Popular genre: “No, metalheads are not here to cut your grandmother’s throat”

Summer 2024: at the windows of the Conciergerie, Gojira delivers an unforgettable performance at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The majority of French people, however, know nothing about the French group, nominated twice for the Grammy Awards and which continues to tour America. This example reflects the gap between the media exposure of a genre and its concrete impact. In reality, “rock and its turbulent child, metal, have always been present and very much alive,” recalls Mehdi Ejlai, boss of the Verycords label, which counts Mass Hysteria and Ultra Vomit as flagships.

As powerful as it is zany, the latter can boast of a gold record (“Panzer Surprise!”, 2017) but is not played on the radio, he laments. To shine the spotlight on this Music, the National Union of Phonographic Edition (SNEP), the main employers’ organization bringing together producers, publishers and distributors of recorded music, has launched a dedicated official classification.

Every week since October 7, this “Top Rock & Metal”, accessible online, lists the best sales of albums in this category, streaming plays being converted into sales equivalent. Two similar “top” already exist, for jazz and classical. This ranking is also available monthly: the first batch was unveiled on Friday at MaMa in Paris, a festival and meeting for professionals in the sector.

At the top sits Indochina with its double opus “Babel Babel”, followed by David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) back after nine years of absence, while the American rock metal group Linkin Park, back on track with a singer, completes the podium.

For Snep and its partners, this “top” is first of all “a tool” to make visible and objectify the performances of these musical genres. Thus appearing in the latest weekly ranking are Nightwish, a Finnish symphonic metal group, and Maneskin, the most famous Italian rock group.

“It’s not the return of rock: it never stopped working,” says Alma Rota, editor at the leading magazine Rolling Stone. Seen from abroad, “in France it is the urban that works” so this ranking provides arguments to “convince” and trigger new opportunities, she judges.

This logic broadens the perspectives by moving away from the “top 200”, the reference ranking of the best performances in all directions. It is “the tree that hides the forest” because it only represents “7% of streaming consumption”, underlines Alexandre Lasch, general director of Snep.

The good health of “extreme music” is also seen every year at Hellfest, the largest French festival, near Nantes. Its director of communications, Eric Perrin, attempts to analyze the underexposure of metal and associated genres in France: “We are music that comes from the United States, 99% English-speaking, so that may have be a little weighed down by this music” on radio stations obliged to respect quotas in the French language.

“There are still preconceptions but we have passed this stage and we prefer to laugh about it,” he also slips. Because “no, metalheads are not here to slit your grandmother’s throat, hold satanic masses and show their buttocks,” says Mehdi Ejlai.

Some, however, are caught up in the controversy, like the Australians of Deströyer 666, whose presence at the Samaïn Fest festival was canceled by the organizers, after revelations from Mediapart on Tuesday about racist and misogynistic comments made by the singer.

“We are in a very small minority who, in fact, continue to convey nauseating things and stupid images,” responded to AFP Pascal Gueugue, creator and president of the Metal Music Federation, asking not to “stigmatize the community” for all that. He prefers to praise “a scene that was rejuvenated: people said that it was going to grow old, that it was going to die. But on the contrary, there are plenty of young groups arriving.”