Botswana's Cowboy Metalheads

April 24, 2011 7:41 PM

Atlas Hoods: Botswana's Cowboy Metalheads (via).
posted by nasreddin (35 comments total)

I love the 21st century.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 7:49 PM on April 24, 2011 [5 favorites]

This is great!
posted by brundlefly at 7:49 PM on April 24, 2011

\m/ !
posted by jonmc at 7:53 PM on April 24, 2011

Oh, and thanks for the heads up on that subreddit. Looks interesting.
posted by brundlefly at 7:56 PM on April 24, 2011

Love it or hate it, when most people think of metal, they think of white dudes. Even if metal was born from the blues and there are growing scenes in places like Indonesia and Peru, metal’s founding fathers–Priest, Sabbath, Maiden–and most of those who’ve come after have been unmistakably Caucasian.

Distantly related old joke.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:58 PM on April 24, 2011 [2 favorites]

Oh, and thanks for the heads up on that subreddit. Looks interesting.

Reading /r/TrueReddit is like stumbling on a colony of Confucian literati in the middle of a NASCAR rally.
posted by nasreddin at 7:59 PM on April 24, 2011 [6 favorites]

\mm/

Botswanan metalheads... FUCK YEAH!
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:13 PM on April 24, 2011

Yeah. This is about as unexpected as global cultural cross-pollination gets. I'm lovin' it, as they say at McDonald's.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:13 PM on April 24, 2011 [1 favorite]

Heh. this dude is fuckin' metal.

Reminds me a little bit -- in terms of the unexpected cross-cultural pollination aspect at least -- of an interview I saw with Pat Boone on Jay Leno, I think, in which he performed some metal song or other, and later said something like: "there's all this great music that nobody knows about," as if nobody knew about metal. And... a little googling turns up, lol, Pat Boone doing Holy Diver.
posted by smcameron at 8:18 PM on April 24, 2011

tanks to that link, i follow up on the link at the top of the web-page, "in the magazine?. i liked reading the article on, "HERE LIES A BUNCH OF MEXICAN DRUG DEALERS
Jardines del Humaya Is No Place to RIP".
now, that article was very interesting.
posted by taxpayer at 8:20 PM on April 24, 2011

I love pretty much every single one of the outfits these dudes are wearing. The Maximum has my favorite look out of all of them.
posted by codacorolla at 8:26 PM on April 24, 2011

“A good example of where we get the style from is Motorhead’s Ace Of Spades cover,” he says. “Also, many metalheads in Botswana are cowboys from the villages and farms, so they mix the cowboy image with a biker metal look. Many wear hunting knives and parts of dead animals. We drink from the hollowed-out cow horns.”

Thankfully they picked that album to emulate, and not Lemmy's... AHEM, other sartorial collection..
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:27 PM on April 24, 2011

Frank Marshall's website has a page with links to more on the bands mentioned, including Skinflint (hosted on his site), Overthrust's Facebook page, and the site for the article writer, Metal Jew, which has some more crazy cross-cultural information (Yiddish-speaking Vikings, and a Jewish Metal video (direct video link)).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:30 PM on April 24, 2011 [1 favorite]

Heh. this dude is fuckin' metal Mad Max
posted by Forktine at 8:38 PM on April 24, 2011

Unsurprisingly, black people look better in these clothes than white people.

You can't deny it.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:46 PM on April 24, 2011 [1 favorite]

I love how international the metal scene is.
posted by spinifex23 at 8:48 PM on April 24, 2011

Forktine: Yeah... I edited down what I originally wrote, which was along the lines of "... fuckin' metal (and/or possibly gay -- not that there's anything wrong with that. Works for Rob Halford, why not for this guy?)" Probably a wise edit... I hesitate to post this, but what the hell.
posted by smcameron at 8:49 PM on April 24, 2011

When people ask me why I'm an optimist, I tell them, "It's because the present my suck, but the past sucked a lot more; we starve today, but we starved more two hundred years ago; we wage war today, but we waged worse and bigger wars a hundred years ago; we hate today, but we hated with every structure of our laws fifty years ago. Also, today we can construct phrases like 'Leather-Cowboy Metalheads of Botswana' and that's an ACTUAL THING FOR REAL HOW COOL IS THAT."

I may have made an addition to that somewhat recently.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:00 PM on April 24, 2011 [1 favorite]

When I think "Botswana", I think "Stable, Free, and Safe", at least as far as sub-Saharan Africa goes.

So, yeah, of course, it strikes me as perfectly normal that metal prospers in nerdy places, like Sweden, Austria, and the US Midwest.
posted by The Giant Squid at 9:06 PM on April 24, 2011

One of the things that makes me proudest of being a metalhead who grew up listening to Judas Priest is that there was not that much response to him coming out. He still fucking rocks and that's that. And he's never been coy about getting the early leather & spikes look from a gay mens boutique in London.

I remember in high school a guy on the football team who had a relative in the music business said he had the inside word, and Halford was... GAY. I thought about it and figured "I don't care".

Black leather and spikes is the Coco Chanel of rock fashion. Timeless. It's once the colored leather starts to show up that things go sideways. Then suddenly there's eyeliner and hairspray and girls at the show...

Then before you know it Quiet Riot is dressing like Heart.

Black leather. Done.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 9:30 PM on April 24, 2011 [3 favorites]

>>Heh. this dude is fuckin' metal Mad Max

>Forktine: Yeah... I edited down what I originally wrote, which was along the lines of "... fuckin' metal (and/or possibly gay -- not that there's anything wrong with that. Works for Rob Halford, why not for this guy?)" Probably a wise edit... I hesitate to post this, but what the hell.

I meant "fuckin" as an intensifier, not a verb. As in, that dude looks like he could fucking kick all kinds of post-apocalyptic ass. But it's a lot funnier when you read it with fuckin as a verb, definitely.
posted by Forktine at 9:38 PM on April 24, 2011

I’m going to quote mefi member charred husk;

So at what point do we stop saying, "It's like we're living in a William Gibson novel" and just accept that we're living in a William Gibson novel?

I need an acronym or something for that phrase.
posted by bongo_x at 10:57 PM on April 24, 2011 [5 favorites]

I guess I’ll just go with LIWGN
posted by bongo_x at 10:58 PM on April 24, 2011

Maximum is super bad ass. He looks like he could be a character out of Brütal Legend.
posted by zephyr_words at 11:00 PM on April 24, 2011

Brütal Legend II: Botswana Rock & Roll All Night (and part of every day!)
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 11:12 PM on April 24, 2011

love these guys. Fashion designers can put together some awesome insane getups, but the modelling that is in style these days, the "I'm too cool to care" attitude is really dull. These guys make their oufits come alive.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 12:31 AM on April 25, 2011

Thanks for that - fantastic.

This is about as unexpected as global cultural cross-pollination gets.

Iron Maiden did a gig in India a few years back after discovering they had a significant following. Favourite song? "Run to the Hills", perhaps unsurprisingly.

And I guess outside of the metal world the "white northern European" image probably holds, anyone who knows anything about metal knows how big south and central America are in the metal world; as well as the huge audiences, bands like Sepultura (who have been around almost as long as, say, Metallica) are stalwarts of the metal world.
posted by rodgerd at 1:18 AM on April 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

And I guess outside of the metal world the "white northern European" image probably holds

Which is weird, because here in NYC, esp. in Queens and the Bronx a fairly large share of the young Metalheads I meet are Latino and Asian.
posted by jonmc at 6:36 AM on April 25, 2011

That guy is probably the son of this guy.

[BTW, sorry to get my funk in your metal, but that "Funky Lagos" collection is great.]
posted by benito.strauss at 7:29 AM on April 25, 2011

in Queens and the Bronx a fairly large share of the young Metalheads I meet are Latino and Asian.

I see that in Atlanta too.

Love this post BTW. These guys' outfits look fucking amazing. I wonder if there's any Al Jourgensen influence here, in addition to Priest and Lemmy.
posted by Maaik at 8:16 AM on April 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Bwa ha ha ha... I was thinkin about Metal Cowboys this morning, as I was listening to Pantera as I left my apartment in Harlem.

This article has everything that lives inside my skull in a neat package.
posted by Eideteker at 12:12 PM on April 25, 2011

Anyone interested in the worldwide metal movement has to check out the docus Metal: A Headbanger's Jounrey and Iron Maiden: Flight 666. Both by the same film makers, the first is a look at metal from the point of view of an anthropologist who is also a metalhead.

666 is... "Hey, Iron Maiden has never been able to go to places like India or most of South & Central America because of costs. But what if we bought our own plane big enough to carry the entire crew, all their luggage, and the entire stage show based on the classic "Powerslave" tour? Yeah, and we'll get Bruce Dickenson to fly the plane! AND WE'LL BRING A FILM CREW ALONG!"

I myself have not seen Global Metal. Yet.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 12:57 PM on April 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

I wonder if there's any Al Jourgensen influence here

I was totally thinking that!
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:06 PM on April 25, 2011

Things like this make me love the world.
posted by deadbilly at 1:21 PM on April 25, 2011

This is awesome, thanks. Had I known that clubs like this existed in Gaberone, I would have loved to swing by.
posted by purephase at 4:56 PM on April 25, 2011