My name is Raphael, and I am a heavy metal fan
There are those admissions in life which cause instant, mass derision, lowering of opinion, sneering, possibly convulsive dismay. Admissions which transform you from a relatively normal person into a stoner dropout, from a more-or-less acceptable human being into an outcast from society. Admissions which send you to the back of the class, the back of the bus, the back of the queue.
No, I’m not talking about being an RPGer (another post, another time). I am talking, of course, about being a heavy metal fan.
Particularly in America, heavy metal fans have a long, long popular misconception to live down. They were the kids with the torn jeans hanging out at the high school with the hackeysack, who smelled like cigarettes and had the long hair and the jean jackets. They might even have been the kids who hung out at the BMX race tracks, swapping crystal meth stories.
At least in the environment in which I grew up, this was the standard accepted image of the typical heavy metal fan, especially in the Eighties. Now, now with death metal and Norwegian black metal bands who burn down churches and eat children … Jesus, the popular image of the HM fan might actually be worse. I can’t imagine.
I’ve been a heavy metal fan off and on since I was a teenager. For better or worse, I’ve never had long hair, I’ve never owned a jean jacket (with or without patches), I’ve never been a smoker and I’ve always been a terrible HackeySack player. But I was a big metal fan as a teenager and, in recent years — probably because I’m going through some kind of pathetic nostalgic regression — I’ve returned to the metal fold in a big way, and it now eats up most of my listening hours.
I’m not talking about the new (nu) metal stuff, or any of the many flavors of extreme metal. I can’t get with that stuff. For me, heavy metal is classic metal, the groups that came to the fore when the term was new and fresh, who defined the genre in its heyday. And the bands who exist now who prefer to pay homage to that unfashionable, uncommercial sound.
To me, heavy metal music is music with grand visions of realms of fantasy, of retrieving The Sword from the Lady of the Lake, of finding yourself in an enchanted forest fleeing from the snarling, ravening hordes. Or smuggling illicit goods in my spacecraft through Zhodani Space. Or being a powerslave, a living god, in ancient Egypt.
Heavy metal music stirs my imagination the same way the books I read do. To a large extent, its subject matter is the books I read.
This is not fashionable. These lyrical concepts are not fashionable. And I’ve known for a long time that this style of music will not make me popular. Most people with whom I speak won’t share the enthusiasm I have for this dusty, moldery form of music whose time has probably long since come and gone, and was never highly-regarded even at its peak. I can accept that. But I love this crazy, silly, energetic little corner of the music shelves, and I could never accept letting it go.
My name is Raphael, and I am a heavy metal fan.