After a publishing process that took over half a decade, Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World is finally out. It's well worth waiting for. The collection includes chapter on metal in such places as China, Indonesia,  Malta, Nepal and Easter Island. I contributed a chapter on metal in Israel. It does repeat a few things I have said elsewhere but also contains some new material.

The ever excellent Souciant webzine has a fascinating article on the future of hardcore by Oliver Sheppard. Sheppard reuminates on how music today is dominated by nostalgia and revivals. Against this backdrop he attempts to imagine future scenarios for the development of hardcore:

As far as the current backwards-looking trend of music goes, I’ve always felt that if there was a Hell, at least one of its circles would consist of an eternal “80s night.” Having said that, there are a few trajectories I can see punk rediscovering to move ahead. As far as pop music goes, I don’t have a dog in that fight. No one can predict the direction that that will take. (Justin Bieber or Katy Perry?) But hardcore punk? Here are some scenarios:

1. Industrial punk

Do you remember Pailhead and Lard? What happened to bands like that? I don’t mean 90s industrial metal like Fear Factory or Chemlab or Gravity Kills. I mean full-bore, no-holds-barred, aggressive, fast, political, industrial hardcore punk. In the late 1980s this seemed like a possible and viable way to go forward, hence why people like Ian MacKaye, Jello Biafra, and others (temporarily) signed up. Optimum Wound Profile notably seemed eager to plow ahead in this direction (see Tranqhead from Optimum Wound Profile’s Lowest Common Denominator LP on Roadrunner, a Crass-ish, yet accessible, industrial punk release weirdly ignored while the mainstream music press was masturbating over Nine Inch Nails.)

Remember Nausea’s Cybergod? Christdriver and Titwrench also made some compelling lo-fi, hi-tech industrial thrashcore songs. Neurosis and even the Swans (“I Am the Sun”) seemed primed to go in this direction, too, until a lot of them went off into “post-rock” territory. Wire’s Read and Burn, Killing Joke’s ’90s material, and the 2005 PESD POLITIKAREPOIZONEKURVAE LP, on Prank Records, also remind us of the potential left laying at rest in this under-explored niche of music. It’s sonic territory that remains to be fleshed out, but is full of promise.

2. Modern Post-Hardcore

Bands like Kim Phuc and The Conversions are doing a new kind of update on 90s post-hardcore that has taken into account the dark, d-beat experience of the past decade. Check out the 2011 Copsucker LP by Kim Phuc, a band that contains ex-members of Aus Rotten. It sounds like 90s post-hardcore – and, yet, it doesn’t. Iceage also tread this terrain brilliantly. Kim Phuc’s Animal Mother/Local Round-up is as good a song from the hardcore scene of 2011 as I’ve heard.

3. Acoustic Neofolk?

This might seem counter-intuitive, but given the “MTV unplugged” nature of bands like Ian MacKaye’s The Evens – described as “post-post-hardcore” by some writers – it might not be that far of a stretch. Death in June are as popular as ever even though the act consists of the singer (Douglas P.) merely strumming an acoustic guitar, sitting on a bar stool – albeit in WWII camouflag garb. Zounds’ Steve Lake made a similar “stripped to the acoustic basics” concert tour recently. And bands like Sonne Hagal, Rome, and Darkwood are basically coming on stage with acoustic guitars, kettle drums, and a Joy Division-esque appearance, claiming roots with punk bands in the past. Coffeeshop postpunk? The Evens would never say they are neofolk, but what is the current interest in back-to-basics, guitar-driven melodic music – yet in the context of punk or alt-underground – indicative of? Billy Bragg has been there all along.

4. Post-Black Metal

Bands like Hateful Abandon, Lifelover, Bone Awl, and the newer Darkthrone releases have been combining a kind of dark postpunk with 90s black metal and garage music. Witness the recent Darkthrone cover of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “love in a Void,” for better or worse. The Lost Sounds’ Memphis is Dead 1999 LP on Empty Records could be seen as a precursor of this particular cocktail of postpunk, deathrock, and black metal. (See Satan Bought Me and other tracks off that Lost Sounds release:.) Acephalix from San Francisco and Tyrant from Sweden have taken their cues from Hellhammer and Darkthrone but are also mindful of influences from Naked Raygun and the Wipers, too.

The cross-pollination between postpunk, hardcore, and black metal is an especially interesting area of current music germination, and it remains to be seen what can be wrought from this fertile cultural matrix. Circle of Ouroborous have recently pulled off some incredibly dreary, melancholic tracks that simultaneously recall Joy Division and Darkthrone. (See their Demon in Iron, something that sounds like it could be a 1979 Joy Division demo if Ian Curtis had just listened to Burzum.)

I don't know how accurate Sheppard's predictions will prove. What I'm interested in is how his article suggests that music critics attempt a kind of futurology. It seems to me that, given the unstoppable flood of music that the internet revolution has unleashed and given the increasing tendency for musical genres to feed on themselves, that musical futurology is going to become an increasingly important 'discipline'. In fact I would go further and suggest that we shouldn't content ourselves with predicting the future, we should attempt to shape it by suggesting new kinds of possibilities. Maybe a future role for critics could be to set challenges for musicians to follow. So, to take a challenge at random, what would metal look like if it abandoned distorted guitars and tritones?

Of course, musicians are usually resistant to critics telling them what to do? Still, I want to explore this idea in the future. I will be giving a keynote at a metal conference in Ohio in 2013 and I talk more about musical futurology then.

Over the last few months, the Jewish Chroncile's Martin Bright has been conducting a campaign against the involvment of some Jewish groups, and in particular New North London Synagogue, in London Citizens. Bright has pointed out that a key player in London Citizens is the East London Mosque, in which some very unplesant extremists seem to be involved.

I've been in two minds about this whole issue: on the one hand the dangers of legitimising fundamentalism through groups like London Citizens are real, on the other hand to refuse to have anything to do with a mosque with a very large membership (at least a proportion of which are definitely not extremists) seems to be a foolhardy act.

But in the last week or two I have been increasingly disturbed by Bright and the JC's stance due to the highly agressive and personal language that  has been used and the clear failure to even attempt to understand where New North London Synagogue and other Jewish stakeholders in LC are actually coming from. Further, this has seemed to me to be symptomatic of a Jewish Chronicle that, under Stephen Pollard's editorship, has become disconnected from the community and foregrounds a few issues (Israel, antisemitism, Islamism) while relegating others to second place.

Following a speach I made at a Limmud session (called, unfortunately, 'Is the JC waging a Jihad against British Jews', not a title I would have chosen) in which I strongly criticised the JC, Stephen Pollard got in touch and invited me to write something in the paper. It has now been published.

Fair play to Stephen for opening up the paper to some quite personal (though I hope, not uncivil) criticisms. Martin Bright has also responded here. It's clear we have very different views. Just to pick up on a couple of things he wrote:

Engagement for the sake of engagement is pointless and intellectually lazy. In order to engage, it is essential to know with whom you are engaging.

Very true, but a) it's quote possible that NNLS and other Jewish groups do know with whom they are engaging and have weighed the risks of doing so, only to come to a conclusion that Martin Bright disagrees with, b) the type of engagement is crucial in this case - London Citizens is not a forum for dialogue so much as a means for different faith groups to collaborate on matters of mutual concern, c) there are risks of not engaging here as well, given that a refusal to engage with a v large mosque may well alienate an often marginalised community.

Engagement, it is true, can be an incredibly vague term. It needs unpacking. I have tried to do this in this article I published last year.

The choice, as Martin and perhaps some of his opponents at NNLS also see it, is a stark one - between engagement and refusal. But there are other choices, between different forms of engagement. One of the things that has upset me about the JC's coverage is that it has prevented the kind of nuanced conversation that needs to happen over how Jews engage with Muslims.

Martin also says:

I am told I would take a different approach if I had better contacts within New North London Synagogue. Mr Kahn-Harris might want to ask himself who it was that raised questions about London Citizens if not concerned members of that congregation.

I would be happy to develop the relationship further, but have not been invited by anyone within the Masorti movement to share the intelligence I and others have about their unsavoury partners.

Well, I am aware that it was indeed people within NNLS that contacted Martin, but supporting one side in an intra-communal dispute is hardly evidence of the broad kind of contacts that a journalist working on a Jewish newspaper needs to have. Martin would like 'to develop the relationship further' but, given the langauge used (on both sides) this is unlikely to happen. Again though, Martin's complaint that he has 'not been invited by anyone within the Masorti movement to share the intelligence' is hardly evidence of a willingness to develop a proper dialogue. NNLS certainly need to listen to Martin's concerns - they are serious ones that must be taken seriously - but Martin also needs (or rather needed as it's unlikely to happen now) to listen to them. 

This whole issue has got me thinking about how one criticises communities. I certainly do not believe that communities are sacrosanct and that no one outside them should say anything - that's how child abuse became endemic in the Irish Catholic church. I do believe though that to be effective it makes sense for critics to have deep connections in the communities they criticise. I've tried to do this myself: I have been strongly critical of sexism in the metal scene for example and because I spent years writing for a metal magazine, my concerns have been heard to an extent.

I guess this controversy will run and run. My relationship with Martin Bright, which I value, is still just about surviving. Given that I write and promote civility it's been hard to know how to criticise named individuals while not being abusive. I've tried my best though...

There's a fascinating piece by Paul Mason published in the Guardian today on the global unrest of the last 18 months or so. The article summarises  the arguments of his new book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions which I haven't yet read so I will refrain from commenting until I do.

Mason mentions me in passing in the article:

Sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris calls what we're seeing the "movement without a name": a trend, a direction, an idea-virus, a meme, a source of energy that can be traced through a large number of spaces and projects.

It's very flattering to be mentioned in this way. Mason is referring to an article I wrote for Open democracy a few months ago called Naming The Movement. It engendered a reasonable amount of discussion at the time and I'm glad that it's got more publicity.

Looking back on my article, what's fascinating is that I was writing before Occupy started and when the Arab Spring was only just getting goiong. It's not that I was particularly prescient, it's that I was mostly thinking about social innovation and creativity when I wrote about the article and only partially about radical politics and social change. While my arguments do apply to Occupy et al, it's important to bear in mind that the nameless meme we are talking about is broader and deeper than the radicalism Mason is interested in. Hopefully that's the source of its power.

I'd also like to remind readers of another piece I had published in Open Democracy in December that revists the same themes from a slightly different angle. In addition, I'm co-editing a book looking back on 2011 and we are still accepting submissions.