Comment by RickS

> Most of the metalheads I know are absolute teddybears.

In my music hobby as a guitarist, I've been involved in heavy rock and classic blues bands, played in a classical guitar ensemble, and did some sessions in a jazz setting. More recently I've been guitar tech and roadie for my son who plays in a metal band.

By far, the nicest people I have come across have been in the metal scene. I've been invited around to try gear, and been offered the lend of more gear from heavy metal guitarists.

My former co-founder in my business is a fan of extreme Northern European metal, and she is one of the nicest people I've met.

Most of the metalheads I know are absolute teddybears. I listen to some pretty heavy stuff (see links), but the other day I cried at a dog video, and recently had to turn off the police scanner at the mention of a particularly sad crime.

There's a weird rule of opposites which can happen with music. I think people often take up art and music as a form of healing, so there's some kind of reaction vector involved. Lots of people who take up Irish Trad are tortured souls or have "thorny" sides. Also, the corpus has a lot of happy sounding songs talking about truly horrible things.

I've sometimes heard a saying that goes something like: "Metalheads are like hedgehog, they put spikes on the outside but are really soft on the belly".

Wow, I haven't heard "Job for a Cowboy" since I was in high school. HN was definitely last place I would have expected the reminder. I will say I saw my fair share of fights at shows between the typical crowd and Neo-Nazi types, who were sometimes hard to distinguish from what we called "gutter-punks". So I don't completely share your experience, though the way you state it was how it was most of the time. Communal and caring, admittedly it seems ever group is this way toward it's in-crowd. West-coast hardcore seemed to bring out people who were looking for fights, I even got someones blood on my shoe once at a Terror show. As an innocent bystander ofcourse.

I'm about 10 years older now, and have traded in that sound wall, for a different kind. As an "adult" (Is 29 adult, probably not) I can get that same feeling listening to people like Lawrence English, and Tim Hecker, who are most assuredly not metal at all but produce much denser layers of frequency that would put any metal band to shame. I mostly just listen to jazz though, which takes a severe bit of concentration, attacking the "ADHD" from a different angle. Forcing me to follow a phrase through, for fear of it becoming noise.

I always look at it as a kind of performance art, for people who would never admit that they like performance art. It's absurd, and it's ridiculous and it's a really fun live experience.

We did once informal study among friends comparing heart rate in rest and taste in music. Those with low heart rate favored faster tempo and those with fastest heartbeat favored slowest tempo.

(Age and cardiovascular fitness matter more, but tt the time we were all young and relatively fit).

AFAIK church burning is typically more black metal than deathmetal, which as a genre has somewhat of an ideological bent. See: the whole recent fiasco surrounding the band Deafheaven

codeine king is very much not rooted in any metal, as a band from the sludgewave era of metalcore/hardcore its a sound rooted in hardcore, codeine king is not metal

vctms is a metalcore band

jfac is a deathcore band, esp during the doom ep era

deathcore being a combination of death metal and metalcore

actually, none of the bands you linked are metal

A great deal of metal is prima facie ugly, and I find that most of the people attracted to this aesthetic have emotional issues, abuse drugs, or self-harm, etc. I enjoy hanging out with some of these people, but it's an observation I can't ignore.

As you point out, there are a number of subcultures, some of which are generally wholesome and aesthetically sound. For example, Manowar fans are usually intelligent, driven, and extremely muscular.