Blow Your Speakers!

So usually I use these little opportunities to blather about how a given album makes my berries tingle, or to daydream about just how delicious Devin Townsend's skull must be, but this is Metal March gosh dangit! The usual potty mouth stream-of-consciousness, though truly a dynamic form, just won't cut it; I need to dork it up hardcore. I need to talk some serious shop with you other dorks out there about a little something we like to call the heavy metals. Tungsten is my favourite. Oh god I'm so lame.

Anyway, we all know/can google the origins of metal. That whole return to form what happened at the end of the hippie-times when the rockers decided to rewind back to blues and start over from there only with even less bathing. What I'm here to bore you ungrateful bastards with today is that perennial question on every disapproving parent's lips since the elder days of yore: why's it have to be so dang loud?!

So strap in, buckle up, reach down between your legs, and ease the seat back as I explore how heavy metal (specifically the eponymous founding subgenre in the U.K. and U.S., but hell why not the rest by association) upholds volume as a virtue in its own right, and how in turn this has impacted, if not single-handedly wrought, the defining colour of the heavy metal sound.

Sound as Substance

Anyone with the most tenuous grasp of physics knows that sound is the vibration of molecules as perceived and codified by a sensitive organism, but as any impressionist or abstract painter will tell you: forcing a medium to be a slave to communicating specific data distracts you from all its own material potential. The first step on our little journey involves discovering how sound functions as a distinct entity. Not just as a vessel for the meaning of speech or affect of music, but a force in its own right, capable of touching and shaping the world around it.

Given that it has been the primary form of communication amongst humans for so long, sound influences human experience in greater detail than merely by the transmission of data. One manner in which sound has come to do so is by the fact that it is always in more than one place. You don't walk up to a sound like it's a painting on a wall, it comes to you. Or, as professional fancy-man Brandon LaBelle puts it in his treatise Auditory Relations: "this acoustical event implies a dynamic situation in which sound and space converse by multiplying and expanding the point of attention, or the source of sound." Holy shit, do I actually know what I'm talking about? What a twist! Anyway, this relativistic spatiality is necessary if you're to consider that sound "occurs among bodies [...]. Thus, the acoustical event is also a social one: in multiplying and expanding space, sound necessarily generates listeners and a multiplicity of acoustical 'viewpoints'." Bam, that's 2 points for LaBelle, zippo/sweet-F.A. for your dumb asses. 

Any sonic event worth mentioning forges a relationship, that's why that old "if a tree falls in the forest" thing is such a resonant little non-riddle. A speaker draws the sensual attention of others with their face-noises, and the sound is taken to be intrinsically linked to them despite the sound waves being well out of their control once the uttering has been committed and broadcast across space and into the listener's mind. When you get down to it, a given sonic event belongs as much to the listener as the broadcaster, for it is the listener who will interpret the event and ultimately determine its functional meaning. Without an active audience you may well just be talking to a literal wall, and god knows we've all been in a situation where listening to someone blather feels like a lot more work that it should be. Man, that's just the worst isn't it? Given an individual's face-noise emanates in all directions, it has the opportunity to create as many of these relationships as there are listeners, effectively multiplying one perspective into several, and because we know how these relationships depend as much on the listener as the face-noiser for meaning, we can safely say that these perspectives aren't just physical, but intellectual and emotional. 

Anyway, you should be getting an idea of how sound can signify under its own power; and just to reassure you I'm not off on a tangent, I'll be getting into how metal is and has always been socially driven, so an understanding of sound as a social force will go a long way in understanding the choices made in the name of its aesthetic.  Just try to keep this in mind I swear it's going somewhere.

Human Technology

Like most human endeavours, heavy metal was of course not simply born, but developed over time such that it was well established before anyone even knew it really existed. This gestation period began in the late 1960s, with the decline of the hopeful, flower power spirit and its usurpation by a darker, more desperate rebellion. Crushing retaliation to the student protests in America of 1968 and 1969, particularly the mobilization of 1000 policemen to the University of Columbia in New York and the pre-emptive deployment 6000 National Guardsmen, 6000 federal troops (armed with bazookas, barbed wire, and tanks), and 12,000 policemen to the National Democratic Convention in Chicago, brought an abrupt end to the dream of peaceful social revolution. This in conjunction with the proliferation of nuclear power and a nascent understanding of pollution as a global issue brought that generation face to face with the grim vision of a future belonging to technology at the expense of humanity. This set the stage for a new brand of protest, and of course a new soundtrack to go with it.

In his essay Communities of Resistance: Heavy Metal as a Reinvention of Social Technology, the nine-feet-tall and gamma-irradiated Sean Kelly explains how the social revolution of the ;60s had mobilized a series of "counter-technologies" such as "humanity," "world peace," "togetherness," etc, in an attempt to ensure such a technologically defined future would somehow include humanity. As is now historically evident, these technologies might have ever so slightly completely failed or backfired. Whereas rock 'n' roll had produced anthems of rebellion against the hegemony (and in so aligning itself, succeeded only in reinforcing the latter by taking forms it was prepared to reject), what became known as heavy metal was itself a rebellion against the underpinning technologies of the society it arose from. No longer a duel of ideologies nor simply a new type of protest song, but rather a sonic resistance in no particular human language, metal had stumbled onto a whole new medium of defiance. Whereas these early metallurgists (and the same goes our modern specimens) appeared to totally embrace technology with all their electric guitars and fancy light shows and distortion and the bleep bloops and pew pews, this was no futurist celebration of humanity's advances. Less of an embrace and more of a bear-hug, metal's use of technology was and is borderline self-destructive, "insofar as they caused the body to tremble at its limits, distortion, amplification and the like denoted material resistances in/of the song to the very technology needed to produce it." Hot damn it is getting scholarly up in here.

Here's where that sonic relationship shit I was yammering about 500 words ago starts being relevant. If you wrap your brain around sound as a social phenomenon which occurs amongst bodies, multiplies perspectives, and creates listeners, you can then see how the heavy metal sound makes the audience's body essential to the experience: it is the instrument, the medium, and the performance all rolled into one. As such, the resistance that metal fosters is not necessarily or directly toward some trite expression of society or world order (lyrics notwithstanding), but rather it is to the music itself. One enjoys the experience by resisting it, that's why you get the exact same flavour of pumped-up-ness by listening to something sticking it to the man as you do by listening to something sticking it to the orcs.

Sound as Power

Of course, no serious discussion of metal music can avoid the ever-popular power chord. I don't have to tell you how awesome it is. You can chug it to bits, you can sustain it all day. It's both that moment of suspended weightlessness at the zenith of your flight and the intricate tumbling of your fall to earth. The power chord is pretty much the musical backbone of heavy metal and decent metaphor for it to boot, for what is resistance but an articulation of power? While we're at it, let's have a shallow dabble in music theory. Take yer basic chord, remove the bit that makes it major or minor, and you've got a power chord. It's not happy, it's not sad, it's not trying to open a dialogue or present a point of view; it's just loud. Coming from a disillusioned generation powerless to affect change in their world, that doesn't seem out of place.

Then, finally, there's amplification. Amplification of sound causes the body to tremble at its limits under increasing stimulus, in multiplying space it calls for more listeners, more bodies, to gather in a community of resistance, and once there the chain reaction sets about amplifying the bodies themselves (a phenomenon colloquially known as a mosh pit). It's not just about decibels; it's more of that there articulation of power. Similarly, when musicians forced their equipment to perform beyond capacity, to be pushed to its limits by the music just as the audience is, they discovered overdrive. That this effect is common to both circuitry and the human body is what allows distortion to convey power and intensity. The fact that distortion arose through practice, rather than theory, is also endemic to metal music, for performance is consistently held in greater reverence than composition. The reason why you never hear about "great metal composers" is because mere composition does not affect the body in any physical sense, instead the immediacy of performance and virtuosity reigns undisputed, and with it the primacy of sound. 

It is well documented that Aristotle had nothing but disdain for spectacle, which he saw as distracting if not detracting from the poet's work. His own circumstantial bias notwithstanding, it is a reasonable position to hold. Spectacle never upheld reason, nor promoted sound rhetoric, it merely moved people, shook them, and made them cry out for more. So next time someone gets in your face, tell them that although technology does indeed allow heavy metal to be reproduced at any dynamic level, its intrinsic nature as both the source and product of a community of resistance, and therefore the needs and pleasures it addresses, demand that it be cranked to 11. You may also addend this by demanding they suck it.

Also did I seriously just bring up Aristotle? I need to have a lie down.

--DJ Spacepirate hosts Burnt Offerings every Sunday at 6 PM, only on CJLO.