originally written by Craig Hayes
This is the first installment in a five-part series. In Mainstreaming Metal, LR scribe Craig Hayes looks back on his experiences as a beacon for underground heavy metal within the confines of a mainstream-centric publication.
• • •
I used to have my very own cyber-stalker. He would regularly send me messages filled with the kinds of poetic verse that’d rival old Willy Shakespeare. Prose like this: “Cunts like you probably never even heard of Manowar or Helloween.” Or this: “You should fucking die in a ditch, with all the other posers.”
Ah. You can almost picture that last one.
There’s nothing more evocative than balladry delivered straight from the heart, and as you can probably guess, my ex-stalker was a little more angry than he was enamoured with me. What drove his passions to such eloquent heights was pretty simple too. I wrote about heavy metal in the mainstream media, and according to my ex-stalker’s damning and ceaselessly colorful testimony, that was a heinous betrayal of the metal community.
Still, before you shout to the hangman to pull that lever, let me at least try to explain.
• • •
THE DEFENSE
I’d been scribbling about music for many years before I started my own blog, Six Noises, in 2009. Soon after, I began writing for other sites solely dedicated to metal coverage. And then, in 2010, I also began writing about metal for the website PopMatters.
If you’re not aware of PopMatters, the site has a million-plus visitors stop by every month, and is therefore one of the big kids on the block. And it was the first mainstream website to dedicate serious space to unpacking metal for a wider audience (via Adrien Begrand’s popular Blood and Thunder column). I eventually became a columnist and contributing editor at PopMatters myself, before I chose to cease writing for the site at the start of 2014. (And sorry, there’s no whistle-blowing intrigue in that decision.)
I’d been pitching ideas to magazine and website editors based in the northern hemisphere for years before I started writing for PopMatters, and many of those editors had told me, on numerous occasions, that because I was based in New Zealand, my location was going to be a huge detriment to me ever, you know, makin’ it in the biz.
So, I set to writing every day, eventually providing hundreds of thousands of words for PopMatters, along with tens of thousands more for other dedicated metal websites, all to prove those editors wrong.
Turns out, they were absolutely right.
For whatever reasons, unlike many of my contemporaries, my writing never raised much interest at all, and every magazine or website that I contacted while I wrote for PopMatters (those that paid for freelance work), continued to turn me down flat. Over the years, it became increasingly, and glaringly, obvious that my body of work was about as attractive as a prolapse, and there’s really only so long you want to dangle one of those in people’s faces. So, at the start of this year, I packed up the remains of my dignity and confidence, and exited the mainstream with a flatulent fizzle of failure.
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CAREER SUICIDE
Now, all of the above isn’t a boo-hoo, poor-old-me tale set on eliciting your sympathy. There are plenty of writers, far better than I’ll ever be, who get shot down everyday too. All that information is there to honestly and very clearly frame my history of writing about metal in the mainstream, which is important for what comes next.
I washed out, bit the bullet, or finally faced reality in the mainstream (whatever you want to call it), but my time writing there was creatively enjoyable. However, professionally, I didn’t earn a cent writing in the mainstream, and made zero inroads elsewhere. So, creative rewards aside, you could say that the last four years of writing every single day were really for naught–unless you want to count my truly impressive collection of rejection emails as some form of success.
Still, that doesn’t leave me brokenhearted. Frustrated, definitely. But not full of regrets. I worked as a magazine editor/writer before I joined PopMatters, so I knew the reality of the publishing world going in. I still get to write plenty of great places, and fool around on the radio on occasion too. Ultimately, I just took my best shot, and I missed the target. C’est la vie.
In the end, it wasn’t my failures that stood out for me, but the lessons I learned about the metal media. Writing about metal in the mainstream, while maintaining a foothold in the specialist metal media, was the perfect vantage point to listen to complaints that writers, like myself, were somehow ruining metal by talking about it outside the clubhouse. Personally, I think there are questions worth exploring about how the mainstream covers metal, but there are also questions worth exploring about what we’re doing in our own backyard.
I’m hoping it won’t be complete career suicide to hold the spotlight up to both, and as all the above biographical detail is supposed to underscore, I don’t have a score to settle with the mainstream or metal media.
At the very least, I’d like to think that voicing any concerns about metal coverage in the media keeps us thinking about why we’re here and what we’re doing. So, in this Mainstreaming Metal series, I’ll be looking at my experiences writing about metal in the mainstream, and comparing that with the specialist metal media. Given I’ve lurked and worked in both spheres, I’ll use myself as the punching bag first, and you won’t have to wait very long to see me take a knockout hit.
In the next post, I’m going explain why I’m a low-down, dirty, stinkin’ fraud. (And then, in the following post, I’ll explain why I’m far from alone in that crime, with my fellow offenders being much closer to home.)
