Iron Boy

Photo by Terry Richardson

When I was in junior high school, I was like a prop for everyone else's humor. It was understood that I would bear the brunt of any joke and it would be perfectly socially acceptable to rip on me. So I developed this real antipathy for everything around me. It was basically a "Fuck all of you" situation.

All the other kids were listening to fucking Run-DMC, Rob Base, and "Push It." I really hated that shit at the time. It was "their" music. I grew up in Queens, and it was all about these hoodies walking around blasting "It Takes 2" out of their boomboxes. I used to dream about playing Twisted Sister on an even huger boombox and blowing all of their heads off with it. Guys like Dee Snyder, Iron Maiden, and Megadeth were role models for kids like me. The way they looked—dirty, with fucked-up long hair—was a blueprint for how kids like me wanted to look. Those bands taught us that we could be this trashy thing, existing in total opposition to all the assholes who listened to pep-rally rap. That's what we learned from heavy metal: a total mindset. At first I couldn't adopt the look because I was 12 or 13, but as I got into high school, I grew my hair and got the denim jacket with the Maiden patch on the back, the high-tops with the tongue hanging out, the rings and necklaces and earrings—the whole nine yards. I went to St. Francis Prep in Floral Park, and they even had separate gangs of metalheads there. They would write graffiti and go to war with each other just like regular graffiti kids, except they were all fucking headbangers. It was awesome. I wasn't tough enough to be in one of the gangs, of course, but I kind of loitered around them. They'd have to fight each other all the time because one metalhead had written over another metalhead's tag. When you learned a subject in school, like history or math, you were supposed to memorize and repeat information. When you became a metalhead, you were getting something more ephemeral. It was like learning a code of ethics. And it stays with you. The behavior that I exhibit to this day is learned behavior from when I was 12. The importance of clothes and image, the way you can call someone out for being a fake because they're wearing the wrong thing—all of that comes from being a metalhead. But it isn't just fashion—it's a link to a set of beliefs about life and what's right and wrong. When you get out of school, you start to drop all those basic black-and-white beliefs. (Otherwise you'll look like an idiot when you're 40.) At the same time, I'll never lose the conception that being into metal in high school gave me the blueprint of who I was. The whole metal look then, the pose that all the rock stars went for, was this kind of John Wayne longhaired loner. The kind of guy who would blow dry his hair for an hour but still put away a quart of whiskey a night and know how to fight. All that's gone now. Those metal ideals of the 80s are a fucking memory. I attribute this loss to several things. First of all, the advent of Nirvana and grunge blew apart the smokescreen of 80s metal attitude with a totally deeper kind of rebel pose. Grunge guys were allowed to be sensitive and still play power chords, and metalheads had no idea how to do that. Plus, grunge was about looking like a total slob, not the cultivated metal chic that required multiple trips to the mall for refinement. Then you've got Ozzy Osbourne, the lunatic father of metal, now appearing as a loving father and a doddering husband on The Osbournes. He's still got the balls to be the father of metal (after all, he's been doing Ozzfest), but he's revealed enough that he's made himself human to the mainstream. That was anathema to the metalhead creed. The real deathblow for the metal look and attitude, though, was Rob Halford coming out of the closet. As soon as metal's hegemony over rebel youth was dethroned, he exposed his leather biker persona as an expression of his sexual orientation—the complete opposite of the testosterone-infused theatrical display it was marketed as. This was possibly the greatest "rock ‘n' roll swindle" of all time, and when Halford finally admitted that he liked boys, the collective (and hopelessly antiquated) metalhead uttering of "Holy fucking shit" was as strong as a hurricane. So now that the metal gods are debunked, where can today's outcast kid learn the metal ideals of yore? Damned if I know. Now, metal is a part of the mainstream. Does Limp Bizkit really offer a viable recipe for rebellion? Come on. Since metal can no longer provide teenagers with a discrete, ready-made "revolution kit" (discovered not through radio or MTV but through word-of-mouth, as I did), teenagers (and the bands they listen to) have appropriated rap and, to a lesser degree, techno and industrial fashions and sensibilities into the genre. That's why it was funny when David Cross on Mr. Show impersonated a metalhead who's "listening to hip-hop now." Teenage machismo has a more thug mentality to it today, and the outlandish and unrealistic costumes from the 80s are a joke. I couldn't imagine a modern metal band unironically donning spandex any more than I could picture 50 Cent dressing up like Rick James. Is this a shame? Maybe not. But what have we to show today for this "progression"? Instead of a bunch of Beavis and Buttheads flinging empty Buds at each other, we've got cadres of bridge-and-tunnel Fred Durst-a-likes calling those very kids "faggots." And THAT's a real shame. Interpol's new album, Antics, is out this month on Matador Records.