Can HM be good without attaching any irony?

of course it can. it just all depends on a. suspension of disbelief and/or b. what yr looking for in music. metal has cheese, riffs, usually decent rhythms, a cartoon theatricality, and feigned menace which are all things i look for in music to one degree or another. i don't care if they "mean it" (or even worse, if they dont!)

i like HM unironically [iz that a wurd ?]

the best HM like the best pop iz not afraid of being what it is

yes of course

Sneering will ultimately deprave your liver and irony is over. No need to secretly like anymore, get it out! Who fucking cares. HM is part of the mad parade. Eat more nuts, control your lust.

Not if you have to ask the question.

HM = music

There are hardly any genres where I'm more likely to say I don't like it. It's a long time since I've heard anything that is certainly HM that I have liked. Nonethless, I love Paranoid the tune and most of that Black Sabbath album, with no irony leavening it at all.

the new generation of collegiate, indie-nerd types playing heavy metal with heavy irony suck... as for listening to the authentic stuff, i think it's best to suspend disbelief. although occasionally the absurdity makes me laugh.

The beautiful thing of HM is that since it has lost the "H" its cutting edge somewhere around 1985 has disappeared from public view. Every rock fan/critic on the planet knows about Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden - they had chart topping singles and albums. Get further down the line of development and more and more of the "generalists" seem to jump ship to safer havens (scared off even more by the cheesiness of the commercially successful side of HM, the "leather, denim & vomit" NWOBHM scene of 1980-1987) and the pace of innovation is only followed by the few that remain. Ask yourself this, in retrospect: "where did the latest development in (Heavy) Metal become too noisy/dissonant/morally unacceptable for me to remain interested in the genre?": Was this in 1982 with Metallica, 1984 Hellhammer, 1985 Napalm Death, Slayer & Sodom, 1986 Death & Morbid Angel, 1990 Entombed & Paradise Lost, 1991 Burzum & Darkthrone, 1993 Immortal, 1995 Ildjarn & Graveland, 1996 Kataklysm & Cryptopsy, 1998 Gorguts? With each of these "revolutionary" bands/albums the majority of fans have "drawn the line" and have gone no further, leaving an ever smaller group of people driving the change. Case in point: see the scores of 30- and 40-something Iron Maiden fans unwilling to admit anything worthwile happened in Metal since the early 80's.

Somehow the development of Heavy Metal has resulted in unusually high "barriers of entry" to get and understand where the development is heading. In reality, nobody switches from listening to your average Radiohead/Autechre/Joy Division/Velvet Underground/name-any-widely-respected-band to popping in, say, the barrage of polyrhythms and atonality and dissonance of Cryptopsy/Gorguts without going through the stages of liking the more traditional "ear-friendly" stuff and slowly developing a taste for the spirit of the music, and THEN getting into the more musically interesting realms. Heavy Metal has become so focused on inaccessibility, fuelled by the merciless underground that violently lashes out against any band that dares to abandon the thrust forwards and goes back to the rock 'n roll-ancestry that has been a passed station for almost two decades. There are no bands that bridge the gap between cutting edge Metal and today's rock scene because the musical rift has appareltly become so wide it has become a musical impossibility. The result is that this self-chosen obscurity places Metal outside of everything and nobody outside insider circles knows what's actually going on. Where most broadminded rock critics have kept track of other inaccessible genres (Experimental noise bands like Merzbow for example are rather well known known in "serious" rock circles - although they are equally "unlistenable" in nature) Metal is somewhat of a Terra Obscura, which few enter because because of this huge investment you have to make to get anything gratifying out of it.

I think Metal is mainly *musically* interesting because it has the place in the musical spectrum on the melodic (as opposed to abstract/collage-type "experimenting with white noise") boundary of human tolerance of the anti-aesthetic.

As a cultural phenomenon it is probably interesting to see how the largely uniform working-class-blue-denim "Metal" subculture of the early 1980s has exploded into this myriad of sub-subcultures, local scenes, nostalgic movements, avant garde movements, radical left-wing and right-wing movements, crossovers with folk, classical, industrial, goth, oi!, jazz, grindcore, et al. At the moment, "Heavy Metal" as a designation for all musical developments has lost any serious meaning. Today it's only the "way of life" sentiment that really connects all the scenes, because musically there is little common ground between, say, Iron Maiden and Sort Vokter.

I'd think HM wouldn't have the mental buffer to develop being good regardless of attachment to irony. Sneering at HM would seem a pointless cruel exercise.

― Brian MacDonald, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I'd set the Wayback Machine for 1985 anywhere in the Provincial Midwest. Put one of these dorks in a a Clash or Jam shirt & put him in front of a Camaro driven by someone with a full on mullet blasting Maiden or Sabbath. These guys would kick your ass for even saying you liked punk. It wasn't until Metallica started wearing Misfits(years after they broke up)t shirts in 86-87 that punk stopped "sucking" or stopped being "faggot music. 80's metal is as retarded as it was in the 80's.

Jim

Those 80's straight edge bands like Judge & Strife should be the new hipster irony. They were funny then & it still is funny

jess 'suspension of disbelief' IS 'irony'.

i think people are too defensive about admitting there's an element of irony in their appreciation of anything. like it means you don't really like it, you're some kind of student disco lampshade-on-the- head prat if you like anything with stupid elements. like when i was young i really only liked things i could feel 100% empathy with...imagine!

that said tho lots of hard rock doesnt have 'stupid elements' to the extent that i need to filter levels of the content out or whatever. martin s's example of 'paranoid' is a good one, i mean that's just fuckin GOOD, even if you get the sense from it that the people who made it are like, no einstein or shit.

did you see them (iommi & osborne) playing that song for the fuckin queen btw? what a nauseating spectacle. oh man. rock's deader than poetry!

she looked more upset than you duane!

"irony is over."-

Intentional irony, maybe. But hundreds of Punk Rock fans mourning the deaths of Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, seemingly forgetting the fact that this kind of hero worship is what Punk wanted to destroy in the first place (debatable if the Ramones *themselves* wanted to do that, too- but their audience certainly felt that way), proves that irony itself is still alive and well.

I like Heavy Metal, in small doses...as far as irony goes, "when the thrill's the thing, who the fuck cares about intentions?" (Dave Marsh).

jess 'suspension of disbelief' IS 'irony'.

maybe for bitter and twisted old people.

but..but...I like my metal ironic!

does HM stand for heavy metal or hair metal? i like both quite genuinely.