On Ableism in Metal

(Note, for the first part of this I’m coming at it as a self-identified cripplepunk with family members with disabilities: I use canes on a part-time basis due to a spinal tumor, my mother uses a cane or a rollator 100% of the time, my father-in-law uses a rollator around the house and a wheelchair if he’s out of the house.)
Thing one is a general accessibility thing that’s pretty common in all genres, which is just that most venues and festivals either ignore or under-serve the needs of people with mobility aids. The Wiltern is a venue that holds 1850 people. When I saw Faith No More there last year there were about 20 accessible seats for mobility aid user and their companions. I went to Aftershock last year, it’s a festival for 10,000 people with accessible seating for maybe 100. My parents are seeing Kiss next week, the venue seats about 1100 and there are 8 wheelchair accessible seats. I went to Das Bunker’s 20th Anniversary last weekend; it was a Union LA, a club with three stages and a shitload of staircases. There may have been an elevator, I think? But even if you could get from the Main Stage to the Noise Room with an elevator you wouldn’t have been able to get to the lounge, and none of the seating in the main room is accessible - just park your chair in the back, I guess.
But that’s true of these venues whether you’re seeing Anthrax or the Charlie Daniels Band - some of it is a venue issue (and in the case of The Wiltern it’s also a historically protected building and they don’t have to be accessible) and that’s something everyone should be working to improve.
And then just with a simple google search I found the bands Crippled Black Phoenix, Cripple Bastards, Cripple, and An Autumn for Crippled Children. Preliminary research suggests that none of the people in these bands have mobility issues and they’re using “cripple” for shock value, which is a bit of a downer when my broken ass probably wouldn’t have someplace to sit at their shows. If Jeff Becerra wanted to change Possessed’s name to Cripple_____ that would be a bit different. If Rick Allen wanted to start a band called Amputee that would be fine - though Rick Allen probably just doesn’t want to talk about it.
CW GORE, RAPE, MURDER, GENERAL AWFULNESS————————
Then there’s the history metal has of fixating on images of gore and torture, many of which have medical horror/amputation elements and many of which present people with facial abnormalities or large scars as monsters, rapists, demons and the like. I’ll also let you know that while I was doing some research on this I found three different album covers featuring women being raped by a person who was simultaneously killing them and amputating their limbs. I also found two album covers where a woman was being raped/murdered by the infant she was delivering while a man observed dispassionately from the lower left corner, one album cover where a dispassionate dude was bout to slit the throat of the infant he had just sliced out of its mother as she was suspended by a breast from a meat hook, and one image of a mermaid about to be raped by the pirate who was holding her down with his hook through her breast (bonus amputee-as-horrific-monster). It makes GWAR seem charmingly quaint and understated.
Edit - I’ve now done some more research and the number of illustrations I’ve seen that feature women who were raped so hard that they were disemboweled as other yet-to-be-diemboweled women look on crying in terror is over a hundred. I never thought I’d want to suggest that somebody study the work of Geiger to learn subtlety but here we are. This is also why I haven’t made a separate post about misogyny in metal, because I have a job and a life and I could literally write five books about misogyny in metal and I’m just not at a point in my life where I have time for that.
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That doesn’t even get into all the individual songs about amputation, paralysis, blindness, and other physical disabilities.
And don’t get me wrong, there are positive, affirming songs by metal bands about those kinds of things. But there are way more songs about how awful or sick or broken or tortured a person would be by living with those things. And there are a hell of a lot more of them by metal/punk/goth bands than there are by, for instance, disco groups or pop divas.
So then we get into the saneism, which is somehow worse.
(Note for this part that I’m a clinically, chronically depressed motherfucker who almost had to take a Xanax when I saw this post had more than 100 notes and who just barely manages to keep her hoarding in check. Hooray, physical and mental illnesses have a lot of comorbidity.)
Just talking about the two bands I mentioned in the original post Kiss has an album called Psycho Circus with a song of the same name and the Melvins have an album called Electroretard. The cover of Electroretard shows a blind girl in a wheelchair being handed a giant venomous spider by a boy talking about death, so that seems both saneist and ableist (personally I read it as either a boy tricking a disabled girl into doing something dangerous OR a boy offering the poor crippled girl the sweet release of death).
Encyclopedia Metallum has 61 bands in their database with  the word “Insane” in the band name. 94 bands have the word “suicide.” “Depression” - 33. “Psycho” - 40. “Sanity” - 66. There are four separate bands called “Mental Disorder.” If you search album titles with “insane” “psycho” or “sanity” you’ll see more than 100 hits for each. “Suicide” shows up in 421 album titles. “Suicide” in song titles shows up over 3700 times.
The big problem with all of this is that it mostly isn’t presented in a way that values people with mental illness. It’s “psychos” as monsters or “look how scary and insane we are” or “suicide is a beautiful end to suffering.” And again, I know there are metal bands out there that have songwriters coping with mental illnesses and suicidal ideation - I know that at least some of this is about getting over something or getting through something. But the vast, vast majority of this stuff is about being scary, being edgy, being shocking.
And it’s been in the music for fucking ever. If someone doesn’t know any other Ozzy song they know Crazy Train. Alice Cooper has a song about love curing dyslexia. Don’t Fear the Reaper is a song celebrating suicide by the original umlaut band.
And it’s not like I hate all of this either. Crazy Train is a kickass song. Electroretard is an album that I really enjoy but despise the title of.
The fix for this sort of thing isn’t as easy as kicking white supremacists out of your personal circle or skipping shows by known racists. Our culture as a whole has issues with ableism and saneism. I think the ableism is gradually getting better and we’re getting further away from a time when disabled people were put on display or denied autonomy. That isn’t as much the case for mental illness or neurodivergence and when it comes to saneism I think the metal/goth/punk attitude that “we’re dangerous because we’re crazy” does a good job of reinforcing the belief that mentally ill people are dangerous because they’re crazy. It’s illness as a costume with disabilities as props and it’s incredibly gross.
I think a lot of it can be fixed by listening to disabled/mentally ill/neurodivergent people in the scene. Don’t spend money on band iconography that either glorifies disability or presents the disabled as monsters. Don’t spend money on music that shits on mental illness (I may like Electroretard but I’m never going to buy the damn thing) or makes suicide a joke (and I’m not excluding goths and punks from this; Blue Clocks Green were a new-wave band who wrote worse song about suicide than basically any metal song I can think of and of course college goths made it an offbeat 80s classic).
It would be super if we got past the idea that mental illness was spooky or romantic or dark or some other bullshit. It’s a thing that happens. It’s generally awful. But plenty of people live with it in their day-to-day lives without becoming axe-murderers or entering suicide pacts or tormenting themselves and others. And it might be nice to cut down on the wheelchair-user-crowd-surfing or prosthetic-wearing-headbanger inspiration porn. These are normal people living their normal lives. And yet:

So I just searched wheelchair crowd surfing and the significant majority of the images (probably 60-70%) were at metal shows. And the only two images that were meme-d were at metal shows. And the one above is more self-congratulation about how cool this person thinks metalheads are for being willing to lift a person in a wheelchair than it is about how much fun this guy is having. See what I mean about disability as props? Oh yeah, how great, your fans are willing to do the same thing for people with mobility aids that they are for literally everyone else. Faith in humanity restored, for sure. *sarcasm, of course*
But I think the ableism/saneism in metal tends to be more about the reinforcement of stereotypes than about intentional exclusion. The reason the original post is about racism and white supremacy is because it’s aggressive, violent, sneaky, pervasive, and more pointedly dangerous than any ableism in the scene. I just expanded on it ‘cause you asked me too and I just went off on it this much because it hits close to home.
Cheers,
And seriously don’t ever google “metal album cover gore.” Fucking hell.