The records are not bad for you. The volume they are played at can be, and the crowd they are played to has occasionally been, and those are separate charges that forty years of argument over whether heavy metal music is bad for you kept stacking on the same shelf as the lyric sheet. The lyric sheet has been acquitted. The loudspeaker has not.
For most of the eighties the case against the music was argued inside a fairground hall of mirrors, where a teenager in a denim jacket walked in at one end and came out at the other stretched into a Satanist, squashed into a delinquent and bent into a suicide risk, until a later generation of researchers put a boot through the glass and measured the boy himself. What they found was ordinary. Ordinary took twenty years to prove.
The team that took the heaviest charge apart first, questioning 275 French-speaking secondary school pupils aged 14 to 18 around Montreal and setting their taste in music against their family lives, drug use and attitudes, was led by the psychologist Eric Lacourse, with Michel Claes and Martine Villeneuve. Their paper in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence in 2001 found that a preference for heavy metal was not significantly related to suicidal risk once the other risk factors were counted.
Is heavy metal music bad for you? Start with the mind
The Montreal study had a second finding that the accusers never quoted. Among the girls only, using music for what the authors called vicarious release, letting the song carry the feeling so the listener did not have to, was linked to lower suicidal risk rather than higher; the same link did not hold for the boys in the sample. The earlier surveys and the anger experiments of 2015 are set out in the trouble chapter. The later work points the same way.
The music therapist who, with the psychiatrist William Bor, reviewed the research linking music to antisocial behaviour, drug use and vulnerability to suicide was Felicity Baker, of the University of Queensland, and their paper in Australasian Psychiatry in 2008 reached a careful conclusion. A strong preference for loud, angry music can be a sign that a young person is struggling. It is a signal, not a cause.
That distinction is the whole quarrel. The correlational surveys of the eighties worked like a photograph taken with the shutter left open all afternoon, everything that passed through the room burnt onto one plate at once, the family rows, the school, the drink, the records on the turntable, all of it smeared into a single grey figure that the heresy hunters then read as a portrait of the music. Take the picture properly and the records stand apart from the rest.
The Macquarie University psychologist who went looking for the harm in the most violent corner of the whole family was William Forde Thompson. With Andrew Geeves and Kirk Olsen he played sixty second excerpts of death metal to 48 fans and 97 people who were not, and reported in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture in 2019 that the fans felt power, joy, peace and wonder while the unbelieving felt tension, anger and fear. Same music, opposite rooms. The listener decided which.
The case for caution has an institutional voice too. The professional body that told doctors to ask teenagers what they listened to, and to treat a fixation on violent or despairing lyrics as a possible marker of trouble worth a closer look, was the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a policy statement on music, lyrics and music videos published in the journal Pediatrics in November 2009. It warned. It did not accuse. On any honest reading the statement and the studies agree.
It is a signal, not a cause.
The ears keep the only real score
Hearing is where the harm is measurable. A heavy metal concert near the front of the hall commonly measures 100 to 115 decibels, and the damage done by sound depends on level and time together, so the same set that is safe for a few minutes is not safe for two hours. The World Health Organization's global standard for safe listening venues, published in 2022, sets a limit of 100 decibels averaged over fifteen minutes. A loud show heard from near the stage can exceed it.
The clearest test of what that does was run at an outdoor festival in Amsterdam in September 2015. A team at University Medical Center Utrecht led by Geert Jan Ramakers gave earplugs to 25 of 51 adult volunteers and none to the other 26, and after an afternoon averaging about 100 decibels, 42 per cent of the unprotected group had a measurable temporary loss of hearing against 8 per cent of those with plugs. The trial was published in JAMA Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery in June 2016. Temporary loss that is repeated can become permanent. Ringing in the ears after the show, the tinnitus most concertgoers have felt at least once, was also more common in the group without plugs: newly reported tinnitus turned up in 40 per cent of the unprotected volunteers against 12 per cent of those wearing plugs.
The music has always treated volume as a boast. The trio that took No Sleep 'til Hammersmith, a live album recorded on its 1981 tour, to number one on the British chart that June, and whose later live album was titled Everything Louder than Everyone Else, was Motörhead. The record was cut over three nights, in Leeds and Newcastle, at the end of March 1981. The band played at the volume its titles promised.
The American band that has made loudness a claim to fame in its own right, with volume records measured at its own shows since the eighties, is Manowar, and "Warriors of the World United" is the anthem the crowd shouts back at that level. Guinness World Records credited the band as the loudest band on Earth in 1984, a title Manowar went on to reclaim more than once before the category was retired over its own safety risk. The record shows the boast was sincere.
All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.
Paracelsus, Seven Defences (1538)
The dose is the answer to the question. Foam earplugs cost pennies, musicians' plugs with a flat filter cost the price of a shirt at the merchandise stand, and neither takes the weight out of the riff: a flat filter turns down bass, mid and treble by roughly the same amount instead of muffling the top end first. A fan who wears them hears the same concert, a little quieter, for another forty years.
The neck, the crowd and the courts
The neck has its own medical file, from a modelling study in the British Medical Journal in 2008 to case reports published since, and it says the same thing as the ears. The danger lies in the motion and its intensity, not in the music that sets it going.
Crowds have killed people at metal shows, and that record belongs in plain words. On 20 August 1988, at the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park, two young men, Alan Dick, 18, and Landon Siggers, 20, died in a crush in the mud near the stage during the set by Guns N' Roses, in front of a crowd of about 107,000. The band stopped playing more than once while fans were pulled from the crush, and Axl Rose asked the crowd to move back, but the group learned the full extent of what had happened only after the show ended. The festival did not take place the following year. Crowd safety at British festivals changed after it.
The one charge that never had evidence behind it was the one that reached the courts: that a song could make a listener take his own life. Judges rejected it every time, and the plainest record of how is Ozzy and the Suicide Solution lawsuit. A song about despair is not an order.
The verdict
| Charge | Evidence | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| It drives listeners to suicide | Lacourse, Claes and Villeneuve, 2001 | Not supported |
| It makes fans callous about violence | Sun, Lu, Williams and Thompson, 2019 | Not supported |
| It fills fans with anger and fear | Thompson, Geeves and Olsen, 2019 | Not supported for fans |
| It damages hearing | Ramakers and colleagues, 2016 | Supported at concert volume, and preventable |
| Crowds can be dangerous | Donington, 1988 | Real, and a matter of crowd management |
So is heavy metal music bad for you? Not the songs, not the lyrics and not the taste for them, which the evidence has cleared of every charge the eighties laid at their door. The risks are physical and ordinary, the same ones any loud music in any crowded room carries, and they are managed with earplugs, water and a barrier that holds. The sect the pulpits feared turned out to be a crowd of people enjoying themselves. The records never hurt anybody. The speaker stacks are another matter.
