Playing death, feeling alive

I've now been listening to death metal, or at least music that's closely related to death metal, for about ten years. That's a lot of time spent on blastbeats.

It goes without saying that I really enjoy this style of music. Exactly why I enjoy it so much is a little more difficult to parse, even for me.

Prima facie, death metal faces a lot of damning criticisms. Most well-known death metal relies on simplistic and sometimes reprehensible subject matter. It's often sexist, both in content and in practice. It depends on mindless speed and volume. It worships technique--or, alternately, guitar tone--at the expense of songcraft. Much of it is derivative or self-referential. It's gone for almost fifteen years without any widespread aesthetic developments, despite a number of inventive bands who've played in the idiom. It encourages its fans to focus on the worst aspects of the world. The vocals are dumb. The riffs make no sense.

And yet some of the most joyous, transcendent experiences in my life have come from this music. How?

For a minute, let's pretend that pretty much all death metal is exactly the same. It has blastbeats. It has lyrics about rotting stuff, demons, or being really mad. It has growling, melody-free riffs, and no audible bass. It has totally shredding solos.

I'm pretty sure that I would be into even this generic version of death metal. As important as composition, texture, and so on are to me, my attraction to this style of music is ultimately rooted elsewhere.

Most of us go through our lives with only limited control over our destinies. We have some degree of freedom to choose our professions, our friends, our living circumstances, the way we spend our free time and so forth. But that freedom is constrained by a variety of factors. The vast majority of regular people (including me) spend much of their waking hours doing what they're told. In every man, the old saw goes, there's a servant who serves a master.

Death metal, even of the genericized variety described above, creates a temporary escape from this logic of control and responsibility. It is an expression of power for people who are largely powerless.

When people write about death metal, they like to use the word 'inhuman.' A lot of it really sounds that way. Experienced death metal musicians play faster than seems possible. They make their voices do things that human voices don't normally do. They write melodic lines that sound like gibberish to "normal" ears. They sing about things that most people don't want to think about at all.

And they do all of this, which requires great discipline and huge quantities of time and money, with no hope of reward. This isn't like punk rock, with its art-school respectability and commercial viability. Death metal bands don't get rich and famous. People don't write books about them. They don't make their families proud. They don't even get laid. For these musicians, the reward is self-respect. They dream of doing something impossible and then, bit by bit, they do it, no matter how silly other people think it is.

Why do people play death metal? For the same reason that people run marathons they don't expect to win. For the same reason that George Mallory climbed Everest: because it's there. It's a challenge and therefore an invitation. It's a venue in which you can do whatever you want as long as you want to badly enough.

This is the feeling that I get when I listen to a good death metal record. I hear musicians--mostly ordinary, un-Godlike musicians--asserting themselves mightily, in the only way they know how. While I'm listening, I can forget about standing in line and paying my bills and doing what bosses and customers ask. For a few minutes, I can feel really alive, death and all.