You and your metalhead friends.

(photo credit: Rob Macinnis)

It’s time for some hard truth (I’m not stupid — I save the hard truth for Saturdays because our audience drops on Saturdays). The hard truth is that you are most likely a big fucking geek. I can say this with confidence for four reasons. First, you can read. Second, you are reading a metal blog. And third, in all probability you are a metalhead. I’ll come to the fourth reason in due course.

Actually, the third reason is the biggest clue. I haven’t conducted any kind of scientific study, because I am not a scientist and studying sounds like work. Instead, I base my conclusion on years of first-hand observation. And what I’ve observed is that most metalheads are big fucking geeks. Not all, mind you. Some are career criminals. But even the ones who look like career criminals usually aren’t — down underneath their scary exteriors, they’re just geeks.

I suspect this conclusion would be greeted with disbelief by most people in the straight world, i.e., the people who look away quickly and increase their speed when they drive past the outside of a metal venue, because they think we’re ALL career criminals. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? And if perchance you don’t, I’ll assemble some of the evidence. Continue reading »

(NCS contributor Leperkahn shares with us the essay he submitted with his application to the college he will be attending this fall.)

I believe I’ve mentioned a few times here before that I’m still a high school senior (if you didn’t know, now you know). Thus, in the fall of 2013 I was more or less engulfed by the college application process, and the multitudes of essays that go with many applications, especially for those colleges that decide admission “holistically” (i.e., most of the ones I applied to). Most of their prompts are exactly the same, and evoke nothing but boredom and annoyance, such as the “describe an experience in which you had to come back from failure, and how it changed you” drek.

The University of Chicago, however, does it right, offering by far the most interesting (yet difficult) essay questions of any college I’ve heard of. The prompts an applicant had to choose from were as follows: Continue reading »

I think about this subject a lot. In fact, I think about it every day. Although I usually don’t manage to review an entire album more than two or three times a month, I write almost every day about individual songs that I’ve heard. I tend to do that quickly, but even then, mixed in with trying to put sentences together in a near-frenzy, I’m thinking (fleetingly) about what makes a review of music worth reading.

I don’t have a single answer to that question. And even the many answers I’ve thought of aren’t all ones I feel capable of following, because I’m a self-taught amateur and I know my limitations. But I thought I’d spill some thoughts about the subject in this post, as much to provoke discussion by readers and other writers as to help myself in a continued groping for some kind of mental synthesis.

I think about what makes a good review from two perspectives, and they don’t exactly line up with each other: What’s fun to write, and what’s useful and entertaining to read. This is why there are so many different answers to that question with which I began: what’s fun to write varies with the writer and what’s useful and entertaining to read varies with the reader. It’s hard to make yourself and everyone else happy.

I know what I enjoy reading. I want to get a sense of the music’s sound and the skill of the songwriters and performers. I want to know something about the genre, and something about the band’s history and interests, if I’m not already educated about those things. But I’m almost equally interested in the skill of the writer. I want to love the prose as much as the anticipation of what I might hear. If a review is dull and drab, inarticulate and deficient in lively turns of phrase, I’m unlikely to go back to that writer a second time. Continue reading »