Let's Go to a Metal Show
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Hello darlings. Welcome to the twilight of 2026. Tomorrow is Election Day in the US so I am sending this silly thing out now in case you need a distraction from midterm anxiety. I voted early to get it over with and experienced a long line at the polls for the first time in my neighborhood. I think it’s a good thing people seem engaged this go-around. Hopefully, whatever happens, we remember to stay engaged so we can mitigate and maybe someday stop this fascist wave. Brazil stood up, Serbia stood up, and we can, too, against any politician of any party in power who says maybe it’s okay for some people not to have rights. We owe it to each other to try.
Okay, spiel over.
Soon in the US we will be fully entrenched in the Thanksgiving holiday, after which no real work will get done in publishing until the second week of the new year. Maybe other industries do this, too, but publishing has perfected the art of tuning out. I don’t think anyone in a major publishing house even knows their email inboxes exist past mid-November. Good for her.
In light of the wind-down, I’d like to take this time to talk a little bit about going outside of your comfort zone when it comes to art. It’s a good thing to think about as the nights get longer and we have more time, hopefully, to explore new reads or other art forms.
A few months ago, I went to the Palladium in Times Square with my wife. She wanted to see some power metal bands that she likes, and no one else was available to go with her. I’m a big believer in supporting wifely weirdness, so I said I would go even though I had no idea who these bands were or what power metal even is.
Which is not to say I know nothing about metal. I grew up in the late ‘90s, early ‘00s in a sort of cultural backwater in south Florida, but we did have a local death metal scene. I wasn’t particularly interested in metal—I was more into industrial/electronica—but I did like having something to do on a Saturday night. I think the regular show was held in a sort of local community center? Maybe a church’s bingo hall? It was loud and involved a lot of screaming, which I could take or leave, but there was usually some kind of interpersonal drama, which I was more interested in. Most of the people at these shows were men and boys, and though there was an aura of weirdness as there is in any alternative community, I remember there being a homophobic tinge to everything, an out-sized performance of machismo on the part of the headbangers. Fights, I think, weren’t too common, but always a possibility. Moshing was less fraught and felt a bit more gay to me. At least people were touching each other in a somewhat consensual fashion, and if they needed a soundtrack about blood and Satan to underscore it, I didn’t see the harm.
There is a big difference between art practiced by an amateur versus a master. Obviously amateurs need a space (and grace) to hone their skills or else we wouldn’t get any more masters. (Another reason to hate genAi, by the way! As it replaces entry level workers in various fields, we lose new generations of seasoned pros.) But if your first exposure to an art form is, well, bad, then your opinion of that art will surely suffer. I was in college when I saw drag kings perform for the first time—something I was curious about, as you might imagine, being a closeted trans masc person. But I was totally turned off at the time. It felt like those metal shows, in a way: a lot of screaming and violent acting-out, a performance of masculinity that did not interest me in the slightest. But those performers were also, like, nineteen! I shouldn’t have been expecting perfection, or even anything too interesting. It took me decades to come to understand drag as something other than a mockery of how I felt. And that only happened after seeing drag in NYC, where the bar was raised quite a bit.
Subscribe nowBut with metal, I hadn’t made that connection yet, so I was not expecting much from the Palladium show. I thought it would be boring at best and at worst, a rancid vibe that I’d just have to knuckle through. But I was pleasantly surprised.
My wife described power metal as a subgenre that takes its cues from epic storytelling, like Lord of the Rings or Gilgamesh. Each band has a theme or gimmick, usually of European or Nordic origin. “They’re not white supremacists, are they?” I asked. You can never be too careful these days with Norse imagery.
“Not these ones,” she said, which didn’t inspire a LOT of confidence.
One of the opening acts also called themselves symphonic metal, which I gather is a category with a lot of overlap in power metal. It means there’s an operatic element to the vocals and/or some orchestral arrangements added to the usual drums and guitars. Again, all new to me. No one in the Lutheran bingo hall back home had anything approaching a classical singing voice let alone backing violins.
The show at the Palladium turned out to be excellent. One opener, a band called Visions of Atlantis, was pirate-themed. Going into the act, I thought it was going to be very silly, but I was just being a snob. There were costumes and set pieces; every song was carefully choreographed so that the vocalists always had something to do during the bountiful (and impressive) guitar solos. Most of that energy was directed into crowd participation. Barely a stanza could go by without the band leading the audience in a chant, clap, or hand gesture. At one point, they told everyone to sit down on the floor and mime rowing, as if we were all the crew of the ship they were singing about. It felt a little like a kindergarten activity in the best possible way. Here was a mid-sized venue’s worth of adults from the tri-state area following instructions and having fun, and it’s NOT easy to have fun as an adult. (There were more small children at the show than I had expected, interestingly; I suppose we’re all fucking forty these days, and if you wanna have hobbies, you gotta bring the kids with you. Which is fine! The little metalheads were adorable and all seemed to have proper ear protection, so don’t @ me.)
The headlining act was a medieval-themed band called Kamelot, who are mostly from Tampa. I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more members had performed in that south Florida bingo hall in my youth. Maybe I was just in a good mood from the opening acts, but the lighting was impeccable and the performance was theatrical. The singer was a man in leather pants and a corset-type thing. One of the lady vocalists from the first act, a band called Frozen Crown, did all the metal growls. There were costume changes. Sometimes in between songs there would be a little pantomime. Was it goofy? Sure, but in the same way a Broadway musical can be goofy. It’s easy to mock sincerity, to deride spectacle, but fuck that. There is something sublime, in every sense of the definition, in so much earnestness and effort being poured into an art form. And this was truly art. You can’t see someone play the drums with that level of skill and think otherwise. Cynicism and unrelenting, baseless criticism are some of fascism’s best tools. “Oh, that’s so cringe.” Baby, if you go through life never getting side-eyed by anyone, then you aren’t living at all. Who are you trying to impress?
None of my recollections about those metal shows from back in the day were applicable here. These people were cool as hell. Even though the audience skewed very male—one of the rare events where the line for the women’s room was noticeably shorter, something I always notice as a gender swapper—I didn’t get the sense that someone was waiting to beat my ass in the parking lot after. I didn’t see anyone get into it over a perceived slight or too-hard mosh hit. I’m actually not sure there was any moshing at all, since there were so many pantos and call-and-response numbers to keep everyone occupied. And maybe it was a lead singer wearing leather trousers, but I felt the vibe was more gay friendly. Not overtly queer, but chill. They were cool because they were nerds. They loved a thing unapologetically, and the performers loved it and them enough to really sell it.
I can’t say I’ll be listening to power metal regularly; it’s still not really my bag. But I have a new respect for it as an art form. I think anything that can entertain a non-believer, especially one who wasn’t very open-minded at the start (more fool, me) is something to be appreciated. It blows me away just how much art is out there that I’ve never even heard of.
There’s a lot of chatter in the romance genre about bringing in new readers, and I do think that would be nice (they say, selfishly) but I don’t think we’ve quite got our pitch down. Romance is one of the genres that’s easy to pick on, which is extremely tedious when, twice a year or so, a big name in publishing goes on a quest for that low hanging fruit. I won’t link to the tweet because Twitter is a cesspool, but a while back noted poster of Thoughts, Joyce Carol Oates, tweeted about how she felt romance was well-matched for AI because it’s so “formulaic,” it doesn’t matter if a machine makes it or not. She compares it to mass-produced clothing, which is really fucking funny if you know anything about the textile industry. (If you don’t, briefly: there isn’t a machine in the universe that can sew a shirt on its own. Even the cheapest clothes wouldn’t exist without human skill. Perhaps I should say especially the cheapest clothes.) Putting aside how wrong she is just, like, factually, Oates seems to think that any art form that has roots in a tradition and/or has genre expectations isn’t real art. You, too, can become this incorrect if you don’t get out of your fucking wheelhouse once in a while. (And get off Twitter!!! It is killing your brain cells.)
People of every stripe could stand to step outside their usual territory every so often. I know some folks only stick to one kind of thing, but I can’t imagine doing that for my whole life. There’s so much out there. Which is why I can’t understand why a cis reader wouldn’t want to pick up a book with trans characters, or why a straight person wouldn’t be interested in a gay love story. Trans and queer people have been engaging with straight art for a long time, and we barely complain at all! Sometimes we even like it.
I’ve been thinking of George Takei recently. Well, more than usual. We lost Walter Koenig of the original Star Trek cast recently, which means Takei is all we have left of that franchise. (And Shatner, I suppose. But…eh.) Takei is an interesting man. Obviously he’s most well-known for his role as Sulu, and Star Trek means a lot to so many people. But it’s his work bringing to life stories of Japanese-American internment camps that made the biggest impact on me. The Broadway musical inspired by his childhood in the camps, Allegiance, didn’t run for very long, but I was able to see it when it was later shown in movie theaters. I think a lot about the effort that must have been exerted to get this musical made at all, and how it might not ever have enjoyed even its limited run and later theatrical release if it had not been for the beloved pop culture icon attached to it. It would be nice if art like this, about an uncomfortable subject, could get the attention it deserves without that kind of pull, but unfortunately, white supremacy, etc. And I may not have ever even heard about this musical if I hadn’t been a fan of the ‘60s space adventure show.
Some people refer to Oscar-bait films or dreary, bummer-inducing art as “being forced to eat your vegetables.” But vegetables are delicious! So for me that metaphor really falls apart.
Eat everything you can, I say.
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