Metalhead?
Brought To You By Metal Month II
When I was little, back in the early eighties, heavy metal was the awesome Iron Maiden, Scorpions and Judas Priest posters that were plastered all over the walls of the bedroom that my older cousins shared in my grandmother's basement. I was so intrigued by the artwork—that creepy skinless monster with the Devil on puppet strings, the guy in the straightjacket with the forks tearing his eyeballs out, that gleaming robot eagle swooping in for the kill—and I just knew that all these bands must scary and cool and like nothing I had ever heard before. But once I heard them, I was disappointed. They just seemed like regular music, nothing at all like what their artwork suggested, and I think I decided at that early age that I just would never be a metalhead.
When I was a little older, in the late eighties, heavy metal was the Anthrax, S.O.D. and Metallica played on a boombox at the back of the school bus by the older juvenile delinquents who lived around the corner from me. These were the kids who rode around on dirt bikes, shot small animals with BB guns and harassed younger kids like me. Now
this music sounded tougher and edgier. I liked it and I liked the atmosphere it gave the bus ride, but I didn't really listen to it outside of that environment. Somehow I didn't want the music of those jerky kids sharing space in my tape deck with my Pink Floyd and REM tapes.
Within the next two years I had made some new friends, friends who decidedly were metalheads. We used to hang out at my buddy Jon's wasteland home—a house with no furniture, with plywood floors where the carpets had been torn up, with peeling paint and an overgrown lawn full of trash, with a sink piled high with dirty dishes, with his psychotic mother perpetually locked in her bedroom, and with a group of us sitting on the floor in the basement blasting the likes of Sacred Reich, Slayer, Death and Obituary on a surprisingly nice stereo. I loved this music like I loved my friends, but somehow it stayed in that dysfunctional place. The only thing I really had in common with my friends musically was Faith No More. Otherwise, they teased me because I listened to stuff like Bob Mould, Siouxsie & the Banshees, They Might Be Giants and Love & Rockets, but hey, that worked for me. I was a misfit among misfits, but not a metalhead.
By the time I got to high school, I had started to get into more loud music, but by and large it wasn't metal. I liked hardcore and punk and especially industrial—I had become a rabid fan of Wax Trax! Records. A lot of the stuff that got lumped in with industrial—bands like Godflesh, Ministry and KMFDM—overlapped substantially with metal territory, but at this point I had started to look down on metal a bit, thinking that it was all a little cheesy and dated. The funny thing is, toward the end of high school, I found myself recruited by some guys I knew to be the singer for their metal band. This was the first band I was ever in and we were all kind of pulling in different directions, but it was a great experience that I think somewhat renewed my appreciation for metal, though, despite actually being in a metal band, I would never have called myself a metalhead.
In college, I got into a lot of different things: bebop, swing, acid jazz, trip hop, post rock, post punk, rock en español, bluegrass, zydeco, surf rock, IDM, African pop… you name it really. The biggest change and influence on me was definitely the jazz though. It was a kind of music I really didn't listen to at all growing up but a sliver of exposure to it on a school retreat to a rocky Maine island hooked me forever. Meanwhile, I had these two roommates in a row, Eric and Zach, who I shared a variety of music tastes with as well as a sort of humorous appreciation for all things "satanic". Hanging out with these two inspired me to go back and revisit some of that thrash and death metal that my friends had been into in junior high. This is when I started buying albums by Motörhead, Metallica, Sacred Reich, Slayer and Death in larger quantities, as well as more recent metal like Sepultura and Korn. I loved to dabble in all of this stuff, but nevertheless, I was still no metalhead.
Throughout my twenties my taste kept expanding in all kinds of directions. I got into more metal, but then I got into more of a lot of things—hip hop, krautrock, indie rock, afrobeat, experimental and free jazz, grime, tango, flamenco, samba, vintage electronica, country, and so on and so forth. After all this time I had amassed a pretty huge CD collection and in the spring of 2005 my girlfriend, who is now my wife, bought me my first MP3 player. So suddenly I had a massive amount of music I had to convert. I tried to do this as systematically as possible, but my computer had very little memory and as a result everything had to be ripped then stored on CD. Doing this, it seemed to me that the best way to organize was by genre, and so I did, creating huge stacks of CDs throughout my living room corresponding to different genres. The funny thing was, despite my assumptions to the contrary, the metal stack was by far the biggest, so large in fact that it had to be split up into multiple piles. Suddenly I, the guy who never really considered himself a metalhead, had to face the inescapable truth that not only was I a metalhead, I was a pretty huge metalhead.