How can a single genre (lol) of music be simultaneously loved and hated so much by so many people? A style that encompasses so many different elements while at the same time retaining enough identifiable characteristics so as to remain part of a whole... in a word... Metal. The very mention of it causes some to shy away in fear, others to scoff, and yet others still to proudly throw the horns in the air and declare their allegiance to a genre of music oftentimes becomes more than just that.
Metal, as a musical genre, is often broken up into many different sub-genres. Most non-fans and a few so-called fans question the need for such a practice. I find that it's actually quite a necessity. I've heard plenty of arguments in my listening years against the breaking style up into sub-categories. They usually go something like this...
"Dude, thrash...death.. it's all just music."
Yea and monkeys and parrots are both animals so why bother coming up with names for each species right?
or...
"Classifying a band like Opeth as progressive melodic/doom death metal is stupid and just makes you an elitist."
Hey, I'm an elitist for plenty of other reasons. I don't need to tack metal genre guru onto my list of elitist qualities.
or even...
"What the hell is Australian War Metal? Now you're just being stupid."
I'll give this one a little bit of credit. The truth is the reason we divide the genre up so much isn't to label ourselves as fans of one genre (i.e. power metal) and not the other (i.e. death metal). It's to help newcomers to the genre as a whole or to help people who are unfamiliar with a band know what to expect. I'm sure some would think it's unfair for me to label a band like Arsis Technical Melodic Death Metal. I willing to bet the band would even find it unfair and say that I was pigeon-holing them. But that's the not intended purpose.
Say for example a person was to come up to me and ask me about the band Nightwish. And lets also assume that this person is a know fan of many death metal bands. If I were to simply answer his queries about Nightwish by describing them as a "good metal band" then he would probably get pretty upset when he listened to them and found them to be "a bunch of pansies with some opera singer" (especially if he'd just dropped $18 on a cd).
Now lets say in this same example our death metal fan of a friend comes up and asks us about Nightwish, but this time we describe them to him as Operatic Power Metal. In this instance he'd probably decide to steer clear of their music and instead go pick up the latest Psycroptic album.
Now in this example there's really nothing elitist about the more in-depth description of Nightwish as opposed to the more standard "metal" description. It simply serves to help guide someone to the styles of music and bands they enjoy the most. And it's important to remember that just because I say that Band X is considered Subgenre Y doesn't mean that they always adhere to that label. There are plenty of bands out there that break of their overall mode on multiple songs on every album. The label merely describes an overarching theme to their music which fairly represents their sound in general.
As for the elitist tag... It gets added later when some metalhead who thinks they know way too much about music (despite the fact that they wouldn't know a key signature if it bashed them over the head) decides to get a bit of an attitude when describing a band as something like Progressive Melodic Death Metal. This usually accomplished by adding a sarcastic tone which says, "How could you not have heard of this band already? I'm so much more ingrained in the culture than you." This sort of practice has got to stop because it really is elitism and gives metal fans a bad name.
There's nothing wrong with having plenty of genre prefixes to help with describing a bands sound. However, there are some words we use to describe subgenres that really are stupid and unneccessary. These are the words that describe something other than the musical qualities of the band.
A prime example of this would be Gore Metal. Gore Metal gets its name from the idea that the lyrical content of the music tends to deal with blood, guts and horror. And while this is usually quite correct describing the lyrical content of a band in no way describes their sound and thus negates the need for a genre title. In fact I can't think of a single Gore Metal band that couldn't more accurately me described as Death Metal. This is because lyrics are not music, they are poetry. No one is going to call Dragonforce Nerd Metal (although maybe we should...) so there is really no need to refer to Cannibal Corpse as Gore Metal. The reality is the genre doesn't exist. The same applies to things like Viking Metal, War Metal, Pirate Metal, etc...
Metal is truly an expansive genre of music that draws upon many different elements, from rock to blues and even classical. When something is that big simply confining it to one single word, "metal" just doesn't do it justice. We need these more in-depth descriptors so that when our new metalhead friend (who just recently discovered Metallica) has a birthday coming up we don't go out and get them the new Nile cd and instead opt for Testament.
I don't know...
-Beyond
