Recently I have been forced to upgrade my current music player software (Zune) and although the new software is slightly more stable, I have been less than enthusiastic about it. I recently went to their “marketplace” to check out their selection of metal and was not very surprised that I had to go through the Rock genre to even see metal as an option. If I wanted I could have chosen Dancehall, world or Spoken word two much more well known genres but I guess people just assume that anything with a electric guitar can be classified under the same thing. This kind of pissed me off from the start. I know most places view metal as rock’s bastard child with some guy named Beelzebub, but seriously have we not differentiated ourselves at all from Kelly Clarkson (who was labeled under rock)?

Next I went to the metal sub-genre, and not that I was surprised, but the top ten artists were in this order: Papa Roach, Linkin Park, Nickelback, Korn, Sublime, Queen, Blink-182, Static X, Green Day, And Disturbed. Seriously. Blink 182? Metal.?  What the hell is up with our popular culture? I mean I don’t want metal to be the “in” thing, because if it was I probably wouldn’t like it, but I don’t want people to automatically think that I listen to Blink 182 or Papa roach when i tell them I listen to metal.

What can we as metal heads do to differentiate ourselves? Do we have to kill Papa Roach and Linkin Park and send their bodies to the popular media with notes saying “Real Metal doesn’t give out free maxi pads with concert tickets”? I don’t know, but Fuck… I honestly think this is where black metal came from. People that didn’t want to be associated at all with those soft-rock pussies.

Giles

This got made me curious to see how iTunes handles the same thing. Whenever I go to iTunes. I have never just searched by genre before. At first it was the same thing; I had to go to “Rock”, which brought up some decent names on the page. I don’t know if this is because of the iTunes Genius that looks through my library and kind of matches up similar music or if it’s just like that. Of course there were some of the cock-rock names there too and the top 10 was a rock top ten. I figured I’d just do an outright search of “Heavy Metal”. This brought up quite a bit of relevant artists, but it also brought up a bunch of hair metal bands from the 80’s. Just about everything was called heavy metal back in the 80’s to include Bon Jovi, Poison, Warrant, etc.. Sometimes when I tell people that I listen to metal music they say something like, “Oh, like Poison, Kiss, Guns N Roses?” and I’m forced to give a simple, yet almost snobby “NO!” Most metal fans of today that grew up in that era of metal would like to forget those bands or at least not have them lumped in with the real metal bands. I’d prefer to call them glam rock or whatever, just not metal. I almost prefer it when people think of metal in the totally Satanic and gory way as opposed to glam and cock rock.

So I can feel your pain Giles. I wouldn’t want people to think that Blink 182 is metal any more than the old school punks want Blink 182 lumped in with the “punk” genre. Papa Roach claims they are heavy metal and even said that their new album is their heaviest yet but the new single is as usual, very catchy like an after school special song. I imagine the rest of the album blows too. Some places know the relevance of separating metal from rock just as much as it’s important to separate R&B from Hip Hop. They don’t always get it right but at least they try. What I think the issue is with the sub-genre thing is that media outlets like iTunes and Zune probably never thought about separating them in the first place and if they had to do it now it would take a lot of time to do so.

Metal will always be the bastard child of the music genre and when it has those little spikes where it gets popular for the moment, there will be bands that want to jump on the wagon and ride it until it’s wheels fall off. It just shows how out of touch the corporate media is with heavy metal. It’s also sad that some bands consider themselves metal.

By the way…the killing Papa Roach and Linkin Park thing? Not a bad idea.

(Image: Zune Logo)

Post from: Metal Martyr