The Fall of A kingdom: A Retrospective - Modern Metal
The Fall of A kingdom: A Retrospective - Modern Metal
When I was still a kid, having not yet grown fully into the awesomeness that was to become the hallmark of my life, I remember having a very concrete idea of what Heavy Metal was all about. Being roughly nine- or ten-years old at the time, this idea was heavily influenced by what the media – and my mother – told me. This is to say, I thought Metal was crappy music, produced by crappy musicians who didn’t know how to do anything but scream inanely while beating their instruments madly into a cacophony of discordant sounds that none but the tone-deaf would call music.
I actually wasn’t really a fan of any music at the time. Odd though it may seem, I preferred listening to those ridiculous nature tapes – the recording of songbirds, crickets and such.I was probably about eleven-years old when I first heard Nirvana (apparently making me something of an anomaly at the time), Kurt was already dead and, to be honest, I didn’t really think the world was missing much by having lost him.
However then came Slayer, Metallica, Iron Maiden and Death. Something clicked inside me when these sounds first came into contact with my ears. It wasn’t long before I was addicted, I just couldn’t get enough.
From then on I would do everything in my power to get my hands on any metal-related form of music I could. I would sleep with Metallica’s Black album playing in the darkness, I would sit in class with Iron Maiden’s melodies dancing through my head, I would practice scrawling the fonts of my favourite bands in notebooks and on the backs of exam papers when I should have been partaking in far more constructive activities (like studying for and actually writing the exams). In short, I allowed the music to become my life, and I was happy doing so.
I continued like this on my own for a time, quite happy to exist in solitude with my passion. After all, who needed people when I had my music?
It was about a year after getting to high school that I started finding my way into a scene I’d, until then, had no idea even existed.
There were others! This was a thought that hadn’t even occurred to me before. I wasn’t alone. Metalheads were real and they existed scattered throughout the crowds around me. There weren’t quite enough of us to constitute an army. Special forces maybe. The black-clad warriors of independent thought; that’s what I considered us to be. A childish and idealistic thought perhaps, but one that I found comfort in nonetheless.
We were, by and large, the outcasts, spurning the norms and values taught by the media and embraced by our more “conventional” peers. We were derided and attacked for the path we followed, and we reveled in the challenge, the conflict. United, we stood as one. Few of us though there may have been, we were strong in our unity.
It was around this time, though that bands like Marilyn Manson and Korn were coming into their own in the mainstream – building their reputation on their ability to shock, and little else. They were in-your-face and just offensive enough to scare parents, without being so extreme that they were completely ignored by the commercial music scene.Oh, how we laughed at their ignorance!
“Shocking!?” We thought. Please! How could anyone consider Korn heavy, or shocking when bands like Cannibal Corpse and Deicide had been out there pushing the boundaries of offensive, and pissing on religion and mainstream sensibilities for over a decade?
Manson and Korn were nothing more than Johnny-come-latelys with limited talent and no imagination, jumping on a bandwagon that Metal had set in motion before these trendies were even a dripping of precum on their daddies’ dicks.
Alas, we couldn’t see the threat for what it was.These bands, and others like them, were to cause a possibly-permanent shift in the Heavy Metal subculture. The amalgamation of the Heavy Metal underground and the pop music mainstream was to follow, and none of us then could see it coming, or realize the implications of such an unholy joining.
Metal had always thrived musically and culturally in independence of the mainstream. Without popular trends or fashion dictating the route Metal should take, the genre was free to evolve. Metal was always a scene that attracted followers, not one that catered to them. That was what made us different. The art was free to evolve on its own, and we – the people – heard its call. It wasn’t like pop music, RnB or Hip hop: all genres who sacrificed their own integrity to the pursuit of more fans, and wider mainstream appeal.Korn, Marilyn Manson and others changed that. They appealed to the soft, and the weak. They sang to the bullied, the downtrodden and the unfortunate. They lured in these people by outwardly preaching a message of strength and not caring – the message of metal – while their actions sang to an entirely different tune.
Thus a new generation of metalheads was born. One that didn’t deserve the title “Metalhead”.
It didn’t take long for the face of all Metal to change. These pseudo-intellectuals and false rebels soon flooded our homes. Attracted by the promise of the “hardcore” reputation that Metal had garnered – a reputation behind which they could hide - safe from the tormentors they were otherwise too weak to combat alone – these weak-willed children became the future of the Heavy Metal holy land. To many of these kids bands like Korn, Marilyn Manson, Disturbed, Slipknot and Coal Chamber are the forefathers of the genre, worshipped as false gods, in place of the true originators. Our history is almost dead and forgotten, deemed not worth the attention of the newer, more fickle breed of metalhead.
It’s almost ironic.
In its near-obscurity, the Metal of my childhood was safe from becoming the very stereotype it was often derided as. Today, with its growing commercial success, Metal is fast-becoming more and more of a parody of itself: a scene filled with no-talent hacks and wannabe independent thinkers. All playing at being hard and heavy, with no conception of what made the genre what it is, what earned it the reputation they’re all trying to cash in on.
I find it sad that if I were eight- or nine-years old today my narrow-minded assumption of Heavy metal would be justified. I wouldn’t find in the modern take on the genre the joy, depth and intelligence that once opened my eyes to the scene, and helped open my mind to so much more.
This is why I largely dismiss the entire generation of wish-we-were-cool kids, all trying so desperately to find acceptance in a culture that their sad need for acceptance helped to destroy.
In the end, to these sad little fucks, I say one thing: Your childhood has pissed all over mine, and that means war!
So that’s all I’ve got for today, feel free to comment below and let me know what you think of my painting job on these models, or if you play Warhammer, get a conversation started on the game itself.
