Enjoying certain bands, especially while being a metalhead, can be a little sketchy when you aren't surrounded by very positive and open-minded people. For example, talking about how much you love Avenged Sevenfold to a neckbeard who owns two boxes of late '80s black metal and death metal demo tapes and thinks that Master of Puppets deserves a zero out of ten compared to Holy Terror's Terror and Submission could earn you a heavy wooden speaker to the head (because a "trve" hesher doesn't use no particle board lightweights.) Avenged Sevenfold, Poison, Disturbed, KoRn, and Ratt are all bands that may earn you a blunt, heavy projectile to your noggin and fit the "guilty pleasure" description in the metal world. They are bands that are considered by-and-large to "suck" and you simply aren't "trve" if you really enjoy their music. But honestly, are there really such things as "guilty pleasures" in music to begin with?
One mistake that many music fans-especially metal fans-make is viewing music objectively. I'm sorry to inform you, but music is art and it is absolutely pointless to create an objective viewpoint about it, meaning to say what is objectively good and what is objectively bad all across the board as if everyone should hold the same view. It's not that way at all. While most metalheads will agree that Limp Bizkit makes music that equates to a pile of cow chips, that's still not enough to objectively declare that Limp is a terrible band as much as we'd like to see otherwise, after all, millions of people bought and liked their records, are they "wrong"? No, they aren't. And it shows itself the other way around; just because most fans love a particular band or album doesn't make it objectively good. You know Master of Puppets that I briefly mentioned earlier? That album is arguably the greatest meal album of all time, but just go on metal-archives.com or any internet post about Metallica and you'll see hordes of tightwads slinging shit about how the album is either A.) terribly overrated or B.) terribly terrible. This is music. This is art. No one is right, and no one is wrong.
Overall, since music is objective, if you like a song or band or album or whatever else related to music and recorded sound and you derive some enjoyment from it even though the majority of people say otherwise, it's not really a guilty pleasure. And remember, you absolutely DO NOT have to prove your taste to your peers, and if you feel like you need to, you're totally and completely looking at music the wrong way. Like Metalhead Jesus said about the heavy metal genre in particular: "Being a metalhead is not about liking some bands while shunning others. Being a metalhead is about loving metal." And this applies to all music. So, listen to Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift all you like, keep it away from me, but have no shame in liking those two pop stars. And if you see musical taste as a superiority war against others, you should probably just, y'know, stop listening to music entirely.
If you want to have a candy bar with your steak, it's not going to burn a hole in your intestines... I guess unless you're allergic to candy bars, then you're screwed. But admitting to a particular taste in music, let alone comfortably listening to that guilty pleasure, isn't going to rewire you're synapsises to become less of a metal head. Get some tattoos and go through a weight training course, join the military and become a warrior if you wanna be an elitist metalhead. Show for yourself with lifestyle, not a cropped and filtered music persona.
ReplyDeleteI agree. People who only like underground metal who make fun of kids who listen to Slipknot and Disturbed are not "elite" whatsoever, they're just jerks. Like you said, show it through your lifestyle. I think MORE people should listen to metal, but if we have a bunch of elite pricks saying to newcommers; "Oh, you only listen to Black Veil Brides? Fuck off poser." then that's going to do the opposite of attracting new people into the genre.
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