Last night I wandered into a cinema playing Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. Now I'm not a metal fan myself, but like most good documentaries, Metal allows the relatively uninitiated to discover what the fuss is all about. In fact, following co-director and metal fan Sam Dunn around the world as he gives us an overview of the music and culture of heavy metal, you often feel like you're sitting in Metal 101 and cramming for an exam. The film's heavy-handed pedagogical approach, complete with chapter headings, is one of the documentary's biggest weaknesses.
The other is its defensive tone: as Dunn's co-director Scot McFadyen puts it, we're invited "on a global journey to find out why this music has been consistently stereotyped, dismissed and condemned." The filmmakers are right to draw attention to the American conservatives' crusade to equate metal with evil, and headbangers with sinners on the road to perdition. It's a shame they do so with such righteous indignation: a bit of humor when dealing with these already self-parodying PTA politico-moms might've lightened the tone. After all, metal is not the only music born out of oppression...
Much fuss is made about what makes metal such a unique sub-culture, but I wasn't convinced. All of the so-called unique characteristics (the persecution, the dress-code, the tribal mentality...) could just as well be applied to other scenes. Acid house and rave culture come to mind, but really, aren't we talking about the entire history of music-based youth culture?
Nevertheless, this conventional Canadian doc does manage to give an honest fanboy overview of the genre, taking us on location to the US, the UK, Germany's Wacken Open Air festival and even Norway, where Dunn boldly tracks down some church-burning proponents of the Black Metal sub-genre. Along the way, he gets good access to some of the biggest names in the field, including Rob Zombie, Alice Cooper, Vince Neil, Ronnie James Dio and Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson.
Article comments
1 - Jason
Wow. You noted that he took a heavy handed pedagogical approach, then criticized him for not straying from his thesis to discuss the business end of metal. Way to miss the whole point, I congratulate you.
A. The whole point was to do this movie as one might do a thesis. It was funded by an academic grant after all.
B. In an effort to define metal's appeal by studying the motivations of those that love the music, going into Time Warner or some other label's marketing scheme was outside of the thesis.
C. The vast majority of the bands that comprise the modern medal scene he was studying are not part of the major label music machine. Sure Slayer made an appearance as well as some elder statesman like Dio, but when interviews include bands like Mayhem and Cannibal Corpse, things are getting pretty esoteric. My assumption is (and I don't mean this condescendingly) that when you think of metal you are either thinking of artists such as Ozzy Osborne or Metallica that the metal community no longer much embraces, or you are thinking of popular acts you hear on the radio. Here is a rule of thumb, if you think it is metal but it charted on any current top 40 list, it isn't metal (at least in the US and UK). There isn't much real (or "true" in the metal fan's vernacular) that sells heavily or gets played heavily in comparison to the other genres.
Ironically, one of the observations of the movie is that people who don't enjoy metal fans don't get the scene and are incapable of understanding the genre. You began your column by stating you were not a metal head, then dismissed the movie as fanboy-ism and the subculture as any other youth movement. To quote Rob Zombie, "No one gets into Slayer for a summer." If a person truly loved the genre as a youth, chances are they still love it today. Besides, an anthropologist (which I admittedly am not) might challenge your assertion that all youth movements are the same thing and not actual subcultures unto themselves.