Heavy metal. TRUE heavy metal.
Most people define “heavy metal” music as loud guitars and a screaming singer. Those people are wrong. In the late 1980s, David Lee Roth, the singer for Van Halen, said:
“Heavy metal is simply folk music played at high velocity.”
I read that when I was 18 years old, and I thought it was silly. But I got into my 40s, and remembered that statement, and I realized how correct it was. David Lee Roth was a prophet. Mind you, at the time, “heavy metal” had only been around for 20-odd years.
“Heavy metal” is not a style of music. It is a way of looking at life. It is taking a look at yourself and the world around yourself, and making a decision to DEFINE yourself. Who am I? How do I interact with the world? Does my interaction with the world make the world a better place? And then DOING something about it.
There is a popular picture of heavy metal fans: long-haired losers who are probably on drugs. Do you want to know who constitutes most of the fanbase of heavy metal?
NERDS.
The heavy metal attitude inspires self-confidence. But not the “self confidence” that is popularly espoused, leading to financial success and romantic/sexual success. It’s the self-confidence that says, “I am good at what I do, and I won’t allow anybody to tell me otherwise, and I am going to be a warrior at what I do!”
The band that inspired the term, “true metal”, was Manowar. Manowar wrote songs about Vikings and other classic medieval warrior tropes. When asked why he wrote songs like that, Joey DeMaio said, “I would rather have people think of me as a heroic individual, rather than somebody who sings about getting high and screwing every girl in sight.”
When I was a teenager, there seemed to be a huge divide between people who played “classical” music and those who played “heavy metal” music. Today, they’re the same people. The band nerds who grew up and realized that there really wasn’t that much difference.
When you’re a teenager, you probably listen to the “pop” music of the day. Because … well, I don’t know the “because”. Maybe because you can dance to it. Or maybe because your friends were listening to it. Or because the radio told you that those were the best songs.
Then you get older, and the songs you actually remember aren’t the ones that made the Top Ten. They were those other songs. That’s why (for those of you who, like me, were teenagers in the 1980s) the “classic rock” station you listen to plays Ozzy and Def Leppard and AC/DC instead of Spandau Ballet and Thomas Dolby. The metal spoke to you in a way that the “pop” didn’t. The metal was timeless. The songs hold up because they spoke to the timeless human condition, not to the “get it now” attitude.
Just wish I could understand the lyrics.
