Heavy Mettle

Sympathy for the devil: fans at a heavy metal concert, in the film Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. Courtesy Seville Pictures.

Whether you’re a devotee of heavy metal or find the whole enterprise — the tresses, the feral vocals and the wanton guitar solos — hopelessly daft, if you were alive during the ’80s, you could scarcely avoid it. Between David Lee Roth’s scissor-kicks and Mötley Crüe’s pioneering use of makeup, hard rock owned the radio and video airwaves.

By the end of the decade, however, mainstream metal had lost its lustre. The reasons are sundry. In 1984, Tipper Gore, wife of then-congressman Al Gore, led a U.S. Senate committee to censor the lyrics of various metal bands, including Ratt and Twisted Sister. Several years later, Ozzy Osbourne found himself defending his art in court after a young fan took his life while listening to one of Osbourne’s albums. Though unfounded, the controversy marked the genre as a moral threat. By the early ’90s, Nirvana had become the hot thing in guitar-based music. Metal subsequently took refuge underground, where it has splintered into innumerable sub-genres and ultimately gotten faster, louder, darker, meaner.

Sam Dunn has been a metalhead since age nine. Now 31, he has channelled that passion into Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, an impressive documentary that seeks to explain the music’s unlikely endurance. For the Victoria-born Dunn and other members of this staunch cult, metal’s allure can be distilled in a single word: power.

“[The music] sounded powerful and it made me feel powerful. It was intense — it is intense... I speak in the past tense, but I’m wearing a Celtic Frost shirt, so clearly I haven’t grown out of it,” Dunn says sheepishly, while sitting in the offices of Banger Productions in downtown Toronto. Keeping up metal appearances, Dunn possesses long hair and a lean athleticism. “For me, it’s a visceral, emotional experience. It’s not about how it’s going to make me think, necessarily. It’s how it makes me feel. That was something that was always hard for me to convey to people. It was like, ‘Would you just listen to the riff! Can’t you hear how f---ing amazing this is?’”

Many couldn’t, and still can’t. Metal’s jackhammer drum rhythms and blazing guitar work tend to leave many people cold. Meanwhile, the subject matter — metal’s favourite themes are treachery and vice — addresses a side of the human psyche most would rather not face up to. Many listeners find metal’s overwhelming darkness unbearable; fans find it exhilarating.

Thoughtful without being eggheaded, comprehensive without provoking a yawn, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey surveys legendary rockers (including Geddy Lee from Rush, Lemmy from Motörhead and Ronnie James Dio) and erudite observers (musicologist Robert Walser and journalist Chuck Klosterman) to get at the music’s outsider status.

“You’ve been made to feel outside, at one point in your life, and this music speaks to you because it’s individualistic or rebellious or has a message of autonomy in it,” says Dunn. “Or, you feel like an outsider by virtue of this music.” As Metal demonstrates, being an outcast is very much a point of pride.

Bang on: Sam Dunn, anthropologist and lifelong metal fan. Courtesy Seville Pictures.

Dunn, who has a degree in anthropology from Toronto’s York University, approaches the material like a social scientist. One of the most contentious issues in metal is its exact origin. Conventional wisdom attributes it to Steppenwolf, the band that first used the phrase in its 1968 hit Born to Be Wild. The documentary suggests — rather convincingly — that the genre can be traced back to composer Richard Wagner, whose thunderous operas inspired metal’s elemental dread and bombast. The music also owes a clear debt to American blues, which was reinterpreted in the late ’60s by British rock bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin. It was Birmingham’s Black Sabbath, however, that gave metal its imprimatur of menace by (re)introducing the “devil’s note,” a dissonant musical interval once banned in Christian music. The band’s 1970 debut album, Black Sabbath, is pretty much heavy metal’s ground zero.

Extreme amplification is crucial to the music’s visceral appeal. So is the accompanying iconography, which often includes images of fire, ruination, apocalypse and, of course, the Prince of Darkness.

“It is a predominantly male thing,” Dunn concedes. “It’s about being tougher than you could be in real life.” Metal achieves that toughness in a number of ways: wearing leather and studs; using terse, often abrasive language; and braying at high volumes. While non-believers see metal as a misanthropic racket, in many cases, it’s a raucous means to address such social ills as hedonism, intolerance, and the degradation of the environment. For fans, metal provides a catharsis no other music can deliver.

In the film, a member of the band Slipknot — known as much for its Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired garb as its sonic onslaught — notes that metal “is probably the last bastion of real rebellion, real masculinity, real men basically getting together and beating their chests.”

For that reason, metal, like hip hop, is largely misunderstood. What scandalizes non-metal fans is the lyrical bloodlust of more zealous bands like Cannibal Corpse (which is inevitably carried through to the album art). Both gangsta rap and extreme metal comprise a lot of dudes who threaten violence — and a small minority who actually carry it out. According to Dunn’s doc, the baddest badasses are likely to be found in Norway’s black metal scene. (“Black” refers to the spirit of the music, rather than the skin colour of its practitioners.) Bands like Mayhem and Hades Almighty are not only ear-bleedingly loud, but virulently anti-Christian, and have been linked to a series of church burnings in Norway in the early ’90s.

Metal is filled with remarkable footage, but none as spooky as Dunn’s encounter with Gaahl, frontman for Norway’s Gorgoroth. They met in the drizzly port city of Bergen, a sinister milieu Dunn describes as “the stuff that movies are made of.” (“You never knew when a pirate was going to jump out of the alley,” he adds.) As per Gaahl’s request, the interview was shot in a 13th-century wine cellar, by candlelight. In the film, Dunn begins by asking what drives Gorgoroth’s lyrics.

Sensually fingering a glass of red wine, Gaahl responds, “Satan.” When Dunn asks him what Satan represents, Gaahl says, “Freedom.”

Even now, Dunn is still spooked by the singer’s chilling theatricality. “This is a band that wants to do the best possible job of portraying the face of evil,” Dunn says.

Is he the real thing?

“Being the endless analyst, I like to turn that question on its head,” says Dunn. “That’s what metal is about: making you question whether it’s evil or not. Gaahl is only the latest representation of metal artists who have made us wonder.”

Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey opens Feb. 24 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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