Heavy metal is my one true love. I would marry the music of Suffocation if I could. Heard of the Mozart Effect? I have that with Beneath The Massacre. Listening to heavy metal has become such second nature to me that I forget how brutal it is compared to the music most other people listen to and blast Necrophagist when I have friend round for a coffee, usually to their extreme disapproval. Apparently it’s hard to drink coffee while I’m headbanging opposite. Whatever. I think Josh Barnett would approve, and that’s all that matters.
I’ve never given too much thought why I like heavy metal, but psychologists at the University of Westminster in the UK have, and actually tested people to see if there were any common personality traits between metalheads. A medium-sized test of around 400 people (of which around half were college students) involved asking them to listen to samples of heavy metal music then fill out a questionnaire designed to measure the participants score on a scale for five personality traits.
It turns out that the people who rated the heavy metal music the highest were males with a need to feel unique, a dislike of authority and low self esteem. Strangely enough, a like for heavy metal was also correlated to openness, which I wouldn’t personally think was commonly found in the same person with low self esteem, which sets off my BS alarm a little.
To me, this sounds like almost any teenage or college age dude I know. Those stupid university researchers couldn’t ever understand my love for heavy metal anyway. It’s not like I even listen to mainstream stuff, I only listen to death metal on cassette so I don’t think this even applies to me.
See what I did there?