The Tyranny of Tradition

Chanting “Death to King Crimson Influenced Prog Metal”, thousands of enraged metalhead protesters stormed the US Embassy in Cleveland last night burning, looting and thrashing everything in sight.  The protestors, enraged by a 4-year-long performance of Opeth’s “Black Rose Immortal”, tossed copies of Opeth albums along with several mellotrons onto a burning pyre just inside of the embassy gates.

Opeth began performing the song at Cleveland’s famed Agora Ballroom back on September 12^th, 2008 and have been unwilling to conclude the song in the years since.  The song was meant to be the finale to a highly successful show, but it kept going on.  First for hours, then days, then weeks, then years.  The crowd, which was filled to capacity at the start of the song, began dwindling.  By December of that year, only 7 fans were left in the building, but the band played on.

Alfredo Garcia, the head promoter for the Agora, has tried everything possible to get them off of the stage.  The sound was unplugged, the lights were turned out, a court order was issued to remove them, the local police attempted to tear gas them, he even hired a gang of hooligans and disgruntled Browns fans to rough the band up, all to no avail.

The people of Cleveland had finally had enough.  Groups of wild-eyed protestors camped out in front of the Agora to try to force them to stop.  When that didn’t work, they marched on the US Embassy and held over three months of boisterous demonstrations imploring President Obama to call out the National Guard in order to end the song.

Frustration and anger finally boiled over when a popular local Cleveland radio station made the mistake of playing Opeth’s “The Leper Affinity”.  Several metalheads began scaling the walls of the compound and a full-scale invasion took place.  Miraculously, only one person was injured, a 34-year-old man whose bullet necklace exploded while he was helping to set a car on fire.

In an exclusive interview with Tyranny of Tradition, Opeth frontman Mikeal Akerfeldt claimed that the band would eventually finish the song but “hadn’t yet gotten to the bass solo or the 2-year-long piano outro.”  He was stunned by the chaos the song had caused.  “We have to be living in a pretty ridiculous world to have music cause this level of violence and hatred.  You’d have to be a highly deluded fool to attack an embassy based on one piece of artistic expression,” lamented Akerfeldt right before he launched into an unprecedented 1467^th acoustic guitar break.