Heavy Metal. What does that mean to you? For me, it’s a thread so deeply woven into my being that it will forever be a part of me. From the moment I heard my first powerchord, I was hooked - I was 12 years old when Heavy Metal took me & swallowed me whole.

From Link Wray through Steppenwolf it sprang, flowing into the Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath, branching out into myriad streams – prog-infused, punk-informed, candy-coated, symphonic, satanic, scarified, theatrical, introspective, antisocial, crusty, blowdried & hairsprayed, clad in denim, leather, and sometimes (gasp) spandex, it has persisted, and it continues to mutate and reproduce.

So what is it? Depends on who you ask. I remember reading an article in the late ‘70s that likened Heavy Metal to a cockroach – no matter how many metal bands died off, there would always be legions swarming to the fore to replace them, it noted.

But Metal’s not as simple as that. It doesn’t just lay eggs like a bug; it seduces and rapes; it cross-pollinates with just about any musical form. It assimilates and is assimilated. It grows underground slowly like a fungal mycelium, only to send waves of mushrooms bursting through the soil, spreading blackened spores everywhere. Like a bad case of herpes, it is parasitic and symbiotic – it takes up residence at the base of your spine and becomes a part of you. It is both vampiric and cannibalistic. Occasionally it has become popular among the masses, but soon, swollen up with pomp, caviar and champagne, it has collapsed under its own weight. And out of the festering corpses, a few fleeing refugees always skitter away to lick their wounds under a rock somewhere, waving antennae outside every now & then to check on the world. Then, newly disguised and renamed, Heavy Metal infiltrates and spreads once more.

It’s been pronounced dead countless times before, but death becomes Heavy Metal. Death defines it, really – red, black, and steely silver, spiked, skull-sporting, and corpse-painted, it revels in its own slow death, chewing on its own entrails for nutrition. No matter what your opinion may be, I know that it will persist longer than I.

When my ashes are spread, I know that a few Heavy Metal prions will drift on the wind, unaffected by the cremation, searching for new, younger brains to infect. And so it will continue…

\m/ \m/

Yup. \m/ Semper Metal.

quote:

Originally posted by RacerX:
For me, it’s a thread so deeply woven into my being that it will forever be a part of me.

\m/ \m/ - Me too.

Metal was one of my first big influences and I still have strong cravings for it. I was 9 years old back in ‘71 when my cool aunt had just purchased Sabbath’s Master of Reality. I fell in love with it immediately. She eventually passed that album off to me when I was 13.

If I should ever face that proverbial dilemma -- where I am stuck on that damn Island -- that record’s coming with me.

The b/f hates anything that resembles Metal. Whenever I’m suddenly visited by a consuming need for it (like every time we’re in my car), I can’t help but play some form of it – during which, I’ve done nothing but create the perfect vision of his own personal hell. "There, now...that didn't hurt much, did it?" It did. And does every time. Poor guy.