HEADBANGING is a multi-skilled occupation. There is, for example, the side to side, which involves shaking the head while whipping one's hair around with each motion.
Then there's the whiplash, a particularly violent procedure developed by AC/DC's Angus Young that sends the hair all over the shop while obscuring the face of the banger. Or, from an audience perspective, there's the thrust, where one moves one's upper body backwards and forwards, with or without the intention of headbutting the person in front of you or behind you. These are just the basics.
Headbanging and heavy metal music have saluted each other for almost 40 years. So complex is this musical subculture that it would seem well suited to an anthropological study and that's just what Canadian film-maker and anthropologist Sam Dunn and his colleague Scot McFadyen set out to do when they made Metal: A Headbanger's Journey.
Since the late 1960s, when British bands such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin blazed a trail that would lead to today's multifaceted heavy metal scene, myths, misconceptions and prejudices have surrounded metal music more than any other form. It has been lampooned in the film This is Spinal Tap, although the real-life documentary on Metallica, Some Kind of Monster (2003), showed that beyond the veil of humour is a genre that does indeed turn its amps up to 11 and take itself far too seriously.
Then there are the fans. The simple view of non-believers is that worshippers of heavy metal are the great unwashed, slaves to a barrage of gothic horror, unfeasibly loud guitars and predominantly black merchandising. Also, it is largely a male domain. This male has long hair, wears black and may have about his person piercings, tattoos or a signed photo of Cannibal Corpse's singer, George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher.
When not pursuing their passion, these social outcasts will be at home disembowelling domestic animals and offering their bodies up to the devil as thanks for Megadeth's last album. This last bit is not true.
Indeed metal music is much misunderstood and maligned. While it is perceived by many as being primal, tribal and perhaps a bit dumb, explore the craft further and it becomes clear that its protagonists and its devotees are playing with more than just the ace of spades.
"Metal confronts what we'd rather ignore," Dunn says.
"It celebrates what we often deny. It indulges what we fear most and that's why metal will always be a culture of outsiders."
Dunn, a heavy metal tragic whose previous anthropology project studied the plight of Guatemalan refugees, decided to set the record straight and rid the world of the Spinal Tap notions that make metal a laughing-stock for those who don't understand it.
Heavy metal rarely gets good press, or indeed much press at all, outside of its own world. There has always been the notion, to those who are not absorbed in it, that heavy metal music is something left well alone. It is, some say, the embodiment of evil, a view shared by some of its practitioners. One doesn't, for example, burn down churches because it looks good on video. One does it because one is in a heavy metal band and the church represents something contrary to one's beliefs. That was the story in Norway where, for a short period in the early 1990s, the hills were alive and spires afire to the sound of music by black metal band Burzum.
This may not be typical of the genre, but extremism in one form or another has always been a part of heavy metal since it was forged from blues and hard rock all those years ago. Satanism, or at the very least anti-Christian sentiment, is at the heart of many well-known bands, including Burzum, Slayer and Mayhem. Many bands incorporate gothic or religious imagery into their lyrics, their album artwork and their stage sets.
If this is alienating to some then, in true rock'n'roll fashion, that's the whole point.
Most of the above acts make appearances in A Headbanger's Journey, as do the likes of Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, Alice Cooper, Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister and Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson. The last is one of heavy metal's most eloquent frontmen and in the film he sheds light on the genre as a whole and his place in it, including the fact that he always projects his voice to the person sitting at the back of a 15,000-seat auditorium.
Just as entertaining, and central to Dunn's theme, is American band Twisted Sister's frontman Dee Snider.
He recalls in hilarious detail his grandstand performance when called by the US Congress in 1984 to testify, in a McCarthy-esque environment, about the group's lyrics and about metal in general. It seemed he had been summoned to become the whipping boy for heavy metal music.
Snider, who came prepared, won that battle. Congress made the mistake of underestimating the intelligence of the artist and the art with which it was dealing.
Back then, metal was still a relatively narrow form. Today, it has moved on, moved sideways, stretched out in so many directions it is impossible to categorise is as a whole. In a headspinning sequence in A Headbanger's Journey, Dunn unveils a handful of metal banners that split into a plethora of sub-genres, cross-genres and sub-sub-genres. There's power metal, for example, then thrash metal, speed metal, hardcore, classic metal, death metal and even operatic metal, the last of which has more to do with the vocal techniques rather than pedal-to-the-metal reworkings of Verdi.
That complexity, says Dunn, is part of heavy metal's appeal.
Black Asylum are familiar with the term cross-genres. The teenage band from the NSW central coast draws on many metal influences for their music, which is how they arrived at the term molten metal to describe it. The five-piece has been plying its trade across Australia for the past 18 months, although, since three of them are still at school, they have yet to commit full time to the cause. However, their commitment is not in question.
"We've all got busy lives but the band is No.1," singer Troy Harris says. "We find time at least a few days a week for a band meeting and we're always practising, rehearsing. The main thing about our music is it's so fresh and we're young and enthusiastic."
That could be said of bands all over the musical map, but bands such as Black Asylum are part of an Australian heavy metal culture that has remained, by and large, underground. Even the most prominent Australian metal acts, including AC/DC, have enjoyed more success overseas than at home. As the metal scene here continues to expand and diversify, it does so without the general public knowing much about it.
This, says Black Asylum's drummer Daniel Hewling, is due to a lack of radio exposure and access to gigs. But, as Dunn's film makes clear, metal's reputation as a subculture, as something that you belong to outside of the mainstream, is part of its attraction.
"Heavy metal's creating its own kind of scene as opposed to other kinds of music," Hewling says. It's a private club, in a way; an art form that is precious about its rituals as well as its music. Hewling goes on to paraphrase legendary metal frontman Ronnie James Dio, another star of Dunn's film, to reinforce the metal philosophy: "A metal fan sees his favourite band as a diamond. Every time one of his friends or someone who's not exactly true to that band takes a hold of that diamond, it takes away from the whole. Fans want to feel true to their band."
Another often overlooked aspect of metal is the degree of musicianship required to play it. Often the music, while raucous, involves intricate arrangements, complex shifts in rhythm and tempo and grandiose solos. As one commentator says in A Headbanger's Journey, had Wagner been alive today, he would have been in Deep Purple.
Of course Wagner would also have been a white male, as are most heavy metal purveyors: some have been accused of racism or sexism due to their lyrics or image.
Eighties band Girlschool are one of few female outfits to have thrived in this testosterone-fuelled domain.
Metal is violent, certainly, but how much of it is socks-down-the-trousers bravado and how much the work of Beelzebub? Hewling says the aggression in Black Asylum's music, and in metal generally, is crucial to the genre.
"It's an expression of energy that's common to a lot of people," he says. "A lot of people trademark heavy metal as the aggressive and angry thing. But the fans need the music to drive them and give them an outlet. It's a challenging thing. They are attracted to metal as a personal issue."
Much derided, then, heavy metal continues to swallow up the world, even if you can't always see it coming. It has a fan base of millions across the globe. Its power and its dollar potential for record companies cannot be denied when the likes of Metallica, Megadeth and, at the most accessible end,
AC/DC continue to sell in the millions. At the other end, its diversification into new sub-genres will keep metal alive and thriving for the foreseeable future.
* Metal: A Headbanger's Journey opens on November 16.
