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dilatedmind

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I can give you a historical/ethnocultural description if you like, which at the very least accounts for significant trends that have arisen within metal over the past 50 years.

Heavy Metal is old school "warrior culture" bubbling up from underneath a plastic system of control.  Long story short, the guys 'n gals that used to protect folk from thugs are no longer allowed to do so (by law), and those thugs - the meanest of them, at least - have ended up crawling their ways into positions of power (difficult not to see this nowadays with all the leaks and scandals showing what a bunch of predatory crooks our politicians are).  In the absence of normal release mechanisms, we channel natural violence into heavy culture (and heavy drinking/consumption...)

The prevailing emphasis on altered states of consciousness (incl. drug consumption), the forms of ritual gathering (gigs, festivals and so on), the deification of cultural heroes, and even the tendency towards dark clothing, face paint, internal symbolism and shock/horror aspects are all traits of warrior cults.

The "corpse paint" of Norwegian Black Metal is even directly related to the war paint worn by north Alpine tribes in the centuries surrounding the ascension of the Roman Emperors - Immortal referred to it as "war paint" earlier on before capitulating to popular sentiment more often than not.  But the tradition is based on the same idea - the point is to look like a corpse, like an undead warrior, risen from the grave to bring death to the enemy.  It's ancient psychological warfare.

I shouldn't have to add that these ancient war cults would have involved predominantly young men, a brotherhood-based society, subversion of wider cultural norms, "heterodox" spiritualities and so on.  Literally, the heavy metal subculture is the old war cult reborn in the modern age.  We're not allowed to kill bad guys any more (most of them are government officials) so we keep ourselves going with culture and kinship.

A lot of metalheads train with weapons or in hand-to-hand combat, a lot of them are interested in ancient culture, mythology, and fantasy, we've got a lot of wargamers and computer gamers who like medieval or Tolkienish settings and so on - to me, it's pretty clear that it's war cult.  And that it should produce this loud, brazen, anti-stupidity, ultimately very real music (that's what "heaviness" is - the degree to which music reflects reality), makes complete sense in that context.

We have descriptions from Roman times of Germanic warriors yelling a barritus - that is, a deep guttural sound reflected off the back of shields to present a wall of heavy noise to the enemy.  That's fucking metal.

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@welkyn

This is an interesting notion and a plausible anthropological explanation, but I think politically it's way off. As for thugs getting into power, that shit was a lot more common during the bygone period you're describing than in the modern era. Nowadays politics does not attract that breed of person as often. I went to a school rife with aspiring politicians. They aren't thugs. They're a bunch of Pharisees, but I could beat up at least half of them. For the most part, thugs now end up as goons for these folks and only become politically powerful in the third world or Eastern Ohio.

As for the 'plastic system of control' - are you referring to the nation-state?

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