Originally Posted by sea

You're ignorant. Have you ever listened to power metal? Thrash metal? Folk metal? Traditional heavy metal? Progressive metal? Avant-garde metal? While some of these may contain things like growled vocals or double-bass drumming on occasion, they are for the most part highly melodic (perhaps excluding thrash), far more so than Slipknot, KoRn and System of a Down. You think that all "true" metal these days is in the death and black categories; you could not be more wrong. Go listen to some Agalloch, or Vintersorg, or Arcturus, or Municipal Waste, or Rhapsody of Fire, or hell, even DragonForce, and tell me that those are black and death metal. That's right, they're not, but they're all considered to be metal. Something tells me there's a little problem with your logic. Try understanding what you're talking about before you open your mouth. Sophistry is only appreciated by people who are less knowledgeable than you; I do not appreciate it.

Nu metal is a metal genre, as its title indicates, so to say that it's not "true" metal is a little bit silly, because there are plenty of "metal" bands that take a huge influence from non-rock-based musical genres, and nu metal's rap and hip-hop influence is no different in that regard. However, what is at issue is the quality of nu metal; as a genre, it seems to be consistently crappy in the eyes of most metalheads. The fact that a lot of nu metal fans come from hip-hop or pop-rock backgrounds even widens the division between them and other more supposedly "legitimate" fans.