>Metal can be a
>lot of things; powerful, angry, portentous, doom-laden, able to give
>that feeling of slow creeping dread like no other musical form on
>Earth. But it can also be a ton of fun, and I think it should be.

This reminds me, in an extremely oblique way, of a documentary that came out some years ago, Sam Dunn's Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. There are many amusing moments in this film, but two stick out in my memory. One is a bit in which Dunn is talking to the lead singer of some Swedish or Norwegian or Finnish black metal band, I forget the details. At any rate, he is one of the relatively few people the filmmaker interacts with in the course of the movie who genuinely and obviously creeps him the fuck out, and have the following conversation (paraphrased from memory, but not by very much):

DUNN
What does heavy metal represent to you?

BLACK METAL GUY stares balefully into the camera for like 15 seconds.

BLACK METAL GUY
Satan.

A beat.

DUNN
(warily)
And... what does Satan represent to you?

BLACK METAL GUY stares balefully into the camera for like 30 seconds, his expression completely unchanged and unchanging.

BLACK METAL GUY
Freedom.

That was pretty much the whole interview. I think that might have been the singer from that one Scandinavian black metal band who were suspected of having murdered their bassist and eaten him. Which is evidently a thing that happened.

This is in opposition to the film's other signpost moment in my memory, in which he's interviewing... I forget, Ronnie James Dio, maybe, or Tony Iommi, or Lemmy—one of the old-timey metalists, anyway—and they get to talking about the sign of the horns and its use in metal. The interviewee points out that in some cases, it's not just a gesture of solidarity with metal, it's actually part of the spelling of some bands' names. "Like, you don't say 'I'm listening to Slayer,' you say 'I'm listening to \m/ SLAYAAAAAA \m/ !!'"

Which, in turn, reminds me of when Ronnie James Dio died and there was a news article about how those nonks from that fundie church down South (you know, the ones who picket soldiers' funerals because God Hates Fags) were going to protest the Diminishing Godliness of America at his funeral. I remember thinking that of all people, Dio would probably have appreciated that.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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