It's metaphor for how to achieve immense success and immortality in music, and particularly in genres like rock and metal, where you're pressured to make a Faustian bargain to devote yourself to the image and the style at the sacrifice of other interests and parts of your self.
The part that begins "Some twenty years ago, the gods put down their feet..." is about how some of the most popular heavy metal bands thus far came around or reached their peaks about 20 years ago, and their popularity has defined the sound of what is "metal" to some degree or another forever after. You can't be "metal" unless you follow this pattern, in music, style, and behavior. It's why so many metal songs share certain traits, like the strong tendency to throw in guitar solos even when they'd be pointless, or how a lot of bands always have at least one guy who has shoulder-length or longer hair. If you don't fit the template, you're not "metal."
It's metaphor for how to achieve immense success and immortality in music, and particularly in genres like rock and metal, where you're pressured to make a Faustian bargain to devote yourself to the image and the style at the sacrifice of other interests and parts of your self.
The part that begins "Some twenty years ago, the gods put down their feet..." is about how some of the most popular heavy metal bands thus far came around or reached their peaks about 20 years ago, and their popularity has defined the sound of what is "metal" to some degree or another forever after. You can't be "metal" unless you follow this pattern, in music, style, and behavior. It's why so many metal songs share certain traits, like the strong tendency to throw in guitar solos even when they'd be pointless, or how a lot of bands always have at least one guy who has shoulder-length or longer hair. If you don't fit the template, you're not "metal."