False Metal: Stand & Deliver!

What is false metal? When we say “death to false metal,” are we really only saying “Slayer is awesome”? Of course not. Within the metal universe, false metal is any metal whose primary purpose is anything other than the furthering of metal itself. “Death to false metal” means don’t suit up if you don’t intend to play hard. “Death to false metal” means that when some people are working twenty-four hours a day for peanuts, it’s an insult to put in thirty-hour weeks and ask for quiche. “Death to false metal,” extended far enough, embraces any creative artistic expression born of sweat and toil and the tireless pursuit of the single power chord that will wash over every last one of us, its distortion heavy and warm, its B-string high and trebly and keening like the midsummer wind on a stormy night. Most of the whiny grownups-profiting- from-adolescents’-angst post-Limp Bizkit funk-inflected seven-string stuff that Spin and Rolling Stone and everybody else have been giving so much attention to lately -- Papa Roach, Slipknot, Staind, Mudvayne: I get sleepy just typing their names -- is false metal of a particularly malodorous strain. Jewel is false metal. Shania Twain is false metal. The Eagles reunion is false metal. Natalie Cole exhuming her father Nat and digitally engineering a “duet” with him: that’s some false metal right there. The designated hitter rule? False metal for sure. Superagent Scott Boras? Perpetrain’ mad false metal, my friends.

So, let's see some offerings, hmm?