"Lately, I've been listening to some jazz albums. I love the new Pat Metheny album. John Coltrane. I still like good metal, though!"
About this Quote
Geezer Butler’s casual playlist flex lands because it refuses the neat boxes people keep trying to build around heavy metal. The Black Sabbath bassist isn’t “confessing” to jazz as if it were a guilty pleasure; he’s reminding you that serious musicians have always been magpies, stealing shine from wherever it glints. Dropping Pat Metheny and John Coltrane isn’t random name-checking. Metheny signals craft, harmony, a modern studio sheen; Coltrane signals spiritual heat and risk. Together they frame Butler’s listening not as mood music, but as study - a way of staying musically alive past the point where legacy acts often calcify into self-parody.
The kicker is the last line: “I still like good metal, though!” That “still” reads like a wink at the caricature of the aging metalhead who either clings to the old sound or “matures” into softer genres. Butler sidesteps both narratives. He doesn’t abandon metal; he raises the bar for it. “Good” becomes a quiet piece of gatekeeping, but also a standard: metal that has swing, dynamics, tension, something closer to the improvisational intelligence of jazz than the genre’s lazier copy-paste brutality.
Context matters: Sabbath’s DNA is blues and jazz phrasing translated into distortion and dread. Butler’s taste-map is basically a receipt for how metal got smart in the first place - and a warning that if today’s metal can’t sit in the same room as Coltrane, that’s not sophistication. That’s stagnation.
The kicker is the last line: “I still like good metal, though!” That “still” reads like a wink at the caricature of the aging metalhead who either clings to the old sound or “matures” into softer genres. Butler sidesteps both narratives. He doesn’t abandon metal; he raises the bar for it. “Good” becomes a quiet piece of gatekeeping, but also a standard: metal that has swing, dynamics, tension, something closer to the improvisational intelligence of jazz than the genre’s lazier copy-paste brutality.
Context matters: Sabbath’s DNA is blues and jazz phrasing translated into distortion and dread. Butler’s taste-map is basically a receipt for how metal got smart in the first place - and a warning that if today’s metal can’t sit in the same room as Coltrane, that’s not sophistication. That’s stagnation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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