The Mind of a Metalhead

No one gets it, really. No one, unless you are a part of it, understands the pulsing passion that is as much pubescent anger as it is a violent coming of age understanding that the happy, joyful world of a time before we faced off with nuclear bombs and bombs in coffee shops and turning planes into bombs is over. There is a sense, a mocking, laughter as heroes from all walks of a genre that everyone at one time has listened to collapses and rebuilds itself again and again.

We are now the children and grandchildren of the devil’s children. To us, the tri-tone is as important to our genetic makeup as what color eyes or skin we have. To us, lyrics about girls and beer and sex are as important as fighting corrupt power while thanking our soldiers for volunteering for jobs most of us would run from. We are the children of the children of the sixties. We are colder, angrier, tied into our computers and our cell phones, hiding from a world that at one time mocked and still mocks us mercilessly.

We are the child who sits alone in a room with a candle burning. Where once our parents got high to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, we stare into flames and listen to Metallica and Queensryche and wonder if it’s wrong that we like the new Linkin Park album or that we think Nickleback has a place in this world. We fear becoming our parents, lost adrift in a culture of “me” and “I” and yet thrive on myspace and facebook and twitter – searching for a companionship that we find only on the floor of a show as we crash into each other, bloody, angry, our ear drums ringing, tribal initiation, a circle of life, a reminder that we are still human despite what outside influences would have us feel.

We are many. Drunk and sober, uneducated and Ivy League. We identify each other with simple, subtle messages. A second look at someone’s t-shirt, a necklace, a leather rope around a wrist, an Army jacket. A wilder look in our eyes that demands more from entertainment than simply floating away into nothingness. Songs are not about love but sex. Not about politics but corruption. Not about pain but death.

Yet we can all appreciate the simplest song about beer.

We accept the pain in our legs after a concert. We accept the ringing in our ears and the highs and lows and the knowledge that the hangover the next day is not as much from booze but from the power and magic of the music that still lingers in our soul even the next day when we are struggling through jobs that often leave us wondering what our place is in it all. We are disillusioned with a purpose. We want to reshape the world but understand that the world will reshape itself. We are folk music with a violent ending. We are protest songs that tear down the system completely.

We are the mass and anger forgotten in the guilt of generations who do not still have a comprehension of what the bomb did to shape us all. We shout and would say that we are not heard but there are masses of us, teeming, rebuilding your streets and your houses and your lives. You have handed us the future and we took our anger and from it created understanding and knowledge and even, possibly hope. We know there is no stopping the blackness, we know it will find us. So we enter the pit day after day after day.