Too Old for Heavy Metal

 Heavy Metal is angry, young people's music. As my 40th birthday looms overhead just a few short months away, I find myself neither young nor angry anymore. Heavy Metal used to define me as a person. It was more than just music. It was a culture and a lifestyle. But these days I just find it increasingly loud and annoying, and today I want to talk about why that is.

WHAT IS HEAVY METAL?

 Now I know a lot of you out there will say that there are many rockers in their 60's still performing and making music, and you would be right in saying that. Alice Cooper, Steven Tyler, Ozzy, and Robert Plant all turn 65 this year, but that's hard rock not heavy metal. And there is a difference.

 Hard Rock in general is good time, party music

Heavy Metal is anger, death and war in clown makeup

Hard Rock is getting laid music with fast, driving rhythms and soft introspective power ballads

 Heavy Metal is mosh pits, acne, angst and black t-shirts

 Growing up I was angry. Angry for being born, angry at my parents, angry at school, angry at the law, angry because it I didn't fit in, angry because I didn't have a girlfriend, you name it and I was probably angry about it. Metal gave me an outlet for my aggressions. It gave me a voice and gave me a chance to meet other people who were just as angry as I was.

 Growing up in Catholic schools, it was the perfect way to stand out, get attention and make a name for myself. I never fit in or had many friends and was forced to be an outsider looking in, but metal let stand proud and say, "Yes, I'm on the outside looking in because I want to be not because you forced me here" 

I didn't really say that, mind you. It was more symbolic. 

GETTING OLD

 I don't hate heavy metal these days, and I don't REALLY think it sucks, I simply no longer find that Heavy Metal has any meaning for me now. I'm not the same person I was as a teenager. I'm not as angry and reactionary as I used to be. I'm still awkward, and an outsider who still doesn't fit in, but I'm old enough to accept that now and it just doesn't bother me.

 I'm middle aged, married w/kids and a job. With half my life behind me and a clear sense of my own mortality, my life finally has meaning for me now. So likewise I look for more meaning in my music.

 Even though there are many kinds of metal these days, (too many to go into here) I ultimately find it very one dimensional. War, anger, death, aggression, all the negative and dark corners of the human experience

I'm not as one dimensional as I was when I was younger. 

So what do I listen to? lots of stuff.

Classic Rock, like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin. Punk Music like Iggy Pop, The Misfits and The Clash. All the Top 40 hits from the 80's, 90's Grunge and one or two modern artists like The Black Keys, Radiohead and The Mars Volta,

Even the metal artists themselves seem to outgrow metal.

The once mighty Metallica cut their hair as their music grew more and more commercially oriented and "MTV Friendly"

About the only thing resembling metal you will find on my I-Tunes is System of a Down. They have such a unique sound and I just find it fascinating. It's metal, its art, its progressive it's alternative...

Complex and diverse music for complex and diverse times. 

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