Why Gawker Shutting Down Has Me Proud To Write For MetalSucks

Yesterday, the website Gawker announced that it would be ceasing operations. The site’s demise came from several recent hits, but its death was primarily spearheaded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire who Gawker outed as gay in 2007. For many, this is a triumph, a display that a media battleship ship can be sunk. But as someone close to me pointed out, Gawker could often be mean-spirited and horrible, but they told it like it is. More importantly, this sets a precedent. It’ll be a bigger news outlet next time.

Given that earlier this week MetalSucks was called “a pariah” and told to go fuck ourselves by a major metal musician, the news about Gawker made me wonder how people would react if this site was shut down. I imagined plenty of people making snarky comments along the lines of, “Good riddance.” But then I also pictured many of those same people trying to load the site the next day, and thinking, Oh yeah when they saw it was no longer up. MetalSucks has a place in this culture, and I’m proud to be a part of it.

I’m a latecomer to writing for MetalSucks — I only started writing full time a year and a half ago — but I’ve been a reader almost since the site’s creation. When I was an intern at Revolver and updating their website regularly, MetalSucks was one of the blogs we most relied on to get up-to-date and honest stories about underground metal. And this was because the MetalSucks creators, Axl and Vince, Matt and Ben, were a couple of metal dudes talking about metal. They were opinionated, but didn’t “spin” anything; if they liked your music, they said so, and if you were an asshole, well, fuck you. Arguably our greatest contributor once wrote a piece about why you should stop liking metal.

Some of our readers think, or once thought, that I’m Axl writing under another name. This is untrue; anyone who knows us both would note that Axl and I are very different people (in fact, unbeknownst to me until last year, when we were teenagers Axl shut the power off during my terrible nu-metal band’s performance at his high school, RIP JP Nocera). The main evidence for this claim is that our writing styles are very similar. But that’s not because I’m Axl, it’s because I’m a loudmouth metalhead from New York who’s happy to ignore someone’s musical legacy or rabid fanbase if they’re a sack of anuses as a person. One might just call it the MetalSucks Voice.

In many ways, MetalSucks is very similar to Gawker. Both are places where issues relevant to specific causes are discussed. But neither has ever attempted to divorce opinion and emotion from these topics. Because fuck that. Unbiased journalism is a nice idea, but is very often a pipe dream. We don’t ride that high horse. Just as Axl believes all art is inherently political, so I believe that all journalism is opinionated, and that said opinion does not negate the reporting of the story, even if it pisses off the people toward whom it’s aimed.

Earlier this year, a band threatened Vince’s life. You all know which band. We wrote about their questionable history, stage banter, and tattoos, all of which suggested that the band’s frontman was a bigot and/or a jerk. Said frontman, claiming he had gotten death threats due to what we’d written, posted Vince’s home address on social media, “bringing the war” to Vince’s front door (in fact just urging those fans who have less to lose than the band does to harass a woman and child who have nothing to do with MetalSucks). The thing is, the posts we’d written about this band weren’t unfounded. We linked to several other articles by other news sites saying the same things, as we often do in posts people deem incendiary or horrible. So why come at us? The answer is simple: we said it the loudest, and in the least uncertain terms. And we threw our salty-ass opinions in there for good measure. Because we’re people, and we have those salty-ass opinions about metal, and we have every right to say them. Don’t like them? Leave the bar.

As a writer for multiple print and digital publications, I promise you this is not par for the course. There aren’t just rules in journalism, there are tons of rules that vary from one news source to the nex. Write for our readership, don’t criticize big mainstream acts, make your headline as sensational as possible, no insulting bands with blue-collar fanbases, and commercial success should be treated as musical success are just a few of them that I’ve heard during my time as a music journalist. Some are spoken, some not. Writing for MetalSucks, the rules are few and far between: write intelligently, cite your sources, be funny, and don’t write anything you wouldn’t say yourself.

It’s funny to me how many people who hate us also lament about how metal used to be “dangerous.” Yeah, well, toughen up — metal isn’t a genre for nice guys. But somehow, that doesn’t extend to MetalSucks. We’re poisonous, vindictive trolls for expressing unpopular and ugly opinions. In fact, that’s the first thing we do — we tell you that the thing we all love sucks. But isn’t that the point? I’m a metalhead writer, and I’m going to think and feel things about every band, genre, or news story I encounter. No one’s making you read my posts, and deeming them clickbait is like suing McDonalds because you got fat.

That Gawker can be brought down is intimidating, to be sure. It’s a solid example of how someone with enough money can systematically destroy a news outlet for saying something that displeases them (thankfully, even the highest-grossing metal stars don’t make that much). But it’s also an important reminder to writers like me that we need to make our voices heard before it’s too late, and that the people who hate us also follow us. If my writing weighs on the minds of the people I criticize, then those criticisms have merit, because I don’t make them as an “unbiased” journalist or freedom-fighter. I make them as a metalhead, a fan.

I write for MetalSucks because, for me, metal culture is a spoken-word tradition, passed down from dinosaur to newbie. Praise, insults, wary questions, these are all best shared chilling on a couch with a bunch of comics and records strewn around, or outside of a show passing a joint back and forth. This is just that, but on the Internet. You may find our news posts boring, our jokes lame, and our opinions on Slayer questionable, but we’re allowed to have them. We’re not the media working with a PC agenda, we’re a bunch of metalheads talking about what it means to be a bunch of metalheads in today’s crazy world.

Think I’m full of it? Let us know below. Every comment helps, and hey, you’re entitled to your salty-ass opinion.