Friend Adam passes along an interesting article that uses the latest Mastodon album as a way to explore heavy metal's relationship with the rest of the pop music world.

One quick note, tangential to the main point. Mastodon is an awesome band, but there is no way they are going to get any kind of mainstream success. Their songs are long, multi-parted and complicated, and about whales. Metallica became popular when they took their 9 minute odd time songs on And Justice For All and cut them down into radio-ready one or two riff tracks produced by Bob Rock.

As a real unrelated aside, i love the formatting on that article, with the footnotes in a separate column alongside the article. If it were easy for me to do that, my comics reviews might be a lot more readable, as i could remove a lot of my parenthetical rambles.