YMMV / Pantera

• Award Snub: Despite having five Grammy nominations throughout their life (and being arguably the most influential metal band of the 90's), the band was never able to win even one.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Cemetery Gates," "Walk."
  • The breakdown at the end of "Domination." Often imitated, never equaled.
  • "Mouth for War" and "Immortally Insane" too.
  • "Cowboys from Hell", which became That One Boss on Guitar Hero.
  • "Floods". An 7-minute doomy ballad that is widely praised by metalheads for having Dimebag Darrell's greatest guitar solo.
  • "Suicide Note". Just Pt. I for the first-time listeners, both parts (especially Pt. II) for the true Pantera fans.
  • "10's" for fans of Broly
  • Some of their 80s material was pretty awesome in it's own right, such as "Heavy Metal Rules" "Out for Blood" "All Over Tonight" "Proud to Be Loud" and "Hot and Heavy"
• Broken Base: Over the quality of their 80's material. The band themselves and many fans disown it as an extreme example of Early Instalment Weirdness, but it also has its supporters, both among fans of Hair Metal and from fans of the band itself who still recognise their technical craft shining through even in their early years.
  • Then there's this again, but about the reunion. Is the Pantera reunion all just a cash grab, or a tribute to the Abbott brothers' legacy?
  • Phil Anselmo in particular is a source of this: was he a massively influential vocalist and vastly underrated lyricist whose severe substance issues and occasional lapses in judgement derailed his career at a number of junctures? Or is he a racist and narcissist whose ego helped destroy the band and possibly led to Dimebag's death via his careless shit-talking to the media and who is now trying to shamelessly cash in on the band's legacy now that the Abbotts are both deceased?
• Critical Dissonance: During the 1990s music genres like grunge, alt-rock, and hip-hop achieved great mainstream popularity, causing many critics to triumphantly proclaim that Heavy Metal was dead. Apparently nobody told this to Pantera: their albums sold millions of copies and their concerts filled up large arenas. The album Far Beyond Driven even managed to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart, making it the heaviest and least radio-friendly album to ever accomplish that feat at the time. Several of Anselmo's lyrics reflect his animosity towards the other genres that became popular around the same time, especially on The Great Southern Trendkill and Reinventing the Steel.
• Epic Riff: "Walk", "A New Level," even the Material Girl respects it.
• Even Better Sequel: Cowboys from Hell is a great album, but Vulgar Display of Power took things to a whole new level.
  • Heck, even Cowboys from Hell is this compared to their earlier 80’s albums.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Averted here as not listing their glam era albums is flattering to the large part of the fandom, due to Canon Discontinuity and Fanon Discontinuity being in effect simultaneously (plus, listing pre-CfH works as Pantera's can piss off many of the band's fandoms).
• Fandom Rivalry: The Pantera vs Exhorder is one of the most well-known in all of metal, especially in the Groove Metal scene where Pantera fans and Exhorder fans claim that the bands rip off each others' styles, when in fact they developed the groove sound independently. Believe it or not, the members of Pantera and Exhorder are friends. Yeah, so ironic.^note The degree to which Pantera was officially beholden to Exhorder depends on who you ask, ranging from "common pool of influences and played a few shows together" to "unabashed worship" - for the latter, Marzi Montazeri (a longtime associate of Phil's who later played in The Illegals and later Exhorder) outright stated that Phil was obsessed with Exhorder, saw them as the future, and pushed the rest of the band to move in that direction. Nonetheless, all parties involved agree on one thing: Exhorder barely toured or even played shows outside of the Southeast and Texas and never took things as seriously as they should have, while Pantera worked their asses off and had to grind for their success in a way that few other bands did.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Christina Grimmie, as both Grimmie and Dimebag died in an almost exact same way, their fandoms express condolences to each other and are united in preventing artists being killed by obsessive fans. Pantera's official account on Facebook criticising the venues for not preventing Grimmie's murder only accelerated the bond between two fandoms.
• Funny Moment: The Dallas Stars hockey team were huge friends of the band, and the band hosted a party for them when they won the Stanley Cup in 1999. During the festivities, a drunken player^note allegedly Guy Carbonneau, who had a similar incident with the Cup in 1993 with the Montreal Canadians tried to chuck the Stanley Cup into the pool off a balcony and missed badly, giving it a nasty dent on the bottom that had to be repaired by NHL-commissioned silversmiths.
  • When they covered Whiplash with Jason Newsted, Dimebag briefly gave the mic to Jason for a line. The latter must've had his eyes closed at exactly that moment.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Becoming the poster boys of macho dudebros in the metal scene, considering that in the 80s they looked as frigging ridiculous as any other Hair Metal band.
• Hype Backlash: From some of the metal community, believe it or not, whether it's the aforementioned Exhorder fandom, people who didn't like the overtly macho 90s vibe turned up to eleven, or people who even felt they weren't pushing the envelope compared to the now-mainstream bands who came before them or the underground scenes at the same time. They also tend to be victims of It's Popular, Now It Sucks!.
  • Moreso these days it's become a trend to borderline dislike Pantera or even mock the hardcore fans due to the macho reputation the band garnered in the 90s, especially after Phil's infamous outburst at Dimebash.
  • Relating to It's Popular, Now It Sucks!, the band has also gotten some retrospective heat for the influence that they had on hotly contested heavy metal subgenres like Nu Metal and Metalcore. Indeed, while one could trace the establishment and success of those genres back to Pantera, the band had very little direct involvement with either subgenre's establishment.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Listeners who are not a huge fan of '80s Glam Metal usually still listen to the band's early material for the kickass solos and riffs of Diamond Darrel.
• Memetic Badass: Dimebag Darrell, both before and especially after his death.
• Memetic Mutation: "Floods"", which was used for the Grover Tragedy fad on YTMND.
  • "WALK ON HOME BOY!", by fans and by trolls who mock fans.
    • And in the same extension "PULL!".
• Narm: Quite a few instances, but the laughter in the middle of "Domination" is probably the most glaring example.
• Posthumous Popularity Potential: Though he was extremely well-respected in the metal community, nobody in the general media acknowledged Dimebag as an awesome guitarist until his death.
• Signature Song: "Walk" is probably the band's most famous song. It's even frequently played over the PA system at sporting events.
• Song Association: "10's" has more or less become the theme of Broly from Dragon Ball Z thanks to Funimation using the song for his transformation scene and subsequent mini-flashback in the dub.
• Spiritual Successor: The entire The Great Southern Trendkill album has one of its own in the form of an another band's album, Lamb Of God's 2012 album Resolution, an album which is compared to "Great Southern" in terms of their dark tone and style.
  • Hell, Lamb of God is pretty much this trope to Pantera. Go ahead, compare "Redneck" to "Walk", or "Now You've Got Something to Die For" with "Slaughtered", or if you REALLY want, "Black Label" to "Suicide Note Pt. II".
• Squick: The lyrics to "Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills."
• Tear Jerker: "Cemetery Gates", "Floods", "Hollow", and "Suicide Note Pt. 1".
  • "Suicide Note Pt. 2" might be even worse then Pt. 1. Despite being abrasive-sounding it is absolutely heartrending, with Phil’s constant shrieks sounding like he’s in genuine physical pain, not to mention the lyrics. It’s so aggressive it FUCKING HURTS:
  “Why would you help anyone who doesn’t want it, doesn’t need it,
  Doesn’t want your SHIT advice
  When a mind's made up to go ahead and die?
  What's done is done and gone, so why cry?”
  • The video released online by Phil Anselmo following Dimebag's death. Watching manly man Phil break down in tears while talking about his former bandmate and friend is incredibly heartbreaking.
• Too Cool to Live: Dimebag Darrell. In addition to being one of the most talented metal guitarists in the world, he was a friendly, unpretentious, outgoing guy who was loved by just about everybody who knew him, and went out of his way to be kind and accessible to fans.

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