SHOULD METAL FANS BE OFFENDED THAT OCEANO GAVE AWAY AN IPAD?
So Oceano recently held a contest to help promote their new album, Contagion, in which the winner got an iPad. And of all the things that Oceano have ever done to offend me — well, really just the one thing, which is make horrible, horrible music — it never even would have occurred to me that this contest prize might be questionable in and of itself.
Yet Shane Mehling at The Deciblog makes this very argument in a recent post:
“Now I’m not typing this on a Smith-Corona, nor am I calling my parents on rotary phone, but come on, what in the fuck does a $500 Scarlet Letter of yuppie scum have to do with extreme metal? Why not just let the lucky winner flip through the latest copy of Sky Mall and pick out their favorite bluetooth foot massager? I understand record labels need new ways to get people to pick up albums but this seems so incredibly antithetical to what metal has at least facilely promoted since its inception.”
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this. I take Mehling’s point; an iPad, awesome though it may be, really has fuck-all to do with metal, which is supposed to be a music of the proletariat (who presumably do not spend much of their income lining Steve Jobs’ pockets). Another way to look at it, though, is that Oceano have now rewarded a faithful pleb with a cool gift he or she might otherwise not be able to afford.
And besides, I’ve never been to an Oceano concert, but I’d wager that the better part of their audience already owns iPhones, or equivalent gizmos; in other words, we might be fooling ourselves to think Oceano fans ever fell outside the category of “yuppie scum.” Oceano isn’t exactly Napalm Death, y’know?
Read the rest of Mehling’s post here (I’m especially a fan of the final paragraph), then weigh in with your thoughts below. Should the prize for a metal-themed contest actively promote the alleged ideals of metal music, or it is a-okay to give away a shiny new toy everyone now and again?
-AR
