And it goes as follows: With record and download sales plummeting, the Dude side of the metal audience divide is becoming more obsessed with what it’s always obsessed about–being ‘authentic’ and ‘troo’. The fashion result is a rigidly conservative dress code of jeans, band tee and middle-parted long hair that only seldom sees the business end of a shampoo bottle.

On the War’s other side: bands fully participating in this, the most drop-dead exciting period in metal history by dressing to match. Bands who understand that what you wear can be, should be, I’d argue, a reflecting image of what you sound like—which is a working definition of one of the many things fashion is about.

These Fashion Bands suffer no ceiling on the size of their audience, what with them appealing to both sexes while Troo Dudes take a perverse pride in their incredibly limited, all-male audience. Which you might say something to do with metal in general being literally, anxiously, and often hilariously homosexual.
But more on that sort of thing later.

Children of Bodom’s Alexi Laiho, Slayer’s Kerry King, and Bring Me the Horizon’s Oli Syke’s have all started lucrative fashion labels based entirely on an understanding that fashion isn’t ‘just’ clothes. It’s also about how we show identity, a silent peer-to-peer declaration.

In the same way that 70s gay men wore yellow or red handkerchiefs in their Levis to let fellow cruisers know what kink they preferred, so a Troo Dudes’ band-tee silently announces to other Dudes his preference of tech death over neo-pagan.

As for what this war actually looks like, a scan of any of this months’ metal mags tells the tale.

On the Fashion Band side there’s Volbeat fusing Johnny Cash bad-ass loner and ‘50s juvenile delinquency chic. The result: sleek designer leather jackets, pompadored hair, indigo jeans. A look that screams swagger and melancholy, just like the band’s songs do.

Just what Triptykon wear, I can’t say. Like the brilliant video for “Shatter,” their clothes are like shadows Tom G. Warrior and his darkened crew paint on their bodies. I kept thinking of Christian Siriano—a winner on Project Runway—and his brilliant post-goth fantasias.

For sheer Holy Shit! value, there’s Melechesh’s S&M bald Arabic torturer look, complete with multiple rosary beads, arcane metallic necklaces, and scary guyliner (!).

For inspired WTF, Dimmu Borgir’s white-dusted, PETA-baiting leather-and-fur medieval warrior gear. It’s uncanny imagery that makes people download out of sheer curiosity: Total fashion WIN.

The inspired variety never ends. From Bring Me to the Horizon’s stylized prettiness to Ghost’s evil-Pope chic (!) to Watain’s gruesome heavy-sigil, Fashion bands appeal sell to both genders—the nerve!–courtesy seductively stylized layers of fantasy, strangeness, gender ambiguity and the sinister in ways only metal, of all genres on Earth, can provide.

And the Troo Dudes, in page after page of band profiles?

Jeans. Band tees. Long hair. Some kind of shoe. Good night and good luck.

Starving for an ‘authenticity’ that doesn’t exist, and would be irrelevant if it did (is In Flames less Troo because they use triggered drums?), the fledgling Troo band that attains the perfect visual blahness can join a legion of other 501-Levi-favoring bands who look exactly alike, with only most obsessed male fans and mags able to tell one band from the other, and with sales to match.

Incredibly, a certain strain of metalcore and post-hardcore find the Troo Dudes too stylish and so the single lasting element that suggests someone might be in a band—long hair—has been shorn to attain a new pinnacle of blah conservatism. And so bands like Underoath, A Day to Remember and Your Demise not only have short hair, but the studied un-cool short hair of the junior banker who turned down your student loan. More interesting bands like Torche and Kylesa have just thrown up their hands and opted out of the War entirely by dressing like indie bands.
Meanwhile, the dis of choice lathered on Fashion Bands by the Troo are ‘gay’ and ‘fag’. This despite the fact that the stunningly gorgeous Ville Valo attracts female fans in Elvis proportions while any given Troo Dude answers sweaty emails from tween boys about classic Charvel neck sizes.

This is what we professionals call irony. And one of several reasons Troo Dudes work so darned hard toto keep up their side of The War, to look dull, loathsome, unbathed, infested by gnats or worse, has to do with what I mentioned earlier, about metal’s intrinsic gayness.

Metal guys constantly joke with varying degrees of nervousness about the subject but that doesn’t change the fact that metal, with sometimes traumatic exceptions we’ll get to in a moment, has always looked hilariously homosexual (close your eyes and think Manowar, Venom, Danzig and Rollins) and that metal operates in a queer fever dream of sweaty, half-naked boys bumping against each other in dark, dingy clubs followed by ritual merch table genuflections before favorite axe masters and poster downloads of Zakk Wilde in extremis.

And girls? Girls? Ha ha ha—you so fooney.

Instead of supporting female metal at least as a way of deflecting charges of being in a genre created in part by delightful gay people like Judas Priest’s Rob Halford and horrific ones like Gorgoroth’s despicable Gaahl, Troo Dudes barely know the incredible wide world of female metal even exists.

Sure, there’s Arch Enemy’s Angela Gossow. But Angela, with all respect, rocks a tomboy drag that neutralizes the gender threat lurking in her cookie monster. And there’s Lacuna Coil’s Cristina Scabbia. But swell voice aside, Scabbia’s as edgy as a retired Suicide Girl signing autographs at an adult video convention. She has an advice column in Revolver magazine, for crying out loud.

Beyond that? It’s just pitiful or sad—I can’t decide.

Femme-led goth-metal is a joke to Dudes and Dude-identified critics.  Full-blown metal art music by the likes of Karyn Crisis, Julie Christmas and the goddess Jarboe garner passing and/or dismissive praise—or more depressingly, that praise floats from a magazine’s pages into an abyss of reader disinterest.

As Next Big Things are regularly made of much thinner gruel, it’s a sure thing that the face-ripping neo-Bolt Thrower-isms of Landmine Marathon would be headline news if only the band wasn’t led by Grace Perry, whose severe hotness, intense stage performances and gold standard shriek probably has Dudes screaming vagina dentata. Metaphorically, I mean.

It’s also essential that Perry, and the vocal flamethrower that is Firebrand Super Rock’s Laura Donnelly and the liquid smoke that is Anneke van Giersbergen and the angrily fluid folk-metal alto that is Rose Kemp not be given too much attention as it threatens Troo Dude macho hegemony (look it up, dude) which Fashion bands further  throw into crisis by being so un-Dude.

Finally (for now), I really can’t help but wonder how seriously critics, the ones who have a cow over Opeth and Porcupine Tree, would take the demonstrably more inventive, stone brilliant, seriously sui generis prog metal of Madder Mortem if lead singer Agnete Kirkevaag hadn’t chosen to be fat and a girl.
I mean, seriously, what was she thinking?

I don’t think this is garden variety misogyny. I think it’s bizarre-o-world homosexualized misogyny, as in: We don’t hate women, it’s just that we just like, uh, guys.

In its innocent form, this is due the fact that a goodly portion of metal fans are really young and really male, and as such, shit-scared of females. And so they retreat into the anonymous safety of jean-tee chic because Decibel’s featured bands do so.

Less innocent is the repetitive imprinting of these retrogressive, tight-assed, frowny-faced notions of what real guys can and can’t look like and act like and before long you’re like a total douche bag on an episode of Glee except, like, real.

There are reasons why the bands, and many of the critics covering them–who often love to identify themselves as beer-drinking, fashion-oblivious manly-men—insist on staying frozen in fashion amber.

One is that bands, critics and fans have, decade after decade, been in this attraction/revulsion, PTSD relationship with ‘80s hair metal. Especially those who survived the period.

I mean, damn, you look at Angel, Britny Fox, Hanoi Rocks, Faster Pussycat, King Kobra, Poison, Ratt, Stryper, Jon Mikl Thor, Twisted Sister, W.A.S.P. and Ziggy Stardust looks like fucking Daniel Craig in comparison. Just one set of Cinderella PR pics makes one imagine an entire generation of drag queens weeping, knowing there was no way for them to compete.

At the same time that Freddie Mercury looked 100% more butch than Poison—although ‘butch’ was in quotes but what Dude knew about camp?—hair metal bands rediscovered that the most important thing a straight guy could want—female attention—could best be guaranteed by looking like a girl.

Eventually the fad faded but those images and all they suggested had a lasting, inverse effect.  Everything since then has been relentlessly, crushingly hetero. Being crushingly hetero is what, in the case of Pantera, separated that band from the relative pansies in Nirvana.

There’s another real world reason for Troo Dudes’ gather-the-wagons entrenchment in retro non-style—it’s the real sense that metal is being assimilated into the culture at large.

It’s a hoot to see your favorite metal archetypes doing dumb things in Metalocalypse. And don’t tell me you didn’t get a thrill the first time you saw the ads for Iron Man using Black Sabbath’s eternal song. But aside from bringing marginal riches to your occasional Mastodon, unleveraged assimilation is every subculture’s worst nightmare. All the once-precious things used in those entertainments kind of don’t mean anything anymore. They’re just…stuff.

But what seems bad might be super-good: instead of returning endlessly to the same old shit—that is, doing what Troo Dudes do—Fashion bands need to ‘metal-up’ in new ways. Triptykon did. Ghost did on what looks like P!nk’s nail polish budget. If you want dark, forget Hot Topic: go to a gay fetish retailer for state of the art chains, leather and so on.

Or forget that shit altogether and…I don’t know, do something amazing.

But onward. There’s also the annoying semi-threat of indie kids and hipsters not only adopting metal-esque face fuzz and long hair, but also wearing our Maiden, Nachtmystum, and Black Breath tees—sometimes without irony, even. Still, being a pint-of-mead-half-full kinda guy, I like the idea that actually listening to these bands will exert some alchemical power to turn the indie-ites into metal kids. Animal Collective and Deerhoof, begone!

In the mean time, I will assume this Great Fashion War of 2010 will end with at least some of the unbearably ugly, conservative, unimaginative, retrogressive and Troo withering away. Because believing otherwise is just too grim and anyway, good stuff does tend to, over time, wear away at bad.

Yes, we will have to suffer through the visual Ambien of Parkway Drive and the like and roll our eyes while metal media tries to sell us on the idea that the future of a forward-looking genre like metal lies in hyper-conservative iterations of the past, in a nu metal resurgeance, inmore post-hardcore, in more regurgitation, in uniformity when constant chage is really the only viable long-term alternative.

You can make fun of Bring Me the Horizon’s Oli making himself up to look more glam  than the tough girlfriend that you never had, but the fact is that  that  “’Crucify Me” is fucking radical pop metal art, it’s 4:59 minutes of atonal screaming, spazz-riffing, drop beats, and computer-assisted Robo-girl vocals. It’s metal in the process of redefining itself.

And it’s anything by Japan’s Sigh, whose Dr. Mikannibal rocks gender roles with her unholy-hot Hello Kitty dominatrix look while bleating super evil sax while keyboardist Mirai Kawashima, sporting his cyber wizard look, batters you with something akin to fun spaghetti western black metal.And it all works.

No other genre can hold such extremes as Bring Me the Horizon and Sigh and still work as a genre. And yet metal does. And the people who grasp that idea and act on not only win this seemingly silly fashion war, but the way bigger ones that operate in exactly the same way.