Blackened Death Metal ~ 21 November 2007

Today, I was looking up a Polish band on Wikipedia called Behemoth, and they were categorized as Blackened Death Metal. I read an article (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/arts/music/20cowb.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) about them in the New York Times and that they were playing at the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza on Sunday night which was touted as "fearsome".

I'd never heard of Blackened Death Metal, maybe blackened orange roughy, but not death metal. But as I was talking to the guys at work, I said that we should start our own Blackened Death Metal band and call it Orange Ruffians, which groaning aside, they liked the idea, as a fun social game to play with at work in a bookstore where all of us are bored silly for something even mildly entertaining, especially fantasy lives of the rich and famous.

As I'd already played drums in a band years ago in California, and another co-worker, Germer, has played bass in a professional band (Smog) on tour, the idea was equally funny in its almost famous possibilities. Riggs was all for it and that he'd front the band and write the lyrics. The really odd idea that I had was that the band should follow the doctrine of the Orange Order in Scotland and Ireland (this coming from a former Catholic), and that William I of Orange should be our hero.

Well, that didn't fly very far as nobody except myself knew who the hell William I of Orange was and that the Orange Order was a Protestant organization in Northern Ireland that excludes Catholics in every way possible (politically, socially, economically, intellectually, etc.). These are the people that took over Ireland in the 16th Century and never really gave it back, until this century, when a peace deal took place and the idea of power sharing was overwhelmingly accepted under many provisionary conditions. I don't think most of these guys care a hoot about the subjugation of Ireland's Catholic population to the political hegemony of the English and Scottish Protestant Union.

But still the idea that a lapsed Catholic would even joke about creating a band with an agenda of touting the Orange Order under the name of a band called Orange Ruffians would probably dismay many honest peoples of Northern Ireland that have had to withstand the ordeals of the parades that stroll the chauvanistic pride of these Orange lodge-members through Catholic neighborhoods with full knowledge that they were the ones who held political power in union with Great Britain. So for all the good Catholics out there that might read this blog, please forgive my lack of indiscretion in light of a good bad pun.