Talk:My War/Archive 1

Flipper
I removed the line about Flipper. Flipers first three eps and first lp were already out 2 years before this record came out. Additionally the statement wasn't really factual in nature, more of a vague statement of opinion.Tombride 04:23, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Genre
If this article identifies the second half of the album as sludge metal style, then why isn't it listed alongside hardcore punk in the infobox? Is it because it's 'sludge metal style'?--TangoTizerWolfstone (talk) 23:48, 17 January 2015 (UTC) This source says the album is sludge metal. OiPunkOiPunk11 (talk) 00:09, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * "Genre" is not meant to list the elements of every genre that can be identified on an album, but only what labels can be applied to the album as a whole. Is My War a "sludge metal" album?  Obviously not. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 00:53, 18 January 2015 (UTC)
 * No it doesn't—it says:
 * Side B is just three tracks, each over six minutes long, played at a menacing crawl. It's post-Sabbath sludge-metal or proto-noise rock, depending on how you wish to retroactively consider this stuff against the underground rock history that came before and has transpired since.
 * Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 00:22, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Another problem is with the intro section, where it says Black Flag were leaders in fast hardcore with their first album, Damaged. Well, the band were already well-established, well-known around the country before Damaged was released, so this doesn't really fit. But I'm not much good at editing Wikipedia, so I'll leave it to a more skilled person, to make a correction there.

Side B accounts for 20 minutes of the album. The entire album is 40 minutes. Half of the fucking album is sludge metal. My War is as much a sludge metal album as it is a hardcore punk album. By your logic, the album isn't a hardcore punk album because it doesn't describe the album as a whole; only half of it is hardcore punk. 2601:640:C480:AFF:91CB:6C52:523F:366B (talk) 01:19, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
 * WP:GENREWARRIORs really get tiresome. You must be a shit-tonne of fun at The Beatles (album) (hey—where's "ska" and "music conrète?!?!?!?!?!?!).
 * The music on the second side easily falls within the broad definitions of "hardcore punk" and "post hardcore"; none of the first side falls within the definition of "sludge metal", no matter how broad.  "Sludge metal" cannot be used to describe the album as a whole, so it stays out of the infobox—you cannot call My War "a sludge metal album".  For fuck's sake, already ... Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:26, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
 * My point is that you say we can't add sludge metal to the genre list because genres must describe the album as a whole, even though half the album is sludge metal, yet you allow hardcore punk and half the album isn't even hardcore punk? Side B is absolutely not hardcore (post-hardcore, sure) and if you think it is you should go to the hospital because you're probably having a stroke.  This won't change no matter how many threatening PMs you send me (lol).  I just want you to have some consistency rather than let your own biases get in the way. 2601:640:C480:AFF:951C:A7F4:460F:93FF (talk) 05:15, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
 * And after all of this "excitement" above, Earles actually said on p41 that side B can be regarded as either sludge metal or proto-noise rock, depending on how a viewer looks back at it. So it is not a foregone conclusion that the material was sludge, it is debatable. William Harris (talk) 10:21, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

Continued genre-warrior-ing
Can anyone find a source that states, unambiguously, that "My War is a heavy metal album" (not that certain songs display a heavy metal (or whatever) influence)? Of course not---no writer is that stupid. Until someone can find such a source, "heavy metal" cannot be included in the infobox. The field would become unmanageable if the box were to include every detectable genre influence (such as "blues", which Earles also mentions---we'd also see "sludge", "proto-noise", "proto-grunge", and who knows what else) (see: The Beatles (album) mentioned above).

For those not in the know: this is political. "Heavy metal" is what people facetiously called the album when they were disappointed at the direction it took. Nobody has seriously considered it an album that falls under the "heavy metal" umbrella. Note that those who add "heavy metal" do so only after removing "hardcore punk", so don't fall for the "but it's sourced!" argument. The sources are misrepresented, and the same people are removing sourced material to push a POV. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:57, 9 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Take a look here, This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk by Steve Waksman, 2009, which talks about the controversy the album caused and how the term "heavy metal" was used in that context. In particular, Waksman states: "Black Flag did not necessarily sound like heavy metal in a literal sense ... The band's turn to heaviness was not a full-fledged embrace of heavy metal", and goes on to detail how the band resisted the "heavy metal" label, and how rare it would be at the time to find any "metal" band that sounded like Black Flag.  Ginn himself stated: "Take the 'heavy' out of 'heavy metal' and that's what we are—it's just heavy.  Heavy metal is a defined form."  And on and on.
 * Please be careful of POV-pushers—and always keep in mind what "heavy metal" means to an narrowly ideological definition of "hardcore punk" to a certain subset of fans. Adding "heavy metal" to the infobox cannot be (and has not been) done in good faith.  "I have a source" is no excuse for these bad-faith shenanigans. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:50, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

This disagreement as to whether the Album My War should have the term "Sludge Metal" in the descriptive box seems to have a good deal of unspoken context involved, by which I mean that a lot of Hardcore Punks have decidedly negative opinions about Metal of any kind and did not take kindly toward Black Flag's experimentation in that direction, in particular guitar solos, longer songs, and even growing their hair long.

I recently watched a documentary on Punk rock which featured an interview with Henry Rollins, in which he said (a paraphrase, but close), that "Punk rockers are some of the most narrow-minded people on the face of the planet." (Link below). That sentiment seems to be ratified here, since it is clear to me that the problem here is not analytic. It is instead the feeling that the putting a descriptor of the obvious Sludge nature of half of My War  would somehow infect the memory of Black Flag as pure Hardcore. In the 70s, there was a real conflict between Metalheads and Punks, and it seems to have carried forward to today. It doesn't seem to matter that in the early 1980s Hardcore and Metal merged into various musical forms, one being Thrash Metal, another being Sludge (Melvins notably), but other sub-genres too numerous to mention. Nor does it seem to matter much that Blag Flag made some stylistic choices that make them hard to classify with real true clarity -- Rollins is also quoted somewhere about saying to the band it might be a good idea for one album to sound a little bit like the last one (no link on that, but I do remember it).

As much as I've written on this, I dont' really have much an opinion on the matter -- since I'm not a big Black Flag fan, nor do I particularly like Sludge (or Doom) Metal. It actually stems from an article I read regarding the provenance of Grunge, which has always intrigued me -- and how resistant the people in the media are to identifying the clear Metal antecedents of the whole scene. This article traced the whole thing back to this album, and in particular that side of it. I don't know anything about the website on which it resides nor who the author is, but it seems reasonable. Moreover I thought it would be an interesting read to anyone who still cares about this particular issue. Sych (talk) 23:22, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE5uu95AAaI&t=3479s

https://medium.com/@asmichael5/my-war-and-the-seattle-sound-d722a62beee2