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History Of Heavy Metal

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Popular music was recorded and marketed as a Counterculture which opposed the normal, functional, and unexciting Culture that was dominant in society; by being outside of that which was in power, Counterculturalists argued, they were able to see what was "real" and to implement a "progressive" worldview in which moral correctness brought us gradually closer to a utopian state.

This marketing mirrored the process of adolescents, the main audience for popular music, who first reject the world of their parents, then once independent re-assess their own values, and finally, rejoin society on the terms of these recreated values. This determines "reality" as they will act to create it, based upon their values system.

While dominant Culture sought what was pragmatic, and Counterculture pursued the moral, metal music became its own movement because it could not agree with either of those approaches, preferring instead to try to seek what was "real," or meaningful and "heavy" (in the LSD-influenced vernacular of the time). Their approach did not aim at correctness, but assertion of subjective meaning.

jeff hanneman, a founding member of slayer, described their music as a mix between old british heavy metal and melodic hardcore punkEarly metal bands, in emulation of popular music as a whole, hoped to discover what was real by finding out first what was not. This attitude, over the course of four generations of music, took metal beyond the grounds of "good" versus "evil" into nihilism, where nothing had inherent value or classification, but could be described in terms of experience.

Nihilism is a frightening belief system for those in societies organized by dualistic (heaven versus earth) and liberal (individualistic, egalitarian) societies, as it denies that our values systems are more real than events in natural reality. To a nihilist, truth is a way we describe some things in reality, but...