Sometime in the past week the article for Dawn of the Black Hearts, the bootleg album of black metal pioneers Mayhem infamous for bearing a
picture of their vocalist's corpse, has been deleted. It now
redirects to the band's discography page.
As far as I can tell, the reason was that hosting bootlegged material (both the recording and the cover art)
contravenes copyright law somehow.
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This despite the fact that Wikipedia still has articles for other famous bootlegs such as Pink Floyd's
The Dark Side of the Moo and Bob Dylan's
Great White Wonder.
On the other hand, the Metal Archives, the most extensive heavy metal-related resource on the Internet (and who have their
own thread in this very subforum), have
explicitly stated that it is the only bootleg allowed its own page on their website due to it being notorious and historically important enough. Obviously the website which
once almost deleted Darkthrone (another one of the most influential BM bands ever) for not being notable enough is more knowledgeable as to the importance of underground metal records than a bunch of die-hard metal spergs.
You'd think just documenting the existence of records that the userbase admits meet the criteria for notability would be alright, but apparently not. It's not like they're forced to reproduce the packaging or contents of the album (in fact, a couple of years ago the album art was deleted after being up for over a decade yet the article still remained), they're just cataloging its existence. I guess if the parties who hold the copyright to something refuse to let it be reproduced it's totally alright to let it fall down the memory hole. Just like a real encyclopedia!
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