Rust in Peace

Amidst some truly stupid music articles getting published – a New York Times “greatest American songwriter” list that omitted Dave Mustaine and a boneheaded Jacobin piece about rockism vs. poptimism that hinged its argument on the idea that The Strokes rock any harder than white bread soaked in skim milk – a small piece of news dropped that I wanted to draw people’s attention to. Metal Sucks and Metal Injection fired most of their staffs, leaving one editor and two freelancers to run the whole thing in what I can only assume is a pivot to AI. A minor blip in the face of all the newsroom gutting we’ve seen recently. Still, I was one of Metal Sucks’s main writers for a few years there, and the fall of that website says a lot about the current media landscape.

My time writing for the site started with a cold email from one of its founders, Vince Neilstein (aka Ben Umanov), asking if I wanted to do the first American interview with Babymetal. Obvious answer to that one. I kept writing for them after that. My irreverent tone fit the site perfectly.

As silly as it may seem, Metal Sucks performed an important role. They kept metal fans abreast of important happenings and, in between posts about Corey Taylor going to Taco Bell, highlighted unsung bands. They also broke genuinely important news items, uncovering Nazis and sex pests in the scene. Their sarcastic and honest approach gave them credibility with the readers that they otherwise wouldn’t have if they just blindly reposted press releases – which they did plenty of, mind you, but at least they put them into language accessible to normal human beings. They were an independent voice that people could trust.

They also gave me a lot of opportunities. Not only did I get to write longer form reviews, they let me cover all sorts of weird shit. I wrote about board games, movies like Danzig’s Verotika, a GWAR roleplaying game -- and, of course, Varg Vikernes’s tabletop RPG, MYFAROG, which was the closest I ever came to going viral. I even elicited a really funny/threatening reply video from Vikernes himself. I would link to the article and the response video but all the images are dead on the article and Varg’s YouTube channel got nuked. Victims of the disappearing Internet.

I also handled their weekly new release column for a couple years, something I enjoyed immensely. It gave me the opportunity to keep current on a lot of new, exciting stuff, and also introduce more obscure releases to a wider audience. It didn’t pay fantastic, but it wasn’t an insulting amount, either. Sharing music is one of my primary joys as a music journalist and that gave me my widest platform to date.

Then somebody at Sony decided to go on a shopping spree.

I’ll never know the reasoning behind the move, but somebody at Sony’s PR arm, The Orchard, decided that they should buy Metal Sucks and Metal Injection. I don’t blame my editors for cashing out – the site they’d started for fun had become wildly successful, but in the process it turned into a real grind and I think they were just burned out. When the big payday came along, they took it. But here’s the problem with the public relations arm of a massive multinational media corporation buying an independent metal news site: everything.

The new editor reached out to me and offered me the opportunity to become a regular daily contributor to the site, basically his second-in-command. We spoke on the phone, and he told me what the pay would be. I laughed in his face. It was a number that, with another zero, would be a “maybe.” The amount of effort they wanted for the amount of money they wanted to pay was ludicrous. I didn’t mind doing work I loved for a modest price for an independent site. I wasn’t going to crank out PR content for multi-billion-dollar company for pennies.

My voice also didn’t exactly fit the new direction of the website. Before, my smart-ass reviews had been perfect for the site. Now that it was essentially meant to sell product, my snarkiness wasn’t helpful. I don’t blame The Orchard, by the way. They have a very clear mandate. They’re a PR company! That’s just totally at odds with the expectations of honesty that people have of a journalistic endeavor, even one in something as small stakes as the metal scene.

I got fired from the weekly column for saying that a new Immolation album sounded like Immolation, and the pushback on a review of a Meshuggah album saying it was “just okay” told me that the writing was on the wall. I love writing positive reviews of albums when I like them! I’m just not gonna do it on command unless I’m making a salary as a PR professional. Which, as previously stated, wasn’t gonna happen.

I’m sure the people after me worked hard and tried to make the site good. I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t even look at it anymore.

That’s why the news this past week hurt. I worked on Metal Sucks for years with fellow metalheads, wrote some articles I was really proud of, helped build it into a site that had an impact. And then, as always – always – happens when a corporation buys a small business, it died. It wasn’t even murder. Just death by neglect.

Stick it to the man and follow my Kickstarter!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waypointcomic/waypoint-1-4

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