This pretty much stems from my thoughts after watching 'One Man Metal' for the tenth time, that none of these musicians who claim to be isolated and depressed actually are so. Perhaps it's my naivety showing through but with Jef Whitehead especially he tries so hard to conjure a image that's far removed from the music he plays.

For Example he moans and whines about hating people and how nobody understands him, yet he is a Tattoo artists whose sole career is based around being people on a continual basis, from inking to designing. Russell Menzies claims to be 'so very alone' and depressed yet has a wife, child, lives in a town and is actually doing quite well. I think the reason people would be throwing rocks at Russell's windows won't be because of the music it'll be because the guy is pretending to be something he's not, I mean "Sin Nanna," I wonder how many nights sleep he lost over that.

Scott Conner would be the only true musician in the series that goes out of his way to avoid people in general, removing himself from a otherwise chaotic environment and not having any relations with anyone, to me this is the epitamy of what a 'One Man Metal' band is about and not walking around with a glum look and black cape just to look different because everyone else simply doesn't get it.

I haven't seen the documentary in question so I can't really comment on how things are portrayed in it, but isolation and solitude are often shown through metaphor and other imagery in the form of people being in remote, grim northern moonforests and the like. These serve as stand-ins for emotional or social isolation that may seem very real to the musicians no matter the facts of their lives. Just because someone regularly interacts with others or has family or whatever doesn't mean that the person feels real, tangible isolation/solitude.

Arguing that this sort of thing is just a gimmick when concrete facts don't support it is sort of akin to telling someone with clinical depression that they've got great things in their lives and therefore have nothing to be depressed about. I'm sure in some cases there are people who are perfectly well-adjusted, non-depressed, cheerful folk who make music in this vein and with these themes just because it interests them, but I'd wager more often this stuff is the product of truly depressed or otherwise mentally ill individuals who genuinely feel this way no matter their circumstances.

i also haven't seen the documentary in question, so i can't comment on it directly. but i do think the isolation/solitude/depression thing is played up a fair bit by a lot of artists wanting to appeal to intended fanbases - a lot of bm comes to mind (i'm sure i could paint watain with this brush if i tried hard enough), as does poisonblack. but in the end, it depends on the individual/s in question. personally, a quote that sums up my own feelings on the subject comes from jerry cantrell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TRjj8ZKvxo
(the quote is at about 40 seconds in)

his point is that creativity (at least for him, and i'd argue for 99.9% of us) doesn't come from some kind of forced solitude and depths-of-hell depression, but rather a more mundane situation of boredom, unemployment, directionlessness, etc. i always thought this was a good quote because it doesn't promote some kind of extreme angle, but rather exemplifies the attitudes of so many garage bands - and AIC ended up (this was filmed before their first album, so they were unknowns at this point) selling multi-platinum based on this.

So, what would he need to do to be "legit"? Kill people with needles?



Yeah, because people with a family never get depressed. And if they do, they never feel like they are alone. Ever.

Maybe you're overthinking all of this?

A lot of those ideas or feelings can spring from feelings of isolation from society at large, not from every single person ever. For example, Sin Nanna describes his discomfort with more developed/industrialized areas and his affinity for nature. This removal from urban areas (which are the hallmarks of modern society) isolates him from the majority of people right off the bat. The fact that he has a family that shares these feelings doesn't mean he connects or agrees with his larger social surroundings.

Similarly for Wrest. Although tattoo artists do have to deal with clients, it's really an extension of his interest in drawing/art, which is often a solitary pursuit. Think of how many hours he had to spend drawing, and probably alone, to get to the level he's at. He just turned that solitary interest into something more social because he had to make a living somehow. In the documentary, he talks about how he had a long stretch of time where he would wake up, write and record music, go to work, go straight home and write/record more, and go to bed only to do the same thing the next day. That sounds rather isolated to me.

You don't know what's going on inside someone else's head, so don't even try to tell a person what their life is like from having viewed a few minutes of it on Youtube.

This. OP sounds a lot like a kid who has yet to experience drudgery outside of being called a dweeb in high school. Feelings of isolation or alienation can manifest in many forms and surely an eccentric Brit parading about his backyard in a cape has something about him that makes him feel separated from typical members of society, especially when his genre of choice is DSBM, which is by no means a real famegrabber or cashgrab.