Politics & Power Quote by Sebastian Bach

“Metal is still the biggest music now in America” isn’t a chart statistic; it’s a battle cry dressed up as a fact. Coming from Sebastian Bach, the former Skid Row frontman whose peak fame sits in the late-80s/early-90s hard rock boom, the line reads like an insistence that the cultural center never moved - that the kids still want volume, virtuosity, and a little danger, even if the radio stopped acting like it.

The intent is defensive and promotional at once. Bach is staking a claim for relevance in an era that routinely treats rock as legacy content. “Still” does the heavy lifting: it signals endurance, an embattled identity, a refusal to accept the narrative that hip-hop and pop own the mainstream. The subtext is less “metal dominates Billboard” and more “metal dominates the feeling of America” - the music of trucks, gyms, Monster Energy cans, military bases, festival fields, and suburban garages. In other words, a mass culture that’s easy to miss if your definition of “biggest” is awards shows and TikTok sounds.

Context matters: metal never died so much as it fragmented and routed around gatekeepers. It became scenes, subgenres, and touring empires; it migrated to streaming rabbit holes and algorithmic fandom. Bach’s line taps into that: metal’s commercial footprint may be dispersed, but its community infrastructure is stubbornly intact. He’s not correcting the record so much as refusing to let someone else write the obituary.