Week Five: Heavy Metal Aesthetics and Sensibilities

Metal has inherently developed a sense of community between metal-heads and fans of the music to create a culture within the music. As this music began shifting away from the core of metal, towards sub genres of metal, the community began to dissipate, which is something I’ve seen first hand on a smaller scale. Waksman addresses this occurrence by stating, “Indeed, James Hetfield claimed that the band’s preference for fast tempos arose in part from their desire to confront the tastes of local metal audiences around L.A.: “Eventually we started playing everything faster, because...the crowd wasn’t paying any attention to us and that pissed us off. In L.A., people were just there to drink and see who’s there and shit. We decided to try to wake everybody up by playing faster and louder than anybody else” (p. 276). Hetfield’s recollection of this increase in order or the community led to the development of harder, faster, more up-tempo metal that generated a number of sub-genres, such as thrash.

This relates to the sense of order and disorder required for metal to function properly. Metal innately requires a sense of disorder to fuel the chaos, relating to the concept of creation through destruction. This sense of chaos was the core of metal music, and once the community became too ordered and too constructed it began falling apart and pissing the artists off when the audience had no interest in the music itself but rather the community and who was at the show.

On more than one occasion I’ve heard by boyfriend say, “Grunge killed metal in the 80s.” I generally blow it off, but Waksman makes a similar connection between the two generations and the music that represented them. Waksman states, “Moreover, grunge was the one genuinely mass-oriented musical phenomenon, in U.S. popular music at least, predicated on the interplay between heavy metal and punk” (p. 301). In other words, grunge takes aspects of both punk and metal and the ideologies that follow these musical genres and their respective communities and incorporates them into the music of a mass culture that ultimately turns into popular culture, i.e. Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. Grunge inevitably became glorified for its musical contribution, which responded to both punk and metal and the concept of identity for young people.

Waksman goes onto say, “Both metal and punk emerged in the early 1970s as ideas, if not genres, out of the perception that rock was in danger of losing the capacity to represent its core teenage audience. The idea that rock’s core audience was, or should be, teenagers was itself an ideological construction designed to promote the notion that rock should be visceral rather than reflective, Dionysian rather than Apollonian” (p. 301). This certainly relates to my article through the importance of youth in the metal scene, but also relates to the larger picture of heavy metal in that the Dionysian model relates directly to metal and the chaos that comes along with it that can ultimately only come out of the presence of young people and the need for rebellion. Unlike Apollonian music, such as progressive rock, the reflection and intellectuality isn’t key to the development or listening of the music. The behavior and ideologies are vital to the function of metal and when those behaviors and ideologies sway away from rebellion, naivety, individuality, and disorder, metal has historically created a new shock value and a new way to keep the attention of listeners. In some of those instances, such as grunge, the music has gained the attention of popular culture, at least temporarily.