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New Barnes and Noble book store in Altoona opens up cultural contact with rest of the world

Altoona, the town that culture forgot, took another sharp blow–this time to its thriving hair metal music scene, a musical tradition in the city for the past two decades. Since the recent opening of the Altoona Barnes and Noble, the first bookstore in the area, access to magazines and music from the outside world has helped slowly spread the bad news that hair metal is no longer a popular art form.

Dirk Cappalo, lead singer for the popular Altoona metal band, Metal Tool Shredd, had a swift reaction to the news of metal’s demise. “I was like, dude… dude, you know, dude,” Cappalo said. “Dude.”

Metal Tool Shredd’s lead guitarist, Tony “Licks Bomb” Zarowsky, said he listened to a new band named, Nirvana. “But they were so lame, you know, A, they didn’t have an umlaut in their name and, two, they didn’t even make any innuendos to the penis or the act of making love, this is classic artistic territory here,” Zarowsky said. “And, I mean, whatever you’re into, but, what’s up with the singer; I was, like, dude, why are you so angry?”

Professor John D. Tibbes, of the Penn State Center for Musical Autism, said that, like kittens that are never exposed to light can not process images even in a lit room, Altoona musicians are finding it difficult to process new sounds. “The members of the heavy metal community, for all intents and purposes, are culturally tone deaf,” Tibbes said. “It is a rare condition with no hope of reversal.”

As an example, Tibbes asks Cappalo to wear earphones and then pipes in a P. Diddy song. Cappalo stares mindlessly into space and then said, “It’s the ocean, right? Yeah. That’s what I hear. Wshhhhhhhh…. Wshhhhh…”

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