Brutal Rock Fest Kicks Off
HAVANA TIMES, Sept. 2 — The Brutal Rock Fest will begin today in the island’s capital with the participation of six metal groups from France and Switzerland, and four Cuban bands, which will perform in the Maxim Rock Theatre and in the city of Pinar del Río, sources from the event’s Organizing Committee announced. The musical event is sponsored by the Cuban Rock Agency, the French Brutal Beastdown Records label and the Swiss association Vrockal Metal Fest, reported IPS.
Of course, Heavy Metal music has been the response of working-class U.S. youth (and then elsewhere) to the brutality of the capitalist system in their lives — so it’s always bemusing to be confronted with its analogs in countries which have supposedly transcended such capitalist ‘relations’. In any case, Heavy Metal’s existence in anti-capitalist countries points to the fact that such brutal relations of production and social organization have very much NOT been transcended anywhere. But the point is to leave these people free to explore their own alienation from the social system which they stand more or less against, at least culturally. And there is really no other organic way to transcend capitalist relations and build truly socialist ones than by the trial and error empirical method of social experimentation. Over-arching “theory” can only get you so far there.