Thrash sucks. Body Count is awful. Grind sucks. Black Sabbath is crap compared to Scorpions or Deep Purple.bigfootkit wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 2:56 amBut Metal has always touched on social/political issues & it's where some of the very best songs come from.VictimeDelExil wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 1:47 am Ah yes because left wing bullshit is so much better. I wish all political lyrics, tongue-in-cheek or not, would fuck off from Metal completely. Punk rockers can have that shit all they want, but Metal is terrible when it has "social issue" type of lyrics.
In the Vietnam era you had loads of anti-war songs like Sabbath's War Pigs & plenty of pro & anti drugs songs (sometimes by the very same bands, ie: Snowblind/Hand Of Doom).
In the NWoBHM era a lot of the songs dealt with the soaring unemployment rates & lack of opportunities (Fist - SS Giro, Priest's Breaking The Law), and Maiden even had Eddie decapitating then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the sleeve of the Sanctuary 45. Their disapproval of her wasn't exactly unambiguous.
Once you get into the Thrash era the political/social content becomes ever more overt. Metallica for example, were singing about nuclear war (Trapped Under Ice), the death penalty (Ride The Lightning), the environment (Blackened), drugs (Master...), and they were easily one of the less political bands in the genre.
Moving on, bands like Carcass & Napalm Death made their animal rights & anti-capitalist agendas very clear, and the wider extreme scene covered pretty much every other social/political point of view or bone of contention in some shape or form, no matter how niche or ludicrous.
If the different strands & eras of Metal share anything at all it's that it's always been the sound of rebellion, whether as a vague notion like on something like We're Not Gonna Take It or a very specific issue as in Body Count's No Lives Matter.
I'm reminded of this exchange from the classic film 'The Wild One', which might be the perfect Metal lyrical blueprint.
A: What are you rebelling against Johnny?
B: What have you got?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpnjYOF0Wb8
All joking aside, the difference between something like War Pigs or Snowblind and what I call "social issues" lyrics really depends on how obnoxiously executed the material in question is. War Pigs is at least somewhat mature in its delivery and is something that most people regardless of political view could agree on to some extent. Whereas something like I don't know, that modern Destruction song that's complaining about internet trolls (the horror!) is absolutely childish, especially considering it's written by 50-something year old men.