Heavy Metal

Any young man can recall the phase just after puberty when he enjoys maximum energy with the added benefit of reckless invincibility. This is a confusing and frustrating time as generations of young men at the peak of their handball careers are relocated to schoolyards considered more appropriate for their lunchtime. With fair and foul creatures known as women added to the mix, boys are left with precious few options. They can either take up rugby to release the anxiousness; start pot-smoking early to dissolve it; or do the sensible thing and discover heavy metal.

Even your now shredded author can remember the time when Queen Greatest Hits and the Lion King soundtrack just didn’t cut it anymore. The day came when a friend saw that frustrated, white, middle-class, virgin Catholic boy devouring himself from within and bought him a ticket to Slayer at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. Clearly unprepared for the ‘baptism of fire’, as he called it, I showed up to his house in my never-fail RipCurl shirt and beige cargo pants. Outraged, he forced me to change into a borrowed pair of black jeans faster than you can say hacksaw decapitation.

Those black jeans may well have saved my life that night. Each guitarist had twenty speaker cabinets a piece, the drummer had a kit so large he could hardly be seen and the singer was the kind of guy that you pray your daughter will never bring home. After the gig, we roamed the streets with a legion of leather-cloaked warlocks and penis-pierced skinheads in search of blood flavoured Slurpees and polite conversation with passers-by. This was indeed a baptism, and many a new metalhead is forged in the distorted flames of that first, memorable concert. 

What we love most about metal? Clearly the accessories.

Becoming a metal fan brought on a sense of solidarity foreign to other styles of music. To those consigned to the befouled excrement of commercial radio, metal is a malformed copulation of loud, thrashing garbage. To those with a musical education, metal is a discordant butchering of the beautiful potential of our auditory abilities. For the metal fan (or chef) however, a measured dose of gloom and doom makes the sun shinier and, unlike IT professionals who can wear whatever they like to the office, provides a Superman-esque metamorphosis for the weekend.

Although one cannot spell metalhead without ‘meathead’, studies have shown a good dose of distortion is the brain food of the intelligent. Those who have witnessed a moshpit of death metal fans embracing the dismemberment of infants might question their collective brainpower, but this beast has embraced contradiction for more than thirty years. From the straightforward to the technical, the transcendent to the absurd, heavy metal music is a unique genus that celebrates a wondrous diversity of sub-genres* without abandoning its core principles of being loud, powerful and rightly critical of fucking emos.

Whether your poison is Black, Glam, Death, Thrash, Doom, Stoner, Metalcore, Prog-Tech or Viking Symphonic – metal maintains to reinvent itself out of the cesspool of ever-homogenous pop music.** Metal can unite the skinny, the fat and the marginalised under a single banner of destruction; it allows men to feel comfortable in tight leather and spikes without being branded homosexual; it provides an opportunity to beat the living crud out of your fellow man in a controlled, good-humoured setting; it proves that the sweat and body odour of five hundred people can be concentrated within a single t-shirt; and, above all, metal demonstrates the delicate fusion of rock and roll, classical, blues, hearing loss, whiplash and unnecessary piercings.

* While I promised not to single out any bands in this article, thankfully there is no genre appropriate for My Chemical Romance.

** Please refer to this wonderful online resource to navigate the realm of metal genres in true Lord of the Rings style.