Your Morning Metal (Suffer the Masses)

I find neuroses fascinating. Never mind.

The promise cast, the hopeful lured. Stabbing by the pointed words. Tortures of the damned you’ll find; guilt preys upon the human mind. All you know and all you feel is all there is and all that’s real. Innocent told you’re a worthless pain, eventually drives all insane. Bleak optimism gained, a lame excuse to hide the pain. Instinct stifled, be ashamed for what you feel is right and sane. Suffering, told what you feel and need is wrong when conflicting with the machine, the machine that’s run so long. Suffer the masses; contradicting views inside. Suffer the masses; the personality divides. Suffer the masses; what’s told and what you know. Suffer the masses; now, now the neurosis grows. Generations handed down the false smile to hide your frown. Instinct stifled, don’t be afraid for what you feel is right and sane. The promise cast, the hopeful lured. Stabbed by pointed words. Tortures of the stabbed you’ll find as guilt devours your broken mind.

―Flotsam and Jetsam, “Suffer the Masses” (1990)

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A Brief Note on Headbanging

In the 1980s, you could easily mark four bands as the dominant names in what we know as speed or thrash metal. Strangely, they all survived the period.

• Anthrax
• Megadeth
• Metallica
• Slayer

It’s not that nobody else made it through, but it seems somehow striking that these four did.

To the other, I couldn’t tell you, without looking up their wiki entries, about any number of bands. But Nuclear Assault, The Forbidden, Panic, D.R.I. …. I’d like to think that the fact that so many of the bands I adored in my teenage angst lived to tell the tale says something about my artistic taste, but at the same time, so many of them didn’t. Agony Column? (Six six six guns … for Satan!) What is Flotsam and Jetsam doing these days? Apparently, any number of these bands turn up on the club circuit, but I’ve managed to see the big four at arena shows in recent years, and perhaps it is a pervading sense of nostalgia, but I’m not sure how many of them actually expected to see the twenty-first century.

No, there isn’t any real point. Maudlin nostalgia, I guess.