It’s official now: The Sideshow Podcast is now ONE YEAR OLD!! From our humble beginnings, to our first interview, through our first Festivus and the creation of our drinking game all the way to our first featured music submission to our exclusive Byzantine interview and all of the mayhem in between, we have been bringing you album reviews, concert recaps, intelligent discussions and senseless arguing for 52 weeks straight, all in the name of everything that is heavy!
As we had discussed in the last few episodes, it turns out we have a few listeners who aren’t into heavy music at all and want to know how they can get into it without scaring themselves away by just accidentally jumping into Brutal Death Metal. We are also fairly certain that most of our listeners have friends or significant others who also just “don’t get it.” So, in this special anniversary episode, Brian, Nick, and Kyle bring you Metal 101, discussing out how to bring someone over to the dark side . As we all know, Metal has many different sub-genres and stylings, and they are not all for everyone. So what we do here is map out what bands and styles should be good for different people depending on their current musical leanings so we can get the uninitiated to hep become defenders of the faith.
Later this week, we will post a rundown of the many bands we discuss and who they may be good for. In the meantime, we would also like to hear from you! Tell us how you got into heavy music and if you have any suggestions for those fortunate knowledgable. Also, be sure to come back next week for Episode 53 where we kick off year two with some fresh changes, new goodies, and a brand new interview!
We also would like to thank all of our listeners “friends of the Sideshow” for their comments, emails, tweets, Facebook posts, G+ messages, music submissions, interviews and just all of the support this last year. We never saw ourselves getting to where we are now (and where we are going) we couldn’t have done it without you!
The Sideshow Podcast 
Episode 51 was liking good, but enough not hear twice? Why is not episode 52 listening on the stitcher?
Help please
Sorry about that! It should be all fixed now. Thanks for listening, and enjoy!
Congratulations on one year of the podcast! You capped off the first year with a great episode that has given me lots of food for thought.
-First off, why no mention of power metal? Ok, I know why at least 2 of you didn’t mention it: you don’t like it. But that doesn’t mean it might not be a good place to start. Catchy melodies with big choruses and clean vocals are hallmarks of power metal and I would think might be easy for a non-metal fan to enjoy.
-Another thing you didn’t mention is that a person’s age makes a difference in what to start with. When you mentioned Asking Alexandria, that might be just what a 14 year old needs to get into metal but I wouldn’t recommend that to someone in their 30s.
-One more thought on where I generally like to start when I get into something is with the best of the best. When I sense my tastes driving towards some new path, I seek out a general consensus of what others think is the very best of that thing. My reasoning is that if I don’t like what is considered the best, then I’m not going to like the rest. Also, experiencing the best is what gets me hooked and wanting more of that type of thing. Some examples of this for me are comic books (I started with Watchmen), science fiction books (started with Dune), and jazz (started with Kind of Blue). Along that line of reasoning, if you go to any list of the best metal albums of all time, you’ll almost always find Master of Puppets near the top if not at the top. Certainly every person’s individual list will differ, but if a majority of people believe Master is one of the best of all time, then I believe it would be the single best place to start for someone who wants to get into metal.
-I could write an entire book about my musical journeys through life, but for now I’ll just write one chapter (which will be long enough). I began with something that Brian mentioned: MTV. I don’t think the impact that MTV has had on generations of music listeners can be overstated. I grew up on MTV, as millions of others did. My musical tastes throughout childhood and adolescence follow like a history of MTV.
I started watching MTV when I was so young that I didn’t even know Duran Duran was supposed to only appeal to girls. But then they started playing videos by this band called Def Leppard. One thing MTV had was persistence. I must have turned off MTV the first 10 times that Def Leppard came on because I didn’t know who they were and therefore I thought I wouldn’t like them. But they kept playing and playing Def Leppard constantly to the point that they could not be avoided. Once I was exposed to their music, I was hooked. Def Leppard would be my “starter” band. Then the next big thing on MTV was Bon Jovi. But when I was 13 years old and discovered that my 10 year old sister liked Bon Jovi, that quickly gave the death sentence to Bon Jovi and much other hair metal for me. But at that same time MTV was playing other heavier stuff such as Ozzy Osbourne and even some Iron Maiden (and let’s not forget those Whitesnake videos that made quite an impression on a boy just entering puberty at the time). Because I was liking some of what I perceived as the heavier music being played on MTV coupled with the fact that I watched MTV constantly at that time, I started watching Headbanger’s Ball, staying up until all hours of the night every Saturday night to get my fix of metal. Back then in the late 80s, Headbanger’s Ball was still playing a lot of early 80s videos that are now and were even then considered classics, such as Iron Maiden’s Run To the Hills and Judas Priest’s Breaking The Law.
Then the moment that truly solidified a love of metal came when I turned on MTV one day and they were in the middle of playing this video that was interspersed with footage of this guy that a landmine had taken his arms and legs and he could not live yet he could not die. I had no idea who this band was that this video was for but I was blown away by it. The impact of the music, the visuals, and the story was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. When at the end of the video they revealed it was “One” by Metallica, my initial reaction was “I don’t like Metallica” but that was only because I had never heard any Metallica because they had never made a video before. I quickly learned to like Metallica.
As I grew, it seemed that MTV did as well. Seemingly overnight, MTV stopped playing that hair metal stuff that my little sister liked and they started playing grunge that appealed to then college student that I was in the early 90s. I ate all that stuff up. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Tool, and other not quite so heavy stuff such as Stone Temple Pilots, Soul Asylum, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, and Spin Doctors.
Then in the late 90s, I am not quite sure what happened but I think it was a combination of things. I had outgrown MTV. The music they were playing seemed to regress as I got into my 20s instead of growing with me. The Spice Girls and Brittany Spears that they were playing on MTV seemed as though they were trying to appeal to 14 year old girls instead of 20 something guys. Even though their non-music programming such as The Real World featured at that time people who were about my own age, I was feeling that the music MTV played was for kids, and I was discovering that I was no longer a kid, thus ending MTV as an influence in my life.
Ya know, I actually did think of Power Metal, but by the time I did, I didn’t have a chance to squeeze it in. I totally agree with you, though, on the accessibility with it’s clean vocals and melodic songs. However, depending on the person, the cheese of a lot of Power Metal could be a detractor. There are detractors in all of the stylings though.
You make a very good point about age, which was something we obviously did not consider. I can’t speak for my co-hosts, but I was doing this from the perspective of teenagers to early-20-somethings. That being said, though, I again have to agree with you that most people 30+ who want to dabble in metal would not be best off starting with Hot Topic bands. Though…thinking out loud here…if that 30-something is listening to Pop (God help them), maybe they would be just as good starting off with the same things we suggested. They may not be able to identify with the scene, or maybe some of the lyrical content, but stylistically, it might make sense. These are the kind of things that just have to be experimented with a little.
And yeah…MTV has been dead for a long time now, but nobody seems to have told them that.