This piece from Metal Hammer (big Babymetal supporters that they are) is pretty much on point.

What’s missing is the “why.” I had mentioned before that metal fans are objectively just some of the most fuck-headed human beings on the planet — leaving aside hair-band sleaze, a weird obsession with “authenticity” and the fact that NSBM is even a thing that exists (and should be flayed alive), metal people can be such dicks about … music!

MH also recently had a little piece about hip-hop that metal fans would like. I agreed with some of their suggestions, disagreed in principle with one or two, had some thoughts of my own, etc. And a lot of the people that commented on the article went at least with its spirit. That’s good.

But SO MANY goddamn idiotic long-hairs just had to get in their “Rap is crap!” comments that I just tuned it out. And why? Okay, so you don’t like hip-hop or rapping in general. That’s fine — I’m friends with some actual working rappers whose material you can get on iTunes and everything, but I’ll be honest in saying that I like my hip-hop in small doses and at certain times. But you! You think nu-metal was the worst thing to ever happen to heavy music until J-pop connected with it, and now the fact that Babymetal samples Limp Bizkit is a sign of an apocalypse that you don’t want because it doesn’t involve Behemoth. You spend actual life energy getting mad about djent or metalcore or really goddamn cool folk metal from countries you’ve never heard of made by people whose names you can’t pronounce not because they’re actually terribly difficult for your ear and tongue but because you are a pig-ignorant jagoff who clings to idiotic notions of correctness or, bob help us all, cultural or racial superiority.

That was a long counter-rant. It could get a lot longer, actually, and target a lot more than metalheads (some of whom are actually lovely people) and get into stupid things about culture that are running around a lot these days, but I’ll pass on A (Long) Short History of Rock Music for People Who Think It Was Actually Invented by Elvis (Who Would Be Mortified That You Think That) and leave this:

No cultural “thing” has ever lasted very long without changing. Our visual arts, our languages, our food, our music — they all change, all the time. Sometimes that change comes through contact with what other people are doing, sometimes it comes through little natural changes (ask a linguist about consonant shifts, for instance), and sometimes it comes because some person or people made a big innovation. Either way, you dolts have modern metal because riffs that grew out of blues rock connected to Tommy Iommi’s industrial accident. That was an innovation. And now other people want to innovate more with the product of that. It’s a good thing.