Heavy metal rules. All that punk shit sucks.
It doesn't belong in this world. It belongs on fucking Mars, man.
Madonna can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned. She's a dick.
Seriously, heavy metal... Oh, fuck!
Heavy metal definitely rules.
In 1986, something strange happened.
Heavy metal became the most popular music in the world
and kids everywhere were growing their hair long,
flashing the devil-horn sign
and playing air guitar.
But not everyone loved it.
Critics thought it was unsophisticated music for unsophisticated people.
One writer went as far as calling it "sick, repulsive, horrible and dangerous".
Tipper Gore, wife of America's future vice-president,
led parents in a charge to censor heavy metal,
resulting in the now-familiar warning labels.
Cole Porter's "The birds do it, the bees do it"
can hardly be compared with W. A. S. P. 's "I F-U-C-K like a beast".
I would tell you it's outrageous filth.
Religious groups launched their own crusade against heavy metal.
They feared it was a vessel for the devil
and had created a satanic epidemic among teenagers.
The lyrics is what's become serious
because it glorifies, glamourises and packages evil.
And then the lawsuits came.
Metal artists were sued for causing kids to commit suicide or even murder.
Heavy metal was the moral panic of the day.
And metal fans? They were considered lowlifes.
Dead-end kids. The bane of society.
How do I know all of this? 'Cause I was one of them.
My name is Sam Dunn and this is me in 1986.
Banger. Rocker. Skid. Call me what you want.
I'm a metalhead and I'm proud.
I grew up in Victoria, BC,
otherwise known as the land of the newlywed and the nearly dead.
A quaint town on Canada's western edge.
The last place on Earth you'd ever expect someone to find metal.
But I did, and I entered a whole new world.
Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, Van Halen.
This was the metal that I first fell in love with.
I listened to Number of the Beast 25 times in one day
while doing air-guitar leaps off my front porch.
I so wanted to be in Iron Maiden
But by age 13 I needed something, well... a little heavier.
I discovered extreme metal.
Beneath the Remains, Altars of Madness, Pleasure to Kill
These were some of the fastest and most brutal albums that I could find.
Soon I was playing in my own metal band,
hosting my own radio show, Overkill
and going to every extreme metal gig that came to town.
At 19 I went to university,
and since Metal Studies wasn't on the curriculum,
I decided to major in anthropology.
Anthropology is the study of human cultures,
and I loved it because I got to explore societies vastly different than my own.
For my graduate degree, I travelled to Central America
and wrote my thesis on the struggles of Guatemalan refugees.
There's always been one culture I've really wanted to study.
Heavy metal.
This music has millions of passionate fans worldwide,
yet for 35 years it's been consistently stereotyped, dismissed and condemned.
I know. I've been defending it since I was 12 years old.
Why has metal provoked such polar reactions?
I need to answer this question.
So, this is my journey.
I'm going to take you into the world of heavy metal.
Before I get into how metal has divided people,
I want to explore a subject that has long divided metalheads.
Who gets to be called the first heavy-metal band?
This debate has been going on for decades.
So, this seems like the best place to start my journey.
Origins
History of Heavy Metal
Early Metal
If you wanna go back to the early metal bands, you have to look at Blue Cheer.
Nobody talks about them very often,
but they were, at one point
the loudest, most metallic trio going.
Heavy metal is, of course, in the lyrics of Born To Be Wild,
which was written by a Canadian, Dennis Edmonton, Mars Bonfire.
He was really talking about that whole experience of...
you know, big bikes and roaring down the highway...
For me, my awareness of it came with Led Zeppelin.
As soon as those guys launched, people started using the term "heavy metal".
I knew instantly that that sound was heavy something.
As it is today, probably Deep Purple...
you know, 'cause they were the first to have this great big fuck-off PA...
and, erm... the first to have a lot of pyrotechnics.
Actually, the first time "heavy metal" was ever used...
was used... about Alice Cooper.
In Rolling Stone magazine
Rolling Stone magazine was doing an interview with us in '71, '72, '73, something like that.
There was a photo of a guy holding me up
and it said, "Da-da-da...It's heavy metal".
Every metal band owes a debt, musically, to Black Sabbath.
They were the original.
Indeed. First metal band ever. Black Sabbath.
Every cool riff has already been written by Black Sabbath.
Anything anyone else does is just basically ripping it off.
Either you're playing it slightly different, or fast or slow, but...
They did everything already.
For my money, Black Sabbath reigns as the first heavy-metal band.
It was here on the gritty streets of Birmingham, England, in 1970,
where Sabbath took music to a darker... more sinister place.
Most people associate Black Sabbath with Ozzy Osbourne,
now known as a reality-TV dad,
but it was Tony lommi, Sabbath's guitarist,
who was responsible for creating the band's sound
and the first true heavy-metal riffs.
When I first heard of "heavy metal" I had no idea what it was.
This was many years ago.
I was doing an interview and somebody said, "About this heavy metal... "
"What's that?"
I just came up with a sort of music that everybody liked
when we first started writing riffs.
And then Black Sabbath... And Black Sabbath seemed so different.
Those few notes, you know, that sort of said it all.
I thought, "God, this is great!"
We loved it. We loved the vibe. You know, hairs come up on your arm.
It just gave us a great feeling of... "This is what we're about!"
The sound being, you know, demonic, it sort of... It just appealed to us.
It appealed to the... We liked what we were doing.
We liked the idea of those evilly sort of sounding riffs.
THE SOUND
Since Black Sabbath,
the sound of evil has become a defining element of heavy metal.
But what makes metal sound evil?
The blues scale has the flat fifth, the tritone.
That's the devil's note.
In the old days, you weren't allowed to use that note.
But Black Sabbath, their title song...
Black Sabbath is totally working the diminished fifth. The tritone.
In the Middle Ages, the tritone was identified as the music of the devil because it...
apparently was the sound one used to call up the Beast.
There's something very sexual about the sound of the tritone.
I think that in the Middle Ages, people who were ignorant and scared,
when they heard something like that and felt that reaction inside their bodies went,
"Oh, here comes the devil!"
There's an ongoing battle in heavy metal
to be more evil than the band that came before you.
This has kept me into metal all these years.
But there's more to this music than just sounding evil.
If you don't have an electric guitar with really good amps and really good distortion,
you don't have the core of metal.
You also need to have a really strong bass sound in it.
Bass with the bass guitarist and bass with the bass drums.
And then usually a vocalist who soared over top of all of that stuff,
with usually a fairly high voice.
They can't be soft, cute, sly.
Um... they have to be leather-lunged in one way or another.
Back when I was a kid, practising air-guitar leaps off my front porch,
my band of choice was Iron Maiden.
I memorised every note, every riff, and every solo.
Maiden was part of the new wave of British heavy metal,
a movement that built on the foundation laid by early metal bands.
They honed a sound that was faster, heavier
and more melodic than their predecessors'.
Now I'm on my way to interview Maiden's legendary singer Bruce Dickinson,
and if the 12-year-old Sam knew about this, he'd be freaking out.
But I've got to keep it together, even though I'm interviewing him
on stage of the famous London venue, the Hammersmith Odeon.
- I'd better start talking, then.
My intention as a front man
is to try and find the guy who's right at the back of the 30,000 festival
and sort of go, "Yeah, you!"
"Yeah, you! You!"
And the guy goes, "Me?" Like that.
And you can do that. You can actually do that.
With heavy metal it doesn't even matter, the microphone is there,
but you've got the sound like you're projecting to the back of the hall.
Like there's a tremendous effort involved.
And so you get the return,
in I think particulary people like Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden,
or Rob Halford of Judas Priest,
of this very operatic style of vocal production,
that was developed in the 19th century, before amplification,
in order to reach the back of the hall.
You're warming up the whole crowd,
and on a good night, when it all works,
it shrinks... whatever arena you're in
and it should, by the end of the... Me in particular, 'cause
I'm the guy usually yelling at everybody and running arround
It should feel like you've shrunk the place to the size of your thumb,
where you can go, "Yeah... altogether. "
Dickinson's operatic vocal style has had an enormous impact on heavy metal music
and although people dont assosiated metal
with virtuosic styles of music like classical or opera,
it's these influences that make metal unique.
MUSICAL ROOTS
The classical roots of heavy metal are fairly obvious.
I would say most of the practitioners, most of the really good ones,
were fans of dark classical music.
And in some cases dark, powerful, heavy classical music, like Wagner.
He actually reshaped the orchestra.
He added tubas, he added extra basses, he added an octobass,
which is actually a double-sized bass violin
that two people to play,
one guy on a stool fingering it,
and one guy, you know, playing the bow.
He just loaded down the bottom end of his orchestra,
so that when that orchestra played the rafters shook,
there was so much bass.
It was the first time anybody really heard that live.
If Richard Wagner had actually been around today
he'd probably be in Deep Purple.
Or Beethoven would've been happy to be in Led Zeppelin.
And the music itself, because it was so huge,
and there was no amplification then, they had orchestration,
I think, again belongs to that metal environment.
Classical music is associated with the university and learning.
Bach and Mozart didn't go to college.
Virtuosic performers who were known as improvisers.
That describes Bach as well as it describes Eddie Van Halen.
From Eddie Van Halen on, the guitar becomes so overdriven, so hot,
that the models of playing for the violin and organ become relevant to the guitar,
which used to be like piano, where you'd hit a note and it would fade.
Not any longer. A note couldn't last forever because it's feeding back.
Suddenly, you have the classical models being relevant
because of technological changes.
Of course, heavy metal has another musical ancestor.
One whose roots lie deep in the American South.
The root of all rock and roll is...
is in blues and slave music.
I mean, they invented... The guitar is an African instrument.
That's where it started.
The origins of metal really can trace itself back to the blues.
in America. And that, of course, is very much an oppressed music
and it very much spoke to people that needed something a little different.
It was about the worker coming out of the factory
wanting the energy to come out in a different way,
in an entertainment form that was theirs and theirs alone.
How were you influenced by the blues?
A lot. I liked blues. That's where we started.
were actually before we called ourselves Black Sabbath,
we were a blues, jazz band.
Our first influence was really American blues
that had been processed through the sensibilities of the English rock musician.
They took American blues and threw it back at us.
ENVIRONMENTS
If you look at the history of Black Sabbath,
and even Deep Purple and certainly Led Zeppelin,
they people weren't come from affluent backgrounds,
and therefore they grew up and knew exactly how to present their music,
to people who came from a like-minded situation.
Describe Aston to me.
A shit-hole, basically. Erm...
Very rough, very... Not a good area.
Some of the people were nice. It just... got run down, you know.
And I hated it, living there. I hated it.
At first. I moved there with my parents.
And I think that influenced our music, as far as
where we come from and the area we were from made it sort of more mean.
The place where we're from, there's a lot of big factories over there.
Like heavy metal factories. They're all there, you know.
So, they're like aluminium and... steel, too.
And you can see the impact around the environment.
And also on the people too, you know.
Places are shut down and some of the places built up.
You can see a lot of things on people and it's not always nice.
The thing to do in the evenings was to go and hang out around the phone box.
'Cause that was the only light source in the whole village.
And it was in the middle, so we used to hang around and swap dirty stories.
If there was any luckless women walking past, you know...
it was just fucking hopeless.
But that's like any small town in any nation.
It comes from growing up in a place like Des Moines.
More people grow up in places like that than you'll ever, ever imagine.
I mean the disaffected.
It's a... it's a place where churches outnumber everything.
It's a place where you grow up in the cemetery because it's the only place that really has anything to do.
It's a place where your friends would rather kill themselves than use their imagination.
There's nothing arround you, so you have to grow this whole other world in your head.
That really makes for strong personalities
and that's why a lot of people from lowa are probably the sickest I've ever seen.
On Saturday night...
- You know, you hear guns. - "Pow! Pow! Pow!"
You just hear 'em and...
It's not even really a "What's that? Was that a gun?"
It's like "They're shooting again. It's Saturday night. "
So, that inevitably becomes part of what Lamb of God is about.
- It becomes part of the landscape. - It was part of your psyche.
Kids are bored, agitated,
you know, especially if they have problems at home.
Parents, drug addiction, alcoholism.
It all contributes to a...
you know, the product of a young, angry musician.
It's a negation of the world as it's handed to you.
It just says, to this daily existence of this boring-ass high school
or this dead-end Dairy Queen job,
"Just no! This is something that's mine, and that I own,"
and "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me. "
THE FANS
I'm 13 years old, 14 on Halloween, which I'm proud of,
and I grew up in a small town in Quebec
where everyone likes Shania Twain and Avril Lavigne, so...
I've changed a lot over the last couple of years.
They were like "What happened to you?"
- Satan has arrived. - Is it a statement for you?
Yeah. There is a statement in it. It's "Fuck you!"
A lot of people in my town would rather I wear jeans or whatever.
Wal-Mart stuff.
But I choose not to and people are gonna have to deal with that.
Metalheads, a lot of them, if you do say something to them,
they have their own opinions and they can talk to you about it and be like, "Ok, this is what I think."
Don't try to like the same music because your friend likes it.
Don't try to listen to whatever's popular so you'll fit in.
That's what you find in metal, you find self-confidence 'cause it's a strong type of music
that gives you the ability to say "OK, screw you!
"I like this band. If you don't like it, too bad. Don't buy the album, don't listen to it. "
My name's Joe Bottiglieri. I'm, 34 years old.
I was born in White Plains, New York. I'm an ex-Marine. Once a Marine, always a Marine.
I'm currently a director of technology for a firm in New York City
and I'm a diehard metal fan.
It was there for a lot of dark times in my life.
From the time I was 12 years old, metal was just a constant
and a lot of the lyrics spoke to me on a personal level
about sticking to your guns and staying true to what you believe in.
It's like a lifestyle music.
Everything else is like "I like it, I like it for a week, I lose interest",
but metal fans love it forever.
I guess what a... I'm not a casual person.
When I like something, it's like real and it's not casual music.
Like no one goes "Yeah, I was really big into Slayer. One summer. "
You know, I never met that guy.
I've only met the guy with Slayer carved across his chest.
No main veins. That's good.
No arterial spray.
If you listen to, like, the Replacements or the Smiths when you're young,
it sort of says, "Well you feel weird and you feel different but that's 'cause you're smart."
You are different but you should be happy with that.
But metal really seemed to tell people that you feel weird but you're not.
That's why I was so interested in the idea of the Kiss Army.
It was this idea that if you liked Kiss,
that means that you're part of this massive coven of people
who have, like, the same values you have.
Kiss songs always seem to imply that as Kiss fans we're being somewhat persecuted for it.
Like if you listen to the songs Crazy Nights
it somehow implies people are trying to stop us from liking Kiss!
I think that's a really brilliant idea and I think that's part of the draw to metal.
It makes people feel like...
it's not a way to understand your loneliness.
It's sort of a way to feel that you are a part of something larger than yourself,
because everything about metal is larger than in this life.
It gives them an alternative universe.
It gives them a life of imagination through which they can view music.
It usually inspires a lot of them to pick up a guitar and start playing.
I'm Eric Bryan. I'm 17. I'm from Riverside, California.
I'm a bass player.
- You're also a student? - I'm a student. Yeah.
- Metal in particularly does something for you. - Yeah.
- What do you think that is?
I couldn't get into other styles. I just can't related to it.
No matter how much I listened to it, rap wasn't doing anything for me.
I can relate to metal, maybe because it's a little more angry.
Something that you have to dig into to define has always interested me.
Because some things you scratch the surface and there it is,
but with metal there's so many meanings to it.
Whether they be religious or just in life, there's something for everyone.
Why is music so important to you?
It's something that I can always count on.
I mean things in life they tend like it's a roller-coaster, Whether you've had a good day or a bad day
Whether you've had a good day or a bad day
the music's gonna be there, and that's been very important.
It really gets inside the mind of an eternal 15-year-old.
If you ever lose that 15-year-old kid inside of you,
then it won't make any sense at all and people will start saying,
"That was the part of my life I'm really embarrassed about it now.
"I wore those stupid trousers and had that long hair. "
People are somehow ashamed of what they were like when they were a kid.
I still have people asking me nowadays,
"Aren't you ever going to outgrow that shit?"
I'm like "Fuck you!" I wear these shirts 'cause I like them, not because it's fucking popular.
I'm who I am and if... if that makes me a fuckin' dork,
or I'm not GQ or I'm not in vogue. I really couldn't fuckin' give two shits.
It's outsider music and it's a outsider subjects
and as a kid I was an outsider and the loner and I think that,
that's where it all begins.
You just sort of getting obsessed with a weird stuff
You don't care about baseball, you're obsessed with the Manson Family.
Not 'cause it's cool, 'cause it doesn't appear to be cool,
'cause it's making you look like the weird kid. And nobody like going out and...
Nobody wants to be the weird kid, you just somehow end up being a weird kid
and you can't figure out how you got there.
Metal is sort of like that, except it's like all the weird kids in one place.
CULTURE
I'm on my way to Wacken Open Air...
the Mecca of heavy-metal culture.
This is where 40,000 diehard fans descend on a small town in northern Germany
for four days of beer, debauchery and heavy metal.
But it's 2am, we've no passes and none of us speak a word of German...
We're gonna stay. We're gonna sleep. In the lot.
but with the power of charades, we track down the organiser Thomas Jensen.
we manage to track down the organiser Thomas Jensen.
He gives us our passes and a bit of a hard time.
Are you fuckin' crazy or what?
- Sam Dunn. - In the middle of the night!
- We had a very, very long hard day. We lost some of our bags.
- Surprise, surprise.
These are the festival grounds.
Tomorrow, this place will come alive with metalheads,
here to worship their metal gods.
I'm in heaven. I'm in fuckin' heaven!
... from Italy. - Where are you guys from?
- From Italy? - From Italy, yeah.
- Salute. - Salute.
It's the morning of the first full day of music at Wacken.
Already... the vast majority of fans are totally hung-over.
Including me.
I'm looking pretty rough. Don't get to tight
Cut me some slack here.-
Wacken is about more than just the music.
It is a veritable feast of everything metal.
Here you can find the metal market,
metal breakfast, metal karaoke...
You can even play a game of heavy-metal foosball.
Sweet. Can I play?
- Who's that? - I want Dio.
There should be, like, black metal versus death metal.
Fans travel tens of thousands of miles from over 20 countries to be at Wacken.
As an anthropologist, I'm here to explore the elements that unify this group of fans.
One thing about festivals is, you can come here and get anything you want.
Get your band shirts. Get everything.
This is the look, the image... This is the uniform.
What makes metal a culture is firstly the music.
No question about it. Secondly...
uniform is the wrong word, but the way you dress.
People dressing a certain way it marks you immediately as a metal fan.
Black is really important. Leather is really important.
Silver is good, you know, in studs. It's not real silver, it's nickel.
Black in Western culture in general is a very interesting thing.
It means of danger, it means evil.
Buat it also again, a freedom.
Outside of the light of day, where people are not watching you.
The kids who liked metal looked like they like metal
Now it's a little different...
Everyone had long hair, everyone was in black, everyone had tattoos.
It was just funny. It was like... an army of kids.
Metal is unified by much more than the way the fans dress.
Because mainstream support has come and gone over the past 35 years,
metal is kept alive by a dedicated core of fans.
They are the ones who publish magazines, programme college radio shows,
run independent record labels and host news sites and chatrooms on the internet.
The underground is just a network of friends.
Just everyone who's participating.
Other people help printing up T-shirts,
another one is driving, another kid is helping out his friends
by coming along helping them load and unload the van.
Sell the T-shirt. It's a community.
Yeah? You know Goddess of Desire? We have three CDs out.
Also on vinyl, of course. True metal.
Metal, for me, is a brotherhood.
I think that's what keeps it alive.
We pass it on to our younger brothers, we pass it on to our friends.
This is a way of life. When I wake up,
I've got Slayer on the stereo. Before I do anything
You know, some people wake up they read a paper, they drink a coffee.
I listen to Slayer, I listen to Testament.
It's... it's... it's in your blood. It's the air that you breathe.
It's a sub-strata of society,
because what attracts heavy-metal fans to themselves is a tribal attitude.
It's "Let's go to a festival and let's enjoy ourselves. "
The fact that the outside world doesn't actualy understand is fantastic.
Another thing that I love is that it's so fucking huge,
yet it's like certain people don't even know it exists.
That was amazing! They're one of my favourite bands.
To see them in front of 40,000 people was a dream come true.
- Was it? - Best show I've ever seen. I was in the pit.
That was fucking awesome. That was fucking awesome.
Wacken hosts a wide range of metal bands.
For the outsider, it's hard to understand how all these fall under the same umbrella.
Even for the diehard metal fan this gets complex,
so you might wanna take notes.
The early metal bands, along with hard rock, shock rock and punk,
gave birth to an abundance of sub-genres,
each with their own distinct sound, lyrics and look.
These are power metal, the new wave of British heavy metal,
progressive metal, glam metal, pop metal,
stoner metal, hardcore, thrash metal,
the first wave of black metal, Norwegian black metal,
grindcore, death metal, Swedish death metal,
metalcore, grunge, goth metal, industrial metal,
hard alternative, new metal,
and the new wave of American metal.
But don't worry. I'm at Wacken to focus on the fans.
Not to meet with bands from every metal sub-genre.
There are a couple of bands though that I can't resist the opportunity to meet.
We're at the gate.
Our interview's with Mayhem. We're by the beer tents. Meet us there.
My first interview is with the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem,
the most controversial group in the metal underground.
The band's former vocalist blew his own brains out with a shotgun
and then his bandmates made necklaces from pieces of his skull.
Warning: This interview gets a little weird.
The History of Metal. Mark it.
We are pretty true to ourself.
We never bargain with our stuff, you know. We just release it.
If people don't like it, then fuck them!
That's why we are here.
Germany sucks for us!
We are here to make, you know, a statement,
saying that, "Yeah Mayhem. We rule."
"We are the fucking best metal band out there. "
If people don't recognise it, fuck them!
We never negotiate or come to terms.
Fuck you! You know what I mean?
Can you repeat the question?
- A lot of people we talk to have said that... - What?
I said that black metal is starting to lose touch...
- Who are they?
Which one? Who the fuck are you talking to?
Fuck them, you know!
- You have any comments about that? - Fuck that.
Yeah, I have a comment. Fuck you! You know.
Beer and interviews? Not a good combination.
But I know one guy who can deliver is Ronnie James Dio.
He's the godfather of power metal,
metal's most over-the-top and fantastical sub-genre.
Think swords, sorcery, chivalry and Dungeons & Dragons,
and you've got power metal.
One of the thing Ronnie is known for is inventing the devil horns,
the most enduring symbol of heavy metal culture.
I'm of Italian extraction and, um...
my grandparents on both sides, both my mother's and father's sides,
came to America from Italy and they had superstitions.
And I will always see my grandmother when I was a little kid
were holding my hand and walking down the street,
and she would see someone and go...
"What's that?" and eventualy learn that it was called the meloik,
a meloik was someone giving us the evil eye, so she was giving us protection against the evil eye.
Or you could give someone the evil eye, too.
So, invent it? No.
But perfect it and make it important? Yes.
Because I did it so much, especially within the confines of that great band the Sabbath,
which have this incredible name already and you put that together with of what people think it is.
But for me because I'm lucky enough to kind of... Just have done it so much,
it's been more equated with me than anyone else.
although Gene Simmons would tell you that he invented it,
but then again, Gene invented breathing, and shoes and everything, you know.
What makes metal unique?
What makes the fans and the culture of metal unique, do you think?
I think it's probably more than anything, the fact that it becomes a great big family of people
who all share one thing, and that is metal.
We just love it, and it's really them against the world.
It really is, and I think that's... that's its importance and why it lasts so long.
Thanks, guys. Thanks, Ronnie. That was great.
It's clear from my experience here,
that heavy metal shares something with all cultures
A sense of belonging to a way of life.
Now that I've explored the roots of metal and what it means to its fans
It's time to turn my attention to why metal has provoked such strong negative reactions in people.
Why has heavy metal been consistently stereotyped, dismissed and condemned?
I ask you, is there anybody with better lyrics than Lemmy?
His opening line on that masterpiece is "If you squeeze my lizard".
How can you not love Lemmy?
We have Sam Dunn in the studio with us.
Sam has been travelling around the world making a documentary on heavy metal.
Welcome to New York, Sam. You're just back from the Wacken festival.
We hear you're just back from the Wacken festival in Germany
That must have been a blast, I always wanted to check that out myself.
Real quick, is there anybody that completely... Your favourite interview so far?
That's hard to choose but I have to say, probably, given my long history as a fan in music,
Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden.
We got to interviewed him right on the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon.
- Wow. - With the balcony in the background, it was totally amazing.
And we hear you gonna interviewing Dee Snider tomorrow.
Dee's always a blast to talk to and always outspoken.
Make sure you say hello for me.
CENSORSHIP
To some parents in the 1980s,
Dee Snider of Twisted Sister was the most dangerous guy on the planet.
This was when metal met its first organised attack.
Twisted Sister and eight other metal bands were place on a list called the Filthy Fifteen,
because their music was deemed offensive by the Parents' Music Resource Center.
Dee Snider was summoned to testify before the US Congress
to defend his music and his livelihood.
1984 was a pretty insane time for Twisted Sister.
We were hearing bits and pieces about this Parents' Music Resource Center
and Tipper Gore, but not really registering
because we were getting protests and religious groups at every show.
So, just another parent group that, you know,
was putting Twisted Sister on a list of targets.
We have always, uh... talked about the positive aspects of the music industry,
but of course, the highlight has been on the excesses that have been allowed to develop
as we have tried to focus our concern on those excesses.
Somebody told us that the Senate committee
was having a hearing on censorship with the PRMC
and wanted to know if I would come and speak.
Now, my view of it, when I heard it, was They want me to carry the flag into battle.
"Hell, yeah! Braveheart, baby!"
Braveheart wasn't even out, but that sort of mentality.
"Give me the fucking flag, man. Let's go!"
I knew that they were, like everybody else, grossly underestimating me.
I knew that they viewed me as just another dunderheaded rocker
and they would bring me in, make me look like a fool, and I would help their cause.
They did not know that I could construct a sentence and speak English fluently.
And I'm there in my cut-off denim, my skin-tight jeans, my snakeskin boots,
and a little bit of eye make-up and my big hair.
And I ain't getting dressed up for nobody. I'm a dirtbag and I'm proud.
And I'm playing these people like, you know...
I'm setting up these guys for the kill.
I have got my speech in my back pocket, which I have worked on for a few weeks
and honed and refined till it's a fricking nuclear weapon,
folded up like a gazillion times, like a bad kid bringing his homework to school.
I open it up and I'm flattening it out on the table, really deliberate.
And they're going, "Oh, man, this is a lamb being brought to the slaughter. "
And I start reading.
"Since I am the only person addressing this committee today
"who has been a direct target of accusations from the presumably responsible PMRC,
"I would like to speak on a more personal note
"and show just how unfair the whole concept of lyrical interpretation and judgment can be,
"and how this can amount to little more than character assassination. "
And I am just tearing apart everything that they have accused me of,
disproving without... beyond a shadow of a doubt,
that everything they've accused me of has been wrong, false,
and they are scrambling, scrambling, scrambling.
They said that Under The Blade was about sadomasochism and bondage.
It was about my guitar player's throat operation.
It's not really a... a wild leap of the imagination to jump to the conclusion
that that's about something other than surgery or hospitals,
neither of which are mentioned in the song.
No, it's not a wild jump and I think what I said at one point
was that songs allow a person to put their own imagination,
experiences and dreams into the lyrics.
Uh... people can interpret it many ways.
Ms Gore was looking for sadomasochism and bondage and she found it.
Someone looking for surgical references would have found it as well.
I said, "I can't help that Tipper Gore's got a dirty mind",
and Al Gore just... Oh, my God, he nearly jumped over the table.
They said We're Not Gonna Take It should be on the Filthy Fifteen for violence,
and it was no more violent than the Declaration of Independence.
The PRMC rated songs according to violence, the occult,
sex, drugs and alcohol,
and although Snider talked about throat operations and standing up for your rights
most metal songs deal with much more provocative themes.
Themes like hedonism, religion, death and sexuality.
GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Heavy metal has always traditionally been male-dominated.
Fact.
It was a boys' club in the way that the music was very aggressive
and it wasn't particularly sympathetic towards getting a female audience.
It wasn't excluding in deliberately, but it's the way it went.
It's very strong music sonically and...
you're supposed to be strong.
Um... you don't look terribly strong.
But you know, on... on the tour buses,
the guys work out with weights, before they go on stage, to get their muscles.
So, strength is one of the elements.
But also, using tools very effectively is another part of that working-class masculine ethos.
Because so much of metal came out of a musician's attitude.
Young men that wanted to play blistering solos, that wanted to play real fast.
This kind of urge of teenage angst,
combined with a desire to be a good player,
was what represented a lot of our early audience.
And for some reason, that seemed to be mostly young guys.
All of the anxieties that you get, uh... you know, as a young man about gender,
for a while at least, those are gone.
It's not about how to deal with women. There just aren't any.
So, you get this sort of heroic male-only world
where men band together and do the job.
That's a way of thinking about gender by not thinking about gender.
If you want to call it sexist, you could, but you'd be missing something.
"Masculine" in Western culture means freedom.
Um... and women are always trying to tie them down and domesticate them.
So, that's part of the masculinity element.
Metal is probably the last bastion of real rebellion, real masculinity,
real... real men basically getting together and beating their chests.
It's perfectly all right for guys to go to a metal show,
take their shirts off and swing them above their heads and go completely insane,
instead of trying to be these, like, sensitive morons, or whatever.
Yeah, I love women and I'm... I'm totally respectful to them.
But at the same time, I'm a guy.
I like hanging out with guys and doing dumb shit. It's just that simple.
Metal is one of the few places where you can actually embrace that.
On the surface, metal appears to be hyper-masculine and aggressive.
But is it that straightforward?
There's another part of this culture where the guys actually look like girls.
Who could forget glam metal?
Influenced by the shock rock bands of the 1970s,
glam was largely responsible for making metal the world's most popular music during the 1980s.
So, I'm heading to its birthplace, the Sunset Strip,
to talk with Motley Crue's lead singer, Vince Neil,
about how the heavy metal image transformed from leather to lace.
Everybody came to LA to play.
And it was a crazy scene, you know? I mean, Sunset Boulevard was, uh...
just packed with... with people just dressed in... from,
you know, from punks to the new romantic to...
to heavy metal to...
I mean, it had everything. And everything in between.
Sunset Boulevard would be packed, thousands of people.
Guys that looked like girls, girls that looked like guys.
It was just bizarre.
We just wanted to look tough, you know, with the leather and stuff.
And obviously, when you do a photo session, you put make-up on.
You gotta try and look good. It just turned out that way.
And then with the next... the next version of Motley,
Theatre of Pain, we just wanted to go completely opposite to what we just did.
- More laces and frilly stuff. - Uh-huh.
You know, just to get people talking.
I don't know how to explain it.
I never questioned my sexuality at any point and I was up there in lingerie.
And... my wife was... well, then girlfriend, she was the one dressing me up half the time.
I was going, "OK, great. Whatever.
"Stockings... Let's do it.
It's going to get me more attention? It's going to get me into trouble?
"Let's do it. Gonna freak people out? Fuck, yeah. "
So, I sit down with Poison, as a photographer at that point,
and they're showing me Vogue and Elle, saying,
"This is what we want to look like. "
On the first album cover, that's what they got.
There were guys on the Strip that wanted to fuck them.
It's rebellion against what men are supposed to be like,
grabbing onto signs that are associated with women,
make-up, long hair, clothes that are colourful and flashy and everything.
That becomes your hyper-masculine identity
is to look very much like a woman.
What are you going to do if you want to rebel as a man?
You gonna get an even more severe suit than your dad?
You can't go that direction. But you can gender-bend.
Some fan was writing to a magazine and talked about having the guts to be glam,
so that being feminine is the most masculine thing that you can do in this world.
It shows us so many other things we take to be natural and unchanging,
and just the way things are, are not just the way things are.
An intriguing thing about heavy metal music
is how you've got these either very feminine, preening, on one side,
or ultra-masculine, cock-rocking, skin-tight,
check-out-the-bulge-in-my-pants, for an audience that was 90% male.
Anyway you sliced it, there's something homoerotic about it, and bizarre.
There's some weirdness about the whole male viewing guys looking like women
or men being actual, you know, very strutty and almost like...
not almost, you know, West-Village gay leather look.
There's really... Some doctors need to look into this.
There were fans who rejected all that and said, "That's gay. That's not... "
Those were fans who didn't understand what gay is.
That Rob Halford was gay and was putting on these spectacles
in basic leather-bar, gay clothing, you know.
With the leather and the studs.
Gay fans knew where that was coming from.
Straight fans saw that as straighter than anybody,
when, in fact, it was coming right out of the club.
What would you say if you saw Rob Halford, right now?
I'd jump his bones.
Even though only 10% of the audience may be women,
it was not a big gay scene backstage at most concerts.
Matter of fact, I never even saw one.
Rob Halford kept it hidden forever,
and I know a couple other...
gay heavy metallists who would never show their colours.
Heavy metal rock and roll is very masculine, you know, very hetero.
When a guy's up there in a skin-tight pair of leather pants, humping the air,
they're not looking at it as "Oh, man, he's shaking his dick at me. "
They looking that "Yeah, man. Yeah, fuck that shit." "I wish I was him. He must be getting laid. "
I, at the time, had never drank, I had never done drugs,
I'd never had sex, I'd never broken the law.
As I was listening to Motley Crue,
it seemed like that was basically the only thing that they did.
According to their lyrics, That was the totality of their existence.
When you're with Motley, you learn a lot about the willingness of a female,
and you'll learn a lot about how...
women will find themselves in amazingly compromising positions
without... any shame.
There's a situation you would have boyfriends waiting outside the bus
while their girls were in the back, heels up.
And you were just astounded as to how is this guy, you know...
She thinks she's going in there for an autograph?
When she comes out and kisses him it's not gonna taste like Doublemint!
When I was young, my bedroom was plastered with photos of heavy metallers
and the occasional half-dressed groupie.
I'm going to talk to the world's most famous groupie,
Pamela des Barres, who wrote I'm With The Band,
a first-hand account of the groupie lifestyle.
This is a perspective on sexuality in metal culture that you rarely get to hear.
What is a groupie, to you?
A groupie is a girl, usually, who wants to hang around with groups.
That's where the word comes from.
I'm with the band, you want to hang out, you want to be in the middle of that sound.
It makes you feel so good, it makes you feel so hot.
It makes you feel like anything could happen.
It started with Zeppelin, I think. I think the debauchery.
Of course, I mean, please. I know girls Elvis had plenty of sex with.
It's been going on forever.
But the idea, of women going to extremes to be with a guy, started with Zeppelin.
The big debate is that groupies are perceived as being objectified, a powerless kind of girl...
That is so lame! Because they are exactly where they want to be.
Women who are hanging out with bands are not dragged and coerced
into the band's bedrooms or backstage or buses or anything.
They want to be there.
They make every effort in the world to get where they can be with these bands.
They're doing exactly what they want to do.
I love women. I think they should be naked backstage all the time.
I love lookin' at 'em. It's great.
I'm not sorry for one moment of it.
You'd get done, send 'em out the back, have them come through the front door.
Sex, drugs and rock and roll. That's exactly the way you live.
And then finally you start realising, "Shit, this is a job too. "
You know, it's a business. It's not just constant partying.
When I got off the road and I was done,
it took me a long time to be able to embrace a woman, with any integrity.
They were all pigs.
And, you know, a lot of these guys are still headfucked about it.
A lot of guys still try to live that lifestyle because they don't know anything else.
You become a product of that environment and go,
"My God! What did I do?"
And then as you grow older, you go, "I'm gonna have a kids someday"
"And if it's a girl and somebody does this to her, I'll kill him. "
People ask if I'd let my daughter do it. Yes, I would.
I had fun. I had a great time.
I wouldn't change any of my experiences.
In the classic age of metal,
women didn't participate or create it or have any power in it.
All women did was hold the boyfriend's jacket at the corner of the pit.
They were not involved at all. But then something happened.
With Girlschool, there's a definite element of respect.
When we go on stage, people give us a great deal of respect, which is fantastic.
But I've been in bands before Girlschool,
with people asking me if I'm tuning the guitar for the guitarist,
or, you know, that sort of patronising comment.
'Cause they don't expect a female to get up and play guitar.
That's the way it's always been.
Everybody tried to, you know... put me a little bit more into like the...
you know, the female... the sexy image and...
But without power and I didn't like that
and people in the record company said,
"Get rid of the black leather. That's number one. Be more of a girl. "
I thought, "Oh, no, no, no, no. I can't. I can't do it. "
I don't want to do it. I definitely want to, you know, be myself.
Talent isn't always enough...
In the eyes of the masses and the public.
You have to be attractive and it's annoying. I mean...
- Why? - Ugly dudes all across the board for metal.
- Yeah, exactly. - Across the board.
Any band you can mention, I'll tell you they're ugly.
We took Girlschool on their first tour, you know.
Nobody else would touch them with a yardstick.
Even the rest of my band said, "Oh, they're girls. "
I said, "Fuck that. They're good. " It doesn't matter.
People would always say about Kelly, "Oh she's pretty good for a girl.
I'd say, "Better than you, man " You know.
I asked Kim and Jackie about metal being a boys' club.
- And they agreed. - Well...
They have as much fun on the road as I've ever seen a guy band have.
I mean, they're disgraceful, you know what I mean?
And they'd drink under the table too.
I've no more questions.
You didn't even ask what it's like to be an all-girl band.
- OK, what is it like? - Crap!
What's it like to be an all-guy band?
Since Girlschool, women have become much more visible in metal,
not only they fronting some of the biggest metal bands,
but they are now mastering the once male-dominated technique,
of extreme guttural vocals.
When you go on the festival
you meet lots of women nowadays who are in the band, and so,
it's not that boys' club anymore.
I think boys are happy about that as well. It must have been a bit boring.
Just guys, sweaty ugly guys around you.
Nowadays, it's a couple of females. It kind of loosens it up, you know.
A lot of young girls say, "I saw you live and it was great to see a woman pull that off.
"And I just joined a band and I want to do that myself. "
Is having a tough persona on stage important to you?
Yeah. Because I am tough on stage. I feel very strong on stage,
and I want to give that to the people in front of that stage,
that you can just have a lot of strength and power
and give it to these people and they take a bit of that home.
Arch Enemy!
Thank you very much.
RELIGION AND SATANISM
Being called sexist and a boys' club is one thing,
but what about metal being called blasphemous?
I'm going to talk to Ronnie James Dio again.
We really hit it off at the Wacken festival
so he invited me over to his house to continue our conversation.
Like many metal artists, Ronnie's music is full of religious symbolism,
yet his message is often at odds with these religions, especially Christianity.
So, I'm curious to hear what Ronnie has to say
about metal's religious obsession.
Do you know if anyone holds the patent to this?
No, I don't think anyone does.
There you go, then, pal. I think it's time to do a Gene Simmons.
I understood that Gene had found out that...
OJ, as in orange juice, had never been patented before, so he patented it.
So, every time anyone mentions OJ
I don't know about OJ Simpson but orange juice
he gets some money from it.
Which seems so Gene-ish to me.
'Cause he's so brilliant at that. He's absolutely brilliant.
I'm interested in getting your perspective on
how religion has played a part in the music you've made.
I was always afraid, as a kid, of the nuns, you know, the big penguins,
that were gonna smack you in the head with a ruler, which is what they did.
Or the fact that if you do something wrong you're going to go to hell.
And, uh... you know, you're going to suffer terribly.
And I'm, "Give me a break here. What's going on?"
That's why for me the whole world is heaven and hell.
That song is about that. The fact that we, in my mind...
we live in heaven and we live in hell.
God and the devil are inherent in each of us
and it's our choice to make.
You can take the road to good and take the road to bad.
If there wasn't Christianity, we wouldn't have metal as we know it.
Religion is really crucial to it.
Most of the creators in metal, at least in metal's first several eras,
were raised... religiously.
Many years ago when we first started,
somebody gave us some crosses, and said, "These will protect you",
and we never, ever went anywhere without a cross on.
I've never been on stage without a cross.
It's become the symbol of the band all over.
I got 'em all over my guitar. We got 'em on stage.
One place or another, there's a cross.
Heavy metal has pretty much from the dawn of the genre been associated with Satanism.
And while Black Sabbath sung principally about Satan being something to be scared of,
you know, some of this stuff could almost be described as a Christian sentiment.
The fans, however, wanted a satanic band
and eventually commercial pressures
meant that Black Sabbath exploited this kind of connection between them
and, uh... demonic imagery and satanic ideas.
Of course we got a lot of flack for it from everybody else.
There was things said about us being devil worshippers and God knows what else.
One particular thing that happened,
here in Europe, was the Church, um...
really tried to stop us from playing in this town,
whatever town it was, escapes me now,
and we didn't... They actually did manage to stop us from playing.
They banned the show. And the church burnt down.
Nothing to do with us. But the church burnt down.
But, of course, then it was to do with us. They tried to turn it... It was our fault.
I think when we used to use crosses on stage on fire and stuff like that,
probably didn't help.
Who cannot think of Black Sabbath without seeing one upside-down cross?
Who cannot think of Slayer without seeing a pentagram?
You know, it's... Visually, it kind of ties you to a certain band, to a certain sound.
It's cool. And I don't think any of the people that use them
actually want Satan to rule the world.
It's just something that enhances the experience for people.
The Satanism that you see is not Satanism. It's some kind of...
... you know, it's some kind of caricature Satanism.
Real satanism wouldn't be...
If you're looking for Satanism, first of all, you don't look to rock and roll.
A bunch of kids running around playing loud guitars,
and going like that... That's Halloween.
When I first heard this band, Venom, I wasn't thinking Halloween.
I thought they were truly satanic, and I wasn't the only one.
I remember for me personally, Venom scared the shit out of me when I first heard it.
I actually refused to buy those records, because I was scared.
I literally was scared I was doing something wrong. It was like so extreme.
And now, of course, anyone seeing this video,
looking at me as the guy that signed these bands think that he was scared of Venom,
they're gonna wet their pants.
But it was different thing back then. This was unheard of.
That shit was really, really, truly disturbing and scary when it came out.
Look how big Venom got because of it. It's a way for bands to become popular.
Although Venom and other early satanic metal bands used Satan to shock people,
Slayer's lyrics directly attacked Christianity.
And as a teenage boy, how could you not get excited by album titles
like Hell Awaits, Haunting the Chapel, and Reign in Blood.
Slayer was a leader of the thrash metal movement,
which was influenced by the new wave of British heavy metal, punk and hardcore.
Along with the world's biggest metal band Metallica,
they introduced a new level of speed and intensity to the genre,
and were known for using graphic lyrics about war and religion.
I like to take pot-shots at religion because I think it's a...
the biggest brainwashing thing that is totally acceptable in America,
and probably most everyplace else in the world.
Um, I just think it's a load of shit.
Tom, another well-tread path with you is your Christian background,
and the juxtaposition with your music.
Catholic.
What place do your personal beliefs have in Slayer?
I consider what we do art, all right.
And it's... Art can be a reflection of society.
You know what I mean?
We're picking up the dark reflections.
You know, and that's what we're reflecting. But evil's everywhere, man.
Everybody's got it. It sits really deep in everybody.
Some people can't control it as much as others.
But I think it's there.
Regardless of whatever fuckin' religion you believe in whatever it is you feel is right,
everybody knows what's wrong.
Everybody knows there's wrong things. There are just things you do not do.
And the people that don't understand that or don't believe that,
then they're not really connected with themselves, spiritually.
It doesn't matter what the fuck you believe.
With God Hates Us All, I can't help but come back...
- How does it fit in? - How does it fit in?
... to the... to the... - He doesn't...
He doesn't...
God doesn't hate.
It's a great fuckin' title.
When they wanted to make that an album title, I was like, "That's fuckin' really good!
"I think it'll piss a lot of people off. "
The bands that want to be the biggest bad-asses, pick bad-ass subjects.
It's not that these people believe in this stuff.
It's a cool imagery that goes along with music.
Some people do believe in it. I'm not going to deny that there's...
That the Norwegian bands are real. They've proven they're real by their actions.
OK, so Venom and Slayer aren't real Satanists,
but many fans, including me,
wonder if the Norwegian black metal bands are the real thing.
So, I've come to Norway, an isolated country in northern Europe.
87% of Norway's population belongs to the Lutheran State Church.
And yet strangely, Norway's biggest cultural export
is satanic black metal.
We're filming a documentary.
Uh, it's a documentary on heavy metal music.
We told 'em we were doing a documentary on the history of metal,
- and he said, "Black metal?" - Did he say it like that?
They know their metal here in Norway, let me say.
Like thrash, black metal evolved from punk and the new wave of British heavy metal,
with additional theatrical elements borrowed from shock rock.
Its sound is raw, yet it is also epic and atmospheric,
like punk rock meets Wagner, dressed as Alice Cooper.
My journey takes me on an overnight train ride
from the capital city Oslo to Bergen,
a small town on the fjords of the country's west coast.
I'm here to talk to people linked to incidents
involving members of the Norwegian black metal scene
and some of the country's oldest churches.
My name is Rolf Rasmussen.
I'm an assistant minister of this church, Asane Church in Bergen, Norway.
I had been here for three and a half years, when suddenly,
the night before Christmas Eve, I received a call from a colleague,
and he told me, "The church is on fire. "
And I fell into shivers, right there in my bed.
And I dressed to go to the scene.
And coming to the church, it was all flames.
The firemen were trying to do their best to contain the damage,
and we were there, the staff, looking at the flames
and the smell was everywhere, acrid and pungent.
And, uh... the fire...
The tower was still up when we arrived,
but after some time, maybe half and hour, it fell heavily to the ground.
This was a great loss, not just to us personally,
but to the whole community.
This church had been standing here for nearly 200 years.
And I saw quite a lot of sad faces. It was not a happy Christmas at all.
Varg Vikernes, the most notorious metal musician of all time,
was implicated in a series of arsons
that destroyed some of Norway's most treasure historic churches in the early '90s.
He was also convicted for murdering a fellow black metal musician
and is now serving a life sentence.
J�rn Tunsberg helped Varg burn down the Asane church.
He served his time and was recently released from prison.
We did meet with Rolf Rasmussen, the minister of the Asane church, uh...
- and interviewed him. - OK.
I'm very interested to hear from you, um... your perspective on what happened.
The most important thing that happened was that a church was burned down.
So, that's something I stand for and
I stood for it then, I will stand for it now, and I will stand for it till I die.
Why is it important to you that you stand behind your actions?
It's kind of, um...
It's kind of a statement to...
... to break down Christianity.
Lately there's been a small trend by some people
to see Christianity and any other established religion as the bad guy
and Satan as the liberator,
the one who can really, uh... turn you into
the powerful strong path that you should lead.
What is the primary ideology or primary ideas that fuel Gorgoroth's music?
Satan.
What does Satan embody or what does he represent?
Freedom.
I think whether we like it or not, black metal in Norway is known for, uh...
a string of events that happened in the early 1990s around a series of arsons.
I'm interested to know your thoughts on the actions of those events,
the motivations behind those events, whether you agree or disagree with them.
Church burnings and all these things are, of course,
things that I support 100% and it should have been done much more
and will be done much more in the future.
We have to remove every trace from what Christianity and, uh...
... the Semitic roots have to... offer this world.
Satanism is freedom for the individual
to grow and to become the superman.
Every man who is born to be king becomes king.
Every man who is born to be a slave, doesn't know Satan.
It's in effect an elitist's religion.
It's only for the best, for the strongest,
for the most successful.
It's not for the timid or the weak. And so...
By that virtue alone, it won't have a large following.
What can you say? Words of a Christian man.
So, I don't care what he will ever say, you know.
I know for a fact that they have lost a lot of followers
so we have been giving them a fist in the face.
How do you feel about what happened to the church?
In a way, I think that Christianity in Norway deserved it.
It was... In the beginning it was, you know, not something the Norwegians choose.
It was forced upon them.
You can say that's a thousand years ago.
But, you know, I wasn't sad. I wasn't really happy either, but I mean...
In a historical point of view, Christianity deserved it, you know.
I think society creates extreme people.
It's like with, you know, a free democracy usually deserves its leaders
and it's... I would say, it usually also deserves its outsiders.
If every metal band wants to be more extreme than those that came before
then burning churches certainly took things to a new level.
But these actions say less about metal's theatrics
than they do about Norwegian cultural sensibilities.
Resentment towards Christianity in Norway goes back a thousand years to their Viking ancestors.
In any case, the majority of metal fans, including myself,
could never understand or defend these extreme actions.
I love going to Norway and Denmark.
Because I love picking up the black metal magazines.
It's so Spinal Tap.
Because each band is trying to be more wicked and evil than the other band.
And it's... I can't turn the page without, you know, "Look at this one!"
Here's these guys and they're...
You know, and...
You know these guys. When you meet them in the mall,
they're, "Hello, Mr Cooper. How are you? Nice to meet you."
My mother's over there. Can she have your autograph?"
And I say, "I thought you were like Satans. "
It's like "Well, yeah, we are, but you know... "
Very rarely do you meet anybody that's truly scary.
DEATH AND VIOLENCE
30 years ago,
parents were losing sleep at night over Alice Cooper.
Looking back, Alice seems harmless compared to church burners,
but in the 70s, people thought he was actually killing babies
and executing himself on stage night after night.
Well, I mean, I was the... I was the poster boy for controversy.
In some ways, I think I invented it.
Because we were the first band to get... We got banned in England.
We got banned and nobody could figure out why they were banning us.
We asked them in London, "What are we banned for?"
They couldn't name anything.
I said, "Is there any nudity in our show?" "No. "
"Is there any bad language in our show?" "No. "
"So, what are we being banned for?"
"Well, there's blood in your show. " Has anybody ever seen Macbeth?
There was more blood in Macbeth, and that's required reading in school.
There was no real definitive rock vampire that was really the creature of the night.
That's what Alice was supposed to be.
If you say, "Welcome to my nightmare, " you don't just say it, you do it.
Give them the nightmare. Show them the nightmare.
Since Alice Cooper,
nightmarish images of death and violence in metal
have only become more vivid.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the most extreme sub-genre,
Death metal.
Building on thrash and black metal,
death metal's ingredients are guttural vocals,
machine-gun guitars, and horrific album art.-
The most infamous band in this sub-genre is Cannibal Corpse.
In Germany, the first three Cannibal Corpse albums are banned
Eaten Back to Life, Butchered at Birth, and Tomb of the Mutilated.
Any song from those records cannot be played by the band live.
They're also banned in New Zealand, first three.
We have to use alternate covers in Australia.
A lot of stuff is banned in Korea.
There's evidence to demonstrate that a...
the average young person growing up today
sees more violence through popular culture
than ever, uh... would occur in real life.
This has been marketed often to young people,
particularly teenagers, who won't have the social context.
They don't have the background of how violence has informed
our human condition over the years,
and so what they're left with is, um... the glamourisation
of weapons and violence as a form of conflict resolution.
This is a band by the name of Cannibal Corpse. Have you heard of them?
And they've been at the centre of a significant amount of controversy,
- regarding primarily their artwork. - Mm-hm.
This is their latest album, just released, called The Wretched Spawn.
Tell me about what you think of that?
Well, it's uh... Things are even worse than I thought.
You've obviously... uncovered some of the latest "leading edge" examples of...
what's out there in the music world.
I mean, I just can't see how responsible societies
could turn a blind eye to this kind of thing
being sold and marketed to young people as a form of harmless entertainment.
First time somebody who knows nothing about the death metal scene...
The first time they see one of our album covers, it's gonna shock them.
If it doesn't, then, we're not, you know... We didn't make a very good album cover.
It's art. Look at it as art. Yeah, it's disgusting, but there are lots of things...
Go to the Vatican and look at the art there.
Whew! That's representing something that's real, that could happen.
This is... Obviously, that's never going to happen.
You know, monsters aren't gonna come out of...
aren't gonna rip out of people's bodies anytime soon, I don't think.
On the one hand, as you see in lyrics by a band like Cannibal Corpse,
there's this fascination with the possibilities of death and the body.
On the other hand, there's this terrifying fear of it.
There's an almost obsessive desire to explore that which is dangerous,
that which is scary, that which points towards obliteration, formlessness,
a delight in exploring the body in its ways of being cut up,
destroyed and mutilated.
That's a very primal desire that we all have.
There seems to be a connection between how
acquainted we are with our mortality
and how much we want to see mortality and death
expressed in our art and culture.
If you look back a few generations,
you'd expect some of your siblings to have died.
When they died, they'd be laid out in the front room, you'd see them there.
Then you'd probably sit down to a meal where you'd be eating meat and you will be well aware,
that this slab, of whatever it was, had been living breathing a few days back.
And it might well have been you that cut its throat.
You knew that death is part of the essence of life.
And as we begun to forget this,
we seem to crave images of death and fear more and more.
I don't really have a good reason why
I craved images of death or mutilation when I was younger.
But I do remember sitting on the bleachers after school,
My buddies and I, we used to compete to see who could come up with the most brutal metal lyric.
And my favourite was Autopsy's Charred Remains.
I'll just read a bit for you because, uh...
I think you'll enjoy it.
Burning from the inside out Bloody foam spews from your mouth
Smell the putrid stench of flesh As it burns you to your death
Afterwards, we would always just, like, have a total round of high-fives.
Like, "Yeah, man, that was fuckin' brutal. "
I still think this music is harmless entertainment,
but a lot of people think that metal lyrics have a serious affect on kids.
Over the past 20 years,
metal artists such as Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne,
Cannibal Corpse, Slayer, Marilyn Manson and Slipknot,
have all come under fire for causing teens to commit murder or suicide.
Although none of these cases have succeeded, the cases keep coming.
Every time a serial killer or a mass murderer,
or a Satanist, or any evil person in our society...
Anytime the media's found out that they've listened to heavy metal music,
it has been blown up as the reason, the reason du jour,
for why this person is doing the things that they do.
You know, "Aha! They were Manson fans, see?
"That's why they slaughtered all those kids in high school. "
American news, especially, keys in on violence, you know.
And it's... And they're trying to promote how wonderful American society is
and all they show is, "Bloodbath at high school in Denver", you know.
And they use that as a byline for like two, three days, you know.
And they sucker a lot of people in. A line we wrote a while back...
It's in Disciple actually is...
"The beauty of death we all adore"
"'Cause TV sucks you in And makes you want to see more of it. "
I do think that it's crazy to argue that there is no relationship
between the imagery in metal and, you know, some teen suicides and some acts of violence.
Sometimes metal messages are confusing. I mean,
The song Suicide Solution is about drinking yourself to death.
But I can understand why a 13-year-old kid,
might be confused by a song called Suicide Solution.
I'm not shocked that some kid listened to this and committed suicide over it.
Although, it's weird in the sense that,
if you're serious enough about Ozzy Osbourne to kill yourself over his lyrics,
it seems weird you wouldn't read the liner notes more closely?
The most powerful predictor of whether someone will commit suicide
is the feeling of helplessness.
Nobody listens to metal in order to feel helpless.
They listen to feel empowered, and connected with other people.
That may be empowered through a song about suicide,
that makes you realise that you're not alone, you're not helpless.
Other people are going through the same things. You don't need to kill yourself.
There's times you're sitting there alone, thinking it can't get much worse than this.
And you... And you're just looking for something to help, and music did that.
It's never saying, you know, just give up, 'cause I can't buy into that.
You know, I can't just give up if I've had a bad day.
If I've had a really bad day, I'm not gonna go drink or whatever, I'm not gonna fight someone.
I'm gonna go home and listen to music, play some bass.
We get letters all the time from these kids that show how much our songs help them,
and they go home feeling better, and they can go back to school.
I have a lot of kids say that when they wear their Slipknot T-shirts, that they feel safe.
Violence has been around a lot longer than we have.
Unfortunately, the ignorance of Republican, puritanical thinking is,
they see a mosh pit, it's violent. That's all they see.
Of course, pits can be brutal places, but at the same time, it's like,
I'd rather have kids in the pit working out the stuff they go through in their lives,
than out hurting other people, with no optimistic ends.
Do you want some more?
Do you want some fuckin' more?
So here we are,
35 years after Black Sabbath first played the devil's note
and metal culture is still thriving.
A new generation of fans has emerged, and the old guard is going strong.
But I set out on this journey to answer one question
Why has heavy metal been consistently stereotyped, dismissed and condemned?
What's become clear to me is that metal confronts what we'd rather ignore.
It celebrates what we often deny.
It indulges in what we fear most.
And that's why metal will always be a culture of outsiders.
For young people, it's a place to belong
where you can experience other possibilities
and transcend everyday life in a very glorious way.
And it's a purging. I think metal performs that task,
of sort of letting us get rid of a lot of tension. It's a catharsis.
You want to have people get up and start leaping around.
That's what it's for.
People in their own way have different releases.
It's something other than your mundane life.
The idea is that the way people feel is as important as how they think.
I don't know why it's important. It just is.
I think I'm a better person now that I've been listening to metal.
It doesn't judge me, it doesn't criticise me. It's just always there for me. Always.
For metalheads, good, beauty, and truth, is up on stage there.
Is heavy metal a sacrament? For some people it is.
If it keeps kids alive, if it gives them hope, if it gives them a place to belong,
if it gives them a sense of transcendence, then I believe it's a spiritual force.
I believe it's a pipeline to God.
Ever since I was 12 years old, I've had to defend my love for heavy metal
against those who say it's a less valid form of music.
My answer now is that you either feel it or you don't.
If metal doesn't give you that overwhelming surge of power
and make the hair stand up on the back of your neck,
you might never get it.
And you know what? That's OK.
Because, judging by the 40,000 metalheads around me,
we're doing just fine without you.