Our most recent unit on protest cultures and “the challenge of music” has most changed my perspective on the environmental humanities. This last week, well, I can’t say I’m surprised metal was left out of the conversation, but its absence is certainly, I would argue, a missed opportunity. To be fair, this is for good reason. The chapter by Martin Klimke and Laura Stapane documents the Grüne Raupe movement in 1980s West Germany, and Noriko Manabe’s monograph explains how music “mobiliz[ed] political resistance in Japan” in the months following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It happens that metal plays little role in either of these sociocultural moments.

The only exceptions I might offer are for Manabe: Japanese experimental metal bands Boris (1992–) and Sigh (1989–). Boris released their album Heavy Rocks in late May of 2011, but given the band’s prolific output (24 studio albums to date), when the album’s songs were written and recorded is difficult to pin down. Was it before or after 3/11? It’s tempting to read their song “Leak-Truth,yesnoyesnoyes-” through this context. Sigh’s album In Somniphobia, released in 2012, narrates the vertigo of a mind disturbed by elusive and imperceptible threats, and which seems to be losing a battle between truth and forgetting. The album bends genre in a way that has me thinking back to Writing Ground Zero, but this quality is so essential to Sigh’s sound that I can’t read into it in good faith.

In a way it is surprising, though, that metal receives only glimpses of attention from environmental humanists, despite its preoccupation with the same “clusters of problems and questions” (Heise 21). Metal culture in the U.S. (not so much in Northern Europe) is usually seen and described as underground or alternative, a subculture. This is a myth cultivated as much by the metal community as by those looking on from outside. While metal culture by definition transgresses normative society, and gleefully digs ever deeper into an abyss of niche sounds and elitist sensibilities, the music remains quite popular. Take Iron Maiden (1975–), for instance. They’re the exception to an aphorism relevant to cultural legacy: You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain. After 44 years, they still have a devout following across generations and truly worldwide. Record sales really can’t quantify their popularity. And as related to our course, their single “2 Minutes to Midnight” (1984) protests the Cold War in a reference to the Doomsday Clock.

Or we can look at the Grammys. Not Best Metal Performance, which necessarily recognizes the genre, but Best Rock Album, a category that to some questionable extent reflects trends in contemporary music. Gojira’s (1996–) album Magma was nominated for Best Rock Album in 2016. The track “Silvera,” one of their most played via streaming services, is a call for action and message of hope, with lines like “time to open your eyes” and “when you change yourself, you change the world.” Mastodon’s (2000–) album Emperor of Sand was nominated in 2017, and dramatizes the experience of receiving a cancer diagnosis with the story of a “desert wanderer” who’s been sentenced to death. It responds to questions relevant to both individual and society, namely “How much time do we have left? What are we doing with our time?” (Appleford).

The genre is growing in popularity, then, if the Grammys are any indication, and also attracting new audiences with the hybridization of genre. Deafheaven (2010–) has pioneered a new subgenre called blackgaze by merging black metal vocals and tremolo picking with the ethereal melodies of shoegazing. Their sound appeals to metal fans as well as those who “usually stay away from heavier stuff” (Stosuy). At the same time, it’s easy to see that metalheads are a self-selecting bunch. So does eco-metal simply motivate angry people to be angry, or does it redirect anger to specific ends? Are fans coming to metal with a preexisting worldview, or are they welcomed into the fold with an ideological initiation of some kind?

My instinct is to say, in an irresponsibly broad gesture, that the majority of those who find their way to metal do so when they are young, vulnerable, and angry without a cause. They are disillusioned, and yet hold on to the better world they imagined—a world they want to believe is possible. And then, once a metalhead, you die a metalhead. For ecocritical work, this might make for an ideal audience. Fans embrace metal as a way of life, sometimes as an essential point on their moral compass. Metal intersects with the straight-edge culture of abstinence and self-control, as one example, or with the crust punk DIY lifestyle, which meets at the crossroads of anarchism and the political bent of punk and hardcore. Who and when a fan might discover any of such beliefs is still murky, as Wolves in the Throne Room (2002–) point out:

There is a style, a sound, a set of beliefs—it’s all there to be purchased or downloaded with nary a thought of one’s own needed to get the whole package. There is deep truth underneath the façade of grim posturing, but one needs to search for it. (Smith)

For the casual listener, probably half of the lyrics are obscured by harsh vocals (depending on the subgenre), and even for those who do the work of searching for meaning, the lyrics may not be transcribed.

Still, metal has a long history of explicit political messages, starting as early as Black Sabbath’s (1968–2017) “War Pigs / Luke’s Wall” from Paranoid (1970), an album universally regarded as the genre’s prototype. The song protests the “Evil minds that plot destruction” responsible for the Vietnam War, and concludes by imagining the Day of Judgment, when “On their knees the war pigs crawling.” Killer Be Killed (2011–) takes up this tradition in “Face Down” (2014), a song that identifies cops as the “pigs” of modern society and incites listeners to revolt against oppressive institutions of power:

Brutality against brutality,
The real face of the enemy.
Keep them pigs away from me,
Abuse of power and authority.

. . . .

Menace to society,
Cop-shoot cop-mentality,
A cancer of a broken land,
Traitor to the common man.
Invaders of your privacy,
Nothing-is-sacred reality.

Kill or be killed!

Another example of indignation at the problems of our age (e.g., neoliberalism, precarity, and corruption) appears in Pig Destroyer’s (1997–) “Army of Cops” (2018), except here we find the more provocative implication that we the people prefer to be held “face down”:

Nobody likes our direction,
Yet we don’t turn around.
Now could it be that secretly
We like being kept down?
Tell me, where does it stop?
This tower of law, this army of cops.

These examples seem to take both diagnostic and motivational approaches, according to the framework Manabe proposes:

Frames are interpretive schemas that allow individuals to identify, label, and make sense of events. Snow and Benford (1988, 2000) define the core framing tasks as diagnostic (identifying the issues, condensing information, focusing attention on particular interpretations), prognostic (proposing solutions, counter-framing opposing arguments), and motivational (mobilizing people to action). (29)

As for diagnosis, metal aims to subvert what Laura Berlant calls cruel optimism, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). This occurs in metal’s critique of conservative and religious Western values (the symptom; Spracklen 22) or “faith in progress and human exceptionalism” (the disease; McMurry 16). In a vast network of signification concerned with man and his relation to the world, especially the errors and dependency of mankind, metal responds to one cause taken up by the environmental humanities: to “help us acknowledge and confront the melancholic, dark side of humanity’s impact on the global environment” (Emmett and Nye 107). Some condemn humanity for exploiting natural resources in an invocation of the Anthropocene:

Only after the last tree’s cut
And the last river poisoned,
Only after the last fish is caught,
Will you find that money cannot be eaten.
(Lamb of God, “Reclamation,” 2009)

Gas the earth, suffocate
By our hand, at this rate.
Reproduce to further man—
Stop them now, if we can.
(Harm’s Way, “Human Carrying Capacity,” 2018)

Others, of course, choose to spread resentment evenly:

I reject this (expletive) race!
I despise this (expletive) place!
(Slayer, “Disciple,” 2001)

Moving into the realm of prognosis, we find that metal turns from the hubris of exceptionalism toward materialism, especially in songs that narrate death:

I am a smear of primordial ache,
A dead star,
A dead star,
Full of dark matter.
(Black Table, “1942,” 2012)

I imagine the end. Then further downward so that I can rest, cocooned by the heat of the ocean floor. In the dark, my flesh to disintegrate into consumption for the earth.
(Deafheaven, “Gifts for the Earth,” 2015)

It’s well documented that a driving force for metal fans is the fragmentation of human subjectivity, a dissolving of the ego (e.g., Phillipov). Atene Mendelyte connects this phenomenon to the Romantic sublime when arguing that the listener cannot enjoy metal unless she “affectively surrenders to its sound-imagery” and lets her mind “be taken into those dark recesses of the subconscious” (487). In other words, the experience of listening to metal opens the listener’s mind to explore new conceptions of her place in the world.

The motivational potential behind metal remains, like many other questions, unresolved. Jonathan Nicholas Piper questions the model typical of metal studies, one which I myself have hinted at here in this post: a cycle of violence and catharsis. Piper argues that, despite violent messages and practices in metal, there’s no clear explanation for what it is that’s supposed to make metal inherently violent; it’s just assumed. The moralizing subtext to this assumed cycle, that fans listen to metal in an effort to purge violent or otherwise negative thoughts and emotions, returns us to a caustic and cruel optimism.

I would be remiss to not address the environmental activism clearly and systematically stated through metal lyrics, interviews, and actions, most notably by Gojira, the Ocean (2000–), and Wolves in the Throne Room. Specific environmental problems appear throughout Gojira’s oeuvre—most obviously in “Toxic Garbage Island” (2008), an ode to the vast heap of plastic floating atop the sea. Equally ambitious in scope, the Ocean “do[es] for earth science class what Mastodon did for Melville: make learning brutal” (qtd.). Wolves in the Throne Room renounces the “alien life form” of industrialized modernity, instead living in and with “rain storms, wood smoke and the wild energies of the Pacific Northwest” (Smith; WITTR).

These details only hint at what these bands (try to) achieve. A comparative study of their approaches to activism, from collaborating with international organizations (Rowehl) to defending ecoterrorism (Davis), and a case study on the affects of their words, sounds, and images on fans might offer new avenues for ecocriticism—its “political struggle for more sustainable ways of inhabiting the natural world” and “scholarly analysis of cultural representations” (Heise 506).

“Kaiowas” (1993) by Sepultura (1984–) is an especially interesting example in that it makes use of both paratextual and textual coding. The title cues listeners into the song’s purpose, which is to defend the rights of indigenous peoples. Kaiowas refers to a tribe who would rather commit collective suicide than let the Brazilian government seize their ancestral lands. The track is instrumental and all-acoustic (the band’s first), a sound all the more remarkable amid the relentless speed of a thrash metal album. As a “tribal jam” with emphasis on drumming, it seems to move beyond an informative function into an expression of admiration and respect.

We can thinking more expansively about techniques of messaging, as Manabe does with metaphorical language or intertextuality (29). Metal’s deep and enduring concern with folklore, epic, and myth points to a certain reverence for the natural world, with an imaginative conception of other life forms and a desire to return to a simpler way of life. Agalloch (1995–2016) worships nature in a mystical celebration of place, the Cascadian mountains. Concept albums often look to nature for a theme, as in Mastodon’s first four albums, which revolve around fire, water, earth, and air, or in the album Oceanic (2002) by ISIS (1997–2010).

Several bands have taken up space exploration in recent years as well. Parallax II: Future Sequence (2012) by Between the Buried and Me (2000–) includes an interlude that emits what can only be described as space sounds. Celeste (2005–) seem to speculate on human and nonhuman futures through their performances. The room is cast into darkness; the atmosphere, filled with thick smoke; and the music, accompanied by red headlights and white strobes.

Harris M. Berger defines the history of metal as “the pursuit of greater and greater heaviness” (59). And just when metal reaches its heaviest, “a new variety emerge[s],” somehow heavier than the last. If heaviness is what makes new trajectories in metal music metal, then what does it mean for critics to represent heaviness in environmental terms? A review of the Churchburn (2011–) album None Shall Live… (2018) describes “consistent audio references to natural disaster: waves crashing, winds shrieking, and always the agonized mass of human voices” (Ambrose). According to the drummer, they hope to instill a “sense of beauty and fear” in listeners, again reminiscent of the sublime (Jameson). Reviews for an album by Ommadon (2008–) use geological comparisons like “the crumpling mountain ranges of riffs, the tectonic low feedback tension and the slow lava distortion” (Coggins) or “heavier than a dying planet” (Whelan). This imagery supports a view of ecosystems as “dynamic, perpetually changing, and often far from stable or balanced” (Heise 510).

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While music has helped me better understand ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, this course has also given me a new lens through which to view metal. Believe it or not, I’m something of a lazy metalhead, in that I don’t typically read the lyrics or go looking for new sounds. This useful new framework has given me an excuse to rethink my interest in metal (and something to do at the gym!). I’d like to continue collecting samples and organize them in a blog. My primary questions are these: how does metal already speak to environmental (and related) problems, and in what ways might it do more to intervene? As for points of departure: How does (or doesn’t) metal overcome the “repressor” of social movements, fear, and motivate the “trigger,” anger (Manabe 115)? In what ways might Judith Butler‘s theory of performative assembly inform the causes and effects of metal culture? Even just incrementally, this pet project might expand the horizon of ecocriticism from genre to medium, and shift the conversation on environmental change from more dominant to countercultures (Heise 513).

(For those interested in learning more about metal history and culture, I recommend the documentary Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2005), directed by “curious anthropologist and rabid fan” Sam Dunn.)