Time for a rant about one of my favorite subjects. Heavy metal. Warning. To some of you, this may be offensive. Some of you may agree. And a lot of you probably don’t give a damn one way or the other. Which is all fine and good too. So, on with the rant.
For you heavy metal aficionados out there, this is nothing new. Most of you are probably aware that the bands you dig are essentially ignored by the mainstream, when, a decade ago, they flourished. We all get that. Most people blame media and MTV and the current “mallcore” generation for destroying what they deem to be this all holy sacred relic. And there might be some truth to it. But the more and more I’ve thought about it, and the more and more I’ve hung out at message boards populated by fans of “tr00 metal,” the more I believe that it’s the fans of the music who are the most to blame.
When the genre first started, it was created by pissed off kids who felt they had a grudge against the world, and their music was speaking to other kids who felt the same way. Most of them were social misfits with rough lives, and they grabbed onto this newfound music like Bill Clinton groping anything in his path. It spoke for them, and thus, it belonged to them. As time grew on, both the bands and the fans got older, and their perception of the world changed, and it eventually got bequeathed to the next generation, as most things do. Another generation of bands following in the footsteps of their predecessors came along, as did another generation of fans. However, as we get closer and closer to present day, the gap has become increasingly larger between them. The fans used to be tough, angry, pissed off people who would just as soon stomp the living shit out of you as look at you. Now, the fan kingdom seems to largely be populated by nerds who buy into the whole image and have turned it into the all holy relic that I described earlier. In other words, the “tr00 metal” fans. People whose worst problems are their computer is having problems. Have self-ostracized themselves because “nobody understands them for who they are.” Think that somehow, being out of the status quo makes them somehow better than the popular crowd. Mostly people who don’t have the balls to do what it takes to exist in the real world, so they make up all kinds of excuses for why everything else sucks. People who have taken something that was meant to be the antithesis of conformity and being involved in a clique into a clique, and criticize everybody that doesn’t fall into their little clique as a poser, when the reality is that many of these people fit the moniker far more accurately than the people they’re associating it with. With that in mind, I’ll outline a few of them now.
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The whole “sellout” theory. Many of these fans listen to a lot of bands that most of their peers have never heard of. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, that’s how music is supposed to get spread around, right? Well…not exactly. See, most metal fans constantly criticize MTV and radio and their peers for not accepting their favorite bands and giving them a chance at success, and are constantly hoping that eventually, their favorite band will make it big. And in the same breath, if said band does achieve any success, they’re considered a sellout because now, the popular crowd likes them. Oh, heaven forbid that should happen, right? A lot of the quotes I’ve seen from these people fall along the lines of “I don’t want some trend following poser bitch with a (insert band name here) t-shirt on raving about how this is the greatest band in the world, that should be relegated to the true fans of the band!” Wait a second. How in the hell does that work? You either want them to be successful or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways, bub. These are the morons who are always trying to convert the unenlightened masses into liking their favorite band and put down anything mainstream that they like. Boo hoo. Cry me a river so I can piss in it.
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The ever-expanding amount of subgenres. A lot of old school metalheads (and by that I mean people who grew up during metal’s heyday) will understand this. Where the hell did all these different subgenres come from? Goth, doom, black, death, thrash, speed, stoner, power, all the way down to the most ridiculous ones. Melodic death. Ambient death. Death-thrash. Swedish melodic goth. Symphonic doom. Trans-substantiated regurgitated speed with melodic prog death overtones. Most of these terms were coined by the current generations of metal fans. The ones who have elevated it to Ark of the Covenant status who discuss the varying types of metal much in the same way wine geeks prattle on about how the glasses have to be shaped a certain way and it needs to breathe for X amount of time and this zinfandel shouldn’t be paired with that entree, and so on. What the hell happened to the good old days when all this just fell under the category of “heavy metal?”
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The complete and utter hypocrisy of these people. Both of the above tie into this, but I’m going to elaborate further. To go back to the whole sellout thing. If a band is successful, they’re a sellout, and if a band tries a different musical style, they’re a sellout. The people who like this new style as well as the older style are called “sheep.” Anyone who likes one mainstream band is called a “poser.” Well now. Let’s analyze this for a moment. You’re calling someone a sheep because (since this is the most common band associated with that term, I’ll cite Metallica as an example) they like St. Anger. A tr00 metal fan would never listen to such an abominable piece of shit. Oh no. You like Load and Reload too? Blasphemy! Kill him! Kill him before he infects the children! Fucking sheep. But wait. If they’re a sheep because they like something you don’t, aren’t you just a sheep running in the opposite direction? Suppose that, gasp, you might like one song off of St. Anger? Or one Korn song? Oh dear god! Mustn’t tell your metal friends. They might think you were…a poser!
Next comes the all important image argument. The most commonly associated thing with image is the trademark long hair. I remember a conversation at an Iced Earth board one time where the topic of discussion was Iron Maiden, and someone brought up the fact that Bruce Dickinson cut all his hair off. Which, when you get right down to it, doesn’t matter. The man can still sing his ass off. A point which was brought up. The response was “It doesn’t matter. Guys grow their hair long for a reason.” Are you fucking shitting me here? Ask most guys with long hair and they’ll probably tell you that they grew it because they wanted to, or they were too lazy to get a haircut, not because they want to fit the heavy metal image. Keep in mind that most of these insipid moron fans are the ones who always preach the “image doesn’t mean shit” ideal while growing their hair out long and having all the leather and spikes and band shirts and shit like that because it makes them look more metal. Mostly, it just makes them look like the pretentious fucking clowns they are. And, of course, complete, utter hypocrites to boot.
And then, of course, there’s the nitpicking about the tiniest little detail. I’ve seen debates ranging from everything over hair length, dress code, types of guitars used (“Dude, get a BC Rich! Fenders aren’t metal guitars!” Really. Tell that to Dave Murray and Adrian Smith sometime), right down to one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen arguments about: the album cover art. Someone please tell me what in the hell the album art has to do with whether or not you like the music. Seriously. I don’t get it. I always thought it was just another bit of pretentious bullshit spewed forth by these cretins. Honestly, I think that if most of the people in these bands that are so worshiped read what their “fans” were saying about them, they would be mortally offended to have them as fans.
One last bit of hypocrisy. As a lot of people probably know, Metallica’s St. Anger video was shot at San Quentin Prison, and the next day, as a reward for behaving themselves and treating the band very favorably, despite the fact that there were probably a lot of people there who were tempted to try and take a celebrity hostage to use as a bargaining chip to get out of jail, the inmates were treated to a free concert. Someone complained that Metallica should be ashamed to be rewarding convicted murderers, rapists, theives, and what have you with a free show. I shouldn’t neglect to mention that this person listened to a lot of music from the Scandinavian black metal scene. Which, if you follow a lot of those bands, many of their members are either dead or in jail for murdering each other, burning churches, killing Christians, homosexuals, people of different ethnicities, etc. Who was celebrating the release of one of the members of the band Dissection, who was convicted and imprisoned for brutally murdering a homosexual. Or, as he put it, “killing a fag.” That whole scene makes our rap wars look like a Boy Scout picnic.
So maybe it’s not the mainstream that sucks. Or MTV, VH1, radio, or whatever patsy these people want to blame. Maybe it’s themselves who should be taking a long, hard look at why metal is in the sorry, pathetic shadow of the state it once held. Food for thought.
