When did Metal become your life?

Getting the Internet changed all of that. I remember many evenings sat using that old PC on dial up AOL Internet looking up bands on YouTube. It all took off from there. I stopped regularly listening to a lot of the music I'd bought before that point. By the end of 2006 I'd discovered Iron Maiden and they were also my first gig, December 23rd at Earls Court in London. By 2007 I'd discovered my first power, prog and black metal acts. Eventually I did discover that I enjoyed other genres too, particularly folk and ambient music, but I owe those discoveries to metal thanks to side-projects in those styles. Couldn't live without metal now. 

I made a (re)discovery recently that sorts of puts my becoming a metalhead in a new light. Better start this story from the beginning.

I currently have a free trial of Amazon Prime, which includes instant video streaming. While browsing this week I stumbled by chance on a more recent iteration of the children's TV show Power Rangers. Power Rangers was easily my favourite series as a child, though I only gave the newer series a passing glance in the listings with a thought along the lines of 'wow that's still going?'

Later I passed by the original series in the Amazon prime listings as well. I'm pretty big of childhood nostalgia so said what the hell and fired up the first episode, with no expectations except to laugh at how bad it looks now and then move on after a minute or two. 

I never got into the episode proper as the theme music struck me first. It was of course toned down somewhat in production terms and the vocals were pretty unoffensive but what I was hearing was clearly metal. A bit of research later and I discovered that the composer was one Ron Wasseman, who released the music on CD and re-did a version of it in 2012. Being about Power Rangers, it's of course cheesy as hell, though I did listen today to the instrumental cut to see if it really was valid for MMA inclusion. It's metal credentials really show without the vocals and Power Ranger themes to detract from it (I added him a little while ago).

I'd forgotten about most of what Power rangers was about by the time of my experiences described in my quoted post, especially the music, but it does seem that I was in fact being exposed to metal much earlier than I realised. Not sure how much of a subtle effect that may have had on my tastes (I was never interested in other music I heard between these times though), but I thought I'd share this little story. If nothing else, it's actually kinda cool to find out that my favourite show from childhood was flying the flag for metal even if I didn't know what it was at the time.