Define older lol.

I’m not quite fifty yet, but my early exposure to metal goes back to when I was toddler.

When I was really little, my mom even played “we will rock you” to get me to sleep, though there’s debate about that song being metal. But she also played a good amount of Sabbath, Iron Butterfly, deep purple, Steppenwolf, etc back when I was still a baby, and that continued as I grew up.

My parents were both fairly avid music listeners, so it wasn’t just metal, and they never got into the kind of metal that got popular in the eighties, except for my dad really liking Poison lol.

But, I was similarly avid about music, of all kinds growing up. But I didn’t really think of metal as a genre until the mid eighties, when it kinda started going more mainstream. It was just music, and I liked what I would hear, but it wasn’t this thing yet.

Anyway, my exploration of metal as a genre on a more intensive level was in jr high. A friend dragged me into a disused bathroom at school, and introduced me to the album master of puppets. Mind totally blown. From there, it snowballed. Maiden, megadeth, anthrax, and it kept expanding.

I never really had any limits to sub genres at all. I enjoyed “hair” metal as much as thrash or old school stuff like original Sabbath. Hard rock was folded into it as well, with bands like aerosmith and queen being accepted as “close enough” to metal among most of the kids that were metalheads in my school.

But I was the one that introduced death metal to the mix! I shoplifted Death’s Leprosy and it ended up being a tad controversial among the metalhead population at school. Some loved it, some hated it, with no in between. I hated it at the time, and they’re still far from my favorite band, though I’ve come to appreciate their skill. But the guy that introduced me to Metallica loved it, and that started a death metal boom as copies of the tape spread.

Back then, out here in the rural area I’m in, long haired guys would catch hell. Metal was automatically Satanism, and you were going to hell. I ended up fighting way more than I wanted to by virtue of being long haired and unwilling to put up with shit after the first few years of it. I was a pacifist, really shy and reserved growing up. So jr high was hell for me. But by high school, I had taken all the abuse I was willing to, and started fighting back. Not that being a metalhead was the only thing that attracted abuse, I had other abuse going on at school too.

Which is tangential, but perhaps shows how the social acceptance of metal and metalheads has changed. Not that there weren’t assholes that were metalheads, but it was a different kind of asshole, and a different kind of fight.

In truth, metal was what kept me from going crazy and doing something really bad. That outlet kept me sane enough to get through the bullshit.

Metallica 92 was my first concert ever. Well, that wasn’t a school thing, which I don’t think counts.

Then grunge happened lol. The popularity contest of music pushed metal off of the radio as much, and even MTV let it drop from front and center. It got harder to find new bands, the established bands often ended up folding or going quiet. It took a while for metal to reach the next generation, which is when things started to get interesting imo. Late nineties, seeing younger kids discover metal was awesome.

But I think the overall quality of metal has improved. There’s less of the kind of garage vibe stuff, where a group of people that aren’t really musicians just get together and make noise. There was a while in the late eighties+early nineties where any idiot with teased hair, a guitar, and no qualms could end up with a record deal.

I’m not actually knocking the garage metal. It has its own glory, but it isn’t exactly well made and high skill. I suppose I should say they’re a higher amount of well practiced musicians going into metal by choice rather than following a trend so they can make a living.

So, yeah. I’m not truly old yet, though I’m looking old right in the anus as I get closer to it. But the journey of metal has been a long one