The Homo and the Negro

by James J O'Meara

  Contrariwise, the author is unable to appreciate Halpern’s intriguing and bracing embrace of the idea of “no rhythm” (and he, for his part, would be horrified by my identification of it as “implicitly White”; note his name).

  Although I’m sure Halpern is as PC as the rest of the New Age audience, his discussion explicitly denigrates rhythm as a primitive and backward element (“Cro-Magnon man pounding on skins and bones”), and explicitly welcomes the modern technologies that have enabled new instruments, and new uses of old instruments, without the “slave[ry]” of “the time machine.”

  The surely accidental association of rhythm and slavery is both accurate and, in this context, rather piquant. It’s like the railroad foreman in Blazing Saddles demanding that his workers sing “a good ol’ nigger work song” and reminding them that “when you was slaves, you sang like birds.”

  Need one point out that, here again, the science and instruments are White creations? Halpern’s techno-positivism would fit very comfortably in the late, great Alisdair Clarke’s notion of Aryan Futurism.

  Of course, it’s really just a question of emphasis; New Age music doesn’t lack rhythm—an Amazon reviewer of the Windham Hill 20 year anniversary sampler complains that it “has some rythmic [sic] and percussion pieces that are actually gnarly and you want to hit the skip key on your CD player if you are looking for relaxing and meditative music”302—it just isn’t interested in it, and prefers to emphasize more important elements.303

  As well, if it weren’t part of the PC catechism to praise Negroid rhythm (while the author of the quote above would tear out his own tongue before uttering the phrase “natural rhythm,”) we might point out that the much-vaunted “jazz” music of the Negro is largely in basic 4/4 (as the [possibly] Judaic hipster Dave Brubeck observed long ago, thus creating a profitable niche for himself), while “(c)Rap” or “Rap(e)” music is even more primitive, merely amplifying said 4/4 “beat” to ear-splitting and gut-punching levels—again, thanks to the White man’s technology—while also eliminating melody, which is usually “sampled”—viz., looted—from White rock or pop (a technique already used by jazz, where the compositional resources of oh-so-advanced “be-bop” rarely got beyond stealing the chords of a Gershwin song and then wailing away).

  What’s at issue here is not rhythm (seriously, did Mozart lack rhythm?) but that amorphous thing (without which “it don’t mean a thing”) called “swing.” Self-hating White critic Robert Palmer observed in his notes to the Ornette Coleman box set that European imitators of “free jazz” were boring, because they lacked what American Negroes had learned as entertainers: how to swing.304 As we have pointed out, this “swing” is by no means any kind of “natural rhythm,” but a particular entertainment device, which Louis Armstrong had to teach to Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, despite their being “the finest musicians in Harlem.”305

  In short, a mere bit of early 20th-century show business mumbo-jumbo, easily discarded by anyone interested in serious composition.

  The pioneers of hip-hop, perhaps because not writing self-hating essays but actually working with White technologies such as turntables, had more appreciation of the “non-swinging” Europeans than Palmer. Afrika Bambaata famously said of Kraftwerk that they “were so stiff, they swung.” He paid tribute to them in the style of the Negro, by imitating—or again, looting—their work.

  Still, a lesson for all those pitiable “whiggers” who are, in fact, just a more literal-minded component of the general demoralized White society: the Negro will never respect an imitator; he will, however, be compelled to admire the sheer audacity of those who either ignore him, or, like Jimmy Page, loot with the alacrity and joy of Viking raiders.

  VARG VIKERNES ON THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

  Speaking of Vikings and other Berserkers: this evolution in the direction of Aryan Futurism is not beyond Heavy Metal itself. No less an icon than Varg Vikernes, the imprisoned, church-burning Godfather of Death Metal, has explicitly rejected all “guitar-based” music as “implicitly Negroid” and thus inappropriate for a White movement:

  The guitar is an European invention, just like the synthesizer. However, the music played on guitar is mostly nigger music—and that goes definitely for all metal music.306 I have nothing against guitars, as you might know a lot of classical music is played on guitar. If I would make any more guitar music it would be classical music. So, it has nothing (or better; little) to do with the instrument in itself.

  I guess I have been a bit unclear when talking about this, until now. Anyway, what I explain above should clear things up for you. I categorize music like this; Aryan music (European classical and folk music, as well as some other more electronic music); Alien music with Aryan lyrics (like all these Viking-metal bands, Oi-rock and the like) and; Alien music with alien lyrics. As simple as that.307

  His most recent work embraces keyboard, synthesizers, and other electronic methods—perhaps due to their availability in prison, since even Norwegian prisons have their drawbacks—producing what might well be called “Death New Age” (although “Black New Age” might be more accurate, it might have paradoxical implications in the light of our discussion here).

  THE GENIUS OF SCOTT WALKER

  The conceptual movement away from rhythm—or at least “blue-eyed soul”—to more purely Aryan modes of music making can be found in exemplary fashion in Scott Walker’s curious trajectory from Pop Idol to reclusive “genius.”308 Born in Ohio, Walker had achieved a “big in Europe” kind of superstardom as part of a Righteous Brothers knock-off act called The Walker Brothers (they weren’t named Walker or even related). He then, well, walked away from it, living in seclusion for decades, releasing a handful of albums, musically avant-garde and alienating, lyrically obscure and tortured, that might be works of genius, either as serious music or else an elaborate post-modern “fuck you” to his fans, sort of Lou Reed via Andy Kaufman.

  Walker’s reticence—in typical fashion, his “comeback” included contributing a song for a Bond film which was so depressing it wound up over the end credits—could be seen as an exaggerated form of the noble Aryan’s traditional self-composure, as Baron Evola has outlined it, in contrast to the hysterical, show-off Mediterranean type so typical of “show bizness.”309

  Anyhow, I was led to link the two by a couple of odd lines from Scott in the recent film biography, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man.310 I mean, odd from the rhythm-worshipping, bongo-beating perspective of today‘s critics: When hiring a session sax man Scott points out: “It’s not going to be a funk session.” Scott explains that he never lets the studio musicians he hires see the whole arrangement, only their own parts, because, “I don’t want them getting together and ‘grooving.’”

  Reticence, loathing of “show business,” use of high-technology to make music on his own terms, and an abhorrence of “grooving” and “funk” mark Scott as a true Aryan Artist, his uncompromising self-exile and technological experimentation not dissimilar to Varg Vikernes’ prison life and music.

  And as already pointed out, this disdain for the easy appeal of “funk” in combination with a penchant for technological sophistication has nothing to do with a lack of rhythm or physicality when appropriate; in the film, we see Scott installing and painstakingly testing out—with his fists—a slab of beef in order to produce just the right beat; the scenes where Scott somewhat impatiently instructs the “percussionist” how to get the rhythm he wants by punching the slab just right are priceless.

  How perfect that the track being recorded—“Clara”—was inspired by a childhood viewing of newsreel footage of the bloody fate of Mussolini and his mistress: one piece of post-war “let’s all hate the Nazis” propaganda—and a rebellion, as Baron Evola pointed out in the same discussion of “Mediterranean Soul,” of the Italian slave mentality seeking vengeance on the man who attempted to lift them to a greatness they were no longer capable of in spirit—that doesn’t seem to have had the intended effect on this Aryan
spirit.

  ALEX KURTAGIĆ ON BLACK METAL

  My suggestions that White audiences should embrace and extend something that might be called White New Age should not be confused with similar but reactionary and retrograde views promoting some kind of “neo-classicism” based on certain tendencies among the neo-folk and even Black Metal genres.

  Prominent Alternative Right cultural critic Alex Kurtagić’s essay “White Noise” at TakiMag311 is excellent, though mainly for representing another neo-pagan incursion into the online “conservative” media. On its own merits though, it’s useful mainly for identifying what’s wrong with the Right’s take on “White music.”

  Kurtagić starts off with this accurate view of the current situation:

  Most of mainstream Pop nowadays is African-American in either origin or derivation, even if the musicians playing it are not. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find even a nanosecond of music in the charts that is quintessentially European in its sensibility. The fact that music derived from African-American creativity has come to enjoy maximum visibility in contemporary mainstream culture, however, says more about the policies of corporate record labels and the mass media of news and entertainment than it does about the quality of music originating in the European soul on either side of the Atlantic. This music is alive and well, I am happy to report, thriving purer and truer than ever, aloof from—and completely ignored by—the brainless and banal MTV sausage factory.

  Then he asks, “what does this music sound like?” and there the fissures begin to appear.

  Lumping together “several genres worthy of examination: neo-folk, Martial Industrial, and various forms of extreme Metal, including Black Metal, Folk Metal, and Viking Metal,” Kurtagić describes them as lyrically reflecting “a decidedly pagan and neo-Romantic sensibility, emphasizing—always to a harrowing degree—dark emotion and obscure mysticism” and musically as “quite complex, drawing extensively from Classical and traditional Folk music, with varied and layered instrumentation, expressionistic riffing, elaborate orchestration, an epic sense of melody, and scintillating musicianship.”

  He sums things up thusly:

  Black Metal artists may be called “conservative revolutionary” in so much as they advocate putting an end to the liberal order, by revolutionary means if necessary, and instituting a new dispensation founded on conservative principles. (Of course, the term “conservative” must not be understood here as having anything to do with the Republicans.)

  Indeed. Then why does it all sound so much like a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored concert of Judaic-manned and directed orchestras?

  The problem with these genres of Metal, in fact, is exactly this combination of truly “traditional folk” with the sounds, ideals and “musicianship” of what Kurtagić and others take to be some kind of essentially Aryan High Musical Culture—Kultur, if you will—which is actually a long- dead post-Renaissance bourgeois taste, although it still apparently controls pop culture, zombie-like.

  Rather than “putting an end to the liberal order,” these soi-disant “pagans” fall to their knees (as Nietzsche described Wagner in composing Parsifal) before a Romantic image of “inspired” conductors, overblown and overstaffed orchestras, garish “temples of music,” and female-faint inducing “virtuosos” (usually Judaic), shared by both Left and Right but in fact largely a creation of the Judaic-owned gramophone business and the German-Jewish “refugees” from the same Kultur-stratum that produced Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

  Baron Evola noted in Ride the Tiger that all this bourgeois rubbish had deserved to be scooped up and chucked out long ago, and that the only danger had been that the younger generation, seeking—rightly—more authentic musical experiences, had been steered not to their own indigenous music (as Bartók, for example, tried to do) but rather to the sub-rational world of primitive Negroid music which produced jazz and its descendants: the “beat” music Evola discusses and eventually Kurtagić’s Metal.312

  Another Traditionalist, Alain Daniélou, himself an accomplished musician trained by authentic Hindu teachers, established the inferiority of Western “classical” or “art” or “serious” music, based as it was on the Greek misunderstandings of tonality, in comparison to integral musical systems such as the Indian and Chinese, in his Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on Consciousness.313

  The whole development of Western music, its increasing “complexity” and instrumentation, which the Metallers seem to ape, is really not “progress” but just a desperate attempt to compensate for the meager, and increasingly inadequate, expressive possibilities of this misbegotten system, while a Mediaeval Indian musician, as Daniélou notes, could make rain appear by sounding the correct notes!

  Paradoxical as it may sound, it is precisely the lack of expressiveness in this “scientific” and “evolving” system that has led, on the one hand, to the constant development of bigger forces and wilder “effects” from Bach to Brahms (Kurtagić’s “elaborate orchestrations” and “varied and layered instrumentation”), with more and more “Romantic” virtuosi and “genius” conductors (his “scintillating musicianship” to provide “expressionistic riffing”), finally burning itself out with Strauss (who needed a wind machine!) and settling down with the dour, unpopular—and Judaic—serialists (whose musical language, Colin Wilson pointed out, was good for expressing only confusion and dread); and, on the other hand, to the attraction, among both audience and composers, to “primitive” music that seems, correctly, to be far more expressive and meaningful.314

  Daniélou tells the story of an Indian during the early Raj, who tried to imitate “Western” music; he got together as many instruments as possible, and had them play as loudly as possible, all different lines at the same time! An “emperor’s new clothes” moment for the much vaunted Western “harmonic development” as well as a nightmare recently reproduced, to much fanfare among White “sophisticates,” by the Negro jazz cacophony called “Free Jazz.” And is it not indeed the experience of the performance of one of these Metal bands?

  By promoting the combination of Negro-derived “beat” music and putrescent Klassical Kultur, Kurtagić and Metal are short-circuiting again the legitimate hunger of the White population for its own traditional expressive folk music, as well as delegitimizing new Aryan technical and musical explorations, such as those of Vikernes and even New Age. He is in fact embodying, in one simultaneous stance, Adorno’s successive Frankfurt School plans for fomenting Communism by first promoting Schoenberg, then when that failed, concocting a new, “sophisticated” form of jazz.315

  Of course, it’s all a question of tactics. No one is unsullied; “to live is to collaborate” (Burroughs, Nova Express). If Vikernes is right, that all guitar-based rock music is Negroid in inspiration, and Daniélou, that Western “serious” music is a dead end, one still can, and must, distinguish that which is entirely harmful to Whites (most pop music) and that which, perhaps due to its lyrical content, is relatively positive (Metal).

  Since the beginning of the last century, the White race has been trying to dig its way out from under the Wrong Turn of the Renaissance. Some of those paths, such as the embrace, by both “serious” composers and teenagers, of “more soulful” music in the form of Negroid rhythm, have been further detours or even dead ends. At this point, we need neither more soft ballads nor more neo-classical flourishes. An authentic White music should proudly embody our race’s unique characteristics—a Futurist focus not on the telluric mire of primitive “rhythm” but the transcendence of time through technological innovation.

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right

  November 30, 2011

  THE COUNTER-CURRENTS INTERVIEW

  James, give us some basic biographical background: When were you born? Where are you from? Who are your people?

  I have come to think that everything boils down to being born and raised in Detroit, a late Boomer during the period when Detroit was the true worke
rs’ paradise, the High Tide of the American Dream, up to about 1972, when the city, and the country, and the West, entered its swift decline. Workers like my father had good jobs with high pay and amazing benefits; in his case, not in the auto industry, but the New York Central Railroad, itself soon to enter bankruptcy.

  These were the last times that one man could support a family, buy a house and car with cash, no loans or mortgages, and men were expected to actually be doers rather than “consumers”; if shelves were needed, he made them, rather than go to some Home Depot. This is the background against which I try to analyze, and immunize myself from, all the post-1980 ideological nonsense of the Identity Left and Free Market Right. Yes, even Richard Nixon, in the light of today, was a wise and decent leader, and his world was the White Utopia.

  More particularly, I witnessed in Detroit the utopia of White Youth—which I have identified with the concept of Wild Boys that Burroughs was just publishing at that time, as well as, later, with the Aryan Männerbund—that this relative prosperity provided, epitomized by the revolutionary political and musical groups of that time and place, unimaginable today; and also the destruction of all that through the encroachment of the Negro. Let’s say that having been exposed to “black educators,” I was already long familiar with candidate Obama’s idea that there are “really” more than 50 states.

  This is not to say that my upbringing was ideal; it was, in fact, quite eccentric, to say the least. I was the only product of the late second marriage of a nearly uneducated, nearly elderly, second generation Irishman to an even less educated middle-aged woman he met in Nassau.