Metal Monday

I was both pleased and slightly annoyed last Friday on discovering BBC Four had decided to broadcast a heavy metal theme night. Pleased because metal rarely gets any kind of mention on the BBC, annoyed because if BBC Four was doing a Heavy Metal Brittannia retrospective it meant the genre had well and truly become obsolete. And true to form, the main documentary was indeed an exercise in nostalgia, focusing too much on metal’s pioneers, spending too much time on the sixties and early seventies, with barely a mention of the eighties and the N.W.O.B.H.M. and absolutely nothing on developments since. Even if the focus was on British metal, why was so much time spent on barely relevant acts like Uriah Heep instead of important post-1980 bands like Napalm Death, or Paradise Lost or whatever? Is it cynical of me to think that cutting off the story around 1980 would make metal still reasonably understandable to the BBC Four audience, while not having to mention the more extreme developments since? Still, it’s comforting to know the BBC’s usual slightly out of kilter view of music extents to metal as well — seemingly obsessed with roots and almost unable to move out of the baby boomers’ sixties-seventies time frame, as if everything that’s interesting in rock and pop got its start there.

But though I can fully appreciate the genius of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath or Deep Purple and the other hard rock pioneers, they’re not metal. These bands all fit in perfectly with the other big rock bands: the Stones, the Who, Cream and all the seventies stadion rock acts. Perfectly normal people could listen to them and go to their concerts and not be looked down upon. They weren’t metal. is metal:

And this.

Not to mention this.

Metal has always been a skeevy sausagefest sort of music, both thuggish and nerdy, listened to by the weird dorky kid with the Tolkien posters in his bedroom and the thicko failing woodshop with a habit of casual violence. It’s never been cool or top forty material, with some exceptions, yet remains popular everywhere anyway. Its image is violent, reactionary and misogynistic but apart from a few of the more loonier Christian pressure groups in the eigthies nobody ever got as outraged about it as they would get over a single fiddy cents video. And I love it.