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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Today's young metalheads wallow in self-pity and sound like Limp Bizkit. These kids don't need rock -- they need Paxil.
Apr 5, 2001 | Keith Metzger.
Even at 16, the guy looked like middle management at Radio Shack. His hair was pederast red, his skin was albino white and punctuating the two was every nerd's special project: My First Mustache. Keith, with whom I shared third period art class, was a very nice guy, but he was also the kind of guy who might have been too nice. He might have married the first girl he slept with. He might have taken the fall for getting caught with a sheet of acid in college. But all this niceness, this middle-class low expectation, is tempered by one thing in my remembrance of him:
Keith Metzger was a full-on metalhead.
A hesher. A dude. A burnout. And he was the first smart metalhead I ever met. He was the first among us to eschew the brainy Rush for being something not very metal at all, and also the first to embrace the signpost of grunge in Soundgarden. (This was in the very late 1980s.) And even still, even after he had started to notice girls -- or, scratch that, notice something and turn ambiguously sexual -- he still loved Iron Maiden. At the end of each school day, like some weird Mister Rogers in reverse, he would hang up the jacket and tie our school required and put on his oversize acid-washed denim jacket, meticulously arranged with buttons of his favorite bands, and emblazoned on the back with a lurid, full-size patch of a Maiden album cover.
We let him run with it. Most of us in third period art, by then having moved on to more adult tastes in postmodern sensations like the Smiths or the Inspiral Carpets, secretly thought Keith's obsessions were beneath him -- kid stuff. But we also knew that there was no rule that said he couldn't indulge, either. One of the things the Jesuits tried to hammer into our heads day after day was tolerance, and in this rare instance of teenage civility, we practiced what they preached. He was not punched in the nuts; he was not Maced with shaving cream.
Thinking back on it now, I finally see what Keith saw in metal, what it had to offer him: drama and escape, the promise of unreality, of black-and-white good and evil and all the simplicity of human motivation that childhood seems to promise and never delivers. There were true bombast and emotion in the metal Keith listened to, his Walkman blaring it as he set up lighting rigs for the school's upcoming production of "Brigadoon." Keith's metal was of the Dennis DeYoung Styx variety -- a little Dungeons & Dragons, a little glam rock and also a little ... Fosse. He wanted what everyone wanted out of music back then: escape from the mundane fates he secretly knew would one day befall each and every one of us.
And, yes, back then, in the late '80s, metal was strictly for nerds or trash, and often did the twain meet, and to paraphrase Spinal Tap, oh, how they danced. This was before nü metal, before the mooks took over with a thunderous cry of "Nerds!!!" and threw the Keith Metzgers of the world, the Dave Mustaines, the Rush fans out of the game, against the wall and into the nearest Creed or Matchbox 20 show.
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Since its inception, metal has maintained an uncomfortable coexistence of mooks and nerds. Even way back in the early '70s, when rock critic Lester Bangs coined the term to describe bands like Black Sabbath, there had always been an audience overlap between people who liked scumbag bands because they themselves were scumbags and people who liked scumbag bands because they offered the same comic-book elements of fantasy and escape that prog-rock bands like Yes did. Basically, if you were a white male disenchanted -- or, conversely, enchanted but didn't want to figure out why -- with the pansification of rock, with glam-era David Bowie on one end of the spectrum and sweet baby James Taylor on the other, metal had lots to offer.
As the '70s morphed into the '80s, though, metal eventually embraced a sort of sublimated pansy element to its pantheon of disguise, and this is what we called the era of the hair band. Hair bands -- the most notorious of which were Ratt and Poison and, the big daddy of them all, Guns N' Roses -- copped a look and sound from glam, but swore the makeup was only there because it got them more pussy. True metalheads saw right through this, though, and this is where the metal underground started in earnest, giving way to the atomic splits and microgenre branding that now characterizes almost every form of popular (and nonpopular) music today.
Death metal. Speed metal. Christian metal. All of these, each one a punk rock unto itself, were formed in reaction against something that was going on in the broader pop world of metal proper during the '80s. And with the push-and-pull broadening of metal's horizons, other elements were brought into the mix: punk, post-punk, hip-hop, goth, industrial and so on. All of this got to the point where, if you wanted to speak to the metal masses, if you wanted to make true metal for the people, your language had to speak to all these factions.
The first results of this was a band like Metallica, who worked their way from indie obscurity to become both the thinking man's metal band and music to date-rape and burn stuff to. It's easy to forget now, what with drummer Lars Ulrich turning himself into the ultimate cyber-narc with his cred-stripping Napster debacle, but Metallica really are the U2 of metal; they've seen it all, done it all and probably ruined themselves twice. Remove Metallica another rock generation or two, add the "renaissance metal" feel that was the rhetoric of grunge and you've got the first wave of nü metal: Rage Against the Machine, Korn, Limp Bizkit.
