In conversation with Martin Jacobsen, the topic of “heaviness” came up. What is heavy? Why is the term applied to metal? This question in many ways defines why it’s so hard to understand what metal is, much less describe it.
From my experience, metal is a spirit that leads to an approach. It’s not dissimilar to classical, where a certain attitude toward life, spirituality and culture leads to a form of music complete with its complexity and techniques. Nor is it all that different from martial arts, where a specific outlook leads to some near-universal shared characteristics.
Coming at metal from a literary/philosophy background, this isn’t surprising. Artistic movements tend to share traits they develop independently. They do this because they approach their art with a similar feeling, sentiment or belief system, and as a result no matter where they start, they end up in similar places. This is analogous to how just about every culture on earth has invented something like a chair, with most designs being very similar.
Jack Fischl over at PolyMic has another take on metal with his article ‘”That’s So Metal” Might As Well Mean “That’s So Masculine”‘ — it’s a bastion of alternative masculine thought:
According to the book Running with the Devil by Robert Walser, heavy metal imagery, music, style, and lyrics offer the illusion of power to a group (young men) that simultaneously lacks traditional forms of power (money, social standing) and is constantly barraged with cultural messages that inforce the importance of those forms of power. Listening to the music, especially by going to a concert, allows low-power young men to escape and live vicariously through metal’s imagery, the way one might live through books, movies, or TV shows.
Whereas pop music tends to portray (or at least address) your classical “manly” man, metal more often ties into elements of fantasy and science fiction — two other bastions of alternative masculine escape. Any given metal song likely depicts a man or male entity (spirit, creature) struggling with something — his place in the world, a woman, his own emotions. In other words, a typical song involves guys dealing with normal guy issues from a guy’s perspective.
He does have a point. The modern world does not exactly relish the hyper-masculine, but it gives it voice in rock music through the intense sexuality of the sound. However, metal takes this a degree higher. Where rock is about individual sexual power, metal is about power itself, and transcends the sexual per se in favor of an overall masculine intensity. This is the epic nature of metal; it is not based in the individual, but all that the individual cannot control.
Some might say this world, by being so obsessed with the safety of each and every person and ensuring that we all get along, is against the kind of conflict-driven Nietzschean masculinity that metal seems to espouse with its lyrics on war, death, violence and destruction.
For many of us however metal is more than masculinity. It is a worship of power itself. When you wield death and conquest, you are the power that society denies. This unites metal’s outsider status with its realistic ideals and returns us to a definition of “heavy.” In a time of stoned flower children worrying about nothing more than their next hook-up, “heavy” encompassed all the thoughts that this worldview could not tolerate. It was all that we fear and want to suppress, including mortality and fear of loss.
What made Black Sabbath “heavy” was not a specific technique but a tendency to gravitate toward these dark thoughts and the reality that society denies. This neatly coupled metal with hardcore punk, which saw a society out of control and in denial of basic facts of life. Together these ideas brought metal to its underground state where it is completely alienated from the values and behaviors of most of civilization.
What is “heavy”? It is that which we cannot define because it is beyond the instruments of our culture — such as it is — to discuss. It is the thoughts that grip us at four in the morning and shock us awake. It is what stalks us in dreams. And it is our primal past, reaching past our modern technology and enforced civility, awakening the beast within.
Tags: heaviness, heavy, Heavy Metal
The heaviness in dark topics (including death and raw power), I think, is what I see in metal. “Masculinity”, though, is only a limited way of seeing it.
“It is that which we cannot define because it is beyond the instruments of our culture — such as it is — to discuss.”
And this is why metal, and to some extent fantasy in general, is actually not escapist. It is a tribute to that which cannot be defined or talked about. It is on the surface alien to everyday reality yet still harmonizes with reality itself. The worst and most escapist kind of fantasy would be something hardly distinguishable from reality. Real escapism would be on the surface just “realistic” enough but out of sync with reality itself. Metal is full fantasy; rock music is half a fantasy. What a dishonor to reality that you could not pay tribute with a bold and fantastical vision! Everyday reality needs a bold counter point not to escape to, but to contrast itself to, and thus define its limits. Thus the posturing, hyper masculinity, demons, painted faces, etc. does not signify an escape from reality, but that there is no escape from reality.
To make war and effective destruction, one must have an army – an ordered disciplined structure, preferably backed by technology. Thus war implements creation. Singing kumbaya is a more fundamental method of destruction.
(When alco-elitists say “Black metal is total destruction! It’s the crunching of tank tracks over the skulls of your children and all humanity blarg blarg blarg”, i wish to ask them if they have ever seen, not saying drawn, some hydraulic or electrical schematics of a tank…)
I’ve always heard this military order and discipline in metal – more than in any other music – and regarded this as “heaviness”.
In the end, “metal” almost translates to “order”, as long as metals, chemically, have crystalline (ordered) structure in solid phase, as opposed to the amorphous structure of nonmetals. =))
I don’t mind being labeled as an “escapist” by an escapist society. To escape escapism seems admirable, to me. Give me reality over the “popular” any day.
I do think heaviness is a sound rather than simply lyrical content. Compare Procreation of the Wicked to some Black Veil song with the same lyrics; it won’t seem heavy at all. Moreover, music in languages you don’t understand or with vocals so guttural as to be indecipherable can be heavy.
But yes, metal is indeed about power.