My thoughts on metal elitism:
I personally believe it's justifiable due to the huge amount of controversy, ignorance and close-mindedness surrounding metal since its creation and up until today. But mainly the 90s. I mean, come the fuck on:
- Grunge basically killed metal in the mainstream. Even though hair metal needed to be culled, it also meant that the thrash metal that was gaining popularity took a nosedive, too.
- Chuck Schuldiner gets a brain tumor.
- Nu-metal. 'Nuff said.
- Church burnings
How do I explain this? Think of it this way:
Your favourite art form is butchered beyond recognition in the form of shitty glam metal. Both your favourite genre and its bastard child are then killed off by a grunge band trying to be pop, only to be resurrected even MORE mutilated with bands like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. To make matters worse, Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer sell out. To a metalhead at the time, those bands were supposed to be showing the mainstream how much metal kicked ass, but instead we got things like Load and Risk.
To make things worse, a certain small amount of metalheads in Norway were fucking around with churches, making the lot of us look bad and Chuck Schuldiner's death was basically confirmed. Any way you slice it, not a happy time for metal.
I believe it was chiefly this that bred the elitism and exclusivity in metal. If you didn't know your stuff or you weren't willing to learn, you were laughable but moreover you were something of an enemy because you're exactly the kind of person that contributed to the stuff in the first subparagraph of this motherfucker. It's not like metalheads in general had anything against casual listeners of metal, they just had something against casual listeners to claimed to be metalheads. And it's still that way.
For a good reason.
Because of Trivium and Arch Enemy and Slipknot and their fans, as those bands and their fans tend to
miss the point entirely. Because if you're not death metal, black metal or germanic thrash then the brutality of your vocals doesn't matter, because down-tuning doesn't automatically make you heavy and because chugging isn't enough. If you want to be metal, then you have to write music that's heavy irrespective of those things, and if you can't then you've missed something along the way. Think about it. Deathklok is a motherfucking joke band and they're heavier than just about any reasonably popular metal band outside of metal circles.
I guess what I'm saying is that there is a shitton of poseur-metal and poseur-metalheads out there. And we see them and leave them be, but if they're going to spout nonsense then we're going to correct them. That's the fucking long and short of it, ladies and gentlemen; your average, learned-in-metal metalhead is a self-righteous asshole who has every right to be self-righteous because so many people spout stupid bullshit about metal.
Anyway, the tl;dr version is this:
Metalheads are elitist because there's a surprisingly high amount of people who claim to know about metal who actually don't but insist they do.
Au revoir, I'm off to wipe Synyster Gates off my hitlist.