> “What we are finding is that they are not angry people. They’re not enjoying anger when they listen to the music, but they are in fact experiencing a range of positive emotions.”
For example, Merzbow, has been around since the 1980's and his music sounds literally like a train wreck-- no conventional beat, no melody, no vocal, just random-sounding reverb, static, tape loops and sometimes machine noise. Similar stuff from P16D4, Asmus Tietchens, Zoviet France and others.
Many folks not familiar with this music would immediately assume it was all about these artists working through some really dark internal conflict, but that's not it at all. Instead, it was a kind of visceral catharsis, searching for a sublime authentic experience, rejecting the artifice of mimic-ing acoustically produced sound through electronics in favor of "native" electronic sounds that aren't bound to any natural reference.
I think that metal music fans have a similar kind of experience, except that the visual aesthetics of metal happen to have distinct associations that make it easy for outsiders to get the wrong idea. If you call yourselves "cannibal corpse" or do things like put skeletons, bloody tombstones, pentagrams and devils on your artworks, yeah, it's going to be interpreted (from outsiders) in ways that may have nothing to do with the ultimate intent of the music.
As far as the top level comment goes though... maybe I'm misinterpreting the comment because this is summary level material, but yeah, that's an odd assertion to me. Death metal is a niche genre in a style of music that has some significant semi-mainstream elements (metal as a whole). Death metal is similar to other sort-of-tangentially related concepts like say horror media (there is a nice semi-mainstream side and also a lot of fringe horror movie / media styles that have fewer but sometimes more dedicated fans). Many horror movies for instance are flat out iconic at this point (ranging from the original Universal monsters to some of the films of Hitchcock to certain films like, say, Halloween, Jaws, or the Shining). On rare occasions, they are both quite popular and they even win an Academy Award (eg The Silence of the Lambs).
In music, the main thing I will say is that there are metal bands with often violent lyrics and imagery that are more popular (Slayer comes to mind), and non-metal bands with violent imagery that also are popular. Certainly if that violent imagery is slightly modified to a bit more theatrical, the band might even become mainstream (I'm thinking Alice Cooper as an example). The "sonic assault" of death metal in some ways wasn't new -- hardcore punk was an influence for the speed (although hardcore punk is quite a bit less technical) and there's certainly a couple relatively well known bands there in that genre that dabbled in (usually more theatrical but still macabre) horror. (The Damned and The Misfits are two fairly big names in the genre, not "mainstream" but big enough that some people will know of them, and there's plenty of other lesser known "horror punks" around...).
So to me that statement ("why are people interested in xyz that seems to induce a negative emotion when in everyday life we tend to avoid situations that will induce a negative emotion") is weird in this context, because this is not a niche question whatsoever overall. The answer to the above question is probably not best answered by looking at the psychology of an obscure genre and more best answered to ask why (in the Silence of the Lambs example) a movie that pushes "negative emotions" of this sort is (at present) #23 on IMDB's top movies of all time.
The study is not without its limitations (self-reporting is the major one), however it's an interesting topic: the author's main hypotheses are:
a) there's something with the way death metal/violent music fans' brain is wired that makes it react positively, whereas with non-fans it makes them react negatively.
b) people who enjoy Death Metal do it by distancing themselves from the actual lyrical content ("it's just a song") and use it as a pressure relief valve of sorts
c) people who enjoy Death Metal enjoy the feeling of being in an elite club that's set apart from the faceless conformist masses.
It's bloody hard to set up experimental protocols to find reliable data to support or go against the hypothesis, but I'm going to keep an eye on this Thomson guy, and of course I'll keep on enjoying my violent music :)
I want the bands I love to be popular... but unpopular... but popular. It's aggravatingly paradoxical. Like, if I see a great band in front of 6 people including the bar staff I'm angry that there isn't a bigger audience; same band in a 1,000-strong venue (say) and I'm disappointed at the loss of intimacy; headlining Bloodstock and I'll be "FINALLY ten thousand people agree with me, about time".
I don't know if this properly translates to English, but in the Mexican metal scene (I don't know if this would generalize to other Spanish speaking regions) I've heard the term "comercial" used to describe when a band has gone mainstream, or "sold out"... It sometimes carries a similar connotation of being too popular.
Individual Thought Patterns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjLIwidBubg
Human: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzvtfbqJeIY
Symbolic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbp60IX_jFQ&list=PL2l9mciyQ-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHHkxUqqnQ4&list=PLArAJlC1y5...
Point A is rigged. This is like having you or I listen to a form of music that we don't like and give our opinions on it. I don't want to put anyone down for liking what they like, but for me personally, I don't like country music. I'd probably answer A with "yeah, this music is assaulting my eardrums, please turn it off" and if you hooked me up to a heart monitor you'd probably notice my blood pressure and heart rate elevate because even listening to it makes me internally cringe off the charts.
Point B, truthfully for a lot of bands I don't even listen to the lyrics. I don't distant myself with "it's just a song" -- they are completely out of the picture. I listen to a lot of these songs because the riffs and growls sound good to me. For example, some of Infant Annihilator's songs are awesome but if you ever looked at their lyrics or song titles you would either start uncontrollably laughing or try to get the band locked up for life.
Point C seems strange. I also never had these feelings, but I think if you did a similar study with any music genre you would draw the same conclusion. A text book example of that would be English speaking people who listen to K-Pop, but it really applies to any genre.
As an aside, the K-Pop case is interesting because I think it proves that people are able to enjoy music without understanding the lyrics (which also applies to some death metal bands who sing in English too).
It is hard to make sense of why people like what they like. I think the moral of the story here is, human brains are hard to reverse engineer.
He needs to repeat the same study on every genre of music and then examine the results in aggregate to look for patterns.
Isn't this a tautology, given that there is no way to react to anything except via the wiring of one's brain?
Is there a biological cause? Is it a "learned" like/dislike?
Couldn't you find exactly the same thing about lots of genres of music? Opera and some genres of jazz for example can cause extremely different reactions in people, at least as strong as that of death metal.
I wonder how much of it is simply due to unfamiliarity and baseline expectations of what music 'should' sound like. We've all heard old stories of people reacting to Rolling Stones the same way people who grew up listening to Rolling Stones might react to Dimmu Borgir.
I know my perception of jazz changed a lot after I spent time with huge jazz fan who taught me about the genre and explained the different aspects of the music and how to approach it. I bet if someone sits down and honestly tries to learn about and understand the different aspects and genres of death metal then their negative reaction will, if not go away, then at least greatly diminish.
Also interesting, I look forward to more studies! :-)
a) We like violent music because our brains like it. Ok, how else would that work?
b) We distance ourselves from the lyrical content. Well, duh. Otherwise we'd all be serial killers. You'd have to be a psychopath not to.
c) Yep, that's sort of the point of being counter-culture.
Not everyone distances themselves from the lyrics; however, the perspective is that it is fantasy music. Kinda like immersing yourself in Quake and killing a bunch of people, but you don't take that out of the context of the game into real life.
I'm not sure where this professor got this idea, but I'd say metal is identical to any genre in the feelings it can give you, except that it is considered "extreme" or "violent" or "negative" by some outside observers. Just watch any interview with someone like George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher and you'll see that even the most grotesque death metal practitioners are disconnected from the subject matter outside of the music.
For me (and surely others), the negative emotions, dark imagery, sometimes downright disgusting lyrical content and other such trappings are fundamentally intertwined with many of my feelings about the worse aspects of life. It's totally part of the draw. There are many, many facts about human existence I am deeply sad or angry & horrified about, and art which reflects a shared understanding of these kinds of things offers camaraderie in misery-- sometimes it leads to catharsis, but not always.
You can separate the music itself from these things, and there are artists who have done this, yet even then the pure music is has many loud, fast and/or violent-sounding sections, and if you're angry, it can act as a channel for that anger to feel expressed.
counter-counter argument: but of course, that's Norwegian Black Metal, very much NOT Death Metal. And you'd be right, and not even all NBM acts welded themselves to the subject matter. But there've been some metal bands who were really passionate about embracing (not 'disconnecting' from) the subject matter, and always a few who sought to become the subject matter, and one or two did actually do that.
Sons of northern darkness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3snMB_CIoY&list=PLNDXDJtQAO...
Damned in Black: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k4iWwluhGc
At the heart of Winter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeOlPQqJR-o
or maybe Wolves in a throne room would work for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsvFVUu9olw
As he's talking about things like the Inquisition and the obliteration of pagan cultures, he's not wrong about some of his history.
It's a pretty unusual pagan who gets as murderous as Varg about historical injustices, though.
One of the problems with the pyramidal nature of academia is professors are likely to be very disconnected from normal experiences of life. Extremes of privilege, wealth, gated community standard of living on campus, high status levels. If only we were all lucky enough to experience negative situations as rarely as an extremely privileged professor. Given that it seems obvious that a rando consumer would have trouble relating to a professor, it seems self evident that a subpopulation of consumers will have essentially no common ground to discuss philosophical outlooks with a prof.
Its kind of like the CEO of walmart not being cultural bro with a randomly selected entry level unskilled employee. Its unlikely either could have anything useful to say about the other.
Agreed, it's energetic music (that I mostly lift to) not "hey man, I wanna go home and kill myself" or "hey man I wanna kill all my neighbors" music.
> “It’s the paradox of enjoying a negative emotion that I was interested in,” says Thompson, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “Why are people interested in music that seems to induce a negative emotion, when in everyday life we tend to avoid situations that will induce a negative emotion?”
I've been listening to various forms of metal (heavy metal, (technical / melodic) death metal, metalcore, deathcore, etc.) for over 20 years, and I never once (not even once) even thought to think about associating negative emotions to the music. In fact, it's the exact opposite reaction.
I listen to it because it makes me feel positive. I listen to it for the same reasons that other people listen to music types they enjoy, which I think can be left unsaid because anyone who enjoys music knows exactly that feeling.