LET’S MAKE A LIST OF WORDS METAL BANDS SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO USE ANY MORE
Not in song titles, not in album titles, not in lyrics, and most certainly not in band names.
Look. These words have had a great run. I don’t begrudge any band their usage up ’til now. I’m not, for example, arguing that Hate Eternal and Hatebreed and Hatesphere should all change their, or that Chimaira should never be allowed to perform “Pure Hatred” again. That would be ludicrous, especially with the amount of respect I have for at least three of the four bands I just named.
But the continued usage of these words makes us seem inarticulate, dull, and dumb – basically everything non-metal fans accuse of us being.
So let’s do this thing. Let’s make a list of words that we hereby declare a moratorium upon. I’ll get the ball rolling, then you guys tell me what I missed, or if you think that there are any that people should still be allowed to use. It’ll be fun!
(And please note, once we kill a word deader than Marilyn Manson’s label support, we mean the plural of that word, too – e.g., once “flame” is on the list, no fair using “flames.”)
Ready? Here we go… in no particular order:
- hate
- hatred
- kill (any tense)
- die
- death
- dead
- dying
- blood
- bloody
- bleed
- bled
- black
- crimson
- blaspheme
- blasphemer
- blasphemous
- brutal
- bury
- buried
- burial
- grave
- anything using “necro” as a prefix
- burn
- burning
- burnt
- God
- Jesus
- Christ
- crucify
- crucifix
- Satan*
- Lucifer*
- devil*
- lord
- celestial
- cerebral
- crypt
- cryptic
- cult
- Pretty much any month of the year
- fire
- flame
- disease
- dark
- eternity
- eternal
- endless
- fear
- moon or any word containing “moon”
- And I think that, as a rule, if you’re starting a band, you should have to look at the Encyclopedia Metallum and if there’s more than one band that already has your name, you have to choose a new name.
Oh, fuck. I think I just killed the collective vocabulary of heavy metal as a genre. Oops.
Anyone wanna add or subtract any words?
-AR
*”Beelzebub” is still cool, though. For some reason, no one ever seems to use “Beelzebub.”
