Heavy metal is healing teens on the Blackfeet Nation
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The imagery and the aggression involved in the music can make it seem daunting and somehow damaging, but the metal community is surprisingly chill and friendly, and, sometimes, just so damned silly.
E.g. here's Slipknot's singer live in concert singing the SpongeBob Squarepants theme song, because the audience really wanted him to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5OLtoY70AI
Or, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Devin Townsend signing this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z1isK2MYWI is not the same Devin singing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsd4ZkFVOHY
All their songs are humorous, but for example they have a song with Joachim from Sabaton called Pasadena 1994. It fits the “war metal” style of Sabaton, but instead the song is about football. (https://open.spotify.com/track/65i7HQAWy3ZlSTEyWWFoPN?si=kUm...)
Or, because this is HN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yup8gIXxWDU
Int pippo=0; is so meta(l) for Italian developers ! ROTFL
This all somehow reminds me of a roommate I had in college. There were 4 of us and he was a physics major who was incredibly distant, straight laced, and stand-offish to the point of feeling like he was somewhat sociopathic. He always had an mp3 player and headphones on, whose contents we could only speculate about. One day he was gone and left it on his bed, so of course we had to have a listen - mostly tongue in cheek joking about it undoubtedly being some sort of screeching death metal type stuff. Somehow it was rather even more terrifying when it turned out to be endless 50s era happy-go-lucky tunes.
I figure the music is the outlet for aggression, so there's no need to find an outlet in picking fights or things of that nature.
- What Makes Metalheads Happy? A Phenomenological Analysis of Flow Experiences in Metal Musicians [0]
- Extreme metal music and anger processing [1]
- The effects of heavy metal music on arousal and anger [2]
[1]: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
Spotify plays the same sequence every time, Guerilla Radio first, then Bombtrack, then Bulls on Parade, then Take the Power Back, all of which are the radio edits.
Then Killing in the Name, which is most definitely not the radio edit, but by judicious use of the little pedal and if we don't get stuck behind a tractor too long, we're just pulling up outside and switching off the ignition at juuuuuust the right moment.
Once he's bigger he'd better be sneaking the full version behind my back on headphones when he thinks I don't know. It's nothing he doesn't hear - and worse - from the bigger kids at school.
Heavy metal, RATM and the like are just more means of capitalist consumption. They might make you feel like a rebel, but you aren't actually rebelling against anything. In some ways I think the commodification of counterculture has resulted in the neutering of activism in the West, people want to listen to the media and spread the memes but no one but the Nazi scum ever wants to follow through in any way that matters.
IDK, maybe I'm just cynical but once you hear this stuff being played in establishment spaces you start to view it all as a sick joke.
I didn't want to gatekeep what others view it as, but "trve" metal music is still made in basements and garages by people with that are as far from capitalist consumption as you can get. Look at Encyclopedia Metallum, there are tens of new releases every day, and most of them barely get listeners - even when released on free/public places like Bandcamp. You can't reduce an entire subculture to its mainstream offshoots.
When the head of state didn't play guitar,
Not everybody drove a car,
When music really mattered and when radio was king,
When accountants didn't have control
And the media couldn't buy your soul
And computers were still scary and we didn't know everything
I always thought about metal shows and festivals as a "safe space", where people can really be themselves, because you don't have to suffer judgmental remarks about what you wear, what you look like or what you listen to. And most people there get this and feel this as well, which is why the community feels so welcoming and chill. Plus as someone else posted here, it's also all a bit silly and I think most people get that as well.
The music is a front for how they feel about society but individually, they are all just big softies. I know a couple heavy metal bands and they would agree that once the early 20s was out of their system, they just want to bring people together.
Why weren't my teachers this cool? I would have assigned the entire album though.
It got slightly awkward as I believe that was just before the Columbine shooting, and after that metal had a more negative reputation for a while.
Hilariously, I won a writing prize about this connection as a teenager in 1989. Fun to see you had a similar experience
When I was a teenager and my parents weren't home, there was a knock at the door and it was an ancient-looking old man. He said he was a medicine man of the Blackfoot tribe. He didn't go into details but he said that since the tribe's numbers had dwindled they had voted to move to a different reservation. The problem was that the reservation they were going to was on land that used to belong to a tribe that was one of their ancient enemies and that he could not allow his tribe's medicine bag to end up there. He had heard that my parents were friends with the (? shawnee ? pawnee) and we had let them build a sweat lodge on our land that before he and his tribe left to go live with the tribe that was taking them in, he wanted to leave the medicine pouch somewhere it could stay on traditional Blackfoot lands. So anyway, he gave it to me and I got to hold it. The leather was old and cracked, the feathers were brittle, and the decorations were old shells and antique beads. I kept it for a while and used it in a couple of sweat lodge ceremonies with my friends before I finally told my dad about it and let him keep it.
Metal can provide this, especially live concerts and the fandom is pretty stable: You meet the same people again and again in your tiny very noisy social bubble.
The whole 6-7 or „chicken jerky“ madness felt very similar to classical group formation dynamics: Be part of it by knowing the secret rites and separate yourself from outsiders that don’t.
The sad thing about those TikTok movements as opposed to metal is: The feeling to belong is an illusion. There isn’t real group just a set of strangers that share a fleeting experience that rarely creates something lasting, a „one-night stand“ like experience if you will.
These things are as missing as they're necessary in kids' lives and (non-mainstream?) music gives people some semblance of community that has a stabilizing effect.
The Discord "communities" don't have the same effect unless the group actually meets in person regularly.
the cool people are elsewhere
The Hu ↑
Helps if you have speakers that wouldn't look out of place at stonehenge.Gentle correction: you meant Crowfoot, or maybe John Two Guns White Calf? Because Sitting Bull, was a Lakota chief.
Why no one talks about the pop "music" sounding like a human tragedy? Listening to that whining all day everyday is sickening. And yet (presumably) majority of people do that. Why no one talks about what is wrong with them?