I was never an Anthrax fan.  Lord knows I’ve tried to like ’em because they sing about Judge Dredd and they had Mort Drucker from Mad magazine illustrate the back cover for their 1988 LP State of Euphoria.  But now I’m done with it.  Bald, goatee wearing, Jewish guitarist Scott Ian pretty much took the cake with his stupidity.  No, I’m not talking about how he’s a Bernie Sanders supporter “In spite how it’s throwing my vote away.”  I’m talking about his recent comment where he feels that former Pantera singer and fellow baldy Phil Anselmo should donate to the Simon Weisenthal Center to show he’s “sincerely sorry” (the article primarily features quotes from another goatee wearing baldy, guitarist Kerry King of Slayer, but Ian’s pathetic comments are at the end) for shouting “white power” and doing a Hitler salute at the end of the set at the latest Dimebash performance.

Now, in my humble opinion, doing a Hitler salute completely out of context in front of people you don’t know, many of whom may be of a darker skin tone, is a pretty boneheaded move.  Nobody is going to dispute that.  But, when you release a video such as the one below, where you’re practically groveling in the dirt and one step above kissing the boot of a black man in prison who is shouting, “who’s your daddy?” before bending you over as you shout “I deserve this!  I fucking deserve this!”, I think the matter should be completely forgotten.  I dunno, you be the judge:

Now, before I go on and continue to make my point about how stupid Scott Ian’s comments were, just take a look at this video.

Real great, huh?  Anthrax, the good time, non-serious, always smiling, party thrash band, shows that they’re ahead of the curve, they’re beyond mere political correctness, they’re so against racism, they’ll do a crossover music video with a notoriously racist and anti-semitic rap group called Public Enemy.  What’s that you say?  Public Enemy isn’t racist or anti-semitic; only Professor Griff is and they duly kicked him out?  Well, then why in the fucking hell is PE’s main man Chuck D singing “Farrakhan’s a prophet and I think you ought to listen to/What he can say to you, what you wanna do is follow for now”?  And yes, we’re talking Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Black Nationalist hate group, the Nation of Islam, who have nary a nice thing to say about white people and especially Jewish people.

Only the leftest of leftists will contest that it’s not a double standard that, if a white band were to sing “David Duke’s a prophet and I think you ought to listen to/What he can say to you, what you wanna do is follow for now”, that white band would look like this:

Catchy tune, eh?  Eh, not really.  I know some people who like this band in spite what they sing about, but I think they’re pretty lousy.  That’s not the point though.  The point is that, without a doubt, there’s a double standard, where someone like Ice Cube can get away with singing “Or your little chop suey ass’ll be a target of the nationwide boycott/Juice with the people, that’s what the boy got/So pay respect to the black fist/or we’ll burn your store, right down to a crisp” or Beyonce can perform at the Superbowl with women dressed like Black Panthers and only a few inquisitive pundits will ask,”but why is one okay and not the other?”

So, that brings us back to Scott Ian and metal in general.  Either Scott Ian is ignorant of who Louis Farrakhan is or he felt that, for a black group, it’s perfectly acceptable to praise anti-white bigots because like the system’s all rigged against them and shit.  Underground music has been getting lefter and lefter.  Whereas punk rock in the 70s and 80s had a few leftist bands that yelled the loudest and were the most popular (actually that’s not entirely true.  The Ramones, Black Flag and Minor Threat are apolitical for the most part, but the Clash introduced Marxist concepts into punk, Crass introduced “anarchism” and the Dead Kennedys were the Jon Stewarts of punk), leftist influence has pretty much dominated the genre in varying degrees, and, since many a punk people now want to enter the field of metal and spread messages of “Social Justice”, the metal scene has also been progressively moving into the realm of political correctness.

I’m a music fan, so I really don’t have the whole Metalgate beef with a band like Cattle Decapitation singing their pro-vegan screed, especially when you can’t even really understand what they’re saying.  What I DO have a problem with is someone like Scott Ian becoming the arbiter of morality and trying to guilt trip Phil Anselmo even more than Anselmo has guilt tripped himself.  For the record, I’m not a Pantera fan as their brand of “groove thrash” and Anselmo’s tough guy, Henry Rollins-esque delivery never really appealed to me, but I respect Anselmo a WHOLE heck of a lot for launching the Housecore label and signing weirdo bands like Author & Punisher and Child Bite, for bringing completely non-commercial underground bands like Neurosis, Morbid Angel and Anal Cunt on tour with them so they could play in front of tens of thousands of people and for spending his hard earned cash on the Housecore music and film festival, giving wider exposure to underground artists and bands.  For crying out loud, he got Goblin, the Italian prog band who did the soundtracks for Suspiria and Dawn of the Dead, into North America!  He should be given some sort of award for that alone!

Now look, I’m no psychic, so I can’t get into Phil Anselmo’s brain and see if he’s truly sorry or if he’s truly “racist” and I really don’t think it matters.  The fact is, he clearly doesn’t want to destroy what he’s worked for for nearly three decades, because, if he did, there IS a fringe industry of white power labels like Resistance who would LOVE to have an endorsement from someone as well known as Phil Anselmo.  The point is that we’ve come so far down this path, that we forget that Tommy Lee went to jail for beating his wife, Ozzy Osbourne the same, that Vince Neill drove drunk and murdered Razzel, the drummer of Hanoi Rocks, that Gene Simmons has pumped and dumped 4,000+ different women without so much as a thought about how it might affect the young lasses’ psyche, that so many musicians have fathered illegitimate children, overdosed on heroin or spread HIV, yet the only thing that really enrages people is the thought that someone might cross that proverbial line of being a “racist.”  Oh, I guess people were pretty outraged over Garry Glittler’s child porn collection, but, even listening to his music is more acceptable than listening to the first Skrewdriver album, the one that doesn’t have any racist lyrics on it.

Now I’m signing out and going back to listening to Manilla Road, reading my Conan books and heading out for night three of Berserker fest.  Cheers and please watch this video from Some Black Guy where he condemns Anselmo’s actions while also completely disputing the concept of “white privilege” in our society.  Good man!