Literature is brain food. It's not like those normal pretentious books you find in bookstores by Jodi Piccoult and Barbara Kingsolver that basically tell you how to think and hit you over the head with guilt. Literature is about big, life-changing, powerful adventures and how they change your soul. While rock music seems to get most of its inspiration from The Secret or books like it, heavy metal draws a lot on literary themes:
Epic battles of good and evil are very metal, says Weinstein, author of 'Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture.' So is man's battle against nature -- as in Iron Maiden's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' based on the Coleridge poem of the same name (in general, the 19th Century Romantics have staked out a particularly prominent place in metal).
'The Divine Comedy' seems an obvious choice with its visions of hell, but Dante's metal presence has been relatively limited. Same goes for Herman Melville, despite the Mastodon album and the Led Zeppelin instrumental 'Moby Dick.'
So, to put it in metal terms, which scribes doth taketh the title of Most Metal? With his clumsy prose and often meandering plots, H.P. Lovecraft still struggles decades after his death for respect in the literary world. But in the metal world, his weird tales blare from Marshall amps the world over. The Rhode Island writer's mystical visions have informed the songs of Metallica, Dead Meadow and plenty of others.
Who else? Frodo and his band of Hobbits have kept a surprisingly tight grip on the collective metal imagination. Everyone from proto-metallers Led Zeppelin and Rush to Norway's death-metal bands have borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien.
Mostly pre-WW II 'Lord of the Rings,' incidentally, is one of the few metal-approved works to come along after World War II. For all their antics and wild attire, metal bands can be a rather stodgy bunch when it comes to their reading material.
In this respect, the guys from England's Iron Maiden prove themselves an adventurous lot, as far as literature goes. Besides such writers as Lord Tennyson (the hit 'The Trooper' re-tells 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'), the group also takes on Frank Herbert's 'Dune' and other science-fiction works. And with 'Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' (based on the Alan Sillitoe short story), Maiden delves into class struggles and marathon running -- neither traditional metal themes. On the other hand, the story embraces rebellion, and Sillitoe was one of Britain's Angry Young Men writers of the 1950s. Very metal, indeed.
Weinstein, who's full of wonderfully odd bits of information (Motorhead front man Lemmy writes very good existential poetry and can 'quote Shakespeare up and down -- `Richard III' is his favorite'), credits heavy metal with many of her students' love of books.
'Kids have told me this,' she says. 'Metal turned them on to writers.'
If it turns you on to writers who are the greatest our culture has produced... well, how can that be bad?
Iron Maiden - Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Comments
A bad song about a book is still a bad song.
Metal is no more about literature than indie rock, emo or pop music, the most representative are garbage about satan, rocking hard, riding free, gruesome ways to die, dark forests or somesuch shallow bullshit. The fact that there's only one example on this page drives the point home.
Nidaros, I beg to differ with your moronic commentary. Have you ever read Lovecraft? There isn't a single satanic thing about it it's just horror stories, like a zombies movie or one of those prank flash things all over the internet. So is heavy metal and its topics, Also, did you read "The divine comedy"? It isn't satanic, is it? Same thing with heavy metal. Some of the biggest pleasures a person can get is listening to music or reading a good book, and you can get both from Metallica's "The thing that should not be".
Actually Rime of the Ancient Mariner is ONE of the Iron Maiden songs based off books. Murders in the Rue Morgue is based off a short story of the same name. Metallica's "The Call of Ktulu" and "The Thing That Should Not Be" are based off of Cthulu. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is based off a book about the Spanish Civil War.
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