| Evis™ |
04-26-2004 05:05 PM |
Why Metal Owns You
Why Metal Owns You
I’m sick of hearing idiots bash metal, using the same tired arguments each time: “It’s just noise.” “You can’t understand what they’re saying.” “Man, that shit’s too crazy and evil for me.” Or even worse, equating metal with mallcore drivel (Evanescence, Linkin Park, Lacuna Coil) as if the two were equal. Enough is enough. This is why metal owns you:
Metal is the most experimental, stylistically diverse, and artistically honest genre of music on the face of the planet. Where more mainstream genres incessantly rehash lame, overused ideas and concepts to the point of nausea, metal is constantly innovating and evolving. Its subgenres can be seamlessly crossed with each other, and metal itself can be combined with nearly any other genre of music. Rock, punk, classical, jazz, hardcore, industrial, folk, electronica, ambient, even polka- all have, at some point, been incorporated successfully into metal.
Metal is more emotional than any mainstream music. Anger, fury, exultation, melancholy, fear, hatred, ecstasy, love, are all to be found in metal, with considerably more intensity than in, say, rock. Whereas a rock band might use a few strings or woodwinds to convey some ersatz emotion, many metal bands use full orchestras and choirs, with classical arrangements.
Metal musicians are much more talented than the majority of mainstream musicians. They usually play faster, tighter, and with more complexity than just about anything you could hear on the radio today. Jon Levasseur or Luca Turilli could outplay Hendrix or Page any day of the week. Mikael Åkerfeldt can single handedly sing better than anyone out on the radio or TV today. The song structures are more complex, and the lyrics are often beautiful, almost poetry. Compare this to the infantile three-chord banality of most modern rock, and the nauseating sameness and monotony of most country and rap. Metal wins every time.
Metal transcends cultures in a way mainstream music could never dream of. As of now, there are metal bands from North and South America, Europe, Australia, even Asia and Africa. The bands often incorporate elements of their local cultures and music into their sound… metal is the true “world music”.
In sum… Metal is beautiful, and majestic, and furious. It is wolves howling and thunder crashing. It is battlefields soaked crimson in the blood of the slain. It is demon-haunted northern forests. It is moonlit graveyards. It is an autumn dusk. It is the starry vastnesses of space. Almost all other forms of music are inferior.
METAL OWNS YOU.
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