music

And on the 8th Day, God Created Heavy Metal

I went to a relatively small school in northeast Ohio called Bowling Green State University. You’ve probably never heard of it, but one thing is for sure, you know what heavy metal is. Typically, mixing heavy metal and high education is like oil and water. Except, almost two years ago, they came together and fused together to be the most badass thing the University had ever seen; POPC 5000: The History of Metal.

The three hour long class was a graduate course with a syllabus describing a 10-page paper due every week; a force to be reckoned with. I’ve always been a bookworm, but I didn’t think this class would be anything too exciting. I just wanted to get it over with and graduate. As a current up-and-coming metalhead, I didn’t really care for metal when I took the class. I listened to mostly punk, some hardcore, and enough alternative/indie to turn into Justin Vernon on command. If anything, I wanted to learn about bands, what they did, and watch some music videos. In short, we covered everything from Led Zeppelin (they basically created heavy metal; don’t argue with me) to the subgenres of metal today like thrash, djent, doom, sludge, death, grind, math, power; the list goes on. We even touched on every topic ranging from types of clothing, attitudes, outlooks, feminism, dogma, technology, progression, culture, etc. Each week we had a different book to read about the metal world, including a book that my professor wrote called Metal Rules The Globe. It turns out, by the end of the semester, this heavy metal class would prove to be the most interesting and intricate course I had taken in my college career.

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Upon arriving my first day, my teacher, Jeremy Wallach, looked like your typical Ph.D type; long hair, big glasses, low voice. Very Bueller-ish. Except for the fact that he got his Ph.D IN METAL STUDIES (YEAH, METAL STUDIES). The dude has banged his head in more than 15 countries with the best of them. In the beginning, he seemed like such an elitist metal snob, scoffing under his breath at students when we went around the room and said our favorite metal bands (can’t really blame him, one guy said his favorite band was Dragonforce). What a snoot, I thought. Au contraire, he was just a metalhead who, once again I can’t stress this enough, had his degree in a field devoted to knowing everything about metal music. When he came around to asking my favorite metal band, I looked up for a split second and then down at my desk. I lied and said Metallica. He looked at me like he knew I was bluffing, but just kept on moving. I was sweating bullets. In that moment, I was indeed………...a poser. Me. A poser. Why did I say Metallica? My favorite band at the time was the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Yeah, post Stadium Arcadium. Determined to redeem my basicness and succeed in writing about good music, I began paying close attention to Wallach the second I walked through that door every week.

Every class he opened up the day with discussions and videos. Whether it was a clip from Headbanger’s Ball or a music video from Arch Enemy, we all nodded as the riffs played. Here is a video of Mr. Wallach talking about what he covered during his time in Puerto Rico at the Heavy Metal and the Communal Experience Conference. One of the many he attended that year.

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I took the class with two of my friends who were huge metalheads and we became the nerdiest students in the class. Unlike them, I didn’t really know that much about metal. After the first week, I found myself wanting to know EVERYTHING. I started to study more. I was raising my hand so often that I had to remind myself to let other people talk. Like a valley girl who loves Starbucks, I found myself talking about this class all the time. Did you know Rob Halford is gay? Did you know that there are metal gangs in Africa? Jada Pinkett Smith is in a metal band. Did you know----I was becoming that person, but I didn’t care. I would go home and research for hours, typing in questions like: why Black Sabbath decided to put their instruments in drop D? Why did metalheads bang their head in the first place? Where did the devil horns come into play? Why do Norwegians prefer black metal? There’s a heavy metal cruise? What the hell? Where have I been? Why did I not know any of this before? Why did I write off metal music when I was younger?

Since the class was centered around the culture of metal, we were able to write about whatever we wanted, within reason, as extra credit. One Friday, I went to a Between the Buried and Me show and wrote a paper on how inviting all of the fans were. Unlike the douche-y bros with bucket hats and bad attitudes I’d try to talk to at other shows, these people were genuinely down to earth. They weren’t going to judge you if you liked a metal band that was deemed “lame” by people, they didn’t care. They thought you were cool because you were at the same show as them. This community had everything I felt I was lacking in a different scene. This was the party I wanted to go to.

A photo posted by BJ (@bjmendy) on Apr 4, 2013 at 3:06pm PDT

You know when you’re a little kid and your parents send you to Sunday School to learn about God, and whether or not you believe it now, you were blown away about some of the things you learned? Like how some people live their entire lives for God or how Jesus turned water into wine? That’s what this class did for me. Metalheads eat, sleep, and breathe music. Call it extreme, but I was falling in love with metal. As a future music critic, this class was like turning the page in my book of uncharted territory I’ve never written about. It was like learning about Earth, except you got to take out everyone who didn’t have something to do with heavy metal and you studied a world made for headbanging and beer, not lame stuff like procreating or evolving. Just like KISS said, “And on the 8th day, God created rock n’ roll.”

Little did I know, the class was only being offered once every few years for just one semester because of this thing called “The Heavy Metal and Pop Culture Conference.”

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What the hell is a Heavy Metal Conference, you ask? It was a four-day event that consisted of screenings, dissertations, discussions, performances, book readings, etc., from the smartest metalheads around. Even Alice Cooper (ALICE freaking COOPER) attended (in spirit, he talked to everyone via Skype). Headbangers from places all over the world like Finland, England, Scotland, all types of ‘Lands, attended and covered every topic imaginable with such scholarly chutzpah. Well-educated pit champions from the glory days of heavy metal came to my BFN school to teach us about heavy metal subjects. Most of the keynote speakers were the authors of the books we had read in class, which made the conference that much more interesting.

I found a video from part of the conference. You can watch it below.

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My favorite part of the conference was listening to a speaker named David Roby, a teacher at Texas A&M who did a presentation called “Metalocalypse as Meta-Discourse.” I was LEARNING things about metal and life through the findings Mr. Roby had discovered through one of my favorite shows, Metalocalypse. The session (subjects touched for that day and time) the presentation was in was called “Session 11: Comics, Sci-Fi and Superheroes: Metal Meets Fiction.” I was at 100% geek mode. These teachers had years of research under their belts. I even got to eat pizza with Laina Dawes (a black frontwoman in the heavy metal scene who I connected with after reading her book). For once, I was glad I paid attention and actually read the books instead of skimming them five minutes before class.

Another old professor of mine named Matt Donahue (featured in the conference video above) is one of the biggest Motorhead fans of all time. Seriously. He presented a segment during the conference called, “Motorhead Matters.” Along with Wallach, he also has a deep-rooted love with metal. He taught a couple of History of Music classes, but more importantly, he floods the metal community with his Motorhead obsession. Here is a clip of him talking about Motorhead below.

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By the fourth day of the conference, I was ready to retire to my bed and write my last paper. A 20 pager. Sitting at my desk, I started to think about the class and what it taught me. For once, I felt better about being a writer because of a class that didn’t even teach me about journalism. Just like a pathologist is fascinated by diseases, I’m a writer obsessed with learning about music, especially about ones that have such a optimistic dogma like metal. In some ways, this course helped me find my way as a journalist. My teacher told me that in the metal community, there aren’t any “cool kids,” and I think that’s what I enjoyed the most from the course. No one has to be “cool” to like metal because metal isn’t cool and it never will be. Yet, it’s still the biggest genre in music today and I think that says a lot about how uncool we all really are. I guess I never really thought about how deep subcultures go or how much you can learn about something without even liking it. Today, I can easily say my favorite bands are Every Time I Die, Pantera, and Mastodon. I know more than two albums by Metallica (unlike my former poser self) and I could tell you exactly how the feminist punk movement got started. I know the difference between doom metal, sludge metal, and groove metal. I know why metal makes you smarter and I can head bang like nobody’s business.

Even though I don’t know everything about the metal world (because it turns out, you’ll never know everything), I still love being able to learn about the type of music I enjoy and unlike math class, I would take this course over and over again. Phil Anselmo, the lead singer of Pantera, once said that writers are just wannabe musicians whether they like to admit or not. I agree with him, and if I could be a musician, I would totally be in a metal band.

by Bridjet Mendyuk