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Why Can’t Country and Metal Just Get Along?

In between posting grades online, xmas social obligations, accidental resulting hangovers, I somehow got myself back to my hometown for Christmas. For some reason, this flight proved troublesome for me; I was racing around unable to find my gate while they were announcing last call for boarding (that has never happened to me), asking the guy in my seat who apparently didn’t speak English if he could move (to which he responded with a smile and a slow shake of his head), dumping the entire contents of my purse on the airplane floor while my cat howled in her carrier...jeezus.

Moments like this can be fixed with an aisle seat, nobody beside me, a complementary glass of wine from the flight attendants, and an episode of Metal Evolution that I haven’t seen yet.

Fair warning before you read on: this is a post that is at least partially about metal (but also about country) and it’s going to start by meandering through the personal, but I promise to ask some very, very important questions for you all to consider by the end.

I’ll start with about today’s events. I got up early to pick up my rental car. On the way back, I plugged in some tunes so I could finally sing along to what’s been on my playlist lately, something I can’t do at home for a variety of reasons including the fact that the soundproofing is so bad I can hear my neighbour sneezing from two floors up. It seemed appropriate repertoire: arrive in the prairies and put on Iron Maiden. I sing quite well with Bruce Dickinson, if I do say so myself.

Let’s go back a step. On Monday, I had a rather lovely visit with my ex-boyfriend. Six years after a brutal breakup, everything is now cool and we had a good time. He even was crazy enough to drive me across Toronto to work, and put me in charge of his ipod for the drive. I told him about my recent listening habits and asked what I should get next. He took me through a series of songs that had strange nostalgic value in that I used to wake up at 4 am to listen to the last hour of his noise/metal radio show. The scariest shit to wake up to, but somehow at the time it was comforting.

Let’s go back another few steps. My brothers recently formed a “supergroup”, combining the remaining members of their former bands into one. At the last show I went to, I had to lean against the bar to avoid the punching, kicking dance moves of their rabid fans. I’m used to this; I lost my baby brother in a mosh pit at a Foo Fighters concert in Edmonton ten years ago when I got forced out within the first thirty seconds of the show. (That sounds crazy. He wasn’t a baby, he was 17 at the time.) His alarm used to be a Tool album that came grumbling through the walls at 6 am. My other brother recently abandoned the band’s brand of hardcore for a hollow-body Gretsch and some country repertoire, a shock to me after 30 years of hearing anything but that.

Let’s go back 40 years. My parents told me today that they started dating 40 years ago, not so long after Master of Reality came out. I was born in ’78, the year that Hemispheres was released.

In short, despite the fact that I am a country music lover and researcher, metal has been hovering in the background for a long time, and I think I love it too.

Some people in my circles are disappointed that I have let my interest in metal be publicly known. When I sent a paranoid pun to my friend in an email, he said, “I get it. Stop it. Email me when you’ve listened to Court and Spark.” But I was always interested, even if it didn’t seem to be compatible with what I normally spent my time on. Luckily, you can get away with an “academic interest” in genres besides that which you built your identity on when you do the work I do, so I used to sneak off to papers on Voivod or Rush riffs at conferences or I would research speed metal in the interest of doing a good lecture on it.

A professional identity is not necessarily a social identity though, so I didn’t think I could get anyone to go along with me to concerts, despite all the above evidence to the contrary that friends, partners, and family would have. I probably didn’t think I would fit in. And I couldn’t reconcile all the things I liked about the music with the things I found attractive about roots and country: metal is not a friendly, accessible music. It might have started on underground labels, might have been one of the most rebellious genres in its original form, but it became an expensive, profitable, big-label music in many ways. The spectacle of metal discouraged the artist-audience connection that seems much more available in country. Also, it’s loud.

Maybe my classical background helps me appreciate the virtuosity and density of metal. Maybe my relatively benign childhood in the suburbs squashed a natural aggression in me that now gets satisfied by hard music. Maybe – certainly – I’m overthinking it. The reason I bring it up is because genre identities are so carefully constructed by us listeners and they are meant to be incompatible with others. Those who scratch Slayer logos into their jean jackets with ballpoint pens don’t turn around and go two-stepping on Saturday nights.

Or do they? When I started interviewing roots musicians, many of them told me how they made the move from hard rock to country. Among their first albums were treasures like Back in Black. Somehow, these guys – most of the people I interviewed in the Alberta scene were men – managed to integrate the music they loved in their teen years with country, creating interesting, heavy songs informed equally by Johnny Cash and Kiss.

There is a generation gap in this experience. Those in their 30s and early 40s tended to grow up on metal, though not exclusively, whereas those who are a bit older might be more drawn to singer-songwriters and punk. The division between punk and metal was the focus of the Metal Evolution episode I watched last night. Sam Dunn persisted in asking groups like Iron Maiden if they could at least appreciate punk, its speed, what it stood for, and the repeated, vehement answer was no. It is a division that is now often seen as humorous; the subject of many pop culture trips back in time. But at the time, it was serious. If you liked one, you probably didn’t like the other.

There are subtle things about both genres I’m ignoring here, not the least of which is their roots. MC5, for example, is held up as the beginning of music that became both punk and metal. And subgenres of each adopt virtuosity, or lack thereof, an indie approach, and the other’s themes. I’ve read that the reason Metallica sped their music up was to compete with the punk bands that were stealing their audience, and so began a whole body of work predicated on the integration of two supposed opposites.

So why is punk part of the background/story of alt-country, but metal isn’t? Is it an attitude problem, that the posturing and overt masculinity of metal doesn’t sit nicely with country? Seems to me there are more than enough tough guys in country, both past and present. Is the overly technical aesthetic of metal offensive? If so, why not in bluegrass? Country and metal address many of the same themes – rejection of suburban life, rebellion against dysfunctional systems, critique of institutional power – and are created by the same demographic.

Are we all closet metal fans not willing to admit our preferences because we are imagining this conflict between the two?

Maybe I’ll continue some of these thoughts down the road, but for now, merry Christmas, and a mostly unrelated video.

Comment by Jack on December 21, 2012 at 12:42pm: Gillian, I don't relate to heavy metal on any level, and I've no idea if country and metal get along or not. The only metal show I've ever seen was by Hank Williams III. The first set was first rate country, the band wearing cowboy boots and hats, ponytails. The second set was the same guys minus the hats, hair unleashed, bashing away on the same instruments. The mosh pit replaced the rockabilly gals dancing up front. They seemed equally adept in both modes. What this says about your headline question, don't know.

As for waking up at 4 a.m. to startling music, years ago in northern Wisconsin one of the guys used the song in the above video to get a bunch of hungover/still whacked guys up and out for breakfast. Not sure if it's metal but it's not what I want to be hearing on little sleep with a pounding headache.

Comment by Julie Wenger Watson on December 21, 2012 at 3:11pm: Enjoyed the post! I liked a lot of metal in my "youth"...There was plenty of it on the local main rock radio station when I was growing up (that and a lot of Southern Rock). Something in it must have spoken to my relatively happy, middle class, teenage self. Now I have my own teenager, and he's really into it. It's been fun listening to what he likes and having him listen to what I like. We've actually found some common ground. He couldn't believe his grandparents let me go see Ritchie Blackmore's "Rainbow" (with Joe Lynn Turner, can't believe I remember all of that) in concert before I could drive. As a parent now, I'm a little surprised, too, now that I think about it... :) Moreover, he can't believe his "roots music"/ "singer songwriter"/"alt-country" loving mom ever enjoyed that kind of music. You'll still catch me singing along with the classics... Rock on!

Comment by Easy Ed on December 26, 2012 at 6:46am: Are we all closet metal fans? No. The closest I came to liking metal was shop class back in high school. We spent three months making a box out of a sheet of tin. Nice touch to bring up MC5, I think that's a very valid observation. But it's hard to trace the origins and Cream, Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge easily come to mind. And in Germany, all the bands there seemed to be playing metal, even the quiet ones. But the migration to country is really interesting. Mark Slaughter from the band of the same name with the hit "Up All Night" moved from Vegas to Nashville a long time ago to become a session player. And I'm sure there are more like him.

Not so many years ago when I peddled music for a living, CMH Records came up with a very unique concept. An old bluegrass label, they got the idea of taking metal artists like Metallica and Iron Maiden and cutting bluegrass versions of their songs. We sold a lot. I mean, an awful lot. By the time I ended up working there we were doing bluegrass versions of all genres, but it was the metal bands that sold the most. Some of it is the "completist fan mentality", and I think that some folks liked the way it sounded. Here's an example:

Finally, to further support your theory, have any of us ever seen Lemmy from Hawkwind/Motorhead without his cowboy hat? I think not.

Comment by Les Thomas on December 26, 2012 at 7:00am: Thanks for the interesting post, Gillian. I started playing music in the late '80s as a teenage skate punk when bands like Suicidal Tendencies and DRI were bringing together punk and metal. I think Rick Ruben producing Johnny Cash's America albums did a lot to bring country to the attention of metal/punk players. Some of Steve Earle's rocker albums would definitely helped a lot, too. I think a lot of musicians start out in punk, move to metal when they become more proficient and then figure out ways of playing than keep them inspired. I feel like folk, country/ alt country allow the expression of a broader range of emotions, whereas metal needs a level of aggression or menace to stay within the style.

On the writing side, I think grassroots publications like Maximum Rock'n'Roll, with its focus on hardcore and even the way punk, metal and maybe early grunge shows were organised have done a lot to inform grassroots alt country, because people have directly fransferred their knowledge and experience. Some fans may recoil at that suggestion, but musicians are usually pretty open-minded, I find.

Comment by Derek on December 26, 2012 at 7:46am: Country music = old people music; metal = youth music. Next question.

Comment by Gillian Turnbull on December 26, 2012 at 8:55pm: Derek: I don’t think I agree, because how then would you explain my obsession with country at 15 and my interest in metal now at 34? And, look at Julie’s story – does it ever really go away?

Thanks, Jack. Interesting about HWIII, he came to mind when I was writing. I’ll listen to your link when I’m not disrupting everyone, thanks for posting.

Ed: Yeah, thanks for bringing up those discs. I got them out of the library when they came out. Makes me think the two are nicely paired, at least in terms of technical complexity.

Les, I think you’re right. I like that way of looking at the progression, makes sense to me. I think especially if you don’t have the cultural/generational associations, it’s easy to like everything.

Comment by Joseph Filippazzo on December 27, 2012 at 11:50pm: That was an interesting one:) being born in 70, I grew up on metal ( and Rolling Stones lol) from 1980 til the whole scene died in the early 90's..along with my musical tastes for about 15 odd years..I thank..of all people ..Emmylou Harris and above all..Gram Parsons for turning me back on to music-even though they not played on the radio! Go figure :P Lol

Comment by Jim Moulton on December 28, 2012 at 4:54am: About as metal as I get is Lynryd Skynrd,love the Grateful Dead. The older I get, the more forgiving I am of what someone else likes, No Depression probably has one of the most Diverse crowd of music lovers of any forum, If you don't care for what I like , that doesn't matter, it's about sharing. As long as the music Spins----

Comment by Marcel on December 28, 2012 at 5:44am: You'd be surprised how many metal fans listen to country, especially "the good stuff" (ha!) like Cash, Hank, Gram and Merle. A few years ago I was at a metal festival, and I saw a lot of posters promoting other metalfestivals and -bands. Except for one: A tribute show for Johnny Cash.

It's always easy to spot the metal fans at country shows: band t-shirts. I've seen them at shows by Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, Hank III. I've seen a few moshpits too at country shows (Jason & The Scorchers!).

The fantastic Roadburn festival in Holland is famous for programming deep, deep underground metalbands. Last year, Jesse Sykes played, and this year Bob Wayne and his Outlaw Carnies.

I think that the darker topics of countrysongs speak more easily to the metal crowd, because they're familiar with it. There aren't that many deathmetalbands that sing about breakups, like Taylor Swift does...

Comment by William D. Harnish on December 29, 2012 at 3:31pm: A worthwhile post. I've gone through periods with almost every genre and style of music. Country and metal don't "not get along" but in many cases they exist in very different spaces of the psyche. Country (good country, anyhows) is soulful and simple, songs that a newbie can figure out passably on the guitar to sing and play with friends. Metal tends to be more technical and "soulless". Metal is populated by thousands upon thousands of bands formed of guys and occasionally women who dedicate hours to a craft which probably won't pay them back in pennies. Drawing an arbitrary line and saying one is definitively better is not useful, because the contexts are different and that is a disservice to performers in either genre. They don't get along because Decrepit Birth doesn't fit comfortably on a mixtape with Wanda Jackson. They're jarringly different, but if taking a side based on that criteria is the order, then it's unfortunate for fans of each. They're missing a lot.

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