On Metal
Life
Before deciding I was a punk guy in high school, I was a jazz guy. I was rescued from staying that way by the guy who sat in front of me in American History and sensed some hope for me. He made a tape with the Repo Man soundtrack on one side, and Dead Boys' Young, Loud, and Snotty on the other.
On the other hand, there were all the kids on the school bus. There were a lot of metal people on that route. Ozzy Osbourne was sort of the baseline. I suppose Motley Crue was big. Also Scorpions and Iron Maiden. Van Halen rated, but that was around the time of 1984. They had a uniform: Black-sleeved jersey tee tour shirts from any of the above, denim jackets with studs and band buttons, some sort of bandana somewhere (around neck, knee, or wrist). In hindsight, there was a class thing going on there. Wearing the metal uniform pretty much meant all the middle class kids were going to call you a "rat."
I had a brief, dysfunctional crush situation with a metal girl. She'd sneered at the jazz thing, then scowled at the punk stuff. Either way, "your music is stupid," she'd tell me, sort of sticking her jaw out, but still always sitting next to me on the bus and still always wanting to argue about music. Dead Boys, she allowed, were kind of cool. She found Violent Femmes—which had ended up on another tape from my music advisor in American History—ridiculous. There was a period where she'd call the house but have no idea what she wanted to talk about, and she'd hang up.
But metal just never swayed me. I knew one guy who sort of "went metal" via Judas Priest, and that seemed to be an expression of him as a disturbed person. I knew a cluster of born-again kids who were constantly struggling to find metal acts that weren't doing the whole Satan-adjacent thing. I knew a few band kids who were into metal, but insisted it was because of the musical virtuosity of their preferred acts.
Metal came back up in the army. There were a lot of metal people in the barracks. Curiously, the metal people I knew in the army were some of the most emo, too. Like, they were the biggest misfits, the least casually sociopathic, and least likely to be violent. In my informal taxonomy of "sociopath," "Captain America," and "Lost Boy" enlistees, all the metal people I knew were firmly in the "Lost Boy" bucket. One of them was this sort of round-faced, apple-cheeked guy who had a special trucker hat/wig combination he used to look like a regular guy on the weekends, and he looooooved Metallica.
Then ... nothing. Post-army, when I worked in a high school in Virginia, there were no metal kids. The kind of working class kid I'd known when I was in high school who most definitely would have been into metal was going to be into rap. Period.
If you'd asked me up until maybe six years ago, I'd have told you metal was probably a museum genre. I guess I knew about black metal. Then I stumbled into the #headbangers channel on Slack at work, where a bunch of mild-mannered product managers and principal engineers were sharing videos and tour dates and observations. I utterly didn't get it, but it was very humanizing and also it taught me that there was still some sort of living, breathing metal scene. That led me to discover folk metal, which I kind of liked (one of the people in the #headbangers channel warned me to keep an eye out for Nazis in that subgenre); and it also led me to discover the symphonic black metal of Dimmu Borgir, which was sort of a jolt because they're both utterly consumed by what I guess I think of as a very pagan aversion to Christianity that marks black metal, but also proud to perform backed by full symphonies.
Me in high school? I would have laughed my ass off at that. Both the satanism part and the symphony part. As an adult? I sort of felt happy for them, because who the fuck doesn't wish they were an avenging warrior from the abyss and scourge of the Christian colonizers but also able to command philharmonic orchestras to headbang along with them?
But it didn't really stick. I just noted that metal didn't behave like I remembered, exactly, and got on with my day.
Maybe a month ago, for reasons I'm not clear on outside of "algorithms gonna algorithm" YouTube presented me with a clip from the metal talk show "Two Minutes to Late Night": It was someone named Gina Gleason from some band I'd never heard of called Baroness performing a cover of "Hot for Teacher" with some other band I'd never heard of called Mutoid Man.
I'd never really understood Van Halen in the metal pantheon in high school, because they had two video-friendly singles ("Panama" and "Hot for Teacher") that suggested a more winking, ironic camp than the "bit a head off a bat" pentagram-infused camp of some of the rest. I hadn't known enough about glam rock—I didn't really know anything about glam rock—to position anything in its tradition. Either way, Van Halen just seemed sort of loutish to me and I was pointedly not going to like it and that's the way it stayed as the band went into decline. I wish, in hindsight, I'd just let myself like "Hot for Teacher," at least, because it rips. When I told Al a few years ago that I'd been very showy in my aversion to it in high school she laughed at me: "That song rocks!"
And the Gina Gleason/Mutoid Man cover rocks. Partly because it just does, all on its own, and partly because of the performance itself. It's fun. They're having fun. The whole Two Minutes to Late Night thing is pretty fun and I'm sorry it isn't being produced anymore, because I'd have really looked forward to it as whatever passes for "appointment tv" in the streaming era.
The "Hot for Teacher" clip wasn't enough go get me to look into Baroness or Mutoid Man, but then I came across Two Minutes to Late Night Boston tribute, which is pretty fun but also very sincere. That made me dig into the many, many metal covers they did during lockdown, wherein bunches of people from metal acts did covers of all sorts of stuff from their bedrooms, kitchens, home studios, and living rooms. It's pretty inspiring. Maybe a little hit and miss—some just don't land as much—but the thing that struck me was how much they meet each song where it's at. When I was being turned to punk in high school I thought "Jerks on 45" was the kindest one should be to what came before. The Two Minutes to Late Night covers are generally respectful, with the occasional silliness (like the metal-screamed "Reelin' in the Years"), and pretty good. I wasn't sure what they were going to do with Kate Bush but it wasn't bad.
So after bingeing a bunch of those, I went back to the top of the dive and started watching Baroness clips. I guess they're considered "progressive" metal. Then Mutoid Man (sludge?) I don't think Baroness is going to stick quite as hard, but Mutoid Man's "Mutants" has gone into heavy rotation. I always thought I needed some sort of mostly-lyrics-free electronica to zone out, but it turns out whatever Mutoid Man is works really well for me, too.
That has led to letting Spotify lead me along through the genre, and I
am retracting my whole "museum genre" observation. Sort of a nice
discovery at this stage in life.