Why don’t gamergeeks listen to heavy metal?
“A shout comes from the wizard
The sky begins to crack
And he’s looking right at you — Quick!
Run along the rainbow
Before it turns to black — Attack!”“Like the sword of the warrior,
we’ll destroy the demons in the end
Like the wings of Pegasus,
we’ll fly to Hell and back again”“You heard about me in the Frontier Wars
Psionic menace carrying alien spores
A living legend in the asteroid mines
Avoiding tariffs and Imperial fines”
Those lines above could all be spoken by a million gamemaster/dungeonmaster/highlords the world over, but none of them come from the gaming table.
Instead, they’re song lyrics from three different heavy metal bands’ tracks (Dio, Sacred Rite, and Slough Feg, respectively). With musical subject matter that could spring from any role-playing game setting, most gamers probably listen to this kind of music, right?
Wrong. The fact of the matter is that most RPG and gaming fanatics — at least in America — don’t listen to this kind of music, despite the overt parallels. I for one have yet to meet a single one.
I’m not alone. Last Autumn I talked on the phone with Mike Scalzi, singer/guitarist/primary-songwriter for the excellent San Francisco-based group Slough Feg, who went so far as to craft an entire concept album around uber-classic sf game “Traveller” in 2003. He told me that he had approached a number of clubs and groups devoted to “Traveller” with the news that there was a forthcoming musical album based on their beloved setting, and was met with stony silence and slightly nauseated disinterest. Like me, he found the whole RPG community just wasn’t interested in heavy metal. There might be the isolated enthusiast of both, but by and large RPGer tastes run in other directions musically, leaving this niche genre — which writes so much about themes embraced by games — to cry alone in the corner, unwanted and unloved.
The question that follows, is, why?
Don’t have the answer? Crap. Neither do I.
But it is a question I’ve long pondered. I’ve come up with all sorts of possibilities, some of which are:
- Metal as a genre is now probably more popularly equated with the metal shows on Fuse, and extreme bands like Slipknot and Cradle of Filth, than with the old-fashioned or classic bands like Dio, who wrote music that could fit in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with nary a tweak. Maybe gamers now are repulsed by this extreme metal (what a surprise) and don’t want anything to do with a genre which includes bands that vomit on their audience, wear silly costumes, and belch satanic lyrics into their microphones.
- Perhaps role-playing has grown past the confines of its early heyday, finding popularity and sustained interest while fads change, while heavy metal in the classic sense has been stranded as a fad of a bygone era, trapped forever as a piece of nostalgia, when you could actually turn on MTV and see Ronnie James Dio confronting mutants with his two-handed sword, while today you — can’t. Like a childhood friend who went to college and discovered Nietzche leaving you to stare longingly at your d20s lying dusty and forgotten on your desk, maybe role-playing games once were played by people who listened to heavy metal, but they’ve moved on now to other places, other sounds.
Perhaps most gamers don’t want to spend 24/7 with their head stuck in a fantasy existence, when there’s real life and a real world out there with real things to do.Nah. Didn’t think so.
I’m quite sure that the fact that I write about both subjects in this lame blog probably alienates any audience I could have who are interested in either. To most, never the twain shall meet.
But meet they do, and comingle, and drink soda pop together, and laugh until the pop fizzes up into their nostrils, at my house.
Technorati Tags: heavy metal, role-playing, games, Slough Feg, Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller