Hey everyone! Today I have the privilege of sharing a guest post that my friend and fellow blogger David Corder decided to write for "Well, Cello There," after letting me write one for his blog, "Always Carry A Pen." He's going to be talking about the hardships we metalheads face for being fans of such a special genre...hope you enjoy, like, comment, share and don't forget to check out his awesome blog here: Always Carry A Pen, and his author page on Facebook, David B. Corder
--------
My friends and I get into the car. The doors slam, and the first thing the driver asks is, “Hey, what do you guys want to listen to?”
There are yells of Taylor Swift, Jason Aldean, John
Legend, and Katy Perry. As everyone shouts out their preference, I sit quietly
thinking to myself, Amaranthe, Impending
Doom, Apocalyptica, Flyleaf. Something I can head bang to, something
that’ll get my blood pumping. I know if I say anything though, my friends will
give me disapproving looks. I’m the only one in the car that listens to metal,
after all. No one else likes it. So I
sit there with my mouth shut, and suffer as a John Legend CD is slipped into
the stereo and I have to hear music that all of my friends love but I don’t.
It’s tough to be a metal head, mostly because we’re
a rare breed. I don’t have many friends that listen to metal, so often times I
don’t get to talk with people about my favorite music. I also face a lot of
ridicule for listening to metal. Though
not always directly, I am constantly exposed to comments degrading the music I listen
to, everything from “only suicidal people listen to metal” to “metal worships
Satan.” One time, when I was hanging out with some people at a Taco Bell, I
mentioned that I liked metal. Right to my face, a guy said, “Metal is
horrible.” That broke my heart, because it showed that he had no respect for my
taste in music or metal for that matter.
However, all of these comments are just assumptions.
Though some may be true to a certain extent, they are not true when referring
to me and the type of metal I listen to. I’m not suicidal, and my music doesn’t
worship Satan. In order to really know and understand something, you have to
get to know it first, instead of making blind judgments.
Also, it does sometimes suck to have no one to talk
to about the latest Skillet album or how brutal Ryan Clark’s voice from Demon
Hunter is, but that just makes me cherish my metal friends even more. Besides,
whenever I go to a concert, I’m surrounded by plenty of metal heads. They all
want to listen to music that they can head bang to and get their blood pumping.
So take heart all my fellow metal heads. Though we
may have to be the black sheep around our friends when it comes to our musical
preferences, just remember there are others out there that feel your pain.
