So, I like the kind of music you'd expect from a sophisticated middle-aged gentleman like me: extreme metal. Obviously some of it is crap, but I listen to a lot of doom, death, thrash and black metal.
That latter genre, particularly, has a well-deserved bad rap for being full of Nazis. Not all black metal bands are Nazis or even Nazi-adjacent - there's the entire subgenre of RABM (Red and Anarchist Black Metal), for example, which usually combines the typical black metal sound with explicitly Marxist or anarchist lyrics. Tremolo picking, blast beats and high-pitched shrieks about class struggle and dialectical materialism! There's also a lot of black metal that's "apolitical", in the sense that their members keep their political lives private and just make songs about demons and folklore and the unfeeling void of space and shit.
It is sometimes a bit exhausting to be into this particular kind of thing, if you happen to despise Nazis. You're not at all alone - in fact, you're so not alone that the Nazis are kind of used to being despised, which means they sometimes hide being Nazis. Hence, "apolitical" is not usually a very trustworthy stance. Some of those bands are genuinely just a bunch of boring centrists who are really into Ancient Mesopotamian demonology and like the sound of black metal. But others are in fact covert Nazis. So when I discover an "apolitical" black metal band that seems interesting, I'm going to go internet sleuthing. This is so common that there are entire communities and shared resources dedicated to helping each other keep track of who are Nazis and Nazi-adjacent.
I don't think I'm going to be corrupted and become a Nazi by listening to Nazis screaming about Satan or Odin or the futility of existence. But what I *don't* want is to inadvertently promote them, or give them money by buying their merch or buying tickets to events where they're playing. So, sleuthing it is - and this can be a bit exhausting at times.
Anyway, this is apparently a post about open source software.
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