“The New Satanism” in heavy metal

Pelle Forsberg, guitarist for black-metal band Watain. Photo by Flickr user Tiffany Peters/TiffanyFoto.

Heavy metal has always had a reputation for being Satanic. That reputation came from a number of places: the stage makeup used by Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper, KISS, King Diamond, and others in the 1960s and 1970s, the moral panic sparked by folks like Bob Larson and Tipper Gore (and echoed in churches nationwide), the explicitly Satanic lyrics of bands like Slayer.

But how many heavy-metal musicians are Satanic? Fewer than you might think. Many bands play up the demonic/evil angle because it’s theatrical and emotionally resonant. But these are metaphors; it would be a mistake to assume the musicians themselves practice Satanism in any form. As in mainstream society, among metalheads there are Christians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, atheists, pagans, Hindus, and so on — in proportions that are not widely out of sync with the culture they live in. The primary exceptions may be among those in the early Norwegian black metal scene. There, a number of musicians claim loyalty to Satanic ideals, in part to rebel against the dominance of Christianity and the takeover of old Norse and pagan traditions.

Over at Invisible Oranges this week, Joseph Schafer examines what he calls “The New Satanism” in heavy metal. As Schafer points out, metal and Satanism actually had very little to do with each other until recently:

Only a handful of pre-’00s metal musicians profess to be actual Satanists. Even fewer claim to worship the devil—most out-Satanists in metal music follow(ed) Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, which does not believe in Satan as an actual entity.

…

More contemporary bands talk about satanism than ever—the Decibel tour celebrated theistic satanism as much as the magazine that sponsored it. And art fueled by genuine faith has a powerful character -— one distinct from music just about opposing the conventions of others.

And perhaps theistic satanism is the most interesting thing about these bands. Musically, Watain, The Devils Blood, and In Solitude all harken back, instead of pressing their genres forward. Performing in live animal blood is not new, neither is torches—that’s all descended from Mr. Brown. Their individual knacks for excellent songwriting is overshadowed by their collective ability to work the press in their favor while keeping up mystique.

Still, what’s behind that “mystique?” Many fans claim it’s just smoke and mirrors; that Watain, for example, probably really isn’t Satanic, they’re just trying to maintain an image. Still, many outside — let alone inside — the scene would be hard pressed to tell the difference. How do you know when all the blood and animal bodies are there for theatrics, and how do you know when they’re there as part of a genuine ritual?

In an interview with Invisible Oranges in 2010, Watain frontman Erik Danielsson had this to say:

These things have been used throughout all of mankind’s existence as a way to commune with something that is greater than life. What we’re using is, as the way I see it onstage, not a bunch of dead animals. … The important thing is that it has lived, and now it is dead. And therefore it represents a state of in-between. It represents a state of putrefaction that is very relevant in the magickal context, in the context where you actually can correspond with something that is beyond life, that is beyond reality. That is what these things are onstage for.

On the one hand, that sounds like a perfectly legitimate spiritual explanation. On the other hand, it seems like Eriksson is tipping his hand, since on the whole, Satanists do not practice animal sacrifice. Watain isn’t claiming they kill the animals (and they certainly don’t do so onstage), but the use of these animals seems to serve the same purpose. So perhaps it’s primarily theatrics, after all.

Ultimately, does it matter if heavy metal musicians are practicing Satanists? Satanism, whether it’s LaVeyan, theistic, Setian, or something else, is a legitimate and protected spiritual practice in many places (even though it is also in a minority position in those places, and is treated very poorly). Will these bands “convert” listeners to Satanism? That’s not particularly likely — listeners who were already drawn to the faith are probably also going to be drawn to music that echoes what they feel, just as Christian metal bands don’t make fans Christian; Christian fans seek out Christian metal.

We have to remember that there is no harm in listening to music, in celebrating music in the arena, in engaging in theatrics to express shared feelings about the world. For every example of “Satanism” in heavy metal, there are other examples that we revere: Greek Tragedy, Japanese Noh theater, horror movies. It is our understanding of heavy metal music, and of the use of Satanic imagery within it, that is the problem — not Satanism itself.

How not to get hysterical about a pentagram

Pentagrams and walls seem to go hand in hand — like bored teens and vandalism. Photo by Flickr user The Trousered Ape.

As the weather turns warmer, kids in suburban and rural areas go outside. They’re bored. They’re looking for something to do. They’re angry, or at least irritated. Maybe they have a magic marker in their back pocket. They’re walking through town, maybe past a church, and an idea strikes them.

Churches in Santa Rosa, California, and Prairie Grove, Arkansas, have suffered recent vandalism — one more seriously than the other. In Santa Rosa, The Church of the Incarnation was tagged with a few pentagrams and other designs. In Prairie Grove, the Illinois Chapel Baptist Church has been vandalized repeatedly over the years, culminating with arson late last month.

Two different cases, in two different parts of the country, reported in two very different ways. Let’s look, shall we?

From Arkansas Matters:

A church is set ablaze in Prairie Grove and officials find satanic symbols spray-painted on the building.

From the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:

The Church of the Incarnation on Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa was tagged with possible Satanic graffiti on Wednesday afternoon, and police said they may have a suspect.

Hmm. One seems more cautious than another. Let’s look again.

Prairie Grove:

“Devil worshiping signs, you know, and stuff, this is nothing but the Devil … People that does this stuff, they are lost … They haven’t the slightest what hell is really about.”

But everyone we spoke with said, there is one thing still standing strong, and that is their faith.

“The Devil can’t beat us down, not as long as we hold faith in Him … I know the good Lord is with us,” said Burnett.

Santa Rosa:

[Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Mike] Lazzarini said the suspect also tagged St Luke Evangelical Lutheran Church, as well as other buildings and signs.

“It’s not church specific,” he said.

A pentagram is a five-pointed star connected with lines considered by some to have magical connotations, and to have satanic meaning when inverted with two points up.

Lawrence said while the pentagrams are potentially upsetting to members of the church, “it’s not enough to make us feel threatened.”

You could chalk up the sensationalism of the Arkansas article to the fact that the crime is more serious, but there have been plenty of times when graffiti like Santa Rosa’s has been reported in a tone more like Prairie Grove’s. In fact, more alarmist reporting tends to be the norm. The Press Democrat reporters offer something refreshing: a report of the crime that doesn’t hysterically imply that the Devil controlled the vandal’s hand — or did the dirty deed himself.

The fact remains, most such vandalism is made by bored, aimless people — kids especially — and not Satanists with an anti-Church agenda. Reporters should write their articles this way, unless they know for certain who the suspect is, and what his/her motives are.

And yet, it’s still plenty interesting to read. Factual reporting that doesn’t descend into fear-mongering. When’s the last time you saw that in a story like this?

Resident Evil 4 might make you a better shooter, but it doesn’t put a loaded gun in your hand

A new study shows that playing 20 minutes of Resident Evil makes you a better marksman. Photo by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Anytime someone defends video games, or discusses the benefits they provide, often the first words out of their mouth will be, “hand-eye coordination!”

It’s said so often that it’s almost a joke at this point. But it also has real-world applications. For example, small studies have found that gaming can improve surgeons’ dexterity.

In some ways, it seems like a “duh” moment to reveal that video games improve players’ real-life shooting accuracy. After all, didn’t Anders Breivik claim that Modern Warfare helped him train for his Norway attacks?

Scientists already know that playing video games — like learning any other skill — changes brains. At Ohio State University, Brad Bushman and Jodi Whitaker showed one way brains do change after gaming.

They had 151 students played 20 minutes of a video game:
1. Resident Evil 4, some with a gun-shaped controller and some with a regular controller
2. A target-practice game (in Wii Play) with bullseye targets, some with a gun-shaped controller and some with a regular controller
3. Super Mario Galaxy, which involves no shooting.

Then they took the students out for target practice with black airsoft training pistols.

Students who played Resident Evil using the pistol controller had the most head shots, an average of 7. They also made more body shots, an average of 6.

Students who played Super Mario Galaxy had the fewest head shots — about 2 — and the fewest body shots — 4, on average.

Students who played Resident Evil with a standard controller were somewhere in between the pistol players and the SMG players.

The participants who played the most video games outside the study, particularly those who played violent shooting games, had the best marksmanship of all.

“The more frequently one plays violent shooting games, the more accurately one fires a realistic gun and aims for the head, although we can’t tell from this study which factor is the cause,” Bushman said.

Of course, what the researchers should have done is have the students shoot first, then play the games, then shoot a second time to see if their marksmanship improved. Not having that baseline data leaves out some important information.

I’d like to think that most people wouldn’t view the ability to shoot accurately as a bad thing. It’s a skill, like anything else. In and of itself, it’s not a problem.

Unfortunately, Bushman thinks it is:

“We shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss violent video games as just harmless fun in a fantasy world — they can have real-world effects,” he said. “This study suggests these games can teach people to shoot more accurately and aim at the head.”

Bushman seems to be missing some steps. Playing a video game doesn’t give you access to a gun. It doesn’t load the gun for you. And, most important, it doesn’t make you want to shoot anybody. If this study is accurate, the most it’s saying is that games could make you a better shot if those other things happened.

Gamers are going to learn plenty of skills in any video game that they’ll likely never use in reality. For example, Resident Evil 4 might also teach players how to run away from zombies, hunt birds in a forest, explore abandoned houses, and use grenades.

Even if Breivik “trained” by playing a video game, the most that game could have given him was better accuracy. It didn’t give him the paranoia or mental illness that propelled him to make bombs or shoot people in the first place. That didn’t come from Modern Warfare. That came from somewhere inside Breivik. And no video-game study can tell us how to find that.

Call of Duty: War game or propaganda tool?

Are video games making society more militaristic? One academic thinks so.

Did video games help Anders Breivik train for his terrorist attack in Norway? Victoria University lecturer John Martino says such questions are missing the point.

“What has not been addressed in the debate generated by violent military games is the role these games play in the process of ‘militarisation,’” Martino states in a CNET.au article published today.

In sum, he’s suggesting that the popularity and increasing realism of military-based games, particularly the best-selling Call of Duty franchise, is contributing to the “militarization of society.” But his article is riddled with errors and mistaken assumptions that leave his argument in the dust.

First, who is John Martino? His two most recent credits involve — you guessed it — looks at gaming and the militarization of culture, including “No Place for Noobs: Computer games and the Militarization of Youth Culture,” presented at the 6th Global Conference: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace, and Science Fiction in Oxford in July 2011, and “Gaming and the Militarization of Youth Culture: Some Initial remarks,” presented at the IADIS International Conference ICT, Society and Human Beings in Rome, also in July 2011.

Martino starts off with Wolfenstein and Doom, which are good places to start, if you’re going to talk about military shooters. He talks about how the military modified the game to help train soldiers. Anyone who thinks you can learn how to navigate a real-life war scene by playing through Doom‘s blocky mazes and fighting its pixelated enemies is arguably suffering from loss of contact with reality.

Anyhow, from there he gets into the fact that Call of Duty developers have worked with military consultants to make sure gameplay elements are realistic. This is the same as bringing in consultants for a film, such as Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line. Nobody would call the latter an effort to turn these films into “recruitment tools” — they would, in fact, be described as working toward historical accuracy.

Not Martino.

Such partnerships share the goal of working to enhance the training effectiveness of simulation technology.

Military shooters add to the already potent cultural tools that political systems have at their disposal for propaganda purposes.

Then, he stacks up his evidence that society is becoming more militarized:

1. “The commemoration of war (think Anzac Day) has become integral to our view of Australian history, and the place of Australia in the world.”

2. “Recent data published by the Stockholm International Peace Institute indicates that Australia is one of the largest military-spending nations in the world.”

These are his examples? Has he forgotten that much of the Western world has been engaged in some way with the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade? Has he forgotten that Australia is within striking distance of the unpredictable North Korea, and might have good reason to want to defend itself?

Martino leaves out obvious counter-examples, such as child soldiers in Africa or other countries where high-end video games aren’t readily available.

I find it much more plausible that the military is responsible for “militarizing” societies, and that kids who grow up in societies undergoing such change might seek military-style games as an outlet, and as a chance to safely explore their natural curiosity about what wartime is like.

Do you think he’s on to something? Are Call of Duty and other games making society more militarized? And, if so, is that a bad thing?

More parents are embracing video games — but not the idea that violent games are harmful

Psychology instructor Jayne Gackenbach and her son, Teace Snyder, play video games together — and wrote a book about the benefits of gaming.

If the name Jayne Gackenbach is familiar to you, there’s good reason — she released research in January that playing violent video games can help soldiers overcome nightmares induced by the traumas of war.

Like many such researchers, she’s also a mom. Her interest in video games started, naturally, with her kids. She told the Edmonton Journal she found her son digging into a shopping bag, and kissing the box of his first game console.

“I was like, ‘what is this?’” she remembers. “I knew (gaming) was a passion with both of them (her children), so I started doing the research.”

That led to Gackenbach playing games with her kids — on the computer, and on gaming systems, until Snyder finally told her: ‘You’re too bad, Mom.’ He’d give me 10 lives and he’d still beat me,” Gackenbach says laughing.

Gackenbach and Snyder’s co-written book, Play Reality: How Video Games are Changing Everything, is out now.

Research has shown that kids should play video games with their parents, girls especially. Not only is it good for the kids, but it also helps parents better understand the games their kids are playing, and what their kids experience while playing.

It’s certainly a lot better than the mainstream approach. A recent study by Player2.com found that most parents don’t check the age rating on video games. Given the recent legislative efforts to keep M-rated games out of minors’ hands, this is saying something.

Many anti-violent-game legislators seem to feel that kids are buying these games illicitly somehow, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s likely that many parents are buying these games for their kids — without looking at the labels — but also are not buying into the hype that violent games are harmful:

Interestingly, 61 per cent of parents do not believe that violent video games affect their children’s behaviour in a negative way; with 76 per cent of these parents stating that violent games do not mirror real life and so did not believe that they could affect behaviour.

The survey also discovered that just over half of parents would not be concerned if their child was playing an 18+ game, but 54 per cent would be concerned if they found them watching an 18+ film.

There’s a new book out on the game that sparked much of the video-game controversy over the past decade: Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, by David Kushner. Kushner examines the creation of this series, its popularity, and how it earned its reputation as the most controversial game of all time. One of the things Kushner addresses in his interview with CNET is how Grand Theft Auto IV (and its hidden sex scene) taught game buyers and parents a very important lesson:

It finally got out the message that games are played by adults, that this can be an adult medium, just like we have “The Sopranos,” “Goodfellas,” etc. And I do believe that the GTA decade brought the end of that debate.

Until then, many had assumed that video games were just for kids — and that all video games, at all rating levels, were somehow suitable for kids. Now, it seems, more parents are aware; and they’re still okay with their kids (teens, most likely) playing these games.

Backward Messages: now on Pinterest!

I wanted to let readers know that I’ve started a Pinterest account, where I’m gathering links related to this blog. Some of them will wind up as blog posts, while others are just along similar lines. Follow me there to keep up with the news I’m tracking.

Want to grow a headbanger or a heavy-metal band? This map will show you the best climates.

This map shows concentrations of metal bands per capita around the world. (Click for larger version.)

This awesome map (sourced mainly from metal-archives.com) has been circulating on the Internet for the past few months, but it wasn’t until recently that someone put it into context. Richard Florida, a writer for the Atlantic and a researcher for Rentfrow, had this to say about the places were metal bands (and fans) might congregate:

Several psychological studies link heavy metal to personality types that are drawn to “intense and rebellious” music (which includes rock and alternative as well as heavy metal). …

My own research with Rentfrow and others shows that intense music preferences (including preferences for heavy metal music) are geographically strongest in the upper plains states of Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska as well as New Mexico, Nevada and Missouri in the United States. The study also found preferences for heavy metal strongest in states with large proportions of white residents.

Although the map doesn’t have a state-by-state breakdown for metal fans (alas), his descriptions of the plains states in particular match closely with other parts of the world with high concentrations of metal bands, particularly Scandinavia. Heck, even Canada has more metal bands than the US, and if any part of North America is most like Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska, it’s Canada.

So, what does this tell us about metal fans that can help us understand why they like the music so much? As mentioned, headbangers tend to be more on the intense side of the personality spectrum — something Jeffrey Jensen Arnett discussed in his groundbreaking book Metalheads. We can also speculate that kids who grow up in parts of the world with extreme weather are probably stuck indoors more — giving them fewer physical outlets for that intense, rebellious feeling. They can channel that energy into any number of things, but listening to metal is one outlet. Making it is another, and as we can see from the maps, the more extreme the weather (in the developed world), the more likely folks are to play this music.

But don’t just take it from me. Recently, a metalhead in Wisconsin (not a plains state, but not far from it) urged people to tune in to heavy metal’s finer qualities. In it, he describes the point of all that screaming so many people find unlistenable — even disturbing — as well as the relentless pace of the music.

Though the origins of screaming have been mostly lost to the ages, it was perhaps popularized by the aptly nicknamed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins of “I Put a Spell on You” fame. Other blues artists adopted the technique both for volume and emotional reasons. These justifications persist today for many bands that use harsh vocals; just as a singer such as Christina Aguilera may use crescendos to emphasize strong emotion and feeling in lyrics, metal vocalists may utilize screaming. This is not true in all cases, as screaming has largely become the norm in aggressive music styles. Still, aside from expressing emotion, screaming has another use: vocal instrumentation.

Screaming, when used as an instrument, reinforces or complicates rhythms in music. Perhaps the vocalist screams to match percussion strikes, bass lines or rhythm guitar playing, or perhaps the vocalist’s cadence further adds to the chaotic cornucopia of rhythms that populate intense, heavy music.

Whatever the application, listeners can think of screaming as a kind of loud poetry.

What do you think, metal fans? Do certain parts of the globe lend themselves more to headbanging? Do certain types of people tend to live in those places, or is it the geography that makes the metalhead?