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possibly the greatest gift this camera store back-room job has given me is the unending gift of being able to be really pedantic about the various genres of metal.
this is entirely due to my deskmate being a former recording engineer, and prior to that the bassist in a nationally-touring hardcore metal band, and prior to that a record store manager and the DJ of a college radio show.
i just like being able to unseat people’s expectations by out of nowhere giving a little semantic rundown on the gradations between doom metal, death metal, and black metal, and what the differing aesthetics really mean for the listener.
i think i’d meant to give that rant fictionally to Natasha at some point because it’s kind of a good way to overcome being The Girl And Therefore The One Nobody Listens To, because for some reason heavy metal is the kind of thing that the kind of nerd-boy who can’t hear it when girls talk is contradictorily somehow obligated to be intimidated by someone being more knowledgeable about, and in this day and age it’s not hard to be more knowledgeable about such a thing than your average nerd-boy-who-can’t-hear-girls-talk.
You just do the verbal equivalent of a wall-o-text about metal, and nerd boys don’t really know what to do. Either they’re into it and are shocked that you are, or they’re not into it but are uncomfortably aware that (and I can’t explain this one) not being into metal is unmanly of them.
Anyway. It’s not foolproof but it’s generally entertaining. And you don’t really have to have much in-depth knowledge; a survey-level familiarity is usually enough.
Similarly, the merits of Black Sabbath’s albums, if you can list them in approximate order and talk intelligently about when the various singers were active, tends to suit a similar function. (The one with the dude from Deep Purple, am I right? That was like, literally so Spinal Tap.)
It’s probably about like studying the Classics in, well, literally any year prior to 1980 probably; having a solid working knowledge of stuff everyone refers to off-hand puts you at a head and shoulders conversational advantage over most people who only know enough to make the references.
I’ve found it stands in quite well for any more meaningful or comprehensive knowledge of popular culture, which I decidedly lack. I have spent more or less my entire life under a rock, as it happens, and it’s been a series of comfy rocks from which I’ve watched basically no television or movies and know pretty much nothing about pop music either. (I’ve actually never knowingly heard a One Direction song, and I know I heard a Justin Bieber song that was identified as such but I don’t remember what it was and couldn’t pick it out of a lineup.)
It’s just. You know. It takes a certain frame of mind to make it through Technical Ecstasy, am I right, but you’ve just got to every once in a while. (You see what I did there? I listened to every one in order, then read critics talking about which ones were worst, and found the one with the most mixed reviews that was kind of in the middle overall, and there, you really sound like you know what you’re doing.)
There’s something in there about generational nonsense but I can’t properly tease it out at this hour.
possibly the greatest gift this camera store back-room job has given me is the unending gift of being able to be really pedantic about the various genres of metal.
this is entirely due to my deskmate being a former recording engineer, and prior to that the bassist in a nationally-touring hardcore metal band, and prior to that a record store manager and the DJ of a college radio show.
i just like being able to unseat people’s expectations by out of nowhere giving a little semantic rundown on the gradations between doom metal, death metal, and black metal, and what the differing aesthetics really mean for the listener.
i think i’d meant to give that rant fictionally to Natasha at some point because it’s kind of a good way to overcome being The Girl And Therefore The One Nobody Listens To, because for some reason heavy metal is the kind of thing that the kind of nerd-boy who can’t hear it when girls talk is contradictorily somehow obligated to be intimidated by someone being more knowledgeable about, and in this day and age it’s not hard to be more knowledgeable about such a thing than your average nerd-boy-who-can’t-hear-girls-talk.
You just do the verbal equivalent of a wall-o-text about metal, and nerd boys don’t really know what to do. Either they’re into it and are shocked that you are, or they’re not into it but are uncomfortably aware that (and I can’t explain this one) not being into metal is unmanly of them.
Anyway. It’s not foolproof but it’s generally entertaining. And you don’t really have to have much in-depth knowledge; a survey-level familiarity is usually enough.
Similarly, the merits of Black Sabbath’s albums, if you can list them in approximate order and talk intelligently about when the various singers were active, tends to suit a similar function. (The one with the dude from Deep Purple, am I right? That was like, literally so Spinal Tap.)
It’s probably about like studying the Classics in, well, literally any year prior to 1980 probably; having a solid working knowledge of stuff everyone refers to off-hand puts you at a head and shoulders conversational advantage over most people who only know enough to make the references.
I’ve found it stands in quite well for any more meaningful or comprehensive knowledge of popular culture, which I decidedly lack. I have spent more or less my entire life under a rock, as it happens, and it’s been a series of comfy rocks from which I’ve watched basically no television or movies and know pretty much nothing about pop music either. (I’ve actually never knowingly heard a One Direction song, and I know I heard a Justin Bieber song that was identified as such but I don’t remember what it was and couldn’t pick it out of a lineup.)
It’s just. You know. It takes a certain frame of mind to make it through Technical Ecstasy, am I right, but you’ve just got to every once in a while. (You see what I did there? I listened to every one in order, then read critics talking about which ones were worst, and found the one with the most mixed reviews that was kind of in the middle overall, and there, you really sound like you know what you’re doing.)
There’s something in there about generational nonsense but I can’t properly tease it out at this hour.
