Report: Heavy Metal's Worldwide Ubiquity Rivalled Only By That Of Hip-Hop

July 26, 2007

Daniel Trilling of the London, U.K.-based magazine New Statesman reports: Heavy metal has long been sneered at by music snobs for being resolutely proletarian, often aggressive, and obsessed with macabre, occult imagery. Over its 40-year history, however, it has achieved a level of worldwide ubiquity rivalled only by that of hip-hop.

This year, the Indian band PARIKRAMA were chosen to support IRON MAIDEN on two dates in their U.K. tour. Subir Malik, PARIKRAMA's keyboard player and manager, tells me that heavy metal has "exploded" in popularity in India in the past five years. "Even though a minority of Indians speak English, people here connect to rock music like crazy," he says.

Metal also has a huge fan base in Latin America, where the Brazilian group SEPULTURA, in particular, have carved out a globally successful career by mixing fast and furious thrash metal with instrumentation and rhythms from Amazonian tribes. In Middle Eastern countries such as Iran and Egypt, metal is an illicit pleasure for teens who play gigs in each other's basements, away from the watchful eye of censorious authorities. Even in Jamaica, an island you might think would be saturated by reggae and its offshoots, there is a nascent hard-rock scene.

Read the entire article at www.newstatesman.com.

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