The Atlantic served up a thunderbolt of awesomeness recently with James Parker’s “How Heavy Metal Keeps Us Sane” (I confess to more than a little intellectual envy). He’s 100% right: very few, if any, other genres can lay claim to such a uniformly low anthropology, not to mention unabashed verticality. Not even Horror/Goth. Metal is just so darn elemental, pun intended. I remember getting in an argument with a metalhead friend in high school, in which I foolishly asserted that the limited emotional palette made it inferior to other, broader styles of music. Yet as Parker points out, that’s precisely what anchors it so profoundly, ht CR:
“We seem to move on a thin crust,” warned Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough,
which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet.
Though written in 1922, this is metalspeak, pure and simple… Since its invention (to which we will return in a moment), heavy metal has been the popular music most ardently devoted to Frazer’s underground magma pools, and most grandly expressive of their inevitable eruption. Metal’s commerce with the lower realm has been extravagant, ridiculous, and covered in glory. The sleeper parched of his dreams, or purged of his nightmares, goes swiftly bonkers: without fantasy there is no reality. It might be argued—indeed, it will be argued, by me, right now—that heavy metal has kept us sane.
Black Sabbath created heavy metal. We can say that with a satisfying kick-drum thump of certainty… Bassist Geezer Butler, a mystical vegetarian, wrote the lyrics. Raised Catholic, Butler as a youngster had entertained thoughts of the priesthood, and for all the band’s occult trappings, his view of things was essentially orthodox, if a little on the medieval side: God over here, Satan over there, man flailing and biting his nails in the middle. “Lord of This World,” from 1971’s Master of Reality, made it all very clear:
Your world was made for you by someone above
But you chose evil ways instead of love
You made me master of the world where you exist
The soul I took from you was not even missed
…Metallica’s singer/guitarist James Hetfield—after Geezer Butler, the second great poet of heavy metal—would go on to make more-complex metaphysical statements: the astonishing “Sad But True,” from 1991’s Metallica, is Schopenhauer in the key of E minor. But with “Master of Puppets,” he hit a metal mother lode. Subjugators and string-pullers, principalities and powers: in the face of all these, heavy metal is cosmic protest music.
By dwelling at such length on the lyrics, and mentioning Schopenhauer, I of course risk the capital vice of the writer-on-metal: I risk being intellectual. Nothing disgusts a metalhead more than to be intellectualized. Which is not to say that he himself is without conceit in that department. The metalhead, quite counter to stereotype, is floridly pretentious. He will call his band Sanctum of Carnality, or Thy Maleficence; he will steep himself in the Stygian prose of H. P. Lovecraft, possibly the most insane overwriter since Webster; he will root through his thesaurus to find a fancy word for “dismemberment”; he will make up his own words, heavy-sounding words, like thraft (High on Fire) and cleansation (Chimaira). But all of this is best understood as a kind of voodoo, a force field of metal-ness with which to ward off the triflers and non-tragedians, while simultaneously short-circuiting the apparatus of good taste, correctly identified by the proto-metalhead G. K. Chesterton as “the last and vilest of human superstitions.” Faddists and lightweights: keep your distance. Critic: we will make your brain explode…
The panicking parents of yesteryear now seem like characters from folk memory. An anti-metal case in our current climate might more appropriately be brought by Richard Dawkins or the Council for Secular Humanism, arraigning some metalhead for singing too loudly about damnation. Not every metal act subscribes to the cosmology of Geezer Butler as made manifest in the sound of Black Sabbath: metal today is produced with equal sincerity and efficacy by atheists and Christians, depressives and libertines, diabolists, miserablists, absurdists, and those whose only religion is metal itself. But when it starts to get heavy, dilating your blood vessels and stirring the roots of your hair, you know you are approaching the primary vision—of man besieged, man pulled apart, man suspended over gulfs of penal fire.
The great scholar of heavy metal Robert Walser, doing research for his 1993 book, Running With the Devil, interviewed a Twisted Sister fan who told him that the easy-listening music favored by her mother had made her paranoid. In Walser’s words: “It so obviously seems to lie to her about the world.” An Avenged Sevenfold fan might say the same today about the music of Jack Johnson, or John Mayer, or Jason Mraz, or any of the golden troubadours on heavy rotation at your local Starbucks. I don’t mean to be ungracious about Starbucks—I happen to spend a good deal of time in Starbucks—but heavy metal reminds me that Starbucks, like much of modern life, is a fiction. Go through the membrane, break the crust, and everything is metal.
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COMMENTS
7 responses to “The Spiritual Benefits of Headbanging”
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It’s hilarious that Parker taps Chesterton as a “proto-metalhead”–he may be on to something. But the claim, “Go through the membrane, break the crust, and everything is metal” strikes me as overwrought (but then, what did I expect from a defense of metal, if not a few overwrought claims?). Surely metal is as much a fiction as Starbuck’s. And you might just as plausibly say that underneath the “membrane” everything is Bach (in fact, people HAVE said this)–and also say that Bach is a fiction. The trick is not to resort to tricks–which includes not just writing things off because they’re “fictions.” Rather, we have to make a proper use of fictions. Or, if I can riff off of Tolkien a bit, we have to be sub-creators under God; we have to make with what He has freely given to us, in accordance with how He’s made it (which we know through His freely-given commandments).
I think what the article is trying to say is that there is no fiction in metal because it points out what life truly: a fallen world. Other genres try to paint a world that is beautiful and unrealistic, creating superficial standards of living. Praise bands do the same thing, where much of the music is about how life is wonderful after receiving Jesus. Metal doesn’t do that. Metal is made by the people who were marginalized by society, who critique society’s error and addresses problems that need to be solved (thrash and death metal). Or sing of their despair and sorrow in a broken world (gothic and doom metal), which lets the listener know that they are not alone in their depression (I can speak from personal experience). THAT is the non-fiction the article is talking about. The fiction is the superficiality of most other genres and band, and metal has nothing pretty to say.
I take your point, Daniel; and maybe that’s all Parker means by “fiction.” I am perhaps overly wary of any talk of “going through the membrane” or anything that sounds like what C.S. Lewis called “seeing through” things. (Granted, some things ARE superficial and need to be “seen through”–or, perhaps, thickened, deepened, and complemented–but modern culture has a habit of wanting to “see through” and debunk EVERYTHING, and I may be a bit over-reactive against that–ironically so.)
Of course, the brokenness and futility of a fallen world have to be kept clearly in view. We just shouldn’t carry that so far as to lose sight of the real beauty that does remain. (I.e. if easy-listening music lies about the world we live in–and it does–so would an overly-morbid metal music.)
Here again, Chesterton is a great model; he’s remarkable for his ability to keep brokenness and beauty both firmly in sight, and communicate them. (I’m currently re-reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Adam Wayne is nothing if not a proto-metalhead!)
I love this post. Black Sabbath – the first Catholic Metal Band. For all the occult image, I’ve always thought they got a bad rap. I’m not sure about the Ronnie James Dio incarnation of Sabbath but the original Ozzy stuff is just like the article says. God on one side, Satan on the other and us biting our fingernails in the middle.
Lester Bangs said a lot of the same stuff about Sabbath back in 1971. Check out his awesome article “Bring Your Mother to the Gas Chamber”:
http://www.creemmagazine.com/_site/BeatGoesOn/BlackSabbath/BringYourMotherPt001.html
Amazing article by Bangs. Had not read that one. Thanks Matt!
I love this post, too! Chesterton as proto-metalhead is a priceless observation. Having read this, I’m now feeling a little better (and less embarrassed) about how much I adored James Durbin’s full-on, screeching metal anthem on American Idol last night 🙂