Clutch frontman Neil Fallon shared the top word of criticism he has about metal music, telling Metal Hammer:
“If I have one criticism it’s that it tends to be purist to a fault and close-minded to a fault, and that if it doesn’t fit in certain parameters then it’s not metal.
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“To me metal had its beginnings the same way punk rock did, as rebellion against standardization of norms.
“It kind of became what it was against to some degree.
“But I get it. If you’re 17 years old and you’re not part of the football team, and you find friends with similar interests and a camaraderie, so you want to dress the same, I get that.
“If someone is elitist like that it’s not about music anymore.
“It’s about branding yourself and it gets ridiculous when people are drawing the finer points between black metal, death metal and grindcore – it’s kind of like living in a fishbowl.
“If that’s all you listen to it beholds you to look around a little bit and inform your music tastes by looking at other things on the menu.”
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Asked whether “metal needs the mainstream,” Neil replied:
“Not that I’ve ever had long hair, but I have a romantic, sentimental feeling that if you had a metal t-shirt and long hair you were labelled as an outcast.
“Now it doesn’t attract that kind of social perspective as much – out in the sticks in parts of the world it does for sure – but in the United States it’s much more common.
“You can go to a metal concert and you’ll find people who have grown up metal and become mothers and fathers, have jobs but they’re still metal fans.
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“As far as becoming mainstream, that isn’t exclusive to metal, it’s happened to hip-hop and punk, which were initially taboo in a lot of ways but in some ways they became victims of their own success.
“There’s always some band playing somewhere that’s going to kick that in the teeth and reinvigorate those genres. The compulsion to make exciting music is thousands of years old and that’s not going to stop because of the internet or fashion sense.”