Maybe 60%-70% of the music I listen to is metal. I occasionally wear shirts from local bands and go to shows whenever I can afford to. I buy all my music. But I do not feel compelled to wear a uniform. Boots are uncomfortable and my color options extend beyond black. I do not hide the fact that I love metal, but I also don't shove it down the throats of my friends. (In fact, only one of my friends is a metalhead, and we share no bands in common.) I love hip-hop, folk, blues, indie rock, pop, electronica, experimental music, punk, and trip-hop maybe somewhat less than I love metal, but with just as much fervor.
Am I a metalhead? Who in the ☺☺☺☺ cares? It's an arbitrary title. If you want to call yourself one, fine, cool, whatever gets you hard, but I think it's sort of absurd to determine with finality another person's quality as a fan because they don't meet the standards that you've sort of capriciously invented, conveniently based on your own behaviors.
Ok, offtopicking, but please reply your oppinion.
There's this guy I know that listens almost exclusively to metal. Yet when he goes out, he never wears any metal-oriented stuff like band shirts, boots, anything of the sort. He doesn't go to concerts because he thinks they're a waste of money. He doesn't buy CD's because he can get mp3's for free. When he rides in a car with guys from work, he listens to pop or folk music because he thinks metal music bothers them and he doens't like that. He doesn't hang around with other metalheads (not anymore anyway, because guys from work may think the worst of him if he does - he's a doctor).
Still, at home he listens to a ton of metal. Is this guy a metalhead? I mean, we're ok, we say hi to each other and perhaps even grab a beer once every two years or so, but to me he's no metalhead and never was.
That's no coincidence - as a research assistant at a major American university, I have worked with surgeons and surgery residents, an uncanny percentage of whom were fans of old school metal and stoner rock - Helloween, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Accept, Slayer, Kreator, Morbid Angel etc.
I suspect after standing on your feet in an operating room for 11 hours reconstructing someone's innards after a heart-lung transplant, and then up all night watching over them to see they don't drown in their own body fluids or bleed to death or reject the heart, you need some shreddies to keep you standing upright and awake.
IT didn't show once they were off duty though, they were just ordinary guys, nary a jackboot or a lick of corpsepaint between them. There is a distinct lack of Autopsy-style gore metal in their collections though - they see and deal with necrotizing fasciitis and caseating granulomas and gas gangrene enough IRL that they don't want to hear about it, even to riveting blastbeats. That stuff is for nonmedical personnel for whom it's a rare curiosity - another friend is a florist and amateur herbalist and listens to a lot of Carcass, again with no outward metalhead behaviours. He personally thinks viking metal and black metal are in bad taste, whereas the surgery resident who lives for Sodom finds clinical pathology metal distasteful.
Because real metalheads feel the need to judge. Isn't the whole point of the subculture the hate of judgment? Well, that and drinking assloads of beer and wrecking people in the pit.
Oh, and that all metalheads are idiots. I'm working my way toward a doctorate.
That's a stupid assumption. Take any single thing in the universe and you'll get people who are better and those that are worse in any of those. Is there a movie better than another movie? A comic better than another comic? A magic card better than another magic card?
I was not saying I'm the better person, for all I know, he's mister universe. But at metal, he sucks. If other metalheads were like him, there wouldn't even be a scene.
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Am I a metalhead? Who in the ☺☺☺☺ cares? It's an arbitrary title. If you want to call yourself one, fine, cool, whatever gets you hard, but I think it's sort of absurd to determine with finality another person's quality as a fan because they don't meet the standards that you've sort of capriciously invented, conveniently based on your own behaviors.
That's no coincidence - as a research assistant at a major American university, I have worked with surgeons and surgery residents, an uncanny percentage of whom were fans of old school metal and stoner rock - Helloween, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Accept, Slayer, Kreator, Morbid Angel etc.
I suspect after standing on your feet in an operating room for 11 hours reconstructing someone's innards after a heart-lung transplant, and then up all night watching over them to see they don't drown in their own body fluids or bleed to death or reject the heart, you need some shreddies to keep you standing upright and awake.
IT didn't show once they were off duty though, they were just ordinary guys, nary a jackboot or a lick of corpsepaint between them. There is a distinct lack of Autopsy-style gore metal in their collections though - they see and deal with necrotizing fasciitis and caseating granulomas and gas gangrene enough IRL that they don't want to hear about it, even to riveting blastbeats. That stuff is for nonmedical personnel for whom it's a rare curiosity - another friend is a florist and amateur herbalist and listens to a lot of Carcass, again with no outward metalhead behaviours. He personally thinks viking metal and black metal are in bad taste, whereas the surgery resident who lives for Sodom finds clinical pathology metal distasteful.
Because real metalheads feel the need to judge. Isn't the whole point of the subculture the hate of judgment? Well, that and drinking assloads of beer and wrecking people in the pit.
Oh, and that all metalheads are idiots. I'm working my way toward a doctorate.
I am petitioning to get players to stop complaining about mythic rarity. Sig this to join the cause.
That's a stupid assumption. Take any single thing in the universe and you'll get people who are better and those that are worse in any of those. Is there a movie better than another movie? A comic better than another comic? A magic card better than another magic card?
I was not saying I'm the better person, for all I know, he's mister universe. But at metal, he sucks. If other metalheads were like him, there wouldn't even be a scene.
Banner and avatar by the one and only Craven at Epic graphics. Check them out.
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