I've really been enjoying all of Simon's recent posts on metal, takes me back to my "angsty, white, suburban junior-high kid having his first existential crisis" days... not that I really want to go back to that...
I guess metal was my first musical obsession, and it's kind of interesting (and surprising) that a lot of Simon's readers are admitting the same.
I was talking to a mate who's deeply into basically every type of metal going from classic to hair, to doom, thrash, death, black, etc, etc(he has asperger's syndrome and it verges on being an obsession) And he says nothing new has really happened since the mid-nineties...
That sounds about right...
This totally goes against my usual stance on music, but I think that metal has to follow rigid aesthetic and idealogical guidlines to be true metal. It's probably the only genre that I'm purist about, because it's very essence demands it; metal is rockism to the extreme. The fact that the genre hasn't really done anything that new in a while doesn't necessarily discredit the new stuff, because it's metal's ever present negativity (in tone, but also what it negatively
isn't, in antagonism to morality/religion/tradition/mass culture) that defines it. If a metal band does get too chin-stroking, bluesy, or good-vibed, then I probably lump them in with stoner, psych, or hard rock (or as just art or hipster metal... which almost inhabit a separate universe from true metal); and if an act dares hybridize with other unrelated genres (like rap-metal and nu-metal), then I (and I'm sure most serious metalheads) wouldn't consider them metal any more than Good Charlotte is punk (although Mike Patton and Celtic Frost get a pass on this
). True metal has very strict rules, it demands to be taken VERY seriously (even as silly as it is), and it won't be shared with any other lovers (no, you can't see hip hop on the side)*... which is why I defected from the metal faithful well over a decade ago. I'm far too polygamous in my musical tastes... *edit.. this was more the case back in metal's days as a mainstream presence, since then I'll admit that I see more metalheads who listen to other kinds of music...
I did, in a way, experience somewhat of a return of the metalhead mentality during my affair with drum 'n bass though... There seemed to be a similar ideal of extremity, seriousness, staying within certain influences, etc... not that I bought into that aspect, but the mentality seemed to dominate the late '90s> scene...
