Stoney

I have the original "XII" by Rage, the album with the orchestra. I remember I liked it a lot; I wonder how I'd feel listening to it again now...

Guys, do whatever you want, accuse me of whatever you will, but I can't bring myself to speak ill of an album like Imaginations... I mean, I realize it is what it is, but maybe it's because I'm obsessed with that kind of fantasy, maybe it reminds me of making out with metal girls, maybe it’s because I've sung it at the top of my lungs with friends... who knows... but comparing Blind to Rhapsody is simply not acceptable from ANY point of view. Rhapsody writes an enormous amount of nonsense about dragons and knights, stuffing everything with tons of useless solos, only catering to the needs of the nerdy listeners who enjoy it; while Blind drew inspiration from literature, taking ideas that weren’t even that banal and composing with purpose.

I don't know the album. I agree with what Bartleboom says about the regression of Power Metal, but in my opinion, it's not Hansi Kursch's fault that power has turned into music for clueless kids (Blind Guardian is one of the very few metal bands I still listen to with nostalgia, and come on, I'm absolutely passionate about Tolkien, what do you want!), but it's that damned Luca Turilli's fault!!! You can't possibly disagree with me!! Bartle, come on, you know it's true too!! :D

You're right, Fallen, no confrontation and no covering each other's backs. I'll limit myself to expressing my opinion: I believe they did well to set off bombs in which 40 Nazis lost their lives; in fact, it should have been 400, if not 4000. After 30 years of regime (of which 5 were wartime), I justify any desperate action that comes from the ground up. If someone enters your bed to sleep with your wife, you go out into the street with a rifle; if an army breaks into your home to kill your family, you become a terrorist. Or should we expect the people to be concerned about having a measured and rational response in the face of certain abominations? Terrorism as a reaction to dictatorship has been a right and necessary thing, and it should be so in every place where regimes (all kinds of regimes) attempt to impose their way of thinking violently, to standardize people, to force them. This applies in Italy as much as in China, in South America, in South Africa, and in any other country in the world.

Lupin, why are you so relentless? Don't you know that violence is justified only when it's used by fascists? They can, everyone else is a terrorist. Come on... what a fervor against them, as if they had ever established a dictatorial regime.

A majority of rogues is defended, while a petty thief in the minority is completely destroyed: that's the trend today. What saddens me the most, however, is that applying this logic to today's divisions and factions is no longer enough; it even requires dragging out the dead from the past after fifty years just to have someone new to take it out on. We have so little to say about ourselves and our present that we can't move beyond ideological clashes, perhaps because, round and round we go, it suits everyone. Thus, we spare ourselves the annoyance of having to say something new, which we wouldn't even know where to begin with.

@Anfoxx, you didn't respond to me. You only shared a couple of updates about your private life and defended yourself by saying that since you're on the right, you've learned to fight for your "minoritarian" ideas. Look, the right has been in power for twenty years; you are the majority now. I'm not on the right; I want to share my ideas with everyone, and I believe that people like Luttazzi represent me when he criticizes our political class: so is my idea a minority one? Am I also right like you, or does it not count for me because I hold opposing views?

I believe that the only way to speak well of an album like this is to have some particular memories intertwined with it; otherwise, a minimum of regularity would dictate that it’s the most monotonous output produced in the history of music over the last 50 years. All tracks are the same, never a peak, never a different figure. Everything is ground in the sea of emo guitars with those annoying octave melodies with the slide and the shouted voice of the singer, always the same, always flat, never expressive. An utterly dispensable album.

When it comes to speaking poorly of the fascists, everyone says, "Oh come on, they had their reasons, what do you expect, it was a different time, let's not paint them as monsters, etc., etc." Yet, when discussing the partisans, everyone is there counting, with senseless precision, each hair on their ass one by one. This is not historical relativism; this is outright apologia, plain and simple. And for crying out loud...

@Anfoxx. "satire cannot mean insulting anyone at will." Uhm, maybe. The point is that a statement like yours has 1000 interpretations. It's clear that everyone gets angry when they hear criticisms of their political side, and it’s precisely the ensuing anger that leads you to mistake a critique (sour, irreverent) for an insult. So you can understand that the definition of "insult" is arbitrary and moreover inflated by your political thought: "Berlusconi is a thief" can be interpreted as a fact, a critique, or an insult depending on the sympathy one has for our beloved Prime Minister, so even saying "it's an insult" is an opinion, and furthermore biased, just like the joke from the comedian you can’t stand. So the question I pose to you is: could it be that your entire argument actually boils down to claiming that among the two biased opinions (yours and that of those who disagree with you) only yours is the right one? No, because it really seems that way to me, you know?