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Snobs give heavy metal fans a bad rap

AGXStarseed

Well-Known Member
(Not written by me)

Rock and roll has always been associated with degeneracy but since heavy metal emerged in the Seventies, it has taken the worst rap of any style. A taste for music with screaming lyrics, wildly distorted guitars and pounding bass lines is often imputed to spotty adolescent males with low social skills or worse, people who are mad, bad and dangerous to know.

In October's issue of the London Review of Books, writer Andrew O’Hagan went even further, associating a taste for heavy metal with being a mass killer. “Someone, perhaps not a million miles from you…is preparing a biography of his mentality in advance of a shooting massacre,” he says darkly. “He is almost certainly a he, and he is unhappy, and he is already fully armed. He is probably on Zoloft (an anti-depressive, in case you were wondering). He is likely to be a virgin with a history of isolation. He may be into hurting animals, or like Death Metal music, and there’s a strong chance he will have been said to have Asperger’s syndrome or ADHD…”

Could this really be true? Should the police be monitoring the internet communications of people who attended Slayer's recent gigs? The idea seems too absurd to contemplate, not least because the violent and often satanic imagery of metal bands is all tongue-in-cheek. As Jeff Hanneman of the band said in an interview for New Musical Express almost thirty years ago, “A lot of it is quite ridiculous, but you don't think of it as a pose, it's just something to write about which is way over the top, and is an easy way of offending people."

As for the fans, they probably enjoy winding up good middle-class folk by sporting skull-and-cross-bone leathers and revving up their Harley D’s in quiet village squares. But I suspect deep down they’re peaceable folk. Decades ago I met a metal fan on a coach who had the patient quietness of a gardener. He had a curiously bulging pocket on his leather trousers, and wore an ancient t-shirt which I think had the grinning skull from Iron Maiden’s classic 1981 album Killers. Or perhaps it was the evil pentagram on the sleeve of Venom’s Welcome to Hell, borrowed from the Satanist Alastair Crowley (though the truth is most metal bands and fans haven’t a clue who Crowley was, or what the pentagram means). He was on his way to see his mum, having just been to a metal festival somewhere in the country, with his friend. And where was his friend, I asked? “Here,” he said, and produced from that bulging pocket a miniature cage containing a very small rodent. “He loves music,” he said, his eyes misting over as he let the beloved little beast run up his sleeve.

ironmaidenkillers-large_trans++qVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpg

Cover of Iron Maiden's 1981 album Killers

But don’t take my word for it that metal fans are mung-bean-eating pacifists who love their mothers. A recent research paper from Humboldt State University shows that during their youth, metal fans are ‘significantly happier and better adjusted’ than their non-metal-loving peers, and are also better adjusted in later life. This paper was prompted by an earlier one from the University of Queensland, which set out to test the view that metal lovers harbour more violent and aggressive feelings than people with other musical tastes. First of all the subjects were asked to submit to an Anger Induction exercise, which wound them up in subtle ways (to me that’s far more creepy than any heavy metal lyric, but let it pass). Then they were asked to listen to ‘extreme’ music of their choice.

The results were intriguing. “Participants who listened to their selected extreme music experienced a significant increase in feelings of inspiration,” say the authors. “These effects of extreme music on increasing physiological arousal and subjective inspiration are echoed in other research showing that music can evoke the experience of power – an effect that appears to be independent of musical genre and whether or not the music contains lyrics. Taken together, the findings support the view that extreme music listeners use music to regulate their anger and to feel active and inspired.”

Note the observation that the good effects are ‘independent of musical genre’. This is surprising, because it’s always classical music which it touted as having beneficial effects on its listeners. So stubborn is this belief that any evidence that it might not be true is simply ignored. There’s abundant evidence that the so-called ‘Mozart effect’, which refers to the power of classical music to improve intelligence, is a myth. But that doesn’t stop people investing in Mozart CDs to play to their babies. Meanwhile, any evidence that pop music might be bad for us is seized with both hands, and evidence that it might be good, such as these two recent papers, is ignored.

Why the disparity? A shrewd article by Bethany Bryson, a sociologist at James Madison University, suggests a reason. The kinds of music we enjoy, she says, are intimately bound up with the kinds of people we are, in terms of education and social class. It’s a mark of educated people that they become more tolerant – indeed, being culturally tolerant is actually a sign of distinction nowadays. But there are limits to this tolerance, and heavy metal lies on the wrong side of the divide. When she analysed the results of some questionnaires, she found that the least popular genres among educated people were rap, gospel, country and heavy metal. And yet jazz was strongly approved.

What this shows is that tolerance these days can cross racial divides, but not class ones. Jazz is ok, rap is not. And there are no prizes for guessing which of these four disapproved genres was hated most of all. The message was: “Anything but heavy metal”. So might it be that when Andrew O’Hagan impugned the musical tastes of serial killers, he was simply giving way to snobbery? Perish the thought. But the facts should certainly give us pause, before we rush to condemn a whole genre of music as fit only for sociopaths.



SOURCE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/snobs-give-heavy-metal-fans-a-bad-rap/
 
Metal is best music...

Yeah, I like metal in many of its forms (Heavy, Power, Thrash, etc.) although I'm not fond of metal that involves the 'singers' screaming rather then singing. Death Metal is certainly not a type of metal that I listen to.
If I want to hear people screaming, I'll watch heated arguments on YouTube.
 
Yeah, I like metal in many of its forms (Heavy, Power, Thrash, etc.) although I'm not fond of metal that involves the 'singers' screaming rather then singing. Death Metal is certainly not a type of metal that I listen to.
If I want to hear people screaming, I'll watch heated arguments on YouTube.
Have you listened to Liabach


 
I like metal a lot and I know many people who do is well. Funny thing when comparing those people to this article, as they are usually the nicest, patient and open people of all and pretty much without exception the highest educated. (Universities apparently look like a breeding ground of metal fans here in the Netherlands, according to a friend of mine who attends one)
 
Same old crap, new note here ant there.

As a performer, I've heard all of the Metal Scandals.

Back in the early 80's backwards masking with satanic messages was the big scandal. Periodically someone tries to claim that listening to Metal makes youth unduly violent or unruly and causes them to commit this or that heinous act. All bull crap but, I will admit that we in the industry are responsible for those misconceptions.

The image we, as a group project and promote is not one of peace, happiness and light. it is an image of rebellion, death, darkness, evil and being anti social. We are the wildest of the wild children, even as we age, we stay wild, or so our public images would have you believe.

In truth we are no more wild than anyone else, we are of every faith, orientation and gender, just like the rest of the world. We have the same peaceful hobbies and amusements as anyone. We love our families, or fight with them, or ignore them, same mix as society in general. Many of us are caring, compassionate, peace loving people who want to help the world.

We chose Rock n' Roll for our careers and, with that career comes an expected image. Because our lives are as public as they are, we have to live that image more than anyone else and, of curse there are icons of the industry that have done horrible things and, that had been made know to the public - always with someone praising them for not following the rules. Again that's part of the hype that creates and maintains our collective image as rockers.

So yes, much of this type of press is our (the insiders in the industry) fault. Very little of it is true but, unless we give up the image that feed our fame, we are never going to stop or even slow such ideas. We intentionally make ourselves appear wild, bad, tough, violent, anti-social, we give the impression of having a blatant disregard for the law and, for anything that is considered polite or proper. We did it to ourselves and, it isn't a bad thing, just going to have people blaming us for bad things more often but, then, even bad publicity is publicity and, this sort of thing is free publicity for the industry so, we'll take it.

We aren't going to loose fans over it. Sure a few parents will demand their kids don't listen and, teens being teens, sales of our music will surge because those fans are going to buy more just because now they are rebelling more, being more like us when they buy the music they aren't supposed to have. *shrug* That's why the image works and, it's why seemingly bad press often works in our favor.
 
(There’s abundant evidence that the so-called ‘Mozart effect’, which refers to the power of classical music to improve intelligence, is a myth. But that doesn’t stop people investing in Mozart CDs to play to their babies.
(This might be a bit off subject, but this is a pet peeve of mine)
I do not understand why it's always Mozart that's studied. If you want to study the effects of historical music, there are so many other choices? Why not Bach? Why not Palestrina? Why not Allegri?

 
I suppose everything must have gone downhill for metal on that fateful day long ago when Emperor Joseph II of Austria informed Black Sabbath's Tony Lommi that his music contained "too many notes". o_O

An exasperated Lommi unfortunately blurted out, "Judas Priest!" whereupon the emperor beamed and proclaimed, "Yes! That's the sound I want!" The rest was history... :p
 
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I suppose everything must have gone downhill for metal on that fateful day long ago when Emperor Joseph II of Austria informed Black Sabbath's Tony Lommi that his music contained "too many notes". o_O

An exasperated Lommi unfortunately blurted out, "Judas Priest!" whereupon the emperor beamed and proclaimed, "Yes! That's the sound I want!" The rest was history... :p
Your comparing Metal to Beethoven.. The problem is Beethoven is noise... Metal is Music... Sorry for everyone who thinks the opposite...
 
Your comparing Metal to Beethoven.. The problem is Beethoven is noise... Metal is Music... Sorry for everyone who thinks the opposite...


Actually I was just telling a joke. A play on the post above mine. There was no comparison. :p

Where did Beethoven enter the picture? (Emperor Joseph II actually said that to Mozart.) ;)
 
Actually I was just telling a joke. A play on the post above mine. There was no comparison. :p

Where did Beethoven enter the picture? (Emperor Joseph II actually said that to Mozart.) ;)
I was too silly.. Now I know I am on a forum with aspies!
 
Your comparing Metal to Beethoven.. The problem is Beethoven is noise... Metal is Music... Sorry for everyone who thinks the opposite...
rap and dubstep is noise...everything else is music :D
 
I really don't see the point in remixing the classical music into danceclub music
 

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