10 Reasons Metalheads and Hippies are the Same

Pretty much since I remember embracing everything related to metal, I also remember hating hippies.  When I was in the Air Force a few of my friends were really into Phish and The Grateful Dead.  I tried being more accepting, I even had a couple CDs, but I just couldn’t get into it.  It was just too damn… happy.  I leaned toward music that sounded like a blender full of silverware and it made you want to punch your friend in the neck.  I don’t know, I was a weird kid.

I went to the Beale Street Music Festival, located in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2001 with some friends and first-hand experienced jam bands for the first time.  I hated it.  I was way more into the simple fact that Bob Dylan and Three Six Mafia were playing mere minutes apart.  That’s kinda mind-bending after one or eight beers.

What bugged me about the jam bands wasn’t really the bands themselves, the music is kind of whatever for me, it was the fans.  I hate those guys.  Tie-dye looks bad on everyone, dreadlocks on white people look like one of two things: dirty tree roots or turds. And trading your crappy homemade hemp potholder for a balloon of nitrous is just, well, it’s trading something that looks like an art project that was made by a blind 3rd grader who has no hands, for a balloon of gas that makes you high for roughly 11 seconds and eats about 11 million brain cells in that time span.  No thanks!  Right around this time I also had a few friends that were really into that whole rave scene that used the acronym P.L.U.R. (Peace Love Unity Respect) as their motto.  They also enjoyed dancing on drugs to bad music for hours.  Only this time the hemp bellbottoms were replaced with some 42″ yellow pants and the brown acid you weren’t supposed to take was swapped out with a MDMA laced pacifier.

For real.

Ravers are a really crappy copy of hippies.  Really crappy. Like you forgot to wipe the glass down and the original page was put on the copier a little crooked.

But, back to the subject at hand.  Relatively quickly I returned to my angry music, black clothes with indecipherable names and going to shows where I regularly shed blood.  Wait, now it sounds like my scene sucked!  Oh well.  I grew to really dislike the hippie kids when I started college.  No one, and I mean NO ONE, looks cool playing hackeysack, and talking about how high you got/are going to get rates pretty high on my scale of lame conversations and I really don’t need to hear about how great The Doors are again.  It still sounds like crappy 8th grade poetry over mediocre ’60s rock to me.

My feelings were not unusual for a metalhead though.  Lots of my peers think hippies suck, their music sucks and pretty much everything about them sucks too.  I kinda blame The Beatles for hippies.  “All You Need Is Love” may be a good song, but a very stupid message.  You need more than love.  You need a damn job and a bath.

But I also noticed something else.  With just a few tweaks, metalheads and hippies are one and the same.  Shudder to think, but it is the truth.  Let me show you in a nice easy to read format.

• Both have long hair and the majority of them have poor hygiene.  Good hygiene is a sign of not keeping it real, and credibility with both sets reigns supreme.
• Both wear altered clothing and clothing that declares their undying allegiance to bands that no one know (read: care) about.  Both groups also have a strange affinity for patches on their clothes, or even sewing their clothes together.  Looking poor means you probably stuck it to the man, said “Screw work!” and have devoted yourself to following the band!  It’s cool man, I won’t tell them about the brand new green Toyota Prius hybrid vehicle you have parked behind the venue.
• Both groups like drugs – especially weed.
• Both groups, especially the die hard fans who are only into the underground stuff, are elitists who may be knowledgeable on music history, but generally nothing else.  Unless you need to know about macrame (ask a hippie) or rare Eastern European weaponry (ask a metalhead).
• Both groups love vinyl.  Additionally you will never meet a hippie who owns one Grateful Dead record or a metalhead who owns one Slayer record.  There are no casual fans.  Rob Zombie once said, “You’ll never hear that guy who says, ‘Remember that one Summer where we loved Slayer?’”  And that is true, you either love it or hate it.
• Both groups almost always have a band logo emblazoned on themselves somewhere.  Even the old ones with jobs.
• Both groups have the superfans who refuse to grow up.  You know exactly who I am talking about.  Both groups’ superfans have stringy skullets, fanny packs and a strange affinity for sweatpants.
• Both groups like microbrews.  This example kinda sucks because I actually think ALL white people like microbrews. (See: Stuff white people like: Microbreweries.)
• Both genres love emulating the abilities of Leigh Stephens and Ritchie Blackmore.  I get it. Let’s try something new, guys.
• Both types of music feature songs that last way longer than songs in any other genre of music. (But then again can you imagine if label execs allowed Ke$ha or Lil’ Wayne to make a 25-minute song?  I’d find a razor blade, a box of wine and a place to wonder where it all went wrong.)

Do you see what I am getting at here?  They are one and the same!  Noooooooooo!  Who do we blame?

Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.

Yep.  Both bands embraced both genres (back then the lines were quite a bit more blurred though), loved the same drugs, singing about weird things and writing long ass songs that focused around the almighty Blues riff.  But you know what?  That’s cool.  I can appreciate that because I can appreciate both bands.  Even I’ve grown up a bit.  My fiance isn’t a big jam band fan and she isn’t crunchy at all, but she is a self described “Tree-Hugging Planet-Saving Ultra-Liberal Vegetarian Feminist” and she is my favorite person in the world!  My ire has diminished a lot since I’ve gotten older.  I’ve got other things to sling my rage-tipped barbs at.  It’s usually towards cars in traffic full with other drivers who cannot hear my spewed venom, but that’s fine.  I’d hate to piss somebody off and get hit.  Getting hit sucks nowadays.  So you’re safe for now hippies.  Safe for now.

But there is no excuse for patchouli.