The photograph needed a "kicker," which is newspaper slang for the title that goes underneath a picture; it's sort of like a headline for the photo caption.

"How about 'Down in a hole'?" I offered.

A few seconds of silence.

"Our Alice in Chains fans on campus will appreciate it," I said.

We went with "Down in a hole" -- the title of a 1992 song by that now-defunct grunge outfit -- but you know what? I think I might have been the only one who fully appreciated it. Not just in the newsroom -- on the entire campus.

Obviously, I bring this up because of the death last week of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley.

I'm not the world's biggest Alice in Chains fan, though I very much enjoy their music, and I certainly recognize their influence and talent. Of the four Seattle bands who broke big in the early 1990s -- along with Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden -- Alice in Chains probably got the least love from the music world, largely because of the darker, sludgier sound they ground out.

They still haven't received the respect they deserved. Can you believe this band, with all its inner demons, drug abuse and infighting, has never been featured in its own episode of Behind the Music?

But I digress. As I wrote a few paragraphs up, there may not have been many students on campus who really got the kicker.

I wouldn't consider myself a huge heavy metal fan. But after four years, I've come to realize that there simply aren't any huge heavy metal fans on campus.

I'm not quite sure why this strikes me as odd, but when you think about it for a minute, it really is. Wake Forest students are fans of diverse artists from Kid A to Jay-Z, from Abba to Zappa, from George Clinton to Clint Black to Black Flag. But tell me, when's the last time you rubbed shoulders with a dude wearing a Cannibal Corpse T-shirt?

Sure, a number of students -- myself included -- may own albums by System of a Down, Linkin Park, Andrew W.K. or Rage Against The Machine, but the roots of these artists reach as deeply into rap, funk, industrial and goth as they do into heavy metal.

(And I am aware that for all their raw heaviness, Alice in Chains was much more grunge than metal, and remarkably melodic to boot. But they still shunned the punk sensibilities held in esteem by their grunge brethren in favor of a more Black Sabbath-like heavy sound.)

I'm not alone on my theory. Ziggy's owner Jay Stephens said that Winston-Salem has a strong heavy metal scene, but when a hard rock or metal band takes the Ziggy's stage, attendance by Wake Forest students virtually drops off the charts.

Three hard rock/heavy metal bands played at Ziggy's during this past week -- Kittie, Prong and the Alice-influenced Sevendust -- and Stephens said Wake students were nowhere to be seen.

Stephens said Wake students really come out only for shows by pop artists like Athenaeum or Edwin McCain or crossover hard-rock acts like 311 or 2 Skinnee J's.

"I think Wake Forest is kind of a socialite kind of place -- if more than one kid goes there, they're all going to go there," he said. "People that listen to metal tend to be more independent, not really group-oriented. I think that may have something to do with it."

The perception that you are a heavy metal fan does, I think, carry with it a stigma not normally associated with Wake Forest students.

For example, this year, WAKE Radio has seen an explosion in the number of DJ's it employs, and while some shows feature emo or punk music, there are no shows geared toward metalheads. There simply isn't an audience base to support one. But at Guilford College in Greensboro, the student-run station WQFS -- which is consistently cited as one of the top college radio stations in the country -- has a fairly high metal quotient in its daily rotation.

General manager Michela Maxwell said that a handful of DJ's have their own metal-based shows each week.

We -- and when I say "we," I mean both "we as a society" and "we as a campus" -- like to fit in with the rest of the cultural world. I think it's funny how we all enjoy listening to Daft Punk and Outkast, when in fact very few of us actually are daft punks or outcasts.

Heavy metal is, in a lot of ways, a reincarnation of punk, simply because it's no longer cool to like. It scores the day-to-day lives of many of America's societal rejects, just as three-chord punk did in the early days of the Ramones.

People who "don't fit in" have always sought shelter in their music. Heck, maybe this was the case with Layne Staley. Maybe his passion for his music was the only thing that kept him alive even this long.

On the morning of the day that Staley was found dead in his apartment, I was actually flipping through the Alice in Chains rack at Best Buy. I hadn't heard a thing about Staley's death. I had just been listening to a lot of Alice recently, and I was thinking about picking up their Greatest Hits album.

It was a strange, eerie coincidence.

Musical diversity is a wonderful thing, and Layne Staley and Alice in Chains brought a little of that to the landscape of mainstream modern rock.