3rd Blog Post 4/8/11

            The portion of this week’s reading that really stood out to me was the piece called Factory Music: How the Industrial Geography and Working-Class environment of Post-War Birmingham Fostered the Birth of Heavy Metal, by Leigh Michael Harrison.

            The reading goes on to describe how the environment in which the members of Black Sabbath and Judas Priests grew up in had an enormous impact on the lyrical content and the style of playing they eventually developed.  Not only was much of Birmingham in ruins because of the bombing it suffered during WWII, it was heavily industrialized.  And on top of that the people who lived in Birmingham and the surrounding areas were lower middle class factory workers.

            Ozzy Osbourne describes on page 148 that “As a child, Osbourne lived in a

home with no inside toilet and shared a bed with five other siblings. The Osbourne

children only possessed one pair of shoes, one pair of trousers, one shirt and

jacket and no underclothing.”

            Geezer Butler states on 149 that “In the Second World War, in Birmingham,

that was where all the ammunition was made. That’s why it got so heavily bombed.

So there were a lot of bricks all over the place, bombed out buildings, all that kind

of stuff.”

            Just based off of this reading and these few examples I found myself wondering: “Where does metal music come from?”  A few of the answers I came up with, but there may be more, include misery, suffering, hardship, social inequality, despair, struggle, lack of security, abuse, oppression, fear, anger, retribution, etc.  But most importantly these things are experienced at a young age, in the formative years of an individual, where they still have the energy to push back against what they dislike about life.  Older people tend to accept things and are all too often complacent with the way things are.  Younger people have the energy to say “To hell with your old ways, systems, and institutions!  Everybody I see working and living in this society are unhappy and miserable and that’s not going to be me!”  Essentially I see metal coming from the youth who are immersed in a very unfavorable environment.

            Not only does Black Sabbath form the foundation for metal music through their songwriting and their style of playing, but they lay the foundation of what kind of individual would like metal music, and this individual is the downtrodden who is constantly fighting against a society that wants them to be dis-enchanted.

            Throughout the history of metal we can see individuals who have come from similar circumstances.  James Hetfield from Metallica was born into a lower middle class family that eventually became a broken home, and on top of that he lost his mother to cancer while still a teenager.  Dave Mustaine was also born into a lower middle class family, he moved constantly with his mother and sisters to avoid contact with his father and he dealt drugs as a teenager just to get by.  Then there is the band Slipknot from Iowa.  If memory serves, the band stated that the sheer fact that they had to grow up in Des Moines Iowa was a horrible enough experience they didn't need a whole lot more to piss them off.

            The main point I am trying to get at is that we don’t really see a whole lot of Heavy Metal Bands coming out of Holmby Hills Los Angeles, The Highlands near Seattle, or even Cherry Hills Village here in Denver.  I’m not saying that it’s not possible, it’s just highly unlikely because the environment an individual grows up in is going to be one of the most influential things that form who that individual is and how they are going to relate to the outside world.  In the case of Heavy Metal and the people who associate with it, they seem to be the ones born on the “other side of the tracks”.