(Note: The following is the lead item in this week's Arcane Arts. I also cover REH, Jane Yolen, 70s horror, and Mike Grell's Warlord. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox)Unfortunate cover blurb.
Metal is vast. Metal is diverse. Metal is sprawling. The number of subgenres is staggering … more than 70, are you kidding? And to be honest, a little stupid. Drone metal. Funeral doom. Djent metal. Some of the finer points make sword-and-sorcery vs. heroic fantasy look like high school debate club.
And so I don’t think it’s possible to write an absolutely definitive history of heavy metal. And even if you could, who would be interested in such a thing? If you like doom are you likely also a fan of funk metal or Christian metal?
This past weekend I finished reading an attempt at a comprehensive history, Andrew O’Neill’s A History of Heavy Metal. I’d describe it as breezy, entertaining, fairly well written. But also, quite biased and therefore incomplete. An ostensible history shouldn’t ignore bands that the author does not like. O’Neill hates glam metal, so we get 10 pages of why it sucks … except for maybe Appetite For Destruction. He also has little use for Anthrax and Megadeth (Dave Mustaine’s nasally voice grates on him) so they’re largely ignored too, despite their considerable footprint.
For what it’s worth I recommend A History of Heavy Metal as a breezy, sometimes entertaining read that filled in a few corners for me. Black and death metal, mainly, and a lot of bands I’ve never heard of.
What he wrote was fine… but it’s not what I want to read. Or write. I’d rather go deep than broad. Curated instead of encyclopedic.
This is a roundabout way of explaining how I ended up writing a heavy metal memoir. We have histories. We’ve got Sound of the Beast and Louder than Hell and O’Neill’s book. We have information: Videos, podcasts, even, a map. We’ve got a million stories of the bands and performers themselves.
We don’t need another Flame and Crimson for heavy metal.
So, I wrote something quite different. A story from one fan’s perspective—my own. My life, with heavy metal as the backdrop.
My memoir will only focus on the handful of metal genres I like. But I’m not writing a history. So if you’re looking for a treatise on Unblack Metal (a real subgenre, by the way) you’ll need to look elsewhere.
But if you’re looking for one fan’s utterly unique story, maybe you’ll like this. August is getting closer.
I just started reading The Warlord omnibus and it is awesome. I had previously read these issues in a Black and White collection and for some reason they did not really hit me but this time it did. I am a big Mike Grell fan in general who I think is one of the most talented (in multiple dimensions) and CONSISTENT people in comics. The later is important because comics writers/artists are really inconsistent in quality. I'm a Jack Kirby fan but prefer his collaborative work than his solo work, for example. Grell usually hits it out of the park. I mean there a few things he does that I don't like but overall.
ReplyDeleteI have really universal taste in music so I am not obsessed with specific sub-genres of Metal. I mean I read your newsletter while listening to Cody Jinks a Red Dirt Country musician. (Though he used to be in a heavy metal band and has a bit of that defiance the Metal has.) Making a sweeping assertion about an entire genre or subgenre of music is to me really stupid and annoying.
Sold... I'm going to get the omnibus!
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