I guarantee you'd never see a metal fest with such a progressive goal.
It's not like there are a ton of socialist/communist metal bands or anything
(note: I'm listening to Rammstein right now, a German industrial metal band who has a song in which the lead singer repeatedly says in German "my heart beats left" and refrences a marching song by Bertolt Brecht)
Do they promote such SJW type things? Would any metal band ever challenge concepts of masculinity?
I feel like the whole wide wonderful world of female-fronted metal bands and visual kei bands with deliberately ambiguous gender presentation not only answers this question but makes it a whole lot stupider than it would initially seem to somebody who's ignorant about metal.
How does this challenge concepts of masculinity?
1. I've never heard of this band before and the music isn't good enough for me to care about them.
2. Women don't have to 'challenge concepts of masculinity' in the hyper-specific way that you seem to be talking about. That's one of the things about being a woman. If the metal community is as overwhelmingly testosterone-poisoned as you think it is, the fact that this band has a female lead singer is challenging concepts of masculinity. You're essentially saying that you know more about what constitutes an appropriate 'challenge to concepts of masculinity' than the women in metal bands, which could be true, but the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it with an analysis more trenchant than tumblr buzzwords and quasi-Maoist 'confessions' that remind one uncomfortably of Dogma 95.
3. You've gone from asking if any metal bands challenge concepts of masculinity to basically insinuating that every metal band has to in order for you to be willing to concede that it's possible. You made a ridiculous absolute statement, asking a question that even granting that metal tends to be a depressingly macho subculture is so broad as to be ridiculous, then moved the goalposts when somebody answered it seriously.
4. Kagrra, is a fun band.
5. That kind of direct, painfully earnest disclaimer for one's own irony generally functions as ass-covering for doing the irony poorly. Honestly, I'd be with the metalheads in making fun of this, only in my case it'd be for its form rather than its content.
6. It also reads like an excerpt from a Dr Bronner's soap bottle.
7. The real reason why this argument is stupid anyway is because well-adjusted people would concede that a band, or an artist of any kind really, can have politics that deviate from anodyne third-wave-feminist-influenced American social liberalism and still be worth paying attention to. The Kinks are one of the best bands to come out of the sixties and they have lyrics that tend to imply traditionalist conservatism, of all ideologies. Fyodor Dostoyevsky had pronounced antisemitic tendencies, and was a great writer. Who knows what the people who built Kinkaku-ji or Fushimi Inari thought about The Issues? Who cares? I'm not willing to throw my lot in with Harold Bloom and say that politics and aesthetics are mutually irrelevant, but there's more to aesthetics than politics just as there's more to politics than aesthetics.
I also think you perennially underestimate the extent to which death/black/extreme metal and the type of music that you listen to sound similar (in their unpleasantness) to people who aren't into them.
1. Yeah but they sound like pretty typical metal to me.
2a. So then Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalaea are challenging the obvious machismo and masulinity in the hip hop community?
2b. She's hot. And that's probably the main reason of her appeal.*
*Yes I will not deny that this is also true of many women in hardcore and indie bands. Yes, this includes the woman who was the main organizer of A Different Kind of Dude Fest.3. I'm talking about on this level. For example look at the Bratgirl insert again. Now if they just were two girls and one guy, that wouldn't be all that atypical, but I don't see any metal band even with female members writing such SJW style tracts. Why is that?
4. No clue who that is.
5. I don't own the record (though I could dig up plenty that I do own with similar inserts), so I don't know the full context, I just took it from somewhere where it was being mocked for the extreme PC and Tumblr-before-there-was-Tumblr style. But I find it weird that you of all people would ever mock something for THAT.
6. I don't know what that is.
7a. Same band I linked to actually had a song attacking EXACTLY that type of attitude:
Palatka - Taco Bell Has Nothing To Do With Hardcore7b. Don't know if you clicked on the original link, but probably about half the songs from that band are self-depreciating in that style, though not so much in a Maoist way rather than that the lyricist was like "I have all these flaws in me that come from the pollution of our mainstream society and I have to not let them overtake me", attacking more mainstream culture than himself. But metalheads seem to take more of an
ubermesch style attitude toward themselves, I can't imagine any thinking that way or writing such songs...which brings me back to the point: why? Why is this thinking found in basically one one style?
8a. That doesn't mean they have anything in common. Completely different origins, styles, influences and history toward creation...etc. There is basically no overlap between that and the metal scene.
8b. That's kind of foolish since I can differientate between different types of unpleasant sounds. I can even tell the difference between country, hip hop and metal. OK kind of dumb example there, but I can also tell the differences between various types of metal too.
8c. Something that I think such people miss is that the vocal styles in metal and this music are completely different, I can not stand the gutteral death metal style vocals or high pitched screeching of black metal, and honestly that would ruin it for me even if I liked the music. I'm aware that hardcore-style screaming is no better for many people (and in fact "I don't mind the music but I can't stand the vocals" is a pretty common criticism of some bands I like I've heard from people outside the scene), but you can't deny there's a pretty big difference between that and metal style.
8d. This sort of attitude is actually a big reason for the metalhead/hardcore kid rivalry in the first place, people don't like something they like being lumped in with something they don't, think of the attitudes toward R2D2-style (non-)"emo" from people into real emo...and you get the idea. People who write proto-Tumblr buzzword filled lyrics and inserts don't want anything to do with death metal and all of its violence and misogyny filled content, and metalheads don't want anything to do with uber-PC proto-SJWs.
8e.
This song is pretty "brutal" in style and musical content (blastbeats galore)...but these are the lyrics:
So death metal.
Poll
