I have conflicting emotions about heavy metal. I never liked it much growing up, but I always had a lot of friends who would listen to it. In my high school the only people I knew who played in bands were either into punk or metal or some grey area in between the two. Being a punk aficionado at the time, I had plenty of opportunities to argue with my metal friends about the virtues and faults of our chosen genres. Unlike the other music I didn’t like, I made several honest attempts to get into metal, usually without too much success. I would decide that I liked the first Metallica album or “Walk” by Pantera, but generally I’d only listen to them for a week or so before I lost interest. I made my longest sustained attempt was inspired by the first season of Metalocalypse. I spent a week listening to quite a bit of Norwegian black metal—straight up church burning music that takes its Satan worship seriously and puts gory photos of recently deceased bandmates on album covers. Metalocalypse is a profoundly silly show, but its glorification of musical brutality is oddly contagious. I have always been a fan of schlocky horror movies that can be incredibly violent without loosing their sense of fun, and I was looking for their musical equivalent. Black metal has some of the most interesting  Wikipedia pages in the business, but at the end of the day I don’t think fun is really on their agenda.

One of the reasons I never took to metal was because I knew my parents didn’t like it. I know that stereotypically teenagers are supposed deliberately listen to music that will piss off their parents, but to be perfectly honest listening to music my parents disliked always made me feel kind of uncomfortable. They didn’t like punk all that much, but I didn’t find that out until after I was already into it. I doubt they would have been all that satisfying to rebel against anyway.

Another big factor was my strong allegiance to punk in my metal-hating heyday. I’m tempted to chalk some of that up to Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences,” since even at the time the obvious similarities between punk and metal kind of bothered me. Fast, aggressive songs dominated by distorted guitars… it’s really not all that subtle. The vocals were what I thought separated the two the most at the time. I’m not sure I agree with that now, but metal vocals have always been the biggest hurdle for me so I suppose they’re worth talking about.

While at one time I was fond of making the obviously untrue claim that metal all sounds the same, this is obviously not the case either for metal or for the way people sing it. There were actually many styles and forms of metal vocals that I disliked, and some that I still struggle with today. The two styles that immediately pop into my mind are the operatic/screamy falsetto practiced by Dio and Axyl Rose and the growl that’s heard in a lot of death metal. I am well aware that this does not even come close to covering the full range that can be found in metal, but they were my most frequent targets back when I used to lambast metal on a regular basis.

These two styles don’t really have that much in common, but they both seemed to tap into a common posture found in metal that I was never comfortable with. Even at the height of hair metal glamness, I always felt like metal was screaming at me about how macho it was. When one of my big heroes at the time, Kurt Cobain would start screaming, it felt more like he was doing it because he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. When the guy from Cannibal Corpse growlscreams at me about “firing up the chainsaw,” it just felt less like he was a kindred weirdo and more like he might actually murder me with a chainsaw or, failing that, at least steal my lunch money.

I started to see some of this in a new light after reading Robert Walser’s book Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. I was surprised to learn that Rob Halford was gay, and introduced all that leather into the heavy metal fashion vocabulary so he would have a professional excuse to frequent S&M shops.

Nor was this an isolated incident. While at first glance heavy metal might seem largely populated with straight white guys celebrating their unabashed machismo, there is a surprisingly amount of queerness that manages to seem both hidden and glaringly obvious at the same time, from Halford’s leather daddy image to the elaborate hair and makeup stylings of a band like Poison. Gaahl from Gorgoroth, who has been called “the evil face of black metal,” started openly discussing his homosexuality in 2008. There certainly is an unfortunate patriarchal meathead streak in a lot of metal, but when all that macho energy is turned toward screaming along with an openly gay man, the whole thing seems sort of… well… awesome.

Metal is still a work in progress for me, but over the past few years I’ve managed to make some inroads that I’m pretty happy about. I’ve become a pretty big fan of Ozzy-era Black Sabbath, which sounds more like a Halloween-themed Cream than what I normally associate with metal. I’ve also been listening to “Living After Midnight” by Judas Priest and “Run To The Hills” by Iron Maiden fairly obsessively. This feels like an important step, particularly since I used to really hold up Iron Maiden as an example of the kind of post-Robert Plant ululating that I couldn’t stand. I’ve also been getting into The Melvins, who always seemed too stoned to be interested in beating me up. I should also mention Sunn o))) and Sleep, who I have enjoyed for years. I almost feel like they don’t count though, since I feel like I listen to them with my “contemporary classical” ears rather than with my still-nascent “metal” ears. Maybe if I keep listening I’ll start to mentally categorize them with  bands like Electric Wizard and not just think of them as an extention of Glenn Branca. In general, I’m still at the stage where there are specific bands and songs that I think are cool, and in my experience that usually goes on for a while until I finally just learn to like the sound of the genre as a whole.

I doubt that I’ll ever get to the point that I love the whole of metal unconditionally. I find it pretty hard to imagine watching something like the video for “Cherry Pie” without cringing, for example. But there’s a lot in metal that I used to chalk up to an unseemly displays of machismo that I think I can reinterpret as like a spectacular display of theatricality, if that makes any sense. Chances are the guy from Cannibal Corpse just wants to put on a good show, and would be more likely to watch John Carpenter movies with me than do me bodily harm.  Just like a good horror movie, sometimes a little musical brutality can be therapeutic.

Heavy Metal Baby

I think it makes sense to start my first venture into the world of blogging with a short explanation of who I am and what this blog is going to be about. I’m a grad student in musicology currently living in L.A., so naturally music has been a huge part of my life and my identity for quite some time. And over the course of my life, I have hated quite a bit of music.

In fact, now that I think about it, I might have actually started hating music before I started liking it. When I was in elementary school and middle school, I went through a long stretch where I disliked basically all the music that my friends and classmates enjoyed, from the Spice Girls to Eminem to Limp Bizkit. I distinctly remember a fifth grade conversation where some of my peers were talking about how Korn was there favorite band. When they asked me who my favorite artist was, I responded with the only musician I cared about at all at the time: Weird Al. They all looked confused and told me Weird Al didn’t count. Which is nonsense of course. Weird Al counts. Weird Al always counts.

The lyrics to this song are burned deep into my lizard brain, and I will remember them all long after I’ve forgotten the names of my loved ones.

This changed for me when I turned twelve and I started listening furiously to the Beatles at my mother’s urging and Green Day at the urging of a friend who wanted me to play bass in a punk band with him. Weird Al was and remains hilarious, but for the first time I understood that people listened to music because it’s dramatic and exciting. I was obsessed, and I spent my teenage years playing music and digging deeper into punk and classic rock. Late in high school I started to expand into classical music and jazz (I started taking violin lessons around age ten, but I don’t think I started actively loving the music I was playing until I was around sixteen).

Now, I’m not giving you this little mini-music bio because I’m a narcissist. Or at the very least, that’s not the only reason. I’m writing this because I think it sets up just why I hated the music that I hated. Liking rock and punk (and later classical and jazz) was at the core of how I thought about myself. I was not just a guy who listened to punk rock, I was a Punk Rock Guy. I actually thought of listening to pop music as some sort of moral failing. “Look at those sell outs, selling out like that,” I would think to myself as I listened to Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables for the fifth time that day, “They should think for themselves, like I did when my friends instructed me to listen to punk rock.” This attitude, in various incarnations, stayed with me until I was in college when some of the walls I had set up between my ears and what I considered Lesser Music finally started to come down.

You tell ’em, Jello. Shove it right in their stupid faces.

My first hint that an extremely selective musical pallet might not be such a great thing came from a friend of mine named Brian, a bandmate who had introduced me to a lot of great music. He came home from college and explained to me that you don’t actually like music more because you dislike other music. To put it another way, you don’t need to eat gross food to understand that pizza is delicious. Even if you like every kind of food, pizza is still delicious, and you get the added bonus of actually enjoying everything that comes across your plate. This blew my mind. It seemed like Brian had reached some sort of unobtainable state of music nirvana. “Wow,” I thought, “maybe I can get there some day too.” Then Brian put on some of the Kidz Bop that he’d been jamming to, and I realized I wasn’t ready.

God help me, I’m still not ready

Even after that conversation, it was still a long time before I really made an effort to challenge my musical taste. And while I think I’ve come a long way, I’m still pretty far from reaching Brian’s ideal of fully renouncing one’s taste, listening with open ears, and smiling. I still find it hard to imagine throwing on some Linkin Park, Kid Rock, or even Brian’s beloved Kidz Bop. But, as this blog will explore in more detail, I am trying.

Once again, I’m not writing this because I think anyone particularly cares about my taste in music. But if you want to over display stands and throw produce at strangers when the supermarket PA plays that stupid song about piña coladas, I am here to tell you that there’s a better way. Hating music is exhausting, but with effort you don’t have to. It is my sincere hope that my journey through learning to hate less stuff might help you hate less stuff too.

After all, who doesn’t like piña coladas? Or getting lost in the rain?

Brief Overview Baby