I’ve loved heavy metal for just over 30 years. In fact, I can pinpoint the year and approximate month that my journey began with the music I love.

An older sibling got me to watch Iron Maiden’s Be Quick Or Be Dead on Videomusic, the TV channel which, as the cryptic name suggests, played music videos in Italy where I lived at the time. MTV broadcast on another channel for only a few hours during the day – and years later I’d get so mad when seeing commercials for Headbangers Ball as I couldn’t physically watch it.

Since Be Quick Or Be Dead came out in April 1992 as the first single from Iron Maiden’s Fear Of The Dark album, I can confidently say it’s been just over 30 glorious, unregrettable, downhill years for my hearing and my neck.

Now, a great deal has happened in the music I love in those three decades.

There was black metal’s cursed ascension and the appearance of djent and other much sighed-over genre names. There was the tectonic change in how we all find and listen to new music, much to the scoffing ire of veteran tape traders. There was that long, cold, half-decade or so where it was incredibly uncool to be into metal (and Iron Maiden reached what many fans regard as their low point; though I love all Maiden releases). And then there was that glorious post-’90s resurgence – perhaps most vividly symbolised by Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson’s return on the Brave New World ‘comeback’ *cough* album in 2000.

A lot happened. And a lot stayed the same. Such is the insular paradox of heavy metal. Indeed, it’s a law of nature that with change comes resistance. And so when looking back on metal’s short half-century existence, two things come to mind that arguably caused more polarisation among its adherents than anything else.

The first was the dreaded glam and hair metal ­– considered even today a phenomenon driven by soulless commercial interests until it was mercifully put out to pasture in the early ’90s (note: “grunge killed hair metal” is a common myth; in fact, the commercial forces behind hair metal killed hair metal).

The second was the rise of what became known as nu-metal less than a decade later.

I am old enough to say that “I was there” when nu metal hit in the late ’90s. After discovering Iron Maiden I’d had several years to find and build my music identity, and I distinctly recall how polarising nu metal eventually became among ‘serious’ metal lovers.

A common sentiment from the crossed-armed Serious Brigade was that it just wasn’t real metal – why, how could it be with their dreadlocks, their baggy pants, their dislike for guitar solos, their penchant for rapping and turntables and electronics, and – worst of all – big commercial label backing.

I’ll concede: I never felt that level of hysterical repulsion toward it (it didn’t make me want to vomit fire, but it rarely got me excited). And I wasn’t alone. At least as far as the angrier, shoutier spectrum of nu metal was concerned.

A case in point: the first Limp Bizkit album received as much love and air play as the next sludge or blackened thrash release on my local community radio metal show; and I know people who felt the detuned riffing from Korn’s Blind was as legitimately raw, new and mind-opening as death metal had been a few years earlier, or thrash a decade before that.

So, face facts: the grittier, angrier, shoutier strains of nu metal, at least for a while there when it was genuinely new, didn’t attract the hyperbole-infused scorn that characterised it in popular memory (a lot of the scorn came later, and often with good reason).

Nonetheless, one peculiar thing did do a great deal to diminish the genre’s artistic merits. It occurred pretty much from the beginning and it became something with which almost every well-known artist doing shoutier late ’90s nu metal remained inexplicably obsessed.

It had nothing to do with dreadlocks or tracksuits. And yet, almost every major nu metal act insisted on incorporating it into their releases (geez, thanks a lot Ross Robinson).

And that quality is…

The whining!

Yes. The whining! Those whispered or moaned woe-is-me vocal lines, as distinct from singing, rapping, shouting or growling.

The whining is inescapable on almost every late ’90s nu metal album – so much so that it’s synonymous with the time and era.

It was always delivered just before the breakdown, or during the intro or outro – and it’s the height of irritating, cheap and clichéd music craft.

I get that it’s an attempt to convey a deep angsty feeling. But in truth it just comes across as lazy. There are so many ways in which a talented vocalist can build tension, stoke pathos, or add tortured emotions. A faux-hurt drawl ain’t one of them.

Quite simply: if you took all those angrier, shoutier-leaning albums from the era and edited out all instances of faux-angst moaning (foux-ming?) you’d actually have some half-solid music. You’d lose the irritating, fake angst, and keep the riffs, the energy, the quasi-industrial stomp and all the heaviness from a sound that was, for a brief moment, original and urgent.

Unfortunately, that’s not the reality we inhabit.

That whining, as I said, is so prevalent in late ’90s nu metal that it practically defines the representative albums from the era. Again, producer Ross Robinson, who had a big hand in so many of these albums, has a lot to answer for.

It tars the entire genre and is responsible for so many of nu metal’s other qualities getting overlooked – and consequently, the whining is a significant reason why nu metal remains one of the most hated and polarising genres in heavy metal history.

The whiniest nu metal track of them all? It’s Gonna Go Away from Korn’s 1999 album Issues. The whole track is literal whining and faux angst.