On Wednesday, August 16, City Pages published an expose on a Minneapolis lawyer who was moonlighting as a record label owner who catered to neo-Nazi audiences. Called Behold Barbarity Records and Distro, their website is down right now, in part I’m guessing, because being a neo-Nazi isn’t as good for business as our president likes to believe. Aaron Davis was a lawyer at Patterson Thuente. Not so much anymore. After being placed on “administrative leave,” it seems that Patterson Thuente has move away entirely from the business of knowing Mr. Davis.
According to Patterson Thuente, the Minneapolis patent law firm was slow to learn one of its partners has a side gig trafficking in fascist-leaning heavy metal.
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The firm now claims it had no idea that Davis' business was selling records for bands with deeply offensive imagery and lyrics. (One band had a song called "Kill the Jews," while another put out an album called Behead the Semite.)
In January, invisibleoranges.com published an unrelated article about the Behold Barbarity’s crazy anti-Semitic merchandise.
Behold Barbarity, a metal label and distro specializing in underground black metal, released a tee shirt which depicts anti-Semitic propaganda from Nazi Germany. The front of the tee shirt reads “die juden sind unser ungluck”, which translates to English as “the Jews are our misfortune”. The reverse side of the shirt depicts a no symbol overlaying a star of David.
As the author in the invisible oranges post remarks, while heavy metal music and hardcore music have frequently played with fascistic imagery, there is usually—at the very least—some plausible alternative reasoning behind what they are selling.
Of course Behold Barbarity isn’t the only metal entity releasing instigative shirts. Emmure released a tee shirt this month which appears to depict a battered woman, though the band denies that interpretation. The Behold Barbarity shirt does not offer any plausible alternative interpretation.
None at all.