Heavy Metal

Any young man can recall the phase just after puberty when he enjoys maximum energy with the added benefit of reckless invincibility. This is a confusing and frustrating time as generations of young men at the peak of their handball careers are relocated to schoolyards considered more appropriate for their lunchtime. With fair and foul creatures known as women added to the mix, boys are left with precious few options. They can either take up rugby to release the anxiousness; start pot-smoking early to dissolve it; or do the sensible thing and discover heavy metal.

Even your now shredded author can remember the time when Queen Greatest Hits and the Lion King soundtrack just didn’t cut it anymore. The day came when a friend saw that frustrated, white, middle-class, virgin Catholic boy devouring himself from within and bought him a ticket to Slayer at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. Clearly unprepared for the ‘baptism of fire’, as he called it, I showed up to his house in my never-fail RipCurl shirt and beige cargo pants. Outraged, he forced me to change into a borrowed pair of black jeans faster than you can say hacksaw decapitation.

Those black jeans may well have saved my life that night. Each guitarist had twenty speaker cabinets a piece, the drummer had a kit so large he could hardly be seen and the singer was the kind of guy that you pray your daughter will never bring home. After the gig, we roamed the streets with a legion of leather-cloaked warlocks and penis-pierced skinheads in search of blood flavoured Slurpees and polite conversation with passers-by. This was indeed a baptism, and many a new metalhead is forged in the distorted flames of that first, memorable concert. 

What we love most about metal? Clearly the accessories.

Becoming a metal fan brought on a sense of solidarity foreign to other styles of music. To those consigned to the befouled excrement of commercial radio, metal is a malformed copulation of loud, thrashing garbage. To those with a musical education, metal is a discordant butchering of the beautiful potential of our auditory abilities. For the metal fan (or chef) however, a measured dose of gloom and doom makes the sun shinier and, unlike IT professionals who can wear whatever they like to the office, provides a Superman-esque metamorphosis for the weekend.

Although one cannot spell metalhead without ‘meathead’, studies have shown a good dose of distortion is the brain food of the intelligent. Those who have witnessed a moshpit of death metal fans embracing the dismemberment of infants might question their collective brainpower, but this beast has embraced contradiction for more than thirty years. From the straightforward to the technical, the transcendent to the absurd, heavy metal music is a unique genus that celebrates a wondrous diversity of sub-genres* without abandoning its core principles of being loud, powerful and rightly critical of fucking emos.

Whether your poison is Black, Glam, Death, Thrash, Doom, Stoner, Metalcore, Prog-Tech or Viking Symphonic – metal maintains to reinvent itself out of the cesspool of ever-homogenous pop music.** Metal can unite the skinny, the fat and the marginalised under a single banner of destruction; it allows men to feel comfortable in tight leather and spikes without being branded homosexual; it provides an opportunity to beat the living crud out of your fellow man in a controlled, good-humoured setting; it proves that the sweat and body odour of five hundred people can be concentrated within a single t-shirt; and, above all, metal demonstrates the delicate fusion of rock and roll, classical, blues, hearing loss, whiplash and unnecessary piercings.

* While I promised not to single out any bands in this article, thankfully there is no genre appropriate for My Chemical Romance.

** Please refer to this wonderful online resource to navigate the realm of metal genres in true Lord of the Rings style.

England

Faced with the choice between identifying with an empire on the verge of collapse that takes itself too seriously or an extinct empire that managed to gain a sense of humour in the process, I choose the latter. The chip on our colonial shoulder, England echoes through much of Australian life, despite the amount of air time dedicated to The Big Bang Theory. Behind the nostalgic title of Great Britain lies a nation that once controlled a quarter of the world and is today the feature of DDW’s Complete Generalisations About Other Cultures.

In order to continue, the difference between English and British must be emphasised; something best illustrated by Hollywood casting. While Irish, Welsh and Scottish accents are either masked or employed for their sonorous qualities, the middle class English accent is immediately associated with either an old-fashioned sort ripe for ridicule, or an all-purpose villain that evokes the revolutionary struggles with the British Empire when set against an American-speaking protagonist.* The Imperial Officers in Star Wars or the Romans in Spartacus are but two examples.

Why does this not bother the English? As suggested earlier, the Poms know how to take the piss, as one look at a London tabloid or ‘healthy’ pub menu would confirm. Along with a drink-drank-drunk attitude to booze, the ability to mock ourselves is a quality brought to Australia on the First Fleet. The emergence of England as an industrial powerhouse, its brutal expansion on a world scale followed by the gradual decline of the past century shows the much-needed development of this thick skin.

What do you mean you're not hungry?

The English people – at least the wealthier ones – managed to bargain a pretty good deal with whomever it was that ruled them over the centuries. Apart from the odd invasion, language change and genocide from Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Norman French, peasants lived quite decent lives on fertile English soils, makings their lords rich and keeping the power of the king limited and representative.** For most of its history, England was not much bigger than the British Isles and its lands in France. As long as the cider supply remained intact, pastoral villagers cared little for the petty squabbling of their nobles.

Cut to the time of Queen Elizabeth I and we see a different England emerging. The year is 1588; the English reformation has overthrown the power of the Catholic Church; the English language is now spoken by rulers and peasants alike; and the invading Spanish Armada has been defeated. With God on their side and a spanking new navy, England saw the commercial benefit of making war with tribes armed with sharpened mangoes rather than their old European foes. Over the next two hundred years, England (joined with Scotland to make Great Britain in 1707) controlled the east coast of North America, most of the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, countless Pacific Islands and Australia – making the Roman Empire look like Tasmania.

Britain lost America in 1776, but the industrial revolution had kicked in and with the defeat of Napoleon a few years later, the English were made practically invincible. As the English language and Earl Grey Tea spread around the world, so did the prim and proper stereotypes in which we bask today. Much to their surprise, the world eventually grew tired of having baked beans and chips with every meal and by the 1947, even India wanted out.

To their credit, English have taken their defeat gracefully; their ale may be warm, but our coins still bear the Queen’s face. Although most Poms do not dwell on their history, the world has a free pass to remind them of their past horrors with a playful chuckle rather than the don’t-mention-the-war issues with other European ex-empires. Next time you meet an Englishman, remind him of the treatment of various indigenous peoples and you will receive the adorable and frustratingly courteous response: “Oh right, we did that too? Sorry about that.”

* An entire industry is based on English accent lessons. Some are better than others.
** Just because the old-country makes me blubby, doesn't mean we still need kings.