If this guy and this girl had a baby fed milk from this cow and this cow…
Since no fewer than five people have asked me this week I’ll try for a serious answer.
Summer of Megadeth is a group blog (or glog) with no clear editorial mission other than to crack vaguely heavy metal-related jokes, mainly at the expense of NYC media fameballerie and random celebrities/pop personalities. Sometimes it’s just a place for people to share music.
One member is a lady who writes about music for actual American dollars. Another is a 40-yr old art director. One teaches science. Another has to ride the bus to get anywhere. Some of them don’t even live in New York!
A favorite meme is to uphold contrarian ideals that are typically seen as wimpy or “not very metal” and proclaim them as so fucking metal (Steely Dan being the example that comes to mind).
Other memes include:
- Dudes in a Room — I think this is meant to joke about the concept of dorky guys sitting around arguing about issues as if it’s going to make the world a better place
- Solving Things (e.g. “We just solved feminism.”) — This one’s related to the aforementioned en-roomed dudes acting as if their booze-addled bickering has anything resembling an impact on anything)
- Putting the same text in the title, body and tag of a blog post — It’s just a silly way of emphasizing what’s being said, like it’s so important you had to say it three times.
- “Yeah buddy” — the sort of thing your average high school hesher would say to a friend who just successfully shotgunned something.
- Puns like “meat-up” for meet-up or “guts” for guys or “deth” instead of death — Just metal-fied versions of words. V’s instead of U’s. Just add umlauts. Tomorrow someone will say “Dudes in a Tomb.”
It was originally founded by a Brooklyn-based writer. At least a half dozen of its contributors have done work for The Awl. Some of them know next to nothing about metal but are able to appreciate the site’s freewheeling anti-humor.
SoM relies heavily on an impenetrable, multi-layered network of metal slang, ever-changing puns and recurring meme-gags that ward off most people who wander over to the blog wondering what it’s all about. It’s jokily hostile to outsiders who don’t “get it.”
The blog has a few dozen contributors, but I’d guess that under ten people are responsible for 80% of the content. They often engage in “dashboard bombing” (posting dozens of similar posts in quick succession to flood followers’ Tumblr dashboards) to turn off any casual followers. If you’re actually following SoM, you’re doin it rong.
I don’t get half the jokes on Summer of Megadeth because I’m not a contributer and therefore don’t have access to the legendary SoM Backchannel, which is either a chatroom or an ongoing email discourse (I’m not sure) between its contributors. A lot of the jokes on the blog only make sense within the context of backchannel banter. I love SoM because it reminds me of college. A bunch of hilarious nerds trying to out-goof each other with obscure references and trolls.
There. A dude in a room just solved Summer of Megadeth. For now. Tomorrow all of these explanations will be obsolete.
Guess what, fucker? We never ended up saying “Dudes in a Tomb.”
