I was just thinking about some funny awkward metal moments that happened to me over the course of numerous years. Some highlights:

1) Classmates on my elementary school bus asking about my AC/DC shirt../."Doesn't that stand for After Christ/Devil Comes?" One of the supervising teachers actually told one of the kids that it did in fact stand for that. Dumb ass.

2) There was this older conservative guy reading a newspaper at a bar. I was wearing a Mayhem shirt and asked him for a light of my cig. He looked at me funny and gave me his lighter. He then goes, "What does the back of your shirt say?" I said, "No love, no hate, no faith, no memory." He gives me this very "you should know better" look and starts reading his newspaper again.

3) I used to deliver liquor for a liquor store. We had a beat up van for deliveries. I used to play mix tapes on deliveries. One time, I left one of the tapes in the deck. Another older colleague took the van out for delivery and comes back to the store and says, "Whover's tape that's in the player is broken or something." I go outside into the van and press play, and it was right in the middle of the Incantation song Blissful Bloodshower. I can see how that confused him. Ha.

4) Making out to Carcass's album Reek of Putrefaction with a chic in my college dorm. About every 30 seconds she would stop and say, "You actually spent money on this?"

Wearing metal shirts in high school was bound to get me some weird looks. lol.

Not so much an awkward moment, but earlier this year I was standing outside a kebab shop with my patched jacket on, and some drunk guy got really in my face wanting a fight, calling me a "fuckin' emo" and that kind of thing, until another drunk guy comes up, and in a drunken voice shouts at the first guy, "Oi... leave him alone, he's rock and roll!"... he then asked me and my friends if we had any cigarettes, pausing before he went off to nod at me, and say "aye... fuckin' Whitesnake man", and doing about a solid 15 seconds of air guitar. I found out later that the second guy was the first one's step-father. Funny old world.

As for genuinely "awkward moments", I can't bring any to mind which aren't fairly mundane.

My grandma thinking my Bathory shirt said Batlord, thought it was more cool than anything though.

Nothing will top the time where my mum didn't let me go see Strapping Young Lad when I was younger because she thought it was a queer bondage show based on the name.

My mum thaught mine said "Rathorn", and one of my mum's friends asked if it was a "pop group", but I suppose that's forgivable considering that when they were young, pop was actually cool.

My mom and brother pulled the same thing on me...they still refer to it as my "Batlord" or "Bathlord" hoodie haha.

I was in a clothing store with band shirts once, and a rack with Bathory shirts was actually labelled Batlord. I chuckled.

Oh these kinds of moments... right off the bat I remember one back in y freshman year of high school and I was talking to someone bands i liked and meantioned Destroyer 666 and eyehategod. This other kid got up from front of the class and came back and was demanding why i hated god or something cause he heard me say 'i hate god' I just looked at him and said e-y-e-h-a-t-e-g-o-d one word. It's a band. And he went... oh and calmly went back to his seat.

Another eyehategod related story. I used to work two jobs, one in the early morning loading trucks at FedEx and then as a computer tech on Keesler Air Force base. So often I'd bring a bring a change of clothes with me. Well I was running late in leaving and just grabbed the first white T shirt I saw and went out the door. Turned out it was an eyehategod shirt, the part that was frowned about was the inscription on the back in nice thick bold letters 'KILL YOUR BOSS' Didn't even realize it when I walked in the door. I excused myself and went to a gas station and bought a 5 dollar welcome to MS shirt.

I find it awkward when somebody asks me to point them out best Linkin Park tunes because I'm into metal so I should know. Or the "aren't you metalhead LOL" when enjoying some pop / whatever played in public

Awesome.

My most ''akward'' moment had to be, well quite a boring one; a dude asked me about my music taste. When I told him I was into metal he started to make shitty growling sounds. Yeah, very boring.

I get that kind of thing occasionally - One of my friends introduced me to somebody I'd not met before with "He's got your kind of music taste, you'll get along". Turns out to be a seriously stereotype-abiding scene/emo guy. I did get on with him okay, but I'm pretty certain it wasn't for the reasons given.

I have Athiest's Piece of Time shirt and on the back it says "WHERE'S YOUR GOD NOW!" and this stupid fucking girl on my bus in high school said "shouldn't it be NOW WHERE'S YOUR GOD?" I didn't have anything to say to her.

Also, I saw Judas Priest on their farwell tour and this nerdy acne ridden kid tried to do a two-handed devil horn thing. It took him several tries to get it right. More awkward/embarrassing for me than anything else.

I don't really wear band tees much anymore, so I don't get asked that much, and even when I did, it was only when I was like fifteen and in high school that it ever happened.

Hardly anyone I know knows anything about music at all, so I don't attempt to discuss it with them at all. But the most awkward moments I have are when someone I know brings up some shit band like Hollywood Undead or Skillet and asks if I like them, and then asks why I don't listen to them. I usually just try try to change the subject because I know it won't end well otherwise.

I was wearing my Dying Fetus shirt and walked in to my Grandmas house and she told me my Abortion shirt was very offensive. Ummm having some friends come over and blasting some Immortal and being asked if this was the latest Abigail Williams.

When people ask me what/why/how, I don't even bother trying to explain. It really saves me the grief and them the confusion.

drinkin' with some friends and all of a sudden i hear this atrocity leave the lips of a fellow drunkard
"sum 41 is thrash metal right?"
we all just looked at him......
and we all felt awkward as fuck

1) When I first met my boyfriend, I spent hours walking down the street bashing Dimmu and Cradle of Filth. When we were walking back to my place I noticed he had a Dimmu shirt on.

2) The back of my eluveitie shirt has some quote listed one word being "Cauciu Curmiso Aviciados", when I was standing in line at a local grocery store a little child had asked "What does that stand for" her mother behind me trying to pronounce it says "Ca-cok- cucumber ....avocados?" rather a fail.

3) Going out to an 'art' festival, meeting a man who had a Mayhem shirt on. Then, discussing Mayhem, Him further saying "I don't like them. I just wear it to look badass"

lol que??

Wearing my Hellhammer "Triumph of Death" t-shirt in public. Every time I walked by a black person would give my shirt a long, hard stare and would then proceed to give me a bad look.

i had some bestial warlust playing pretty loud and went to take a shit, my girlfriend and her parents popped in to visit, i didn't know until i heard a knock on the bathroom door, apparently they just stood around for a couple of minutes before deciding to knock, wtf!?
needless to say i turned it down pretty quickly.

i am surprised that i have not had too many awkward moments considering i have a shirt which says "true satanic black metal" on the back, had a few bad looks but that is about it

EDIT: i was speaking to the lead singer of a band and i did misprounce their name in front of him which was kinda awkward

My girlfriend bought me Butchered at Birth from Amazon, and my mom opened the package. She freaked out.

This one wasn't really awkward for me, so much as it was for everyone else. Back in high school I was one of the few people that listened to metal, and, being a pretty quiet dude, that was all most people knew about me. In my literature class one day, the teacher had us taking turns reading Shakespeare out loud. When the time came for me to read, part of the passage had the character singing a few lines of a song. Not being a singer myself, I nervously paused before the singing part. The teacher said, "now for this part, you have to SING it." Some guy next to me was like, "yeah, come on, start singing." I stayed silent for a couple more seconds and then just broke out in this really rough and silly sounding death growl. In retrospect, it was actually pretty juvenile and stupid, but the people who knew I was a metal fan found it really hilarious. Our teacher was actually pretty cool about it too, she looked really weirded out at first and then just gave an awkward chuckle and called on the next person.

/\ like a boss /\

Having my IPOD accidentally start blasting Deathspell Omega on an airplane, with a nice suburbanite middle aged lady sitting next to me. On the whole pretty funny though.

Probably more awkward was the time I decided to wear my Emperor shirt with a massive pentagram on the back of it around my hardcore, diehard Catholic grandmother. Should have just saved it for another day...

Just so you know, your mum and grandma are incredibly adorable.

strapping young lad rocks my hairy anus...

Please explain rhetorical questions to her.

This one isn't really that awkward. I was wearing my Feel the Fire shirt and I was buying a book and the cashier was kind of staring at my shirt. He said "Feel the Fire, huh?" all the while giving me this weird/confused stink eye look. I just said yeah and took my receipt.

vital remains song "where is your god now"

I remember when I first started taking guitar lessons I went to a "band camp' which was more or less a four hour lesson where you talked about your interests in music while somebody only a couple years older than you taught a couple songs. The awkward part was that one of the instructors was a brain-dead paperweight of a human being, and said he was into "metal". I asked him to list some of the band he listened to, and he started saying a bunch of core bands before mentioning A7x, and began to ramble about them and how "influential they were to the genre". To make the problem worse, when another student asked him to describe metal genres he said the two main genres were "white metal" and "black metal". He said black metal was anything that pretty much included themes of violence, gore, death, or satanism, and white metal being what he listened to. He even went as far to say that black metal was "bad for the whole genre". To top it all off, he failed as an instructor and I asked him if he could teach me any riffs from Tony Iommi or Chuck Schuldiner, only for him to respond that he didn't know who each of them were.

On the first week of school this year, this really obnoxious scene kid in my English class was making fun of my band's full length album, saying my vocals were too low in the mix. I kept on telling him it was probably just something wrong with his speakers, as it sounds fine on my CD player, but eventually the guy tried to get me to growl in class. Well, I hesitated at first, as usually I am very quiet and reserved, but when I realized he was expecting me to be quiet and weak, I broke out into "Hammer Smashed Face", which resulted in an awkward silence, with a couple hesitant chuckles, followed by my teacher saying "Whatever drug you're on...I want it". My growl sounded absolutely horrible, so that's probably why he thought it sounded "really good" and then went on to explain how vocals were the most important "instrument" in all music, and that guitars, drums, and especially bass don't matter at all...

Another time, I had a family reunion where I wore my Emperor - "Wrath of the Tyrant" shirt, and an estranged aunt took one look at it and said "death metal! I love it!". I didn't really know what to say to that one.

I was showing a few friends around NYC while wearing the Atheist tour shirt that has "Unquestionably Back 2009" on the back. In the middle of a conversation, an man who was probably in his 60's came up to one side of me and simply asked "Who?"
"What?"
"Who?"
"Who what?"
"Who's back?"
"Atheist."

At this point, he started talking about how God has always been around and how it doesn't surprise him that the Atheists have come and gone, or something along those lines. Eventually he got the hint that we weren't particularly interested in what he was talking about, but he followed us around for a few minutes before finally heading in a different direction.

this is sig-worthy

A girl from school walked up to me when I had headphones in and asked what I was listening to, I put on the cheeriest face I could, looked her in the eye, and said "Septic Flesh".
That was more funny than awkward, but that's the best I got.

every time someone asks me what I'm listening to or 'what type of metal is that' I just say it's kpop

The first time I knew about Dragonforce. I lost some hope for metal.

Ah, just had an awkward metal moment last night, when my date kept calling me a metalhead. That was really weird. I hadn't listened to metal the whole night and was not in a band shirt.

Other awkward moments include my grandfather picking up a fresh batch of CDs I got a while back and peering through and going "Dimmu Borgir? That's a scary cover...Atheist? Huh..."

Also, my dad trying to read my Emperor t-shirt. He was way off.

Not exactly awkward, but I once wore a Pure Holocaust tee to school. Got sent to the principal's office not long after entering school.