Wade Michael Page, the alleged lone shooter in Sunday's vicious attack at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, was a longtime member of a neo-Nazi heavy metal band named End Apathy.
The band's lyrics are full of hateful and inflammatory messages about "getting rid" of the "enemies of the white race;" in at least one song, listeners are encouraged to "gather your guns."
End Apathy's music was easily available on MySpace as well as the website of its record label, Label 56. The band's MySpace page has since been deleted, but searches for similar bands reveals myriad online choices for followers of such music — such as another band Wade played in, Definite Hate.
Hate rock predates the Internet and has been around for decades — with records often being sold at festivals geared toward the genre, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
But could the Internet be helping it spread?
After all, you can't exactly walk into your nearest Best Buy and ask for End Apathy's latest vitriol-infused single. That doesn't mean it's hard to get — it was merely a Google search away, available on MySpace, last.fm and other music-listening platforms.
Marilyn Mayo, co-director at the Anti-Defamation Leaguer's Center on Extremism, believes the online world has inadvertently made things easier for hate rock.
"The Internet has certainly contributed to an increase in the availability of [hate rock], because it's not music you can generally buy at Amazon or iTunes," she said. "It's music that small record companies sell online, and people can buy it even in places where it might be banned because it's filled with hateful lyrics."
Label 56, like the dozen or so other hate rock companies operating in the U.S., exists almost entirely online.
The label advertises its music as "independent music for independent minds," with the goal of bringing "to the forefront music that is ignored by the corporate-owned record labels, radio stations, magazines, and television." Its site could be mistaken for that of any other metal-oriented label on the web.
The company's homepage doesn't show anything immediately recognizable as a neo-Nazi symbol, although "56? could be a stand-in for "Eastern Front," a World War II reference. Neo-Nazi groups are fond of using numbers to represent letters per their order in the alphabet.
The events calendar, however, is the clearest indication of Label 56?s political orientation: it advertises concerts with titles like "Skinhead Action" and "Summer White RnR Weekend," some of which are co-sponsored by well-known hate groups such as the Hammerskin Nation.
The company wouldn't return a request for comment on this article. But it has disavowed its relationship with Wade's band, pleading in a statement that people should not "take what Wade did as honorable or respectable" or "think we are all like that."
Tech enthusiasts often discuss the Internet's potential to change the world for the better, but we can't ignore the dark side of the Internet's power to share, either. That's not to say that hate rock should be wiped from the Internet completely. Even the ADL's Mayo, whose job it is to "fight bigotry in all its forms," concedes that it's a form of free speech.
"It's our job to expose this music and it's lyrics and the bigotry and hatred it promotes," she says. "They do have a right to sell the music, but we also have a right to expose it for what it is."
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, EdStock
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