Underground Metal vs Commercial Metal

As the author pointed out in the previous article What's so good about Heavy Metal, many nowadays metal heads think that metal as a genre died out because it went commercial and lost all of its underground appeal, the very thing that made it interesting in the first place.

I would like to expand on a few points that the author may have missed. Certainly, as the more commercialised elements of metal appeared, as in Dimmu Borgir and Arch Enemy, it has certainly lowered the bar for what constitutes, and what does not, proper heavy metal. There is more to it than that, however, as the opposition between underground, or 'true', metal and its commercial, or 'fake', counterparts are about as old as the genre itself.

The question of 'selling out', mainstream whoredom and commercialism arose in the 1990s because there was a bridge between the power metal/jock metal of bands like Pantera and Mötley Crüe and the more old school thrash metal of Metallica, Sodom and Slayer that was never gapped.

This paralleled the even older gap of the previous decade, when the split between heavy metal bands like Motörhead and hard rock bands like Van Halen divided the fan base between album listeners - meaning underground fans - and radio listeners - meaning commercial groupies.

This irreconcilable fracture gave rise to entire subgenres like black metal, death metal and grindcore, which were at least in part deliberately designed to avoid having to deal with the large scale commercial appeal that was at the time endemic of everything and anything bearing the 'metal' label. In fact, the composer behind Burzum's Filosofem claimed that the record was the ultimate 'anti-trend album' and that it was recorded under purposefully bad conditions in order to retain a raw low fi sound. Similar sentiments have been shared by bands such as Phantom, Mayhem and Darkthrone, who are also known for their anti-commercial stances. That desire to create increasingly darker and difficult to access music has, in turn, triggered the rise of the 1990s revival of glam, grunge and punk rock, which were basically slowed down and pseudo progressive influenced garage rock. This 'trend' was heavily promoted by record labels and music executives, but by the 2000s, it was clear that the public preferred the 'darker' sound of Burzum and Mayhem to the recycled alternative rock/radio friendly metalcore so heavily pushed in mainstream circles.

At the end of the day, the question is about which type of metal music you want to listen to. The formulaic 'hard rock' of commercial record labels, or the true underground heavy metal of those - few, but growing - actually extreme bands. Heavy metal is, first and foremost, the music of the underground. Let's not forget this.

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