Now I personally don't want to label metal 'underground'. I try to get my friends interested, but for one reason or another metal was meant to hold a limited audience. Which is fine because it has remained resilient through the years with such support. Exclusivity has become a defining pillar of the scene, the implications of which look dismal for the future of the genre.
Why should we fear hipster succession? The answer lies in location. If you live in a major metropolis then you should either start packing or get out your guns. I live in San Jose which, if you live there you know, means you attend shows in San Francisco. The city is rife with gentrified districts and the numbers are increasing.
I attended TeseracT a few months ago at Slim's (they were touring with Protest the Hero) and this was by far the worst infection I have witnessed. The problem here is the -core aspect of PtH's metalcore sound. San Francisco has a long heritage of hardcore punk music (Dead Kennedys, Flipper). Hardcore, however, has more rigid structural rules than metal. As such the genre stagnated almost as soon as it was born. Yet hardcore appealed to this last ironic generation of teens because it had the underground factor. Nevermind the fact that these kids might be listening to utter garbage. So long as the music was underground, it was cherished. What you are left with is hipsters who look hardcore and listen to hardcore, they even live where hardcore simmered some thirty years ago, but they are far from punk (whatever that means). Metalcore has opened the vintage floodgates into the entire realm of heavy music. This concert was particularly hilarious because you had all the old metal geezers in the back while the hipster hardcore kids dominated the stage and the pit. To which I can only respond with: “Fuck. Keep it”. It was the same problem when I saw Between the Buried and Me. My problem is not with 'who likes metal' but rather why they like metal and what the implications are for the genre.
Hipsters tend to take the honesty out of music because of how they rationalize their choices. People who respect their taste in music do not listen to bands because they are underground; they listen to them because they make good music. If a band gets too popular, they let it slide so long as said band remains honest. If said band loses their integrity, say Metallica, for instance, then one abandons them not for crossing some unspoken popularity threshold but rather because they have betrayed the trust of their fans. This is a powerful bond not easily broken by the likes of the mainstream press.
Hipsters, and I'm generalizing here, define their musical taste by what is unpopular; I'd even venture to say it is a defining pillar of hipsterdom (whatever that means). Metal has rare bouts of popularity but is unlikely to achieve mass appeal anytime soon, especially given the rigid parameters of top-tier saleability in the music industry. These impossible conditions leave metal with one possible future. Since the genre will not likely be rising to the mainstream popularity which could save it from a skinny-jean-clad audience (though I must admit that is pretty thrash) it is only a matter of time before the genre is completely saturated with hipsters. In San Francisco, metal culture has dwindled to only a handful of bands. Conversely, there seems like an infinite amount of hipsters who would love nothing more than to feed upon the last untouched scrap of Bay Area history (yep, they got jazz too). Have no fear Oakland. Once they push out the black people they'll do the same thing over there.
I do not bring this up because I'm a metal purist. I bring this up because I hate the fact that rent is even higher in the city than it would be ordinarily. I hate the fact that Valencia Street is clean and chic. I hate that riding a bike is now a San Francisco thing. Most of all, I hate how Dolores Park, my childhood playground, has sunk into a mire of irony. If it were any other youth movement I would welcome them with outstretched arms. But what we are dealing with here is the corporeal representation of a failed generation. I hate to speculate on the worst-case scenario for local metal, but be prepared for a decade of mediocre heavy music.
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