Lamentations of the Flame Princess (www.lotfp.com) presents: Impure Metal: How Underground Heavy Metal Became Mainstream Heavy Music By Dave Burns [email protected]

Words Are Not Just Words

I know this sounds a little cliché But I don’t give a damn anyway So let this be a lesson to you Though we leave we are never through If you help to keep metal alive The underground will always survive I pledge to keep it alive I promise metal will thrive I swear myself to the cause I’ll teach all the metal laws

Razor “Iron Hammer”

Lessons? Causes? Laws? In today’s world, the lines Dave Carlo wrote seem to be quaint relics from a bygone era in which the words “heavy metal” had a meaning that transcended music and embraced an ethos. Almost every time you placed a record on a turntable or a cassette in a deck during the 1980s, some singer was belting out lyrics targeting a whole host of enemies. Battles, wars, and violent acts were filtered through a heavy-metal prism and became tales designed to rally denim and leather troops for an approaching cataclysmic confrontation that would banish posers from the face of the earth, shatter the societal chains wrapped around individuals from birth or fundamentally alter the way that the world worked. Metal was not merely a genre of music, but an antagonistic philosophy seeking changes in the status quo: I always understood rock as a form of revolution of young people against the establishment. Though nowadays, of course, it’s one big commercial machine, deep within me the spirit is there. I can’t deny it, because I experienced it like that when I was a kid.1

Tom G. Warrior’s sentiments were not always explicitly expressed by thrashing, banging, and screaming metalheads; however, his belief that “rock [was] a form of revolution” was buried somewhere in the mix whenever heavy metal blared from stacks at shows or headphones at home. In fact, the “underground” spoken of in “Iron Hammer” was not a concept magically appearing from nowhere without any antecedents, but a term with a particular history that dovetailed with the position metallers occupied within the wider societies in which they lived. Although there are 2 numerous interpretations of the word’s meaning when it is employed in an oppositional context, each one is a variation on the idea that an underground movement is “separate from prevailing social or artistic environments, and often exercises a subversive influence.”2 This definition is broad and can cover everything from the high-brow pranks of a performance artist to the ham-handed plays of unreconstructed Marxists--but the origins of the term stem from two historical events. When Germany rapidly conquered France, the Third Reich believed that the absence of a concerted counterattack was a sign of the country’s resignation to its fascist fate. Thousands of men and women, however, refused to meekly line up behind the puppet government the Nazis installed and formed a fragmented Free French state that resisted the German occupiers and native collaborators. Secrecy was essential to the resistance, and an elaborate network of safe houses, cryptic codes and alter egos were utilized to frustrate the coercive arms of the authorities. This collective effort to fashion a new nation within the boundaries of the corrupted state came to be called “the underground,” because the fascists forced freedom fighters to conduct their operations in a covert world that existed below the surface of everyday life. After the colonial war in French Indochina inherited by the United States became the Vietnam War, a complex protest movement coalesced around various anti-establishment impulses that embraced and expanded the notions associated with the designation “underground.” Newspapers like The Barb in Berkley, California, and The Paper in Lansing, Michigan, played a central role in the rebellions of the 1960s and were referred to as the “underground press” to distinguish the publications from staid mainstream periodicals that refused to publish material deemed to be detrimental to the war effort and the morality of Americans. Articles extolling the liberating effects of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll ran next to screeds clamoring for social justice, attacking consumerist materialism and condemning the war machine in the underground papers; and out of this psychedelic printed stew, a variety of underground movements emerged that wanted to return to a barter-based agricultural economy, undermine the power of the military and big business, muster an outlaw army made up of freed prisoners or reconfigure human consciousness with LSD. By the late 1960s, similarly inclined undergrounds had arisen in the industrialized countries of the West and provided some of the foundational material for what would become the first heavy metal band to ever exist. There is little doubt that Black Sabbath was a unique group that pioneered a dystopian and discordant sound which made the tame bohemian strains of The Velvet Underground appear soft, smooth and decadent; however, the fact that the band’s lyrics were a direct outgrowth of the ideological underground of the sixties receives much less attention. But Black Sabbath’s scathing anti-militaristic anthems (“War Pigs”); bleak fables about technological hells (“Into the Void”); weed- 3 inspired odes to freedom (“Sweet Leaf”); and revolutionary dreams of peace and love (“Children of the Grave”) were subjects ripped from the headlines of the underground press and continue to reverberate with a distinctive metallic clang today. Yet many music journalists lauding the flowering of countercultural rock believed that Black Sabbath were benighted barbarians who traded in brutish power instead of refined art, and a deluge of derogatory words rained down like soot from a Birmingham mill on the heads of the band. So, at its very inception, heavy metal was presented as a medium fit for maladjusted miscreants who deserved derision when the genre could not be ignored. These haughty attacks only strengthened the folkways imparted to heavy metal by its working-class cultural origins, and by the time the phrase “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal” served notice to the world that the genre was not going to disappear, metal was the musical form for the downtrodden and disenfranchised who refused to break under the pressure applied by the authorities. Gamblers, rakes and outlaws were protagonists in the yarns spun out by Motörhead; convicts, harlots and delinquents populated the back alleys where Iron Maiden lurked; and Witchfinder General chronicled the wanderings of wastrels who lived for the rush of sex, drugs and music, while Saxon was being hassled by the “Strong Arm of the Law” that Judas Priest was busy breaking. The dark and depressive notes about human existence also remained a lyrical staple, and the horror of nuclear warfare (Raven “Seek and Destroy”); the moral bankruptcy of modern civilization (Judas Priest “Savage”); the vapid venality of the media (Motörhead “Talking Head”); and political corruption financed by businessmen (Legend “Frontline”) were all topics heavy metal bands touched on in songs. The music itself also became a subject during the first half of the 1980s, and titles such as “Heavy Metal Mania,” “Heavy Metal Thunder,” “Metal Daze,” “Heavy Metal Rules,” and “Heavy Metal is the Law” began to appear on the back of record covers. These paeans to the power of the weighty chords were not only signs of a thriving genre, but also evidence that the music formed the basis of a culture that was hostile to mainstream conceptions of aural entertainment. Bands slowly started to identify enemies within the music industry, and popular bands capable of producing insipid hit singles became the adversaries metalheads sought to eliminate with their strafing and searing sounds. Although industry-approved trends and fads assumed various guises during the decade, obstinate headbangers continued to scoff at the posers, prostitutes and pimps that presented safe, radio- friendly fare as the future of music. Disparaged, derided, and dismissed as misfits with no prospects in the industry or life, metalheads appropriated the term “underground” to mark themselves as brothers and sisters united in opposition to mainstream society. The haphazardly constructed definition of what it meant to be 4 underground, however, was not completed until the fury and force of heavy metal was ratcheted up to feverish levels by the bands who considered themselves to be thrashing maniacs. There is no need to trot out evidence underscoring the anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian leanings of thrashing heavy metal due to the numerous examples readily available, but the importance of the amorphous ideology of the underground was conveyed in some out-of-place lyrics contained in Tankard’s “Acid Death:” Fight for the nation underground Dyin’ and killin’ so hard tonight We break up the wall of sound The end is near we will fight

The unifying principle of the underground was lifted from the do-it-yourself credo and contrarian conventions of hardcore punk, but thrashers made it all their own to highlight their marginal position within the wider confines of the music industry and polite society. Tankard’s adversarial lines were one of many verses that vaguely outlined the parameters of the underground without ever spelling out what it meant, but certain components were as clear as the shards of glass littering the floor wherever drunk thrashers congregated. Almost nobody writing about heavy metal is concerned with such fundamental matters though, and the majority of journalists are content to prattle on about the underground with little thought of what it actually means. The only serious attempt to define the concept was undertaken by the sociologist Deena Weinstein who used Dante’s Divine Comedy as a model to claim that paradise represented widespread commercial acceptance and success; hell the underground where “music…too extreme sonically, lyrically or both to even attract a mainstream audience” resided; and purgatory the twilight regions located between the two poles of popularity.3 However, while heavy metal was a genre of music that certainly welcomed the freedoms associated with material wealth, the shifting of units was not the overriding goal of the musicians cranking their amps up to insane levels. In “All the Aces,” a song attacking the money-minded “parasites” who latched onto Motörhead and had a decisive effect on the early career of the band, Lemmy Kilmister proudly proclaimed: “The only thing I know is playing rock ‘n’ roll / I’m not a businessman / I’m just in a good time band,” bringing a conflict masked by contracts and public relations agencies out into the open and providing an example of what really separated metal from the mainstream. Money was necessary for the metal to flow, but many exponents of heavy metal were exasperated by the grasping nature of the industry. After many years and labels, Joey DeMaio saw this struggle in stark terms and compared it to the war indigenous peoples waged against the predatory plans of politicians and businessmen: 5 I mean the natives got fucked again. It’s just the way it is. I just don’t understand it. It really sucks. You’ve got native people who live with a sense of atmosphere and feeling in their heart; then you’ve got all these business types who come in and fuck everybody over. That’s the way it is in the music business, in the whole world. It’s the people doin’ battle with all these other motherfuckas who think they’re going to create fashions and trends.4

And as thrash metal encountered the “commercial machine” Tom G. Warrior identified as a spirit- sapping force, numerous bands and fans rejected the scramble for cash the industry encouraged and championed ideals rooted in their common underground identity. For example, when Dave Carlo venerated “the metal laws” and swore fidelity to “the cause,” he was not making rhetorical statements--but airing convictions that paved the career path Razor followed. In the liner notes of Violent Restitution, Carlo included a “special message to our fans,” informing listeners that the barbs of critics had failed to diminish his “drive” and announcing the creation of a self-financed label named Fist Fight. Razor had made no money from record deals in the past and the hard and costly financial ropes Carlo had been taught enabled the band to begin to make a “bit of money,” but he was not wallowing in wealth and not inclined to do so: [W]e’re far from rich. We don’t care. We do this because we love the music and for no other reason. As long as there are people who want our albums, we’ll be making them. We don’t have a major deal, we don’t have mega management, we haven’t been offered a decent tour proposal throughout our career, but we’re having a hell of a lot of fun and we don’t kiss anyone’s ass, ever.

But by the time Razor released their next album, it appeared as if there were no people who wanted to hear the band’s songs. Roadrunner declined to release Shotgun Justice due to the allegedly poor sales of Restitution and had begun turning its attention to other fields of music. The refusal of executives to stay the course with Carlo’s band, however, was not an isolated incident--but merely one event out of many that signaled the beginning of a larger industry-wide movement that would change how metal was bought, sold, distributed and defined in the mainstream and the underground. 6 A Lesson in History

Now those days are gone forever Wish I’d made them last Now we feel so sad together Thinking of the past

Trouble “Thinking of the Past”

In the late 1980s and opening years of the following decade, heavy metal was riding high, but the genre quickly descended into a deep depression, causing many bands to call it a day, forcing small labels to fold and making many isolated metalheads scramble for any slim slivers of steel they could find. Of course, the primary reason for the implosion of metal in the early 1990s was the meteoric ascendancy of grunge/alternative, and the process that Mark Adams from Deceased describes below occurred all across the United States: People just weren’t coming to shows like they used to, and the general interest in metal was starting to weaken. People that we’d known for years as some of the most die-hard metalheads were now starting to listen to bands that weren’t exactly radio oriented, but then again certainly weren’t metal either. Bands like Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Nirvana, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were soon replacing bands like Judas Priest, Queensrÿche, Iron Maiden, Voi Vod in their stereos….It suddenly seemed like there was an incredible backlash against heavy metal for whatever reason, and people that had been into it for so long now seemed bored with it. At first it started with these people saying, “Oh yeah. I still love metal, but when I want to mellow out, this is my one CD that I listen to.” Well, that one CD eventually turned into several, and pretty soon wound up being played all the time, while the metal CDs either collected dust or got traded in at used CD stores.1

Although Europe is often presented as a stable stronghold of heavy metal, the alternative boom also sent ripples across the Atlantic, creating an adverse environment in which “the whole metal scene dropped down” for Gamma Ray’s Kai Hansen and his peers on the continent and in Britain.2 The rapid rise of alternative and the quick collapse of metal, however, has rarely been explored as a historical phenomenon. Most outside observers and sympathetic individuals regard it as a natural event governed by some inevitable cyclical pattern of popularity. The result of this line of thinking is the simple acknowledgement that “grunge killed metal” and a shrug of the shoulders at the whims of the musical fates that provides no explanation for events shaped by human hands.3 Others, modern-day sophisticates such as Terrorizer’s Paul Schwarz, look back on the metal being churned out during those days with disdain and hail grunge as “a movement which revealed how many of the most accessible and popular bands of the ‘80s had become drained of all vitality by rock star excess and attendant creative laziness.”4 To Schwarz, the struggle to make metallic ends meet in the evolving environment was a healthy and cleansing case of survival of the fittest, where only bands 7 that refused to remain mired in the moronic muck of the past were able to make it through the nineties. As is often the case with what passes for journalism in the metal press, concrete examples are absent, and a cursory survey of the available evidence paints a different portrait than the one hastily sketched by would-be philosophers. Taste in music is always open to debate and cannot be measured in any objective fashion, but the quality metal being produced by numerous bands during the early nineties was undeniable when compared to past efforts. Thrash was being pushed in new progressive directions by Believer and Sacrifice, and some Bay Area bands like Heathen were pointing the way towards a melodic and technical hybrid of the genre that tapped into newfound reservoirs of abrasiveness. More traditional metal was also far from a stagnant cesspit devoid of ideas, since Manowar combined the epic and everyday aspects of heavy metal on The Triumph of Steel to deliver one of the best albums of their career, Motörhead unleashed one of their finest hours on Bastards and Accept made a stunning return to form with Objection Overruled. There were new and old bands that were cranking out paint-by-the-numbers music, but releasing excellent albums did not prevent bands from being discarded and forgotten because immersion in the mainstream had inflated the levels of sales and popularity bands were expected to achieve--becoming the true measurement of whether heavy metal was good or not for far too many people. Metal as a genre could never scale the astronomical heights industry insiders wanted it to reach, and as Sacrifice’s Rob Urbanti astutely points out, bands forgot where they came from and began to structure their sounds around what was in or out of vogue to please more people: I don’t think that had anything to do with thrash. I think that [grunge] maybe killed the glam scene, but as far as thrash goes, I think that death metal just kind of came up and took over because thrash was just becoming…well, money was becoming a driving force in some of the bands’ writing style and that’s not how it started….You just never thought you would make money off of the stuff, you did it because you like the music. It just came to a point where bands started making money and that became too much of a factor in thrash bands’ music….Money starts to take hold in underground music…unfortunately.5

Here is a clue needed to uncover one of the real reasons why heavy metal experienced a severe downturn in the early 1990s. Certainly, bands had long been tailoring their output to match the current standards that record companies discerned in their crystal balls (e.g. the contract-enforced sterility of Raven’s The Pack is Back), but as the stakes increased as heavy metal became more popular, the horizons of many bands expanded well beyond the underground ethos, and the carefree days of cranking out molten metal with likeminded brethren were over. Nevertheless, everything seemed to be right in the word of metal as the nineties commenced and was considered a triumphal moment at the time. Heavy metal had come into its own, and in May 8 1991 Deanne Stillman of the New York Times could correctly contend that “the subculture shows no signs of extinction” due to the “countless clubs nationwide, myriad journals, [and] fanzines” nurturing and sustaining the music.6 It also seemed that the underground had brazenly bulled its way into the mainstream without compromising any beliefs, if the press release for the Clash of the Titans tour was any indication: “How do these bands with no top-40 or album-rock airplay and scant video play launch a tour of the same arenas as Billy Joel and U2? Answer: Fans.”7 But the Clash of the Titans, featuring Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer and Alice in Chains, was a prominent manifestation of the infection that had settled into the marrow of metal when it became infused with the mainstream. Alice in Chains was a curious choice to round out the bill after Death Angel was forced to withdraw because of a bus accident and could be read as an ironic or appropriate addition, given what happened over the course of the following year, but the inclusion of a grunge band on a thrash package was a symptom of a much more fundamental disorder. Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax had sipped from the founts of publicity and desperately desired more notoriety, more exposure, more listeners, more money, and broadening their audience by taking Alice in Chains out on the road was only one exploratory part of this effort. Megadeth appearing on the Arsenio Hall Show and Anthrax’s cameo on Married with Children were also part of this bid for mainstream acceptance, and as the stages grew larger, so did the potential for a desertion of the underground ethos. Celebrity and the recognition accompanying it are highly addictive narcotics, and all three of the thrash units sense of self-importance became so big that childish tiffs erupted during photo shoots, tour buses and hotel rooms were transformed into fortresses of solitude, and members of the bands belittled one another in the press.8 On one of the few occasions when Dave Mustaine, Jeff Hanneman and Scott Ian managed to set aside their differences for a joint interview “after many bitter protestations,” the only thing the three could agree on was the need to make themselves seem superior to every other thrash band in existence. None of the guitarists would own up to playing thrash, because it was a “limiting term” and, according to Ian, you “could just turn on a speed drill and record it” to make the “ultimate thrash album.” Testament was the only group mentioned by name, but the “titans” spent the majority of the interview ridiculing the efforts of the innumerable “Slayer babies” or “Metallibabies” and refused to name a single thrash band that they considered to be good. Hanneman maintained that thrash was stale and unoriginal because the people aping his band lacked “self-worth,” but Mustaine provided the real motive for the all-out assault on thrash bands when he flippantly claimed the only thing separating Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth from their less-well-known peers was that “[w]e’re making money.”9 9 The Clash of the Titans was never about the fans, the music or metal. The tour was a calculated marketing venture that enabled the bands to tolerate one another to achieve a larger goal: padding each band’s pockets and publicity portfolios at the expense of others. When asked about the purpose of the tour, Dave Mustaine, never one to mince words back in the day, had a mission statement prepared: “We can give credibility back to this scene and prove that this music is marketable.” Words Tom Araya would have found comforting, since he was exasperated that negative coverage was “the only publicity [Slayer] got” in the mainstream media. Obviously, none of the “titans” cared about the “scene,” the bottom line was all that mattered, and Mustaine predicted that the absence of camaraderie on the tour would have little effect on the outcome: “We’re going to co-exist. We’re all going to make money, and the fans are going to be delighted.” The features in national and large regional papers across the nation proved to be a boon for the bands, and the tour did ensure that they would be able to stay active during the nineties, but any significant connections to the underground had been severed, and bands of a smaller stature never reaped any rewards from the high-profile activities of the “titans.”10 As for the remaining member of the “Big Four,” an examination of their journey from thrash to hard-edged radio-rock during this period supplies the reasons for the egotistical behavior of their little brothers. The sins of Metallica are legion and legendary, but despite the incessant cries of “sell-outs,” there has been little analysis of why or how the band actually sold out. Many regard the Black Album as a stylistic shift that did not place Metallica beyond the boundaries of metal and view the alternative imagery and music of the Load-era as the time when the band turned its back on heavy metal. In Sound of the Beast, an “authoritative” history of heavy metal, for example, Ian Christe presents the Black Album as the conclusion of a larger process of maturation metal was passing through that made America over into “a nation of headbangers--housewives, sailors, software programmers, major league ballplayers and all.”11 And Metallica merely expedited the populist metallic groundswell by “craft[ing] a thick sound befitting universal popularity--one that would carry to the back rows of big venues and punch through the speakers of tiny transistor radios.”12 In essence, according to Christe, it was a matter of acoustics instead of any crass calculus based on money or popularity employed by Metallica. This makes for a comforting bedtime story where everything ends happily ever after, but is shoddy history that conceals much more than it reveals. For, in reality, Metallica’s wild Billboard bullet ride to the top of the charts was the product of an industry-driven strategy which saw the most popular underground band in metal discard the values that had allowed them to succeed and embrace the norms of the mainstream in order to become a “serious” band receiving praise from rock journalists. 10 With the well-wide-of-the-mark gambit at remaining relevant as metal has become “safe” again that was St. Anger fresh in so many minds, it is hard for many metalheads to recall that at one time Metallica was the most important underground band in heavy metal. Of course, one could argue that Metallica ceased to be underground once they signed with Elektra and when …And Justice For All sold like hot cakes and ultimately went double platinum, it is almost foolhardy to place the band outside of the mainstream, but Metallica had not yet totally shed the values that made thrash a hard sell for record company executives. There was just something special about Metallica, and the furor over the release of the video for “One” was a sign of this status. Many underground bands had made videos, and Megadeth’s clip for “Peace Sells” had been voted on to the top-ten videos of the day numerous times and was even adopted by MTV as the opening music for their “news” segments, so it is odd and ridiculous that Metallica would be held to a different standard than Testament, Overkill or Nuclear Assault. But the band’s attitude and ideology before the “One” video was aired resonated with underground headbangers and made a hostile reaction to the act inevitable. In the years preceding the video, Metallica had consistently espoused anti-establishment views that marked the band as underground metallers who would never play the industry game to achieve success. Shortly after the release of Master of Puppets, the questions about what increased popularity meant already began to appear, and James Hetfield set the record straight: We’re doing it our way. We’ve always wanted to do it our way. I’m happy with it. We haven’t had to conform to any certain standards, record companies or whoever else wants us to do it. They haven’t molded us in a certain way, we did it all ourselves and that’s great.13

By this time Hetfield had also become comfortable with Metallica appearing in the pages of Hit Parader and Circus, coverage that had bothered him in the past, because it was “so widespread” and often indicated that “another band was blowing it” by watering down their sound--but he took comfort in the fact that the band was able to say what they “want to say in interviews and [magazines] are not twisting the shit around.”14 The preoccupation with doing it their own way was also expressed by avoiding videos, radio, and other promotional avenues designed to lure consumers to a product, and as late as March 1989, Lars Ulrich could assert that Metallica might be able to “reach a few more people” through the mainstream media, “but the bottom line is that it has to be done our way” with a relatively clean underground conscience.15 “One” did not make Metallica mainstream, but the glitz and glamour surrounding the single and video was intoxicating, and the seeds had been planted for what Christe correctly characterizes as radio-friendly songs. The size of the speakers or venues was not the reason behind the alterations though, since the roots of the plodding and bland beats of “Enter Sandman” are located in the reception 11 Metallica received from the mainstream rock press. Heavy metal has always been considered an obnoxious and loutish bastard child of rock ‘n’ roll that was not a genre to be taken seriously, and the 2 million copies of Justice flying from the shelves during the late eighties did nothing to change this fact. Most coverage of metal was typed out with tongue planted firmly in cheek and petty swipes at the accouterments and attitudes of headbangers were common. Moreover, as Metallica entered the mainstream radar, jibes such as “thrash… is an artform that makes much of speed and use of little else” and accusations of having “no class” due to the monotonal and monosyllabic nature of their songs were common reactions from rock journalists.16 And many variations of the following insulting opinion of Metallica’s performance were read or heard by the band: Most of what Metallica offered was indecipherable to anyone but the most avid followers. With the exception of “For Whom the Bells Tolls,” and a song that prompted listeners again and again to “obey your master…faster, faster,” [lazy idiot] each piece bore a striking resemblance to each other piece. The effect was not unlike standing at the door of a blast furnace.17

By Justice some journalists had made the effort to read the lyrics and listen to the albums and offered a more favorable opinion, presenting the band’s music as “power-chord poetry” deserving respectful consideration, but the damage had been done, and any approval was drowned out by a consistent chorus of jeers in Metallica’s mind.18 The first step to counter the criticism was to bring in Bob Rock, a Canadian producer responsible for the slick sounds found on Motley Crüe, Bon Jovi and Loverboy albums, to soften the band’s harsh attack. Metallica’s stated reasons for bringing this producer into the studio were many, but one perceptive reporter saw the handwriting on the wall: “Bob Rock’s interest in making Metallica’s music listener-friendly…actually coincided with the band’s own desire to burst out of thrash-metal’s buzzsaw prison.”19 Next, Hetfield, in this case, began to free Metallica from its “prison” by establishing distance between the band’s musical past and present trajectory: “People are going to label you forever. It really didn’t bother me so much; although the thrash title was one thing that did bother us a little….People would have preconceptions about that.”20 These moves proved to be successful: the press was ecstatic and executives regarded the product (the Black Album) as “just what the music industry need[ed]” to remain a viable force in entertainment.21 Metallica was also pleased with the results. Hetfield and Ulrich had quietly decided to quit “doing it their own way” in order to win acclaim from the journalists and bands who had previously spurned the band, and the Danish drummer exulted in the bands “artistic” success: I know there were a lot of bands who went, “Oh, yeah, Metallica, they sell a lot of records, but they can’t play or write songs….So this is a big ‘Fuck you’ to all the people who felt that way 12 for years and years and who came up and smiled to our faces, but as soon as they walked away, the were laughing at us--‘These guys. What’s this thrash shit?’”22

Metallica rapidly became a parody of the band it once was after “One” catapulted them into the klieg lights of the mainstream, and Ulrich and his bandmates began to believe that the only type of music worth playing was a style which would make it easier for “a lot of people…getting exposed to what we do.”23 Ulrich was no longer defiantly insisting that the “the public will change for us in a few years, instead of us changing for them” and intimating that the mainstream was “defective” and “needed to be replaced.”24 This was because Metallica had become part of the faceless hit factory and jumped into the fire of the hierarchical industry structure with both feet. Any allegiance to underground values or music was buried under derisive statements about thrash metal, former lyrical subjects and the listeners who felt betrayed. For one brief moment, it had seemed that an underground band who called for “crushing all deceivers [and] mashing non-believers” and would “go against the grain until the end” could retain their identity and integrity within the confines of the mainstream. However, Metallica shit on their hardcore supporters, lashed out at the scene from which they emerged, offered no support to up-and-coming traditional or thrash metal bands, and adjusted their sails to the prevailing industry winds that would carry them from one ridiculous transformation to another--leaving metalheads with an endless series of what ifs. But as the similar impulses behind the Clash of the Titans prove, placing all the blame at Metallica’s doorstep would be a simplification, and one could claim that the band’s decision to dive headfirst into the mainstream was the result of a profound sea change in the underground. In fact, the entire underground had linked its future to the music industry well before Metallica “matured” and was defenseless when executives, publicists and the press decided to redefine what it meant to be metal. At the first Foundations Forum in 1988, over one thousand metallers from bands, labels and PR agencies met with industry representatives in an effort to discover why the growing popularity of heavy metal had not been translated into “legitimacy” or “credibility.” James Ryan, the United Press International stringer who covered the three-day event, discovered that many of the movers and shakers in metal were at their wits end: Band members complained that MTV won’t air their videos (except on its late night Headbangers Ball program), publicists whined that magazine editors never return phone calls, and promotions people lamented that only a handful of specialty radio stations give airplay to heavy metal or hard rock.25

13 Some attendees blamed the inability of heavy metal to be accepted by the media and the industry to the unholy trinity of Satanism, drugs, and death that was wrongly regarded as the be all and end all of metal by outsiders. But Mike Greene, the president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and a member of the “Credibility and Respectability” panel, hit the nail squarely on the head when he told the assembled audience that the “mainstream establishment” remained aloof because heavy metal “music [was] saying things that society does not want to hear.”26 Ironically, Greene was a card-carrying member of the “mainstream establishment,” and his presence at the forum was not only evidence of how far the underground had strayed from its roots, but also a harbinger of things to come—because, despite the concerted effort to attain credibility, legitimacy and respectability, heavy metal in its undiluted incarnation would never become part of the mainstream. Nevertheless, many metallers at the Foundations Forum continued to methodically march towards the mirage of popular acceptance and failed to heed the wise and prophetic words of an unidentified metal disc jockey: “If this form of music tries to be respectable…then this form of music will disappear.”27 Metal did not just disappear, however, it was twisted and distorted into a freakish caricature that was packaged for wider public consumption, and the underground had become so wedded to delusional dreams of achieving mainstream levels of sales and exposure that it went out with a fizzle instead of a bang. As was noted above, the idea that “grunge killed metal” has become the orthodox interpretation of why heavy metal experienced a severe slump during the 1990s, but the truth is that grunge/alternative became metal for all intents and purposes. Metal could not just be discarded as a category of music, since it was a significant part of the music market, accounting for four of every ten rock sales in the late eighties, so industry insiders merely expanded the parameters of metal to encompass bands that were not metal.28 The designation “alternative metal” had been used sporadically by some journalists to describe “heavy” bands that were not traditional metal fare, but after the phenomenal sales of Nirvana’s Nevermind, the two terms were used interchangeably to create a new brand of metal that would be palatable to mainstream tastemakers.29 Industry insiders were jubilant that a tamer form of music which could be marketed as metal had arisen and wasted no time in making sure that listeners would come to the same conclusion. Julia Eisenthal, director of A&R at EMI, insisted that “the hybrid of these categories is a natural evolution” because “metal and alternative are about a vibe and place….[where] there are no rules only attitude.”30 Val Azzolt, VP/GM of Atlantic Records, also believed that the fictitious walls separating different genres had been broken down and was glad that the unavoidable had finally occurred: Heavy metal, alternative, hard rock, rap…I hate to sound boring, but it doesn’t make any difference. It’s so fucking obvious. I can’t figure out why it took so long: Its the same 14 music!...The same marketing tools are used—touring, press, in store play, word of mouth, listening parties, hip street magazines. I think it's the same thing: guitar-driven, guitar-oriented music.”31

The mainstream media was also ready for alternative and metal to become one and the same, but much of press merely shifted most of their attention to alternative and made the transition from one genre to the other appear “natural” to readers. Corey Levitan, editor of Circus from 1990-1993, for example, admitted years after the fact that covering metal in the magazine was a tedious chore made tolerable by the “free CDs, concert tickets and party invites,” and he saw little to no difference between Iron Maiden and Warrant or Britny Fox and Helloween.32 Levitan and the staff at Circus “really loved alternative rock,” and when he was given permission to alter the format of the magazine he was “delirious” with joy, paving the way for many people to exchange metal for alternative without a hitch.33 The industry line was that metal and alternative were the same, however, and the angry outbursts of alt-rock bands about being classified as metal were common occurrences during the early nineties. In a Rolling Stone piece on Nirvana, Chris Mundy made it a point to address the blurring of the lines between alternative and metal: “another misconception surrounding Nirvana is that the band plays, or even embraces heavy metal—a myth perpetuated by reams of rave reviews from metal mags and an appearance on MTV’s Headbangers Ball.”34 When Mundy asked about the coverage from metal media outlets, Chris Novoselic claimed that his band was “heavy” without being remotely metal and attributed the mischaracterization to desperation: “Metal’s searching for an identity because it’s exhausted itself, so they’re going to latch onto us.”35 Helmet was also often marketed as a metal band, and John Stainer “hated it when people mentioned metal in conjunction with us.”36 Yet another band often lumped into the metal category was Soundgarden, but Kim Thayil was adamant about metal being a juvenile impulse that had nothing to do with his band: “I never thought [metal] was cool. Are you talking about our youth or something? I think we stopped thinking it was cool before the band formed.”37 The confusion between which bands were metal, alternative and grunge was no accident or based on a misconception, since expanding the metal genre to include music that was not metal by any stretch of the imagination was a strategy the industry deployed to manufacture sales. After interviewing label executives, publicists and insiders great and small, Billboard’s Jim Bessman relayed the main message he heard to readers seeking information on trends in the industry: The traditional lines between these once distinct genres [metal and alternative] have blurred to a point where crossover is the only constant. Which is fine by anyone in the business of 15 exposing new music. As the walls tumble down, there is more space potentially available on playlists--not to mention record store shelves.38

The VP/GM of Roadrunner, Doug Keogh, agreed with this assessment and believed that the wave of the future should not be resisted: When there’s crossover between metal--a term of the past--and alternative, we don’t want to reinforce the boundaries between music, especially with the marketplace being less and less concerned with there kind of categories.39

Keogh’s reference to the marketplace as a disembodied entity exerting a force on music was the primary reason why the business-minded believed that the merging of metal and alternative was a salutary event for the industry. The early years of the 1990s were also the opening phases of the cutthroat process of top-to-bottom consolidation in the music business that has accelerated in recent years.40 Tower Records and Coconuts began to spread their chains across the country, and wherever a link landed, small regional and independent retailers closed up shop because they could not match the discounts and deals large, multi-location stores offered to customers.41 And as Relativity’s VP of sales Marc Offenbach observed, this larger development had an effect on how metal was bought and sold: Kids used to go to independent stores because that was where you found all the weird stuff that you couldn't buy in the chains. But I think those days are over. The chain buyers are really getting into the hipness factor of carrying metal. The chains are in the malls and that’s where the kids buy metal today.42

These large retailers wanted to simplify and streamline matters and were not interested in making distinctions between what was metal and what was not--only the “hipness factor” of any given release. Although some heavy metal bands soldiered on, their albums would never be described as being cool by anyone affiliated with the industry. When retailers, publicists and labels used the term “hip,” they were referring to bands that played music marketed as rap, funk, grunge, or alternative metal. These fast and loose genres became forms of music that chains and those servicing them pawned off as metal--a term that could now be employed to describe bands like The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Babes in Toyland, Ugly Kid Joe, Tribe After Tribe, Therapy?, Wool, and The Screaming Trees.43 The people who welcomed these “metal” bands with open arms were the same individuals metal labels, bands, and publicists had sought to impress with their seriousness, and when attention shifted away from heavy metal for once and for all in the mainstream, many erstwhile backers of metal followed suit. The larger independent labels that had begun as labors of love run out of bedrooms and were staffed by metal fans who had championed metal on college radio stations and in zines had become so invested in the mainstream vision of metal that they did not put up a fight when alternative 16 became the new metal. In fact, the labels did everything within their powers to aid and abet the orchestrated shift in taste by regurgitating the palaver of mainstream executives and adopting the industry line on the future of metal. Johnny Z wasted little time in readjusting the orientation of Megaforce, releasing “alternative metal” albums by Mindfunk, Skatenigs and Lucy Brown and telling anyone willing to listen that his label was no longer metal: “We’re a college label right now, and our band Nudeswirl is getting raves at colleges.”44 Roadrunner also did an about face and Monte Conner regarded metal as a “ghetto” and made a self-proclaimed “very conscious effort to get away from it” by dropping thrash and old-school death metal bands in the wastebasket and working with marketing director Derek Simon brought over from Columbia Records to make the label “much broader and…help [its] alternative-leaning artists grow.”45 The fallout from the alternative and metal fusion was far reaching: bands changed direction or broke-up, metal labels and magazines expired, listeners abandoned metal in droves and journalists and industry insiders declared metal to be dead once alternative was capable of standing on its own two feet. The mingling of the two genres never entirely disappeared though, and nu-metal bands like Korn, Coal Chamber and Limp Bizkit were often presented as the natural outgrowth of the continuing marriage between metal and alternative. Metal also mutated over the course of the 1990s in more “extreme” directions and gave birth to the death and black genres. These forms did grow out of the soil of metal, but contorted the music into battering and bruising shades that bore little resemblance to eighties heavy metal. In fact, many rabid supporters of death and black metal regarded heavy metal as an anachronism that deserved to die, and some journalists agreed with this argument. One of these fickle supporters was Ian Christe, who was so enraptured with the experimental and existential tangents of death and black metal that he wryly and wrongly claimed that “[h]eavy metal as it existed in the 1980s has vanished with nary a lipstick trace” and had been superseded by a something “far more interesting: An extremist successor driven by romantic yearnings and nihilism.”46 But the obituaries composed by people from all points of the musical compass for heavy metal proved to be premature. Scattered metallic remnants who remembered the power and promise of the golden age of metal stubbornly clung to their records or tapes, scoured magazines filled with more popular fare for the odd gem that tapped into the spirit of past days and began to walk the land again in packs as the Internet and the curiosity of a new generation allowed heavy metal to pull itself out of the grave that the industry had prepared for the metal genre--but was never able to fill with enough dirt. Still, the manufactured collapse of heavy metal in the early 1990s has had long-lasting and detrimental influences on the genre, and the impulses and ideas outlined above continue to warp metal into unnatural shapes today. 17

Metal Is a Business…and Business Is Good There is more to this world More to this world than they can see Dream of in their philosophy They always try, but they just cannot explain

Blaze “Nothing Will Stop Me”

One of the lingering aftereffects of the indiscriminate mingling of alternative and heavy metal in the early 1990s is the seamless convergence between what was once was divided into the mainstream and underground. Metal “journalists” and the marketing departments of major independent labels toss around the word “underground” and pay lip service to antagonistic traditions—but what is presented as a genuine underground is actually a tightly choreographed charade performed to make standard business practices look like something subversive: I don’t know if there’s integrity in music now. It used to be commercial music that had no integrity ‘cause of major labels. Now, independents are making musical moves on the bands, readjusting bands so they work down a path, a marketing plan. They readjust those bands if the path changes. They try to create styles, and if the style changes, they just readjust and tell the band to change the style. We’ve stayed away from that crap.1

The deceptive dance Bolt Thrower’s Gavin Ward has avoided is often obscured by wild moves and elaborate steps designed to disorient and distract the causal observer, frustrating attempts to pull back the curtain and watch the make-up being applied backstage. However, one can occasionally catch a glimpse of the forces at work in the marketing of what passes for metal today: In post-modern times…distinctions are categorically non-existent, representing nothing more than power relations and taste dictators, never leading to some objective, transcendental artistic truth. These parameters are behind us and all that is left to analyze is the mere concrete question of what works and what context makes it work.2

Avi Pitchon’s high-flown discourse on music appreciation is nothing more than the same genre goulash sought by the mainstream industry during the years when alternative and metal were being molded into one formless lump of easily consumed music. This is not surprising, considering that the verbal gymnastic routine executed by Pitchon was part of a larger advertising campaign Terrorizer conducted to convince readers that the sickly-sweet and pompous Eurovision hard rock doled out by Nightwish was heavy metal. Pitchon’s review of Once was merely one component in a massive marketing barrage of live reviews, features, interviews and space leased by Nuclear Blast that was in full gear during the last half of 2004.3 The immediate goal was to sell magazines based on Nightwish’s growing prominence, but the core message was that the band managed to “cover all demographics” by 18 appealing to a wide cross-section of metal consumers: “old supporters from the metal scene, gothic girlies in black velvet dresses plus a surprisingly large number of people wearing shirts by Darkthrone, Emperor, Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth.”4 Terrorizer’s pandering to whatever happens to be popular is not an isolated phenomenon and is the natural byproduct of a metal media that cannot critically examine the past or the present. An egregious example is Ian Christe’s treatment of the alternative tidal wave which subsumed and supplanted heavy metal in the early nineties—since the lone historian of metal, despite his earlier acknowledgement of heavy metal’s disappearance, reproduces the industry-sanctioned history of metal. In Sound of the Beast, heavy metal becomes a malleable and indefinable impulse that permeates everything and anything conniving industry executives and clueless rock journalists decided to classify as being metal. Christe cuts metal loose from its moorings and interprets the misuse of the term as an indication of the genre’s triumph: “The influence of heavy metal after the 1980s was so great that virtually every new band bowed to its sound, no matter what the intentions.”5 This sleight of hand allows Christe to compose an unbroken narrative in which the Butthole Surfers, Soundgarden, Jane’s Addiction, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were evidence that “the key to survival in the 1990s was adaptation and transformation.”6 Christe even goes so far as to echo the market-informed notion of Nirvana being a metal band by claiming that Nevermind was a “Beatles-influenced version of heavy metal[’s] screaming full throttle” sound.7 In the end, Christe clumsily kneads grunge, alternative and metal into a shapeless mass of music in order to present the moment that inaugurated metal’s darkest period as a success story by claiming that “[a]fter courting mainstream status throughout every phase of its rebellion, the underground was finally charging aboveground” in the early nineties.8 Christe was writing for the largest possible audience and offering an argument about the nature of metal would have limited the potential number of readers, an approach that causes him to use the industry-approved measurements of heavy metal’s existence in Sound of the Beast—gold records, Soundscan numbers and Pollstar figures.9 This methodology leads Christe to not declare metal in a depression until the middle of the 1990s, and even then he lists the sales figures of Slayer, Pantera and Megadeth to argue that the downturn “was the creation of television executives” who canceled Headbangers Ball or perhaps it was the managers at “Tower Records [who] put its spiked wristbands on sale,” the only other piece of hard evidence Christe can find.10 And there are many more times when the ridiculous and counterintuitive vie with one another for supremacy in Christe’s chapter on the “anti-metal era.” Korn’s, Slipknot’s and Limp Bizkit’s, all mainstream nu-metal monstrosities, “debut albums in the mid-1990s showed that the heavy metal spirit survived in ways that were increasingly hard to identify,” while Metallica rivaling the sales generated by The Rolling Stones 19 becomes proof that “heavy metal had become the new rock ‘n’ roll” by the end of the century.11 Christe’s glowing historical account also reads numerous bands and lives out of existence by failing to convey the actual extent of heavy metal’s collapse and ignoring the denim and leather dynamics that made Jeff Wagner declare that Fearless Undead Machines was “pure metal in the absolute, and those proclaiming the genre’s death have been officially silenced.”12 The industry-inspired mode of analysis in Sound of the Beast, however, is not a quirk or an oddity, since all the “journalists” writing in metal magazines are not independent agents capable of fashioning an identity separate from the business of selling metal to the highest bidder. In a recent thread on the BW&BK message board, one member had the temerity to make a negative comment about the outlandish value-added scheming of Nuclear Blast that is designed to bilk buyers seeking an artist’s recorded output and send shoppers scurrying to the stores on the release date. The offending super-special-limited device this time around was a Sony green apple sniffle disc version of Cathedral’s The Garden of Unearthly Delights--a technology the corporation breathlessly describes as a “phenomenon” useful for “promotional purposes.” But the conversation did not move past the first expletive-filled negative eruption, because the level-headed Aaron Small (BW&BK and Metal Maniacs) stepped in to set the record straight: “this packaging will be of huge appeal to collectors and is generating press for the band. So obviously [Nuclear Blast] are doing their job--we’re discussing the record.” Unfortunately, the pros and cons of compact discs that smell of green apple are beyond the scope of this article, but the reasons behind Small’s response that sounds as if it was fed to him by Nuclear Blast’s marketing department are worth exploring in greater detail.13 The spirited defense of the label’s marketing strategies Small felt compelled to conduct is due to the utter absence of walls between the business and the media in the coverage of metal. Writers for the major magazines exist at the sufferance of the labels purchasing advertising, and this arrangement colors every aspect of what we will charitably continue to call the metal press. But to frame this symbiosis as a process that journalists reluctantly engage or are entangled in against their will would be a distortion, since it is a reciprocal relationship from which writers derive numerous benefits. Promos, backstage passes, trips to Florida, England and Brazil, and parties where the alcohol flows for free are just some of the fringe benefits that labels provide to metal journalists through direct payments or the indirect disbursements that are known as advertisements. The hand-in-glove partnership between the media and record companies does raise questions about the reviewing process, but among the more insidious effects are that labels run roughshod over the careers of bands, package and promote metal anyway they please, cheat higher-quality bands out of coverage and shift allegiances with money as the prime motivation without fear of being called to account by an independent press. In fact, to act as a 20 watchdog or a whistleblower would not be in a journalist’s best interests, because the career path of people writing about metal from magazines to labels is well-trod. And the number of former and current journalists whose work in zines and glossies served as training for spitting out promotional boilerplate is large and growing--even the kvlt-as-fukk Nathan T. Birk who is fond of petulantly declaring his “hate [for] most of the people in this forsaken “industry”--cocksuckers, nearly every one, of all stripes” and denigrating anything with a “street team behind it” or “pimped in multiple-page ads” in year-end lists for all in the industry to see could not turn down a position as a PR lackey at Napalm Records.14 Journalism as a method of advancement in the metal music industry is an accepted and time- honored practice, but many of the consequences are not apparent due to the shroud of secrecy surrounding business matters at magazines and labels. The lack of any commentary on this practice, however, is one effect of this incestuous association, and the veil obscuring industry matters will never be pulled back to reveal even hints of what transpires behind it as long as the press and record companies are joined at the hip. Moreover, the cozy union of what are considered two opposing poles in real newsrooms shows no signs of slowing and has become so transparent of late that some journalists have begun to employ terms such as “promotion” or “PR” in their pieces to let readers know they are aware of the commercial environment--but the acknowledgement is only a cynical ploy to boost their own credibility without touching on subjects that would risk a reprisal from labels’ advertising departments. The most prominent and instructive case of a writer moving from a magazine to a corporation is the long march of Marco Barbieri from the underground into the mainstream. Barbieri started out with a zine defiantly called No Glam Fags in the late 1980s that became Ill Literature in the mid- 1990s, but was immersed in the business side of music from almost the beginning as a manager and a student majoring in Entertainment Management. This résumé served as a springboard into the executive ranks and after spending the first half of the 1990s handling publicity and A&R at Metal Blade, Barbieri moved on to Century Media Records where he eventually became the VP/GM of one of the largest independent labels in the world. Once ensconced in this position of power, Barbieri applied what he had been taught in the college classroom to make Century Media over into an underground label with a mainstream soul. Music management programs are geared towards establishing a professional network to smooth the way into the workplace--making learning about the business a process of passive inquiry where industry practices are not questioned and future employees are urged to “sit back, relax, and open [their] mind” so academically accredited managers and lawyers can “pour in all [they] need to know 21 about the music business.”15 One lesson Barbieri absorbed was that the metal underground is a backwater of profits and popularity in the vast mainstream sea of the music business, and he has set his sights for fairer shores: “We are continually trying to find new and creative ways of marketing albums and achieving more and more clout in the mainstream for [our] diehard underground bands.”16 Seeking clout in the mainstream, however, requires the jettisoning of underground values, and one marketing scheme Century Media is participating in reduces metal into a commodity devoid of meaning. In the December 2005 issue of Revolver, Vestal Watches ran an ad featuring slinky and sultry Christina Scabbia wearing a fedora with a “I’m fucking metal” button pin stuck into the hatband and provided no copy to sully the artistic shot. The advertisement did direct readers to the Vestal website and when Internet surfers made their way to the site, they found a multimedia presentation for “metal” and “leather” product lines that resembled a webzine. Tourdates, interviews, and press were all just a click away, and a streaming audio jukebox with songs by Century Media/Nuclear Blast artists Arch Enemy, Nevermore, The Haunted and Hammerfall was kindly supplied as muzak to enhance the extreme shopping experience. Upon further exploration, the intrepid Internet warrior discovered in a rambling statement that sounds like it should be taped to a sneeze-guard protecting a Chinese buffet serving Industry’s Delight and Marketing Director’s Spicy Chicken that any reservations about using metal to hawk a faceless product are groundless due to the values watches and metal share: Vestal collections are more than just timepieces--they are accessories that fine tune style and expression. Vestal watches are products of a lifestyle accessories that complement the energy and personal sensibilities of the music-inspired individual….Vestal’s progressive philosophy in accessory design eliminates the conceptual lines separating music, fashion and youth culture, opening the door for previously unexplored crosspollination amongst multiple genres.17

If this paragraph was polished up a bit by a secretary or publicist, it could have been uttered by an executive during the heady days of the early 1990s, or Barbieri in a reflective mood: I've gone through the whole thrash, grunge, glam, death, black. I mean, [No Glam Fags/Ill Literature] has been there through it all, and it’s never been about one scene, and I think that's another reason why it’s survived and existed for so long….I feel like the nu-metal stuff is a part of the scene and should be covered.18

The “scene” is king in the metal music industry--everything done in the name of it is excusable and turning metal into one more commodity to be auctioned off for cross-marketing rights is acceptable behavior. And as “the scene” grows, so do the money-grubbing noses sniffing around the trough, and many of the people currently singing the praises of metal will abandon it once something more profitable or popular comes strolling down the catwalk with a come-hither stare. Because the idea that metal is interchangeable with a fashion accessory transforms it into something that has no core 22 meaning or substance, something anyone can take off or put on depending on what is “in” one year or “out” the next—a state of affairs making commitment and dedication anachronisms that complicate marketing campaigns. Barbieri’s talk of “the scene” that resonates with people old enough to recall the golden age of heavy metal, however, is a smokescreen thrown up to hide the more unseemly aspects of the metal music business at Century Media Records. There is no sense of solidarity or unity rooted in common purpose at the heart of the label, since the crass calculations of what will make consumers most aware of a product is the driving force behind every move the corporation makes. Metal is an investment that the label needs to earn a return on, and the magic surrounding the music is no longer a part of the equation for Barbieri: I have gotten so jaded having something like 10,000 recordings in my collection, seeing hundreds and hundreds of bands live and being surrounding with metal non-stop for the past decade. I feel everything has been done and young bands just can’t compare to the classics when it comes down to sheer enjoyment.19

Without faith in new music arousing the emotions and trapped in the grips of an apathetic funk continually reinforced by a surfeit of the free music and free shows journalists and label employees take for granted, Barbieri continues signing bands, releasing music and shaping the future of metal using profits, sales and promotion as the only index of what is good or bad. Bands are only components to be plugged into the marketing matrix which spits out revenue, and it matters little whether metal musicians exist to create new material as far as Ula Gehret, Century Media’s European label manager and former Metal Maniacs contributor, is concerned: If I had a label myself, I would just want to do reissues. That’s the ideal label situation--you don’t have to baby-sit the bands, you don’t have to worry about touring or studio problems, it’s really just a matter of acquiring, reshaping, reassembling and re-releasing. You don’t have to deal with all the headaches like the A&R guys at the labels do. It’s almost like dealing with a Greek mythology or a dead language--you can interpret it and shape it however you want.20

These are the people entrusted with the task of “leading fans to musical fulfillment with the best of all genres of heavy music” by the blind and thoughtless lottery that is “the scene.”21 It is little wonder that the words “heavy metal” do not appear in this line from the label’s self-congratulatory company history, since the values of the underground have been exchanged for the cash nexus of the mainstream and the category “heavy music” allows much more market flexibility and advertising wiggle-room than a form of music with troublesome living traditions and ideals like heavy metal. 23

Adam Bennati The Lack

Mike Conte Adam Bennati

24

Christina Scabbia Vestal Ad Impact

Leander Gloversmith Hiding With Girls

25 The New Indie Order is Here

Feeling the pain as it rips through my brain Twisting what’s left of my mind Tearing the same, this blood burning flame Decaying all it can find Banging your head, stuck in the dread, Leaving the posers behind Powers you see, the power you need Nerves and bones we grind

Overkill “Hammerhead”

Another lasting legacy of the fusion of alternative and metal is that the supercilious scorn rock journalists once heaped upon heavy metal from the embankments of the mainstream is now considered humorous and insightful criticism in today’s corrupted underground. Writers who at least evince a passing interest in heavy metal are scarce in the major metal magazines, but cynical hacks run amok, mocking those who dare to treat metal as a serious matter. Toeing the industry line that metal is meaningless and merely music no different than that produced in any other genre, these journalists malign traditional metal values at every turn in order to build a new groundbreaking, forward-looking future over the defiled corpse of the past. To these cosmopolitan elitists, true metalheads are morons who are clogging up the evolutionary arteries of metal by raising protests when alternative acts are marketed as metal and attempting to preserve and pass on heavy metal as a craft to be learned instead of a commodity to be sold. The critics who lash out at the narrow-mindedness of metalheads are all cut from the same sophisticated cloth and their snide commentary is as formulaic and hackneyed as the lines spit out by advertisers. Two of the most prominent representatives of this school are J. Bennett (Decibel and Revolver) and Kevin Stewart-Panko (Terrorizer, Decibel, Metal Maniacs and Unrestrained!), and the similarities between the lines of attack the two deploy are striking. Bennett believes that metallers who “can’t grasp the concept that it’s okay to be equally as psyched out about At the Gates and Stevie Wonder” are “closet fascists.”1 Stewart-Panko, less reserved and inclined to trivialize history, hits the same note by claiming that “the intolerance and energy that goes into decoding, deciding and bitching whether a particular band falls into some strictly defined code of metal is on par with Nazi foot soldiers checking for blue eyes and blond hair in their recruiting for the Hitler Youth.”2 In a more mundane mood, Stewart-Panko maintains that the “metalheads [who] believe the world revolves around [their] musical tastes” are “hirsute dudes in their parents’ basements bitching about shit they actually know 26 little about.”3 While Bennett regards metalheads dedicated to the music their nickname is derived from as losers who need to be informed that they “really can’t live in [their] mom’s basement forever.”4 ` These reoccurring, threadbare themes not only highlight the pack-journalist mentality permeating the metal media, but also show how little attention each one devotes to the subject that allows them broadcast their half-baked opinions to the world. For the journalism Bennett and Stewart- Panko practice is written in a vapid vacuum where anything beyond the promo and band bio cannot be incorporated into their work, and both critics failed to comment on a significant shift in the alternative- metal continuum due to their insularity. In the past half-decade or so, all genres of metal have experienced a rebirth and the number of metal magazines on bookstore shelves, old bands cut down in their prime reforming, and labels releasing new material have multiplied at a maddening rate. The bad has certainly outweighed the good, but the renewed interest and expanding infrastructure has created an atmosphere where heavy metal bands have a chance to make records and play out sporadically. At the same time that new and old metalheads were rejoicing in the metallic renaissance, the genre was sucked into the cultural meat grinder of kitschy nostalgia and became a hip and ironic signifier of self- aware coolness. Motörhead and Motley Crüe shirts appeared on fashion runways, VH-1 churned out titillating tripe such as the 100 Most Metal Moments and refugees from the alternative-punk-grunge ranks began to dip their toes into the waters of metal. These farcical larks, however, became serious when metal was declared to be “safe” again by the alt-rock intelligentsia: Metal, having for the most part become a dumb exercise in excess, probably deserved the death knell delivered by grunge in the ‘90s. But a new, smarter and more intense breed of heavy stuff has arisen lately unbeknownst to those not paying attention.5

This was due to the “hipster contingent” on the east coast deciding that metal was cool again since “bands like Mastodon and High On Fire have given metal the green light” among the indie-rock crowd and alternative is becoming metal all over again as journalists like Kevin Stewart-Panko and J. Bennett lead the charge.6 The market forces are different in this particular instance, since alt-rock and post-punk bands are eagerly grabbing metal’s coattails in an effort to ride the current wave of popularity, instead of resisting being forced into the boundaries of the genre. One example out of the increasing number of bands participating in the “punk-metal-pop evolution” in an effort to capitalize on metal’s growing market share is Early Man.7 The band consists of two veterans of the indie/punk scene in Columbus, Ohio, who stuck their whetted thumbs in the air and moved to New York City to participate in the metal scene the hipsters are assembling out east. Guitarist Mike Conte and Drummer Adam Bennati were greeted with glee by the indie establishment because Early Man’s “heavy stuff” allowed them to 27 become “heshers” for a night. Thrilled by experiencing the adventure of musical slumming without compromising their hip credentials, indie scenesters declared the band to be a sensation, and Matador Records, the home of Cat Power, Belle and Sebastian and Yo La Tengo, recognized the potential of the cross-dressing sounds of Early Man, signed the band to a contract and released Closing In. Matador marketed the band’s debut album as classic, traditional and true metal that was faithful to the golden-age sounds by fusing Judas Priest, Celtic Frost, Mercyful Fate, Diamond Head, Motörhead and Metallica.8 Indie media outlets were deluged with promos and press kits to initiate a buzz, and the band received a free pass from many writers that would not know molten metal if their it was poured down their throats. However, the trendy and hip “metal” equivalents of Spin and Rolling Stone--Revolver and Decibel--were serviced, and the caustic and contemptuous J. Bennett was the promotional point man for Closing In in both periodicals. In his Decibel review, Bennett adopted the demeanor of the world-weary cynic who was familiar with the music industry hype machine to supplement the genteel Generation-X/GQ intellectual pretensions the magazine aspires to under the editorship of Albert Murdian. The review begins with a description cribbed from the bio and a word of warning: The Decibel Powers That Be have seen fit to call bullshit on Early Man’s suspiciously hipster- ironic take on the quintessential ’80s metal triumvirate of Metallica’s Kill ’Em All, Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz and Diamond Head’s Lightning to the Nations…and for good reason.9

Bennett then calls into question the truthfulness of Conte and Bennati’s story about being Pentecostals who were deprived of rock music until they were nineteen and eventually declares it to be nothing but PR shenanigans. This is the only suspicion raised, and the suspected promotional tomfoolery is not enough to keep Bennett from doling out more repetitious praise to Early Man: But none of that will matter when the A&R people at every commercially-minded independent metal label in the universe hear Closing In and realize they basically slept on the best Metallica album since Master of Puppets, as sung by Ozzy Osbourne and Sean Harris, with Brian Tatler on lead guitar. And there’s nothing even slightly bullshit about that.10

By the time the end of the year rolled around, Bennett was still reproducing information provided by the label (this time he also mentioned the instruments listed in the bio), but was now a unrepentant believer in the band’s authenticity: “Uptight hard-liners may call bullshit on Early Man’s suspiciously ironic exposition of NWOBHM riffs and classic eighties thrash, but Closing In might be the sickest Metallica record since Master of Puppets.”11 Bennett’s aural analysis of Early Man is bullshit based on the words of PR flacks. There are a few fleeting nods to Metallica and some stilted NWOBHM-influenced leads, but Closing In is merely 28 souped-up stoner rock. Early Man is nothing more than a combination of the rough rock of Winnebago Deal (another two-man outfit without a bassist) and the smooth-Sabbathisms of Sheavy (Conte also echoes Ozzy’s vocals, but without the heart behind Steve Hennessey’s delivery). If stoner rock is your bag, you could find this interesting--but the band’s shtick about being true metal warriors tapping into the traditions of the 1980s makes them a prefabricated act taking advantage of the renewed interest in metal. It only takes a little bit of time and effort to research Conte and Bennati’s past to realize that Early Man is insincere hipster hucksterism that would appeal to coffee-house intellectuals in disguise like J. Bennett. Bennati and Conte claim to have served time in “underground” bands in Columbus together, and they most certainly did--just not the kind that their classic metal posturing would indicate. The chronology and lineage of the duo is confusing, because the statements made during and about the period before Early Man came into existence conflict, but the bands Conte and Bennati were involved in at one time or another in Columbus were Blow-Up and The Lack--groups that Columbus Alive, the city’s alternative mag, used the following genres to describe: post-punk, industrial hardcore, no wave and ambient electronica.12 Bennati, who played drums in The Lack and supplied electronics for Blow-Up, grew his hair out and donned a jean jacket, but his real roots lie in different fields of music, and his top-five records list reveal where they can be found: “My Bloody Valentine Loveless; New Order Movement; David Bowie Ziggy Stardust; Danzig S/T; Morrissey Viva Hate.”13 Bennati also recalls dressing up as “David Bowie for Halloween when [he] was in the third grade,” proving the Pentecostal tale to be false, but this fib pales in comparison to the lies about the two being dyed-in-the- wool true metalheads, and everywhere one looks evidence of fakery is found.14 For example, at one time Dave Pajo, a post-rock icon who has “jammed” with Slint, Tortoise, Billy Corgan, and Will Oldham played bass in the band and is no thrash, heavy or street metaller by any standards. Early Man are opportunistic alternative musicians posing as metalheads Cashing In on what they regard as a fad, and once it is not “safe” to play what lazy fools and deceitful pimps pass off as heavy metal, Conte and Bennati will pawn the instruments (“a ‘73 Gibson SG and a white ‘84 Jackson Randy Rhodes Flying-V [and] a five-piece Zickos glass acrylic drum kit manufactured in 1972 only”) prominently listed in the band bio to bolster their assumed identity through material goods for whatever tools are needed for the next trend. The inability to discern the difference between honest metal and fabricated metal is also a flaw in the work of Kevin Stewart-Panko. In a review of the 2004 Northern Lights Festival, Stewart-Panko trashed Goat Horn as an “utterly redundant” group of “retro-thrashers” (a damning charge in his book) and decided to dust off his old-school bona fides to underscore his authority: 29 I grew up on ‘80s metal and rolled in the same neighborhood as Sacrifice and Slaughter. I saw all this happen twenty years ago and seeing some band looking, acting, covering and stealing from Toronto’s metal past and presenting it as Toronto’s future rubs me the wrong way.15

Anyone who follows the traditional metal underground is familiar with Goat Horn and knows that this judgment could not be more wrong. Goat Horn are not retro-thrashers or thrashers. Sacrifice’s “Re- Animation” is a song the band covers, but the core of their sound is just simple and straight-up heavy metal that cannot be filed under one of the many offshoots the genre has produced. Metalheads have recognized the magical and ecumenical spirit of the eighties that the band channels in innovative ways, and Goat Horn has been accepted as brothers, playing the Classic Metal Fest and slated to appear at Headbanger’s Open Air this summer. This is because the Canadian trio is a sincere throwback--in sound and belief: I see the year 2004 as 1984 really. I was born 20 years too late and therefore see what we are doing as the future. Our recording process is much influenced by the high-production values that once made records sound great. Records these days don’t pull me in with the sound, they don’t gel with my brain or something. I just hear the fakeness of the computer and don’t sense the sweat or juice of effort going into it.16

And Jason Junop and his bandmates have spilled their share of sweat by cranking out heavy metal in the old-fashioned way, releasing their own material, building up an audience without the assistance of media blitzes and remaining true to themselves and metal: This is our number one true passion all the way. Real Metal or no Metal! If a label like ‘Media offered us a deal, it would have to be on our terms, otherwise we’re not interested. We know where we want to take this band and unless someone shares our vision--we’re fine doing it ourselves.17

Of course, Junop’s true metal testimonial is the kind of talk that sends Stewart-Panko into fits, and anyone who has the gall to insist that there is such a thing as “real metal” is a nothing less than a Nazi in his warped conception of how heavy metal works. This is due to the fact that Stewart-Panko “grew up on ‘80s metal” and continued to “grow” until he moved beyond such immature fare and is now the champion of the kinds of forward-looking and groundbreaking metalcore bands that the suits who are bastardizing the name of Combat Records would sign. If confronted with his unerring support of bands who have a tenuous metallic character, Stewart-Panko will throw out titles and names such as Bonded By Blood and Exciter--but these are only musty relics of a past era he waves around to dispel any doubts about his credentials and uses as wards to keep modern bands from taking too much inspiration from obsolete forms of metal. 3 Inches of Blood at the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, on the other hand, received rave reviews from Stewart-Panko, because the band “bridges the gap between traditional metal and 30 new school hardcore” by writing “songs about orcs and pirates that did not have [him] pashawing in disgust.”18 These fellow countrymen of Goat Horn, however, are one more band who has hopped on the metal bandwagon after it has become “safe” to play again. Bassist Brian Redman acknowledges that he passed through a “too punk for metal phase” that ended when enough of the people around him no longer regarded metal as idiotic: We’d sit in the park drinking and break out a Dio tape, but it was a guilty secret. But once people grow out of trying to have acceptance from their peers, they can enjoy metal for what it is….For a while, there were kids who liked old metal but didn't think it was cool enough to fully embrace it, so they played it off as ironic. They don't have to hide behind that anymore.19

Considering that Redman played bass in the Seattle straight-edge hardcore band Trial during the latter half of the nineties, the stories of drinking in the park as a youngster seem strange, but the contortions he has to go through to claim metal without praising it unequivocally is revealing. Metal is only a thin veneer for Redman, and 3 Inches of Blood is a group of ex-hardcore, metalcore, and sludgecore players who have abruptly found their metal roots and joined forces to “tread on the bleached bones of exhausted genres,” according to the band’s bio on their official Roadrunner site. But signing to Roadrunner forced the band to engage in more twisting and turning maneuvers, because their label was responsible for the some of the trends (“Nu-metal,” “Hair-metal,” “Emo,” “Screamo,” “Post-hardcore,” and “Metal-core”) 3 Inches of Blood is here to “vanquish.” Some PR hack over at Roadrunner must have alerted Jamie Hooper, the vocalist who provides the metalcore screams for the two-vocalist band, to this fact and provided him with the proper script: We’re kind of in a weird position, considering the more modern leaning line-up of that label. We’re nu-metal’s greatest enemies, so it’s a weird juxtaposition for us. But let’s just say that we fit in very well with their back catalogue--Annihilator, Pestilence, King Diamond, Suffocation. We’re very pleased to be a part of that.20

The ridiculousness of this is almost too much to bear. Here we have a band signed to a label responsible for undermining metal by embracing alternative, nu-metal and metalcore and dropping the acts listed above long ago who are going to fight Monte Conner’s market-driven vision by grafting metalcore onto traditional metal--it makes no goddamn sense, unless it is a manufactured rebellion. As a matter of fact, the bio is merely empty chest-pounding, because 3 Inches of Blood have appeared on the MTV2 Headbangers Ball vol. 2 CD alongside Korn, Avenged Sevenfold, Killswitch Engage, The Agony Scene, Slipknot, Atreyu and have shared the stage with Himsa, Horse the Band, The Black Dahlia Murder and The Darkness. Then again, it does not have to make sense, because Stewart-Panko and almost all other “metal” journalists could care less about raising--let alone exploring--such matters. Whatever the labels and bands present as the truth is the truth, and investigating claims or examining 31 events is not part of the job--only wading through the free material sent by the labels and whipping up some words based on it. So, in the end, the cutting and caustic criticism of J. Bennett and Kevin Stewart-Panko is not very daring or dangerous, and they have every right to listen to whatever they please, but no right to call themselves metal journalists. 32 Traditional Metal (The Commercial Chains Are On)

You try so hard to convince us you are true Well let me tell you we are looking right through you Everything you say you hate is what you are Popularity and lies can take you far

Scepter “Payback’s a Bitch”

The ability of trend-driven bands to pose as traditional metalheads fighting those who pour poison into the wellsprings of heavy metal is also underwritten by journalists who pose as the guardians of true metal. In the past few issues of Terrorizer, “classic metal values” has become a catchphrase used to describe the approach of bands swimming against the metalcore tide. The writers typing out these terms, however, often fail to provide concrete examples of classic values. This lack of a coherent definition allows them to wield the words in a free and easy fashion that turns classic values into little more than advertising lingo utilized to deceive the gullible and uninformed. For example, Leander Gloversmith bemoans the prevalence of “today’s industry schmoozefests” that contravene the principles of “traditional metal’s decade most glorious” and insists that “it’s been too long since artists in the limelight have truly pursued the ideals of yesteryear [and that] bands brave enough to raise a resounding middle finger to the industry rat race are few and far between.”1 Yet, despite this sordid state of current affairs, Gloversmith finds hope in these industry-polluted days because there is a group of young bands who adhere to the values from “the days of yore” that includes The Black Dahlia Murder (TBDM). But it just so happens that TBDM are neck-deep in the “industry rat-race” and are doing everything they can to win by tossing traditional values to the wind. Trevor Strand, the band’s vocalist, talks a good game though, and picks the proper targets to attack: A lot of metalcore is obviously Swedish-influenced, but it’s so bastardized, so inbred, those bands don’t even understand themselves where their roots lie. And a lot of today’s heavy bands seem to be just products, nothing heartfelt at all; they’re too safe to even be considered metal, in my opinion, too watered down.2

Here is someone who seems to be a straight-shooter and willing to reach back across time to resurrect the values of the past and right the wrongs of metal. In the very same article, however, Strand states that his band will not be the one to buck the conventional commercial wisdom: The thing is, heavy music is cool again right now. MTV’s playing heavy stuff again, and it’s really big with young kids who are at high school and college age. I guess it’s enjoying a resurgence, but I’m not so naïve to see that it’ll be in a recession again soon, so we have to make the most of it while we can. To be honest, I’m also not so naïve that I can’t see it was 33 probably money that got us on to this tour, simple as that. I’d like to say that the industry is waking up to the potential of extreme music, but the truth of it is, Metal Blade bought us onto these Ozzfest dates because they know that we’ll be playing to 8,000 new people every day, and who can blame them? It’s a great opportunity.3

Strand has no classical metal values--he merely wants to make as much money as can and not stir up any waves to disrupt the fast track of success TBDM is careening down by appearing at Ozzfest and being the darling of the moment in the pages of “extreme music” magazines that cover “heavy music.” There is not an ounce of metallic value in Strand’s acquiescence to business as usual and his reasoning resembles that of the insiders who believe that metal is a trend or a fad to milk cash from while the getting is good. In addition, the attack on “today’s heavy bands” and “products” is ludicrous due to the band’s own material machinations and location in the metalcore camp, but TBDM is only a small part of a strange and contradictory storyline Terrorizer composed to distance the magazine from one trend and create another one out of thin air. In spite of the "extreme" claptrap about standing apart from the mainstream, Terrorizer is a magazine that wants to reach high “sales efficiencies” in order to get the greatest possible “return on [its] investment.”4 In recent months, the quest for increased circulation has become blatant, and most of the covers and lead stories have been reserved for the bands making the strongest promotional push into the mainstream market (Mastodon, Arch Enemy, Children of Bodom and Opeth). Past market trends have also received their turn in the spotlight, and metalcore was a genre that Terrorizer believed would be the next wave of metal to sweep across the face of the globe. Terrorizer devoted numerous reviews, interviews and slots on the Fear Candy CD (one of which was supplied by Revelation Records) to metalcore and in a celebration of Trustkill Records’ tenth anniversary, Ian Glasper saluted the label as an ambassador of a healthy genre within a sound industry: “Alongside Victory, Revelation, Ferret, and Equal Vision…Trustkill has been releasing most of the great US metalcore in recent years.”5 Glasper saw no signs of US metalcore weakening and believed that Trustkill was going to be an underground fixture for years to come, since the bands being amassed under the label’s banner were an “eclectic and invigorating gathering of talent…that looks unlikely to abate any time soon.”6 Avi Pitchon was also overwhelmed with the dizzying amount of solid and spectacular metalcore acts, but was somewhat worried about the increasing number of good bands: I often blame myself for being a bit jaded and overworked….The critic should stay alert even in times like these when there are simply too many good melodic death metal core bands. Yet the problem is subtler: there are too many decent such bands.7

And the revelation emerging from Pitchon’s critical anxiety, that there were not too many bad bands, merely a glut of good ones, ultimately became the basis of a harsher editorial line at Terrorizer, and 34 Leander Gloversmith, the magazine’s resident metalcore export, performed an about-face as Pitchon’s cause for concern became a classic metal crusade. Gloversmith is a product of the metalcore scene, playing in the Korn-inspired band Imprint that morphed into the now defunct emo, post-punk and metalcore group Hiding With Girls. Drawing on the knowledge of all things “core” and “metal” he acquired in these bands, Gloversmith landed at Terrorizer and became the beat reporter covering the three-word bands who scream about the intrapersonal pain caused by interpersonal relationships. The assignment was carried out with the zeal of a committed scenester, and Gloversmith gushed over Shadows Fall “slamming full force into one of the most menacingly groovy riffs since At the Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul inspired a generation of hardcore bands to get their thrash on,” hailed Caliban’s mastery of the “21st century metalcore formula (walls of metallic riffery tied to pit-inflaming breakdowns, tastefully iced with goosebump inducing melodic refrains),” and was positively delighted that “metallic hardcore [is] currently experiencing a glorious flourish in popularity thanks to the likes of Killswitch Engage, God Forbid [and] Walls of Jericho.”8 Gloversmith continued to hand out effusive praise to metalcore acts great and small for many months, but eventually moshed into a brick wall. In the July 2004 issue, Gloversmith published a piece on As I Lay Dying, and the band insisted that they had “written a timeless metal record” instead of “just another metalcore album” in order to “survive” the approaching collapse of the genre. Gloversmith was so moved by As I Lay Dying’s calculated and poorly carried out shift in direction that he published a sidebar titled, “Metalcore AD: Who will survive and what will be left of them?” In this textual aside, he used an At the Gates Index to assign “survival ratings” to bands and placed his bets on As I Lay Dying, Darkest Hour, Every Time I Die, and The Black Dahlia Murder.9 The immediate reason for the grim assessment was As I Lay Dying’s prediction that everybody would start getting sick of metalcore in a year, but the real impetus behind Gloversmith’s taking of stock was that a new product line was being imposed on him. Metalcore is one of the most popular genres of music today. Thousands of teens and young adults are adopting the fashions of Funeral for a Friend, bands using melodic Swedish death metal and hardcore as templates are being formed at a hectic clip, and metalcore is in heavy rotation on Sirius’ Hard Attack, Fuse’s Uranium and MTV2’s Headbangers Ball. That such a tepid and twisted form of metal is all the rage has roused the ire of individuals listening to all other types of metal, and this backlash, combined with the specter of market saturation industry insiders begin to fear whenever any variety of metal becomes popular, is currently working to stem the flood of metalcore. Terrorizer, sensing the shifting popular sands, decided to abandon metalcore and use the discontent percolating up from the metal masses as a marketing hook for the magazine and the bands gracing its cover. 35 Although there had been murmurings about metalcore bands breeding at too fast of a rate, the reservations were voiced in the subdued tone critics dependant on ad revenue for their existence have turned into a fine art—but in the October 2005 issue, a thunderbolt from up high was cast at metalcore with a suddenness that was only matched by its comprehensiveness. Jonathan Selzer propped himself up in his editorial chair, looked across the Atlantic, and spied dark clouds gathering that heralded a titanic “clash of values…between the angst-ridden tide of metalcore that makes up a large portion of the [Ozzfest] bill and the somewhat more celebratory, old school yet contemporary approach of Arch Enemy.”10 To get to the bottom of this battle between the true and the false, Terrorizer devoted two articles to Arch Enemy in as many issues and dispatched none other than metalcore correspondent Leander Gloversmith to Las Vegas to ascertain the band’s opinion about the struggle for musical integrity the band found themselves waging after Century Media had paid its blood money to reserve a place for the Swedes on the cesspool of a tour that is Ozzfest. Michael Amott played the role of the true metal defender to the hilt, claiming that Arch Enemy distilled “a true metal feeling with an extreme edge” and testifying that the band “love that ‘metal as life’ stuff.”11 Angela Gossow, Amott’s partner-in-metalhood, was also committed to the cause: “The feeling of true metal is something we want to get across on every album, especially now to the Ozzfest crowd.”12 And Amott, moved by this “true metal feeling,” boldly lashed out at the other bands on the tour in the name of all that is holy about metal: When we go up there we do something completely different from other bands...we’re the best metal band up there and we’re pure metal. Some of the other bands have a flavor of it here and there, but then I guess we have a closed-minded approach to what metal is, because a lot of stuff gets called metal that I don’t consider to be metal at all.13

Gloversmith, inspired by Arch Enemy’s rhetoric and on holiday in a city where people step out of their everyday lives, also felt the power of true metal and decried “the American extreme scene [that] has found itself dominated by metalcore and its increasingly commercialised aesthetics.”14 Years of screaming in metalcore bands and all the praises sung for metalcore were forgotten memories, and Gloversmith was dead set on denigrating the genre in hopes of destroying it: “There’s metal, there’s hardcore and then there’s that bastardised hybrid of the two, the oh-so overplayed box of tricks known as metalcore.”15 The promotional “journalism” is so thick and tortuous that it is hard to pick a starting point. Let us begin with the most simple and egregious case: Gloversmith’s startling transformation from metalcore supporter to classic metal authority. Gloversmith is a hack bending with the trends and fads who will write whatever will enable him to retain his position at Terrorizer. Little more needs to be 36 said, and if there were any ethical or professional standards in the metal media, he would never be allowed to write for another metal magazine as long as he lives. But this is the world of the metal press, where anyone can say anything, so Gloversmith will go on spewing out the appropriate lines and pounding out sloppy journalism. One skewed point that Gloversmith makes about what sets Arch Enemy apart from the American scene, however, needs to be addressed at length. Holding up Arch Enemy as an antidote to the “commercialised aesthetics” of metalcore is willfully wrong, since commercial considerations have had a decisive effect on the direction the band adopted on Anthems of Rebellion as well as Doomsday Machine. Gloversmith is too much of a tool to recognize this maneuvering or chooses to ignore it, but Paul Schwarz comments on the market-dictated mood swings, and the shift in sound based on sales becomes an obstacle Jonathan Selzer cannot circumvent. In his article on Arch Enemy, Schwarz makes no sweeping claims about the band and comments on the trend-chasing sounds of Rebellion in the most straightforward manner the needlessly convoluted Terrorizer style of writing allows: It will doubtless come as a surprise to many, not least AE’s hardcore following, who were generally rather scornful of the riff-oriented, relatively uncomplicated direction taken on 2003’s ‘Anthems of Rebellion,’ that ‘Doomsday Machine’ is not its sequel. Considering the success it enjoyed, one would at least have expected that there was some pressure on AE to follow in the relatively radio-friendly footsteps of ‘Anthems.’16

Selzer, on the other hand, mounts his soapbox in his editorial and brays about “classic metal values,” forcing him to be more evasive than Schwarz: Of course the mutual territory on which these two sides are divided is AE’s home country Sweden: the fact that metalcore’s template is the Gothenburg sound originated by At the Gates, but drawn into an entirely different--some would say more opportunistic—context.17

This attempted sentence is nonsense--it literally makes no sense. Selzer should have inserted a comparative clause somewhere in this mess, but was so flustered by the genre tightrope he was walking that he forgot to do so before the issue went to press or Selzer is such a slovenly editor that he cannot even uncover a glaring error in the space allotted to him on the magazine’s first page. Anyway, what Selzer is attempting to get at in the sentence reproduced above is that Arch Enemy may share some similarities with a band (Terrorizer would never name names) from Orange County, California, but the classic metal blood flowing through Arch Enemy’s veins make their music authentic, trend-free metal. It would be foolish to contend that Doomsday Machine is out-and-out metalcore, but Anthems of Rebellion is a different story entirely. Rebellion is Arch Enemy’s “mallcore” album and if it were not for the presence of Gossow’s mucus-mangling vocals (Christopher Amott did contribute some 37 clean vocals though) and a handful of tracks (“Silent Wars” smokes and shreds no matter which way you slice it), the songs on the album are not far removed from the fare offered by Bullet For My Valentine or Haste the Day. Arch Enemy also shared the stage with Bleeding Through and Himsa on the third MTV2 Headbangers Ball Tour in 2004 to capitalize on their new orientation, and the degrees of separation between the three acts would have seemed very slim from the floor. Rebellion was an album without many of the “classic riffs and ripping solos” Amott recently called a “dying art” and heavily inflected with metalcore and Pantera-by-way-of-Fear-Factory riffs that was written with the goal of breaking the band in the American market.18 But the growing discontent with metalcore altered the sonic thrust of Doomsday Machine, and the band released what could have been the follow-up to Wages of Sin. In other words, a slick, modern melodic death metal album incorporating the Swedish style Michael Amott had a hand in creating--but not a sound that anyone with a grain of metallic sense would call classic, true or traditional metal. Terrorizer’s and Arch Enemy’s efforts to present the band as classic metal is not merely a harmless chronological and classificatory error, but a concerted promotional campaign that callously erases from existence numerous bands playing tried and true heavy metal in the here and now. Sharlee D’Angelo also hoisted the true metal flag in the Las Vegas interview and his contribution to the debate was an ignorant rant: You can definitely see a difference between American and European bands. Like we consider Judas Priest to be a metal band, while for a lot of American acts one of the premier metal acts is Pantera, who I also think is metal, but a much more American version of it. American bands seem to take everything from that sound and add hardcore.19

Such a resounding dismissal of American metal is ludicrous and obscene. There are scads of bands in the United States playing classic and traditional metal that have much more integrity than Arch Enemy. Bands such as Overlorde, Skullview, Agent Steel, Brocas Helm, Twilight Odyssey, The Gates of Slumber, October 31, Destructor, Superchrist, Slough Feg, Attacker, Boulder, Manilla Road, Pharaoh, Twisted Tower Dire and various thrash acts adhering to true classic metal values are below D’Angelo’s and Terrorizer’s notice. These bands simply do not exist in their insular and incestuous metal world, because they do not benefit from the commercial coverage Arch Enemy receives: • Featured on almost 1,000,000 CD Samplers [Terrorizer, Guitar World, Concrete Corner, etc.] prior to the street date including 350,000 Ozzfest samplers

• Full-page artist profile consumer ads with Alternative Press, Revolver, Amp, Law of Inertia, BW&BK, Alarm, Metal Maniacs, Metal Edge, Hit Parader, Guitar World, Terrorizer, Metal Hammer, Pit, Unrestrained!, Guitar One & many more!

38 • Select [radio] stations to be chosen to give away full catalogue for contest (all contests will be done with stations who maximize their spins and support of the album). Autographed copies and posters are being used as incentives as well.

• Band will co-host MTV2’s Headbangers Ball around release date.

• Over one hundred 30-second [commercial] spots hyping Doomsday Machine will begin airing prior to the street date and run through the first month of release on both MTV2 and FUSE.

• Massive Internet banner campaign is in motion & banners advertising the album have & will be featured on high traffic sites such as Blabbermouth.net, BW&BK.com, Metal Judgement.com, Metal Sludge.com, Digital Metal.com, The Guantlet.com, Trustkill.com, PAHardcore.com, Lambgoat.com, and Blistering.com.20

There are many more bullet points appearing in the Caroline Distribution New Release Mailer color insert for Doomsday Machine (prearranged cover stories with some glossy metal mags, more contests, co-op advertising, etc.), but each one treats the album as a product to be cross marketed to consumers who will carry it to the cash register at Target, Borders or Best Buy. To portray Arch Enemy as something other than a commercial artist is the height of lunacy, and Terrorizer is merely one cog in a vast promotional machine designed to create retail and consumer awareness for a band which has used its Ozzfest appearances to fashion a specious narrative with no regard for the past, making the magazine a ready and willing participant in the “increasingly consensual short-termism of the music industry” it supposedly stands against.21 39 The Cash Is Better Than the Cause

It’s the beginning of the end For the age we descend Greed led to this fray Hyborian kingdoms swept away Over the ruins stand new thrones Made with human bones

Ironsword “Beginning of the End”

Mascara-wearing metalcore acts pumping out material left and right, indie rockers passing themselves off as diehard metalheads, elitist critics denigrating heavy metal at every turn while presenting the latest alternative metal permutation as the future of metal, and trend-chasing, money- hungry independent labels using the underground as a magic word to cover up their mainstream practices may prove too much for heavy metal to bear. Bands playing traditional and true metal that is as fresh and challenging as anything composed during the golden era continue to muster the strength and resources to release material, but the quality heavy metal falls on editorial ears deaf to anything that does not have advertising dollars or promo copies working in its favor. What is more frightening is that the issues explored in this article are becoming malignantly worse by the day, and the metal press blithely writes on whatever the metal music industry deems to be worth covering. There will be no dissenting voices raised in the metal media about how loosely the term metal is applied or the effects business decisions have on the genre, because metal journalists are paid operatives who have no reason to spit out the industry teat keeping them well-fed and content. If a skeptic ever needed proof of this fact, the recent spate of fawning and celebratory interviews/reviews the metal press generated to accompany the release of Roadrunner United: The All- Star Sessions should have supplied more than enough damning evidence. Monte Conner, the consummate industry insider, granted numerous interviews for the Roadrunner United promotional campaign and basked in the words of adulation written by the metal journalists who threw him softball questions. Of course, the dropping of old bands and signing of nu-bands was mentioned by some reporters, but the disaster was framed as an unfortunate incident--and it was time to let bygones be bygones. Conner’s rehearsed lines lend an eerie similarity to his responses in interviews conducted over a span of many years, and one constant argument aired again was that Roadrunner was never supposed to be a “boutique” or a “specialty” metal label and anyone looking at the label’s signings over the course of its existence would have to concede that this was true. 40 Roadrunner has certainly released a variety of material, but in each and every case it was in response to trends within the industry. When Ministry began to put industrial on the popular map, Front Line Assembly was signed; when the genre “alternative metal” was first bandied about in select circles, Last Crack inked a contract; when grunge became the next big thing, Gruntruck was added to the roster; and when Korn kicked off the nu-metal onslaught, Coal Chamber and nu-merous other bands became the bread and butter of Roadrunner as Conner finally managed to hit the wave of a trend at the right time. Since this successful moment, Roadrunner has selectively seized onto each trend in the industry and framed it as metal as the need arose, but Conner knows what kind of music really counts: No matter what happens with the trends--metal being in or out, cool or not--there are certain types of bands that will always survive. Bands like Creed, Nickelback and Godsmack that sound great on the radio and write mainstream music with an edge.1

Although Conner claims to be a lifelong metalhead (“But I’m just a huge metal fan, I always have been. I’ll be listening to this music till the day I die.”), he regards metal as just another trend to be exploited and has done irreparable damage to the genre as an A&R man building up a label under a VP/GM who considered metal to be a “a term of the past” at a crucial moment in the genre’s history.2 The metal media, however, only raised these issues in a roundabout fashion or in passing as Conner told the story of the label to interviewers that were more than accepting of mainstream music industry practices. BW&BK’s Tim Henderson believes that Conner is “the maestro of metal” and had difficulty even describing him as an executive due to A&R being “such a major label term” that could never be applied to someone in the metal underground. However, Henderson has no problem with major label-like machinations and insists that to see the world of music in any other light is ludicrous: [Roadrunner] dumped the extreme forms of death and thrash and sold their soul for something they tried to pass over as rock ‘n’ roll. Hell, they sold a shitload of records with this new philosophy. And the record business is indeed, a business. Sure, labels want to sell records to make back an investment.3

In his Bloody Roots special on the history of Roadrunner, Ian Christe also saw nothing wrong with Conner’s business acumen, praising him as someone “who has found ways to make underground music commercial” and asking no probing questions as the A&R man waxed nostalgic about the early days when he “signed product for pennies.”4 The industry view of bands as products for sale in the marketplace is what has had a harmful effect on metal and the people playing the music--but Conner and his stenographers in the press will never grasp this simple truth. When Frozen in Time was receiving its turn in the media spotlight, 41 Terrorizer asked Conner whether the appearance of an Obituary album on Roadrunner meant that future death metal releases could be expected and received this answer: I’ve always prided myself as being on the cutting edge of metal. Sure, at one point, Roadrunner signed too many death metal bands and I partly deserve to be blamed for this. But what is happening now is the whole Killswitch thing and we’ve got to be one of the first labels to bet on it. We’re not bandwagon jumpers, our aim here is [to] be first on to what’s happening next. So I wouldn’t sign death metal bands today, no, but it doesn’t mean I’ll turn my back on the bands we had in the past.5

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of metal knows that Conner’s claim of not turning his back on bands is false, but this distortion went unchallenged and John Tardy’s opinion will never receive the attention it deserves in the metal press: It seems like over the years, Roadrunner just doesn't acknowledge…they don't seem to think about or care about it and they just have done as little as they possibly can to help us out through the years. They literally have done nothing at all for us, which is why we were like, if we have done what we have done with them doing nothing, if we did it ourselves and at least put some effort into it, maybe we could achieve something a little bit bigger, but it’s just one of those things.6

No one will ever make an effort to find out why Derrick Green hopes that a new band is “not on Roadrunner getting raped” either.7 Many fans burning or buying CDs could care less as long as an apparently endless stream of albums fall magically into their laps, the metal media outlets deriving their profits from the labels who advertise in their pages are not going to rock the boat and bands cannot speak out at length about contractual issues because they occupy the most disadvantageous position of power in the metal music industry. These things are just not talked about and hardly anyone asks questions about business matters, so executives like Conner can say whatever they want without any fears of being contradicted in print or html, and heavy metal will continue to die a thousand deaths each day at the hands of an underground that is mainstream in all but name. 42 Notes

Words Are Not Just Words

1. Ian Christe, Sound of the Beast (New York: Harper Entertainment, 2003) , 21. 2. Encarta Dictionary. 3. Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (Da Capo Press, 2000) , 283 4. 1996 interview from a New Zealand zine conducted by someone known as Commander X. http://home.planet.nl/~verdoore/interview101.htm.

A Lesson in History

1. www.upthetombstones.com/1991_miscellaneous.shtml. 2. Jim Raggi, “Gamma Ray,” Lamentations of the Flame Princess 3 1999. 3. Type the phrase “grunge killed metal” into any search engine and count the hits. 4. Paul Schwarz, “Nevermore This Godless Endeavor,” Terrorizer August 2005. 5. Corey Bonnett, “Sacrifice,” October 3, 2005. www.metaleater.com/interviews- sacrifice10032005.php. 6. Deanne Stillman, “Heavy Metal Mania: It’s More Than Music,” New York Times May 12, 1991. 7. Ibid. 8. Edna Gunderson, “Heavy Metal Titans Thrash—and Clash,” USA Today May 23, 1992. 9. Jeff Gilbert, “Apocalypse Now,” Guitar World August 1991. 10. Gunderson, “Heavy Metal Titans.” 11. Christe, Sound of the Beast, 216. 12. Ibid. 13. 1986 interview in Thrasher by Pushead. www.metallicaworld.co.uk/Interviews/1986_thrasher.htm. 14. Ibid. 15. Jim Sullivan, “Metallica Moves to Center Stage,” Boston Globe March 5, 1989. 16. Greg Quill, “Metallica’s No Ferrari, but Fans Don’t Care,” Toronto Star December 11, 1986. 17. Ibid. 18. Lenny Stoute, “Metallica Blasts Power-Chord Poetry,” Toronto Star April 9, 1989. 19. www.allmetallica.com/info/thrashkings91int.shtml. http://metallica.bizhat.com/page.php?id=388. 20. Jim Sullivan, “Metallica,” Boston Globe December 20, 1991. 21. Ed Christman and Geoff Mayfield, “Enter Metallica: Album Speeds Out of the Gate,” Billboard August, 31 1991. 22. David Fricke, “Metallica: Once the Scourge of the Mainstream, The Titans of Thrash Are on Top of the Charts,” Rolling Stone November 14, 1991. 23. David Hinkley, “Metallica Survives the Threat of Thinking Rockers,” Calgary Herald January 5, 1992. 24. Christe, 149. 25. James Ryan, “Heavy Metal Seeks Credibility,” United Press International October 14, 1988. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Karen Schoener, “Sounds Around Town: Alternative Metal,” New York Times August 17, 1990. 30. Elaine Halbersberg, “Shards of Steel: What’s Behind the Splintering Metal Market and Who’ll Pick Up the Pieces?,” Billboard May 23, 1992. 31. Jim Bessman, “How to Peddle the Metal: There Are No Hard and Fast Rules When It Comes To Marketing—Or Defining—Hard Rock,” Billboard May 22, 1993. 32. Steven Ward, “Running Away With the Circus: An Oral History of Circus Magazine,” June 2005. www.rockcritics.com/features/part10-coreylevitan.html. 33. Corey Levitan “Metal Almost Ruined My Life” www.coreylevitan.com/rants/metal.txt. 34. Chris Mundy, “Nirvana,” Rolling Stone January 23, 1992. 43 35. Ibid. 36. Christe, 225. 37. Ann Magnuson, “Sub Zep?,” Spin February 1992. 38. Bessman, “Peddle the Metal.” 39. Ibid. 40. Ed Christman, “Consolidation Continues to Whittle Away Industry Players,” Billboard December 19, 1992. 41. Bob Gendron, “Five Record Stores That Have Found Their Groove: Tough New Rules Affect Small Shops,” Chicago Tribune September 25, 2005. 42. Ed Christman, “Chains Vs. Indies: Which Stores Score?,” Billboard October 22, 1994. 43. Steve Morse, “Metal is Still About Rebellion: It’s Just Taking New Forms,” Chicago Tribune November 28, 1991; Diana Darzin, “New Music,” The Hollywood Reporter June 19, 1992. 44. Bessman, “Peddle the Metal.” 45. Chris Morris, “Roadrunner Puts Its Pedal Beyond Metal,” Billboard October 22, 1994; Bessman “Peddle the Metal.” Monte Conner wasted little time in reacting to the alternative boom, despite the death metal orientation of the label: “I see no future for the new bands. We'll drop half of them in 1993. There's no point anymore, sales drop and the bands have nothing new.” Robert Heeg, “Zit er nog leven in death metal?,” Watt April 1993. 46. Ian Christe, “Death Metal: Born-Again Heavy Metal,” Wired October 29, 1997. http://wired- vig.wired.com/news_drop/news_lycatalog/story/0,2149,7874,00.html.

Metal Is a Business…and Business Is Good 1. Chris Dick, “Bolt Thrower: Operation Phoenix Rising,” Metal Maniacs February 2006. 2. Avi Pitchon, “Nightwish Once,” Terrorizer 120 June 2004. 3. Natasha Scharf, “Night at the Opera,” Terrorizer 121 July 2004; “Hard of Hearing: Nightwish,” Terrorizer 123 September 2004; Nick Moberly, “Stagefright: Nightwish” Terrorizer 123 September 2004; Gunner Gavermann, “Nightwish: Finn de Siècle,” 126 Terrorizer December 2004; “Stagefright: Nightwish,” Terrorizer 130 April 2005. 4. Gavermann, “Nightwish: Finn de Siècle.” 5. Christe, Sound of the Beast, 225. 6. Ibid, 222-226. Christe does come to his senses for one moment, noting that “Faith No More and Soundgarden were heavy without necessarily being metal,” but he classifies both bands as metal at different points, and the alternative as metal interpretation overwhelms this short phrase. 7. Ibid., 232. 8. Ibid., 219-220. 9. Ibid., 306, 322. 10. Ibid., 219-220, 306-307. 11. Ibid., 314, 322. 12. The quote from Jeff Wagner’s Metal Maniacs review appears on the promotional sticker on the jewel case of Deceased Fearless Undead Machines. 13. www.bravewords.com/braveboard/viewtopic.php?t=1483&highlight=cathedral+garden+earthly. It appears that the thread has been removed or deleted, since a message reading, “the topic or post you requested does not exist” appears in place of the thread now. 14. “Critics Pick the Top 10 CDs of 2002,” Metal Maniacs March 2003; “Unrestrained!: The Year in Review,” 29 2005. Birk is the Promotion Department Contact (US and Canada) for Napalm Records. 15. Donald Passman, All You Need to Know About the Music Business (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005) , 21. 16. January 3, 2002 Interview. www.metallian.com/interviewbarbieri.htm. 17. http://www.vestalwatch.com/main.php. The rights to the jukebox has been passed on to Epitaph Records (for the time being), but you can find a Lacuna Coil interview there if you browse around. 18. Eric German, “Behind the Screams Part III: Century Media Records, Interview with Marco Barbieri,” www.metalupdate.com/interviewcenturymedia.html. 44 19. www.centurymedia.com/us/staff.php. 20. “Back in Demand: Classic Metal Is Being Resurrected,” Billboard June 24, 2000. 21. www.centurymedia.com/us/thelabel.html.

The New Indie Order Is Here

1. J. Bennett, “Pulling Your Head out of Your Ass and Other Bright Ideas,” Decibel 10 August 2005. 2. Kevin Stewart-Panko, “Kevi-Metal’s Rim Shots,” Unrestrained! 28 2005. 3. Kevin Stewart-Panko, “Kevi-Metal’s Rim Shots,” Unrestrained! 29 2005. 4. J. Bennett, “Pulling.” 5. Eric Davidson “Must See Music: Bands to Watch in 2004, Deadsea,” Columbus Alive January 21, 2004. 6. Kevin Elliott, “Deadsea Rising: The Coming of a Real New Metal in Columbus,” Columbus Alive May 11, 2005. 7. Mahssa Taghinia, “First We Take Manhattan: Former Columbus Rockers Make Good with Early Man’s Punk-Metal-Pop Evolution,” Columbus Alive February 2, 2005. 8. www.matadorrecords.com/early_man/biography.html. Patrick Amory of Matador Records described the band as a combination of “Slayer. Metallica. Judas Priest. Iron Maiden. Blizzard of Ozz period Ozzy” on the Early Man bulletin board. 9. J. Bennett, “Early Man Closing In,” Decibel 14 2005. 10. Ibid. 11. J. Bennett, “Early Man Closing In,” Revolver February 2006. 12. Adam Bennati, “Playlist: Columbus Musicians’ Favorite Records,” Columbus Alive February 28, 2002; Taghinia, “Manhattan.” 13. Bennati, “Playlist.” 14. Ibid. 15. Kevin Stewart-Panko, “Northern Lights Festival,” Metal Maniacs 2004. Cover and first few pages are missing so the month of publication is uncertain. 16. Decadent, “Goat Horn,” Hailmetal.com April 14, 2005. Goat Horn is a band to watch for numerous reasons. Decibel has taken a proprietary interest in the band due to the Canadians youthful exuberance and jaunty lyrics that some could misconstrue as ironic irreverence. Goat Horn is also heading into the maw of the metal music industry machine and Andrew Sample, Century Media’s Director of Radio Promotions, wrote an article on the band in the most recent issue of Metal Maniacs (Andrew Sample, “Goat Horn,” Metal Maniacs February 2006.) that resembles a piece of promotional material you would receive in a press kit. Hopefully, Goat Horn does not end up on package tours consisting of bands “with that shaggy bowl type haircut complete with convenient side brush look (especially when signed to labels like Metal Blade),” found on the “CHOKE LIST” inside Threatening Force. Sample’s words about Goat Horn being a throwback to the days when “the metal community appreciated acts that practiced what they preached” are true, but his claim that “[t]hey are a sore thumb on the hand of present day heavy metal” is correct if you only compare Goat Horn to what journalists are wrongly calling heavy metal in the metal press—but dead wrong when you consider that there are hundreds of bands across the world playing honest and heartfelt heavy metal. The majority of these bands, however, will never appear in the major metal media outlets—so they simply do not exist in Sample’s world. Goat Horn are a solid heavy metal band that deserves whatever exposure and success that happens to come their way—it is just the metal press that is flawed. 17. Chris Barnes, “Goat Horn,” Hellridemusic.com October 6, 2003. 18. Kevin Stewart-Panko, “New England Metal and Hardcore Festival,” Metal Maniacs November 2005. 19. Andrew Miller, “Take No Prisoners: Three Inches of Blood Like it Raw,” The Stranger, Nov 2, 2005. 20. Official bio from www.3inchesofblood.com.

Traditional Metal (The Commercial Chains Are On)

45 1. Leander Gloversmith, “Mastodon: Where the Giants Roam,” Terrorizer 123 September 2004. The other bands Terrorizer has named as champions of classic metal values are Meshuggah, Mastodon, The Dillinger Escape Plan and Children of Bodom. 2. Ian Glasper, “The Black Dahlia Murder: An Honorable Killing,” Terrorizer 136 October 2005. 3. Ibid. 4. www.terrorizer.com/press.html. 5. Ian Glasper, “Trustkill Records: To the Power of Ten,” Terrorizer 120 June 2004. 6. Ibid. 7. Avi Pitchon, “Heaven Shall Burn Antigone,” Terrorizer 120 June 2004. 8. Gloversmith, “Undying At History’s End,” Terrorizer 124 October 2004; Gloversmith, “Caliban The Opposite From Within,” Terrorizer 124 October 2004; Gloversmith, “Shadows Fall,” Terrorizer 124 October 2004. 9. Gloversmith, “As I Lay Dying: Emerging From the Shadows,” Terrorizer 133 July 2005. 10. Jonathan Selzer, “Editorial,” Terrorizer 136 October 2005. 11. Paul Schwarz, “Arch Enemy: Survival of the Fittest,” Terrorizer 135 September 2005. 12. Ibid. 13. Gloversmith, “Arch Enemy: Heavy Betting,” Terrorizer 136 October 2005. 14. Ibid. 15. Gloversmith, “Between the Buried and Me Alaska,” Terrorizer 136 October 2005. Here is an exchange from a October 31, 2002 Interview conducted with Gloversmith (Matt B. “Hiding with Girls.” www.killthenoise.net/hwgint.htm.): Killthenoise: Favourite records of all time? Gloversmith: Quicksand Slip; Thursday Full Collapse; Glassjaw Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence; Helmet Betty; Handsome Handsome; Fairweather If They Move Kill Them; Kerbdog Kerbdog; Pantera Far Beyond Driven; Refused The Shape of Punk to Come; U2 Achtung Baby; Couting Crows August and Everything After; Nothingface Audio Guide to Everyday Atrocity; Boysetsfire After the Eulogy. 16. Schwarz, “Fittest.” 17. Selzer, “Editorial.” 18. Caroline Distribution New Release Mailer July 25, 2005. 19. Gloversmith, “Betting.” 20. Caroline Distribution New Release Mailer July 25, 2005. 21. Jonathan Selzer, “Editorial,” Terrorizer 140 January 2006.

The Cash Is Better Than the Cause

1. Geri Miller, “What's Next On The Heavy-Metal Horizon?,” Billboard June 29, 2002. 2. Chris Morris, “Roadrunner Puts Its Pedal Beyond Metal.” Billboard October 22, 1994; Tim Henderson, “Roadrunner: United We Stand,” BW&BK Jan./Feb. 2006. 3. Henderson, “Roadrunner: United We Stand.” 4. Sirius’ listing for the Bloody Roots episode I heard read as follows: Monte Conner of Roadrunner Records Wed 1/4 10:00 pm ET A rebroadcast of the very insightful interview into one of the world's pioneer metal record labels, Roadrunner Records, as host Ian Christe and label honcho Monte Conner reflect back on 25 years of metal supremacy in thrash, death, street, nu metal eras and beyond. The quotes are recalled from notes I took but did not save. 5. Oliver Badin “Obituary : The Iceman Cometh,” Terrorizer 133 July 2005. 6. Zach Palmer, “Obituary: Frozen in Time,” doomsdaymusic.com December 5, 2005. 7. Derrick Green, “Call and Response with Sepultura,” Decibel 16 February 2006.

Impure Metal: How Underground Heavy Metal Became Mainstream Heavy Music © Dave Burn 2006. Permission is granted to distribute or reproduce this article, in whole or in part, provided no changes are made and proper credit is given.