Stars in Spikes: Will Pop and Hip-Hop's Rediscovery of Heavy Metal Lead to a Genre Resurgence?
Justin Bieber performs at the 2016 Purpose World Tour at Staples Center on March 20, 2016 in Los Angeles
“Metal has again become that rebellious thing,” says Matt Young of Warner Music. "It’s gone away and gotten dangerous again."
Leave it to Game of Thrones, a series whose epic medieval
battles and dragon-fire iconography echo classic heavy metal motifs, to
accurately depict the once-prominent genre’s status in pop culture
today.
Watchers of the show will recall this year’s most overt
celebrity cameo: Ed Sheeran, who appeared — with no alterations to his
real-world appearance, maybe a haircut — as a Lannister soldier with
singing and speaking parts in a scene that lasted a whopping four
minutes. Akin to his ubiquity just about everywhere else, you couldn’t
miss the megastar in Westeros.
But few would have spotted the second musical guest Thrones
slipped in this summer: the metal band Mastodon, who blended in as
faceless, trudging members of the Night King’s army of the dead. No
spotlight was given to the Atlanta prog-thrashers, just a quick “hey,
was that...I think it was!” Easter egg for crossover fans.
The
positioning was perfect. Of course the Mastodon guys were cast as trio
of re-animated corpses, left to rot behind a wall that seals them from
civilization — that’s been heavy metal’s relationship to the mainstream
for nearly a generation now. You don’t find it unless you’re looking for
it.
Following the early '00s -- where metal saw a spike in notoriety, as
rap-metal hybrids like Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit popped up on TRL and
more nuanced metal-leaning groups like System of a Down and Deftones
were in MTV’s regular rotation -- the genre has largely been scrubbed
from hit radio, and relegated to specialty stations and niche circles.
Now, in 2017, the pop zeitgeist is so bereft of guitar music of any sort
that it’s difficult to imagine a time when bands following Metallica’s
blueprint — or even pleasing hair-metal-ers Bon Jovi or Motley Crue —
might commercially dominate once more.
Yet the culture behind the
jams somehow thrashes on. In the U.S., heavy metal has developed a
dichotomous presence in recent years, where the music itself provides
virtually no influence, yet the genre’s visibility in merchandising and
live performance — especially from major artists who otherwise have no
bearing in metal — is stronger than ever.
Just look to the artist of the moment, Taylor Swift, whose gothic cover for her approaching LP “Reputation” was mocked online
as the advent of her black metal phase. To boot, the video for her
single “Look What You Made Me Do,” the No.1 song on the Hot 100 right
now, opens with her in full zombie makeup, crawling from a grave and
then re-burying her human self. That feels a lot closer to, say, Avenged
Sevenfold, than “All Too Well,” doesn’t it?
The list goes of
superstars repping the heavy style goes on, from Justin Bieber’s Iron
Maiden-inspired Purpose Tour merch to hip-hop, where the culture has
bled deepest: see Kanye West rocking a Type O Negative shirt in the
studio (lest we forget the Metallica-y Yeezus font); Travis Scott
donning a Slayer t-shirt for his GQ magazine shoot (and riding a
red-eyed, animatronic eagle on stage opening for Kendrick Lamar this
year); and Lil Uzi Vert also swiping the Metallica typography for his
mixtape Luv Is Rage. Then there’s the Marilyn Manson factor — LUV wears a
diamond-encrusted pendant forged in the shock-rocker’s image, and Drake
even had his dad pose for a photo
with him. Further, during his Made in America set in Philadelphia Sept.
3 (and then again at Meadows in Queens, New York two weeks later),
Jay-Z urged two circle pits in the crowd to conjoin and form one big
unit of mayhem. 4:44? More like 6:66.
Remember
when Aerosmith and Anthrax collaborated with Run DMC and Public Enemy to
boost their own edge factors? The reverse now seems to be the
prevailing trend.
“Metal has again become that rebellious thing,”
says Matt Young, Executive Vice President of Warner Music Artist
Services. “And it’s not the hair metal, it’s metal’s roots. You can see
Iron Maiden shirts in H&M, their artwork is becoming iconic. It’s
gone away and gotten dangerous again and that’s what makes it cool.”
The
shift in dress from pop and hip-hop’s tastemakers — plus the
ultra-influential Kardashians touting the clothes — has unsurprisingly
trickled down to fans’ everyday wardrobe.
“When I was in high
school, if you wore studded bracelets to school you’d get sent to the
principal’s office,” says Missi Callazzo, co-owner of Megaforce Records,
the label that first signed Metallica in 1983. “Now, spiked bracelets
are high fashion. Every designer made biker jackets last year. … we had a
metal T-shirt being sold in Fred Segal, it was crazy.”
Pop’s
clearest proponent of thrash has been Lady Gaga, who not only performed
with Metallica at the Grammys earlier this year (yes, a bum microphone
ruined it, but the rehearsals were awesome) but injected some metal fuel
into her current Joanne World Tour. Each night during “Perfect
Illusion,” Gaga stands in black leather, her blonde hair blown out and
moussed like Lita Ford, as she wails to a song that’s one double-bass
blast beat away from morphing into an alt-metal bonanza, a la In This
Moment or Butcher Babies.
“Lady Gaga has probably done more for
metal in the last four years than anyone else,” Callazzo says. “Why are
all these mainstream stores carrying these metal shirts? You can trace
it back to her and her look and her aura of helping to exude all things
metal.”
But does such a stylistic embrace mean heavy metal is on its way back to the musical conversation?
“I
think there’s space for everything to be successful,” says Chris Brown,
Vice President of Marketing for Roadrunner Records, which manages some
of metal’s heaviest hitters including Slipknot and Killswitch Engage.
“You see it on the touring side, like the Rock on the Range festival (in
Columbus, Ohio) being such a success and selling out months in advance,
with tens of thousands of people each day. It’s shows that the fans
are, in fact, there.”
Though in terms of incoming listenership,
Brown believes one of metal’s greatest obstacles to be the acceptance of
streaming among diehard fans, who still cling to the genre’s more
album-based format.
“It leads to people wanting vinyl or CD, and
less of just listening to a single,” Brown says. “That mentality can
exist with streaming and Spotify, I think it’s just an education
process. Slowly it’s happening. Out of all the genres, rock feels like
the one with the most room to grow, and once it starts catching up then
people are going to rediscover it in some ways.”
Fans who do use
streaming, however, are exceedingly committed to the genre. Spotify
released data in 2015 that found metal fans to be the service’s “most
loyal” listeners, based on a methodology that measured listening to the
genre’s core bands.
But this isn’t necessarily a good sign for the
music’s mainstream relevance. Metal has thrived for decades in part as
an insular “you don’t know unless you know” scene, but if the genre is
to again be appreciated for its superb musicianship and innate power, a
few new bands will need to explode across the rock consciousness — the
sort of Nirvana or blink-182 needle-moving moment that ensnares the
counterculture. (It sure feels like people can use some monster tunes to
scream along to these days.)
Young, Brown and Callazzo agree that
Danish metal band Volbeat -- who topped the Mainstream Rock Songs chart
twice this year with “Black Rose” and “The Devil’s Bleeding Crown” and
opened for Metallica this spring -- is one act with heaps of crossover
appeal.
“[Volbeat] has done a good job of taking in a lot of the
history of rock and metal, but not making it inaccessible,” Callazzo
says. “If you’ve become disillusioned [to the genre] and want to hop
back in, they are a good entry point.”
Brown also sees a resurgence in hardcore punk, metal’s petulant
cousin, with bands like Turnstile (Baltimore), Knocked Loose (Kentucky),
and Angel Du$t (Maryland) hopping on national tours with proven acts
like New Found Glory and Every Time I Die.
“There’s definitely
energy and passion there, and it’s a fan base that is embracing
streaming, and is listening to hardcore and hip-hop in the same day,”
Brown says. “The new fan is going to help reshape the rock side of the
industry.”
Until then, visibility in any form, from the French
metal band Gojira scoring a Best Rock Album Grammy nomination this year,
to Tool in June becoming the heaviest band to ever headline Governor’s Ball, down to the teens wearing Master of Puppets shirts in the suburbs, is a small step forward.
Says
Callazzo: “If that girl walking down Fifth Avenue in an Iron Maiden
shirt makes just one person go and listen to ‘Number of the Beast,’ I’ll
take it.’”
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