Post by Souriquois on Feb 24, 2018 14:58:12 GMT -4
TAAKE'S WAR WITH 'ANTIFA': BLACK METAL BAND'S TOUR IS IN JEOPARDY AS MORE VENUES CANCEL FOLLOWING NAZI CONTROVERSY
Troubles are mounting for Taake, the Norwegian black metal band accused of anti-Muslim lyrics and Nazi sympathies a decade after frontman Hoest appeared onstage with a swastika painted on his chest.
As Newsweek reported earlier this week, Taake's upcoming American tour has been derailed after antifascists—or “antifa”—began protesting the band and drawing attention to its past flirtations with Nazi imagery.
On Tuesday, the rapper Talib Kweli announced that he was canceling a planned show at Kansas City venue Riot Room to protest the venue's booking of Taake. (Riot Room subsequently announced on Facebook that it was canceling the Taake show.) "I wouldn’t feel safe bringing my team, family, and fans into a venue that is sympathetic to white nationalism," Kweli said in a statement.
Now, Newsweek has learned, numerous additional venues have cancelled planned performances by the black metal band, which denies supporting racist or Nazi-sympathetic views.
Representatives from Denver's Globe Hall and the Chicago venue Bottom Lounge told Newsweek that they have decided to cancel Taake shows. "It looks as though the show is no longer on our website," said a rep for Bottom Lounge, which was scheduled to host Taake on March 30.
The Salt Lake City venue Metro Music Hall is also pulling the plug on a show.
"We will be canceling this date," Will Sartain, co-owner of Metro Music Hall, said in an email to Newsweek. (Taake had been scheduled to perform at the venue on April 3.)
Sartain said that his venue investigated the band after receiving several emails from activists. "Our company is based on the principles of two conflicting ideologies when considering this issue," Sartain added. "One, we value free speech. I cannot stress this enough. Artists should not be censored. On the other hand, associating our venue with a band using anti-Muslim speech and Nazi symbols is something I cannot tolerate."
Last week, the manager of Phoenix Theater in Petaluma, California (where Taake is scheduled to perform on April 8) told Newsweek he was having second thoughts about hosting the show and worried that it would become unsafe.
The Manhattan venue Le Poisson Rouge also cancelled a show earlier this month, after New York City Antifa alerted its Twitter followers to the band's allegedly racist views.
It's unclear clear if Taake's planned American tour will still take place. The opening act, King Dude, pulled out of the tour on Monday.
Much of the controversy stems from a 2007 incident in which lead singer Hoest performed shirtless with a swastika painted on his chest. In 2012, the band was embroiled in another controversy when its lyrics were blasted as Islamophobic. (The band responded at the time that its lyrics were opposed to religion in general, not Islam specifically: "Our view, in the name of freedom of expression, is that it is shameful to adhere to Christianity or Islam.")
Antifa activists have put pressure on venues to drop Taake as part of their ongoing efforts to disrupt and shut down anything tied to promoting fascist sentiments.
The band was not immediately available for comment on the recent cancellations, but has strenuously denied being a white nationalist band or supporting Nazi politics.
"Many of these claims are just ludicrous," Taake's manager, Bjørnar Erevik Nilsen, told Newsweek earlier this month. "I think the band has explained multiple times that it's not a Nazi band at all. The band has also played concerts in Israel, which would be completely ludicrous if it were a Nazi band."
Troubles are mounting for Taake, the Norwegian black metal band accused of anti-Muslim lyrics and Nazi sympathies a decade after frontman Hoest appeared onstage with a swastika painted on his chest.
As Newsweek reported earlier this week, Taake's upcoming American tour has been derailed after antifascists—or “antifa”—began protesting the band and drawing attention to its past flirtations with Nazi imagery.
On Tuesday, the rapper Talib Kweli announced that he was canceling a planned show at Kansas City venue Riot Room to protest the venue's booking of Taake. (Riot Room subsequently announced on Facebook that it was canceling the Taake show.) "I wouldn’t feel safe bringing my team, family, and fans into a venue that is sympathetic to white nationalism," Kweli said in a statement.
Now, Newsweek has learned, numerous additional venues have cancelled planned performances by the black metal band, which denies supporting racist or Nazi-sympathetic views.
Representatives from Denver's Globe Hall and the Chicago venue Bottom Lounge told Newsweek that they have decided to cancel Taake shows. "It looks as though the show is no longer on our website," said a rep for Bottom Lounge, which was scheduled to host Taake on March 30.
The Salt Lake City venue Metro Music Hall is also pulling the plug on a show.
"We will be canceling this date," Will Sartain, co-owner of Metro Music Hall, said in an email to Newsweek. (Taake had been scheduled to perform at the venue on April 3.)
Sartain said that his venue investigated the band after receiving several emails from activists. "Our company is based on the principles of two conflicting ideologies when considering this issue," Sartain added. "One, we value free speech. I cannot stress this enough. Artists should not be censored. On the other hand, associating our venue with a band using anti-Muslim speech and Nazi symbols is something I cannot tolerate."
Last week, the manager of Phoenix Theater in Petaluma, California (where Taake is scheduled to perform on April 8) told Newsweek he was having second thoughts about hosting the show and worried that it would become unsafe.
The Manhattan venue Le Poisson Rouge also cancelled a show earlier this month, after New York City Antifa alerted its Twitter followers to the band's allegedly racist views.
It's unclear clear if Taake's planned American tour will still take place. The opening act, King Dude, pulled out of the tour on Monday.
Much of the controversy stems from a 2007 incident in which lead singer Hoest performed shirtless with a swastika painted on his chest. In 2012, the band was embroiled in another controversy when its lyrics were blasted as Islamophobic. (The band responded at the time that its lyrics were opposed to religion in general, not Islam specifically: "Our view, in the name of freedom of expression, is that it is shameful to adhere to Christianity or Islam.")
Antifa activists have put pressure on venues to drop Taake as part of their ongoing efforts to disrupt and shut down anything tied to promoting fascist sentiments.
The band was not immediately available for comment on the recent cancellations, but has strenuously denied being a white nationalist band or supporting Nazi politics.
"Many of these claims are just ludicrous," Taake's manager, Bjørnar Erevik Nilsen, told Newsweek earlier this month. "I think the band has explained multiple times that it's not a Nazi band at all. The band has also played concerts in Israel, which would be completely ludicrous if it were a Nazi band."
This is an issue which has me torn... I am a fan of Black Metal and I used to be irritated with Antifa for shutting down those shows, since they have protested shows by some of my favourite bands... and as someone in the metal scene myself, we do a lot to keep racists out of our scene, while being more nuanced about it than Antifa was. Metal, not just black metal, has always flirted with Nazi imagery... Slayer probably does more than any other band, and two of their members are Jewish, one member has the largest collection of Nazi paraphernalia in the world. But if you listen to Slayer's music closely, they condemn Nazis, and violence writ large. There is kind of an agreement among heavy metal fans that we have to keep Nazis out of our community, since I think metal fans are more tribalistic than fans of other music genres and we try to keep everybody safe. We may not be perfect at it, but we try.
On the other side, I support antifa when they mobilize against the real far right. They need to be opposed.
But this is not the '90s. Antifa needs to focus on the real threat, but also, I feel that metal bands need to maybe, in the time being, tone down on the Nazi stuff when they perform in North America because of the political climate.
Metal is not right-wing music lol. It traces its origins in the traditionally Labour-voting British working class. Metal's overwhelming whiteness is not exactly a bug, it's a feature... the early metal musicians were all fans of African-American blues artists, and they related to the emotions in the music because a lot of them were poor and hungry, living off food rations in the post-war UK, but, in an early discussion of what we call today "cultural appropriation", these artists did not want to disrespect these artists by copying them outright, so they added their own elements to it, often elements that are distinctly European, things that are subversive in many "white" cultures at the time (ie heavy use of the tritone, probably the most distinctive feature of metal, which gives it its dark, aggressive sound). Then, when metal crossed the Atlantic to the Americas, it didn't just click among whites, but also among Latinos who added their elements to metal. Also, one of the most legendary metal musicians, Rob Halford, is gay, and I think he is among one of the people who pushed homosexuality into mainstream acceptance. There is not much "fascist" or "far-right" in metal. Sure, there are far-right metal bands, but they stole the music. And yeah, most metal fans are white, so with the exception of areas in the US with large Latino populations, PoC at metal shows are very much in the minority, so, white metal fans have a tacit agreement to protect them... I guess it can be seen as "white saviour complex" by some SJWs, but in my experience at metal shows if there were one or two black folks at a metal show, white folks had their eyes on them in case somebody tried to start crap with them we'd have their backs.
I am kind of disappointed in Talib Kweli. While I do understand his reservations, I thought he knew better than that. It is true, that Nazis will show up a black metal shows, these are people who don't think much and don't dive into the lyrics or the history of metal. I am a fan of both Talib Kweli and Taake, so I don't know what to think.
And, I really see rap music as the new metal, really. They both were created by marginalized youth who were upset with the status quo. Both early rap and metal were political, both genres touched on violent themes, and both were railed against and censored by conservative adults because it made them nervous. But like metal in the 80s, rap is now going through a highly commercialized "glam" phase, though rap now is going back to its raw, political roots like metal did in the early 90s... maybe next, rap will go through an apathetic phase like metal did in the late 90s, early 2000s.
Norwegian black metal is controversial, it had a history of violence and some went into some racist crap, but it also gave birth no non-racist offshoots.. Ishaahn from Emperor did a Nelson Mandela tribute song, after all.