(TheBRHM.com) Every genre eventually has to reckon with its own history, but few have let that history calcify quite like heavy metal has. For a style built on rebellion and volume and the refusal to sit still, the modern fanbase has grown strangely comfortable, strangely protective, strangely allergic to anything that arrived after the golden years. And as someone who has spent a lifetime inside these crowds, often as one of the only Black faces in the room, I’ve watched this shift happen up close and it worries me.
Let me tell you where I come from first. My uncle put me onto Hendrix before I could ride a bike. Somebody’s older cousin handed me a burned CD with Pantera sitting right next to Living Colour, and after that there was no saving me. This stuff raised me. Which is exactly why I feel comfortable saying something a lot of longtime fans don’t want to hear.
We have become the very thing we used to laugh at.
Scroll under any fresh band’s video and the pattern jumps out immediately. Some older head typing that music died in 1991. Another swearing the last real record dropped before the kid in the clip was even born. Then comes the big one, the phrase you hear at every festival and every bar and out of every dude in a faded tour shirt older than my marriage. They don’t make them like they used to. Ain’t nobody touching Maiden. No young band could ever carry what the greats built.
Here’s what gets me, though. Those same folks won’t give a fresh group even one honest spin before writing the eulogy.
Consider how the legends actually became legends. Metallica put out a raw, sloppy, gloriously mean debut, and Kill ‘Em All is a wonderful mess in spots. Everybody knows it. Their real stride didn’t come until a couple albums deep, and growing into it was only possible because the scene back then ran on a longer fuse. Fans followed a band through the awkward years. You bought the record, sat with it, caught them in a sweaty club with forty other people, and gave them room to figure out who they were. Patience like that was the soil. Those oak trees we worship now only got tall because somebody let them be saplings first.
Fast forward to today and everything has flipped. An upstart drops a debut, and if the opening single doesn’t reinvent the wheel by the second chorus, it’s dead on arrival. Eight seconds and we skip. Derivative, we call it. Just copying the classics, we say, while complaining in the very same breath that nobody sounds like the classics anymore. You can’t have it both ways, family. You really can’t.
This happens to bands who are genuinely worth your time. A whole crop of young acts is out here right now doing serious work. Kids playing thrash with real fire. Groups folding blues and soul and hardcore into the mix in ways the old guard never dared. Singers who can actually sing rather than scream because it’s fashionable. Some of these musicians have chops that would have made 1985 nervous, and most get maybe one album cycle of attention before the internet decides they’re a flash in the pan and drifts back to arguing about whether some thirty year old fourth album beat the fifth.
Being one of the few Black faces in a lot of these pits, I’ve always paid close attention to who gets welcomed and who gets told to prove himself twice. So maybe my radar runs hot on this. Metal spent decades branding itself as the outsider thing, the music of misfits, the last home for anybody who didn’t fit anywhere else. Come as you are, we don’t care where you’re from, just bring the riffs. That was the whole promise. Yet somewhere along the line a big chunk of the crowd got comfortable and got older and got protective, and now the outsider genre has its own velvet rope and its own bouncers deciding who’s allowed to matter.
Nostalgia itself isn’t the crime. Loving old records is a beautiful thing, and certain albums that shaped me will get defended with my dying breath. The real crime is using that love as a wall instead of a door. When affection for the past becomes an excuse to slam the gate on everything new, you aren’t protecting the music. You’re strangling it. You’re guaranteeing the thing you cherish has no future, then acting heartbroken when it starts to feel like a museum.
Speaking of which, plenty of festivals feel exactly like one now. Same headliners fifteen years running. Legacy acts doing the anniversary tour where they play a single beloved album front to back because that’s the only thing guaranteed to move tickets. Men in their sixties and seventies pouring out everything they have, and God bless them, because that spot was earned. But when so much of the top of the festival circuit is dominated by heritage acts, where exactly is the next great one supposed to grow? Climbing to headliner status requires a ladder, and we keep sawing off the bottom rungs while wondering aloud why nobody new ever reaches the peak.
Somebody reading this is already loading up the obvious rebuttal. The new stuff just isn’t as good, plain and simple. Heard it a thousand times. And sure, plenty of young bands are mid. Plenty always were. For every legend from the classic era there were fifty forgettable groups history forgot, which is fine, which is how it works, because the cream rises. Rising only happens, though, when there’s something to rise out of. A big, messy, living scene full of okay bands and decent bands and a few brilliant ones is what gives the brilliant ones somewhere to come from. Choke off that flow and purity isn’t what you get. A graveyard is.
Nobody here is asking you to pretend. Don’t lie and call a band amazing when they aren’t. My ask is simply for the same grace the old gods received. Sit with a record longer than one spin. Show up for the opener, not just the headliner. Buy a shirt from the young act at the merch table driving a van across the country on gas money and a floor to crash on. Put a friend onto something real when you hear it. Costs you nothing, and it happens to be the only way any of this survives us.
Those bands we now call untouchable were once brand new and unproven, and somebody gambled on them anyway. We owe that forward. Not backward to the ghosts, whose love is already locked in, but forward, to the kids who might turn out great if we’d only let them be young first.
A scene doesn’t die when its legends stop. It dies the moment the crowd decides nobody after them is allowed to matter. And from where I’m standing, wearing a shirt older than half these musicians, that moment is a lot closer than any of us want to admit.
Turn something unfamiliar up loud tonight. Just once. See what happens.
Staff Writer; Terry Poole
This brother brings sharp ears, deep respect, and real passion to every heavy metal riff, rock record, and overlooked gem he covers for TheBRHM… He writes for fans who still believe loud music should have soul, history, and meaning…
One may contact him at TerryP@TheBRHM.com.