"My strangest media moment a photo session they all had dressed up like 50 gangsters. That was pretty cool. We have to get some more of those kind of photos sometimes"
About this Quote
There is something wonderfully un-pretentious about a metal lifer admitting his strangest brush with media artifice wasn’t scandal or controversy, but a bunch of people playing dress-up. Kerry King frames the “50 gangsters” shoot as both bizarre and “pretty cool,” which lands because it captures the core tension of rock-image culture: authenticity is the brand, yet the brand is built out of costumes.
King’s intent feels less like bragging than a quick nod to the carnival side of publicity. A photo session is supposed to freeze a persona into a single, marketable myth. “Gangsters” are a particularly telling choice: outlaw glamour, disciplined menace, a ready-made visual shorthand for danger that can be consumed safely on an album insert or magazine spread. For a musician associated with aggression and extremity, the gangster look is both adjacent (violent mystique) and comedic (everyone knows it’s a set). The subtext is an insider’s shrug: you can take the music seriously without taking the photo mythology too seriously.
Context matters, too. Rock and metal media have always traded in archetypes because they travel fast: the outlaw, the monster, the antihero. King’s closing line - “We have to get some more of those” - isn’t nostalgia so much as a quiet endorsement of play. It’s a reminder that even the hardest scenes survive on occasional self-parody, a pressure valve that keeps the posture from becoming prison.
King’s intent feels less like bragging than a quick nod to the carnival side of publicity. A photo session is supposed to freeze a persona into a single, marketable myth. “Gangsters” are a particularly telling choice: outlaw glamour, disciplined menace, a ready-made visual shorthand for danger that can be consumed safely on an album insert or magazine spread. For a musician associated with aggression and extremity, the gangster look is both adjacent (violent mystique) and comedic (everyone knows it’s a set). The subtext is an insider’s shrug: you can take the music seriously without taking the photo mythology too seriously.
Context matters, too. Rock and metal media have always traded in archetypes because they travel fast: the outlaw, the monster, the antihero. King’s closing line - “We have to get some more of those” - isn’t nostalgia so much as a quiet endorsement of play. It’s a reminder that even the hardest scenes survive on occasional self-parody, a pressure valve that keeps the posture from becoming prison.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Kerry
Add to List
