On why vulgar scum exists

This post isn’t about music, but it’s a good place to start. I’ll start with the type of music generally associated with the type of people one would imagine in the title. Death metal – What is death metal? To the untrained ear, it’s basically a cacophony of horrible, headache inducing noise whose sole purpose is to be gratuitously ugly and disturbing. But what is it really? I think that it is society’s aversion to distasteful topics, it’s the sweeping under the rug of the grotesque and unpleasant parts of life, like death. Things such as these more often than not make people lash and out and behave in weird ways, usually out of stress, shock, denial, and the inability to process what has happened.

What is death metal then, as an end-result, apart from the source of musical enjoyment? Quite simply, it’s an outlet, a simple coping mechanism. But then you get the niche genres of death metal that are just ridiculously over-the-top, purposefully crossing taboo boundaries that would give any conservative person a heart-attack. Is there a point to that kind of music? Yes, and quite simply the reason is very evident. The music can be seen as an absurdity, to the point of being comical, sometimes satirical. More so than the regular death metal, it helps people better accept death, or express their interests and fears about human morality. It is also a humbling reminder that we are all animals, and we die like everything else.

[End music bit]

Extrapolate this into all other aspects of human behaviour that are seen as unfitting and you get roughly the same conclusion. With the exception of behaviour that is purposefully attention-seeking, unacceptable attitudes and acts can be viewed as an outlook on life. Perhaps it is because a person can distastefully mock a subject (or any subject) with vulgarity or crudeness (without any disrespect) that they have transcended a point to which they can objectively do so.

In other words, and not to sound as if I’m substantiating infantile boundary-crossing, perhaps the level of comfort with which certain people can approach subjects with a readiness to be distasteful about them means that they have an ineffable appreciation for the subject, or what makes it tick. One example of this is any one of the many stand-up comedians that do cross boundaries; despite the fact that they do, they usually do so with a sense of satire that exceeds that comfort about a subject that regular, clean satire comes with.

Another element to this crudeness is an invariable truth when the subjects are spoken about. Because there’s no beating around the bush once boundaries have been crossed, there’s no sugarcoating or euphemisms to cover subjective opinion in. This could be why something like 4chan is so popular, because in amongst all the filth, is an underlying river of truthful opinion.

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