Why heavy metal is good for you - 2 - It's about literary themes

October 4, 10:58 PMHouston Metal Music ExaminerBrett Stevens

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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.'

Headbanging Hobbits?

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