The ‘Nu Metal’ Era: Gems from the Deluge (Part – I)

May 11 • All Updates, Articles, The Slumbering Ent • 9143 Views

This is not an article on what nu metal(inclusive of alt.metal) is but what it was to this author (Deckard Cain) at an earlier time. Not an attempt at personal aggrandizing but  a realization that there are many metal loving Indians who might have tread a common path, and the belief therein that it might strike a parallel. For the sake of convenience this article is split into different sections. Here is Part I on why it was important, Part II and Part III revisits some old favorites within the genre, but will be published later on.

Created by Lusokav

THE PICTURE

Nostalgia. A fruit that tastes sour to everyone, save for its beholder.

A term that suffers a great elevation in importance when equated with something very personal. Let’s say music here. Narrow it down a bit and you arrive at this silly 5 letter world.

Now let’s pause here a bit before we jump headlong into the matter at hand. I’d be glad if you can take the trouble of imagining a mental timeline, say of your changing musical tastes over the years up to this very day.

When something of a rough mental picture is arrived at you’d probably start to perceive some semblance of a pattern to it all.

More often than not you start with the more accessible bands and then move onto something more challenging. Now the term ‘challenging’ can mean different things and is purely contextual. It can mean anything from ‘ simpler yet heavier’ to ‘avant garde’. And yes it’s a given that some do get stuck somewhere near the starting point of the process at comparatively simpler/accessible forms, but that is as much a conscious decision as choosing your job after college as opposed to a shallowness in taste. You tend to get stuck but still very much conscious of the fact that you are so. While some of this is due to a lack of the heightened sense of curiosity that most fans of the genre come to possess, most of it I believe is due to this comfy-ness that creeps into each prospective metal fan somewhere along the line. The will to not explore nor experiment with your tastes within the genre/music can be seriously self-limiting. Extrapolate this behavior, and in effect maps your relation to music as art or as a means of entertainment/lifestyle/temporary relief.

THE CARICATURE

Coming back to the evolution of taste(change to be precise) and it’s likely that the first really heavy records you lent your ear to do occupy that much cliched ‘special place in your heart’. It is a shame then that some of us are rather too shy to acknowledge that fearing inevitable derision, all the while ever ready to retreat to the comfort/confines of the elitist posturing that seems to go around metal circles (The Hipster?). Picky even about what to/what not, to write about and share online.

Increased internet usage and the side effect ‘development of the online persona’ maybe to blame. Where your true self may forever be concealed. In this desperate race to emulate somebody else’s tastes, aren’t we all lost? Aren’t we in effect conforming ourselves to the very essence of what this music tries not to perpetuate? I’d rather be tagged a person with a shallow taste than a pretender. ‘Staying trve’ is not your dream ticket to the ‘Halls of Kvltoria’ but being yourself and listening to what you want to listen. The question is not ‘Beiber or Burzum?’, it’s you.

P.S.  Kindly quit donning the role of ‘savior of the scene’, ‘preserver of the arts’ and ‘General Boring’.

But to the ones who really appreciate their formative years in heavy music, it does play an important part albeit subconsciously, in what you listen today and in also what you look for in music today. Similar to how the environment you grew up in has a bearing on your future. Probably why I still prefer some good metalcore and nu-metal to this very day than unwillingly shun it to gain faux image points.

But more importantly those formative years of music listening relates to a specific time period in our lives that was either filled to the brim with fun or one of loneliness where good music shouldered your multifarious teenage problems. Yet this was where your average impressionable self was either inflamed or put down by metal. For most people my age, mid – late twenties, this period was high school. High school was always about new found freedom and all the ‘trying outs’ that it lead to (although on a lesser scale when compared to college) but more so when it came to music.

THE TRIAL

For me it was also a time when the ‘dial up Internet’ was very much the buzzword around town but still managed to elude most Indian households. The very same device that made a whole racket trying to get you connected to a web of questionable existence. The same time you made a calculated decision to rather wait than click your browser’s ‘refresh’ button, when things on the internet were slower than ‘slower than usual’. You couldn’t just go into Google and type in “best metal albums” and be handheld your way to the pantheon of gods.  This inevitably meant scooting off to your friend’s place who fortunately  had a decent internet connection and Limewire(hellyeah!). The friend who never shied away from openly expressing his distaste for the music and in hurling remarks that were more of an implied meaning of how you were wasting his precious monthly ‘MB’ download limit. Ultimately it came down to cassettes and television to feed my information hungry brain. Cassettes especially so, with a price range that easily exceeded the meager 100 rupee budget and complete with a false ‘imported’ tag, much to my chagrin. The albums that did trickle out into small music stores were always the craze and were obviously the popular ones. And when it came to television I was glued to this terrible show, in hindsight, called Billboard top 100 on Star World for every morsel of music that it dropped. Those garish bollywood dance sequences you had to go through before landing on a show on MTV or V Channel that played English music, to say the least.

But through all that, the sense of accomplishment and subsequent satisfaction achieved was more complete (probably in vein to the excitement of a tape well traded in the 80s), and not a click away like it’s today. To add to that almost euphoric sense of excitement you experience when you find someone with similar tastes. All of that belonged to a time in our short lives that shall remain well etched in my memory. Something you could call back on to escape the dull daily grind that our lives have become.

GOLD THAT DOTH SHINE

So from time to time, when chanced upon a bit of mainstream hard rock or nu metal very reminiscent of the early 2000’(circa 2004 in my case), I get this great nostalgic rush. You’d find me poring over Youtube playlists that takes you to a time more than a decade old. A plethora of different nu metal and hard rock acts are immediately dwelt upon. Sometimes the sheer curiosity of whether I’d like it today as compared to ‘back then’ drives me to listen. And its always ends in the affirmative and leads me to the understanding that an embracing of the past is,well…..not really bad!

Yes it’s a given that as we age we look for something more challenging in music, on account of our senses becoming more perceptive and our requirements becoming more varied. This change is often given the rather demeaning title “growing out”. One of the reasons why you listen to better music today, and one that’s oft shoved under the carpet, is because of the crucial reference point set up by the bands the music you formative years (growing up). For me it was Nu metal. A bridge to wide open spaces that were more green more verdant! (varied metal here) You are to thank it and not disown it. Genre irrelevance has never been this relevant.

The next part will consider some of the favorite releases of the author (personal gems), heedless of how he’d be mocked at in the virtual domain. 😛

And lest we forget…  

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