I once saw a guy in a C&W/Southern Rock band playing a Pepto-Bismol Pink Jackson Rhoads. It was a righty, he was a lefty.
Pointy geetars ain't just for moshing.
Scott Ian used a Custom Jackson that looked like an LP Jr for a decade or more. Decidedly not pointy.
And Metal isn't an STD, though if you did wind up in the sack with a Metal chick (and survived) there's a 50/50 chance of "turning".
At its core, Metal isn't all that different from most other genres: Sinatra sang about life, love, Lady Luck, and being your own man. Jazz does the same thing. C&W does the same thing. HipHop and Reggae do as well, though they do acknowledge political issues directly.
The "problem" with Metal started when the Punks got into it and brought with them their "violence for the sake of violence", nonsensical screaming at the top of their lungs, and speed for speed's sake. Then a few of the more technically minded and self-absorbed turned it into an Olympic event.
Still others turned it into a Machismo competition.
Let's not even discuss the Clowns with the growling and corpsepaint.
However, I've yet to hear someone like Sinatra, George Jones, or Sir Mix-A-Lot take on classic literature like the Charge of the Light Brigade, Icarus and Daedalus, the Norse invasion of Saxony, classic Hammer films, post-apocalyptic life, Science Fiction in general, or even modern works like The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, much less modern politics, the issues of medical incompetence and malpractice, the attempted political revolution in China's Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the American Farm, or the threat of Nuclear War. Even RUSH covered similar topics, and they're not considered "Metal" by most people.
The "face" of Metal is noise and violence. The core of Metal is musicianship and technical ability that is reminiscent of Classical, coming from people who were largely self-taught, and that's more the rule than the exception. While most of the top-ranked Jazz musicians have a College degree in music on their wall, a larger percentage of Metal musicians have the albums they learned from on theirs. While the typical Metalhead can't read sheet music, many can create a Classically-themed guitar solo on the fly that is equal in technicality and compositional form to the works of Beethoven, Chopin, or Mozart, and again, they learned it from listening, not by being told.
Few Metal players move on to Jazz, but those that do, and do so via traditional School Of Music (Berkely, etc) tend to fare better than those without a background in a similarly technical genre. Andy Timmons and Alex Skolnick are two names that come to mind. Both were considered Metal shred kings in their day, and later made their mark in the Jazz/Fusion world.
Most Metal players aren't afraid to embrace different genres, but I still find the same old prejudices in nearly every other genre, even against non-Metal. C&W is too simplistic for a Jazz bassist. Jazz is too busy for a C&W player. Blues doesn't venture out of its little box. None of them do. How long did it take Fusion to get any respect from both Jazz and Rock circles? Even Prog rockers - who share more with Fusion than any other genre - were against it. "If you're going to play Jazz, play Jazz" they said.
Meanwhile, Metal has more branches than a California Redwood.
It's truly the Tree of Life.
