Maryland Deathfest

This is my life. These are my peers.

I'm currently on my way to the ninth annual Maryland Deathfest. This will be the fifth year in a row I've attended "America's biggest metal party of the year," as it bills itself.

And this year, like every year, I find myself wondering how exactly I ended up involved in such a wacky culture.



MDF has grown from a one-day fest to a four-day, sixty-three-band Memorial Weekend blowout. It takes place at Baltimore's Sonar club, which is a stone's throw from city hall. In recent years, the organizers have erected multiple outdoor stages, so the fest now effectively goes down in the streets of downtown Bawlmer. The attendance is in the thousands.

It's hard to capture just how weird the atmosphere at MDF can be. Baltimore is a poor, majority-black city, and the locals seem baffled by the horde of drunken, mostly white dudes that descend on town every May.  Because it's a festival, those in attendance usually rock their most excessively metal garb. Patch-covered vests, studded gauntlets, and huge gothy boots abound. Brutal slams reverberate against the I-695 overpass that runs through the center of the city. A mess of lifestyle-homeless crust punks loiter by the gates with their smelly dogs, scamming on attendees for food and cigarettes.

It's no surprise that MDF serves up great people-watching opportunities. The music sounds weird and dangerous, and the people listening to it try very hard to look weird and dangerous. Very few of them actually are dangerous. Most of them are calm, reasonable, law-abiding people in their daily lives. At the worst, they're deadbeats or slackers. So they mostly fail to look dangerous, and instead look hilarious. Some of them look hilarious deliberately, like Cannibal Corpse chicken-man up there.

The Sonar, without the black t-shirts

And the backdrop makes us headbangers look even sillier. Baltimore really is a dangerous place full of hard people, and all the heavy metal posturing is mere mummery next to the genuine poverty and despair that surrounds the Sonar. During MDF VI, I watched a puffed-up dude in a Nasum shirt get thrown out of a Subway sandwich shop by the shrimpy cashier, who was considerably more ready to put up his fists.

Sometimes I'm a little embarrassed to be associated with the sweaty masses at MDF. For the most part, though, I'm proud. We're a goofy bunch, and we're not as tough as we'd probably like the world to think. But our goofiness--and our weird, dangerous music--is how we deal with the genuine poverty and despair that surrounds us everywhere, not just in Baltimore. A lot of us are even happy with the strange little niche we've carved out for ourselves. I can think of worse ways to make peace with the world.