CONVERSE COURTS THE METAL SET

Full disclosure: I own a pair of Converse. They’re my favorite sneakers. They cost forty bucks, have no shoelaces, and provide roughly the same amount of comfort and protection as wrapping my feet in tissue paper would have done. Cheap, pointless, and comfortable: now that’s fucking metal.

So. I was catching up on my Deciblog this morning when I saw this piece that Jeanne Fury wrote on Heavy Metal Holiday, a new short film/long commercial that Converse has produced in an apparent bid to… uh… well, presumably, to win over the metal crowd, although I’m not entirely sure why, or how they think this completely fucking bizarre thing will accomplish that goal. As Ms. Fury so eloquently puts it:

“You can be damn sure Converse spent good money on Heavy Metal Holiday, traveling to London and Venice, renting that fancy hotel room with the giant chandelier, and paying for food and stuff. But why? Yeah, it’s amusing… But couldn’t they have filmed that shit in Baltimore or Cleveland? Is this supposed to be artsy? Or, worse, is it supposed to be funny?”

I actually think Fury is giving the thing too much credit — I didn’t find this amusing at all. For some reason, the audio is all, like, weird n’ shit, with the Black Metal Dude’s rambling constantly overlapping with itself AND competing with some generic background metal, pretty much to the point where it’s difficult to understand what he’s saying. And frankly, we’ve seen enough pictures and videos of guys in corpse paint doing things you wouldn’t expect to see guys in corpse paint doing that HMH would have to come with something pretty damn special to stand apart from the pack. And some Infernus wannabe riding around in a gondola and struggling with his umbrella on London Bridge is not special.

So I guess what I’m saying is, if someone at Converse decided that the company needed to reach out to the headbanging demographic, couldn’t they have just made like Scion and sponsored some shows or paid for some awesome band to record an album or something?

Of course, the sneaker company has now succeeded in getting the metal media to write about them, so if their only goal was to get everyone’s attention, well, I guess they’ve succeeded.

In any case, go here to watch, if you so please. It’s apparently part of a series that also includes such titles as You Said No to Prom and Mother’s Day is Freaking Awesome, although I didn’t watch any of the others because life is just too short, and because I did, in fact, go to both my junior and senior prom.

-AR