It's practically indispensable for many, and some of the most interesting reviews (and, to be fair, some of the most mind-numbingly banal ones) have been written there over the years, by some really colorful personalities that didn't work for any magazine or publication, but just loved metal and had a keyboard and a modem. Say what you will about the Archives (I know there's plenty of people with plenty to say about it) but one would be hard pressed to deny just how useful a tool it is for many metalheads around the world to discover new music in the Internet Age. This got me thinking about the idea of a Heavy Metal Canon, which got me thinking about the Metal Archives. Likewise with black metal fans and say, "The Divine Wings of Tragedy." For example, I think most power metal fans wouldn't disagree that "Transilvanian Hunger" is a classic of extreme metal music, even if they don't personally care for it all that much. I supposed that the reason this was so, was because metal music (and metal culture) has a uniquely robust body of work on which it rests, a nigh indestructible Canon of Established and Indisputable Classics, comprising music so ridiculously good that we can all pretty much agree should be included in said canon, irrespective of whether it's our individual cup of tea or not. In the midst of all these, heavy metal (and metalheads) seemed to stick out conspicously in the way that it stubbornly resists to wane and disappear to the extent that virtually every other subculture has. Recently I've been reading about various musical subcultures through the ages (mods, punks, hippies, goths, emos and the like), how they arose, and how each inevitably declined and fell with time.
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