Happy metal: not all metal is negative

The metalhead stereotype can be unforgiving. Based on the cacophony of growls, guitars distorted beyond recognition, and blast beats, you'd figure the people who enjoy listening to this dissonance must have seen some shit, or perhaps something's wrong with them to begin with. Totally understandable; metalheads acting like idiots regularly make the news. The vocalist of As I Lay Dying (right) was just arrested for allegedly plotting to kill his wife, some fans love Slayer so much they pause carving the band's name into their skin with knives (warning: slightly graphic) to spray pentagrams on tombstones in cemeteries, and a woman was raped in the mosh pit during the Limp Bizkit set at Woodstock 1999. 

The aggression and energy of metal is frequently construed as the release of negative emotion. Yet, a lot of metal  can be interpreted as happy or uplifting. Especially in progressive metal, the music often tells a story of "this is just the way it is," devoid of an angry message aimed at someone. Any aggression from the vocals or instruments merely adds weight to the story, the anguish of being mistreated or wailing at the illogical injustice of losing a loved one. Sometimes, the energy and intensity can be used to tell a positive or happy message, too, as I'll show below.

This or the Apocalypse - "Lamnidae"

Vocals: clean, shouting
"Lamnidae" is one of my favorite metal songs. Here's a link to an (imperfect) drum cover I did of it two years ago. What I love about this song is the sense of positive energy you get from it, of camaraderie, going through a difficulty as brothers. The lyrics of the chorus are especially inspiring when coupled with the guitar (and the drummer effortlessly flipping the sticks): "Broken, relentless / Show them more heart than scars / Never give in / Stop holding your breath and start making your mark."

Between the Buried and Me - "Astral Body"
Vocals: clean, growling
Even with the growling at 1:38, the first half of this song just has such an optimistic, open feel. I particularly love 2:11, especially the 32nd-note bass drum rolls right before the hitting the snare, which give it more of a kick. The rest of the song alternates between neutral and aggressive tones, but for an album opener, the beginning of "Astral Body" has a lot of optimistic energy.

Intervals - "Mata Hari"
Vocals: none
It's really hard to write about music, especially instrumental pieces. "Mata Hari" is a guitar-driven story about... life? I envision daily life; the chorus is about that golden end point you're working towards, and the verses are about the daily grind (though quite a bit more epic than staring at a computer screen in an office). Perhaps it's easier to just listen to it and form your own conclusions. At 1:28, the distorted guitars undoubtedly have undertones of aggression, but I just get a feeling of optimism, like taking your energy and devoting it to pushing towards where you want to be. And slightly unrelated... but 2:36 is so awesome.

 

Killswitch Engage - "Holy Diver" (Dio cover)
Vocals: clean, shouting
Metal is all about intensity. While definitely awesome, this intensity shouldn't always be taken too seriously. Bands like iwrestledabearonce constantly poke fun at metal (while still delivering awesome metal) and others like Protest the Hero try to tell progressively more ridiculous stories in each of their music videos. Killswitch Engage covered the early 80's metal classic "Holy Diver" but kicked up the tempo and ridiculousness (especially in the music video). I can't help but find this stuff funny and awesome, a high-energy, apparently very serious song that's hilarious when you read the actual lyrics and picture trying to say them in any non-metal context (e.g. "Ride the tiger / you can see his stripes but you know he's clean / Oh don't you see what I mean?").

Notable mentions

Periphery - "Insomnia"
Vocals: clean, screaming, growling

Most of the song is high-energy, with plenty of screaming, guitar wizardry and crazy drums (just listen to the intro for awesome chaos). There is one riff, though, that I always feel describes an interesting sense of elation and freedom. The lead guitar from 2:18 - 2:30, particularly the rising notes at 2:23, has less of an aggressive and angry "fighting back" tone than... ecstatic, jubilant, free (at least, in my opinion!). 

John Petrucci - "Glasgow Kiss"
Vocals: none

You could argue that this is more rock than metal, so I've placed this under notable mentions. This is one of the most optimistic, happy metal songs I know. I really like how the drummer plays on the ride cymbal during the chorus (e.g. 0:14) and the odd-time at 2:30 (or is it 8/8?? I can't tell...).

Necrophagist - "Extreme Unction"
Vocals: growling
I don't know, something about this song just makes me so happy, like playing peekaboo with babies or taking a puppy for a walk in a sunny field. (In all seriousness, I'd be very surprised to find a "happy" death metal song. I wonder if it's part of the definition. And side note: the way the vocalist's fingers move like spiders on the guitar neck while he's still growling the chorus at 1:47 is sick.)

TesseracT - "Concealing Fate p.1"

This is part one of the six-song “Concealing Fate” movement by TesseracT. Ex-vocalist Dan Thompkins described it as “a concept album based on life and its obstacles.” In my interpretation, the music tells such an interesting story of struggle and perseverance. This blog post is about the first song in the series, “Acceptance,” which I consider a masterpiece from start to finish. Despite being almost nine minutes long, I’ve listened to this song so many times that it’s one of very few songs I can drum to (my version of singing along, since I have zero vocal talent) without having the song playing. This is the song that got me into TesseracT.

Band: TesseracT
Song: "Concealing Fate part I - 'Acceptance'"
Vocals: clean, screamed

0:00 – 1:14
Sunrise in a post-apocalyptic world, traversing a barren city on foot. Memories of people and places briefly coloring what you see before the vision returns to desolation. 

1:15 – 1:43
The slow eerie guitar in the intro continues in the background when the rest of the band kicks in, detached but impossible to forget, a hawk high above. The way the notes are briefly pulled to the foreground before fading to the background is like thoughts that float to the spotlight of your consciousness before retreating into the mire, or like waking from a dream in the middle of the night before falling slowly back asleep. The intensity of the notes gives this sense of urgency, which is combined with a progression that says "this is the way things are, regardless of how you feel about it." It fits with the post-apocalyptic theme in that the world around you is intense, painful, bleak, but you just have to keep going. 

Jay Postones, the drummer, has an interesting way of keeping the beat but accenting the guitars and maintaining intensity, as well. The simplest way to explain this is to describe each layer:

Base layer: keeping time
 -    Right hand: quarter notes on the china cymbal. This is very intense because quarter notes have lots of space in between them, so it’s basically china…snare!...china…snare!, and chinas are the sharpest-sounding type of cymbal. Here's a clip of Chad Smith from Red Hot Chili Peppers demoing a china
 -    Left foot: 8th notes on the hi-hat. This gives the band a little more support to stay on rhythm
 -    Left hand: hitting the snare drum in the middle and end of the measure. Normal

2nd layer: accenting the guitars
 -    Left hand: in between keeping time on the snare, hitting crash and splash cymbals to accent what the guitars are doing
 -    Right hand: in between keeping time on the china, also hitting crash and splash cymbals
 -    Right foot: hitting the bass drum to give extra kick to these additional cymbal hits. Note that it's completely disassociated from his left foot, which is plodding along eight notes

Basically, this whole thing is like patting you head, rubbing your stomach, juggling, reciting Shakespeare, and dancing simultaneously. 

1:44 – 1:58
Super intense, love it. The lyrics here are “Now show your hands / you have no right to complicate.” The guitars create this rolling feel by having a riff that doesn’t last the entire measure and then repeats before the drums have finished the measure. An abstract way of thinking of it is like Least Common Multiples... if 3 is the guitars and 4 is the drums, they start at the same point but have to go through three measures before they meet up again. I like to imagine the rolling as the deluge/stampede of water horses that Arwen summons in The Fellowship of the Ring.

1:59 – 2:42
This section exemplifies what I love about double bass drumming. Beginning with a rolling, almost skipping feel, it transitions to a heavy, forward-moving rhythm. While single-bass drumming, common in rock music, gets the job done, I find double bass to be such a simple addition that can add so much more to the song. This section is also interesting because the guitars follow the drum pattern, instead of the other way around.

2:43 – 3:21
I envision pushing vs. slackening here, like struggling through opposition but then being pushed down and catching your breath before trying again. This can be as abstract as the course of life itself, or you can interpret it more literally as fighting that huge dog monster on the left.

3:22 – 3:57 
After the intensity of the previous section, you're left catching your breath, alone, distant. I imagine a space battle several hundred years in the future, where you've managed to escape in a one-person pod, a small vessel released from a doomed ship. Now you wander the stars, unsure of your fate.

3:58 – 4:50
The previous buildup and resulting release of energy follow the same pattern as the beginning of the song. Right before this part begins (~3:54) it sounds like a bomb nearing the ground. Then: explosions. Organized chaos while the eerie guitar from the previous section haunts the background and phases in and out irregularly, like a choppy TV screen. 

This section demonstrates really well how a subtle change in the drums can influence the pace and feel. In the first half, Jay rides a large crash cymbal, so the cymbal is still reverberating (making a lot of noise) when he hits it again. This creates a constant sound. In the second half, Jay switches to a china cymbal, which has a much shorter half-life (for lack of a better term). This gives the second half a feeling of movement, of stepping forward with each china hit. Here's an expertly-designed diagram on the right. The peaks indicate striking the cymbal.

4:51 – 5:17
Hopes, regrets, life. As Protest the Hero said in "Tongue Splitter," "If you don't regret nothing, then you might as well be dead."

5:18 – 6:00
I feel this best encapsulates the theme of acceptance in the song. It somehow describes the flow of life as well, pushing again and again, like 5:26 - 5:29 with the bass drum, meanwhile being pulled backwards, as symbolized by the guitar note sliding downwards at 5:27, like a groan or release of breath. Interestingly, the drums follow the opposite crash-china pattern from two sections ago by starting with the progression/steps feel of the china and switching to the broader crash sound in the second half. 

6:01 – 6:16
Explosions, electricity, release of energy. Just silently headbang in acknowledgement.

6:17 – 6:30
This is the same as the previous section but made 'djent'-er. Djent is a subgenre of progressive metal that features palm-muted guitars and often really weird time signatures. (Here's a medley of the band Meshuggah, one of the fathers of djent.) In "Acceptance," the riff now sounds metallic, grinding, more like the cogs of a machine.

6:31 – 6:53
Beautiful, beautiful release. I imagine escaping from a cramped, sweaty, dark factory and flying over a forest, through mountains, perhaps into space. I love how the guitars tone down in the second half, which feels more aggressive and darker. 

6:54 – 7:15
Catching your breath, a moment of serenity. In a space shuttle in the silence of space, looking out the window at the Earth below. Or as in this epic picture to the left, gazing over a hill at two deities in the calm before the storm. A god and his vessel? A savior and a destroyer? Embracing the moment of not knowing. 


7:16 – 7:52
The final confrontation, memories of your path up to this point circling your vision as you proceed to the end. To your judgment? To the next chapter of your life, or of all life on Earth?

7:53 – 8:50
Resolution. The hand has been played, now the consequences are unfolding. The end of the intensity at 8:15, immediately replaced by the sound of the oncoming, of white light, like slowly awakening on your back in the woods, your mouth dry and lips cracked, arms and legs sore with no memory of how you got there. As your eyes adjust, you see footsteps in the dirt leading around the corner, hinting at explanations, symbolized by the quiet, mysterious guitar beginning at 8:30. This guitar is also the beginning of the second part of the Concealing Fate saga, "Deception."

Note: all pictures are from the YouTube videos for "Acceptance" and "Deception." I don't know any of the artist credits, so if you recognize any of these, let me know so I can give credit to the phenomenal job the artists did.

Misconceptions about evolution II

This is part two of a two-part blog post aimed at addressing misconceptions about evolution. This part addresses misunderstandings in the details of how evolution works. For the first part (addressing claims that evolution doesn't exist), click here.

Even among people who accept that evolution occurs and feel they have a decent understanding of it, the finer details of how evolution occurs are still fairly tricky. I've tried to synthesize primary literature and popular press articles here to help explain some confusion.

1. “Evolution means organisms are becoming better.”
Evolution is just a change in the frequencies of characteristics in a population. Natural selection (one way through which evolution can occur) means these changes are in response to the environment. The environment can change, however, and what was advantageous last year might not be so this year. In great tits, the size of beech crop that spring (the number of beech seeds) can select for either thorough or superficial explorers, for example, though the size of the crop varies every year. 

Also, a species can just as easily evolve towards decreased complexity. Many cave-dwelling species have lost eyes and pigmentation because the energy required to develop and maintain those features isn’t worth it when they’re not being used. Similarly, while humans have highly developed respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems relative to ants, ants compose 15-20% of the Earth's terrestrial biomass and do quite fine without all that extra morphological complexity. 

2. “Evolution is for the betterment of the species.”
While group selection is a topic of hot debate among evolutionary biologists, the discussion concerns details separate from this misconception (e.g. why honeybees will continue to serve their hive if they can’t reproduce and pass on their own genes). A common example of the “betterment of the species” misunderstanding is of lemmings drowning themselves to prevent overpopulation. The idea is that when density gets too high and there just aren’t enough resources to go around, some of the lemmings should off themselves to prevent the collapse of the whole group. While this sounds tempting, the problem is that it would never evolve. 

This comic by Gary Larson actually illustrates the point perfectly: if just one individual can cheat the system (i.e. not kill itself), the cheater can reproduce and pass on its ‘cheater’ alleles to the next generation. Hence, the mass suicide would be undermined. If anything, this would be extremely fast selection against doing something that altruistic, because anyone that had the alleles to do that wouldn’t survive to pass them on. 

Another way of addressing this misconception is reiterating that evolution does not have a ‘goal.’ Organisms do not become perfectly adapted to their environments, and they’re not proceeding towards some end point of higher consciousness or complexity. Consider the horseshoe crab, which has stayed relatively the same for 150-200 million years. 

3. “Humans are not currently evolving.”
While we may have greatly diminished the effects of natural selection due to technological and medical advances, we are still undergoing mutation, gene flow, and small levels of genetic drift. The pressures we faced in our hunter-gatherer days are quite different from today, now that we live in much higher densities and have entirely different diets. The gene for the enzyme lactase, which digests the sugar lactose in milk, for example, evolved and spread through European populations merely ~7,000 years ago. Another recent development is human resistance to malaria.

4. “Humans are more evolved than other species.”
If the common ancestor hypothesis is correct, and more life didn’t come crashing onto Earth via an asteroid or something, all species on Earth today have undergone the same amount of evolutionary time. While humans may possess higher cognitive ability than other species, this has nothing to do with how much evolution has occurred. Even relatively-unchanged species like the aforementioned horseshoe crab have been evolving this entire time, albeit through more of an internal "fine tuning" than a rearranging of body plan. 
 
5. “Humans cannot influence evolution.”
This idea overlooks how humans have selected for dog breeds, crop output, and antibiotic resistance in bacteria, HIV, malaria, and cancer. Humans have long knowingly and unknowingly selected for favorable traits in the crops that give us our food or for the animals we keep as pets. Outside of direct human-organism interaction, climate change has changed the breeding and migration of several species and the appearance of cities has selected for behavioral and morphological traits of animals living there. As we change our environment, we inevitably change the animals, plants, and microbes within it as well.  The direction of that change, towards extinction or successful coexistence, is up to us.
 
This list is not exhaustive.  I found ideas for which misconceptions to address from the following sources: 

• Wikipedia: "List of common misconceptions - evolution"
• UC Berkeley's "Understanding evolution"
• Talk Origins: "Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution"

This is part two of a two-part blog post. To read about how to address claims that evolution doesn't exist, click here.  

Misconceptions about evolution I

This is part one of a two-part blog post aimed at addressing misconceptions about evolution. This part addresses claims that evolution doesn't exist. For the second part (addressing misunderstandings in how evolution works), click here.

Before I jump into a loaded topic, let me preface with a few notes. Firstly, this post is not an attack on religion/spirituality. The theory of evolution does not preclude belief in the supernatural because faith and science are separate and non-exclusive entities (e.g. deism). Science is a process of discovering new facts about the world and forming conclusions from them, while faith is a set of beliefs concerning what we can’t empirically measure. Just as this post is not an attack on religion, it is also not a defense of atheism.

Second, this post is not an attempt to lecture anyone. I don’t expect someone who doesn’t believe in evolution to read this and suddenly accept it. Rather, this post is meant to clarify misconceptions on evolution that are often cited in arguments against it. I would hope that any reader of this blog who encounters someone who doesn’t believe in evolution would use this post’s contents as a means to inform, not insult. Open-minded discussion, I think, is the key to any sort of reconciliation between people who don’t see eye to eye. 

While this post will explain what evolution isn’t, let me briefly explain what evolution is. Evolution is a change in allele frequencies in a population from one generation to the next. Alleles are gene variants; for example, the genes for eye color will have alleles for blue eyes, brown eyes, etc. Evolution means that the gene pool of Generation 2 isn’t identical to Generation 1. These changes can come from:

• natural selection (e.g. due to a drought, an island’s plants only produce small seeds and large-billed finches die because they have nothing to eat. Because they didn’t reproduce, the alleles for large bill size are not passed on. Next year, the average finch bill size is smaller),
• mutation (e.g. an error in DNA replication leads to a slightly-different protein being produced every time the cell divides),
• genetic drift (e.g. rats hidden on a cargo ship come onto an island with no rats. While the parent population on the mainland may have had a wide range of coat colors, only the migrant rats’ coat color alleles will get passed on. If no one has a white allele, no baby is going to be white), and 
• gene flow (e.g. male elephants from outside the herd immigrate and mate with the females).

Most of the time, an error in DNA replication (mutation) does nothing because it’s in an area of the DNA that never gets coded anyway (i.e. “junk DNA”). When the error is in an area that is coded, the organism often dies (or rather, is never born) because the new protein produced from that DNA usually doesn’t do what the organism needs for survival. Rarely, the mutation actually makes the protein better, or a big segment of DNA is accidentally copied so now there are two identical proteins being produced, so any mutations one copy gets can accumulate because there’s still another functioning copy (i.e. paralogs). On enormous time scales, these mutations can accumulate and completely change how an organism looks internally and externally. However, for every successful species we see today, there are billions of species that didn’t make it. This means that they hit an evolutionary dead-end; the mutations that got passed on and accumulated either led to a body plan or behavior that just couldn’t compete with a different species, or the environment changed (e.g. an asteroid strike) and the morphology that worked before just didn’t work any longer.

So, let’s get started on the misconceptions!

1. “Evolution is a ‘theory,’ which means it hasn’t been accepted by scientists.”
While theory in the colloquial sense refers to something we’re not sure about, a scientific theory refers to an explanation of a natural phenomenon that is strongly supported by experimental evidence. See the theory of gravity or the theory of electromagnetism.

2. “Scientists often disagree with one another, which indicates we shouldn’t trust evolution.”
Science works because it can be tested, and that testing can come from incredibly varied viewpoints. A hypothesis cannot be accepted unless it can be refuted, so scientific discoveries are always very carefully worded; you never ‘prove’ anything in science, you only disprove all known alternatives at the time. But the beauty of science is that ideas can be refuted. If the sun rose from the west tomorrow, we’d have some serious rethinking to do regarding our accepted explanation for how the Earth rotates. Or if an Italian guy pointed a telescope at Jupiter and discovered moons orbiting it, we’d have to reconsider our belief that everything in the Solar System orbits the Earth… or did that already happen??

In all seriousness, while researchers may argue over the details of evolution (e.g. whether sympatric speciation is possible), evolution itself has been long ago accepted as the best explanation for life’s diversity. As the community gains more information, it may refine evolutionary theory, but this does not mean that the theory is flawed.

3. “The complexity of today’s species could not have happened by chance.”
Biologists agree! That’s because the complexity didn’t happen by chance. Today’s species are an accumulation of changes that happened over billions of years. An analogy that opponents of evolution use is that you have a slot machine with 50 slots. Each slot has a letter, and there are 27 options for each slot (all the letters of the alphabet, and a space). You pull the machine’s lever, and all the slots start spinning. You would have to pull the lever 3.7 x 10^71 times before you’d get the sentence “I am a dancing banana man and I love peanut butter.” But evolution doesn’t operate like that; it’s an incremental process. Say, instead, the fourth time you pulled the lever, you got an ‘I’ in the first slot and you got to keep it. A few pulls later, you get the space in the second slot and get to keep it. In this way, you’d eventually build that full glorious sentence.

A real-life example to consider is bacterial resistance to antibiotics. If you took Antibiotics A, B, C, D, and E and ran them all through a bacterial culture, it’d be extremely unlikely that any cell would survive that onslaught. If you expose the bacteria to a small dose of Antibiotic A, though, a lot of cells would die but a few would likely survive due to having a mutation that protects them against that antibiotic. Those cells, suddenly facing no competition from other bacteria, would multiply like crazy. Repeat this process one by one with the other antibiotics… and at the end, you’ll probably have superbugs resistant to all five antibiotics.

4. “If evolution is real, why are there still chimpanzees around?”
Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees; humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor 5-8 million years ago. With the exception of species that humans have artificially selected for (e.g. dogs coming from wolves), no species today coexists with its ancestor.

5. “Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.”
Another way of saying this would be that the entropy of a closed system cannot decrease, and that if the Earth is a closed system, increasing complexity (e.g. a human has a more developed respiratory and circulatory system than a fish) thanks to evolution can’t occur. However, the Earth is not a closed system because it receives energy from the sun. Also, the second law of thermodynamics refers to energy in a system, which is unrelated to morphological complexity.

This list is not exhaustive. I found ideas for which misconceptions to address from the following sources: 

• Wikipedia: "List of common misconceptions - evolution"
• UC Berkeley's "Understanding evolution"
• Talk Origins: "Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution"

This is part one of a two-part blog post. To read about misconceptions on the details of how evolution works, click here.