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.