Your time away from metal
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For six years of my adult life, I did not listen to metal, except for the odd Godflesh record. I was a drum ‘n’ bass and techno DJ from 1997 to 2003. During that time, my music collection became about 95% vinyl, and I listened almost exclusively to electronic music. I grew up on hair and thrash metal, and loved death metal when it first came around. (I discovered death metal through the Earache/Columbia releases of the early ’90s; my favorites were Carcass’ Heartwork and Entombed’s Wolverine Blues.) But as I dove into DJ’ing, metal fell by the wayside for me. Only a chance “if you like Slayer, you’ll like The Haunted” recommendation on Amazon got me back into it years later.
Metal has become an integral part of my life. I would call myself a “lifer” now, except for the fact that I was mostly metal-less for six years. (My occasional foray into Godflesh then was because of their breakbeat experiments, not their metal.) Drum ‘n’ bass discovered distorted basslines and became overtly aggressive during that time. My DJ’ing focused mostly on the lighter side of d&b. I remember complaining that d&b had become “too metal”.
Tastes change, of course, and even within metal my tastes have changed. (Cf. Robert Christgau: “My tastes don’t evolve; they broaden”.) But to me it’s logical why I left metal for a while. As a child, I loved the music of metal – the notes, the sound – but I didn’t have much of a personal connection to it. The most any metal song spoke to me was the anti-parental anger of Metallica’s “Dyers Eve”. Lyrically and musically, …And Justice for All is an incredibly angry record – its labyrinthine complexity is Kafka-esque – and thus an important memento of my teenage years. But I didn’t know it then. I didn’t have the capacity to reflect upon music and see how it fit in my world. I just liked it.
Additionally, I’ve always liked all kinds of music. When I was young, metal was just a part of my music collection, which was wildly eclectic to the point of schizophrenia. As I got deeper into DJ’ing electronic music, my attention shifted there for professional reasons. I had to put in time with electronic music, necessarily to the exclusion of other music. Ironically, that’s the case with metal for me now. I write on it, ergo I listen to it all the time. If I could have 40 hours in a day, I would fill those other hours with other kinds of music. But, alas, a day only has 24 hours, so something – namely, other music – has to give.
I don’t mind. Metal is, after all, lovely music. And writing on it has given me the ability to reflect upon it and establish a personal connection with it that I lacked when I was younger. I don’t just like metal, I feel it deeply. But not all the time. Metal is born of unrest, and it is taxing to listen to hours upon hours of it. Who knows how many millions of blastbeats and hours of growling and screaming I’ve heard? If I ever find peace, I can see myself getting out of metal. When I retire as an old man to some beach bungalow with an acoustic guitar and a dog/cat, will metal be appropriate for my existence? At that time, I won’t want sensory extremes and elevated heart rates. So maybe I’m not a “lifer”. Or maybe I am. Even if I’m not listening to Pantera or Nasum when I’m 70, I’ll still appreciate what I’ve learned from them. And maybe I’ll blast them occasionally, just for old times’ sake.
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Even old-school metalheads take breaks from metal, sometimes for years.
Have you done that? Will you do that? Why or why not?
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