Issue 18 2009

I was browsing through Borders bookstore the other day when I saw a book entitles “Bang your head” which had a very ‘metal’ looking cover. Now normally I just bypass metal books, I’ve found few have contained anything of interest to me, but this one made me take a closer look. Not because it actually looked interesting, but because of the tag line accompanying it, “The rise and fall of heavy metal”. Fall of heavy metal you say? How come I haven’t heard of this?
After doing some research on the interwebs I learned that this book mostly focuses on the LA scene in the 80’s which eventually got taken over by the grunge movement of the 90’s. But to say that constitutes a fall is a rather gross exaggeration. More like returned to its original state of bubbling just below widespread mainstream popularity. In fact many people would consider the demise of 80s metal as a good thing for metal as whole, bands such as Twisted Sister and Motley Crue didn’t really give metal a good name.

But seeing as this author seemed convinced that metal was dead, I thought I’d use this opportunity to show how popular metal was after the ‘fall’, and how popular it still is today.
I’m going to start out with the obvious and point out the 80s bands such as Twisted Sister and Motley Crue are still around touring and recording albums. Perhaps they’re zombies in disguise?
Going on into the 90s, only a mere few years after this supposed fall we have the likes of Panteras' ‘Far Beyond Driven’ getting to number one in the US and Australian music charts, as well as three of Sepulturas' albums selling over one million copies. The 1990s also saw the start of Wacken Open Air, which by 1998 featured over 70 bands in its line up.
Moving onto the early part of our current decade, we can see the European bands that formed in the mid-90s are starting to gain popularity. Melodic death metal form Sweden was running rampant across Europe and starting to heavily influence American bands. In the year 2000 Children of Bodom released the single ‘Hate Me’, which subsequently topped the Finnish charts and went on to be certified platinum. Staying in Finland, Nightwish released their biggest album ‘Once’ in 2004. This album, along with its pre-ceding single went on to dominate music charts across mainland Europe. It even managed to top the European chart. So for a few weeks in June 2004, a metal band was the highest selling artist in all of Europe.
Currently metal is experiencing a level of mainstream popularity it hasn’t seen in a long time. Unfortunately New Zealands music scene is mostly influenced by America, where metal isn’t a mainstream genre, but in Europe metal seems to be almost common place.
The numbers I got for this article I pulled off Wikipedia in 10 minutes. Maybe someone should introduce the author of ‘Bang Your Head’ to this wonderful creation, just so he knows metal hasn’t fallen, but that you just have to look a little below the surface to find it.