Glencore Ruin Headbangers Ball

Industrial metal band take on industrial metal processor.

Guhn Twei isn’t neutral when it comes to a Swiss multinational polluting their hometown. (Photo: William Brière Daigle/handout)

Drag metal pioneers Twisted Sister were wrong in their breakout hit “You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll.” Just ask the organizers of Alienfest, an annual alternative music festival outside the city of Rouyn-Noranda in northwestern Quebec, who recently pulled the plug on the latest installment rather than risk pissing off the company town's main employer.

Metal band Guhn Twei say they were uninvited from performing at the free outdoor concert for being mean to Glencore PLC, a Swiss multinational energy giant that operates a massive copper smelter in the city. One of the organizers is an employee of a subsidiary worried about being seen to bite the hand that feeds. Despite it also feeding deadly levels of arsenic.

Guhn Twei's album Glencorruption features lyrics calling the world's largest commodity trader “thieves in ties,” “capitalist parasites” and “rapists of the planet.” Or at least that's what indie music mag Exclaim! claims the offending lines are. I'm supposedly bilingual but honestly couldn't tell if the words are in French or English.

You’re more than welcome to try yourself:

I've never been able to fully appreciate the heavier forms of metal as it's impossible to not imagine it's Cookie Monster providing the growly doom vocals, but the language seems downright polite coming from a musical genre that's given us the likes of Gwar, Cannibal Corpse, and the Revolting Cocks.

But Guhn Twei aren't just shouting at the devil here. As residents of the town, they have actual skin in the game, albeit less than they used to.

Lead singer Simon Turcotte, 35, was diagnosed with cancer in 2016 and blames Glencore for the amputation of his right leg. He also has receipts to back it up from the province's health authority, which released a report two years ago on the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region's substantially higher rates of cancer and heart disease, not to mention lower birth rates, caused by being downwind of the Horne smelter, the country's sole remaining industrial processor of scrap metals.

“To censor a local artist whose cancer has cost him a leg and who denounces the poisoning of his fellow citizens in his songs so as not to displease an ecocidal multinational is the complete antithesis of the punk movement,” Turcotte wrote on Facebook shortly before the upcoming event was called off.

The mining town of Rouyn-Noranda sprang up nearly a century ago after gold, copper and other shiny objects were discovered underground in this corner of the Canadian Shield. Around the time the toxic smelter was being built, president James Y. Murdoch of the now-defunct Noranda Inc. reportedly said: "This smelter will be a monument that either exemplifies our stupidity and recklessness, or our wisdom and foresight."

A hundred years later it’s looking more like the former.

Glencore is one of those corporate behemoths that, if you've heard of them at all, it's usually for something tragic and/or evil like it is with ExxonMobil, BP, or Monsanto. They were fined $1.1 billion a couple of years ago after Department of Justice investigations into bribery and corruption cases in the US, the United Kingdom, and Brazil.

They also have a bit of a track record when it comes to poisoning people. For example, roughly a third of the population of La Guajira, nearly 340,000 people, suffer respiratory problems after four decades of breathing in the dust from Glencore's coal mine in northeast Colombia.

The name of the company's late founder may also ring a bell as the recipient of a presidential pardon on Bill Clinton's last day in office. The aptly named Mark Rich fled the country in 1983 rather than face up to 300 years in prison for breaking the law via tax evasion, racketeering, and doing business under the table with Iran during the time they were holding Americans hostage. The lead prosecutor in the case was none other than Roodles the Clown back in more innocent times when America’s mayor’s brain worked.

The pardon was controversial because Rich’s rich ex-wife was a major donor to the Democratic Party, and this was well before it was normalized for a sitting president to simply sell them off like common steaks, sneakers or state secrets.

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Quebec, being the distinct society that is is, has a more laissez-faire approach to the mining industry and safety standards than elsewhere in Canada. This is a country province that once had a city proudly named Asbestos until it rebranded four years ago as Val-des-Sources (Valley of the Springs) in the feint hope of attracting tourists and outside investment, leaving Dildo, Newfoundland, as the reigning champ of amusingly named Canadian towns, although the Quebec municipality of Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! remains a solid contender.

The Horne smelter was allowed to emit up to 33 times more arsenic into the atmosphere than the provincial limit for decades, although it was reduced in 2022 to just five times more. Progress! Also le progrès!

A contractor in Rouyn-Noranda offering a stage to Guhn Twei is like if a campaign staffer for RFK Jr. invited the Dead Kennedys to perform at a fundraiser. Although it’d be more on-brand if Sideshow Bob’s campaign announced DK would appear without actually checking first.

Just ask Jed Bartlet, Iron Mike or the Queen of Smooth Pop.

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It's a shame Glencore are such dicks as their name actually sounds pretty metal. “Glencore” suggests a pastoral form of metal specific to Scotland like how black metal is with Scandinavia. “I just heard the new glencore album from Lokness Mönster and it's dead fookin' brilliant!” Or maybe a misspelled subgenre with a muscular baritone inspired by the vocal stylings of Danzig founder Glenn Danzig.

“C IS FOR COOKIE!” (Photo: Jonas Rogowski/Wikimedia Commons)

It's a heavy loss for the metalhead community, who don't have much else to look forward to on the upcoming cultural calendar apart from a couple of non-metal local music festivals and a Bryan Adams concert in August. Call it his Summer of 63 tour.

Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, said in the Wonkette chatcave she was “FILLED WITH VENOMOUS WRATH” over the news of Alienfest's demise, should any of you care to offer a blood sacrifice or two to help cheer a dark entity up.

[Exclaim! / CBC / DOJ]