CityLab, a blog dedicated to the people ‘who are creating the cities of the future—and those who want to live there’ published an article a bit out of their league as they tried to find out where the heavy metal bands are. I got the news via Rolling Stone and the resulting map (see above), also published on Reddit and Flowdata, couldn’t be clearer: metal is especially popular in Scandinavia, but also in Europe, North America and Australia whereas Africa, Indonesia, China, India couldn’t care less about it. It’s effectively well established that people from Sweden, Norway and Finland and Iceland are metal heads as there are numerous metal bands coming from these countries. Since we always want to find an explanation, geography and personality are advanced to explain this phenomenon. Geography may be an explanation indeed, as all these metal-loving regions have very cold winters, and the author of the article, Richard Florida, even writes that metal darkness reflects ‘northern Europe’s long, cold winter nights’. Beside this, there’s the violence of the genre that could be correlated with ‘Scandinavia’s pagan past’ or even ‘high levels of alcoholism’?? In this case wouldn’t Russia be ahead?
However it is less clear regarding personality. City Lab quotes Dan Levitin who identifies ‘heavy metal as part of an “intense music preference” defined by music that is distorted, loud, percussive and fast and linked to aggressive personality types.’ But are people from Finland more aggressive than people from China? I don’t buy it, Scandinavians may have been Vikings in the past but they are not more vehement than Latinos, no way!
Florida got another idea, and did examine, with the help of his colleague at the Martin Prosperity Institute, a possible correlation between economics, social factors and heavy metal popularity: ‘What we found is that that the number of heavy metal bands in a given country is associated with its wealth and affluence. At the country-level, the number of heavy metal bands per capita is positively associated with economic output per capita (.71); level of creativity (.71) and entrepreneurship (.66); share of adults that hold college degrees (.68); as well as overall levels of human development (.79), well-being, and satisfaction with life (.60).’
Sure these Nordic countries are very big on social safety, free education, and universal healthcare… could it be the explanation? Could Metal be the music of the wealthy socially-advanced high-quality-of-life societies? Florida concludes ‘Strange as it may seem, heavy metal springs not from the poisoned slag of alienation and despair but the loamy soil of post-industrial prosperity. This makes sense after all: while new musical forms may spring from disadvantaged, disgruntled, or marginalized groups, it is the most advanced and wealthy societies that have the media and entertainment companies that can propagate new sounds and genres, as well as the affluent young consumers with plenty of leisure time who can buy it.’
However, I am very big on ‘a correlation doesn’t mean a causation’, wouldn’t we get the same thing with hardcore? Or punk or grunge? How many grunge bands from Africa do you know? They counted the number of bands per 100,000 people and it seems logical to think there’s gonna be more bands of any genre, in rich, socially advanced countries than in underdeveloped ones. The only correlation that could eventually exist, could be with the nihilistic mentality of these countries. Scandinavians are predominately atheists, just like many of these metal bands… Slayer, Motorhead,… but there are also so many Satanic ones which is totally different story and we are back to the beginning, so what does it mean? At the end metal is just a white people thing, right?
