When two German festivals kicked the 2023 version of Pantera off their summer lineups last week, due to frontman Phil Anselmo screaming "white power" repeatedly onstage and throwing Sieg Heil nazi victory salutes, there was a deafening reactionary silence from some of the most influential rock publications in America.
The drastic rise of white supremacy and nazi ideology in our country has become a severe crisis of sociopolitical danger, but a conversation has yet to take place about how to effectively fight back. The left sees it and attempts to address it, but is so obsessed with never stepping on anyone's toes that they've paralyzed any impactful dialogue about solutions to the point of parody, while the right is gleefully stomping through the same room with anvil boots and calling it freedom and patriotism.
When that genocidal hatred is screamed and supported onstage by an American hard rock icon like Anselmo, never before in modern history has there been a more urgent moment for music journalists to address this problem directly - to use their privilege and platform for responsible editorialization and kick off important conversations, rather than the usual inconsequential gladhanding shit-shining access journalism we've come to know as the standard.
Instead, we're hearing a chorus of crickets - particularly from Revolver Magazine, the leading hard rock music publication in America, whose breathlessly fawning coverage of Anselmo over the years has given Anselmo's racist, genocide-promoting bully antics a new era of exposure, popularity and profit.
I say fuck that noise.
If now isn't the time to start a conversation about hateful ideologies poisoning the things we hold dear, then when? It is quite literally a matter of now or never.
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