Metal Archetypes

Metal music. Enough has been said on the topic. Genres subdivided, bands discussed, songs propagated… India has opened its eyes and ears to this intense form of music. However, the listeners and propagators themselves remain untouched. The metal archetypes of our generation thus unfolds:

• The Metallica fan: Ah. One of the all-time classics. The big four is where metal begins and ends for this chap. Yet apparently metal flows in his blood.

• The \m/: A class below our Metallica guru. Probably hears the occasional metal song playing in his favourite pub every week. One standard pose in every picture ever taken of our dear good man has him flashing it. Dio shudders in his grave.

• The \\m//: Lets just expand this to every facebook status update, twitter post, birthday car, signature, epitaph.. you fucking name it.

• The lone mosher: There is one at every gig. Quite possibly he hasn’t heard a metal song in its purity yet. The sheer magnitude of the distortion is enough to set his head, well, if you can still call it banging then that, yeah. Will punch. Will kick. Will shove. Will push. Will bleed. Will sweat. Profusely. Oh how I love them so.

• The flaming skull: Lets-play-some-metal-and-unleash-my-inner-beast of sorts. Silent otherwise… can be a major headache at those indoor arenas. He will present himself as the violent schizophrenic type. Trust me, he’s not even close.

• The kvlt man: Will not look beyond LOTR. Metal is a way of life. Classical music is nothing but its lost father. Probably knows every subgenre ever invented. Can identify the artist within 0.123 milliseconds of hearing the song. Can state every field of the id3 tag from memory within 5. I salute you sir.

• The kvlt man 2 : He will silently judge your music taste. The long hair and monochromatic wardrobe is just a way of simply… being. To him, the modern day metal heads are a bunch of twats. Real metal died with Sabbath. Secretly he is a member of the Bathroom Black Metal Vocalist Club. (Inaugurated in 1995)

• The follower: Find your nearest kvlt man. Find his hard disk. Find a way to play every song through them crappy laptop speakers for 6 weeks straight. Congratulation… you are the follower.

• The lone stranger: You will never understand him. Solitude is his only friend and his enemy. He listens to metal because it defines him. It expresses his inner self. It captivates his soul. It’s what separates him from the rest. Yes. It is what makes him different.  So when he steps into every metal concert in his black t-shirt, beer mug and a surprisingly cheap cigarette moments after sending friend requests to the band members of the headlining act, he feels that he is misunderstood by society and he will remain alone forever….because its not like there are merely 1000 more like him in a 1 mile radius.

• The underground listener: Considers everything you have heard to be mainstream. Only satisfaction in life is to uncover the most obscure metal act in an underdeveloped country and tag every friend possible in the video link.‘Cause he is just that cool.

• The gifted musician: Will consider any piece of music which does not have 220 bpm, 16^th note double bass patterns and guitar solos without shredding not worth listening to. But of course if you do find that one obscure song by that one obscure artist which fulfills his given conditions, the guitar tone is just not going to be good enough. You want to hear some brutal shit… listen to his band...its awesome… actually no... he.is.awesome.

All said and done I think I have spent a lot of time falling in and out of pretty much most of the above archetypes. At one time I never looked beyond the Nirvanas and the Pink Floyds. Then came the likes of Tool, APC and Dream Theater. Finally, came college and it opened up an entire new dimension in music for me and now, after 4 years of pure unadulterated exposure to countless different genres, I can say that I leave learning a very valuable lesson.. and that is to never look down upon a particular style of music or an artist. Simply because behind the cover of these disputed musicians lie a host of people who spend innumerable hours recording, mixing and mastering their records which may or may not appeal to you or me, but quite certainly, does appeal to a host of people out there in the world today. But then again, this isn’t called the daily hypocrite for nothing. \m/