>True. Kinda blows my theory out of the water, in fact.

It's why I'm here. This is fun to talk about anyway, so thanks for kicking off an interesting subject.

>Yeah, you just described me, basically. I am in fact, a
>(slightly) redneck jock who looooooooooves Pantera. (Although
>the "popular ascendance of Metallica" is precisely when I
>stopped listening to them--I don't want soft introspection,
>James, I want to ride the goddamn lightning!) But "built-in
>aggression and fuck-all-y'all attitude?" Check and check.

Yup. And nothing wrong with that either! But I definitely fall more to the introspective, introverted music geek type, so after a brief dalliance with them in high school (when I was still figuring out what I was, or what I might turn out to be), I lost interest in Pantera, and tough guy metal in general. It just seems like a less-interesting thing to do with a genre that has larger, funkier potential. It's nerdy and weird, I know, but give me gore lyrics, college freshman-level philosophizing, Satan worship, or most anything else over "step to me and you get punched, SUCKA!" I still do like a lot of "Cowboys," anyway, but after that they lose me.

>I think it might be worth drawing a line, particular in the
>'80s and early '90s, between US/UK bands and European bands.
>Where I grew up, in rural Virginia, we didn't hear ANYTHING
>from Europe. We didn't even know bands such as Bathory
>existed, for the most part. We had thrash, Florida death,
>Motorhead and Maiden, and that was about it. Nobody, to my
>knowledge, knew anything about the Scandinavian scene. I
>imagine folks in big cities knew what was going on, but out in
>the sticks, not at all.

True of a lot of places, I think. Some trve kvltists bitch about the internet because now everything's so accessible, maaaaan, and you don't EARN YOUR KNOWLEDGE. Whatever. The upside - that you can explore all the regional scenes, hear obscure demos, and crawl down into so many nooks and crannies - is so massive to me. When I originally listened to metal, pre-internet, I was basically limited to what people thrust in front of me. So, again: Metallica and the others in the Big Four; Queensryche and Maiden (the Bruce Dickinson years); a little US death metal, particularly Cannibal Corpse and Carcass; and rather randomly, Napalm Death. I ran into a few other odds and ends during the brief period that I read Kerrang and Metal Hammer, but it was so much work and there was still so much I knew nothing about. When I got back into it some years later, the internet opened my eyes in a big way. In fact, I would have been lost in all of the above conversation in my pre-internet years. Even though I was into metal, I wasn't truly All The Way Into Metal. Few were... it took a whole lot of effort to do that - trading demo tapes with guys overseas, buying zines, learning to read Swedish just to get good recommendations, etc.

>...at least now, in 2013. Nowadays when I go to shows I find
>comfy spots to sit in the back of the venue, on account of
>being old and creaky, which makes for good people watching.
>Which I did a lot of last night (Bodom, AA, Emmure, Job for a
>Cowboy, a couple others), and two things were clear: one, I
>wasn't the oldest guy there, but I was surely in the 98th
>percentile; and two, 98% of the crowd was quite obviously in
>the introverted, not-popular-at-school category.

Yeah, I think the internet facilitated that, too! It seems like metalheads used to be a mix of burnouts and introverts, but a lot of the burnouts moved on to become juggalos or nu-metal fans or whatever, while the introvert crowd just grew and grew as an ideal tool for the facilitation of "metal studies" became available...

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