Every year or so I give a listen to some of those bands from the past, the ones that you’ve grown out of and you associate with specific moments of your life. Often these bands are so questionable that you can hardly justify having listened to them in the first place. Nothing falls more squarely into that last category than metal bands.

Heavy Metal was more or less responsible for turning me into a music listener. It’s what got me to pay attention to music as a phenomenon. Nowadays, though, I find it to be the complete opposite of almost everything I look for in music, and generally offensive to my sensibilities. I must have changed immensely from those days, though it doesn’t really seem like it. I have a certain affection towards the music and the subculture, but I can’t help but look at it with a critical eye.

Though I didn’t listen to metal that long, I saw enough to feel comfortable making some general observations.

There’s a sense in the metal community that their music is not merely great, but that it is greater than all other forms of music. It’s common for metal fans to only listen to metal, perhaps with some proto-metal classic rock bands thrown in the mix. Among metal fans who I interacted with, the question of whether the metal genre was enough for a listener was treated genuinely, and there really was an attitude that nothing else was worth listening to. It makes sense, if you think about it. It’s an outsider’s genre, and not exactly a ‘cool’ one; you have to convince yourself that its community is self-sufficient, that much like the world might not need you, you don’t need the world.

Metal becomes a very confrontational genre, because people are defining themselves by it, and in opposition to “decent society” or “the establishment” and whatnot. During the early 90s metal, glam, and all other excessive 80s genres were shunned in favor of alternative rock and its variants, and everything that metal represented was treated as a joke for a very long time (famously, metal’s most popular mainstream representative, Metallica, ditched the whole aesthetic and reappeared as a hard rock band). Metal fans unsurprisingly ditched the mainstream too.

One of the ways the whole superiority thing manifested itself is in what I guess you could call the quantification of music. The explanation for why metal was so much better often became a numbers game; “the most is the best”. Metal guitarists are the best because they can hit the most notes per second, metal drummers are the best because they can hit more parts of their drumkit per second than anyone else, metal vocalists are the best because they can hit the highest notes for the longest time, and so forth. Comically enough, it’s also applied to lyrics: metal lyrics become the best because they use the longest words. What you end up with is a lyric sheet full of empty nonsense, unbearably tiresome songs that serve as little more than a showcase of technical prowess, and incredibly repetitive music, because there’s only so many ways you can be a fast drummer. The whole thing can verge on the autistic, especially when you see people counting the amount of riffs on a record to prove how good it is.

If you look at this music this way, everyone else must be some sort of idiot in your eyes. When a guitar magazine publishes a “Best Guitarists Of The Decade!” list, you can scoff at Kurt Cobain being #3 (nowadays it’s probably Jack White, but at the time it was good ‘ole Kurt), because c’mon, how is he the best? Can he play Ywngie’s solos? You’re damn right he can’t. People who listen to mainstream music are people who can’t handle ‘complexity’, and metal’s complexity makes it be as good as classical music (classical music is one of the only genres that metal fans don’t regularly disparage). You can also use this metric to rehabilite trashy rock from the 80s that no one likes anymore (terrible glam bands, for example) because their solos were superior to Nirvana’s.

This all appealed to me, I suppose, because of some sense of superiority that I had, which this subculture just fueled and fueled. It was that time when you’re starting to discover anti-establishment tendencies and no one else seems to, and you feel like you’re onto something. I was questioning my own religious beliefs at the time, and a bunch of yelling about Satan seemed oddly fitting. Metal’s pretty anti-everything in that way, and lyrically it has the same focus, but is criticizing something far larger and more important.

I’m willing to concede that point to metal: it’s lyrical focus isn’t (or at least wasn’t) that bad. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s heart is in the right place, but I’ll say there’s worse places it could have been at. It’s too mythical, though. It’s not criticizing religion as a force in the world, but as some Middle Ages empire that must be defeated (preferably by dragons). It’s not criticizing politics as they are in the world, but as some new world order thing that’s utterly irrelevant to anything. I’m not trying to suggest that being literal is being right; I’m a big fan of Bob Dylan, who was hardly a realist. The thing is, if you listen to a Bob Dylan song, say, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, it’s not literal, but you can associate it to real life concerns. You can’t really do that with a song about the keeper of the seven keys or the warlock. It’s too far gone.

Put this way, it might sound as if metal is completely unredeemable. It has its moments, though. When technical skill is used in service of a good composition, it can be impressive and emotional. The speed and aggressiveness in metal aren’t really for everyone, and I’m not sure they’re sustainable for most people (it’s habitual for teenagers who listen to metal to eventually ‘mellow out’ and move to softer versions, or drop it altogether). When you’re a hormonal teenager, though, it might just be the only thing that’s crazy enough. And though I might not appreciate the qualities that make metal… well, metal, encountering those qualities was what made me think hard about what exactly was there in a song, why I liked something, what I could reasonably consider “impressive” and what I could consider “half-assed”.

I can probably point to the metal band Opeth as planting the seeds of my current musical curiosity, and eventually lead me away from metal completely. I started listening to them as they ‘broke through’, and there were a lot of mixed opinions towards them from metal fans. The band took elements from death metal (growling vocals) and some general ideas like guitar tones, but were not traditionally “metal”, the music was moodier, the instrumentation was restrained and very conventionally ‘melodic’, and they had folkish interludes and clean vocals that didn’t sound at all like the folk that metal bands usually favor. Lots of people disliked them, though, because they were “not metal”, did not have metal riffs, and were just too much of a crossover band. I loved them, though, and after that I started catching onto that ‘crazy’ idea that maybe you couldn’t measure emotion by the amount of notes in a solo.

That attitude towards the band was hardly unique. In the past few years (by which point I wasn’t really listening to metal anymore, but was familiar with the communities), metal has become more acceptable to mainstream tastes and some bands have come out to some acceptance. Within metal communities, though, they’re often looked down as impostors or poseurs, who must be trying to make a mockery out of honest metalheads. And that’s an issue that people who listen to metal are notoriously sensitive about, and I guess it’s one of the things that I find hard to accept about the whole subculture: there’s not much of a sense of humor. Sure, bands can write ‘funny’ songs every once in a while, but the idea that someone wouldn’t take metal seriously, that they’d listen to it for camp value or because they find it a bit ridiculous, can be taken as an insult.

I find that hard to accept that now, but during 2001-2002, these bands were serious business to me. The idea that this whole thing was completely ridiculous and often insane just didn’t really come to me, even as I understood (perhaps subconsciously) that the aesthetics and philosophy behind this subculture were absurd and that imitating them would be laughable (thankfully I never really adopted metal aesthetics in terms of personal presentation). Even as metal genres become more and more a parody of themselves, the attitude barely changes.

I hardly listen to metal these days, especially if it’s not a record I used to listen to. People get upset when music is referred to as being “all the same”, but a lot of metal is truly the same. There’s a lot of obsession regarding genres and sub-genres and styles and revivals, and bands are “old school Florida death metal” and “revival Bay Area thrash” and how in God’s name do you expect anything to sound fresh when you can’t leave the confines of some scene that existed for six months during the eighties? This isn’t really unique to metal, but metal’s where I’ve seen it more closely.

Besides sounding like the same old thing, I guess a real problem I have with metal is that it’s not enough for whatever range of emotions I currently have, if it’s anything at all. I can’t really think of many situations where I could realistically say “This song by Goatwhore really speaks to me right now, really gets to my soul about the stuff I’m going through”. It’s just not really very likely. This isn’t really a lifestyle change; there was never a point in my life during which songs about witches, dragons, or the underappreciated pagan lifestyle really spoke to me. The change is in what I seek from music.

These days, what I’m looking for in a song is a line or two that I can relate to, a line that seems like it has something to do with the experience of being me. There’s really no chance for that line to be “sadistic, surgeon of demise / sadist of the noblest blood”.