Metal is from Mars and Pop is from Venus

Screw that, forget about that

There’s awful lot of writing about men and women on Substack at the moment - such as this heaps normal piece from Arnold Kling that says Elon Musk is masculine and Anthony Fauci is feminine, for some reason. Menly men want to go to Mars and womenly men want to make vaccines apparently. That’s just science.

Now there is an important conversation to be had about political polarization along gender lines - at its most extreme in South Korea.

But I am not intellectually equipped to contribute to that debate. So instead I want to talk about metal and pop.

Metal codes as masculine. Now let me stress that women can rock as hard as any man. But metal’s whole vibe is dude-ish. Adolescent serious themes of alienation as apocalypse pervade the genre. Musicians are lauded more their bruising technical virtuosity than their ability to seduce the audience into pleasure. The primary public space is the mosh pit where participants hurl themselves into combat.

Meanwhile pop codes as feminine. Replacing science fiction with romance, pop is concerned with emotions, relationships and pleasure. The production in a pop song may be as fiendishly detailed as metal but the art is hidden in the service of fun. Don’t get in the way of people having a good time. The space of pop is the dancefloor - give people a bit of space, to dance, to dream.

So hence I am interested when metal and pop get together. Can something be totally metal and totally pop?

Of course, the power ballad is a thing. And a truly wonderful thing. In a future post, we might talk about Desmond Child and the Golden Age of the Power Ballad in the 1980s. But I want to propose the following as a pop-metal apotheosis.

What I love about “Screamager” is that it rocks hard. The riffage is fully brutalist. And it also has a million hooks and is catchy AF.

The video looks like it was made for 50p - which is a shame. The boys from Belfast need some Take That style synchronized choreography. The lyrics seem to be about thwarted teenage love (pop) turned into despair (metal). All boxes checked.

So here we have fully reliable scientific evidence that something can be pop and metal simultaneously. Schrodinger’s pussy / cock if you will.

But this is all too taxing. Lets just go back to our easy dichotomies and pretend this never happened.