When did we start to take metal so seriously?
Hello Heathens,
Something that I was very glad about a few weekends ago was that all weekend Metal Twitter was abuzz with a picture of some fans playing Magic the Gathering in a circle pit at a show. Is this an incredibly dumb thing to do? Probably, but the other people at the show didn’t seem to care, and the band on stage had fun seeing it trend on twitter afterwards and even commented that it was cool. It seemed like everyone involved thought it was a lot of fun. That didn’t stop the broader metal community from being very upset that people had fun at a concert. Apparently there is a correct way and a bad way to have fun at a concert that involves the twitter fun police auditing your behavior at the event.
I personally don’t understand what the big deal was, the band and other people in the pit didn’t seem to care. I’ve been to many shows and in many pits, and generally people are very fast to let you know you are behaving badly in the pit. If you are breaking a social norm for that pit, no one is shy about telling you, enforcing the rules, or just doing the kind thing of picking up someone who falls down, and making sure they are alright. Pits are chaotic spaces, but people in them are pretty decent humans.
While there certainly was an era where metal fans and metal bands took what they were doing seriously (sometimes too seriously in the case of burning churches or murdering people….). That era has largely passed. Parents and politicians aren’t scared of heavy metal anymore, and no one is shocked when you tell them a band name like Cannibal Corpse like they were even 10 years ago. Metal is more mainstream in Europe than in the US, and it cracks me up to see how many European metal fans take the genre super seriously when there are bands like Rhapsody singing about fighting demons while riding unicorns. Metal is dumb, over the top, sometimes shocking, and mostly about freedom of expression and having fun in a niche community. It’s not that deep, and shouldn’t be taken that seriously.
Keep Heavy The Sabbath Day