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There’s nothing like half-assed anthropology

I wanted to start this post with my usual disclaimer about how I’m not a total asshole and sometimes other people are wrong right (Freudian slip), but that’s just a waste of time and my heart wasn’t in it. So read on to hear what I have to say about this pseudo-intellectual douchebaggery.

The New Yorker recently put up an article about some Al Qaeda hippie and made sure to draw some bizarre connections to death metal.

Death metal is a severe offshoot of heavy metal, a reaction to the superficiality of eighties popular culture. In the early nineties, bands that played death metal considered themselves part of an élite vanguard. They tuned their guitars in unconventional ways, and some, influenced by classical musicians, composed songs that required high degrees of discipline and technical virtuosity to play. Onstage, artists often wore sweatpants to demonstrate their athleticism and lack of pretense; the genre’s signature vocal style is a heavy growling chant. (“We like it when it’s simply rotten,” one musician told me.) It is a subculture in love with its offensiveness, and obsessive about guarding its artistic purity.

In case you missed it, I’m going to repeat that little gem.

Onstage, artists often wore sweatpants to demonstrate their athleticism and lack of pretense;

I know a fucking lot about death metal, and more than a bit about sweatpants, so maybe I’ll just come off as sounding like part of some “elite vanguard” when I say this, but that passage is a crock of shit and the author has to know it. Here I cite a legendary Facebook thread, in which some guy named Scött [sic] muses:

Florida Death metal is for fat guys who wear black sweatpants, eat Cheetos by the truckload, and get their hair caught in their guitars’ tuning pegs.

Amen, brother. I love Cannibal Corpse and Hate Eternal as much as the next headbanger wasted on too much cheap beer, but the scene is unfortunately fraught with, well, fat white guys in sweatpants and knotty hair.

The author of the New Yorker article doesn’t understand death metal, and I’m fine with that. But why lie so poorly that even the uninitiated can spot your idiocy? I’m as much an armchair anthropologist as my whole lazy wannabe-Web-3.0 generation, but even I find this lack of effort appalling.

By the way, as of today, Google reports 0 results for “Florida sweatpants metal” and only 7 for “sweatpants metal.” I’m proud to be contributing to this great cesspool called the internet.

(via Metal Inquisition)

Update: A recent post on Invisible Oranges references the sweatpants metal meme without an ounce of respect.

There was definitely a jeans era (thrash) and, to some extent, a sweatpants one (death metal).

The post itself is a moderately interesting look at the use of camouflage attire in metal getups.