Extreme Healing The Catharsis of Heavy Metal

heavy metal has been a huge part of my

life

it’s not just a music that i listen to

but i’m deeply immersed within heavy

metal

culture so it affects my aesthetic it

affects and as you can see

it affects my ideology it affects my

self-image

so today we’re talking about metal and

i don’t know i just love meddling what

can i say

but when i heard that today’s theme was

what on earth

i immediately thought of metal because

what on earth is a question that metal

has get asked

a lot what on earth are you listening to

what on earth is this vocalist saying

what on earth does your

does your shirt say or going back to

catholic school what on earth possessed

you

to wear that shirt to church

the tough thing about those wood on

earth statements is that um

i feel like they’re often not rooted in

curiosity they are rooted in skepticism

and judgment and when they when people

say what on earth what they really mean

is

what is wrong with you and i think some

of that skepticism is understandable

because heavy metal is a genre that

tends toward the extreme

it’s extreme that’s naming conventions

cannibal corpse

suffocation bloodbath

it’s extreme in its imagery and its

content so you know leather and spikes

blood and guts sex and violence it’s

extreme in the music itself

so the tempo is the vocals the

musicianship it can be loud it can be

dissonant

angry even violent it’s sometimes hard

to stomach and i’ll play you an example

right here

[Applause]

[Music]

well

[Music]

foreign

so upon hearing this you might be

wondering why on earth does anyone

listen to it and there are many reasons

that i could give

as an answer but today i’m focusing on

one and that’s extremity of

emotion because despite the extremes of

heavy metal

or rather because of them it can

actually be quite

therapeutic and that’s what i want to

talk about today catharsis

not the band but the idea that heavy

metal

can help comfort my extreme emotions

but on to more rigorous research of this

topic and here’s where i have to consult

my research notes

if you’ll allow me all right so there

are many studies

about looking into the stereotype that

people that listen to heavy metal are

bad apples

and contrary to popular belief much of

the research has shown that listening to

heavy metal can instead

increase feelings of peace calm

happiness and empowerment

it can help regulate emotion it can help

listeners

feel more comfortable with negative

emotion and it can build self-esteem

lastly it can better prepare them for

dealing with mortality salience

which is the knowledge of our own

impending inevitable death

so that’s nice there’s a caveat though

all of these sort of benefits of

listening to heavy metal only apply if

you already

like heavy metal so you couldn’t just

like go home and listen to bolt thrower

and then feel all calm and relaxed

like i will i can you can’t

unless you already like bull thrower in

which case please come and talk to me

after the show cause like

we can chat and be friends but still i

think

that notion that angry aggressive music

can be therapeutic is not enough

yes if i go home and i listen to angry

music when i’m angry it can be cathartic

corpse grinder screams so that i don’t

have to

but the truth is not all heavy metal is

aggressive not all heavy metal is fast

or ugly or

violent or angry or depressing and

that’s a stereotype that i also want to

question a bit

today and i want to think about emotions

beyond the angry

and i want to do that through a personal

story

in march of 2020 right i started the

pandemic my wife gave birth to twins hey

there they are and that was great

but literally the day we got back from

the hospital my wife developed a really

terrible fever

and a terrible cough and she was having

trouble breathing

so we took her to the er and she was

admitted

now at this time they didn’t really have

many coveted tests so they wouldn’t give

her one

so they just sort of presumed that she

was positive because she had a viral

infection and

she had really severe pneumonia in both

her lungs

that first day was really scary

we didn’t know much about covet at the

time how bad it was you know did she

have it

did i have it did our babies have it

she was sitting in a hospital bed and i

was making some pretty grim phone calls

that first day because

i don’t have any family in kentucky so

if i needed to find somebody to take my

babies

who may have coveted if i had to be

hospitalized or

worse um it was brutal and not like in

the good heavy metal way like yeah this

is brutal like just the awful way it was

really really awful

luckily she did pull through okay

but she had to be quarantined

quarantined for 14

days and i felt awful for her because

she just went through a really difficult

pregnancy

and then just had a major surgery to

bring these babies into the world

and now she can’t hold them she can’t

see them she can’t feed them for 14 days

so i felt awful but i also felt

something else

and that was the realization that i

alone

had to raise newborn twins

with no babysitting for 14 days

my only helper was this three-year-old

maniac

i gotta say not much help folks at two

weeks

it was extremely metal here’s my work

from home set up

unlike my wife who felt miserable and

terrible the entire time

i felt miserable and terrible as well uh

and heartbroken

but i also felt joy because i was

bonding with these

beautiful tiny creatures so i was going

through the wildest emotional swings in

my entire life

and heavy metal was my soundtrack now i

listen to heavy metal with my son

oscar all the time he will regularly

request high on fire

and gore guts specifically old gore guts

only which is super elitist

um but i won’t get into that

people will say oh isn’t it kind of

scary for him all the scary sounds and

i’m like well no because he doesn’t

think barney greenway from napalm death

sounds any scarier than cookie monster

and of those two figures

i just want to say one of them giving

terrible dietary advice

the other offering a pretty strong

message against fascism

so who’s really the worst influence of

those two so heavy metal has always been

a big part of our household but i can

only see during the pandemic how

intertwined it was with my emotions

some days were napalm death days just

raging angry really frustrated with our

circumstance angry music for angry times

some days were really dark not knowing

how sick my wife was

not knowing when you know what it was

going to be like when she came home

missing our wife and mom facetime being

totally inadequate

the melancholic aching black medal of

londlos helped me through those sad

times

if i ever fell into a groove it was

through sleep

the band not the activity i was not

experiencing that much

but that just slow rhythmic

groove of doom metal

shrieking into the void with ludacra

just everybody got their wits end all

four of us

even the dog everybody’s screaming just

letting it all out

through the horrifying shrieks of

lori shannon as our proxy but also

dancing and laughing to the joyful

irreverence of gamma bomb

a thrash metal band that just makes me

happy

late night inspiration from man of war

when i felt like i couldn’t go on

anymore the genre of power metal

just is reassuring it’s always uplifting

it made me realize that i could do it i

couldn’t make it

and we did make it we emerged

covered in baby poop and vomit and pizza

sauce

exhausted and sleep deprived we made it

and when we got our reunion man it was

so sweet

so there are many kinds of music that

people can turn to when they feel

sad or when they feel intense emotions

but for me heavy metal is different

there’s something about the extremity of

heavy metal

that allows it to do something that

other genres can’t for me

it is absolutely the best melodrama

it’s not surprising that many of the

observations i made about heavy metal

have been made by scholars looking at

other

genres of media with extreme emotions

horror film

hollywood melodrama from the 1940s and

50s

soap operas i mean you want to talk

about a genre built on sex and murder

just ask my grandma

like these other genres how heavy metal

is powerful because it doesn’t shy away

from big emotions

in a world where melodramatic is usually

an insult heavy metal just leans right

into it

heavy metal will never tell you that you

are too much

because it is by definition too much

now i’m not going to tell you to go home

and listen to metal because i know it’s

not for everyone

but i want you to remember that during

extreme times

extreme times call for extreme

soundtracks and i hope that

you have some thing some music or some

media that you can turn to to comfort

your understandably extreme emotions

during this pandemic

and i want you to remember that comfort

doesn’t always come in a hug

sometimes it comes in a scream thank you