I've noticed specifically here in New York that closed minded "metal heads" generally have an aversion toward rap, but tend to enjoy dance music (house/techno). What are all your thoughts? Any preference?

If they were really 'close minded' they wouldn't like either.

I prefer rap, but dance is OK I suppose, especially if I'm in the right mood and had a few drinks.

Not a fan of either in general but there are alwqys exceptions. I've listened to dance stuff in the past, even 'danced' to it - usually with chemical assistance TBF - so if I was forced to pick one, I'd go for that.

Actually, I'm a big Orbital fan, so yeah: dance.

I'm just as big a fan of EDM as I am metal to be honest. Techno is my style of preference. I quite like hardcore hip hop however there's no comparison really.

This.

Although that probably means that I'm close minded. Or you know, they just don't appeal to me.

If I had to choose one, it would be house/techno. But personally, I'd be happy if I never heard either style again.

Hip hop has definitely lasted much longer for me, but dance was massively exciting in the early 90s, especially cos metal ran out of steam at the same time.

No thank you.

At what point in the 90's did metal 'run out of steam' exactly? The 90's was a damn good decade for the genre. So many new sub-genres emerged. It was an exciting time.

91/92 was probably the beginning of the end. By 94/ 95 metal had seriously splintered and things were very c onfused and directionless.

Illegal raves and their evolving electronic music and chemical refreshment were 10 times more exciting than Burn My Eyes type of shite, baggie trousers, grunge, Norwegian silliness, dry & nerdy tech-death and plain average kind of stuff like Sentenced, Iced Earth, In Flames, Nevermore, etc. There were individual albums here and there but as a movement metuLz was on its arse. Itdid survive all that as time went on - but largely by just imitating the past, relying on classic acts to return to form and by sheer weight of the number of bands.

Dance music itself got domesticated surprisingly quickly. By 95/ 96 it was ubiquitous and had lost any kind of edge. By then they were using it as a backdrop in clothes shops. Rap had more creative mileage in the long run -but hip-hop's game has basically been up for a very long time now too.

There's no way metal ran out of steam that early rob. 1997 was when it started to taper off a bit but the first half of the 90's was extremely strong in my opinion.

1995.

The exact nadir is very hard to pin down, but it's very tempting to point to the release of Nevermind or the black album as readily identifiable beginning-of-the-end moments.

Korn's first album springs to mind, or Sepultura's Roots..

More broadly I often thought it was the moment in Terminator 2 when Arnold opens up with the mini-gun on the cop cars and then it says 'human casualties 0.0'. That was the moment when the burdizzo squeezed shut on mainstream pop culture.

Yeh but 97 was a pretty strong year, so was 98. 99 wasn't bad either. I didn't really start to notice things going slightly 'wrong' until around 2000/2001.

There were some crackin Norse BM and BM related albums up until the early part of the 00's IMO. But then, if you aren't a fan of that stuff...

There have been some storming death and doom albums (and black metal, to a lesser extent, if your idea of black metal is as admittedly narrow as mine) in modern times, but very little that wasn't directly drawing from the early classics. I suppose that is the bigger issue.

The vast majority of what passed for mainstream metal from the mid 90's onwards was fucking gash obviously, and the same is true today really. Soft hearted rubbish, or wacky, kooky novelty shite.

I've been through phases of both, and tend to like specific niches of both.

I feel like dance wise I'm more into uplifting/ethereal trace stuff. Stuff that when you break it down isn't too dissimilar to some atmospheric black metal in it's structure, driving beat and melodic passages.

House. Easily.

That said, rap led to trip-hop so there's that too.

House, deffo. Fuck hip-hop and all that shite.