Technically I was learning Spanish here with my band Mortuum

I was toying with calling this post “The devil made me do it” or “Heavy metal made me what I am” but I was a little concerned about the kind of people that would attract to the site. Anyway, what I’m trying to get across is that in this day and age of global English and what many people regard as cultural homogenisation, heavy metal is one of the few remaining bastions where it’s actually okay not to be a “world citizen” speaking (and singing) in some clichéd mid-Atlantic variety of English.

This might sound like some pathetic exercise in jingoistic fist-waving at all things global but it’s really not. Spend more than a few minutes looking through the Myspace pages of various metal bands and you’ll notice something strangely curious. Lots of them are singing in their own languages. Even the people who speak languages that aren’t considered to be “beautiful” in the traditional sense. It doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t make sense, but for some strange reason it does. Continue reading →