There’s a glaring problem within tabloid media, and this isn’t a new problem either. For years now rock, and mainly metal music have been completely misrepresented by the tabloid media. I’m looking at you The Sun, Mail On Sunday, and quite possibly the biggest offender, The Daily Mail. For years a simple genre of music has been the focal point of everything bad with the younger generation, be it violent conduct, or most recently the unfortunate suicide of one school boy who just happened to enjoy bands like Slipknot. This won’t be shocking news to people, but this needs to be addressed.
It’s clear who these newspapers and “news” reports are aimed at, and the ones who are going to react the exact way they’re hoping. These people are what I like to class as “professional parents”. You know the ones I mean, those that feel the need to parade their precious Timmy and Tammy about like they’re jewellery and are completely horrified when anything remotely negative could affect them even in the slightest. They completely latch onto everything that these media outlets are feeding them. This then reinforces their own pre-determined ideas on a subject without giving a single moment to the notion that metal music is a destructive force. It’s alright to have bias in any form of media when backed up with suitable facts and figures, but to have completely baseless accusations is completely inexcusable.
I’m not about to turn this argument about face and start firing out facts, like “statistically acts of violence are performed by those who listen to rap and hip hop”, as although that may be one way of interpreting the facts, it’s not fair on those that do listen to those genres of music, and are honest, rational members of society. It is true that studies have been made in personalities of genre fans, but these conclusions made from them are really just rash generalisations. A study made by The American Psychological Association though proved that it has nothing to do with the genre of music, but that it’s the lyrics more than anything that affect you and it’s pretty clear that violent, as well as loving, lyrics are present in every single genre of music.
As we can then clearly see, psychology reports are not attributing metal music to any form of violent or suicidal thoughts, and that we can only summarise that these media outlets are purely picking out metal music as a scapegoat for social problem; and it’s unfair. They even go as far to creating tenuous at best links between these obviously disturbed people and their likes and dislikes. Rock and metal may not be the most popular genre of music in this country, and that could quite easily be one of the reasons behind it being such an easy target for prejudice, but there are still significant numbers of people who listen to it, and the vast VAST majority of us do not have violent tendencies. It’s not even like we care that we’re not the most popular taste in music, that’s not why we enjoy it, we just want to be represented fairly in the media, and if you’re going to start pointing out people’s likes and dislikes when they’ve murdered someone, be fair and point out everyone’s likes and dislikes proving that it’s as pointless as it always has been.
This has been an open letter to those newspapers who’ve recently been upping the frequency in times they’ve pointed out someone who has been involved in a violent, or suicidal act has just so happened been listening to bands like Slipknot recently. That is inconsequential towards the act that’s been committed and quite honestly is lazy and overall discriminatory journalism towards those of us that listen to these genres of music, making those mothers that I pointed out earlier in this piece believe that everyone who just so happens to like metallic music is a suicidal maniac in waiting. To the parents of the boy who unfortunately felt the need to take his own life I am sincerely sorry for your loss, but his likes and dislikes had absolutely nothing to do with what he did.
