Maybe some of you rookies ought to save your distasteful expressions for other things you can't quite figure out, like employment or books. I am, chronologically speaking, the perfect metal commentator. Born in the Seventies, I grew up during the Eighties and logged my college years in the Nineties. I span generations, kiddies. As for the "not one of us" insinuation, if the "us" referred to is the headbanger community, than I have been one of "us" for a lot longer than you, and the major difference between us is that I'll still be here long after you've shifted allegiances to hip-hop, new country, or adult contemporary. Last decade's harvest of hard rock went down my throat without so much as a cough. I immersed myself in the entire scene, just as I had in the decades before, and I comprehended and conceptualized all that I saw, heard, and felt. Metal is timeless; only backward-ass punks and punkettes with black fingernails would think any different.
And you're funny-looking too.
Even though it will put me in direct jeopardy of losing my Crusty Old Metalhead Grouch certification, I'd like to go on record and say that the recently completed Nineties were a very good decade for metal. Surfing the Net has provided the prefect mechanism for revitalizing the fan base; only true aficionados of the art form could keep up with the sixteen-gazillion websites out there (of which UMR is clearly the classiest). Oh sure, we get doomsayers and one-band ponies and fluff-spoutin' non-minds, but the mere fact that the forum exists is encouraging.
One thing I missed in the Nineties was metal-friendly radio, but even back in the Eighties those stations with an iron-and-steel playlist had extremely dubious prospects for survival. I also felt the absence of Headbanger's Ball, but I can't say I yearn for those days when MTV was pushing the latest trends on us like crack. Since Music Television hardly features any music to speak of now, lamenting the lost Ball is more and more like crying over mopped-up milk. VH1's Rock Show makes for an adequate substitute anyway; I tend to get grumpy when I miss an episode.
More importantly, however, the music - and the music is what holds us all together here in Metalvania - that the hard rock genre produced in the last ten years was simply splendid. In the darkest Eighties there was this category called "mainstream metal" that everybody (except for me and a couple of other guys) did their level best to bury. And now it is born again as "power metal," which encapsulates so many excellent European projects that it's almost enough to make one weep. Progressive metal was another willful problem child that never seemed to do what we wanted it to; modern-day prog reminds me of a beautiful, blonde teenager with a penchant for older men. Easy to get along with, in other words. Eighties thrash gave birth to death metal, which was awfully hard to swallow in large doses. In the Nineties, though, death mutated into "black" and then "dark" metal, both of which are pretty cool.
Furthermore, thrash in the Nineties definitely followed the "aggro-groove" sound patented by Pantera. While I can think of plenty of bands that I like more than Pantera, I can also think of multitudes of acts that I like a bunch less than Pantera. So that's a good thing. I managed to enjoy about thirty-five percent of the hardcore bands that I encountered, even though there is apparently a long-running contest between these groups to see who can obliterate the most traces of melody from their output. I sometimes caught myself wanting to yell: "Play a ballad, would ya?" And that isn't like me at all.
Plenty of glam and sleaze and LAM outfits took it to the streets on the reunion bandwagon. It was better this time around, however, because they had all been irradiated by grunge and alterna-metal and also because we were finally able to take or leave them. As for the new acts that kept cropping up under these classifications (and even less commercially viable genres like pomp and AOR), it was simply a breeze to enjoy them. It was no cynical cash-grab in the Nineties, because there just wasn't much cash out there to grab.
The only school of recent metal that I can't (or won't) much stomach - and here's where I'm sure you'll dismiss me as an old fart, but I've got to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - is what is variously referred to as nu-metal, hip-core, hard-rap, and rap-rock. I don't need to name the bands; we're all aware of whom I'm discussing here. Prattle on about this being the "future" of hard rock and the "cutting edge" of heavy metal, but I've got two major bones to pick...
Never mind that Korn's music is ridiculously overwrought and that Jonathan Davis's "vocals" remind me Ookla the Mok. And never mind that Kid Rock has yet to produce even a single tune to match the first rap-rock songs in (pre)history, Run-DMC's "Rock Box" and "King of Rock." Instead, I'd like to focus on a concern much closer to home: the fact that this stuff doesn't amount to anything except Faith No More minus the creativity and the integrity. FNM were the pioneers of hip-hop and funk elements in metal, and they also managed to ground those elements in a purely impressive matrix of experimentalism and musical courage. To put it in a simpler manner, when the Faiths switched into rap mode, it was meant to match the song's fabric and structure. It wasn't just power chords grafted onto a hip-hop song. The best of the hip-core crowd (Stuck Mojo, 311), in their very best moments from their very best albums, haven't equaled one-eighth of the white light and white heat available on Faith No More's worst disc. Call me pathetically retro if you must, but it's a fact, and facts are still facts.
The second bitch I have about hard-rap is that the acts can't songwrite for stale camel crap. Every major component of good writing is lacking in the hip-core harvest; structure, focus, logical progression, texture, instrumentalism, arrangement. All of these are AWOL (and the intelligent listener is SOL). This is what has contributed to the general gist of "sameness" that permeates their material. One track by Rage Against the Machine can be a pretty thrilling experience. Two songs can be okay. Three gets me twiddling my thumbs. If you can get through a whole CD, more power to you, but you don't know shit about rock 'n' roll.
Either you agree with me somewhat, at least so far, or you ceased reading when I implied that the Deftones kind of suck. That's actually a shame, because I'd like to reiterate what I said earlier: I adored heavy metal in the Nineties. Heaps (or "Heeps") of trad headbangers have been pissing and moaning about alt-metal, neo-punk, industrial, and gothic, but I've learned to appreciate the whole bushel basket. The problem wasn't metal in the Nineties. The problem was metal fans in the Nineties.
Mayhap I'm a naïve rube, but aren't metalheads supposed to welcome diversity in metal, at least to the point of taste-testing all metallurgic forms? Instead, we've been diseased by political in-fighting that makes the rift we had between Jon Bon supporters and speed-metal zealots in the Eighties seem like a game of patty-cake. I may not like the majority of rap-rock, but I can stand to listen to it and, more importantly, even admire it in its historical context. The average hip-core initiate cannot seem to do the same with Queensryche or Anthrax or Wishbone Ash.
If a Limp Bizkit partisan requested that I sit down with them so that they could walk me through "Significant Other" and explain why they venerate it so, I would gladly agree. On one condition. They'd have to allow me to do the same with "Sad Wings of Destiny."
Who among us can blame the younger fans, though? We were all that way once--attracted to the most abrasive sounds available, trying to make some vacuous statement, possessed of a fickle loyalty that followed along on the trail of every Next Big Thing. I was that way and, in many ways, I still am. As far as the harshest sounds available, I still dig 'em (as long as they fit the goddamn compositions, or as long as there are goddamn compositions to fit). And I still manage to get excited about what might be next for heavy metal.
Frankly, us older bangers are just as big a part of the problem. A lot of us (me included) left the field in the early Nineties, convinced that metal was dead. For that, we should have our mouths washed out with brimstone. The vets among us slag grunge and alternative still, even though it seems more and more clear that alternative and grunge were merely the Nineties variation on heavy rock and metal. Our biggest collective sin is the lack of support for the newer groups--instead of whining about the Metallica betrayal, we ought to have been throwing our dollars behind Sentenced and Iced Earth and other bands that follow the Mighty M's original attack plans. Rather than rounding out our collection of live Maiden bootlegs, we should have been actively sniffing out artists that fit our tastes and tickle our fancy. Face it, fellas: we've been less than beneficent. We demand another "Rust In Peace" from Megadeth, plead for another "Destroyer" from Kiss, and pray for a sequel to "Master of Puppets" from the Mets (alright, we're justified on that last one). Then we turn around and completely ignore (or underrate like all hell) a brave, visionary work like "Van Halen III."
Old timers, we all act like kids once in awhile too. We've got to grow up sometime, you know?