Why The Devil Hates Metal

It all started with Black Sabbath. Some young men from Birmingham, England that created a new style of music and added a new concept to it.

They first came up with the idea of shocking people by music, since people did pay to get scared. It was an era horror movies were popular and it is a genre that seems not to get out of fashion.

So if people would buy a ticket to get scared in a cinema, why not make them buy music to get the same effect?

That was what the boys from Black Sabbath thought and they did so. Changing riffs and creating a new sound for guitar might also have been due to the fact that their guitar player, Tony Iommi, had lost a part of his finger during an accident in the metal factory he was working.

When Ozzy Osbourne left the band, he was replaced by Ronny James Dio, who introduced the devil’s hand to the metal scene.

Now how diabolic are those guys? Dio means God and the sign he had learned from his grandmother and this making a fist with your index and little finger up is a sign to ban the devil.

Is it so shocking? Well, consider you dress up on Halloween as a monster to scare off real monsters. Evil fears itself. Tradition says that a mirror is a better weapon against evil than any other weapon. Maybe that is why vampires might not have a mirror image as an adaptation to survive.

So back to the devil. He is used in heavy and power metal music as a metaphor. Yes, shock rockers do sing about him, but they also seem to fear him, since they use the devil’s hand to scare him off.

It is shocking like a horror movie and many traditional metal artists are not satanist. If so, why does Ronny James Dio mostly wears a Celtic crucifix and not a twisted cross?

Here we go a step further. Yes, there are bands who got carried away and started worshipping the devil and not only use him as a shock metaphor. Look at Iron Maiden. Their mascot Eddy is a good example to show it is just entertainment.

This is mainly black metal and some forms of black metal. Do not confuse it with pagan metal. Many pagan metal bands also sing against Catholic church, but traditional pagans do not really believe in Satan as an entity like pictured in Christianity and some other monotheistic religions.

For some black metal bands satanism is just a way to shock as well and they might be not so bad as they seem, but there are exceptions. Some bands do cross lines and sometimes they blame the music to commit crimes.

But be honest: will you kill somebody because music says you should? Will fathers take axes because they hear a song like “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter”?

I do not think so. Many commit crimes because of other factors. Black metal musicians who end up in jail because of their actions, acted out of a ideology or because they believe Satan had told them.

This is insanity and there are also rappers in jail for murder or rape. They do sing about their actions and even state that it is cool.

So why blame metal music for people crossing the line? I think that if there is one form of music Satan might hate, it is metal, because it does not fear to show his true face and to shock people enough so they might think.