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Citation: Cooper, Dan. “Breakdown in Babylon: An Exploration of Psalm 137 
Through the Lens of Metal Culture.” Paper presented at the Wesley Ministry 
Conference and Symposium, Tyndale University College & Seminary, Toronto, 
Ontario, April 25, 2017. (MPEG-3, 35:02 min.)

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Hello, everyone. Thank you for sticking around and being willing to listen to this. I am really excited to be here to present to you guys. This is a paper I wrote during my PhD studies and kind of working on it ever since. So I'd like to maybe get it published.

I don't know if it's worth publishing, but I'd like to get it published. So any feedback is very, very welcome. So, as my paper title suggests, I'm looking at Psalm 137 through the lens of heavy metal, metal subculture and probably not exactly what you were expecting, but I think it is valuable to explore the cultural parallels between metal music subculture and exilic Judahide culture and is a way of understanding a psalm that we like. The by the Rivers of Babylon part, it's the smashing baby's heads against a wall that doesn't make us feel very comfortable as Christians, nor necessarily do I think it always should make us feel overly comfortable. Extreme violence and Corey imagery, these aren't the things that good Christians talk about.

You don't walk into a church service and start hearing about dismemberment or infanticide, but you walk into a metal concert and those are exactly the things you're going to hear. You're going to hear about burning crosses and you're going to hear about cannibalism and you're going to hear about dismemberment. You're going to hear about some fairly shocking things for maybe the handful of you that have been to metal concerts.

But I think as I've studied both exilic culture and metal culture, I think metal culture, music and lyrics, and those who participated in it have been strongly criticized by parental groups, academic groups, so on and so forth. But they've been wrongly criticized. I think they've been considered it's bad music or so on and so forth. But if we're being a little bit more nuanced in our approach, I think we can realize there's a lot more to it. Same way as one Psalm 137.

We can look at it as a bad song, an unchristian psalm. It's been given such names as that. But I think if we take a more nuanced approach, I think we can get a lot more value out of both. I have written a paper and this presentation kind of loosely follows said paper. If you'd like a copy of it, just let me know.

I can email it to you later.

So sort of some underlying methodological and ethical questions. I am definitely not suggesting that metal culture and auxiliary culture are the same thing. I am definitely not suggesting that. I'm kind of drawing on similar studies that have been done between lament psalms, specifically exilic lament psalms and, say, blues music or jazz music, african spirituals, and more recently, Richard Middleton's paper on reggae and lament psalms, kind of drawing on ideas found in some of those paper that I think their methodologies work. I just think maybe we need a different kind of music to explore this psalm specifically.

So I think, yeah, there's a lot of value in looking at these other ways of approaching lament as a way of understanding lament in the Bible.

Another methodological, ethical thing worth noting is I have a personal bias. I'm a metalhead. I have been listening to metal for a very long time, for basically since very early childhood, I've been listening to my dad's metal records. When I became a teenager, I started listening to my own medal. I've been listening when I rededicated my life to Christ.

I started listening to Christian metal. And so that, of course, brings with it a bias that I might be perhaps too lenient to metal culture, but I think many of the studies I've read on metal culture have been perhaps a little too harsh. And I think this quote here kind of describes where I'm coming from. Because of our long term involvement with metal, we feel that we can avoid the condemnatory stances that characterize previous accounts of the genre and provide a glimpse into some of its political meanings. It's from Rafalovich and Schneider's song lyrics and contemporary metal.

But since I am a Christian metalhead, that kind of gives me a certain degree of otherness where I look at metal culture from a Christian Wesleyan Holiness perspective, where I have to measure what I read in the lyrics, what I hear in the lyrics, with my own desire for personal moral purity, both in thought, deed, action, word. So it kind of puts me on a fringe standpoint from a couple of different cultures, but I think sometimes it's good to be on the fringes. So understanding the cultural similarities from its early days in the 1970s, metal has almost always been fueled by a sense of rebellion against broader culture, a culture that it sees as repressive, a culture that it sees as condemnatory. In its early years, heavy metal drew both musically and lyrically, from blues so black blues. Ozzy Osborne has said countless times that he simply just ripped off blues and put more distortion on it, but they did so from a shared sense of oppression and otherness and in solidarity with the sufferings of North American blacks.

Among death metal fans surveyed by Natalie Purcell, approximately 20% of them were unemployed, and those who were employed were disproportionately in lower socioeconomic class than others in the area. Similarly, Charles Brown found that heavy metal fans that he interacted with tended to be young under the age of 25, with most being in their teens, and notes that they often felt little or no controlled in their economic social and political systems. And they felt forced to attend schools that they didn't like, jobs that they didn't like, and they felt a decreased amount of economic mobility. Of all the studies that explored this socioeconomic status of metalheads, I'd say Khan Harris's study is the most enlightening and intriguing. He again found that the metal scene that he was studying the Israeli metal scene was again lower socioeconomic status.

But many of them were, strangely enough, palestinian, Assyrian and Babylonian ethnically living in Jerusalem. So it's kind of the exact opposite of what we're looking at where it's Israelites living in Babylon.

The situation faced by many metalheads in Israel, it's just kind of this ironic mirroring. And because the the Judahs exhilarate Judahides, they experienced much of the same things. They had no economic or social mobility. They were very much stuck in their place forcefully. They had no control over really anything, especially the early groups of exiles that were brought out.

This is Jewish nobility, these are city folk. And then they are then forced to work crops that crops that they didn't even know existed. Crops they don't know how to farm in very different lands. They're going from arid Jerusalem surrounding area, this hilly, arid place, to basically a swamp, and learning how to do crop, learning how to, for one, farm for the first time, and two, farm in lands that they know nothing about. They had very limited social mobility.

And even those who did experience some degree of social mobility, such as such as Daniel, they were faced with constant, constant pushback from other people who didn't want them to progress socially. They were stripped of ancestral lands and sources of income that their families had known for generations and were forced to work unknown Babylonian crops. Those who once lived relatively prosperous, prosperous lives in Jerusalem were now slaves of the Babylonian empire with little or no means of upward mobility.

Another thing that we can draw in similarity between Israelite and metal culture is the scene or a group, the kind of group dynamics you see in both. An important part of metal culture is the scene, both locally and globally. So the scene is the local group or the global group of metal heads. So it's a small world and it's an even smaller world for metalheads. You get to know people, you get to know people at concerts, you get to know people online and you have this shared sense of solidarity with other metalheads.

You see a guy walking across the street wearing his Slayer T shirt and you have that instantaneous connection of that guy's also a metalhead. I like that guy. And we like to think sometimes we think of metalheads as being antisocial. A lot of sociologists who have actually looked at metalheads have found quite the opposite.

Despite feeling of alienation of broader society, metalheads tend to be from functional families. As a staggering 71.6% of metalheads interviewed by Natalie Purcell described their relationship with their parents as loving and appreciative and medi stated that they found hope, community and help within the metal community and through its lyrics. When metalheads attend concerts, they make friends. When they shop at record stores, they make friends. When they see each other wearing T shirts, they make friends.

Similarly, the exilic and post exilic books of the Bible portray communities that, although they were geographically dispersed, there was a certain degree of solidarity. We see in Jeremiah and Ezekiel there's a sharing of correspondence between those left in Jerusalem and those in Babylonian captivity where there is this shared sense of oneness despite being spread out from one another. Prophets speak with and about other prophets and various groups that were farming in the day. Others were excluded from the group. While the group builds shared identity around the common work projects like the temple in Jerusalem's walls where we have similarly, metal culture will often try to create an otherness and divides of well, you're not a pure metalhead.

And I gave this presentation one time and I had a purest metalhead in the crowd. Ironically in a group of biblical studies, one who said, well, your definition of metal is too broad and which doesn't sound really all too different to the exilic community saying well, you're not really part of the fold. Well, can you really trace your lineage back far enough? Same as, well, can you really trace your lineage back to Ozzy? Osborne?

I think it's kind of some funny cultural similarities, some a little more surfacey, but they're worth noting. If nonetheless another important thing is marginalization. Marginalization leading to self alienation and the sort of reciprocal effect of marginalization and self alienation part of creating a subculture in the shadow of a dominant culture is creating clear definitions of what makes someone a valid member of the community as well as makes someone not part of the community. So again, in metal subcultures distinguishing oneself from broader culture is seen as a high, even necessary virtue. Dina Weinstein suggests that newer forms of heavy metal create a style that is completely unacceptable to the hegemonic culture, end quote.

But I would argue that counter hegemonic dress, art and music has been a core part of the metal culture from its early days. Music, lyrics and visual art of metal culture is purposely repulsive to the uninitiated. Similarly, the dress of metal culture expresses not only darkness and countercultural ideas, but is also designed to frighten away nonmetallers in the face of social strains. This selfimposed otherness is at least partially a means of creating and sustaining an identity for the survival of both the individual's individuality and the community's social purity whether or not that social purity even really exists. So looking again to the culture of the exiled Judahs, this dispersed yet unified culture stubbornly of stubbornly, self imposed uterness finds some strong parallels with the exiled community.

The exiled Judahides found themselves spread throughout the Babylonian empire in small little pockets and they committed themselves to a very strict self imposed otherness of diet, of dress, of religious practices, self imposed otherness that was conspicuous to those around him daniel daniel's friends. This self imposed otherness that was harmful to their social progression, it was dangerous and perilous for them to be so conspicuously other in the same way that wearing a death metal T shirt is probably not going to get you a job, to be frank. It's a self imposed otherness that is in some ways repulsive to others. It clearly sets boundaries between us versus them.

So these are the ways that things are similar culturally. But I think beyond just these surface level cultural similarities, we can see in both metal lyrics and metal art forms and in Psalm 137, a similar way of dealing with their problems that there there is they're both other cultures, they are both sub, small, oppressed subcultures that have to reflect on the culture around themselves. They have to live in another, more dominant culture. And there are ways of expressing that otherness through song. Whichever kind of music we're talking about, there are some very strong parallels that will really help us understand this whole violence issue in Psalm 137.

So in metal music comes as no surprise we find very counter religious ideas not always antireligious. Sometimes they're very strongly religious, such as some Scandinavian bands. Yes, some of them are atheists, some of them consider themselves Satanists, some of them consider themselves worshippers of Odin and whatever other pantheons the Israeli death metal bands that Khan Harris studied, some of them ascribed to follow the ancient Babylonian deities. So it's not that metal is antireligious. It's perhaps counter orthodoxy.

It is somewhat counter religious, although not antireligious.

Ironically, 14.9% of metalheads interviewed by Purcell just considered themselves religious. 14.9% consider themselves religious, while another 14.9% consider religion a very positive institution. So they're not against religion. Purcell found that generally, compared to those around them in their area, metalheads were just as likely to be religious as nonmetal heads. According to the General Social Survey, even within Christian medal scene, we see that obviously they're they're Christians.

You know, these Christian bands consider themselves Christians, however they describe themselves. But within their medal there are themes that are obviously Christian, but not always the most church friendly themes.

They're unwilling to sweep things under the rug. They'll deal with issues within the church. They'll deal with abuses within the church, heresies within the church, issues within the church unabashedly. And they'll do so sometimes using religious themes that are sometimes taken for granted that they will then turn on its head in a not antireligious, but counter religious way. It may seem very bizarre to suggest that this psalm is antireligious.

I definitely would not say it is antireligious, but I would say it is a little counter orthodoxy, I guess you could say. He suggests the psalmist hanging up his harp is tantamount to the prophet closing his mouth and refusing to speak, that this is the psalmist's God ordained task, to sing God's praises, to sing these songs of Zion, and for him to shut up his mouth. That is the same as the priest giving up his ceremonial robes and forfeiting his role as Levitic priest. The music that the psalmist produces. He hangs his harp on the tree again, he's giving away this sacred instrument of praise and then sings a song without musical accompaniment in a way that we sing songs, we don't just speak songs.

So he's in one way orthodox, but in another way just kind of slightly off the grain orthodoxy. This psalm is obviously not against Yawistic orthodoxy, but it absolutely flies in the face against Babylonian orthodoxy. Babylonians believe that their God had conquered all of these other gods, that he had, you know, that he had killed Yahweh and conquered Yahweh on his holy mountain. But this psalm appeals to a God that the Babylonians thought was defeated. It appeals to a God that the Babylonians believed was weak, that was either destroyed or enslaved or beaten in some way.

And this psalm flies in the face of that another way that both cultures deal with the stresses that they feel is through a constructive deconstruction. Metal's purposeful distortion of broader culture is also reflected in its musical and lyrical styles. Khan Harris that found that synchronism in musical instrumentation, style and lyrics is common among Israeli metal bands who are unashamedly influenced by traditional folk music. And again, metal was very much influenced by early jazz and blues, american blues specifically in the Christian world. Christian metal bands such as the Chariot and Becoming the Archetype have respectively included mennonite hymns and renditions of traditional English hymns on their albums, but not with their own distortions.

Rafalovich and Schneider note the paradoxical nature of metal's desire to create newer and heavier sounds, along with its reliance on the on the established to find something to disestablish. Metal is often considered to be extremely frantic style of music, with its sudden shift in time signatures, mood, volume, et cetera. Usual conventions of melodic singing have been replaced by guttural growling and screaming. Metal lyrics have been criticized as being unpoetic, as they rarely follow standard poetic conventions like meter or rhyme, and instead are much more free form. It's clear that metal musicians aim to demolish culturally constructed ideals of beauty and normalcy, but with this, disestablishment is not without purpose or an awareness of its roots.

It's not merely demolition for demolition's sake, but an opportunity to create something new out of the rubble. Similarly for the exiled Judahides, the rubble was all they knew, which is reflected in Psalm 137. Though its focus is, in a sense, on Zion, this psalm is radically different from most Zion hymns. This psalm, most commentary, most commentators agree it really defies form critical classification. It's sort of a lament, but it's not quite a lament.

It's sort of a Zion psalm, but not quite. It doesn't really fit into any of these categories very easily. William H. Bellinger bestus describes this as an anti song of Zion. The poetic structure is chaotic and the voicing changes multiple times.

The parallelism is inconsistent. Going from Bi Cola to Tricola. It's all over the place musically.

But I would argue that this chaos, this chaotic structure is purposeful. It's meant to be jarring, you're meant to expect elementsum, you're meant to expect a song of Zion, but instead you get something that is somewhere in the uncanny where it's similar but just dissimilar enough to make you feel uncomfortable.

The psalm constantly has antithetical parallelism bouncing between these very opposites, zion to Babylon speaking to silence, musical instruments to silence it's bouncing between these polar opposites in a way that it's meant to be jarring. And there is this combination of Jewish pride, but also mournful sadness of what has happened to the people. So this creates a sort of chaos into control. The use of unmusical music is directly tied to metal's use of shocking imagery in its art and lyrics. Although listeners tend to have highly polarized opinions about the music, the lyrics of metal music elicit reactions that go beyond disdain to disgust, fear and indignation.

It's no surprise that metal has disgusting imagery, it has chaotic imagery, it has confusing imagery. And that's very purposeful we find in metal culture. There is dehumanization of the body, demystification of the body. There's decapitation. There is human beings being transformed into animals, into these beasts, into even to just puddles of flesh on the floor where we have this constant dehumanization that is a reflection of the way that metal heads are often dehumanized.

By the society that they live in, that they're kind of creating a self fulfilling prophecy, or rather an ex eventu prophecy of what has already been done to them.

Although definitely not to the same extent that secular music, even Christian metal, will use gory imagery, will use dehumanization, demystification of the body. But within this psalm we find some of the similar responses. In the most obvious is the infanticide verses seven through nine. But I found one of the most interesting is the verb used in verse two. To hang tala is used out of the 28 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible, only three times is it used to not describe hanging from a tree or hanging from a pike.

It is almost always used to describe execution. So here we see the psalmist executing his harp on a tree. It's again, this demystification, this destruction, this chaos that we see in the psalm later on in the next few verses, we see shriveling hands and a tongue sticking to the roof of the mouth, that these body parts that are so essential to the psalmist are being dehumanized, they're being slowly destroyed around him.

But this destruction is not without purpose. It's used to describe the way that the body, that the way that the person is destroyed from outside forces. This is how the psalmist feels that their musicality is being executed, that even their own body is being shriveled and destroyed by the chaos around them. But then chaos is weaponized by both metal and this psalm. Shocking imagery is not only designed to give a feeling of catharsis to its audience, but also designed to directly combat society using this, this kind of it's a way of showing just how insane the world is.

And metal will take something as simple as an injustice in the world and will take that injustice and spin it to its absolute, most extreme portrayal of. You may start with a problem of rape in society. And metal will take that and spin it to its absolute most insanity and show it off to the world and say, look at how disgusting you really are. And in much the same way, this psalm takes something that the Babylonians would have praised. They would have been excited for their destruction, their infanticide, they would have been so proud that they conquered yet another people.

But this psalm shows it to them, to their face and say, look how disgusting you really are. Look how perverted, how revolting this really is.

This countercultural disgust warfare is a conscious effort on behalf of metal songwriters, as well as a highly valued virtue to metal listeners. I'd say these two quotes perfectly sum up the point.

You look around at a show and you see people, for the most part, who know that there is something with the culture that we live in and want to live and breathe outside of it as much as possible and see metal as standing in opposition to that plastic, candy coated world painted by the likes of corporate music companies.

And then it's as simple, but really to the point. Metal exposes a lot of problems. It tells truth about what's really going on in the world and it's not just a bunch of blank.

So, as we discussed earlier, the exile Judahides were a minority culture and they had no power to exert any power on those around them. But the Babylonians demanded they continue life as normal, that this mocking call for a Zion psalm was just the worst thing they could have possibly asked for. But instead of giving them a Zion song, they give them this anti Zion song, this chaos, this brutality.

So finally, let's go over the violence question and just finish this up here. So suggesting the psalmist or the Old Testament general employs hyperbolic language to shock the audience is nothing radically new. The prophets often shock their audience with surreal imagery, with parading around naked in the town square, with doing some pretty crazy things. But what do we do with the violence in the psalm? I'd say this is easily the most difficult, but the most valuable question we need to be asking about this psalm.

So why the violence? Well, I'd say firstly, I'd say in metal culture, it's a social commentary. It's a way of looking at the violence, the prescribed normal violence in the world, and showing it for the absurdity that it really is, for showing that the way that we treat other human beings by completely demystifying the human being in its lyrics, is a way of showing no human life is really worth something. A lot of metal bands, some definitely believe in demystification of the human body and believe in some pretty crazy things. But a lot of others have more of a different understanding that maybe we sometimes assume.

For instance, much of the violence described in Colombian black metal is as a response to the gang warfare and the war on drugs that happened in Colombia. And death metal is a way colombian death metal is a way of understanding that violence and showing that violence back to its American audience and saying, look at how disgusting your government is, frankly.

But it's also a form of catharsis. It's a way of dealing with the pain in a way that is nonviolent.

As one medalhead says, it's not happy, it's not loving, it's not cheesy, blanky teen angst. It's a release for its sheer brutality. And ben. A metalhead who was interviewed said, sometimes I'm upset. I'd like to put on a heavy metal.

It kind of releases the aggression I feel. Instead of going out and getting all mad at somebody, I can just drive along, put a tape in, turn it up, puts me in a better mood. It's a way to release some of your pressures instead of going out and starting a fight with somebody or just going out to your parents or your cat or something like that. It's simple, but it's the truth that metal is a way for these metal heads to get rid of that aggression. And frankly, I would argue that it's the same for the psalm, that it's a way of creating a social commentary and a way of combating the society that the Judahs found themselves in in much of the same way.

That early apocalyptic literature was where it uses same very similar hyperbolic language, this extreme violence, this these chaotic imagery where this demystification of the human body. We find these sort of animal human hybrids in apocalyptic literature in a way of understanding just how dehumanize society treats humans.

But it's also a form of catharsis. Again, similar to apocalyptic literature, the apocalypticists aren't asking the people to take up arms against whatever empire they're dealing with. And this psalm isn't saying, let's rally together and kill Babylonian babies, but it's saying, blessed are the blessed is the one. The one which you could put a capital O on if you want. In many ways, this psalm, like many other psalms, takes vengeance out of the hands of the psalmist.

The psalmist gives up vengeance and puts it in the hands of another, the one who will eventually do this, the blessed one who will eventually do this. So in a way, this angry psalm can really only we try to look at it as a lament psalm, and lament we usually understand from the perspective of sadness. But I think if we broaden our perspective away from just sadness, but to negative emotions in general. I think it helps us understand the psalm isn't one that is mournful and sad so much as, yes, they are by the rivers of Babylon weeping, but it's also an angry one, spoken by people who experienced trauma that I couldn't even comprehend, that even as a metalhead. Maybe I couldn't exactly pray everything that's in Psalm 137 because I've never had my children killed.

But I can understand the value in letting out those frustrations. And I think that's what this psalm is aiming to do is to vent those frustrations. Thank you.


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