What did you discover (big or small) in 2011?

The major discovery of 2011? The reason why I didn’t like metal… as in the music.

One of the benefits of hanging out with James is that hanging out with him ends up being like enrolled in your own private history of rock ‘n roll class with a heavy dose of critical listening. For the most part, I considered this a really fun way to spend an evening… until the night he got on a tangent of metal music.

With the noted exceptions of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” (which was played at the beginning of every football and hockey game when I was in high school) and Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” I could not stand metal.

I think he had put on Megadeth when I found myself squirming in my seat and my heart racing like a bat out of hell and resisting the urge to just jump across him and steal the trackball from his hands and shut the blasted thing off.

For me, metal == anxiety.

For some friends, saying that I didn’t like it would be enough and they’d drop it, but not James. His curiosity was piqued and he just HAD to unravel the mystery of why metal music caused me to become a writhing ball of anguish.

And you know what? The asshole figured it out, too.

The first thing we discovered was that here was a frequency range (high to mid), essentially the lead guitar, which was the trigger for my heart to start feeling like it was going to leap out of my chest and kill me at any given moment. Just fiddle with the equalizer and pull that frequency range out of the picture, and suddenly I don’t feel like I’m going to die anymore.

Of course, when you take out that frequency the song kinda loses it’s bite and it sorta doesn’t feel like anything anymore either…. so at that point, what’s the point in listening?

Then there was the matter of the lyrics. I’m a lyric driven person, and well… the thing about metal is that sometimes the lyrics aren’t exactly the most decipherable part of the song… or at least, not to me they aren’t.

Knowing this, James went through a period of maybe a week or two where he just fed me links to metal songs that he was listening to so I could read them. I read a lot of metal as poetry, usually following up the read by playing about 30 seconds of the song to catch the mood the artist was trying to portray.

It was becoming much easier to appreciate metal after breaking it down into parts.

I also realized something… When you’re listening (or reading the lyrics) to a song, you have a choice as to who to identify with. You can either identify with the emotion that the band is putting forth as if you were one of them, or you can identify with the person that the song is being aimed toward.

Music is a sonic snapshot of emotion. It just so happens that with metal, the emotion that’s tends to be predominant is anger. It so happens, anger is one of those emotions that I don’t really do.

When you present me with an angry song where say… the lyrics suggest that the singer wants to murder his ex-girlfriend who fucked around with him or some such (not that I’m thinking of any specific song or anything, it just seemed like something appropriate to write a metal song about) the character that I’m most likely going to identify with is the ex-girlfriend who’s going to get murdered.

Worst I ever have wanted to do to an ex-lover is give them a knuckle sandwich over something dumb they might have done, but to feel that torturous “I want to murder you if you’re not mine so I’m going to write a song about it instead of actually doing it?” Not something I really relate to, it never even occurred to me to put myself in their shoes.

So, when it came to metal… I always just saw myself on the receiving end of the gun. That’s not exactly the end you want to be on, so that’s why my anxiety runs rampant around metal.

While metal isn’t a genre that I’d say I turn to with any degree of frequency, unraveling the mystery of why it made me anxious helped me be able to listen to it and appreciate it for what it is, rather than cowering in fear every time someone turned it on.