For the third time now I have gone from looking like this:
to this:
Every time I've done it, I cause everyone around me to ask "why?", and every time I've done it I end up choosing to grow it out to its old length. A year and a half later and, boom! I'm a metalhead again. But this time I'm going to consider keeping my head well shorn, maybe forever. For so long it has been part of my heavy metal identity to sport this look, but recently I've been finding myself drifting away from this identity altogether.
Am I saying that I'm no longer listening to metal like I once did? Not at all. Heavy metal in all of its screaming, heavily distorted glory is still my favorite music and it connects with me on an emotional level that most other styles of music haven't touched. Coming from a background of being bullied, laughed at and not fitting in, heavy metal was the single thing that made sense to me and brought me face to face with all of the negative emotions that were festering inside me during that time. I'm not going to be one of those people who have said that metal "made everything better" because it didn't. I was still miserable and I wallowed in depression, always feeling like there was a little concentrated ball of anger and negativity shaking violently and ready to explode inside of me. Metal was a silent friend for me. It didn't offer any solutions (at least in my eyes) but it was always there when I wanted it to be. In that sense, it was like a drug as well in that it eased the pain a little but never made my problems go away in their entirety, or even partially. But heavy metal didn't only give me a coping mechanism, it gave me an identity, thus, my hair grew long like on the heads of all of my favorite metal musicians. Other types of music like hip-hop never did this for me, but that's the thing: I've been listening to more hip-hop than metal lately.
Yes, it's true! For example, I'm actually listening to Talib Kweli as I'm typing this, not Judas Priest or anything remotely "metallic". While metal will always be a huge part of my internal makeup, it's becoming less and less central to it. Jazz, alternative, electronica, and most recently, hip-hop, have been seeping in to my CD collection over the last few years and have been taking up a huge part of my listening time. Looking at my current music collection, it contains much more metal than any other genre, but all the other genres combined far outweigh metal, and I'm even enjoying some of this other music more than anything in the metal end of my collection (Radiohead, for example.) With so many other colors and flavors permeating over my previously black and bitter musical palette, it's hard to identify strictly as a metalhead anymore.
My previously long, Christ-like tresses were keeping me back in a time where I wanted to stand out in a way that said "fuck all of you, leave me alone" supplemented by lots of black, scary looking t-shirts. I'm slowly distancing myself from that side of me and turning into a more confident, positive person, as well as a person who no longer bases his image around one style. So I cut the hair, which was my personal first step in rechristening myself not into a hip-hopper, a raver, or a jazzer, but into my own person who is made up of all types of music. Plus, it's more metal to not give a fuck about how society thinks we should look. Maybe I'll blast some Morbid Angel after posting this. Or maybe chill with some Portishead? These days, anything's possible.
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