Kitty Empire
Sunday March 25, 2007
The Observer
Heavy metal is the preserve of knuckle-dragging simpletons, right? Of delinquent Beavises and monosyllabic Butt-heads; people for whom making the sign of the devil's horns was the point of evolving an opposable thumb?
Wrong, according to a study presented this week to the British Psychological Society Conference. Warwick University's Stuart Cadwallader, who carried out the study, says some of the brightest young people in Britain like nothing more than a monster riff to unwind to after a hard day of being a chess prodigy. The study found that one third of their sample - drawn from members of the National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth, or Nagty - rated metal among their favourite genres of music, ahead of classical and jazz, two complex genres long thought to be the sound of choice for brainiacs.
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All this seems deeply counter-intuitive. Ever since 'heavy metal thunder' - a reference to motorbikes in Steppenwolf's 'Born to Be Wild' - gave birth to a whole genre of noisy, aggressive music, people have looked down on metallers as thickos with poor social skills. Of course, cannier metallers have played up to the stereotype. AC/DC's guitarist Angus Young still dresses as a schoolboy in a winking acknowledgement of metal's puerile attributes.
Yet clever kids have always been into metal. Take the lid off any university science lab and you will find metal fans scurrying around. Queen's Brian May has a degree in astrophysics; Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden is a graduate who holds a pilot's licence too. Lemmy from Motorhead knows an awful lot about the Third Reich.
The study's conclusions come as no shock to me. Although I don't lay claim to youthful brilliance, I was a metal brat once. I remember the frisson of buying my first album - Destroyer by Kiss - when still in primary school. It wasn't like my father's Beatles albums, or my mother's operas. Nor were Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath or any of the other bands my exotic long-haired cousin introduced me to, or the other things they led to - the blues, punk, industrial, techno, hip hop, grime. And that was the whole point.
The Cadwallader study concluded that metal helps smart kids relieve the pressure of being gifted. Again, this seems to blow fundamental socio-demographic certainties out of the water. You would have thought that sensitive, gifted young people would gravitate to less hairy forms of music for succour. Mopey indie rock is tailor-made for the middle-class and misunderstood. Then there's emo, with its triumphalist alienation and clever song titles. 'This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race' quips a song by Fall Out Boy. But no - it's Slayer all the way for these junior masterminds.
One of the respondents summed up metal's appeal as only a member of the under-19s intellectual elite could: 'The cathartic release offered by heavy metal played loud, either by my hi-fi or myself on guitar, is a wonderful thing when it's needed.' This teen metallurgist proves two things. That he or she got to the heart of the matter a lot faster than Cadwallader, with his fancy funding. (Give the kid the PhD instead!) And second, that for young clever clogs, as for the rest of us, metal's primary appeal is the way it refracts ugly feelings of frustration into something meaty and satisfying.
In the savage 'uurrgghh!' of metal you can hear the collective human howl of disgust at a world gone mad. It's the sound of the rejected getting even, the trampled-on standing up, the unbeautiful settling scores with the buffed. Metal is the arena where the most unpleasant human emotions are let out to play - safely, for the most part. (Metal still sparks sporadic moral panics but, largely, metallers are a self-regulating and moral bunch.)
In a society embarrassed by intelligence, members of Nagty must nurture juicy revenge fantasies against the clots who rule the playground. Surely it's better for them to stick on 'Iowa' by Slipknot - a classic of nihilist bleakness - than to go on a murderous spree with a compass. Metal offers a world where injustice is punished, wrongs are Avenged Sevenfold (a band), where Vulgar Displays of Power (a Pantera album) are acceptable - if only for the duration of a CD. What's not to like?
And then there's the business of scaring your parents. These talented teens have probably spent a disproportionate amount of their lives pleasing their mums and dads with their sparkling SATs and prowess on the violin. As puberty and the natural urge to cleave away from the nest take hold, metal is a logical first port of call. You want to express an identity distinct from your parents? Heavy metal - exciting, ghoulish, loud - is perfect. That or gangsta rap.
Of course, metal is currently undergoing one of its occasional irruptions into fashion. It wasn't so long ago that Lordi won Eurovision. Fashionistas are still sporting ironic Judas Priest T-shirts - the kind of sacrilegious behaviour that brings proper metal lifers out in hives. A recent spate of so-called 'hipster metal' bands - esoteric outfits like Mastodon, Lightning Bolt and Sunn O))) - has brought this most outcast of genres blinking into semi-respectability. If these gifted youth aren't careful, they might end up cool as well as clever.
