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.