"Jon Schaffer, guitarist and songwriter for American power metal act Iced Earth, was one of the first rioters to enter the Capitol Building during the January 6th riots..."
He was just a heavy metal wildman saying wild things, until one day he wasn't
May 19, 20225:00 AM ET
GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN
Twitter
In the metal bands Sleep and High on Fire, Matt Pike has always looked to esoteric sources. Over the last decade, however, he's found inspiration in the conspiracy theories of David Icke.
Photo Illustration by Estefania Mitre/NPR; Getty Images
Matt Pike has always seemed to relish his underdog status.
In the fall of 2008, Pike's heavy metal trio of nearly a decade, High on Fire, was slotted as the warm-up band for Opeth, a Swedish prog-metal institution on a three-month sweep through the United States and Europe for which they had recruited a select cast of au courant American acts. One night near the middle of the tour, inside Raleigh, N.C.'s Lincoln Theatre, fans — a sea made up mostly of men clad in black Opeth shirts — greeted High on Fire with impatience, their arms folded in frustration.
Pike, then in his mid-30s, met that less-than-welcoming party with trademark aplomb. Poised at the lip of the broad stage, he moved in perfect time with the band's mighty rhythm section, as relentless as some gargantuan engine's pistons. Shirtless, sweat dripping from his broad tattooed frame, Pike tossed back his light brown hair, which cascaded far below his shoulders, and spit at the stage, as if cursing the very gravity it evidenced. Then Pike lifted off again, unleashing another splenetic electric solo above the band's churn.
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The Opeth devotees were swept up in Pike's energy, grinning up at his wild-eyed guitar theatrics. High on Fire felt dangerous, mean and urgent. If Opeth's set was a river winding down an elegant rut, High on Fire was that same river beyond flood stage, cresting its banks and roaring.
That was the first time I'd ever seen Pike play, and to me, that night, he seemed heavy metal incarnate. A year earlier, High on Fire's Death Is This Communion had suggested a trompe-l'oeil rendering of ancient warfare, with Pike hemming and hawing about epic battles, quarreling gods and Mesopotamian religion above the band's sculpted racket. In the 14 years since, without changing much of his style, sound or the substance of his songs, he has risen from that undercard to become one of modern metal's bona fide icons. A rebel to love, Pike has supplied a rare link between metal's sprawling underground and what's left of its mainstream, between its past and present.
But the same sense of underdog insurgency that long made Pike so compelling, as an opening act and eventually as one of metal's marquee performers, has recently gotten much more complicated — and the conflict could come to define Pike's career as much as his music. In early February of this year, I called Pike to continue a conversation we'd started a few weeks earlier about his debut solo album. He answered with something like a gruff whimper. "They canceled me on Bandcamp, dude," Pike said from his home in Portland, Ore., not bothering with a greeting. "Can you believe it?"
Actually, I could: Two days earlier, the British music website The Quietus had published an extensive interview with Pike. After 30 years as one of metal's most riveting guitarists and adored characters, first in stoner-metal trio Sleep and then in High on Fire, Pike, now 49, had finished the unruly and uneven Pike vs the Automaton. In that interview, he spoke about making the album during lockdown and the future of his more famous enterprises. And as he's done off and on since at least 2010, Pike then leaned into a longtime inspiration: the conspiracy theories of writer, firebrand and laughingstock David Icke.
For more than a quarter-century, Icke's outlandish ideas about people descended from aliens and Israeli criminal networks have frequently been associated with global antisemitism — that is, very broadly, a prejudice against or hateful perception of Jewish people. In 2020, his views on COVID-19 even prompted the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate to issue a 25-page report on Icke's beliefs, saying he was using the pandemic "as an introduction to his antisemitic superconspiracy." But if The Quietus pressed Pike about his associations with Icke, they didn't print that part. Instead, Pike talked about how global warming is not much of a threat, our worries about it likely due to a capitalist scheme, and that whatever is labeled "misinformation" is likely true.
Matt Pike gives special thanks to director Sam Raimi, stuntman Evel Knievel and conspiracy theorist David Icke in the credits for "Alien Slut Mum" video.
YouTube
A flicker of online outrage followed, with Pike fans such as cultural critic David Grossman voicing disappointment that Pike had again extolled Icke without addressing his antisemitic underpinnings. (The writer Alice Walker prompted similar controversy when she called Icke's books "a curious person's dream come true" in The New York Times.) The ire seemed brief and bound to fade, though, as it had for years whenever Pike referenced Icke. A jeering headline here, a concerned Reddit post there: This was just a heavy metal wildman saying wild things, right?
Bandcamp Daily — the editorial arm of the music-selling website Bandcamp — finally disagreed. After spotting the Quietus interview, editors there decided to scrap a playful piece where Pike picked some of his favorite obscure artists and albums from the site. They'd done that less than five times in the site's history, Editorial Director J. Edward Keyes told me. "We are unabashedly an advocacy publication, which requires us to ask with every piece, 'Is this something we want to advocate for?'" Keyes wrote in an email.
Bandcamp Daily had previously gushed about Pike, even excitedly citing his love of Icke-adjacent conspiracy theories. NPR and Rolling Stone had done much the same. I'd glibly turned his Icke adulation into a punchline during a glowing review of High on Fire's 2015 album, Luminiferous. Pike had long seemed heavy metal's avuncular goofball, a fan of fast cars and potent weed, sporting wild tattoos like Bill the Butcher slicing a pizza. He personified metal's long-running theater of the absurd, the very quality that seemed to animate his onstage bravado that first time I saw him. "He can be a bit of a cartoon character," as Billy Anderson, his longtime record producer, put it. The conspiracy theories simply seemed part of his bit.
But on the phone that afternoon, Pike was mystified by what had changed to prompt this "cancellation," since Icke wasn't new territory for him. He demanded to know how something that had recently served as his selling point — creativity fueled by conspiracy theories — started to seem like it could cost him some piece of his career. Who had reset the line others felt he had now crossed?
"I'm not, like, preaching his gospel. I was using the David Icke 'mythage' to create a song that had a science-fiction, fantasy motive," Pike said a few days later, his momentary whimper now approaching a growl. "I don't understand how that gets to be not published. If you can't say an author's name in an interview, you're telling me I don't have freedom of speech. That's the problem."
For a flash, I felt the sinking feeling I expect adult children experience when they learn of a parent's investment in QAnon. Pike often complained to me about "cancel culture," but he was unwilling to admit that Icke, antisemitism and his association with either might be a problem for Jewish people or anyone else. This controversy was about protecting his freedom, he insisted, not shifting social mores meant to protect the vulnerable. "This is why war exists," he stammered, "because they separate us by propaganda narratives."
Matt Pike's interest in David Icke and his brash statements at large met mostly shrugs from the metal community for more than a decade. But in recent years, there has been so much conversation — within metal and, of course, far beyond it — about how a fan might and even should respond when an artist they adore does something they find odious or dangerous. I was now not only that fan, increasingly confounded by what Pike had to say, but also a journalist who'd been interviewing him for four years. I could ask Pike what he believed and why he believed it. That was my first responsibility. And only then, I could decide if I were going to remain a fan — or, perhaps, back away.
From digging ditches to headlining stages
A decade after I initially encountered Pike onstage, I finally met him — and, for a spell, shadowed and interviewed him on tour for several days — at the start of September 2018.
I still can't get over this:
"Jon Schaffer, guitarist and songwriter for American power metal act Iced Earth, was one of the first rioters to enter the Capitol Building during the January 6th riots..."
"...he said that inmates threw shit at him."
https://www.metalsucks.net/2022/05/03/newly-released-footage-shows-iced-earths-jon-schaffer-with-bear-spray-in-hand-during-january-6th-riots/
If you've never listened to Iced Earth, start with the album "The Glorious Burden" for context on who Schaffer actually is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn2sZ3pk7tk&list=PLL44kuYYS8ynPaQoSnppWGfEf3_5PELwj
I read that.
Fucking terrible hit piece
Can Matt Pike face the music?
He was just a heavy metal wildman saying wild things, until one day he wasn't
May 19, 20225:00 AM ET
GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN Twitter
In the metal bands Sleep and High on Fire, Matt Pike has always looked to esoteric sources. Over the last decade, however, he's found inspiration in the conspiracy theories of David Icke. Photo Illustration by Estefania Mitre/NPR; Getty Images Matt Pike has always seemed to relish his underdog status.
In the fall of 2008, Pike's heavy metal trio of nearly a decade, High on Fire, was slotted as the warm-up band for Opeth, a Swedish prog-metal institution on a three-month sweep through the United States and Europe for which they had recruited a select cast of au courant American acts. One night near the middle of the tour, inside Raleigh, N.C.'s Lincoln Theatre, fans — a sea made up mostly of men clad in black Opeth shirts — greeted High on Fire with impatience, their arms folded in frustration.
Pike, then in his mid-30s, met that less-than-welcoming party with trademark aplomb. Poised at the lip of the broad stage, he moved in perfect time with the band's mighty rhythm section, as relentless as some gargantuan engine's pistons. Shirtless, sweat dripping from his broad tattooed frame, Pike tossed back his light brown hair, which cascaded far below his shoulders, and spit at the stage, as if cursing the very gravity it evidenced. Then Pike lifted off again, unleashing another splenetic electric solo above the band's churn.
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The Opeth devotees were swept up in Pike's energy, grinning up at his wild-eyed guitar theatrics. High on Fire felt dangerous, mean and urgent. If Opeth's set was a river winding down an elegant rut, High on Fire was that same river beyond flood stage, cresting its banks and roaring.
That was the first time I'd ever seen Pike play, and to me, that night, he seemed heavy metal incarnate. A year earlier, High on Fire's Death Is This Communion had suggested a trompe-l'oeil rendering of ancient warfare, with Pike hemming and hawing about epic battles, quarreling gods and Mesopotamian religion above the band's sculpted racket. In the 14 years since, without changing much of his style, sound or the substance of his songs, he has risen from that undercard to become one of modern metal's bona fide icons. A rebel to love, Pike has supplied a rare link between metal's sprawling underground and what's left of its mainstream, between its past and present.
But the same sense of underdog insurgency that long made Pike so compelling, as an opening act and eventually as one of metal's marquee performers, has recently gotten much more complicated — and the conflict could come to define Pike's career as much as his music. In early February of this year, I called Pike to continue a conversation we'd started a few weeks earlier about his debut solo album. He answered with something like a gruff whimper. "They canceled me on Bandcamp, dude," Pike said from his home in Portland, Ore., not bothering with a greeting. "Can you believe it?"
Actually, I could: Two days earlier, the British music website The Quietus had published an extensive interview with Pike. After 30 years as one of metal's most riveting guitarists and adored characters, first in stoner-metal trio Sleep and then in High on Fire, Pike, now 49, had finished the unruly and uneven Pike vs the Automaton. In that interview, he spoke about making the album during lockdown and the future of his more famous enterprises. And as he's done off and on since at least 2010, Pike then leaned into a longtime inspiration: the conspiracy theories of writer, firebrand and laughingstock David Icke.
For more than a quarter-century, Icke's outlandish ideas about people descended from aliens and Israeli criminal networks have frequently been associated with global antisemitism — that is, very broadly, a prejudice against or hateful perception of Jewish people. In 2020, his views on COVID-19 even prompted the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate to issue a 25-page report on Icke's beliefs, saying he was using the pandemic "as an introduction to his antisemitic superconspiracy." But if The Quietus pressed Pike about his associations with Icke, they didn't print that part. Instead, Pike talked about how global warming is not much of a threat, our worries about it likely due to a capitalist scheme, and that whatever is labeled "misinformation" is likely true.
Matt Pike gives special thanks to director Sam Raimi, stuntman Evel Knievel and conspiracy theorist David Icke in the credits for "Alien Slut Mum" video. YouTube A flicker of online outrage followed, with Pike fans such as cultural critic David Grossman voicing disappointment that Pike had again extolled Icke without addressing his antisemitic underpinnings. (The writer Alice Walker prompted similar controversy when she called Icke's books "a curious person's dream come true" in The New York Times.) The ire seemed brief and bound to fade, though, as it had for years whenever Pike referenced Icke. A jeering headline here, a concerned Reddit post there: This was just a heavy metal wildman saying wild things, right?
Bandcamp Daily — the editorial arm of the music-selling website Bandcamp — finally disagreed. After spotting the Quietus interview, editors there decided to scrap a playful piece where Pike picked some of his favorite obscure artists and albums from the site. They'd done that less than five times in the site's history, Editorial Director J. Edward Keyes told me. "We are unabashedly an advocacy publication, which requires us to ask with every piece, 'Is this something we want to advocate for?'" Keyes wrote in an email.
Bandcamp Daily had previously gushed about Pike, even excitedly citing his love of Icke-adjacent conspiracy theories. NPR and Rolling Stone had done much the same. I'd glibly turned his Icke adulation into a punchline during a glowing review of High on Fire's 2015 album, Luminiferous. Pike had long seemed heavy metal's avuncular goofball, a fan of fast cars and potent weed, sporting wild tattoos like Bill the Butcher slicing a pizza. He personified metal's long-running theater of the absurd, the very quality that seemed to animate his onstage bravado that first time I saw him. "He can be a bit of a cartoon character," as Billy Anderson, his longtime record producer, put it. The conspiracy theories simply seemed part of his bit.
But on the phone that afternoon, Pike was mystified by what had changed to prompt this "cancellation," since Icke wasn't new territory for him. He demanded to know how something that had recently served as his selling point — creativity fueled by conspiracy theories — started to seem like it could cost him some piece of his career. Who had reset the line others felt he had now crossed?
"I'm not, like, preaching his gospel. I was using the David Icke 'mythage' to create a song that had a science-fiction, fantasy motive," Pike said a few days later, his momentary whimper now approaching a growl. "I don't understand how that gets to be not published. If you can't say an author's name in an interview, you're telling me I don't have freedom of speech. That's the problem."
For a flash, I felt the sinking feeling I expect adult children experience when they learn of a parent's investment in QAnon. Pike often complained to me about "cancel culture," but he was unwilling to admit that Icke, antisemitism and his association with either might be a problem for Jewish people or anyone else. This controversy was about protecting his freedom, he insisted, not shifting social mores meant to protect the vulnerable. "This is why war exists," he stammered, "because they separate us by propaganda narratives."
Matt Pike's interest in David Icke and his brash statements at large met mostly shrugs from the metal community for more than a decade. But in recent years, there has been so much conversation — within metal and, of course, far beyond it — about how a fan might and even should respond when an artist they adore does something they find odious or dangerous. I was now not only that fan, increasingly confounded by what Pike had to say, but also a journalist who'd been interviewing him for four years. I could ask Pike what he believed and why he believed it. That was my first responsibility. And only then, I could decide if I were going to remain a fan — or, perhaps, back away.
From digging ditches to headlining stages
A decade after I initially encountered Pike onstage, I finally met him — and, for a spell, shadowed and interviewed him on tour for several days — at the start of September 2018.
NPR is such a horror. They were bashing 2000 Mules a couple mornings ago stating the data were false and the whole project was a sham.
And people believe them like the Bible. I used to and then I awoke with a start and realized their propaganda is criminal.