By dwelling at such length on the lyrics, and mentioning Schopenhauer, I of course risk the capital vice of the writer-on-metal: I risk being intellectual. Nothing disgusts a metalhead more than to be intellectualized. Which is not to say that he himself is without conceit in that department. The metalhead, quite counter to stereotype, is floridly pretentious. He will call his band Sanctum of Carnality, or Thy Maleficence; he will steep himself in the Stygian prose of H. P. Lovecraft, possibly the most insane overwriter since Webster; he will root through his thesaurus to find a fancy word for “dismemberment”; he will make up his own words, heavy-sounding words, like thraft (High on Fire) and cleansation (Chimaira). But all of this is best understood as a kind of voodoo, a force field of metal-ness with which to ward off the triflers and non-tragedians, while simultaneously short-circuiting the apparatus of good taste, correctly identified by the proto-metalhead G. K. Chesterton as “the last and vilest of human superstitions.” Faddists and lightweights: keep your distance. Critic: we will make your brain explode.

Culturally, metal has lost its boogeyman privileges, having been superseded in infamy first by gangsta rap and then by Britney with her shaved head and her dangerous umbrella. Never say never, but it appears that the age of anti-metal litigation is also over—that it peaked in 1990 with the suit against Judas Priest, in which it was alleged that backward messages concealed on the album Stained Class had driven two fans to suicide. This, even more than a similar 1986 suit against Ozzy Osbourne, was metal’s Scopes trial: Priest front man Rob Halford, he of the four-octave range, cracked up the courtroom with a tape of the backward messages he had found in Stained Class, including one that seemed to say, “Hey look, Ma, my chair’s broken.”

The panicking parents of yesteryear now seem like characters from folk memory. An anti-metal case in our current climate might more appropriately be brought by Richard Dawkins or the Council for Secular Humanism, arraigning some metalhead for singing too loudly about damnation. Not every metal act subscribes to the cosmology of Geezer Butler as made manifest in the sound of Black Sabbath: metal today is produced with equal sincerity and efficacy by atheists and Christians, depressives and libertines, diabolists, miserablists, absurdists, and those whose only religion is metal itself. But when it starts to get heavy, dilating your blood vessels and stirring the roots of your hair, you know you are approaching the primary vision—of man besieged, man pulled apart, man suspended over gulfs of penal fire.

Nu metal, the big metal noise of the ’90s and early ’00s, has come and gone. Metalheads never really went for it—too much rapping in there, and not enough warlocks. Where was the dread? The moral-astronomical scale? The itchy, hybrid bounce-crunch of Korn and Limp Bizkit seemed linked less to metal’s traditional concerns than to the blocked ducts and thwarted entitlements of a generation of football players. But even here metal was still performing at least one of its offices, doing bootleg rage therapy for a mass audience: in the moiling and roaring of Korn’s Jonathan Davis, especially, something fundamental seemed to be seeking an outlet. Other bands of the era had more typically metallic preoccupations. Fear Factory was obsessed with technology and the dissolution of the individual: “Must not surrender my God to anyone,” sang Burton C. Bell, “or this body will become carrion!” Slipknot, masked and boilersuited, the maddest of them all, had its fans going about in T-shirts that read People = Shit. Which is, you must admit, succinct.