In a long and rain-swept Olympic opening ceremony, it was left to French metal band Gojira to provide the one special gold medal moment. The band are now one of the biggest French bands in history, and their powerful, dark and brooding songs of apocalypse and environmental disaster are both thoughtful, political, and loud.
Their very appearance yet again underlined the mainstream media’s curious non-relationship with heavier forms of music. These days, some of the biggest bands in the world or some of the most groundbreaking units are not to be found in TV and radio pushed aside by the much more favoured indie genre.
In 2024 Metal is now so far beyond the cliche and constantly pushes the envelope, and somehow, fills arenas doing it. Listening to the radio in the UK, you will rarely, if ever, hear a band like Gojira – even on the ‘alternative’ music station 6music. None of this music ever gets played or heard outside its own specialist stations. The fear of rock is still bogged down in old cliches that it’s all a bit spinal tap or dated, and yet compared to much more favoured forms of music, it constantly moves and changes.
Gojira proved that if you put a heavy moment into the mainstream, the world won’t choke on its junk food meals as it sits there watching the Goggle Box and proves that music has far wider parameters than those permitted by the ‘tastemakers’.
Far from it.
The band’s appearance has been celebrated, and the genius idea of using it with opera underlines that, in many ways, metal is actually the classical music of these times. It has the same bombast, the same pyrotechnic over-the-top dynamics and the same emotional intensity.
Maybe the floodgates will finally open, and the FA Cup final will be metal; Metallica will play the Super Bowl and even UK radio or even the one sole UK music programme that still remains on TV – Jolls Hooland’s ‘Later’ may embrace some of these bands? or even the Mercury Awards, despite its attempts to pick the ‘right’ band instead of the best and most groundbreaking band, may embrace the higher decibels…
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