Why You Really Need Violent Music

I will not celebrate mediocrity
I will not worship empty shells
I will not listen to worthless noises
I will not subject myself to selected predictable choices
My time, my attention
My quality should not be bought and sold
For convenience's sake, ever!

There’s nothing I dislike more in music than vulgarity. All those death metal songs that describe in detail how they’re going to sodomize the corpse of your grandmother leave me cold (no pun intended). But then, there are songs like this. Do you see any vulgarity in the lyrics above? Yeah, me neither.
And yet, the average listener (aka the person who isn’t a metal fan) might easily hear the song (or, God forbid, watch the music video) and assume it’s just one of those awful, gory, vulgar metal songs.
They’d judge the song without giving it a fair trial. And that’s their loss, really. Fuck them, who cares what they think?

I certainly don’t, I just wanted to point out how smart that “disgusting metal music” is. Or can be. But that’s not the main point here, the main point is that sometimes you need violence. Not actual violence, you know, but sometimes, you just feel like your head might explode or that you want to punch something and then, you get a song like this and you listen to it, you crank it up loud and you sing along to it and you bang your head.
And then, you don’t want to punch something anymore. Magic.

You know, people say rock music makes you more violent, but that’s not true. It makes you defiant, sure, but there’s a big difference there. As for actual violence, not really. Well, in some rather extreme cases. But music is an outlet for the violence that already exists within you. It’s not Corey Taylor who makes you want to punch people, it’s your idiotic boss or the unfairness of a broken relationship or whatever else. But it very probably isn’t Corey Taylor. No, he actually does the opposite, because you hear him and all that passion in his voice, all that raw feeling that is the same with your raw feeling and you feel good, because someone understands and someone was able to actually do something smart and often, beautiful. Out of that raw feeling. It’s art.

And art can sometimes be violent. Art sometimes needs to be violent. Because otherwise, we’d probably start strangling each other.

Violence in games or movies or music isn’t the problem, it’s the solution. It’s the slightly more grown-up version of ‘but that’s not fair’.
No, it’s not. Not for you, not for Corey, not for me, not for anyone. But you know what I love about metal music? That it tells you this – that it’s not fair and it’s not going to be fair anytime soon, but it pushes you to fight. It also says ‘so what?’. It tells you to kick them in the teeth (figuratively) and not to just drown in the unfairness.