Delving into the Duality, Delicacy, and Disorder of Death (Metal)
How an often vilified and misunderstood genre of music saved my life
Ghosts enter our lives in all sorts of unexpected ways.
In February, Chester Bennington’s ran across my consciousness with a new release from Linkin Park. “Lost”, a song left on the cutting room floor from their second album, Meteora, surfaced with the announcement of a 20th anniversary edition reissue later this year.
The song couldn’t have been more on the nose if it tried.
Ghosts.
Chester’s completed suicide in 2017 gut the music world. Linkin Park played a gigantic role in my early development, along with many millions more across the globe with their first album, Hybrid Theory, in 2000.1
The first song to enter my consciousness was “In the End”, released to the airwaves the following year, which was the first year I really began to listen to the radio on my own after my parents’ divorce and 9/11. Growing up with classic rock and modern pop set the stage, but nothing really captured the intensity of the emotions eleven-year-old me was feeling.
Until “In the End”.
The song was a revelation. Chester’s singing and songwriting gave words to the frustrations I was feeling in my own life for the first time in a real, raw, cathartic way at exactly the right moment. It was the first time I actually heard someone growl and contort their voice in so much pain, which mirrored the torment inside me. I sat and cried then, much like I did listening to “Lost” for the first time now. Only this time, it wasn’t just tears of loss, remembrance, and reverence.
It was with tears of joy.
The music had come full circle.
At first, there was heavy reluctance to listen to “Lost”. Though I didn’t know it at the time, there was a fear of awakening some of those old wounds. Recently, I’ve been coming to grips with new levels of integration between my younger self and present self. A crossroads.
A crossroads where I’m going to have to choose what I want to carry with me from my perceptions of who I was as a younger person, who I am today, and where I want to go. The coincidence of this timing isn’t lost on me.
In listening now to this hauntingly beautiful song of struggle, recorded twenty years ago during the days I was struggling most, I can say the fears were resoundingly not true. Instead of reopening old wounds, the opposite happened; I found hope.
Hope that I am not the same person I was all those years ago, that I had in fact been able to move forward in meaningful ways and that there was so much beauty to carry forward from those days to integrate with who I am as a person today.
It reminded me that the parts I did love about my younger self, that have been brought forward to today, were authentic. And the ones I left behind needed to be encased in glass.
Though this song was but a precursor to the much heavier metal I would find not too long after, this is what Linkin Park and the metal genre means to me; the exploration of the darkness that most don’t want to see. Without this exploration, we cannot fully see the light within and in front of us.
We have an ongoing obsession with the light in America.
When certain unwanted emotions arise, we’ve built a culture of sweeping them under the rug, frantically avoiding them, or being outright hostile towards them. We invent all kinds of ways to not feel them.
However, without actually sitting in these emotions, we don’t end up properly recognizing the honorable place of the darkness within us. We’ve completely eliminated the nobility in suffering, and it’s there, whether you want to see it or not. Obstinately denying those pieces within us denies us the chance to fully experience what it means to live as human beings in an imperfectly perfect world.
This is what metal so brilliantly allows us to traverse.
I implore you to see the beauty of the darkness within. Allow me paint for you a sonic and word picture.
Whether you’re a therapist who has built up an intolerable amount of vicarious trauma from deeply listening to the pain of your clients, a teacher futilely trying to help calm down students going through their own pain, a server being treated like disposable waste by the general public, or anyone being treated differently just for being you, the darkness rises and can fester within.
Think about your darkest days.
The days that seemed the most interminable.
The days where you felt alone, afraid, exhausted, and numb to everything.
The days where you felt beat down, dragged, knocked out, pissed off, and incomplete.
Think about these existential frustrations in your life in as safe as a manner as you can muster at the moment2.
And I mean, well and truly, let these emotions fill you to the brim. Got them there?
Can you feel that? Good.
Now, grab your best pair of headphones or speakers and listen to this.
If that felt overwhelming to some of you, that’s perfectly understandable! If you’re not used to the cacophony, it can seem like a wall of, well, noise.3
Okay, fine, let’s go one step down in intensity and see how it fits. Let’s try this.
Okay okay, I understand you might not have been mentally prepared for that ending. Fair enough. No more screams this time. Let’s go one more step down, and hopefully the point remains intact.
To some of you, no matter which song you felt gravitated towards (if any), you may have felt something odd and unexpected.
Release.
All the pain, misery, frustration, shame, grief, and darkness you could conjure, released.
Not ignored, and not buried under mountains of coping skills and distractions before we actually get a chance to feel.
When you let yourself feel these emotions, they then transition into felt emotions. Seen emotions. Released emotions. And that’s when the real magic happens.
This is something that all humans understand intuitively. Music is something that has been found, cultivated, and celebrated by every civilization known to existence. There’s a reason music is vitally important to the human condition, and this is just but one aspect of it’s power. This slice of music just so happens to hit at the parts we tend to shy away from the most. And one of the reasons how it accomplishes this is by using contrast.
Humans perceive things in contrast to one another; for example, how we perceive videos. These are ultimately a collection of still images, which, in contrast to one after the other, give the illusion of movement.
Our perceptions of color can change drastically depending on the background that’s applied behind them.
We perceive velocity only as a perceptional contrast between reference points. Flying through space, with only stars to see, you would have no idea how fast you were going until a celestial body passed you by.
Our brains thrive on contrast, and our world would be rendered impossible to perceive or experience without these contrasts existing.
So, when you hear things like good vibes only, you’re hearing the removal of emotions that stand contrast to the light. How will you know you’re seeing the light without the contrast of darkness? How will you come to understand euphoria and joy without knowing what it’s like to be utterly destroyed as a human being?
The answer is simple.
You can’t.
You may never grow to like metal; that is more than understandable. Each genre has it’s own unique powers, and by no means is metal the only one capable of releasing dark emotions. My hope is for you to consider respecting it as a legitimate form of art, just like any other music. Somewhere, somehow, every song matters to someone, even if it’s just the original artist who created it. It matters.
Your emotions matter.
You matter.
You’ve always mattered, and life sometimes finds away to obscure that from yourself and others.
I never listen to the darkest metal to get angry. I listen to it because I love it. And I felt and still feel it loves me, more than words can comprehend. Countless songs over the years gave voice and continue to give voice to the feelings I couldn't and aren’t always ready to express in so many words at a given moment.
These songs were, and some still are, true to who I was and where I was. And listening to songs both old and new is cathartic in part because listening to it reminds me to love myself and meet myself where I am in that moment. Once these feelings have been really felt, we can then emotionally process just what the hell is going on.
Then coping skills and distractions are incredibly useful.
We all need love, and this music is the warmest blanket I know. It’s comfortable and well worn. I can feel every thread and where it goes, the stories it keeps, and the love it emanates. Metal means to me what any music you love means to you. Nothing quite soothes the madness brewing within like staring madness in the face and laughing alongside it. Laughing at the absurdity of life and honoring your darkest held emotions.
Finding the beauty in the darkness allows the light to truly shine, and the brighter the light, the darker the shadow it casts.4
Hybrid Theory, to date, is the best selling debut album from any artist of the 21st century. As of this writing, the album has sold over 27 million copies worldwide. Their second album, Meteora, sold over 16 million. These numbers are not likely to ever be reached again, particularly for this genre.
If some of these are tied to your deepest traumas and you have yet to process through them, please consider choosing something more towards the surface until these can be processed with a licensed mental health provider. This article is certainly not intending to retraumatize anyone who may be reading this. You do not have to do this alone!
This song represents a genre called melodic death metal (or more commonly called metalcore or melodeath). The highlights of this subgenre of metal are contrasting elements of death metal vocals, crunching guitar riffs, and choruses filled with clean vocals and soaring, uplifting instrumentals. The dark and the light together in beautiful harmony. Lyrics can center on a lot of things, but many of which squarely address emotions such as the ones conjured for this exercise.
Max, what a fantastic thinkpiece. IMO this really encapsulates the mindset of how our generation was raised, though not 100% of us obviously. Emotions are hard. Life is hard. Having anything to help us cope and process difficult emotions, thoughts, situations is key to self-actualizing. We all have the potential to be incredible, beautiful people who positively touch other's lives. Many of us, myself included for the majority of my life, have the wrong mindset about this. For the longest time I was under the impression that life was a race to some goal or finish line. I put on my horse blinders and ignored my feelings to achieve goal after goal.
Thats not what life is though. Life is a crucible. It's a pressure cooker, a wood chipper, or whatever other metaphor you choose to use. The struggles we face and (hopefully) overcome all help us to grow. As humans, we cannot become the person we have the potential to be while ignoring key parts of ourselves. We need that heat, that pressure, to refine ourselves. Those emotions and fights and shitty situations all chip away the fallacies that we have about ourselves. They highlight our nature. How can you know yourself without that? How can you become the best version of yourself if you're ignoring those pieces of you? The tale of Sysiphus is an allegory for each of our lives. Learn to love the struggle, live the boulder, love the hope that this time you'll succeed. It's hard, but also love the inevitable setbacks. Those fights help define our very nature. Maybe one day that boulder will rest at the top of our individual hills, but today is not that day.
Remember everyone that you do not have to struggle alone. Loved ones and human connection help us overcome. Beautiful art (such as metal!) help too. Life is always beautiful. You just have to look around and recognize that beauty