What Makes Metal Heavy?

Abstract: Metal music especially death metal, black metal, heavy metal, speed metal, thrash and variants like grindcore tends to get stereotyped often - and the worst case is when it is done by the fans. The words "brutal" and "pummeling" (in the case of death metal, for example) do not convey the extreme nature of the music, only the extreme nature of the methods used to produce the music - which can apply equally to boring music as to dark, evil, extreme, loud and violent death metal, black metal, grindcore, and thrash. Too often we are told - in metal CD reviews, on the backs of metal CD's, in the reviews written by mail order companies, in the reviews written by labels, or on the metal radio - that a band is "the most extreme" or "the most brutal." But the bands usually lauded as the next extreme most commonly fade away, while a few core bands remain, acknowledged by a serious fanbase to have an unquantifiable quality known as "brutality" or "heaviness." This essay is an exploration of that quality.

In the night, one can hear many noises: some sound scary, and some emanate from patterns in our surrounding existence we find terrifying: the crack of a twig broken by a heavy but stealthy footfall, the screeching of a window being opened covertly, the quieting of ambient animal noises in the presence of a predator.

Similarly music comes in varying degrees of seriousness and, when serious, different degrees of threatening profundity. Metal does not terrify with its loud drums, loud distorted vocals, and guitars buried under waves of electronic fuzz; it terrifies with its seriousness, and the kind of terrifying literal yet abstract reality a death metal, black metal, or thrash band can portray with vivid intensity. Where society hides from fear and allies itself with the consequence of fear (death), metal allies itself with death to dispense fear - as it has done since Black Sabbath.

Surely the first to hear Black Sabbath's detuned minor-key power-chord riffing felt that in itself as an affront to music: minimalist in essence and destructive in rhythm, the first wave shook traditional "rock" and "blues" enthusiasts loose with its very appearance. However, as they began to appreciate the music behind the noise, they began to understand what made Black Sabbath "heavy": the patterns which revealed the thinking behind such noises, putting context to the fear they instilled. What made Sabbath terrifying was the abstract and nihilistic breakdowns which interrupted otherwise vigorous and (for the time) violent structures. Evidence: they sold plenty of songs on the radio using the aesthetic of heaviness, but few of their truly "heavy" - or frighteningly real - songs were popular.

Many people avoid viewing metal as art - after all, it is "just noise" - but those who do understand its artistic ambitions understand how it connects to the chaotic world of art. An artist exists to represent his world, but to tell his experience in that representation - to pass on knowledge and awareness. Art is about waking up in a world full of people sleeping as they live, walking like zombies and filling their minds with the useless so they do not have to contemplate the signal of awareness: mortality. Metal (especially the nihilistic, brutal, dark and savage genres death metal, black metal, and thrash) works by taking society's victims where they fear to tread into the void of ambiguity, where anything could happen and death is inches away. That is heavy. To the people who'd rather sit home on a sofa in front of a television eating microwave food, that is an intrusion on their illusion - an interruption of the denial of life's end that in turn denies life - and so they turn it away.

Their justification: it's just noise. Many metal fans and bands seem determined to prove them right by making music which, while implementing the aesthetics of heaviness - pounding furious blast beats, detuned guitars and low chords, utterly gutteral vocals - have not found the profundity that makes metal threatening. And when one looks at the list of history-making metal bands, one can see that the enduring testaments of metal art did not follow that path. What makes metal great is its lack of fear - an unflinching stare into the abyss of the fear of death and the fear of making choices - that cloaks in the "scary sounding" aesthetic of fear a relentless energy toward joy for life.

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