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