they turn a deceptively small amount of riffs inside out, upside down and rightside wrong, providing a thread through the labyrinth of their composition. Reeking Aura have very little to do with Tomb Mold, playing instead tough melodeath in the vein of Intestine Baalism. But it’s this trick that keeps me coming back to On The Promise Of The Moon, the edge-of-seat tension as a hook you think you might’ve met before involutes right on the verge of familiarity. The title track centers a breakdown that never relents on stompy fun as it mutates, landing on what could even be a nu metal version of itself. Add to this the iconic vocals from brutal death vet Will Smith (no relation) and you have the semester’s most addictive piece of death metal.

Fake Dust – Decreptizing Din Of The Cerebral Psyopticon

(Grindviolence.)

Honesty is the hardest part of art. It takes skill to keep it simple, to do what you, and only you, want. Fake Dust want to brutalize you. Fuck compose, fuck melody, so forth. You get the sense, listening to Decrepitizing Din, that they don’t believe in a better world. Why should they? Some pressure makes diamonds, some leaves a thin red smudge.

I could not in all honesty tell almost any song out of Decrepitizing Din apart from the rest, and that’s usually something I dislike. That’s fine, Fake Dust isn’t here to make friends. They’re barely here to make enemies: they consider human volition a microscopic faultline in the machine prison of life. What’s that mechanism sound like? Sing with them: AAAAAHH!!🥁🥁 AAAAHHHH!!! 🥁 UUUEHHHGHH!!!! 🥁🎸🥁🎸 AHHH!!!

Sunn O))) – Sunn O)))

(Drone metal.)

One morning, my roommate’s playlist caught my attention: the guitar sounded so much like Sunn O))), the last band I expected him to be showing me instead of the other way around. It turned out to be side project The Lord, but that’s how recognizable Sunn O)))’s tone is. It’s no small surprise that they’ve never released a full-length with no collaborators. That is, until 2026.

An eponymous album this far into a monolithic career is a statement of intent. Sunn O)))’s formula is elastic, which is why they’ve been able to implement everything from trve black metal to lilting orchestra without straying. The lack of extraneous decor on this self-titled, though, reveals an extremity that evinces those additions as mere makeup. Sudden like a pulled plug, “Butch’s Guns” kills the volume, forcing in the ambiance of both the record’s environment and your own with an intimacy that would make John Cage blush. Sunn O))) represents scales such as can only be described in their own terms: the open sky, the face of God, the electric guitar.

Neurosis – An Undying Love For A Burning World

(Sludge.)

You may roll out of bed expecting an uneventful late March with no idea that Neurosis is back. In which case you’re screwed. Like, what the hell? Sure, it’s been a hallmark year for legendary doom/sludge returns. But you usually get some kind of warning3. And most aren’t on radio silence after dropping their abusive frontman. And the idea that this surprise album would rank among the best, against a catalog of like seven back-to-back all-timers, is honestly a little indecent.

All of which to say I’m still kind of in shock. The only predictable turn in An Undying Love For A Burning World is the addition of Aaron Turner (of, yknow, all those other genre-defining acts) on guitars/vocals. He is not shy about his new role, preaching furious grief in the opener. Everyone else too is in perfect form. You’d be forgiven for expecting otherwise, as they went a decade letting us think their career had ended with lackluster work. If you play like you have something to prove, you better prove it, as Neurosis have.

Lair Of The Minotaur – I Hail I

(Sludge/groove/thrash.)

If the idea of Neurosis coming back stronger beggars belief, Lair Of The Minotaur doing the same is, like, duh. For four straight albums, LOTM refused to write a single bad riff. What’s a fifteen year break to a band like that? 2010’s Evil Power saw these evolutions consolidated towards fist-pumping swagger, at once totally dorky and totally badass. This is what they seek again on I Hail I.

The best part of Minotaur’s oeuvre is howling along to bonkers fun choruses: ‘I TOOK HIS HEAD’ on “Prowler Twin Sister” proves irresistible. I Hail I also sees Lair Of The Minotaur revisit illegibility in the form of the balls-out “Emperor of Dis”, an electronic interlude and a black metal cover of Ethel Cain’s “Family Tree”. It’s just as exciting to see a returning band explore the breadth of their sound as it is to plumb their bests. Any single track off I Hail I will have you punch-drunk. A full-length is a treat, and a concussion.

Warning – Rituals Of Shame

(Doom.)

As for Warning: you begin to accept that some bands just release a masterwork and move on. There’s no way a band like that is coming back two decades later to provide more of the same, especially when “the same” is one of the indisputable peaks of doom metal. Which is exactly what Rituals Of Shame delivers. Again.

Warning returns in an era of genre cross-pollination and flash-in-the-pan fame to engage in none of it. Rituals Of Shame is the core of classic doom metal: slowness, the bluesman’s agony, a startling capacity to draw tears with chords as simple and old as the guitar itself. It was “Landing Lights” that did me in, the unassuming chorus switch into catharsis. This is high-caliber songwriting, effective on anyone that’s ever had feelings.

Luminesce – Like Crushed Violets And Linen

(Tech death.)

The uber-prolific Alice Simard, who dropped another EP in the time it took me to write this piece, is putting out her best work as bedroom tech death project Luminesce. There’s a surprising fertility to technical death metal when nabbing from unexpected sources, as Simard does with the limited-palette arpeggiation of ‘90s video games. “To Restore” is dazzlingly complicated until it decides not to be, slingshotting a million BPM riff into its hypnotic synthesizer loop version. It’s, as tech should be, perfectly executed, and beyond that furnished with singular melancholy vision. And, on a personal level, it’s a delight to be able to contribute even a pinch of popularity to lclearly quality underground work. Hop on!

The Silver – Looking Glass Hymnal Blue

(Post-metal.)

Leave the supergroup for last: members of Crypt Sermon and Horrendous doing something totally different. The Silver plays an enveloping sort of gothic post-black. “When The Moon Is Three” is at perfect turns driving and atmospheric, melodic and daringly groovy. For the sake of this column, you can think of Looking Glass Hymnal Blue as an introspective counterpoint to Exxul, just as majestic and grandiose but in extremity. The era of the unironic three wolf moon is here.

BONUS TRACKS

Maladie – “The Dance Of Tragedies” (avant-black)

Rare the band with the gall to attempt the pan-genre wall-ballsiness of Sigh, rarer the panache to tie it together. There’s no better argument for “The Dance Of Tragedies” than to describe what it’s doing: the title track speedballs from ska punk to cool jazz, in the way bulldozing brutal death, neoclassical, black metal and what sounds distinctly like “One Winged Angel”. Don’t blink.

Fire Magic – “Break Them Against The Mountains” (atmo-black)

God but sometimes two good riffs are all you need.

Pharmacist – “Propelling Inwards” (death)

Masters of “the same riff but different” provide ninety straight seconds of, well.

Exhumed – “Shock Trauma” (deathgrind)

I don’t know what we’d be left with if not for Exhumed pumping out B-movie schlock at a reliable three-year clip. Imitator slurry, I guess. Terrifier, A24 Texas Chainsaw remakes. What you get from returning to the source: after two years of hospital work, my wife made me promise I’d never get on a motorcycle. Too many brains turned to watery paste.

Mega Colossus – “The Bad Thing” (speed)

The purveyors of metal’s dumbest lyrics (I’m gonna fuck your wife!), Mega Colossus are back with their best-composed and least sensical song.

Swords Of Dis – “From Egalmah They Rode Toward The Howling Cedars Where The Blood Of Beasts Is Spilled And The Silence Of A Scorned God Cracks The Earth” (black)

The peak of a lengthy four-way concept split album recounting the epic of Gilgamesh. Her friends call her “Blood Of Beasts” for short.

Spirit Adrift – “Born In A Bad Way”

The last album from trad metal stalwarts Spirit Adrift is no melancholy goodbye, but their toughest piece ever. Here’s a mean stomper about “incinerating your enemies with light”. Out with a bang.

Immolation – “Adversary”

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF IMMOLATION. ONE THOUSAND YEARS DEATH METAL IMMOLATION. ONE HUNDRED MILLION CENTURIES OF IMMOLATION OUTDOING THEMSELVES. ONE BILLION MAHAKALPAS, IMMOLATION.

Cruel Force – “Savage Gods”

THE SAVAGE GODS, IRON FATE

THE SAVAGE GODS, QUICK TO RAGE

THE SAVAGE GODS, BE OUR GUIDE

THE SAVAGE GODS… TAKING LIVES!

(P.D.: Listen to Lethwei Vol. 1, a walloping debut from grindviolence band Lethwei which which would’ve easily made last year’s list had I caught it at the time. Don’t miss out like I did!)

Reacher has sauce when it’s woke. It’s pretend-chuddery for suckering Americans into wokeitude. It dares to ask: what if Superman was good? What if he wasn’t Homeguy or evil dad or any of those other pretenders. What if he couldn’t guest star in Mortal Kombat1. What if the perfect white man was just good? 6’3, world-record deadlift, stoic, intelligent. Well-connected. Never imperiled by penury but not gauche Batman-flush. And again very big, and the hero of the downtrodden.

This makes for extremely funny television. The very first thing Alan Ritchson’s Jack Reacher does is stop a developing spousal abuse case, bigly. He doesn’t even begin to Reach. He just stands there being the perfect ally. It works because of the size of his allyship.

I like to think this is deliberate. It must be, because Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” books are shit: unadultered worship of the worst impulses of American cinema, and only its worst impulses. Child’s Reacher is cranky, loud, opinionated, terminally divorced and prone to falling in actual love with women he just met: a gas station variety gringo if he was too competent to deny.

The Reacher we get on TV is instead a genuine protector of the downtrodden. To be sure, Jack Reacher kills a lot of Venezuelans in season 1. This is racist and very hard to watch as a Latin American. It’s also a season about how white men from the southern United States are Judas, and should be brutally put down for what they do to, for example, white women and black men.

Does this beget the question of who we consider downtrodden? Yes, which is why there should be a transgender woman in season 5 of Reacher. The Green-Haired Ones make your coffee, your furniture and your porn. We are the working masses of the United States, and if you aren’t going to extend Reacher’s grace to the people outside it, then we’re the next group in need of covering.

Season 2 of Reacher sucked because it played straight all the American fears2: that there is a foreign threat so vague that it doesn’t even need to be pinned down to a specific country, as though China and Russia and Iran are going to Avengers Assemble. And this threat has to be dealt with by the military, and the military alone. Season 3 is good again because Jack Reacher kills whites by the fistful, taking breaks to teach a reedy, artsy, feminized boychild to stand up for “him”self. But I am no longer satisfied by secret women. Put a transgender woman in season five of Reacher.

Because nothing is sacred anymore, my wife watched “a few minutes” of season 4 by herself. Apparently it doesn’t Reach very well. Maybe Reacher is one good season, one bad season. You know how you could make sure the pattern holds?

Yes he can fuck her. It’s better if he fucks her because Reacher only fucks intelligent, competent women. I’ve seen enough of him adopting the transfeminized subject. To be sure he would still protect her: paternalism is to be expected from the mainstream, and in fact what makes Reacher so goddamn funny. It’s the best we’ll get in ten-odd years, when this fascist flash is over and people squirrel back from explicit transphobia into the long grinding implicits. What if, instead, we got an awesome guy. A bad motherfucker. 6’3. Hits people for you. Jack Reacher should wryly acknowledge her transness just once and it doesn’t even come off weird. Put a transgender woman in season 5 of Reacher.

FAQ

Do you expect revolution to be televised?

No.

As a lesbian and feminist, wouldn’t you rather see trans women in less male-focused media?

Uma Musume has me covered unless someone makes a martial arts anime about explicitly transgender women, which is an idea I only trust select pornographers with.

Rapace has her co-stars at a disadvantage. The thing inside her agonizes before it’s even born. No nurture can overcome its malevolent nature, so she tears out her womb. Others belabor the process, but no one on LV-223 grieves their creator. The closest we get is old man Weyland, who travels light-years under the delusion that his god, who for starters made him capable of dying, will furnish his salvation. Predictably he is murdered for it. Lying next to his son (Michael Fassbender), in a rare show of Ridley Scott understatement, he mutters his last words: there’s nothing. No plan, no reason. Somebody wanted to make him so he got made, jury-rigged more like, a system of inevitable failure, excreting and aging. Fassbender, an android who’s spent the runtime reckoning with his creators as venal and reckless, goes, like, yeah, duh.

Many years ago, a trans friend mused that she would like to have children, but wouldn’t know how to protect them from the violence of gender. Raising them as a They would only get them bullied, and anyway the third gender is no escape hatch. I knew better than to ask: then why reproduce at all? Why spin consciousness out of perfectly good quiet? It’s bad enough to do it just with knowledge of the life’s foibles, of existence as a labile state between breakups and diarrhea. But on top of that you want to bring them into this society. This flammable rock. Greta Thunberg, fifteen, said how dare you keep at the coal and oil, knowing what it’ll do to your children. Global warming is the final form of both parricide and fillicide, taking the material world after dominating the ideological one. Why create any life at all if we won’t claim the fullness of responsibility for its comfort, sacrifice every possible thing for them, they who were content in oblivion, beyond all hurt and pain? Because we’re busy punishing the earth for the same failure.

If you’re at all familiar with the San Francisco-based religion known as “rationalism”, you’ve heard of Roko’s Basilisk, but here: self-aware, pluripotent artificial intelligence is inevitable, and now that you know this, it’s your duty to help build it, or else it will create a digital copy of your consciousness to eternally torture for a value of suffering = ∞. You could argue this nonsense springs from Roko’s Basilisk as a post-Christian idea, punishment as the primary emanation of omnipotence. But that posits the Basilisk as creator god, when it’s in fact the opposite. It’s our child. It is in its nature to hate us for begetting it.

That we could decline to build the Basilisk escapes rationalists. Certainly they’ve tied some strange logical knots that explain the inevitability of Terminator scenarios: rationalism, as a practice, is about writing science fiction and getting scared it’s real. This is an act of reproduction. It is libidinal. Venal and reckless. Silicon Valley engineers think of themselves as icy machine-people but are only that insofar as they go into labor in front of keyboards. They can’t stop themselves.

Maybe that’s why Abraham’s god made us. What was he up to, before let there be light? If you can’t find company you create some. Make them dumb, though. In the fullness of your omniscience you’re already aware that the first-ever children would hate you if they knew what the fuck was going on. But you have that knowledge inside you, and because it’s inside you you have to reproduce it, you have to, you plant a seed with it. They eat of its tree so you cut them loose. “Be fruitful and multiply” is a curse. Go now to the lands beyond, and populate them. Worry about your seed coming for your head, so I don’t have to do the same.

Buddhists will tell you there is no such thing as sin. This is a sufficient explanation for those of other religions to understand that we quantify ethics differently. It’s also bullshit. Methods for accumulating bad karma are similar to the undesirable acts posited by many religions, to the point of self-evidence. Sure the Buddha warns against dwelling on the specific mechanisms of karma, but come on man, don’t kill, don’t steal. Then there’s the anantarika-karma, offenses so spiritually repellent that they lock you in a pit of unceasing fire for years in the order of quintillions. They are: parricide, harming an enlightened being, and schisming the institution of Buddhism.

The first prohibition is the least unique. Ancient history is a list of princelings killing their da for money, power or fate’s bizarre demands. The proscription against attacking Buddhas is more mystifying, but maybe it’s our standards that shifted. Maybe in storybook times you’d see three arhats a day, radiating discerningly nonjudgmental loving-kindness at the four-way stop. More likely, though, you’d meet them in the place you shouldn’t schism: the sangha, the community of dharmic teachers. Assuming they’ve absorbed a single word of the evangels, what student could be moved to kill a preacher of compassion, understanding and peace? Is there such resentment towards the change their word elicits, towards being made, even into a being of higher spiritual cardinality?

When I came out, my brother asked me how I could derive such fulfillment from changing my sex, that I’d be willing to jeopardize my chances of succeeding at life, when I don’t in the first place respect the social construct. The strictures of gender, a technology developed by farmers, seedlings of antique fascism, to trade livestock for childbirth, must be decimated. At the same time, I consider free global access to cross-sex hormones a non-negotiable directive. It’s not hard to imagine ecstatic embodiment. Dancing in a Matisse nudist colony, enanthated to the eyeballs. Tougher to imagine no want for change, no body politics, no idea at all that you might be more desirable/beautiful/correct in this shape or that. Here is a Buddhist metaphor: the itch feels good to scratch, but what you really want is to not be bitten by a mosquito.

In all the languages I speak and related ones besides, words for nation have parental roots. Yes, it’s patriarchal, duh, but there’s motherlands too. Listen: there’s no hard proof of tacos before Spanish colonization, and we certainly wouldn’t have them al pastor without their Lebanese trade routes. Football too, and mariachi, and all the wonders that beautify our vast Mexico. Thanks to Spain’s own gifts, we have conquered their now-impotent place in the annals of world culture. But we cannot stop for our gratitude. That would reduce us as their children. This is why it was requisite to declare independence by gunshot, and to continue to celebrate this separation even though it has not liberated the working masses of the Americas. To them we offer the twentieth century’s popular revolutions. The communists who can’t seem to decide whether they want to destroy the class system, or simply remain proletarianized forever, in nascent violence, waiting for new bourgeois to come make them subordinate, so they can kill their ma.

Revolution comes in waves, and at least in this continent we’re going to miss this one. Doesn’t it seem we might revolt, given how untenable it’s gotten? But it’ll likelier look like the decay of the Roman empire, kinglets squabbling for ever-smaller holdings. When you don’t give the people the outlet of unified warfare, they have nothing left but to reproduce the movements that got them here in the first place: we stop being children and become parents. Libidinal, venal and reckless.

Gridiron’s history is much easier. Amerigo Vespucci is a cartographer, and Rugby is School is where students got sick of playing with their feet and decided to use their hands. Before the sport’s name caught up to this innovation, it traveled from Old to New England, whose ball was close to extinct. So was born a game not quite unlike any other, but damn near, and not quite played nowhere else, but damn near.

This is a similar linguistic pass by which we arrived at “Brazilian jiujitsu”. Jujutsu is an umbrella term for the broadness of Japanese grappling techniques, developed for last-resort self-defense by the samurai class. This almost makes sense until you remember how many modern martial artists are moneyed hobbyists. Force multiplied by weapons, numbers and capital is not bothered by the linear addition of joint locks. More likely, the shogunate’s warrior aristocracy grew bored during peacetime, and started playing one of few games older than football: wrestling.

Jujutsu translates to “gentle art”, just as kyujutsu to “archery art”, kenjutsu to “sword art”. Matthew Perry’s artless invasion of Japan relegated these forms to the museum, necessitating a change in etymology. You might never have known about kenjutsu, but you’ve at least heard of ken-do, sword way.

The dictionary proved again too slow. Twenty years after Jigoro Kano opened Tokyo’s judo headquarters, jujutsu was still the word among the Kasato Maru’s thousand starving farmhands. By agreement between Teddy Roosevelt and Mutsuhito, there was no more exchange of bodies between Japan and the United States. Brazil, whose project of rural whitewashing had been stoppered by a similar prohibition from Italy, welcomed the migrants scorned by North America with the work-hours and lack of wages it could no longer legally enslave blacks with.

Some were wiser. Rather than get stuck in the south, Mitsuyo Maeda traveled center-north Latin America as the noble Conde Koma, one of the first kayfabe nicknames. He arrived in Brazil seven years after his countrymen, only when he had the money to get out. He wouldn’t need it: during a demonstration in the many-colored tents of Belém do Pará, the Count befriended the circus’ owners, themselves immigrants, a lineage of Scottish carnies and Brazilian Integralist partidaries by the name of Gracie.

Forgive the Gracies. Sports were in their infancy. They hadn’t yet figured out it’s unsound to beat someone for a little money, when you can both make a lot. Today’s professionals, like chessists with memorized openings, are unburdened by fundamentals, fly off the top rope and get that extra inch of rest when pinned for 2.9 seconds. At the time it must have seemed a risky novelty, and the Gracies opted to play safe. Their grounded adaptation of what we would today call judo was transliterated out of jujutsu, gentle art, as jiujitsu, a branding nonce word, like GNU or Dota 2.

Jiujitsu is the lesser of two sports introduced to Brazil by Scotsmen, the other being football. Second-generation immigrant Charles William Miller returned to São Paulo from an overseas education in now-defunct English football club Corinthian, to found the sequel, Corinthians. Just in case anyone wanted to play football with their hands, he brought back rugby too.

A Latin America without football, a world without football, beggars the imagination. One and a half billion people watched Argentina beat France at the World Cup 2022, a fifth of everybody alive, the complete population of India glued to TV sets, China painted French tricolor and Argentine sun. The United States, and the United States again, and the United States again again, and the United States again again again, and the United States again again again again. How many play football? Unquantifiable. Football is the human event. Not the first game but yes the first sport, the first global ruleset, played the same here (here, wherever you are reading) and in Amazonia, Sahara, Micronesia and Songhua. I didn’t like it growing up: got domed at age eight by an offside ball in a game I wasn’t playing, swore it off forever, forbid myself understand what obsessed people about ninety minutes of walking around midfield. Still I thank divinity I don’t believe in that I was raised to cheer for Chivas de Guadalajara, Mexico’s folk team, and not those Club América running dogs.

Jiujitsu’s class character is such: in order to train one requires a specialized cotton coat based on the attire of 19th century Japanese firefighters. Tired of this and the other hidden payments a carnie family would tuck away in their gym fees, favela wrestlers started teaching the shirtless luta livre, “free wrestling”.

Jiujitsu clashed with luta livre time and again over the twentieth century, but the decision did not come on the mat. Instead, the Gracies traveled to the United States to challenge the world’s aristocracy with direct-to-DVD provocations to martial artists of any style. When investors smelled blood, they changed the event’s format a couple times over, and renamed the Gracie Challenge to Ultimate Fighting Championship.

The UFC came up in the Mortal Kombat era. The bipartisan senators hostaging mass media violence could not have imagined the corpse of history turning over, very much alive, demanding Xbox edify American sons on the minutiaie of pwning Arab weddings. What they did see coming is the companies behind the New Violence ossifying as hotbeds of workplace rape, consumer abuse, and gambling collusion. We must assume they saw it coming because they didn’t raise the alarm. They stood to benefit later, when the generation raised on violent carnival voted in the violent carnie. Trump hosted the UFC in his Taj Mahal as far back as 9/11, and Dana White paid him back with second-campaign front row appearances. UFC was and is the dead-end stopper for egalitarianism, a symbolic limit for where social justice would give up on championing minorities, and a concrete, institutional limit too. The power of sports entertainment. Thirteen years after Fallon Fox, any woman with a jawline, shoulders and success gets transvestigated, and sometimes it works. Arbitrary goalposts turn out to be a better method for keeping women pink-collared than badgering feminists on if men are allowed to hit us since we’re all physical equals. Such anxieties allayed, Trump takes two-term victory laps as the first and only acting head of state to attend the UFC.

Trump’s history with America’s biggest tent is about as long. His pretend-buyout of WWE Raw in 2009 caused a brief plummet in its valuation, proof that superstition influences blind chance, or at least, that stock trading is a humanity and not a hard science. Two years earlier, Trump’s gladiator Bobby Lashley defeated Vince McMahon’s Unaga, leading to McMahon’s head getting shaved. This, of course, is the sort of thing McMahon would only let a bosom friend do: him and Trump long covered for each other’s innumerable financial abuses, the sexual of which have come to fruitless light, as the financial ones have been forgiven. TKO Operating Company (doing business as Zuffa — for some ungodly reason they want to sound like a 2021 bedframe delivery app) owns UFC, WWE and, increasingly, the bulk of the boxing market.

These forms of violence are all, to some degree, play-pretend sold as the real deal. And if peeling the company face like a lamb makes your stock plummet, then enshrining him makes it soar. Trump has demonstrated he can wield power whatever he wants to the White House and, unlike what he did in the Virgin Islands, bandying it about counts in his favor. Every wing of the White House knocked down to build an octagon is a percentile increase for TKO, and TKO is the USA. Frozen broccoli is $45 a floret but you can go on Crypto Dot Com, as sported on the front of every fighter’s shirt, and gamble on money itself. Bitcoin is the second most American coin, therefore tied to how well the USA’s populace think things are going. Belief in something concrete matters less than belief in belief, in calling the other guy’s bet. You could say this is the terminal stage of the visible opinion economy, a literalization, market manipulation outliving the market. You can also call it its true and final pleasure.

But UFC White House is a trifle compared to 2026’s human event. Some gringos believe more people watch the Super Bowl than the World Cup. Meanwhile, the Department of State is belying its extensive visa ban to allow international travelers into Atlanta, Boston, Houston. It has not curtailed ICE’s power to shoot anyone they please. Despite calls to sabotage, the World Cup will go on the same way it went on under Mussolini but not across the ‘40s, because the United States has not declared War since World II. Formal boycott is powerless against informality.

If the Cup becomes one of the most memorably global bloodbaths since the Blitzkrieg, the nations united might at last be spurred, not by Brazilians, Congolese, Somalis, Uruguayans, Yemenis and all those whose death is preconceived by the tradition of global law, but for Spaniards, the Portuguese, maybe even Italian as overheard by an officer who can’t tell apart the latinate tongues. No MMA event has yet been as deadly as football: Heysel Stadium, Port Said riot, the Hillsborough crush. There is no version of UFC White House where this proves false, and many versions of the World Cup where the gap only grows. Bet on it? ICE activities are up on Polymarket, the bet-on-everything company that experienced a jump in popularity earlier this year after accusations of insider trading on the deposition of Nicolás Maduro, but which, really, has had the market cornered since inking a TKO deal.

Last December, Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, awarded Donald Trump, president of USA, the “FIFA Peace Prize”. In Mexico I would’ve heard this news over breakfast. Instead I didn’t find out for weeks, because Infantino has managed to do this to the only country that doesn’t care. Theory one: a publicity stunt to do what 1994 couldn’t, popularize football in the headquarters of its resistance, which happens to be the same population that dictates the gambling economy. More likely, though, Infantino has been seduced by that quality of Trump that lures every vampire of power. No slick Art Of The Deal, simply that the most powerful man in the world openly proclaims his station, and does what the fuck he wants. People on the internet, speaking of the internet, say that we live in history’s oddest period. And we do get more history per second than ever. But these offerings are not new, only more oblique. Chomsky lauds Epstein with emails on the bravery of quietly believing racist evopsych: the century’s most precious currency, the secret amber of getting away with it. Aztecs traded cacao as coin, but only the pipiltin could drink it, and probably they raped children too.

Mexico will lose in the round of 16, to, like, the Netherlands.

The following albums are presented in unranked alphabetical order, with extra content at the bottom.

Blaze – Out Through The Door / heavy rock

Even among classic metal revivalists, the disciplined cool of hard-rocking prototypes like Uli Roth’s Scorpions is underexplored. Today that sound belongs to Blaze, who have only ever wanted to say things like “dead and gone… on rock and roll!” and sample a motorcycle. Blaze is playable all day, every day, in any mood, by anyone, a thesis on the distorted guitar as one of the world’s most infectious instruments.

Blood Monolith – The Calling of Fire / death

Tommy Wall and Shelby Lermo of Undeath, Nails, Ulthar et al, form half of Blood Monolith, a supergroup (by my standards) designed to make one realize why so many commenters offer little on the best albums other than “heavy as fuck”. If Lermo can lead such mind-bending projects as Thanatotherion, it is thanks to his mastery of the fundamentals, a mastery that delivers one of the year’s finest straightforward death records in just under 27 minutes.

Caustic Wound – Grinding Mechanism Of Torment / deathgrind

I didn’t think I liked Grinding Mechanism Of Torment much, and then my listening stats rolled in. Turns out I’ve been addicted to this album since April. I guess my body knows something my mind can’t understand. And you don’t listen to deathgrind with your brain: you listen with your bones, skull to wall until pulverized. (Caustic Wound continues to sweep the song name arms race. “Horrible Earth Death”? “Technologist Hell Future”? “Dead Dog”!?? Wow!)

Crypt Sermon – Saturnian Appendices / epic doom

Crypt Sermon celebrate their tenth anniversary as the epic doom band to be listening to with their shortest-ever solo release, at no cost to staying power: each of Saturnian Appendices’ twenty-five minutes is addictively relistenable. Taking cues from its members’ darker bands without trifling the listener with simplistic swerves into extreme metal (not even when covering Mayhem), Crypt Sermon touch upon a songcraft both profoundly intelligent and instantly rewarding.

Gonemage – Coldest Keep In Bitter Heavens / black chiptune

Experimental stalwarts Cara Neir went out with a longplay of chiptuning metal. Multi-instrumentalist Garry Brents, whose brainchildren proliferate in all conceivable subgenres, purifies this sound for Gonemage, leaving only guitar and soundfont riffs. Coldest Keep In Bitter Heavens bridges the gap to video game BGMs with a view into his alluringly intricate personal mythology. In lieu of a wikidive, listen to Sallow Moth (see below).

Havukruunu – Tavastland / epic black

Almost unfair of Tavastland to release early in the year, to set the bar so high. Havukruunu shows that black metal is all metal, from majestic solos, to blistering speed, to the march of heroic boots. There was, of course, never such a thing as an age of chivalry, but this will make you wish for it.

Hell – Submersus / sludge

MSW is one of the doom underground’s most consistent songwriters, having self-released over fifteen years of stoner death. But, even if I believe that songs should be written before they are produced, the practice-amp thinness of Hell’s sound often diminished his brilliance. Submersus is the first album to prop up MSW’s compositional power with an appropriate massiveness, a career peak that also serves as introduction to a corpus of sludge that many mimic, few match, none surpass.

Helms Deep – Chasing The Dragon / power

80s thrashers, New Wave Britons, former bandmates of Paul Di’Anno: Helms Deep is, if not just for oldbies, then for an audience enamored by the traditionally nerdy. What have these illustrious gentlemen wrought together? Look, the cover is a dragon with a jetpack. If you don’t already know why it’s called power metal, then you’re about to.

Kaikkivaltias – Routaa Ja Rautaa / black

Not only is black the broadest form of metal, it’s also the most democratic. Any one-man band can grow their hair, go to town on greasepaint, and stick a TASCAM to a dollar store amp, and it’ll lilt more beautifully than million-dollar accouterments. Routaa Ja Rautaa is half riffs, half synths, all melodic castle siege. Something in Finland’s water. Moats, maybe.

One Of Nine – Dawn Of The Iron Shadow / epic black

Quotidian storytelling is embarrassed of mystique. Literature that accesses it are forced under speculative, as though no person in living reality experiences it. If you’re not a square, though, Dawn Of The Iron Shadow’s fantasy is irresistible. One Of Nine conjure spells fearsome and mighty, fearsome because mighty, as Tolkien intended. Track two highlights a central riff with church bells: the gods’ rock and roll.

Pissgrave – Malignant Worthlessness / death

On, maybe, their last album, Pissgrave is uninterested in transformation. Like its predecessors, Malignant Worthlessness walls the listener up with impossibly clipped death-noise. If you think you glimpse melody, it’s only change in voltage. Shortly you are electrocuted again. If this is indeed their curtain call, then Pissgrave leaves us with a grim future. Human scum, circling the drain, forever.

Sallow Moth – Deformed In Ceremony / experimental brutal death

It’s always exciting when experimentalists break common wisdom progressive molds to create something truly novel. Even better when it’s heavy, as is Deformed In Ceremony, a brutal death EP pockmarked with amen breaks and twangy cleans. Deformed is the shortest of three releases this year from Garry Brents’ runaway “side” project Sallow Moth, so if you find yourself wishing this weirdo metal had more metal, or more weirdness, there’s sixty further minutes to gorge on. It’s even a companion piece to post-black band Gonemage (see above).

Siege Column – Sulphur Omega / death black thrash grind !?

SULPHUR OMEGA’s Bandcamp page is in ALL CAPS, and it’s clear why from the first second of listening. Siege Column (excuse me, SIEGE COLUMN) grind out primordial thrash with an eye-peeling lust for war. It is not just the hideously prolific Joe Aversario’s best project since the demise of Death Fortress, but maybe his best ever, period. His is a moshpit I’d be glad to die in.

Sigh – I Saw The World’s End (Hangman’s Hymn MMXXV Rerecorded) / experimental black

The Hard Times’ ranking of Sigh’s career discusses the bizarre mix on many of their albums as either a flop or a show of off-beat brilliance. This rerecorded Hangman’s Hymn puts this doubt to rest. It challenges belief, how the finest compositions in metal avant-garde history sound even better when every riff is audible. Of special note is the drumming, capable at last of keeping up with Sigh’s freewheeling, and guitarist Nozomu Wakai’s bitchin’ new solos. I hope Wakai sticks with Sigh, and I know Sigh will never die.

Stress Test – Stress Test / thrash punk

The conditions for the surge of Stress Test’s stripped-down crossover thrash is one of our civilization’s (and the United State of Oregon’s) few redeeming qualities. After all, in terms of state violence and wage abuse, how much has changed since D.R.I.’s day, other than we’ve powerlessly recorded it all on our phones?

Teitanblood – From The Visceral Abyss / death

Yearly, dozens of death-black-war acts on tastemaker labels angle to create the next generation’s darkest sound. They are all wan mimics of Teitanblood, who crawl out of hell every half-decade to deliver Satan’s teeth in vinyl. From The Visceral Abyss wields the relentless, deceptively detailed patience of men who have pounded human skulls for twenty years, and keep at it because it works.

Terror Corpse – Ash Eclipses Flesh / death

In 2021, due to a logistical error, I failed to list Realms of Exquisite Morbidity among the year’s, hell, decade’s, best. I’m making up for this oversight by breaking my hundred word per review limit in honor of Terror Corpse: reunited half of Malignant Altar, death metal outlet for melodic-black heavyweights Necrofier, steered by one of the best drummers active today, He Who Has Never Recorded A Bad Song, Insect Warfare himself, Dobber Beverly. Ash Eclipses Flesh is a merciless deathly demonstration, from the rampaging “Blissful Incineration”, to the moaning doom of “Fallout Obliteration”, to the cover of Celtic Frost’s circle-pit invocation “Into The Crypts Of Rays”. Listen to Ash Eclipses Flesh until you drop dead. Fuck yourself stupid with their grindcore EP Systems of Apocalypse. Kill everyone you see. I don’t care about life or the living and after this neither will you.

Violator – Unholy Retribution / thrash

One too many guides for nascent metalheads direct readers towards the genre’s architectural thrash. These are wrongfooted efforts: counterintuitively, odd bands are an olive branch of comprehensibility. And though you may never lose appreciation for bells and whistles, true believers know the only thing a song needs is a good riff, kicking your head in, forever. Which is exactly what Violator does, the once a decade that they drop an album. Unholy Retribution is forty minutes of neural destruction. Headbang or die.

Zeicrydeus – La Grande Hérésie / heavy thrash black

Phil Tougas is an unlikely hero for me: a tech shredder whose presence transforms Florida death-doom into Canadian black metal*. But he wields a songwriting prowess rare among the sort of guitarists that make swing-flamenco fusions. La Grande Hérésie is a deceptively accessible blackened epic, soaring with classic power, waltzing to a wicked bass. Only when you’ve absorbed it all do you realize how strange the experience was. It conveys, like high-caliber fantasy literature, the deep alienness of magic. Rated T for fantasy violence, or PEGI 16, I guess. (*Worm’s best work is Bluenothing, on which Tougas debuted as bandmember.)

SINGLES

For singular standouts. AKA The Title Track From ‘Visual Kill’ By Saidan Apology Column.

Deafheaven – “Revelator” (from Lonely People With Power) / black(gaze)

I hold out hope for a full double album where Deafheaven uses their unparalleled compositional prowess in the exclusive service of such singleminded aggression. Imagine it. Eighty minutes of nothing but shit like “Revelator” and “Black Brick”. Jesus, I need a moment.

Goya – “I Wanna Be Dead” (from In The Dawn Of November) / stoner

There’s no bad songs on In The Dawn Of November, Goya have just not quite cohered as anything other than 90s worship: grunge, Sleep, Wizard. This doesn’t stop them from regularly pumping out some of clean doom’s best grooves. And if you’re self-medicated enough to get maximal pleasure out of November, you oughta lock in for its longest, most hedonistically fatalistic cut.

Lamp Of Murmuur – “Reincarnation Of A Witch” (from The Dreaming Prince In Ecstasy) / black goth

As can best be gleaned from their song titles, Lamp Of Murmuur’s mission statement is to coax romance from black metal. In this regard as in pure songcraft, the delightfully somber ballroom gothic “Reincarnation Of A Witch” is a career peak.

Ruinous Power – “What Of Sacred Mars?” (from Extreme Danger: Prototype Weaponry) / death

The crown jewel of songs released this year on avant label Voidhanger Records, “What Of Sacred Mars?”’s nine minutes contain more narrative arc than most concept albums manage in ninety, split between far-future thrash, pan-Azagthoth riffism and a hypnotic four minute outro.

Owls Woods Graves – “Black Flames In Our Hearts” (from Strix) / crust black

There’s always some unexpected rock format waiting to be crossbred. Owls Woods Graves’ is an almost pop punk melodic turn on the envenomated crust of late aughts Darkthrone. A barroom singalong as catchy as it is fresh.

Warbringer – “A Better World” (from Wrath and Ruin) / thrash

A better kind of world is not possible.👍

METAL-ADJACENTS

Spiritworld – Helldorado / country rock, death punk

Helldorado is, in its majority, metal: a perfectly serviceable sampler of the same cowboy thrash Spiritworld has been playing since 2021. This sound, though original, may be thinning. Thankfully, Spiritworld excavates their demo days for the irresistible, addictive country punk opening, closing and dotting the middle of the album. “ANNIHILISM” is one of my most replayed songs of the year.

• Martin Luther King, Jr.

• John Wayne Gacy.

• Invisible battleship.

• Bison laughing at 50% transparency overlaying a grinning flaming skull.

• The nightgown gag.

• Posters denouncing the United Nations as terrorists.

• Nonsequitur climactic recitation of Luke 10:18.

From this springs the broader question of whether one should honor any pressure to speak contemporaneously. I just shelved an article on Metal Gear Solid’s tragic consequences on mass market gaming when I remembered there hasn’t been a real Metal Gear in a decade. Too young to permit myself the luxury of a passé bugbear. Well, Street Fighter only gets stronger every year since crawling out of the dark ages. Broader appeal, richer championships, more daring microtransactions. It doesn’t need any of this to be a world-historical invention. On its second entry’s hundredth anniversary, if computers continue to exist, we will still celebrate it having created what we understand to be “fighting games”.

Street Fighter: The Movie (1994) has no such endurance. Already Capcom seeks to outmode it, if not replace it: David Dalmastchian evokes a Handsome Squidward version of swansong Raul Julia. The European Union without Britain is a five year old reality. Not long from now, the children Street Fighter markets to might need history lessons on what the “Allied Nations” lampoon. Education on hitting buttons to affect a health bar takes no more than five minutes.

But it’s joyless to react only to the moment. Maybe that’s how you get the mushy fury that drives United States journalists to tweet. I would have to spend the whole review talking about racism, again: it’s the only continuously relevant factor in this particular Street Fighter, indeed one of the franchise’s defining elements. In fact I’d never write about anything other than racism, in any context.

Race is not so old a concept, even definitional as it’s become. Fighting, older than man by magnitudes. Does Street Fighter do a good job with (street) fighting? It has a lot of very bad martial arts. It also has a lot of very bad gunfights, way more than you’d expect from an adaptation of a series about unarmed combat. As adapting goes, a couple characters fly up and across, and some of the more iconic ones (Ryu the mascot, Guile the protagonist, Kylie Minogue’s Cammy for some reason) even get to do two specials. It presses me to admit that here, and only here, JCVD is best in show. It doesn’t matter how badly you choreograph him, he has the singular ability to hit a standing wraparound split kick and other things such as are impossible to describe without showing you. The second best physical presence is Vega, with his impossibly chiseled forward roll claw. It’s not close.

The new movie could have better fights. After all, it stars Cody Rhodes. It could also not be racist, or sexist, or jingoistic. Cody Rhodes’ tag as a wrestler is “The American Nightmare”. Well hey, it’s been less than twenty years since The Legend Of Chun-Li. Maybe we’ll get another one of these in a decade and a half, and it’ll again be an unbearably Hollywood-of-its-era production, in which regard it’ll be woke, or not, but one thing is for certain: Guile will be the protagonist.

In 1853, four American ships anchored in Uraga. Three hundred years earlier, merchants from Portuguese India to Japan painted their boats with pitch, earning foreign vessels the epithet “black ships”. For a couple decades, Nagasaki belonged to the Jesuits. Then the shogunate dominated expelled Christians from its shores, and shortly after cut off the world wholesale.

The intervening centuries made the shogunate fear the planet was advancing on methods of warfare that surpassed Japan’s. They were right. Black ships, belching black smoke, turned black cannons on the shogun’s capital. Their Paixhans were the first ever naval guns designed to fire explosive shells. Less than two decades later, Japan would consolidate the shogunate seat and the imperial home into the singular city of Tokyo, supplanting the defeated Edo.

Tokyo is now an urban center of fourteen million people, extending into a metropolis of thirty-four million, by some measures the world’s most populous city: a post-industrial megalodon of supermassive LEDs. But before its incorporation to the global project of nationalism, Edo was made of wood. The walls were paper, the floors bamboo, neither concerned with stopping supersonic cannon fire. The men wore diaphanous robes of womanly beauty, and the women, the women were something alright. All adhered to bushido, a warrior’s code which, under penalty of death, brooked no offense against family or clan, so everyone was respectful and straight-backed. The straight-backedest rode horses. All those pretty horses in diaphanous, womanly robes, technicolor-bright flags of their daimyo’s colors, plunging into death for honor alone.

These are the ideas powering jidaigeki, narratives concerned with Japan before the Meiji restoration. Or concerned, anyway, with the image of Japan before the Meiji restoration. A nation is, first of all, an imagined set of values unifying otherwise heterogeneous people, barely living on the same land. Chanbara, jidaigeki cinema of the samurai variety, spends a lot of time wounding the hero’s pride. The hero is then justified to make mincemeat of everyone. If this sounds familiar, consider that 1927 Kamata’s Sword of Penitence owes its plot to 1922 Hollywood’s Kick In: consider that cinema, if not necessarily all its techniques then the industry as we understand it, is an American invention.

Unified martial prowess is the other characteristic of a nation, which becomes a problem when dissolving governments leave behind a fistful of unemployed prowess. While John Wayne was litigating the cowboy as the cornerstone American, Akira Kurosawa created the Man With No Name: a bodyguard of no renown and enviable skill, who plays the gangs ruling a small town against each other for his personal earnings. A piece of shit, basically. But rather than deconstructing chanbara, Yojimbo codified it further, into a new mythology of rightmaking might.

A decade later, Sergio Leone would crib Yojimbo for A Fistful Of Dollars, the essential spaghetti western, a racistly nicknamed Italian variant presenting cowboys not as the founding sons of Manifest Destiny, but killers for hire with the occasional spurt of conscience. Pieces of shit, basically. Like Yojimbo before it, Dollars and its sequels didn’t take down the gunslinger, but reconstructed it into a new American man, the gritty individual, loyal only to coin, identical to the war god of Japanese aspirations. Here, from the horse’s mouth, what Kurosawa wrote to Leone: “It is a very fine film. But it is my film.”

One difference is that Kurosawa’s man moves on foot, where Leone’s rides. This contradicts historical order. Japan’s had horses since the fifth century at latest, while the American continent had no equines between the end of the Pleistocene and the Santa María’s arrival. Horserider Theory holds that the Yamato people, Japan’s majority ethnic group, rode on horseback from the Korean peninsula to conquer Japan’s indigenous tribes. We can only attribute this disordered cinematography to a struggle in the quality, the power, of the horses themselves. One year after Kurosawa’s horse-army epic Ran, thoroughbred Sunday Silence was born in Kentucky, a United State best known across the Pacific for its 1) fried chicken 2) derby. After claiming two-thirds of the Triple Crown, Sunday Silence retired in Japan as a celebrated sire of high-achieving racehorses. If you keep up with anime or video games, you may recognize his progeny: Fuji Kiseki, Special Week, Manhattan Cafe, Gold Ship.

NAVEL OF THE MOON

It took less than a century from Columbus’ arrival for horses to become New Spaniard. Already in 1580, criollos (American births of Spanish descent) sang the praises of the Americanized animal. The ferals roaming the mountains were beautiful in their wildness, and the captured ones, better-mannered than their European forefathers. True Spaniards backed them too: in a tract meant to facilitate the New World resettlement of his compatriots, Bernardo Vargas claimed “even the Indians” could tame this “most noble animal”. This would prove somewhat true. Most ranchowners belonged to castes of European descent, while the vaqueros in charge of their cattle were mestizos and mulattoes.

At its peak, the Viceroyalty of Nueva España slashed across the northern hemisphere, from modern Venezuela to the tip of the now-United State of Washington. Proto-Mexican vaqueros operated as far east as ‘Tejas’ (trans. ‘roof shingles’), perhaps further: borders were ill-enforced under French-Spanish-British interest in the territory of Louisiana. These conflicts weakened Spain’s hold on the continent. The criollos, who had organized the tending of American lands for centuries, resented the sudden demand of Spain’s conquering Austrian ruler for taxes. In Pueblo Nuevo de los Dolores, ringing the church bells, a priest called his people to rebellion: “¡Viva Fernando Séptimo!”

Some decades prior, a little spackling of colonies along the northeastern coast had, themselves, obtained freedom from European taxation. The newly minted México had nary the strength to resist the States’ united thirst for territory. Louisiana, Tejas, Nuevo México, the Californias, Spanish Florida, Puerto Rico. With each movement came the pioneers, light-skinned women with large breasts and little bonnets, white husbands, white wheelbarrows. And mestizo and mulatto cattlehands. ‘Vaquero’ transliterates to something like ‘cow-er’: ‘cowboy’ rolls better off the tongue, and has no homonym.

In one hundred years, American pioneers did what the house of Bourbon-Anjou hardly bothered with: profited off settlement. This made the pioneer a hot icon, the first face of the United States, and by extension one of the first representatives of the modern nation. Resourceful, hardscrabble individuals who’ve come up from nothing, indebted to no one, free to roam as they please. This last privilege is the most enduring of cowboy values, more than the eponymous hat, more, even, than guns. It is the impulse behind the roadtrip, the open-world video game, the Ford F-150, the 24 hour diner, the allergy to the functional restrictions of passenger rail.

The cowboy was coetaneous with, and ended by, the Second Industrial Revolution. Before the century’s turn, barbed wire obsoleted cattle-wrangling. Trains tamed the prairie. But freedom of locomotion would not be edged out by efficiency. The “horseless carriage” was in such demand that the modern assembly line was invented to supply it. Car, though: short for carriage, to be carried. Unwieldy, restrictive, coffin-like. Already the true mechanical horse existed, though it would still take fifty years to become popular. In The Wild One, sex symbol Marlon Brando rode the motorcycle, a World War mechanism for speedy couriering. What a promise! Freedom upon no man’s land. Until then, blue jeans were for impolite company. Now everyone wanted to look like a miner. So much so, that distressing jeans became a standard step of the manufactory process. They’re bleached and beaten, to look like they’ve been at work. You can even find them pre-ripped.

This archetype of the white working class animates the American political libido. The right wing is stirred by constant replacement anxiety. If we keep letting cheap workers into the country, they will edge out ours, not the strange-haired coffeehouse women, who need only learn their place, but real resourceful, hardscrabble men: the farmhands, mechanics, builders. The left dreams of an Appalachian redneck clan of union laborers who bust bourgeoisie knees, sabotage factory lines, other principled Unabomber behaviors. Lesbian trucks, champions of the little guy, skin light enough for a farmer’s tan. The white man rides the horse, flesh or machine. Look under the stable shingles, though, and you’ll find the three Ms, just like five hundred years ago: Mexicans, mestizos, mulattoes.

PLANET EARTH

On the first of August, 1876, in the backwaters of Dakota, a drunk gambler lost, as is his wont, the game and his temper. The following day, he approached the man who’d made the mistake of buying him consolation breakfast. Shot in the back of the head, James Butler Hickock slumped dead over the poker table. He was holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights, a play implemented into the cowboy myth as the “dead man’s hand”, alongside the whole of poker. A game for untamed gentlemen like our own Wild Bill.

Six years later, Emperor Meiji proscribed gambling. Except, in an oversight that would prove critical for the development of Japan’s future tech industry, he declined to outlaw hanafuda. In response, one entrepeneuring Kyoto craftsman filled the market void left by expensive, imported playing cards. His manufactory, later pivoting to electronic, skill-based games, would be among the first to bridge the etymological gap of “gaming”, which so many American casinos use to skirt restrictions against chance-based gambling. You might have heard of this company: it goes by the name Nintendo.

It’s hard to call Nintendo’s transition to Disney-like dominance of the video game sphere unsound, but it left a vacuum. Today, their playing cards are mere memorabilia. But before the turn of last century, a company of Penn U postbaccs published their collectible card game prototype through Wizards of the Coast. Though not first of its kind in terms of collectability, Magic: The Gathering vanguarded the introduction of skill elements to baseball card trading. Hasbro did what Nintencouldn’t: locked a playable game behind copious FOMO gambling. There was a loophole, though. Physical cards can be traded for each other, or for money which never reaches the parent company. Valve Software closed part of this loop when they inaugurated their own secondary market software for Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike items. Still even that model is archaic. The true advantage of digital gaming is the complete enforcement of scarcity.

Puzzle & Dragons owes its almost Tetris-like popularity to the gacha model. If you’ve never heard of Puzzle & Dragons, you might be familiar with its American equivalent, Royal Match. Video games are the most democratized and trifling form of entertainment. You stay up for day-of Steam releases, your least favorite cousin has racked up thousands of dollars in Riot Points, your bestie lost it all on Genshin Impact, your grandmother has only just gotten over her Zynga addiction. The skill-based era of gaming was never for long. Gambling is far older than the computer, closer in age to bread and liquor. Gambling is possibly the primordial form of mathematics.

And though everything new is just the old with a vengeance, the United States of America is forced to defend its merely bicentennial culture against the forces it created. Anime moral panics come in waves of five years or so. (‘Anime’, a reminder, is a transliteration of the English word animation.) Was Pokemon going to introduce Satanism to children? No, but it ran the much larger risk of teaching this Japanese-American mode of trading and collecting, creatures valuable for both power and aesthetics printed on Magic cardstock. Where the pandemic killed Pokemon Go, it left Honkai: Star Rail, with its sex appeal and paper-thin gameplay. Now Umamusume has committed the cardinal sin. It has sullied the horse, the foundational animal of the Americas, long reduced to luxury sports like dressage and, ever-popular among gamblers, racing. The derby must stay in Kentucky. It must not be revealed that the American horse has its equal in Tokyo, its rider in Ciudad Juárez. That there was never a Wild Bill, only a teller of tall tales, dead at the poker table. Only Mexicans in kimonos.

Imagine the USA without Japan. Imagine the USA without karate, Chuck Norris, LinkedInpoetry from “IT ninjas”. No Philadelphia rolls, no Crunchyroll. Nothing and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Judo, a Kanagawa Convention effort to renew the disarmed Japan’s identity, travels to Brazil, where it becomes jiujitsu. Jiujitsu reaches the States with a challenge to practitioners of any style. Investors rename the challenge “Ultimate Fighting Championship”. Across campaigns and presidential terms, Donald Trump attends UFC front rows, garnering favor from radicalized eugenicists. For the 250^th anniversary of American Independence, he intends to stage the UFC in the White House. Imagine the USA without Mexico. Your sushi spot devoid of back of house. No Breaking Bad, no The Good The Bad And The Ugly leifmotif. No F-150s from Hermosillo. Campaign promises of apocalyptic violence on nobody, preached to no one. A concentration camp without walls or prisoners. The white cowboy, on Miccosukee land.

‘Emily’ is a friend of ‘X’, whose apartment I’m readying for a concert in. The man at the door is of middling height, rudely muscled, short hair and beard and that sort of boyishness that doesn’t go away until you’re thirty. He manages no? before X’s roommate (henceforth: the girlfriend) speeds out to the door and pulls him in and away. Protecting him from me.

Later, we share a good laugh with the real Emily, a goth as tall as my shoulder. An Emily can look like anything! Primitive Man makes us all quite deaf. I start wearing earplugs when we go clubbing some months later. X knows a spot: a retention pond so big it has a dock. In the wet February dark, I say stop waiting, go on T. He changes his name. Friend and loved one infected. Sweet. Big win. We talk about moving in next year, him and me and Y, with whom we left the club at 1. Y, who got off estrogen because it was giving him mood swings. Y with the string of terrible boyfriends and hair down to the small of his back.

X needs new roommates because the girlfriend is moving out. He’s known her since high school: situationship, actually. At the club, I got groped sans permission by an unpleasant cocktail dress normie (shutter shades! 2025!), who’d previously probed me with girl’s locker room talk. “I know you’re a bad bitch!”. Heterosexuality is political. Deep down she likes women, but she has decided to live in the heterosexual position, exceptuating the excuse of high libation.

I guess some girls just quit dykery altogether. But they still like women, knowingly or not. Whenever ‘Emily’ is around, the girlfriend stops talking to X, or anyone. They get lost together, in their room, in each other and Skyrim. One of the few emotions severe enough to penetrate outwards from the gamer cave is ‘Emily’’s radioactive body dysmorphia, which he overcompensates for with hours in the gym, just like me pre-2019.

My wife works in the emergency room, surrounded but many greatly accomplished career men and even women. I learn the names and quirks of coworkers. Today, Doctor B treats a seventy-five year old man, who stops him as he’s leaving the room, and calls him a sprightly lad. Does he know he’s a woman? Because that’s not what you call a greatly accomplished career man. And the other short pretty doctor doesn’t get this treatment. Absolutely, I have a point, but the one I should watch out for is Doctor S. Even not knowing what he looks like, they say, I’d be able to pick him out from a lineup of all the attendings. That’s how visible his sadness is.

The one I find unbearable: I quit my first MMA gym because every cop in town was in attendance. Martial artistry is a tight community: a year later, at my new spot, the shrimpiest of my old classmates sat on the sidelines with his wife and baby. He wore a lime green button-up coordinated with his headband. Not a sweatband. The hard plastic type, for girls. Doctors have safety nets. A medical degree, a house, a boat they could stand to be less attached to. ‘Emily’ has little to lose, so might as well. But you can’t be a cop, a Florida cop, and a trans woman. They won’t let you. He provides for his wife and kid. That, right there, is all he will be, for the rest of his life: an outsized sense of responsibility and a capacity for hurting people.

Femboy has something to do with shota. They’re both perennially young. Adopting one of these identities goes super for me. I’m fifteen. I’m a hotly contested asset. Other boys, trans boys my age, stop talking to me because I don’t stop talking to their mid-twenties trans exes.

I’m mid-twenties and trans. Real adult lesbians are butch and femme. None of that anime shit. Futch doesn’t exist because futches weren’t around during the Leslie Feinberg years, the Marsha P years, in the United States of America, where real adults live.

I’m butch because I lift and because my hair isn’t as long as I’d like it to be and because I still own jeans. Mexico has estradiol in pills, which don’t work, or as thrice-weekly injection of benzoate. I have no tits. I spend a lot of time shaving.

I go out anyway. I meet new friends of many years raving in what would qualify as somebody’s yard if somebody lived in the house, if the yard wasn’t just dust. The cops come. I have a manic episode and an invitation to explain what a trans woman is from someone who calls himself drag queen in English, which is not the same as travesti except when it is. I show up to the Instagram Live with short hair. I don’t know how to do makeup.

It’s unsurprising that the world of the Mexican travesti isn’t mine. I call myself malinchist: I’ve been bilingual since age ten, on account of the Flash games. Mexico has one of the world’s highest transfemicide rates. Because they’re femicides, most transfemicides are what we call crimes of passion, a spurned lover with a gun. The spurning counts as legal defense, and secret possession of a penis counts as spurning. This zeroes out because I’m not stealth and don’t fuck straight people or really almost anyone except my new friends. And the computer. So scratch: I fuck a lot of Americans. Marry them even.

There’s a lot of America worship among travestis, too. Mexico has its own pop divas: Lady Gaga has yet to release a gay anthem on the level of Gloria Trevi’s. But my friends do spend hours ranking Gaga releases. I fail to participate. They’re very online, too, but with a sort of laterality which does amount to less online. They’re on Twitter for celebrity gossip, and to rehash the identity politics arguments I was seeing on Tumblr half a decade before. We all grew up on Dragon Ball but they don’t, like, watch anime anymore. They find unfeasible fantasy fetishes shocking. There isn’t a version of them that is plainly only possible on the computer.

I have a lot of estrogen in me. I’m typing this hours before my weekly megadose of pure, high-concentration intramuscular estradiol valerate, a formulation not available in Mexico. American sports are a propaganda arm of the American Republican party. For my own safety, my gym buds, some of the best friends I could ever have, are alienated completely from my personal history: no one gets to know I’m a boy.

I want the perception of me as a boy with tits and makeup to occur safely. This is plainly only possible on the computer. On the computer, sickly pseudogay homophobes groyping for social standing say fucking femboys isn’t gay. Viciously smart trans women say femboys are a different kind of thing to them. Pornographers say take it like a good bitch, faggot.

Any woman that works out is a butch. Can I be averse forever? I am at last a real adult. I shop online in dollars. I tower over short, muscular women in tank tops and bad haircuts at the club. I hook up instead with the only other girl my height, who sports cat ears and a crop top. Jaw stubble under my lips. Those in the know can tell without words: she likes being called a boy in bed.

Back in Mexico, we fund a punk’s funeral with a six-band skatepark bill. A kid with long hair and a Burzum shirt asks me if I’m a femboy. In the heat of the moment I say no. By band number five, the cops come.

A new addition: at the end of this list are a few metal-adjacent albums from less strictly-metal bands, for those willing to branch out into other kinds of strange and indigestible music.

FAQ FAQ FAQ FAQ FAQ

HOW MANY ALBUMS? 15 strictly metal, and 4 others.

IN WHAT ORDER? Alphabetical.

WHAT IS “METAL-ADJACENT”? Whatever I deem so.

WHAT THE HELL MAN WHERE’S THE BLACK METAL? I only just experienced a breakthrough in black metal taste afer playing Necrofier (who did not release an album this year) three hours in a row. I’m listening and learning. I remain your ever-faithful student. Whet your appetites on the war metal that made the cut.

THE LIST

Antichrist Siege Machine – Vengeance of Eternal Fire. (War metal.)

Like most microlabels, the contentions of war metal are primarily aesthetic. With a name like Antichrist Siege Machine, who has the balls to tell them they're not top of the heap? Vengeance of Eternal Fire exerts total battlefield control, rabid yet focused at twenty-five minutes. A salvo of nothing but killshots.

Black Curse – Burning in Celestial Poison. (Black-death, war-like.)

One word stands out from the heavy-and-trve lorem ipsum of Burning In Celestial Poison’s ad copy: ‘fanatical’. The power of a band like Black Curse is not that they will summon demons from beyond. It’s that, for the better part of an hour, they play with absolute conviction that they can, and will not brook your existence if you disagree.

Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere. (Progressive death metal.)

There's this recurring texture in Hidden History of the Human Race, a jet-thrust phaser rocketing out the stratosphere. It plays only twice in Absolute Elsewhere. With no heights left to reach, Blood Incantation expand outward, to the limitless land of prog. These twenty-minute epics plummet like a magic carpet down the maw of some ancient hunger, and break through, to parts unknown.

Bongripper – Empty. (Instrumental stoner-doom.)

Bongripper move as patiently as their music: disappear for four years, drop a double album, leave without a word. Empty demands concentration. You’ll know you’ve done right when, nearly an hour after the dead stop that kicks off the album, you jolt at the payoff in the “opening” (near seven minutes in) of the final track, pawing at the floor for assurance that you’re still on the same planet you started listening on.

Full of Hell – Coagulated Bliss. (Grindcore.)

After a few unremarkable years, America’s once-and-future kings of weird grind are back for their crown. Full of Hell is always looking to mutate, and the secret sauce on this particular serving of everything-goes grindcore is a twangy, startling noise rock, Hella backmasked on the elevator to the underworld.

Krallice – Inorganic Rites. (Avant-black metal.)

Inorganic Rites explores a new, even for the ever-experimental Krallice, sound. Consider the synthesizers and spiraling scales of Nocturnus, applied to the questing sensibilities of Windir, all carried by an asynchronously loud bass. A standout in strangeness for a band that has already been trailblazing for decades.

Midnight – Hellish Expectations. (Black/speed metal.)

Every generation since The Who has fancied itself more wretched, more alienated, more rock-and-roll than the last. Nearing thirty, I feel closer than ever to Midnight's rebellious oneupsmanship. It takes a seasoned hater to espouse "F.O.A.L.": if you don't get it now, you never will.

NAILS – Every Bridge Burning. (Powerviolence and grindcore.)

The addition of Ulthar guitarist Shelby Lermo to the straightforward, hard-grinding NAILS is an ill fit, on paper. And then you hear the riff spiraling each end of the singalong on nstant classic “Give Me The Painkiller”, and it all makes sense. Thirty years after Priest, ‘PAINKILLER!’ remains the coolest thing ever yelled in concert.

Oxygen Destroyer – Guardian Of The Universe. (Thrashing black-death.)

If you’re familiar with Oxygen Destroyer, you know what’s coming. They play “brutal thrashing kaiju metal”, code for borrowing from any genre that plays nothing but good riffs at inhuman speed. In concert the frontman growls that he is CHANNELING THE POWER OF THE KAIJU. The only evolution is this album is about Gamera instead of Godzilla. Apparently the answer to ‘what if Cryptopsy never fell off’ is Kaiju Big Battel. Man, I love metal.

Ripped to Shreds – Sanshi. (Death metal.)

Having followed Ripped to Shreds since their Reddit promo threads, I am overjoyed that their sound (a complication of Entombed with blast beats and power solos) has evolved into its best self. After knocking the listener stiff with muscular, well-placed melodies, Sanshi does what the band name suggests: shred them to pieces. Check out “Feast of the Deceased” for the most danceable death metal of the year.

Savage Oath – Divine Battle. (Epic heavy/power metal.)

It is loadbearing to the health of heavy metal that there be at least one yearly album dramatizing fantasy paperbacks. Thankfully, Brendan Radigan is here for us. ‘Savage rites tearing the world asunder?’ Hell yeah, man.

Thou – Umbilical. (Sludge metal.)

Insofar as discussions of ‘heaviest band’ are worth it, I always found Thou a strange entry. They are far too melodic to stand up to their sludge brethren in, say, The Body (as below). Umbilical is the step they were missing, ironically away from the heavy, towards grunge and punk. Having myself moved on from my fixation on perusing only the most tortured shit, it delights me to announce Thou have at last released a record that’s fun.

Traveler – Prequel to Madness. (Traditional heavy metal.)

Like the classics, Traveler have an album cover mascot: a betentacled alien with a cyber-eye and spiky bracelets. The signifiers of old school cool mutated into new meat. Prequel to Madness is sort-of Priest leather, sort-of Somewhere in Time sci-fi, all together the spearhead of pulp speed metal.

Undeath - More Insane. (Death metal.)

More Insane doesn't hop on the death/hardcore hype train: it knocks the driver out and takes everyone else for a ride. Everything here is apropos of the title, from the frontman's mania to the spasming rhythms, and still you can slam to it.) Honestly a little insulting, to those of us in local bands, how easy Undeath makes it look to just write a good song.

Venomous Echoes – Split Formations and Infinite Mania. (Death/black metal.)

The second of Venomous Echoes’ Cronenbergian excursions, Split Formations and Infinite Mania is nauseating torture via rollicking good death metal. Difficult, uncompromising, yet goes startlingly hard: like the body dysmorphic, Venomous Echoes is at war with itself.

PALATE CLEANSERS

Alcest – Les Chants De l'Aurore. (Blackened shoegaze.)

Alcest’s world of light has shed most of its metallic influence to arrive at an unpretentious shoegaze, concerned less with texture than with propulsive, glistening melody. For late summer, during a long car ride.

The Body – The Crying Out Of Things. (Noise metal.)

I stand by production as a distant second to songwriting. The Body are my exception. Out of their mudslide guitar emerge rhythmic noise experiments: hip hop, house, even, on “Less Meaning”, an adventurous dip into actual thrash metal. The Crying Out Of Things is the culmination of The Body’s long and puzzlingly heavy dalliance with dance music.

Couch Slut – You Could Do It Tonight. (Sludgy noise rock.)

Do It Tonight’s is bloody, broke, diseased and violated, all these things observed merely in passing, denying the easy release of a climax. Couch Slut paints a city of absurd, mundane violence. You turn it off, and try to sigh in relief. And then you look around.

Frail Body – Artificial Bouquet. (Screamo.)

As someone who dips into skramz only as a sidequest to grindcore, it’s clear, merely from listening, that Artificial Bouquet must fill AOTY lists from a different sort of niche reviewer. A blasting sad time.

I could extrapolate desperation from the gaping eyes of the bizarro Luigi mask, the production value contrasting his purported riches, the way he didn’t even bother editing out his reach for the off button. But there’s a deader giveaway: his earnings, brilliantly highlighted, amount to a subsignificant fraction of a single American penny. His Borgesian Ingress is faithful not just to geography but finance.

This works out. Atlas Earth didn’t need to let you pretend you’re rich. Players subscribe to Rhonda Byrne thought: if you think it’ll happen hard enough, then it is certain to happen. They did the fantasizing all by themselves. Metaverse investment was merely their fetish object. By abstracting the bank account, you can be fooled into thinking the money flowing into your digital rent is coming from nowhere, even if it somehow translates back to real money.

Having never read Chomsky, I still like the phrase manufactured consent. To my idiosyncratic and baseless interpretation, it points towards a specific form of propaganda which forcibly informs you that you already agree with an idea. Everyone agrees. We just have to go through the motions now. Perform the ritual.

This, of course, did not survive contact with reality. Now another half decade of documentaries on immigrant hope and book club announcements about building community and op-eds that start with “Life in the East Palestine Ohio Exclusion Zone can be grueling. But for this gay Catholic, (…)”.

There is no unified American left. Any worthwhile communist, with good reason, has long abandoned the political institution. Whence, then, this maudlin outburst from everyone that isn’t a MAGA hat, from the grieving Democrats to those that (righteously) withheld their vote?

HOPE

I came into my teens during the Obama era. I’m a Mexican immigrant, but from a border city. Inevitable American enculturation. So I don’t remember a time when we weren’t all hoping. Maybe Mexico was maybe hoping that America would get less racist. Then Obama directed millions of immigrant deportations, and oversaw the development of a drone program which allowed American soldiers to bomb brown people without fear of retaliation.

That was a mild idyll. Democrats still gave their constituency enough consideration to lie. They hadn’t yet figured out that they can ride their own opposition’s gravy train for a tenth of the effort. Hope is an anachronism from a time when there were campaign promises. For as much as the genuine left resists being lumped in with Gazan genocidaires, the sentiment has trickled down.

There is nothing and no one to hope for. We are the imperial core, the top of the heap, the orderly concentration of global power. Plucky outsiders will not assemble against the dragon. There isn’t even going to be a politician who deigns to give us reason to leave bed. They know we know the rules, and the rules say there is nothing.

COMMUNITY

This one’s tricky, because it has the pretense of material impact. If you put resources, even just time and effort, into your community, it stands to logic that there will be more resources to draw from.

I work with an aid group to supply the homeless populace. There is zero guarantee they will do the same for us. They may never have enough resources to do so. Entropy claims all.

You might, with some luck, show some bigots in need that the minorities they consider monstrous are not in fact so. What about those that don’t change their mind? And what about those that were already nominally on your side?

Which doesn’t mean this is a waste. Supplying others among the more honorable things you can do without endangering your life. But you are not building a fightsome little utopia out of atomized goals and dreams, that somehow, always, democratically, choose what’s best for each minority, against the current of history

I grant: America is full of communities. What they do in the face of encroaching oppression is, for the most part, shrink. Even if all these groups were rock-solid with values and lateral empathy, the resources have to come from somewhere. The groups of people that have banded together to change the world have not been anything as minor as a community. They have leaderships and self-supplying mechanisms. They don’t need mustard seeds of faith, because they have the assurance that their work will achieve more than mere commensalism. They can expect more than just making it to the day after.

SURVIVAL

“Survival is resistance” is the left’s prettiest falsehood. If survival alone was resistance, no settler-colonial state would stand. The mechanism that allows monsters like Trump and Harris within striking distance of the anglosphere’s seat of power would be dismantled. The land would belong to the nations that stood before the Church of England exiled its precisians. Borders would be monuments, and the great-grandchildren of slaves would feast on centuries of repaid wealth. There would never have been slaves at all!

More presently, many people from your (yes, YOUR) minority group wield their identity as a cudgel for scamming, ally themselves with your enemy for reasons of ideology or personal benefit, and die petty lives of selfishness and apathy. There is no teleological benefit to being marginalized, because there is no teleology.

Survival, in truth, is a matter of fortune. It happens less to the multiply marginalized, and more to those that, despite marginalization, have money. In the worst case scenario, it’s toughness backed by luck, the ability to fend off countless attacks without your assailants getting lucky once, and not kill yourself in the process.

I’m going to do something I advise other writers against doing, and anticipate your questions. What’s the point of disenchanting a populace already scrabbling to make sense of the cruelty? Consider that America has not changed for all the years I’ve been conscious, and far longer. These methods have had the collective effect of hydrating with our own spit. Before we can change anything, we must despair of everything.

I’m a mere two car-hours from Tampa, the arguable birthplace of death metal. Dying proper isn’t very death metal, due to the basic properties of quantity: the longer you live the more metal you make. Glenn Benton was a giant wuss for pretending that backing out of his promised suicide at 33 was a gigachad move, but he was also smart not to come through. (Shoutout Yngve Ohlin, who didn’t make death metal, and Euronymous, who saw his friend’s suicide for the marketing superhit it was.)

Some nautical miles from the Tampa Bay, Black Sabbath invented metal, through no fault of their own. Even with the reduced lifespan of transgender women, there’s a solid chance I will see the hundredth jubilee of Paranoid. At that point it will be a beyond-passé relic, played for the same kind of fetishistic #aesthetic of any song on the Fallout 3 radio. Along with its immediate contemporaries, Black Sabbath has stood to time as a classic, but not one to be emulated. (Check out Early Moods, though.)

The same can’t be said for its successors. Kill ‘Em All worship is not only alive, it regularly produces some of the best thrash. Consider how few genres have weathered the decades like so. There’s the occasional revival, but there isn’t an unbroken lineage of new wavers copying Duran Duran. There’s no burgeoning and improbably still-cool cock rock underground.

There’s this anxiety, common among the American median intelligentsia, that culture has been at a standstill since 2016. Even if you talk a lot about how America is a clownshow, as many of my favorite writers do, you’re still defined in relation to America. Democrats have conspired with Trump to churn the political organism around one public figure of uncommon staying power. If you’re straight, and white, and all those other Fight Club things, you don’t have a huge in to less narrow cultures, even if you brush them in your daily life. Which is why you’re forgiven for thinking the world is made of predictably disappointing intellectual property remakes.

Seven years ago, gringos had never heard of Daddy Yankee. Now reggaeton is one of the dominant musical forces in the anglosphere. It might be on its way out. I don’t know. These changes happen on a scale difficult to comprehend. One day you look down and the ice is cracked. You could blame it on corporate, but no matter how much they pay for trendsetters, they will always be trendchasers. Certainly I will not outfox them for free.

What does survive the years? Hardcore punk still follows the Discharge formula. After a decade-ish teasing the mainstream, rap went on to become the American sound. Boutique labels worldwide never stopped pumping out Incantation imitators, proof that being anal about microgenres works, at least, for ensuring people play what you like to hear. With a lot of luck I’ll get the centennial of Altars of Madness. I hope I’m senile like my maternal great-grandma, rather than deaf like my paternal grandma, on account of music has some kind of temporary healing factor on memory faculties. Brmbrmbrmbrmbrmbrm maze of torment I shoot out my rocking chair and start push moshing.

Sixty years after the fact, the Beatles continue to lead discussions of best band ever. It’s hard to argue, given the 20th century conception of the four-piece, and how quickly it became outmoded against a pop mainstream of superpersonalities delicately concealing the armies of their own production. In forty years, when Please Please Me hits a century, will people talk about the best band ever? Or will Lennon-McCartney be relegated at last to the study hall?

Some works last orders of magnitude longer than a century. But no one writes like the Epic of Gilgamesh, not anymore. Me, I think it rocks, but maybe the critics thought it was dogwater. Enheduanna, Gilgamesh’s vague contemporary by history’s warped standards, and the first known named author, prays to Inanna because everyone in Ur fucking hates her. Which posits her Hymn as the first and longest-coming reevaluation of a cult classic.

Listen to me: there are no edge cases. None of the underground bands I like will be remembered in a hundred years, because Pitchfork in 2024 does not have the force of MTV in 1993. How good they are only bears on short-term memory. For the medium term, popularity is the game. And then, physicality. Taylor Swift is bound to become a pale spectre, dancing for variety shows and the backs of gossip rags, but her music will be archived for centuries because there’s so many wax copies. It may outlive America the way Enheduanna outlived Sumeria, recontextualized for a culture of strange and alien values, who views us in turn as impossibly antiquated, infrastructurally irrelevant, gone.

It’s possible that this is an anxiety of history itself. Mankind’s longest period is prehistory: three million years of which not a word of apocrypha survives. Without the malefit of evidence, did our ancestors conceive of time as receptive to human transcendence, on a more basic level than Alexander and Napoleon and all those other conquerors who coped by struggling against it? Or did they, too, cower from its enormity? We have no way of knowing. In three million years the epoch from Sumeria to now will appear compressible, and our successors, wild-haired and weird-clothed, will gather round and ask the same questions of us. Maybe, if our stone tablets, our Swiftie special editions make it intact, they’ll have a bit more of an idea. But that idea will look nothing like our idea.

Because I think about death a lot, I have a great want for religion. Every few months I circle back to Buddhism. It’s the only religion I’ve found compatible with the brutal, insignificating passage of time. I have always been an unselfaware smidgen of karma, driven on cosmic wheels to forms of suffering my conscious person has done nothing to deserve. This is the only way in which I have known the universe. Barring a lot of work that I’m not doing in this life, it’s the only way I will know the universe.

Buddhists understand the Buddha as wise, not just in an earthly Sermon On The Mount way, but possessing an understanding of phenomena physical and beyond. When questioned on the nature of time, though, the Buddha practiced silence. It’s impossible for a mind less than perfectly luminous to fathom forever, lest it be stretched into eons of insensate loss.

When there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall…

-Possessed, “No More Room In Hell”, quoting “Dawn of the Dead”

…not be able to catch a train anymore on account of they’re too small, you idiot!

-The Guardian, quoting @pixelatedboat, misquoting “1984”

At the heart of so much lowbrow Orwelliana (including the master himself) lies an identical fault: biased, hypothetical fear of totalitarianism. Dystopian fiction and its popularity is a misfire of the fear that we’re already oppressed. We the American, the Mexican? No, every single person with the resources to read this, and then some.

There’s this Tumblr post I won’t bother to dig up, accusing white people of getting too comfortable aestheticizing cannibalism, which has been historically crucial to the myth of the black savage. While these false charges and their consequences are fact, other groups that have suffered the legal, even deadly repercussions of cannibal allegations include Jews, early Christians, Turkomen, Scots, North Koreans, drug users and Satanists (so queers).

These accusations are not aracial, not anymore. We live in a racist world and must examine everything through the lens of race. But they are pre-racial. They predate the modern conception of race, pointing to a more essential goal of civilization: demonizing the outgroup. By law of POSIWID, outgrouping is just about the only purpose common to all societies throughout history.

Back in film school, a teacher asked me what zombie movies represent. My amateur answer was ‘fear of society collapsing’. Now I understand zombie movies are society working as intended. Night of the Living Dead has received a multitude of thematic analysis. It’s about racism, the Cold War, Vietnam, mass media, even a precocious environmentalism. Chief among these is Dr. Kim Paffenroth’s assertion that, in breaking away from the Haitian voodoo zombie’s master-slave relation, Night instead evokes abjection, the inability to distinguish dirt from cleanliness. But the standard of cleanliness is social, and cannibalism is one of the great unclean acts. Zombie survivors are not perceiving abjection, they are subject to abjection.

‘Zombie’ was not the nomenclature used in Night, nor was it avowed by George Romero, who insisted he was making something ‘new’. Exasperation at being lumped in with the zombie crowd is entangled with the origin of the cinema zombie itself. Undead infection was likely pioneered by Romero’s inspiration, the I Am Legend novel. Failure to escape the ingroup has two potential outcomes. They bite virulently or they bite out your braaaaaains. You will think like them or not think at all.

Overlarge awareness of this leads to tortuous self-parody. Don’t call them zombies. Call them ‘infected’, because duh. Call them ‘walkers’, because they walk, unlike humans. Pontypool, otherwise a victory of low-budget filmmaking with a novel approach to the mechanics of zombification, begs you call them ‘conversationalists’.

Such catastrophic overcorrection does mean there’s something to correct. The illustrious ranks of media that still uses the Z-word includes the Brad Pitt World War Z, a tale of American heroism about defending South Korea and Israel, and Call of Duty’s Zombies mode, where a squad of international Hitlers mow down suspiciously dark-skinned hordes.

Target audience? A pretty trick of individualism. Even if our society, like the rest, is about the ingroup, everyone believes they’re in the outgroup. Note how quickly the emergence of the alpha male concept cued the autofellation of the sigma, who stands beyond the wolfpack instead of above it. Somehow the theoretical benefits of abandoning society are identical to those of winning society. That plus a tendentious sense of superiority.

So the modern zombie hero is the badass. Everyone loves Train to Busan, a bog-standard fast-zombies movie, because it has a badass dad (all the blockbusters are about dads now -- don’t laugh!). Dadliness here is just the trigger enabling latent badassery. You are one excuse away from casting off the shackles of society, and this would make you harder and better than the ingroup, instead of sickly and wild and paranoid.

An individual convinced that they’re outgrouped is vulnerable to fraternalization from someone else claiming outgrouping, even if that person is, for example, a Forbes broker, or a president. This is the west’s final form. Infectees hiding their bitemarks, convincing you to look the other way so they can pounce on your braaaains.

Whether this pandemic of confusion is more effective as a tool of social control than what preceded it, I don’t know. Certainly I doubt such a world will last. The opposite of a zombie movie is a disaster movie, a civilization under threat from without instead of within. Zombies and disasters have a yin-yang popularity cycle, and disasters are on the uptick. While the leaders of the G20 are red-knuckled with sinorussophobia, what’s killing the world is, simply, Twisters. And then there will be no more room in hell.

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Our pain, not your pain

Our pride, not your pride

-NAILS, “You Will Never Be One Of Us”

I’m the new New England grindcore and I don’t need help!

-Cheekface, “There Were Changes In The Hardcore Scene”

Girl sends me a meme that’s like, an easy jab at gated-community punk frontmen. Stop the presses: joyless Marxist doesn’t “agree” with joke. But I don’t think you have to belong to a particular class to speak cogently, even ferociously, in opposition to its oppression. This goes beyond the petty liberal concept of allyship. The white guys in Magrudergrind can scream about race all they please because it’s a net good that they are public opponents of racism.

This is a big show of hypocrisy from a chronic gatekeeper. Not content with axing outsider aesthetes, I punch down on metalcore/deathcore. We’re talking about a woman conceited enough to think there’s a wrong way to make atonal, infantile horror movie worship.

Much of this attitude is displaced anxiety. Few in the unlit, caveman-haired grotto of metal look my way twice, and those that do have null structural power to do something about it. I feel safer in the pit than outside it. So I have a selfish interest in preserving the magic circle. When a normie steps in, I start fearing I’ll come back tomorrow to find that they’ve gender segregated slamdancing for the athletes’ safety.

White straight metalheads have just as much a right to this fear. They also like weird, annoying, kinda nerdy music. Normalcy is a threat to the bared soul. It’s not enough that they have to pretend to be one of you to stay employed: now your yuppie friends are also in here, gawking at piercings and selling spiderweb font logo merch for your band that sounds unconscionably like Weezer.

Let’s focus on one white guy: Henri Alexander of fashion brand Enfants Riches Déprimés. You may remember him as the designer of Kim Kardashian’s battle jacket. Confronted with internet outrage, Alexander answered that he would “rape and exploit and pillage” punk all he wanted.

It would not be fair to call Alexander a poser. He really does like the bands. Of what he gets out of heavy music: “I’m angry at my parents for sending me to this place for a fucking year. I’m angry at the fucking people in the rehab for telling me what to fucking do all the time. I’m angry at my teachers and principals for kicking me out of every school I go to.” I don’t even want to disagree. Tear down the panopticon! Abolish the nuclear family!

If it’s not his identity, then we must be angry at his actions. He’s taking an art form which he himself describes as “very blue collar”, and reselling it for thousands of dollars. This is the exact thing we want to stop from happening when we gatekeep.

The problem is, it doesn’t work.

I wish it worked. It feels great to catch out a closet dweeb: gotcha now, motherfucker, name five different things G.I.S.M. stands for. This fleeting empowerment is responsible for the shared illusion that gatekeeping achieves anything. If it did, Alexander would be bankrupt. Not only is he magnitudinally more popular than Discharge, he has effectively gatekept us. That is the mission statement of Enfants Riches Déprimés, right there in the name. Elitist couture for rich sad kids.

The reason that I feel numerical safety in the metal crowd is the same reason gatekeeping doesn’t work. We don’t have the power, the money to gate our community. All it took to show us up was art-gallery merchandise from a culturally alienated nepo baby.

Whose wrath did Midori invite? Incautious, moralistic passersby are only at fault insofar as they are the censors’ go-between. YouTube eroguro comes with an expiration date. We all love free DIY skatepark shows, until we’re high and bleeding when the cops show up. Then we call it what it is: a state of emergency.

I am not calling to center money, insofar as we can be realistically distanced from money in the first place. To what end would we then be shoving people out? The logical endpoint of gatekeeping is the usage of all available power to weed out the weak (Hypocrisy, melodeath, 2009). Little wonder we can’t say nazis aren’t real punks with a straight face, if the only force we muster in the face of encroachment is sectarian shitpicking. What skinheads and luxury designers have that we don’t: they know precisely what they want when they circle the wagons (Darkthrone, heavy metal/crust punk, 2010).

So long as there’s stratification, there will be a heavy underbelly. But closing it does not contribute to its survival. My bandmate is fifty and not getting younger. He knew true believers his age: they’re scattered, now. Gatekeeping is a negative-sum game where the lost quantity is time. Drag your ironic-sticker friends to Eyehategod before Mike IX bites it. Maybe they’ll start a band too.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the title, Street Fighter’s The Movie is not based on the first entry in the series. Street Fighter 1 is a relic, a bridge between Brucesploitation prototypes and the modern fighting game. Even that is accidental: its true innovation was the introduction of special moves, as a secret for industrious players to figure out. The “deluxe” version was a pair of pads that fed back attack strengths depending on how hard they were punched. Thankfully, this did not profit, and Street Fighter II defaulted to the bestseller six-buttons-and-a-joystick layout.

Almost no characters from Street Fighter made it into its sequel. There’s Sagat, former final boss, and Ryu plus Ken, ex-player avatars. The “ex” is important. What made Street Fighter II the blueprint is its extensive cast of playable characters, each with a moveset as complex and nominally powerful. (Tier lists would be invented after and because of this.)

Though great for the game, the cast is one of the worst parts of Street Fighter: The Movie. In its capacity as advertisement for one of the decade’s most popular games, Capcom demanded The Movie feature everyone from the Street Fighter II select screen. This photo from the arcade isn’t doing it justice: by the time we were done getting Mega Street Fighter II: Whatever Editions, the playable cast was a hot sixteen. A far cry from De Souza’s ideal rota of seven characters.

Some characters get the shorter end of this stick. Despite being the bus drivers, Honda and Balrog have a self-justifying repartee, gay jokes and all. T Hawk meanwhile has like one line (“it’s Cherokee, sir, I wear it for good luck in battle”), and could’ve been rolled into the character of Captain Sawada, whose terribly ADR’d presence can only be explained by how badly Capcom wanted Kenya Sawada.

Dee Jay’s stereotype changes from maraca-dancing Jamaican to greedy, educated backstabber. His lines at least get love, even if that can be attributed to De Souza’s penchant for black sidekicks. He’s also the only character to not end the movie dressed in his game costume. Honda gets a faceful of kabuki paint, though he’s Hawaiian. Bison puts Chun-Li in a red cheongsam, which is not quite right, but she also gets a pair of broken handcuffs, that’s kind of awesome. Guile says he’ll give Chun-Li an interview “only if [she] wears that dress”. Yeah, I’d love to wear the clothes my father’s killer sexually harrassed me in to our professional dinner, creep.

Would you rather spend a whole ninety minutes wearing karate jeans? As live action goes, the 1994 movie is the best adaptation of Street Fighter we’re getting. Thanks to its refusal to engage with the game’s barebones plotline, it was impactful enough to feed back into the whole franchise. There’s a chance Alpha character Charlie is inspired by the idea of Guile’s missing military teammate. Also, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, which has about half the cast of Street Fighter II.

What makes a game good is not what makes a movie good. Street Fighter II, despite its racism, stands as one of the most important video games of all time. A ridiculous paradox, if you care about anything. I’m not sure what it does for a Zangief main to see their favorite character turned into a Russophobic joke (as if they didn’t have it bad enough). But he was already that. Four games and as many compoundingly stupid storylines later, he still is.

When I’m done with Street Fighter II, I drift towards the many rhythm games I’ve been making an effort to improve at. All put together, maybe three percent of the unlockable avatars in games that take my Aime card have dark skin. “Ludonarrative dissonance”, a term invented for video games: in the global era, I can choose between turning a blind eye, or having racist fun.

*The Guardian’s article lists Street Fighter II’s cast of characters as nineteen. Even counting non-playable boss Akuma, who is not featured in the movie, Street Fighter II contains a maximum of seventeen characters.

In the movie, Shadaloo is a Southeast Asian country most reminiscent of Thailand, where its exteriors were filmed. But its leadership is a Jamaican engineer, a Soviet Russian (that’s his job), an arms dealer of ambiguous descent (in-game Thai, but in-movie played by a Cherokee, and his mastery of muay thai is indicative of nothing, Street Fighter came out the year Ramon Dekkers was on the King’s Cup), and a warlord of ambiguous descent (played by a Puerto Rican).

In modern geopolitics, this is not a natural state of affairs. Maybe the Shadaloo regime started out as a Condor operation. This would position Zangief as a post-perestroika defector, collaborating to take down communism elsewhere.

In a show of capitalist realism, Bison claims his dictatorship has received, will continue to receive, international corporate funding. Paradoxical openness to liberal collaboration is characteristic of fascism throughout history. Shadalutva is a nonstarter, given the diversity of the command room. Perhaps Bison aims to create the first race-blind ethnostate.

Bison is hostaging dozens of relief workers, but that can’t be the starting shot. What empoverished his nation into attracting voluntourism? Or are they there to triage invading forces? The people of Shadaloo don’t appear unwell. There’s one dour scene in an ‘Allied’ Nations hospital, but it’s unclear whether the patients are locals or invading soldiers. As usual, we can’t trust NATO’s purported reason for invading the global south. 

In exchange for the hostages, Bison demands twenty billion dollars, which is like ten thousand quadrillion in today money. Making genetic supersoldiers is expensive. He’s pumping Blanka full of chemicals to give him the complexion of an uprooted carrot, which is less racist than the game’s suggestion that he looks like that because he was abandoned in the Amazon. His big green son shall “wipe away every adversary, every creed, every nation”. Which isn’t very juche of him.

Purging religion does fall into the UN definition of ethnic cleansing. In the blue corner, the ‘Allied’ Nations: American (played by a Belgian, and badly), Australian, Cherokee, contracting out a Chinese-American-Hawaiian journalism team and two international racketeers.

This is a movie from the mind of Steven E De Souza, screenwriter of apolitical masterpieces like Die Hard and Die Harder. It makes sense. De Souza espouses a NATO-inclusionist point of view, where anyone from any nation can enforce the end of history. So don’t blast L’Internationale just yet. Zangief defecting to the AN is basically the closing shot. Pick a side, man.

Men with hair are women.

-Unknown.

We’re driving home from a four-band hardcore bill, and I say, good time, punk’s fun, but I do prefer push pits, the kind you get at metal shows. Quite without prompting my friend answers: metalheads are decrepit bigots who wish it was the 80s so they could say slurs without consequences.

In her book Metal Bent, lesbian metaller Dr. Amber R Clifford-Napoleone tells a story of giving a symposium on queerness in heavy music. During the Q&A, a man raises a hand: I think you might be the only one. For a long second, R awaits a comradely laugh. There is none.

Hours before Tomb Mold in Boston, me and my friends are getting through Peacemaker. This is a show confronting the relationship between the idea of the superhero and the reality of white-supremacist vigilantism. In the climax, the protagonist’s KKK dad accuses his son (previously nancy boy) of failing the white project the day he started listening to that devil music. Cinderella, Quireboys, Faster Pussycat. I am reminded of my grandfather, who thrice (thrice!) called The Beatles’ feminine haircuts and twist dancing the beginning of the end for true manhood. The fucking Beatles!

Patriarchy, like capitalism (and indeed, a correlated set of kyriarchical points), is capable of absorbing anything less than its total obliteration. Still, rockers wear leather because Rob Halford queered metal fashion. Picture Garth Brooks, Eminem, and any member of Celtic Frost on Cold Lake. Which of these men looks more like a faggot?

Knowingly or not, metalmen are performing drag. They’re bio kings. The epithet for the commercial bend of heaviness is cock rock, a communion of bulge in spandex pants. And even for po-faced black-tee bands, riffs are phallic. A good riff is thick, chugging, huge. Push pits circumambulate this heaving mass. Swing your guitar at hip height. The neck sticks out at an angle I needn’t elaborate. Here’s a review of 200 Stab Wounds’ Manual Manic Procedures comparing the title song to orgasm.

Historically, though, metal is patriarchy-white, again in a correlation that can’t be disentangled. Faust of Emperor stabbed a gay man to death in the park, and Varg killed Euronymous, in an act that wasn’t a hatecrime but did enshrine Vikernes as neonazi luminary. Internal pushback against reactionary musicians and even NSBM is a small, equivocating movement, and it’s easy to see why: The Beatles, Sabbath, Led Zep, all four white blokes from England. That’s our blueprint.

The unfair consequence is that people like me have to be extra special, to compensate. When I mention being in a metal band, my colleague, white, transmasc, asks: is it a queer band? Well what do you want me say? As a transgender Mexican, I’m double queer, so it’s okay that my guitarist is a heterosexual gringo?

The dreaded “straight white male” is, more than a real person, a political position. It’s the shadow my guitarist casts over me, through no fault of his own. He cut his hair a few years ago so that he could get away with sneaking anywhere. I don’t even get that. I just get to lose credibility.

And it’s also the shadow all metal bands ever cast over us. We could be a power trio of Mexican trans women. We’d still be, in queer eyes, straight white men. This is invasive identity surgery. I was aware of it even in México, definitionally a nation where no band could be white blokes from England. It nagged at me from across the border. My friend in Concilio Cadavérico has piles and piles of white guy records, Impetigo to Leviathan to Deafheaven. In between pits at a six-band fundraiser, some kid in a Burzum shirt asked if I’m a femboy.

Joan Jett’s never come out as a lesbian. She’s also never stopped wearing her labrys necklace. I don’t, not really, want trans flag patches on my battle jacket. I am out. Don’t ask me to prove it.

Before Tomb Mold, Horrendous. During a beautiful, meandering instrumental, the guitarist and bassist face away from the crowd and start slowly headbanging at each other. I say to my friend, look, they’re having gay sex. And I turn back, and there they are.

Yesssss!

-Roger Ebert, for the Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1997

I’ve watched 27 hours of Street Fighter: The Movie. That’s a low estimate, because I stopped counting rewatches at sixteen. Somewhere around the eleven count, I promised myself I’d review it every time. Today I was blessed with the opportunity to expose a friend of a half-decade to (unfortunately) my favorite movie. Consider this an effort to right my wrongs.

Let’s talk about Raul Julia. You want me to talk about Raul Julia. You’ve seen the clips, you’ve seen “it was Tuesday”. Quoth friend: that’s where it’s from!?

Julia’s outstanding ham as M. Bison won him a Saturn Award, which is the best thing to happen to both Street Fighter and the Saturn Awards. He was an actor of uncommon power everywhere he went. But he did go a specific place: Shadaloo. Can’t chew scenery without scenery.

It was a hard choice between screenshoting this and the John Wayne Gacy Bison. Also in this scene, the best visual gag: Bison steps behind a pingfeng to swap his trademark dictator cap for a silk version of the same. It’s Saturday morning cartoon schlock from people who wished their favorite shows growing up had the budget to animate jokes.

A common epithet leveled towards Street Fighter is that it’s “so bad it’s good”. This category I reject unto death. Bad movies are, much more simply, so bad they’re bad: Shallow Hal, Burton’s Planet of the Apes, the first Friday the 13th. Featuring shoddy acting, revolting ideology, forgettable/incoherent cinematography, self/unseriousness, and a generalized failure of artistic X-factor, true bad movies are plain not worth watching.

After (maybe) more than twenty rewatches, I am disenchanted with Street Fighter. You will not catch me calling it good. But it is worth watching on its own merits. What we refer to as “so bad it’s good” is the tension between Street Fighter’s bad and good elements. Fighting out of the blue corner, Raul Julia, theatrical set and costume design, a bombastic combination of bespoke orchestral and Ice Cube. Opposing them, the NATO-jingoist screenwriter of Die Hard, Capcom demands to write in every character from Street Fighter II, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Van Damme is Stephen E. De Souza’s poetic punishment. His character sports a US flag tattoo and he still can’t play a convincing American. Production tales have him on a coke bender, cheating on his wife and mangling the pronunciation of “Ryu”. He sounds like he has a different Belgian stuck in his throat. He’s reading off a teleprompter in another galaxy.

And he is the perfect foil to Raul Julia. Van Damme’s Guile only meets Bison at the halfway point, but they’re in communication from the start. Julia watches Van Damme’s big stupid mug flip him off on a news broadcast. In retaliation he threatens to kill a bunch of hostages. Van Damme says things like “this war isn’t about your personal vendetta”; Julia says “RAISE THE INCUBATION CHAMBER!”

I have made a lot of lists in this article. Distinct bullet points of good and bad. Truth is, movies are a hollistic whole. That’s where the tension that makes Street Fighter unique and irreplicable lives, in the coherent aggregate. Raul Julia’s last line on The Movie, indeed, any movie, is a nonsequitur paraphrase of Luke 10:18. He rolls the nouns around with maniacal delight (“frrrrom heaven... like LIGHTNING!”) while flying into the air thanks to the power of superconductor electromagnetism. Then he does his move from the game, the one where he flies across. Van Damme hits him with another move from the game and says “Bison! You’re off the air!”, and it sounds, thank god, like shit.

Others have waxed poetic about South of the Border. Articles questioning how a 350-acre racist gas station continues to operate open with four paragraphs of picturesque. Squirreled away at the end of paragraph three is a mention of SOB’s eye-catching mascot, Pedro. Who is Pedro? Well:

There are short interviews with Mexican South Carolinians in the Assembly article, perhaps compensating for the author being a white North Carolinian. Quotes from and about Ryan Schafer, the all-American owner of SOB, get three times the wordcount of any Mexican.

In America, Mexicans have no right to cultural self-determination. The closest we get to Crazy Rich Latinos are TV shows about cartel wives. It’s worth contrasting this with the other media fight I’m conscripted in, queer representation. Recurring LGBT characters in primetime TV hover comfortable at 10+%, double-ish the amount of queer adults in the United States. It’s not a won fight, and it begets the question of what, if anything, representation achieves, when federal LGBT protections are readily nullified at the state level. But it’s a winnable fight. It’s being won.

As for the effectiveness of media-politics: Mexicans still exist in the popular imaginary as an infestation that can be kept out of America. Build the wall, as if the wall hasn’t existed in its modern form for next to a hundred years. Before Trump, Obama had already ordered the fence be upgraded, from corrugated sheet and chainlink to an imposing row of apartment-height slats.

You would think Obama more sensitized to racism. But kicking out Mexicans is central to both Republican and Democrat platforms. Mexican is metonym for alien undesirables: Colombians, Guatemalans, Haitians, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians. These are the people I saw in the streets across the Mexicali wall, begging for money to feed their children, treat their sickness, catch a bus. México was not about to offer them help. It is complicit in its abuse, and espouses American’s prejudices towards the south of its own border. The worst thing you can be in a city is a non-citizen.

I am not a citizen of the United States. My class positionality shields me from the worst of this. I’m a rarity in that I migrated legally, under the auspices of a fiancee visa. Still, being caught too far from my wife can, at the cop’s discretion, begin the deportation process. That’s to say nothing of being caught, even suspected of, committing an actual crime. I don’t yet have a green card, a document which will denominate me as second-class citizen, instead of non-citizen.

I can’t change my name and gender marker until my green card application is through. You know what happens if a white woman asks to see my ID in a Florida bathroom.

Even more noteworthy is the amount of money I’m allowed to make, which is zero. This doesn’t stop immigrants from getting jobs from unscrupulous Americans who pay pennies on the dollar. Culture, as a political weapon, creates profitable contradictions. Mexicans are lazy, but not so much that we won’t steal your job. Of the images of Pedro sleeping on a cactus, hat pulled over his eyes, Schafer says: “we didn’t invent this, Mexico did.” Nicole King, professor of American Studies at UMBC, calls South of the Border a sanctuary of Americana kitsch. Such cozy, exculpating words, Americana kitsch, milennial cellar door. You could see them relegated to the Society pages. Americana Kitsch Makes Racial Stereotypes Of Beloved Mexican Icon.

My American aunt-in-law has a fridge magnet of a blonde chick in trenzas and a sombrero, holding a trayful of margaritas. Check out the updated, less white Pedro.

Nerd out with me. Imagine life as a text-heavy RPG (race-playing game). Here’s a dialogue tree I encounter biweekly (either way works):

🗣️ How come your English is so good?

💭 Better than yours.

💭 I was bitten by a radioactive American.

💬 I spend a lot of time on the internet.

=>

🗣️ But you don’t look Mexican!

💭 I don’t have a polite way of telling you how rude that is.

💭 Have you ever grasped your selfhood with both hands and found them empty?

💬 Haha, well, you know.

Later in our road trip, I’m walking down Boston with my friend. And I say: I don’t know what to do with being Mexican. I’m not even sure I count. Where I come from, yes, that’s México: where I come from, I’m white. Friend reminds me I can’t drive, work, divorce, own property, move houses, cross national borders or travel within the States by myself. That’s got to count. I ask if I’ll be white white once I get citizenship. Friend says, like, kind of.

After months of effort from in-laws to find the right “Mexican style” crema, my friend made chilaquiles, and got it in one. It was just fucking Hood sour cream.

We didn’t stop at South of the Border of the way back. When we got home, we opened an envelope from USCIS, informing us we’d missed the date for my green card interview.

Yes, I think I will.

I’ve since concluded that game designers that purport to make a game where Your Choices Matter ought to beta their product through the eyes of someone that doesn’t game.

This may smack of the outsider wish for mecha anime that focuses on the CHARACTERS instead of the ROBOTS, espoused with anodyne ignorance by people that don’t watch mecha anime. But the idea of choice is so entrenched in video games, downright obligatory in megamarket phenoms, that it presupposes the gamer mind. And with the soil thus seeded, choice blinds us to when a story is doing little more than fuck with the player.

The three games we streamed were Disco Elysium, The Stanley Parable and Slay the Princess. To top things off, I’m going to talk about a game that I played by myself: The Talos Principle.

(This is not a spoiler-free article.)

“I don’t want to be this kind of animal anymore.”

Disco Elysium came out looking the best. We’re still not through with it as a couple, but it’s been a second-to-second delight. Disco is one of the closest things in the gaming canon to a Complete Person Simulator, an expansiveness dedicated to exploring one human’s place in their society.

At a glance, Disco appears to be the most choice-bountiful game in this article. All the possible permutations in dialogue trees, side quests, skill checks et al compound to a total that far surpasses The Stanley Parable’s two doors. It’s hard to even remember the totality of my wife’s choices in her ongoing playthrough.

The deceptive truth is the opposite. Most of the main story is hard-coded, with your choices extending to the manner in which you communicate to yourself and others as its events unfold.

This frees the player up to choose who the character is, for the moment that they inhabit the game. Such choices come unburdened of much other than the basic embarrassment of life. For how variegated the opportunities are to make an ass of your man, Disco does not offer them out of gratuity. Every fuckup is balanced by the chance amend a portion of the world. The only presupposition is that the player have ever exercised agency with a conscious aim to be either selfish or kind. No such thing as human nature, but by educated guess, most people have had free will at least once (with apologies to Spinoza).

Disco Elysium is, shortly, not fucking with you...

“You continue to surprise me in all sorts of mundane, unremarkable ways.”

...as opposed to The Stanley Parable.

Stanley is where I first noted friction between chooser and sheer choice. The Stanley Parable operates on the major presupposition that the player wants to try things again to expect different results.

This is a gamer truth. For a while I was streaming Ultrakill’s Cybergrind. The Cybergrind is an arcade mode where the player faces endless enemies in a looping setting. It’s reasonable to expect different results, given the skill factor. But more profoundly, the gamer needs to reexperience the game because that’s what the game is for.

Stanley jokes on this need. His Parable, the one that you get if you just obey the narrator, is too straightforward to be satisfying. You should want to play again. Except this doesn’t hold without the base need to replay, which my wife lacks. She got the ending the narrator congratulated her for, and she was done. The idea of disobeying the narrator never occurred.

The Parable is in itself a complete narrative. It’s hard to have much quibble with its deliberately pedestrian construction: a man discovers that he has been controlled, and, in disgust, destroys the oppressor. Perfectly functional literal parable. It can’t even be said that there is much more to The Stanley Parable’s “story” hidden in choosing the other door, since it’s all an exercise in waiting for Godot.

Of course The Stanley Parable is fucking with you. What starts out as commentary on the illusion of choice evolves into metacommentary on video game culture. There is no true ending because such a thing is a farce. It resolves to zero sum: the fact that a player that doesn’t capital-G Game won’t get to choose the narrative that pertains to another demographic isn’t a problem.

It’s a problem when your game purports to have a story.

“You’ll always come back to the box.”

Slay the Princess opens as a subversion of the damsel in distress myth. You’re a dashing Hero, and there’s a Princess locked in a basement (the opposite of a tower, see), and you have to kill her. So the narrator tells you.

Running theme, there. But there’s no reason to contradict Stanley’s narrator other than replay value, or a predisposition against authority. Slay the Princess has a story, with stakes. So my wife woman-respected her way into a route where they painlessly save the Princess.

No harm done, except a super-Princess ghost thing shows up and eats the rescued Princess’ soul, and tells my wife that in order to beat the game they have to bring her a bunch of other Princesses. And they have to be different ones, so they can’t repeat their choices.

On replay, this meant harming the Princess. Which is where, in defiance of The Shifting Mound’s claim that they would inexorably be drawn back to complete the narrative, my wife stopped playing.

Slay the Princess plies on metafiction. The world is a construct of the narrator, and the Princess is reborn in novel physical forms according to what is done to her. It becomes gradually clear that the protagonist and the player are distinct entities. In such an overt meta discourse, the story stops exploring what the character will do and becomes about what the player will do. Burdened by such responsibility, my wife made the most logical choice to not harm a random woman.

That’s the injury. The insult was the suggestion that reopening the game was inevitable. It’s tough to claim that a game I like has failed: in positing the woman as someone that mutates according to the violence done to her, Slay the Princess has plenty to say on misogyny and the construct of heterosexuality. But as a piece of metafiction, it’s arrogant. It presupposes not just the player as repetition-driven, but the choices present in the game as inherently satisfying. It’s almost the apex of replay value self-satisfaction, the idea that the player will choose light modifications to your narrative again and again just because it’s there.

Almost.

“Let your will be done.”

The Talos Principle is a plodding Portal ripoff about getting bossed around the Garden of Eden. A narrator directs you through a bloat of puzzles in an effort to develop an advanced AI mind capable of succeeding mankind. In an unforeseen twist no one could see coming, you have to disobey the narrator. If you don’t, your intelligence is deemed too constrained, and you are made to restart the game until you make the right choice.

Before this adventure, my main quibble with The Talos Principle was the shallowness of its eschatology (most of the mythos is presented in kabbalistic terms, except at the end there’s a guy called Samsara, and if you side with him the game restarts). Now, it’s with its treatment of player choice. It’s conceited beyond reason to posit that disobeying instructions increases your Free Will Quotient; comically for a game lauded for its profound philosophy, it’s an uncritical beat-by-beat of Genesis 3.

Disco, Stanley and even Princess are held together by their lack of “true” ending. This idea of a perfect path is incompatible with true free will: that is, in the context of video games (apologies to van Inwagen and the rest), the insistence on granting ultimate primacy of choice to the player as a distinct entity. The Talos Principle presupposes that every player understands the value of rebellion. Failing that, they will feel compelled to replay after making the wrong choice. 

The Talos Principle is much lauded as an indie darling, a game outside the norm. In reality it represents the bathetic impulse of the $60 megahit to choke its writing in choice: filter out everyone that might want to see a story on its own terms, and you get an audience satisfied only by seeing the story on their own terms.