"Having experienced life, what would the caption read under your high school picture and why?"
"David Potter: Most Likely to Join a Black Metal Cult"
It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of metal music. Since discovering my love for the genre around late middle school and early high school, I've accumulated a sizable collection of band shirts, many of which I frequently wear proudly. The theme of much of my wardrobe led me to meeting my lasting high school friends, and even today my good friends here at Ramapo often call me "metal Dave."
Since starting listening to metal with System of a Down and their contemporaries in middle school, I've continued to explore different sub-genres of metal, some found through friends and others through exploration of various music websites on the internet. From System of a Down and other bands in the 2000s "nu metal" family, I first explored backwards to 70s and 80s "heavy" and thrash metal. For a few years, my favorite bands were Megadeth, Metallica, Testament, Iron Maiden, and Judas Priest. After a few years of listening mainly to this older family of metal, I moved forward a decade or two to darker "progressive" metal and death metal such as Katatonia, Opeth, Edge of Sanity, and others. Some bands out of this period of my metal exploration remain my favorites, but more recently I've been enthusiastically exploring the controversially-titled family of "post" metal: mostly-newer bands combining the heaviness of various established forms of metal with atmospheric qualities of post-rock and "shoegaze" music. In the past few months, I've also been exploring a fair amount of "black" metal; very raw, dark, and often chaotic music, and a genre associated with some fanatic action in Scandinavia. Some of these musicians were damned serious with their anti-society views, burning churches and making light of death.
My own evolving taste within metal music has recently led me to black metal. A few years ago, when I was listening to mostly thrash and "heavy" metal, I wouldn't have imagined moving on from that style of metal. However, given how even then my taste was still evolving and how outspoken about my love for the music I was (and still am), I could see another person - who would happen to know about the happenings of Scandinavian Black metal - predicting that I would eventually venture into the realm of black metal. While I don't quite see myself burning churches, I thought it would be a funnily ridiculous but not entirely far-fetched high school yearbook prediction for me to join a black metal cult.
