Let me say form the outset that I'm not looking for a NSBM debate here.

I was in a record shop today that specialises in Indie. They sell lots of other styles of music , butin much smaller sections and have a lot of good metal vinyl as well. Anyway, I browsed the second hand metal CDs and found (amongst about 10 Saxon CDs) Graveland and Hate Forest. I thought to myself that these could have come from the same person's collection, maybe they wanted to get rid of them because of some ideological shift? It was just a thought. I also bought a Burzum CD from this shop another time now that I think of it, but it was new.

Perhaps this is a bit of a stretch, but it was just a thought. I knew a Christian guy who was into metal who told me that he'd 'cleaned up his collection' one time, getting rid of albums he must have thought were blasphemous or something. I also had experience in the late 80s where someone I know got rid of some music (The Eagles I remember as a specific example) because they'd a tape by a guy called Gary Greenwald exposing Satanic back masking!

Has anyone ever done anything like this, had a cull of their records because of some kind of ideological awakening? Did you regret it? Or has anyone benefited from someone else's cull?

I'd be interested to hear anyone's experiences.

No. The value of music doesn't lie in how much I agree with it.

Yep. I've done it, but it wasn't a major section of my music or anything like that really. It was just a long ass time ago when I really didn't care about what I listened to and I had a bunch of shit that was anti Christian and or pro Satan and I decided to get rid of it. Since I came to that conclusion I don't buy anything that's blatantly in those categories, just personal opinion really. I know some Christian dudes who agree with me on the issue and some who don't have a problem listening to stuff like unholy goat sodomy or bands of that ilk.

Don't care. If I think the music is worth listening to, I'll listen to it... whether it be written by a racist nazi murderer, liberal commies, or people addicted to Robitussin.

Yeah, if the music is good I listen. If lyrics threw me off then I wouldn't have much of my black/death metal in my collection and that would be a shame!

I don't have any principals or hardset beliefs. I try not to be a shithead in life. A lot of great artists are completely terrible people even outside of their views on race relations. I don't want to be their friends and I don't care.

Yeah I got some NS stuff in a bulk deal a while ago that I'm not overly keen on retaining [yes it's on my 'list']

I (for a limited time) benefited from a friend's culling of his record collection once. Not really sure why he did it, as he continued to listen to metal thereafter, but he was moving and I suppose he wanted less items to have to move. So I claimed a box of a few dozen CDs. Then stopped in a washroom on the walk home, only to come out of the stall and see that some assclown had taken off with the whole box What could I do? It's a washroom, so there weren't any security cameras to help identify the thief.

I've never done a focused ideological cull like that but I've certainly traded away old stuff that I didn't like much anymore and didn't care to have in my collection. Why hold on to stuff that has no use to me? As it happens, some of the stuff I traded away has been stuff I strongly oppose ideologically (this is stuff I'd bought as a teen who didn't know any better) but my views are as such: why listen to actively hateful trash when there is so much other good music out there that isn't full of braindead political ideology? Just being practical, really.

That said, I've benefited from other people's culls but none of them have been ideological as far as I'm aware. Usually if people are selling away a bunch of stuff, it's because they're broke and desperate for money.

I don't agree with Dave Mustaine's current political ideologies, but I'm keeping the Megadeth albums, anyway. The songs on there are just too good to get rid of.

Never had a "cull" as I've never bought stuff that crossed ideological lines in the sand for me. I do actively avoid buying/listening to stuff that does cross that line, though.

i wouldnt support an artist i disagree with on a fundamental level with money if that is apparent through their music. However i wonder how often i actually do notice this. Its not something i spend time with investigating.

I can't buy or listen to any Gorgoroth =/

This is truly a tragedy! Why them specifically?

I own a couple of CDs from some of those shady Russian "we're just proud of our heritage, and we couldn't be Nazis because we're not German"-type bands - Temnozor, Nokturnal Mortem, etc. Terrible cover stories, but eh. I doubt I contributed to their success in any great way by buying $15 CDs, or to their spreading the word of "pride" and whatnot. That being said, I draw the line at buying anything from guys like Landser and Skrewdriver - it's *too* blatantly hate speechish. Thankfully, those bands generally tend to suck for musical reasons anyway, so it's a moot point in the end.

I also try to avoid super-cringey "red wine and satanic verses written in latin" bands. I guess it's an ideological thing, because I find them really childish and don't want to encourage such dorky behaviour.

Mainly the murders and gang rapes.

So do I. I like Megadeth, but the crazy ideologies come from only one member, and they're nothing compared to what other musicians believe.

What murders?

Rape and torture etc [I thought it was murder, my bad]
http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Gorgoroth/770

No problem. Those are still valid reasons for not wanting to give them your money.

Oh man, I knew about the torture, but not the rape. It does dampen my opinion of the entire Gorgoroth name, but the music is still top notch black metal (At least the first two are) and I can't keep myself from listening to them.

I'd be most interested in a catalogue of bands and their crimes, one may even exist but I haven't looked yet.
Similar to this I suppose http://www.metal-archives.com/artist/rip

Dont care. I'm not a friend of those guys so their private life doesn't affect the enjoyment of their art.

The most obvious againt my ideologies artists I simply pass. The subtle ones are the hardest.

These kinds of thoughts actually make me overthink some albums. For example, while not metal, Death in June's "But, what ends when the symbol shatters?" is a favourite of mine, yet I'm always trying to read in between the lines, trying to find any hidden connotation in the lyrics. When an artist is treated as 'suspicious', it kind of reduces my enjoyment in listening to it. And I'm not even an antifa freak or anything of the sort.

They're hardly the only black metal musicians convicted of violent crimes. You'd have to boycott Burzum, Mayhem, Emperor, Zyklon, Dissection, Thorns, Satyricon, Aborym and quite a few others if you want to avoid association with such things.

Lets face it, dark and violent music always sounds best when it's made by people with dark and violent tendencies. Otherwise it ends up feeling like Hollywood play-acting. Rose Tattoo put it best: Nice boys don't play rock'n'roll

Zyklon? what did they do
I mean, I know Zyklon-b killed a heap of people but...

The way i see it is all of the weirdness and questionable activities surrounding Michael Jackson doesn't make his hits sound bad. Some people can't separate the artists from their art. And I wouldn't worry too much about 'giving your money to Gorgoroth' because they're probably not seeing it anyway. There are definitely lyrics and ideologies that I don't agree with but the melody and songwriting is what matters.

Not sure that comparison works for me. Michael Jackson, weird as he ever was, was never convicted of anything. He never struck me as a molestor personally. I think he missed his whole childhood and wanted to surround himself with kids and expensive things to live vicariously through them.

It's a bit different than admitted murderers is it not? And just to reiterate...I'm fine with buying a murderers music. Or a racist. Whatever.

Samoth was jailed for church burning. Faust killed a dude (he wrote all the lyrics so he counts as a contributing member)

I'm not bothered unduly about the political leanings or actions of bands I listen to. As such, I've never had to purge anything from my collection based on ideological grounds. I might gain a heightened appreciation for bands whose ideology I support, but I wouldn't seek out bands to listen to based on their beliefs alone. I do draw the line at running around with slaves on the back of my shirt (Arghoslent) and things along those lines, but I don't have a problem listening to their music.

I used to have a wide array of ideologies in my collection. At best, the bands (whose albums I later got rid of) simply had a reference or two to an idea with which I disagreed. At worst, the band members were deeply rooted in some legitimately bad spiritual stuff, so much that in some of their music, you could literally feel the inner darkness, or so-called "mysteriousness", just by listening to the music. I used to revel in that; I used to intentionally seek out occult-type bands who meant what they said.

But the more time went on, the more I began to realize what this music was doing to me. Similar to how a "relaxation" CD of soft pianos can bring calmness to a person or a room, so this occult music seemed to bring negativity into my life whenever I listened to it, but even more intensely, and it didn't go away when the CD stopped. I still wouldn't listen to a nazi band or something today, but I could, and still can, tolerate less-than-favorable lyrics on occasion. A rap song about drugs, or a deathcore song about being being macho, or whatever; I can handle that. This was something else completely.

Slowly I got away from that negativity - both in stuff in my CD collection, and in stuff I'd find online. But I didn't realize for a few years yet quite how deeply it really affected my life. I'm not 100% better, even today, but I'm really getting there now. At first the music just sat on some shelves, but after a talk with another person I somewhat knew, and after some surprisingly difficult prayers, I decided to just get rid of those albums completely. The person to whom I talked (I don't know their musical preferences) just burned the bad stuff they owned; I sent mine to be recycled so the materials could be reused.

Please don't ask which bands' albums I recycled. That darkness is out of my life now, and that's all I care about.

...yikes

Interesting. Music seldom has any kind of real, lasting effect on my mood or feeling to this degree.

Personally, I find the idea of getting rid of music that supports an idea you don't share to be a little odd. Quite a few historical painters held very radical views and yet no one would seriously argue that that diminishes their works. Metal especially isn't a genre built around the lyrics, and I don't really care too much about the lyrics in many others. It's kind of like how I see Chick-fil-A: I may not exactly agree with what the owner believes and does with some of his money, but I'm not donating to his cause, I'm buying his product, and that's what I want to see continued. Also, I suspect that if I dug through his competitors' history, I'd find things as bad or worse. This is the approach I take to anything where my money indirectly meets someone else's different principles.

i have learned to separate the art from the artist a long time ago.

that being said, i did pick up this cringeworthy little practice around jr.high where if the lyrics were "bad" or something i didnt agree with, i would image different lyrics in my head. As lame as this is, it was actually kind of fun because in some cases, it was almost like a word game. Using a given time scheme and music tone to come up with lyrics to something on your own. as if you were the one who wrote the song. ultimately, its one of the dorkiest things about me that ive stuck with up until now, but I like to hope that I'm improving my lyricist skills every time i come up with a "good" alternate line to a song.

It extends beyond metal, in my opinion. If you choose to avoid music due to the artist's beliefs of a non-musical nature, where do you draw a line?

Look at Wagner for instance. Almost unanimously renowned as one of the most important composers of the 19th century... but the dude was an outspoken racist and bitter anti-semite. His music was championed by the nazis. Fast forward a few more generations, and John Williams borrows Wagner's ideas heavily in crafting the score for the Star Wars movies (which is seen as some of the best music put to film). Where do you draw a line? Are you allowed to listen to artists who were heavily influenced by past artists with questionable ideologies?

I'm not gonna bother trying to dig up examples in metal, aside from the glaring fact that the foundation for nearly all modern black metal hasn't really changed since it was laid down by crazy Norwegian teenagers with fucked up ideas. Do you just ignore the entire sub-genre?

Also, throughout my years of listening to music, metal especially, I've learned to live by a mantra. In any song, bad lyrics do not detract from the experience, good lyrics enhance the experience.

This has mostly been true for black metal. Beautiful music with (usually) very incomprehensible vocals. But after reading the lyrics for some songs, the exact thing above happens!

Agreed. Lyrics only detract in extreme(ly bad) cases but good lyrics add a lot to the music.

More on topic, I say nothing sacred, if your music is any good, I'm on board. That said, many bands with controversial themes tend to be shitty, shock one trick ponies that don't even have the decency to play anything remotely enjoyable. So I don't think I have music from an artist/band whose views are douchey or extreme (at least, nothing comes to mind as I write this) but I wouldn't care as long as the music is good.

Never done it. In fact, in the last couple of years or so, I've been allowing a lot more of the "clearly dubious" things into my collection than I once would have. I got over my age 17-24 mindset and started enjoying music in favor of smelling my own morally superior farts again, I guess.

I think the closest I've come to cleaning anything is deleting a bunch of "Neohate" MP3's I was sharing on a P2P program many years ago (I don't think it could've been later than 2004) when some user with a persecution complex messaged me to piss and moan about it. At the time, they convinced me to move them to an unshared folder and tell them I deleted the files. I eventually did delete the files after a while for the simple fact that the novelty of a joke Nazi hip-hop group had worn off and I realized how dreadful they sounded.

I tend to avoid sharing my last.fm and discogs profiles with some people, too, simply because I'd prefer to avoid problems with potential finger-wagging dorks who think it's their job to play the morality police online.

I don't buy albums from bands who I really don't agree with (not interested in racist shit or brutal DM about raping women or whatever). But yeah - I don't even really get how this becomes such a big problem; are there really that many bands out there whose ideology is that flagrant to make them a "might not listen to" band? Certain genres like punk or some BM, sure, but stuff I listen to like rock, power metal, prog, etc - very rarely has any lyrics that could be considered offensive.

I don't know, the whole concept of separating the art from its producer is always a difficult question. For instance, it extends to not only music, but art in general. Take Wagner for example (as stated above by capeda) - he was an Anti-Semite. The thing is, that in those times, antisemitism was basically the norm, and I believe Wagner was even pretty hardcore for his contemporaries. Edgar Degas, who painted wonderful things, was also an Anti-Semite, even expressed his antisemitism in his paintings. Émile Cioran was a Nazi sympathiser in his young years, renounced them later in life.

In my opinion, you can never separate private life and the work you create - both are, in my opinion, inextricably linked together. But I would probably never not enjoy art, even if the artist had views that do not correspond to my personal views. In that regard, I would say, that everyone should enjoy the music they do. That saying, I really have a profound dislike for NSBM, because it's just so backwards and (dare I say) stupid. While the music may be good, making national socialist ideas the central aspect of your music is just weird.