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I had to stop reading at: > “It’s the paradox of enjoying a negative emotion that I was interested in,” says Thompson, a professor at Macquarie University in S

• deleted 8y ago
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• throwaway8879 8y ago
  An overwhelming majority of metal is super positive. Even songs like Iron Maiden's 'Fear of the Dark' doesn't sound negative although it's literally about fear. Even in extreme metal, say Necrophagist's songs like 'Multilate the Stillborn', it's all goofy and energetic and tongue-in-cheek. I've heard a lot of metal but can't think of any that is negative in a serious way. Perhaps melancholy if you consider sadder stuff by Opeth or something.
  • faltad 8y ago
    You just need to venture in the realms of Black Metal to find negative songs in a serious way. Try any DSBM song, such as Psychonaut4, Lifelover and others. Then all the nationalist black metal which preaches ... well very aggressive ideas sometimes. This is of course a fringe but it exists.
    • Accacin 8y ago
      Yeah, French band called Peste Noire have an album called: 'La Sanie des siècles – Panégyrique de la dégénérescence'. IMO it's some of the most evil black metal I've come across. Guy behind the band has views that I do not agree with at all, but I enjoy his music.
      • YegoBear 8y ago
        That's a fantastic album. I can't really understand the lyrics to most black metal songs, even if they speak English, so I always listen to them as if it were classical music or a video game soundtrack, and just enjoy the highs and lows.
    • throwaway8879 8y ago
      Perhaps you're right. I'd never ventured into black/norwegian metal other than maybe classic Cradle of filth or Dimmu Borgir. But even those felt goody and sort of like an act to me. I'll give those a listen, thanks.
      • vbsteven 8y ago
        I can definitely recommend bands like Lifelover, Psychonaut4, Totalselfhatred, Alcest, Lantlos, Bonjour Tristesse, Drawn into Descent if you want to experience some not-so-happy metal
        • r721 8y ago
          And then there's funeral doom metal, stuff like Mordor "Odes" or Worship "Last CD Before Doomsday", which is utterly bleak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzaaCSLUSQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzaaCSLUSQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Leu5jqXGAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Leu5jqXGAo
          • mountainplus 8y ago
            Never thought I would see these bands mentioned on HN. Would have even missed a heartbeat to see Thergothon or Skepti but Mordor is an absolute total surprise. Cheers, good fellow!
        • Thlom 8y ago
          The first Burzum records were pretty not-so-happy. Pretty good if you can ignore the ideology ...
          • Applejinx 8y ago
            Varg is a murderer—he does claim self-defense, and that his victim, also an obsessive black metal creator, meant to murder HIM—and an arsonist, and politically outrageous. He meant and means every bit of it, and would earnestly explain to you that (for instance) the arson is church burnings, and that the Christian Church has executed a pogrom of his ancient Viking culture, using the most ruthless methods. As he's talking about things like the Inquisition and the obliteration of pagan cultures, he's not wrong about some of his history. It's a pretty unusual pagan who gets as murderous as Varg about historical injustices, though.
    • perfect_wave 8y ago
      Doom metal also goes that way. Funeralopolis by Electric Wizard, one of my favorite songs, really springs to mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-x6qqNy0mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-x6qqNy0mo
    • bigger_cheese 8y ago
      Two albums I really enjoy in this vein are 'Geliebte Des Regens' by Nargaroth and 'Telepathic with the Deceased' by Xasthur. Both are pretty bleak and depressing subject matter wise but I find them enjoyable to listen to.
  • rangibaby 8y ago
    Necrophagist’s first album is fantastic, I was messing around with Apple Music and was listening to music I liked when I was at middle school and it and the album “Peace Sells...” were the only metal that really held up.
    • throwaway8879 8y ago
      That first album is great considering it's just Schumiez playing/producing/recording/singing everything. Fermented Offal Discharge has an amazing neoclassical solo. The second album is even better in my opinion, a really talented drummer and bass player in addition to more complex writing. There's so great non-traditional time signatures on that album too. God I wish they would release a new record. It's been over a decade I think.
  • sosuke 8y ago
    If you get a chance watch the Iron Maiden's documentary video. The people from around the world seems totally happy and excited and seem to get a lot of good from the music.
• GiuseppaAcciaio 8y ago
  It's still worth a read, and as well a summary article/comment written by the author (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324102543_On_the_enjoyment_of_violence_and_aggression_in_music https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324102543_On_the_en... , pdf available). The study is not without its limitations (self-reporting is the major one), however it's an interesting topic: the author's main hypotheses are: a) there's something with the way death metal/violent music fans' brain is wired that makes it react positively, whereas with non-fans it makes them react negatively. b) people who enjoy Death Metal do it by distancing themselves from the actual lyrical content ("it's just a song") and use it as a pressure relief valve of sorts c) people who enjoy Death Metal enjoy the feeling of being in an elite club that's set apart from the faceless conformist masses. It's bloody hard to set up experimental protocols to find reliable data to support or go against the hypothesis, but I'm going to keep an eye on this Thomson guy, and of course I'll keep on enjoying my violent music :)
  • throwaway8879 8y ago
    I am wondering - how much of it is because most fans can't really understand the words or even look up the lyrics? I'm trying to recall the words to my favorite death-metal songs but can't remember any. All the growling just sounds cool. :)
  • kranner 8y ago
    > a) there's something with the way death metal/violent music fans' brain is wired that makes it react positively, whereas with non-fans it makes them react negatively. Isn't this a tautology, given that there is no way to react to anything except via the wiring of one's brain?
    • GiuseppaAcciaio 8y ago
      Let me rephrase and see if I can get my meaning across: the author is asking if there is a pre-existing genetic/morphologic/physiologic/whatever predisposition that makes it so that some people can listen to death metal and suchlike and have a positive reaction where others (anecdotally, the majority of other people) will have a strong, visceral negative reaction. Is there a biological cause? Is it a "learned" like/dislike?
• jjjensen90 8y ago
  Agreed... I've been listening to metal since I could choose the music I listen to, and it has made me feel many things, but never negative emotions. Excitement, wonder, elation, adrenaline rush, relaxation, etc... In fact, especially as a younger person, listening to metal got me through some hard times emotionally, and the friends I made through shared interest helped me as well. I'm not sure where this professor got this idea, but I'd say metal is identical to any genre in the feelings it can give you, except that it is considered "extreme" or "violent" or "negative" by some outside observers. Just watch any interview with someone like George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher and you'll see that even the most grotesque death metal practitioners are disconnected from the subject matter outside of the music.
  • slfnflctd 8y ago
    Okay, this is the 2nd comment I've seen in the thread saying, "never" were negative emotions involved in the listening of this music, and I feel compelled to remind everyone that our experiences are all different. For me (and surely others), the negative emotions, dark imagery, sometimes downright disgusting lyrical content and other such trappings are fundamentally intertwined with many of my feelings about the worse aspects of life. It's totally part of the draw. There are many, many facts about human existence I am deeply sad or angry & horrified about, and art which reflects a shared understanding of these kinds of things offers camaraderie in misery-- sometimes it leads to catharsis, but not always. You can separate the music itself from these things, and there are artists who have done this, yet even then the pure music is has many loud, fast and/or violent-sounding sections, and if you're angry, it can act as a channel for that anger to feel expressed.
  • Applejinx 8y ago
    Counterargument: Mayhem. counter-counter argument: but of course, that's Norwegian Black Metal, very much NOT Death Metal. And you'd be right, and not even all NBM acts welded themselves to the subject matter. But there've been some metal bands who were really passionate about embracing (not 'disconnecting' from) the subject matter, and always a few who sought to become the subject matter, and one or two did actually do that.
• mfukar 8y ago
  Well if you hadn't stopped reading: > “What we are finding is that they are not angry people. They’re not enjoying anger when they listen to the music, but they are in fact experiencing a range of positive emotions.”
• ryanmercer 8y ago
  >I've been listening to various forms of metal (heavy metal, death metal, metalcore, deathcore, etc.) for over 20 years, and I never once (not even once) even thought to think about associating negative emotions to the music. In fact, it's the exact opposite reaction. Agreed, it's energetic music (that I mostly lift to) not "hey man, I wanna go home and kill myself" or "hey man I wanna kill all my neighbors" music.
• crispyambulance 8y ago
  Never got in to the metal thing myself, but I did listen to noise a lot and experienced similar surprises. For example, Merzbow, has been around since the 1980's and his music sounds literally like a train wreck-- no conventional beat, no melody, no vocal, just random-sounding reverb, static, tape loops and sometimes machine noise. Similar stuff from P16D4, Asmus Tietchens, Zoviet France and others. Many folks not familiar with this music would immediately assume it was all about these artists working through some really dark internal conflict, but that's not it at all. Instead, it was a kind of visceral catharsis, searching for a sublime authentic experience, rejecting the artifice of mimic-ing acoustically produced sound through electronics in favor of "native" electronic sounds that aren't bound to any natural reference. I think that metal music fans have a similar kind of experience, except that the visual aesthetics of metal happen to have distinct associations that make it easy for outsiders to get the wrong idea. If you call yourselves "cannibal corpse" or do things like put skeletons, bloody tombstones, pentagrams and devils on your artworks, yeah, it's going to be interpreted (from outsiders) in ways that may have nothing to do with the ultimate intent of the music.
  • soundwave106 8y ago
    Merzbow frequently utilizes fetish and BDSM imagery / concepts and from the article perspective (although about death metal, it is similarly seen as "extreme music") I find that part of the article's conclusions interesting, in that for some there may be an endorphin release postulated sounds similar to what might be happening in the BDSM concept known as "sub space" (or occurring in other ways for other people, for example, "runner's high" is from what I understand a similar endorphin release). As far as the top level comment goes though... maybe I'm misinterpreting the comment because this is summary level material, but yeah, that's an odd assertion to me. Death metal is a niche genre in a style of music that has some significant semi-mainstream elements (metal as a whole). Death metal is similar to other sort-of-tangentially related concepts like say horror media (there is a nice semi-mainstream side and also a lot of fringe horror movie / media styles that have fewer but sometimes more dedicated fans). Many horror movies for instance are flat out iconic at this point (ranging from the original Universal monsters to some of the films of Hitchcock to certain films like, say, Halloween, Jaws, or the Shining). On rare occasions, they are both quite popular and they even win an Academy Award (eg The Silence of the Lambs). In music, the main thing I will say is that there are metal bands with often violent lyrics and imagery that are more popular (Slayer comes to mind), and non-metal bands with violent imagery that also are popular. Certainly if that violent imagery is slightly modified to a bit more theatrical, the band might even become mainstream (I'm thinking Alice Cooper as an example). The "sonic assault" of death metal in some ways wasn't new -- hardcore punk was an influence for the speed (although hardcore punk is quite a bit less technical) and there's certainly a couple relatively well known bands there in that genre that dabbled in (usually more theatrical but still macabre) horror. (The Damned and The Misfits are two fairly big names in the genre, not "mainstream" but big enough that some people will know of them, and there's plenty of other lesser known "horror punks" around...). So to me that statement ("why are people interested in xyz that seems to induce a negative emotion when in everyday life we tend to avoid situations that will induce a negative emotion") is weird in this context, because this is not a niche question whatsoever overall. The answer to the above question is probably not best answered by looking at the psychology of an obscure genre and more best answered to ask why (in the Silence of the Lambs example) a movie that pushes "negative emotions" of this sort is (at present) #23 on IMDB's top movies of all time.
• VLM 8y ago
  "when in everyday life we tend to avoid situations that will induce a negative emotion" One of the problems with the pyramidal nature of academia is professors are likely to be very disconnected from normal experiences of life. Extremes of privilege, wealth, gated community standard of living on campus, high status levels. If only we were all lucky enough to experience negative situations as rarely as an extremely privileged professor. Given that it seems obvious that a rando consumer would have trouble relating to a professor, it seems self evident that a subpopulation of consumers will have essentially no common ground to discuss philosophical outlooks with a prof. Its kind of like the CEO of walmart not being cultural bro with a randomly selected entry level unskilled employee. Its unlikely either could have anything useful to say about the other.