“Sucks ass”: The genre Billie Joe Armstrong thought was complete garbage
When people ask about what I do for work, one of the questions that I get asked immediately after is, ‘Oh, so what sort of music are you into?’. I’ll be honest with you: it’s a question that makes me squirm, as I’m still yet to find a way to provide an answer that is both accurate and informative and doesn’t take an hour of everyone’s time listing everything I actively enjoy listening to. For example, simply telling someone that I’m into jazz isn’t a fine enough distinction – will that person go away thinking I love Art Blakey or Kenny G? Responding with another question in ‘where do you want to start?’ feels like a cop-out, and saying that I like ‘all sorts of music’ simply isn’t true.
Nobody likes ‘all sorts’ of music, and quite often, even those who make such farcical claims will buckle under pressure when asked about a genre that they actually truly despise. It’s understandable that you might want to convey that you have a broad taste, but saying that you like a bit of everything implies that you’re a-okay with both hair metal and musique concrète. While there’s bound to be someone out there who does indulge in both, it’s probably a fair assumption that they’re in the centre of a very thin Venn diagram.
It’s perfectly socially acceptable to say you outright hate a certain genre – in fact, people will probably appreciate your brazenness in saying so. We’ve done it, and there’s no reason why you can’t, too. Even your favourite musicians will go on record to vilify other scenes and musical movements, and given how quickly their words can get spread around; sometimes their words will seem like the harshest of all.
One particularly reviled genre is nu-metal, a faddish merging of elements of hard rock, rap and poorly spelt band names that rose to prominence in the late ‘90s and early 2000s through bands such as Linkin Park, Korn and Limp Bizkit. In a feature for Loudwire where certain bands were asked for their opinions of the genre, one particularly harsh critic was Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. While he himself is known for having been a prominent figure in the equally divisive pop-punk scene, he made his feelings clear that nu-metal wasn’t for him.
“I think that the metal rap thing completely sucks ass,” Armstrong asserted. “I don’t get it, I don’t wanna get it, and I don’t mind if I don’t get it.” To dismiss an entire genre by calling it no more than a bottom-feeder is about as derogatory as it gets, and while other musicians who were asked the same question had a range of differing opinions on the matter, the Green Day frontman was perhaps the biggest critic of all.
Smashing Pumpkins vocalist Billy Corgan claimed it was “fantastic” and praised it for its ability to cross-pollinate between different and seemingly opposite genres and create new avenues for culture to thrive in, while Slipknot’s Corey Taylor acknowledged the work of bands adjacent to the genre such as Deftones while debating whether his own band were deserving of being labelled as nu-metal.
Perhaps most interestingly, however, was the response from Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello, who apologised for his band’s alleged involvement in giving birth to the genre in the first place. Having merged elements of rap and rock as early as 1991, the band had created a new sound that others latched onto, but he was critical of the way that nu-metal did not adopt the same anti-authoritarian and political stances that Rage Against The Machine was celebrated for.
“We’ve never considered ourselves to have anything to do with that genre,” Morello claimed. “There’s a lot of great musicians in that genre, but the ethos of it tended to be much more misogynist in nature, anti-women, fratty, and there was a political and intellectual content to Rage Against The Machine that is singular in that broad genre of music that I’d like to keep clean.” As eloquent and well thought out as his statement is, it’s nothing more than a long-winded way of saying it “sucks ass”.
