Kids playing metal

One of the highlights (for me) of going to the county fair yesterday was a performance by all the kids that participated in a summer “Rock Shop” program that was run by my kid’s guitar teacher¹. They played covers of seven or eight Kill ‘Em All tracks, starting with “Hit the Lights” and closing out with “Metal Militia”. They were quite good, especially considering they were a bunch of eleven- to sixteen-year-olds.

My kid only just started playing guitar earlier this year and didn’t feel ready yet for the summer program. Having seen this performance, though, he is now highly interested in doing it next summer, which is pretty great. On the way home, my younger kid announced “I think I want to learn electric bass.”

Watching the band play, I was thinking about growing up in the Midwest in the 1980s. In a middle school, a friend of mine got sent home for wearing a Van Halen t-shirt to school. In high school, it was a huge controversy when one of the junior-year kid’s band played “Welcome To the Jungle” at a school-sponsored battle-of-the-bands. I guess maybe there is stuff now that is equally as controversial as even the most innocuous metal was back then, but it is kind of hard to imagine that happening now in all but the most isolated settings.

Mostly, I think it’s pretty cool to see a bunch of kids having fun playing old Metallica songs up in front of a bunch of people and getting a lot of positive feedback for it from a county fair type of crowd.