Okay, I know you looked at this article name and thought "what does this even mean?" Well, let's get you immersed. Imagine your favorite band right now. It could even be your favorite genre if you can't plant a pin on one band. Now imagine how your friends think about your music. Do you think they'd like it? Do you already know that they like it? Do they think your music is weird? If the answer is yes, then you probably like the same genre, or your friends just don't care about your music preference. But if you answered "no" to my previous questions, then that could mean one of two things. Either: A.) You're really self-conscious about your taste in music for a specific reason, or B.) There's an incredibly negative stigma around your taste in music. What's that? Both of these things are the reason? Well then, you came to the right article.

I'm gonna tell you right now; I am an avid listener to Hard Rock/Metal, and I listen to Sirius XM Octane pretty much religiously. But how many people in my life actually know that? Not a lot, actually. You wanna know why? Imagine somebody who listens to hard rock or metal. What do you think they look like? I'm going to guess for you. You're thinking of a guy, most likely, with a lot of tattoos, a mohawk or long hair, possibly dyed. He probably has a lot of piercings, perhaps a beer belly or way too ripped to be alive. He's also probably wearing ripped jeans with boots, sporting a wicked awesome band tee, and holding a beer. If you're thinking of a woman, she probably has brightly colored short hair, shorts that are "too short", piercings, and "unfortunate" tattoos. You also probably think anybody who listens to hard rock looks really scary. Well...

We don't all look like that! However, if you do match the description I labeled above, you gotta tell me who did your tats. You guys are in a judgment-free zone on my end, you keep doing you! You can pull off dyed hair, I can't.

But now I'm going to illustrate a situation where I was talking to a co-worker. It was the end of the night, and I had happened to bring up the fact I had off for a concert the upcoming Friday. I, of course, was asked what concert, to which I replied "Disturbed," real casually. My co-worker was appalled, replying "I didn't know you were like that, Em."

Cool.

But this is specifically why I don't tell people I like hard rock, go to concerts, or even have my own campus radio show that plays hard rock. There's an incredible stigma around it that only criminals or really angry people listen to it, and that they're all incredibly scary, drunk, or again, angry. But let me break this down for you, real simple: we aren't. We are every day people that enjoy a particular genre of music, attend concerts, and are passionate about what we listen to. I usually don't tell people what I listen to on a regular basis because it's none of their business, but also because I'm self-aware of the stigma it carries. As soon as I tell somebody that I listen to this genre, they are either surprised and widen their eyes, literally say to me "oh, you like that?", or just have a puzzled expression, like my co-worker, because I don't "look like the type to listen to that."

At all of the concerts I've gone to, I've only ever seen a handful of rude people enter the concert venue, and they didn't even match the description of what I wrote earlier. Everybody else was incredibly polite, making conversation until the opening bands came out and cracking jokes about the drive to the venue, the terrible parking situation, or just what we hoped the bands would play. There are families with kids that LOVE this music, that relate to it. And we didn't all just show up with black shirts on and black skinny jeans, or anything similar you may imagine. Those who did? They were really, really nice. They talked about their day at work, how cool their new tattoo is, and how great their lives were going. This group of listeners are so incredibly chill, it's almost inhuman. The hard rock community is a close-knit one, and we aren't ashamed of it. Stop trying to make us feel that way.

Please, stop judging us for what we listen to. It's really rude, and quite frankly, it's really annoying.