Hey Crispy,

Of course, part of what makes it even crazier is that something like the second piece I posted, a cover from Gwar, is a sort of spectacle and theater which is itself at the far end of a historical development of the blues, and a sort of fairly purist, roots-oriented masculine blues-guitar revival in rock and roll in the mid 1960s. So you start out with one of the big moves towards an aesthetic of naturalness and authenticity, but at the end of the day you end up with (among other things) Oderus Urungus in full prosthetics. (And yet also within even the most fantastical and spectacular subgenres of metal, no matter how high the stage-blood or pyrotechnics bill gets, you still also have a musical and fan milieu that is obsessed with calling out fakeness, with an ethos of authenticity, etc. -- but authenticity to what, exactly?)