Guest Blog: Confessions of a metal elitist!

This week the inmates are running the asylum. You'll remember I challenged people to Right This Blog! With that in mind welcome: SPARTACUS

It's safe to say everyone has their idealised path to musical enlightenment.  Listening to the old man's The Wall vinyl while reclining on an orange and brown pleather couch while marijuana drifts past from an older brother's Escort in the driveway.  Stevie Nicks eulogising on Rumours as mum cooks spuds to go with their bangers on a weekday arvo.  Perhaps you're the Kiwi that apparently first listened to Black Sabbath while bouncing around on a trampoline with your pre-teen crush? 

I say that's bulls**t. Don't believe you for one second.  You heard this stuff and probably didn't even like it the first time around.  I'd say whatever it was would have been a pretty pedestrian experience at the time and The Beatles would have bored the hell out of you.  I bet the only Zepp record you heard for 10 years was Presence or HOTH or something lame like that, and only got I and II way later.

Face it, you were listening to Celine Dion or Cliff Richard on your way to church on Sunday morning, not Kashmir while getting on the turps hours past your parental imposed curfew.

However, no matter what genre you were listening to at the time, your musical consumption fantasies and associated levels of band elitism are simply no match for metal. 

Most metal fans would have you believe their first metal experience was Slayer's Reign in Blood in '89 after their friend stole it from a now closed-down record store in the Hutt, got hit by a bus running out the store and then they subsequently prised the tape from the freshly mangled hands of their former mate to play the blood-drenched cassette under a full moon later that night.  Nope, if you're 20-30, as a metal fan you most likely got your intro to the metal genre through nu-metal, which, let's face it, was as mainstream as metal has ever been. 

Some will whine, "b-b-but I listen to Mastodon and Trivium or Lightning Bolt and Mr Bungle!"  I know the truth.  They're not metal, they're irony dressed up like metal for the sole purpose of hipster, I-listen-to-all-sorts credibility.  A generation of metal fans cut their teeth on nu-metal and I won't hear otherwise.

Just as grunge blew hair metal out of the water with its earnest angst, minimal arrangements and working class fashion sense, nu-metal stomped the old-skool of metal flat.  Thrash wasn't aided by the fact that Slayer and Megadeth were stuck in a rut, or that Metallica's slide on to black ice left us with 'the Black Album' and then Load and Re-Load.  Even Carcass went the way of nu-metal after their opus, Heartwork (still my favourite metal album of all time). 

Sure, if you lived in Gothenburg you could get your fix of Swedish Death Metal or join in a church burning, but in language you'll understand: yeah, nah...You bought Korn's self-titled, were rocking a Starter cap and Blind was the heaviest thing on the planet.   And don't make me bring up Pantera's pre-Cowboys... albums, DON'T MAKE ME DO IT.

Some say Faith No More kicked off nu-metal with Angel Dust, however I disagree.  I think the first blueprint I heard was Bleach by Nirvana. Meantime by Helmet, Frizzle Fry by Primus, Burn My Eyes by Machinehead and the much loved self-titled Rage Against The Machine then laid the foundations for nu-metal's rise to power. 

Although I didn't like it at the time, much credit has to be given to Korn's self-titled album and its first three tracks.  A bass heavy sound, down tuned gats and heavy post-production with a vocal style that relied less on screaming and more on wailing and yowling about some serious personal angst.  Gone were the anthems to chopping up hookers or killing Nazis.  Some may mourn those days; I wasn't fussed.  I didn't know what a hooker was and thought concentration camp sounded like a fun two weeks.

It helped that the grunge took a bullet in '94, blending into all sorts of alternative rock and the rise of mid-nineties g-funk and gangster rap was liberalising profanity and bad attitudes.  So by the time the second half of the nineties rolled around, nu-metal was there to jump on the cultural shift.  Tool and Marilyn Manson were on hand to spread notoriety and push the limits of the genre in '96 with Aenima and Antichrist Superstar respectively, while so many others were happy to assist in the bastardisation of death metal with turntables, samplers and emo-attitudes in hand.

Korn's third album and arguably the zeitgeist of '97-2000 then turned up, being Follow the Leader.  Featuring their biggest crossover hit, Got the Life and a mix of their heaviest work and a collaboration with Ice Cube, Follow the Leader blew nu-metal up big time and solidified the hip-hop influence.  Roadrunner had by this time long ditched its Floridian and European metal stable and was signing up anything with dreads or a backwards baseball cap.  Max Cavalera's last Sepultura outing, Roots, was obvious Korn worship.  Numerous nu-metal bands were shifting big quantities, with Coal Chamber, Soulfly, Deftones, 311 and System of a Down all racking up around a million copies of their debuts. 

These records may sound quite different from each other, but they all feature similar tuning and groove oriented riffs combined with non-traditional vocals, beats and production.  Most people were inflicted upon from here on in by Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and Slipknot's subsequent records as well as a horde of similar bands.

Like other journeys of discovery, I needed a gateway drug to lead me astray, and to nu-metal I extend that gratitude. 

Hi, I am Spartacus, and I'm addicted to heavy metal riffs.

I was involuntarily cured, however, sometime in 2000-01 while watching an episode of The Sopranos.  Young AJ, roughly the same age as me, had the exact same Soulfly and Manson posters on the wall as I did.  It was a watershed moment, and slightly disturbed about the similarities between myself and a TV character, I promptly moved backwards in time to collect the dirtiest riffs I could find and moved on to blacker and more gore-drenched pastures. 

Since the early 2000s metal has come full circle with plenty of new up and coming grind and thrash bands.  However, I still break out the odd nu-metal album now and again.  Gotta pump some weights?  Primitive.  Mum just bag on you for dumping your latest GF?  Around the Fur.  Raged at the destruction of Brazilian rainforests?  Roots.  

Or you could skip these, go straight to Reign in Blood and collect your 200 metal points.

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