I returned the comment with a fairly-confused look and an eventual "Thank You," as Shambhala would be the last place where I'd expect to receive a compliment for a shirt with art from progressive Metal group Tool on it. After all, this is a festival dedicated to cultivating peace, love and understanding through generally-uplifting electronic music; even Tool's socially-conscious and very trippy guitar-driven sounds would seem out of place if played through any sound system there. Granted, given the heavy psychedelic content of both Tool's music and that particular festival, the probability of finding at least one Tool fan would be likely rather high, especially in such a diverse crowd.

But it got weirder than merely being complimented on my rather-Metal shirt at a rather-Trance-y festival; both myself and those I camped with noticed the trend all weekend long: there were Tool t-shirts everywhere. What on God's Green Earth were all these metal heads doing at Shambhala?

Then Excision dropped his remix of Slayer's "Rain of Blood" and it all made sense. More after the jump.

I'm trying to make a point here less about Tool or Slayer fans (As in all reality, seldom are the two in the same room) and more about the progression of Metal as a serious genre in the year 2009.

I'm not going to lie to y'all; I really love my Metal. But it's getting harder and harder to say I like it, when I'm supposed to listen to every new track from the genre in a hyper-pretentious pseudo-ironic mode more akin to the yawning eye-rolls I encounter when immersed in some new overly self-conscious Indie bullshit. To be truly Metal is to like your music with a whiskey chaser and to feel unfulfilled if not sore as shit after a concert. People really don't get Metal, with its generally-fake Satanism, mauvais imagery and ridiculous antics. They think it's too loud, or the continuous guitar solos stupid, or the drumming boring, or the fans idiots. However, a good Metal show is a sublimely spiritual experience, something akin to exorcising one's deepest demons in a group setting reminiscent of "Fight Club." Yes, it's okay to be really angry (If only for a moment), to tell the world to go fuck itself in your most piercing, blood-curdling scream. Productive, no; cathartic, yes.

The Metal I've fallen out of love with is a sneaky, politically-correct shell of its former glory. While a few groups still probe the edges of the genre and make absolutely fantastic stuff, I've begun to feel less ridiculous wearing a giant sombrero and waving a foam light-sabre listening to Epic Trance (even!) than I do at a Metal show. Metal shot its load two decades ago, by going straight to the cultural equivalent of Godwin's Theory: you can make a statement against Christianity and their morality by proclaiming Satanism, but in a postmodern society wherein even Satanists have websites proclaiming that they're actually really okay guys that are just very Nietzschean and think differently, well, all the theatrics get to be a bit much. And let's not get into how hard it is to be at the level of anger necessary to listen to Metal when you smoke pot all day...

Here's where I get to why I love Dubstep: it's as heavy as Metal — if not heavier in many acoustic aspects — and I can listen to it baked. The very obvious Dub influences mean you can bounce to it at a cut-time feel if you want, or if you want to just fucking throw-down, many of the faster basslines will do the trick. And, as a self-proclaimed head-banger, the ultra-heavy snares used in Dubstep explode at exactly the right time. While in many respects it's not as fast as Metal, the ability for DJs to drop Drum-and-Bass tracks can give a set the necessary heart-pumping blitz factor.

Dubstep is the music I wish I was listening to in High School.

The weird part is that Dubstep owes more to Rap and Reggae than it does Metal. Since coming out of the UK beginning around 2002, it's become a very global phenomenon, with pioneering DJs such as Skream and Benga just now starting to get their deserved recognition. Interestingly, perhaps because it's such excellent chronic music and perhaps because British Columbia certainly has an abundance of that, B.C. is starting to produce some of the sickest Dubstep artists on the continent. Everyone at Shambhala was dropping it, and I've gotten the impression people in Vancouver can't get enough of it. We're just starting to see it here in Calgary and I could not be more stoked.

If you like heavy music, prepare for what will likely be an incredibly important and influential period that will make all that Emo crap your boring friends listened to in the first half of this decade seem to have been worthwhile.

-æ.

       

Written by :

Ændrew Rininsland