Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from Heavy Metal

“You’ve seen Iron Maiden live?”

That’s what one of my students asked me as he stared incredulously and then laughed a little. Students tend to assume that teachers either don’t listen to music at all or that we only pipe Muzak into our homes while we think of innovative ways to make their lives miserable.

I enjoy a lot of different music, but I was a teenager in the 1980s, the decadent decade of, blue frosted eye shadow and shoulder pads. It was also the heyday of heavy metal music, what we now call “old school” metal.

In elementary school, I swooned over Shaun Cassidy and Andy Gibb. In junior high, I graduated to Duran Duran. But, In high school, I couldn’t get enough of Motley Crue, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and yes, Iron Maiden. I loved the operatic quality of the singing, the technical musicianship of a smokin’ guitar solo, and the epic story telling of the songs.

Heavy metal, more than anything perhaps, is about attitude. It’s not necessarily about “Breakin’ the Law” in the literal sense. It’s about breaking the status quo. It’s about saying, “We’re not gonna take it, and if you try to make us, some heads are gonna roll.”

It taught me to overcome adversity even in the face of incredible odds. It taught me that that even though I might not fit in everywhere I go, I am always welcomed by the leather- and denim-wearing, ,  long-haired world-wide metal clan.

Listening to heavy metal and attending heavy metal concerts taught me not to judge people by their looks because some of the nicest, most helpful people I’ve ever met are metal enthusiasts. And it might be easy to assume because of the way they look or talk that heavy metal musicians aren’t very educated, but if that’s what you think,  you’ve got another thing comin’. 

Metallica wrote songs inspired by H.P. Lovecraft (“The Call of Ktulu”), John Donne and Ernest Hemingway (“For Whom the Bell Tolls”). Manowar offers up an epic based on Homer’s Iliad (“Achilles, Agony and Ecstasy”); Led Zeppelin (considered by some to be the first heavy metal band) retells the story of The Lord of the Rings (“Ramble On”). And yes, Iron Maiden was even inspired to set to music Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

I can still distinctly remember talking to a classmate at Kent State when he asked me what plans I had for the weekend. It just so happened that I was going to a Metallica concert, and I told him so. His immediately reaction was surprise and quiet laughter. “You don’t look like the heavy metal type,” he told me.

I could see why he would say that. I think I was wearing penny loafers at the time. But, I said, “I didn’t know there was a dress code.” The most metal thing you can do is to defy expectations and stereotypes.

This coming weekend, I have concert tickets to see Josh Groban. But that doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten my metal roots. I’ve heard it said that the music you listened to when you were 18 is the music you will always love, the music you’ll always come back to when you need solace, comfort or inspiration. That music for me will always be heavy metal. I am college-educated, a wife and parent, and I live in the suburbs, but I’m still metal at heart even if I don’t look it anymore.

And here I am, 25 years later, still defending the faith. Rock on.