Commiserating the Celebration
Stay heavy and wear quality ear protection.
Hi, I’m Aaron, and I’ve been a fan of heavy metal for 40 years.
Don’t get me wrong – over the last 4 decades I have grown to explore and love an abundance of other genres, but Metal has always felt like home. As an awkward introverted kid from suburban Orlando, Heavy Metal gave me an immediate community of like-minded weirdos to bond with, some of which are still my best friends to this day. Heavy Metal provided the inspiration and courage to create art of my own. Heavy Metal has seen me through times of both darkness and light; never judging my choices, but a constant companion that’s always there when I need it the most.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but my older brother was my earliest introduction to Hard rock and Heavy Metal. While he and his friends were either mercilessly beating up me and my friends or jumping their bikes over us in the cul-de-sac, the sounds of AC/DC, Iron Maiden, and Def Leppard were ever present. But it was really the advent of MTV around that time that really sealed the deal. Didn’t matter what time of day or night it was, but you could reliably flip to channel 72 and be assaulted by a wave of long haired weirdos shredding on electric guitars, explosions of neon imagery and an abundance of hot, scantily clad chicks. For a young impressionable mind, this was everything. And the tunes weren’t so bad either.
I’ve obsessed over music for as long as I can remember. It’s never been enough to know a few songs or own a couple of records, I had to know ALL of the songs and own ALL of the records. In hindsight, I realize that this obsession was the earliest sign of my addictive tendencies cracking through to the surface. But that obsession lead to a lifetime of exploration and otherwise useless library of knowledge about all things Heavy Metal. What started with the cable TV accessibility of Hair Metal quickly evolved into a love of Thrash/Speed Metal and would truly blossom when I stumbled my way into Death, Doom, and Grindcore. That eventually spiraled into the 2nd Wave of Scandinavian Black Metal (and the 1st wave in reverse), Symphonic Goth, Industrial, the resurgence of old school power metal, and a retroactive appreciation for the NWOBHM and OG traditional metal bands of the late-70s/early-80s. Along the way, I was just as obsessive about other non-traditional forms of aggressive music – Punk, Hardcore, Darkwave, Ska, early Hip Hop (Yo! MTV Raps was a daily ritual after school), and everything else you could posit in between.
I’m almost 50 years old and still question myself about how to spell “Wednesday” correctly, but I can have a deep and articulate conversation about A Blaze in the Northern Sky just as assuredly as I can Look What the Cat Dragged In. So take that for whatever it’s worth.
As a I approach the mid-century mark, I find myself listening to less “new” metal and spending more of my listening hours retracing the decades of other music that I’ve missed along the way – everything from Steely Dan to Portishead, and it’s genuinely exciting to venture into these previously uncharted paths. All of that said, there’s a high probability that I’ll be cranking The Obsessed or Black Sabbath at some point tomorrow.
Music is like oxygen for me; I couldn’t exist without it. So I’m entirely chuffed to have this new forum that’ll allow me to tell all of my old Heavy Metal stories to a new and unsuspecting audience! And to be able to share that with my Doom Brother Rob is an extra treat. So strap in, I’ve got plenty of untethered opinions and you’re going to hear (and read) a lot of them.
Stay heavy and wear quality ear protection.
