contracts as encouragement: an application to heavy metal

For the nth time, we return to this issue of the popularity of heavy metal, why is it popular where it is, why do people listen to it, how come it has come to generate this sub culture all of its own.

Some of the frequently cited observations regarding heavy metal music can be listed as follows:

(a) it's aggressive
(b) loud
(c) overblown
(d) not subtle

Similarly, heavy metal fans are characterized as:

(a) frustrated
(b) repressed
(c) mostly male

Now, one way of summing all this up is to understand the following truth: all bands, and I would argue heavy metal/hard rock bands in particular, display one amazing characteristic of human nature - they show what a group of men or women can accomplish when they work together. By making their music loud and fast, the heavy metal band is proclaiming this from the rooftops - and the kind of mind that will attract to this proclamation are those who have a desperate need to get out of their present situation because it represents hope to them. Subtlety in announcing this runs the risk of being mistaken for apology - and apology is not going to be tolerated by the miner's son in England in the 1960s or the Mexican immigrant in Langley Park in 2010.

So the crowd at a metal show is not there because the music is the way it is, the direction of causation runs the other way. The music is representing a basic idea - hope to mitigate conflict by mutuality in working - that people for whom life has been hard (or they believe it to be) are likely to promote. The music is the way it is because that's the way the world is. As Lemmy said it once, rock and roll is middle class - and the middle class is always striving upward.

The mocking that heavy metal music often is subject to is therefore only looking at a superficial layer of the music, it does not allow that there might a deeper reason behind the forms the music takes. This deeper reason is really quite simple, and once admitted, it allows for an understanding of why the music works the way it does.

Now, if you think about it, this explanation also explains why heavy metal music has no solo artists - apart from a brief time during the late 1980s when the "neoclassical" stuff started becoming popular - and it might even represent a reason why as we move in an increasing direction on the income scale more and more solo artists become popular. In some extremes, there is almost no team behind the music - think classical music for instance. (Yes a team plays the music, but the team is not making the music).

In some ways therefore, a contract by its very existence offers hope of a better life simply by allowing for the fact that a private ordering amongst two or more parties can make both better off. This is now beginning to sound very much like McCloskey's recent thesis on the bourgeois virtues, so I'll stop now.