Axe Fetish: Music Gear Worship And What It Means

Elitism in Metal: Sheep in Wolves' Clothing

Metal is almost impossible to define. Overdriven electric guitars, double-bass drumming and screamed or growled vocals might be decent starting points, but it's difficult to put your finger on the pulse of whatever it is that makes metal metal.

Still, you know it when you hear it. Metal is something you can almost smell. That's not to say that there aren't disagreements--plenty of venom has been spewed over whether or not Tool is a metal band, even dating back to the 90's. The same sort of thing has happened more recently with the success of Deafheaven's Sunbather, and a number of other American bands making music influenced by Norwegian second-wave black metal. While most would be willing to at least acknowledge these American bands as metal, there are large pockets of metal fandom that won't let you call them "black metal" without a fight.

But not every case of this is so grey. There are some bands--or even entire subgenres--that no one from the traditional metal scene either "accepts" as metal, or even acknowledges as worthy of the distinction of "art." The truth is that metalheads have a fairly notorious reputation for elitism, and even a cursory glance at the sorts of things posted on metal fan sites will give at least some weight to this stereotype.

I should probably confess that I'm no exception. As someone who holds Meshuggah's Destroy Erase Improve record in high regard, it's hard for me not to view the phenomenon of "djent" as much more than a bunch of scene-kids pissing in the pool.

But where exactly do these attitudes come from? Why are subgenres like "djent," "nu metal" and "deathcore" so abhorrent to the core metal fanbase (myself included)? They have all of the trappings of metal--screamed vocals, blast beats and so on. The musicians in these sorts of bands tend to have chops, too--nu metal notwithstanding.

I think that's just it. These bands are so offensive to traditional metalheads precisely because of these similarities--it's sort of like when you're a kid, and your friend shows you his holographic Charizard card. At first you're impressed or jealous, but then you look closer and notice it's one of those counterfeit cards from the dollar store.

It's hard to pick a single word to describe what these subgenres are missing to the orthodox metalhead, but I'm going to go with spirit. These bands look like metal, they more or less sound like metal, but somehow it all seems like sleight of hand. It's not real magic, it's just a bunch of sneaky card-switching tricks. Most metalheads would likely pinpoint spacer earrings as a significant red flag, but probably couldn't explain why.

I guess it's similar to why punks don't like Green Day or blink-182--the plastic version of punk that you can show your friends who don't like punk. Despite their mutual categorization as "punk," I don't think Black Flag and Green Day have much fan base crossover. By the same token, I would hazard to guess that Slayer, Burzum and Morbid Angel have a hell of a lot more crossover appeal with each other than they do with TesseracT, Korn or Bring Me The Horizon--despite all falling under the "metal" umbrella, technically speaking.

Fan base crossover may seem irrelevant, but I really don't think it is. Although this may be more true for my generation than the one coming up, we tend to define ourselves to a large degree by the music we listen to. That's why we wear band shirts. We might like to think we do it to support the artists, but I think it's more a matter of showing everyone you come into contact with what team you're on. If you see someone wearing the shirt of a not-that-famous band that you like, you probably feel some compulsion to go talk to that person. We're walking billboards, whether we admit it to ourselves or not.

So when "djent," "nu metal" or "deathcore" start to spill over into the mainstream, and people with no prior exposure to metal start to think that that's what metal is, it's kind of... well, annoying. And the more this happens, the more you get people who want to make that kind of music, who have no particular interest in what we would traditionally call "metal."

I have my suspicions as to how this happens. I think the evolution of a music scene tends to follow a predictable pattern: a band does something innovative and a movement begins around them. This group of bands then influences young musicians, who form the next generation of this subgenre, perhaps the better part of a decade later. Rinse, repeat. As this keeps happening, eventually a generation of bands comes along that hasn't even heard of any of the bands in the original movement. Over time, the subgenres split and fracture until you can barely tell that they have common roots. That's how we get from Elvis to Cannibal Corpse. I would hazard to guess that we're at the point when the majority of "djent" bands are influenced more by Periphery than they are by Meshuggah.

The end result is that if you're a metalhead, it sort of feels like false advertising. You're getting margarine when you asked for butter, or stevia when you asked for sugar. It's sort of like a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing thing, but really it's the other way around--fangs and claws on the outside, lamb chops on the inside. In the 90's we would have called them poseurs, but I don't think that's fair.

I think the truth is that they're just doing something different, and that it isn't metal. And that's totally fine. But it's kind of annoying when you tell someone you like metal and they assume you mean that stuff. That's why I said that what these subgenres are missing is the "spirit" of metal. The wolf costume may be fashioned from metallic fur, but the lamb on the inside probably grew up listening to emo music.

Which is also totally fine. I had an Alexisonfire phase in high school myself. But the "spirit" of a type of music would seem to me to be a hell of a lot more important than superficial features like what instruments you use, or what techniques you use on those instruments. It sort of begs the question of why we use labels like these in first place. I guess we should just, you know, listen to the music.

Note: this article originally appeared on Ultimate Guitar February 13, 2017: https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/community_feed/elitism_in_metal_wolf_in_sheeps_clothing.html