sharing of music

What I listen to most: a lot of metal lately. It's really hard though, after the age of 15 or so, to try and define yourself based on music, and I say I "metal" simply because it's the one I play most often lately. I switched over from cd's maybe six years ago, and when I put it all on an external drive the count was something like 120 gigs of music, that number's now at over 200. I listen to most of it fairly regularly, and it follows the basic trends of blues, jazz, polka, classic rock, instrumental, and metal. There's just...a little bit more metal than the rest. My primary reason for listening is simple in that it's loud, violent, and shows an incredible amount of artistry/musicianship that a lot of other genres tend to lack. Almost all of the metal I listen to is scandinavian black/death/doom/progressive metal, and the latter especially (progressive) is more experimental than anything, portraying very few of the stereotypical metal-tendencies. They'll incorporate any number of instruments to a song, so long as it sounds right in the end.

Concerts - almost entirely metal. I get bored otherwise. I've only been to one non-metal concert in the last six years, and it was an acoustic by a metal band. I just really hate having to sit still and just listen to some song, and metal doesn't really do seating. There's just a large pit in the center, and everyone roams freely.

It's the anger, aggression, and cynicism that really turns me on. The entire point to black and death metal is that everything is not all right, the symbols of our society are boned, and it's appropriate to fight against it. 60's folk metal has nothing on the guy who burned a church down because he decided that christianity is the greatest evil to befall norway EVER. Yeah...he's in jail. I don't really condone the violence obviously, in terms of physical action, but I appreciate the ethos. ESPECIALLY since it's often driven by that scandinavian paganism (note that's lower-cased, pagans are not organized. idiot wiccans) that appeals to my childhood misconceptions where the myths were real...that's a whole 'nother story.

The song I'll be bringing in for this: what I'll show in class largely depends on the mood. I don't really have a singular favorite, and I don't really have a singular favorite genre. So I'll play whatever seems fitting at the time, and this also depends on whether or not I can play NSFW songs. Options:

Vintersorg
Morbid Angel
Diabolical Masquerade
Opeth
Tom Waits
Mac Wiseman
Finntroll
Sepultura

How I would teach this in the classroom: first, I don't know if I could. IF I did, it would be either from a historical perspective using tribalism as a moniker, and use something like Sepultura or Finntroll for that, or else I would do it from the perspective of creative soundtracks to personal movies, using Vintersorg as an example of symphony.

It's all very primal, and a lot of it depends on a more tribal structure. They often rebel against large governments with any kind of malicious power over them. It's sort of like the Norse version of rap in terms of what it accomplishes. And just like rap, there's a lot of commercialist crap on the market. So I could also use this in the classroom as a sort of media literacy/awareness unit and ask students to dissect different examples in order to determine why it's made. Is the music made only to be sold (a very american thing generally) or is it made for its own sake or some greater artistic purpose? What does it say when entertainment is packaged solely for consumption?

Historical context of the genre...or at least the sub-genres I listen to: oftentimes they're started in a ludditical fashion. Swedish/Norwegian/Germans who have no interest in the prevailing ethos of the modern world, and work towards a fusion between what came before and what ought to be. Oftentimes this boils down to paganism/religious freedom and a fully democratic-socialist government. I recently learned there is an actual group of knuckleheads who claim to do christian metal. That...doesn't really work. It flies in the face of everything.

In contrast to genres of metal such as american thrash, black/death metal tends to look for old sounds and infuse them into modern. Example: Finntroll is a metal band, it's also a polka band. More specfically, it's humpaa metal, using the darker and faster scandinavian version of polka as a basis for its sound.

Diabolical Masquerade or Dimmu Borgir tend to go in a different direction, using full orchestras as a spine for their songs.

Their videos...

let's just say they're not the norm. They are very esoteric, oftentimes constructing a visual narrative out of the song's narrative. If you've ever seen the show metalocalypse, you've seen a pretty good parody of this in the first season (i believe it's the second episode), where they show almost the entirety of a song called "thunderhorse" before their lead singer pulls the plug on it. The video in the episode shot for using all of the stereotypes in a bad metal video: apocalyptic, feudal system, main character as a mighty old-school warrior who beheads everyone in his way, etc. They're rarely made to be sold, often only up on the band/artist's website as an extra for fans.