Oh, dear. It must have been the heavy metal.
In their reporting of the couple arrested Tuesday for their plans to bomb the B.C. Legislature on Canada Day, CBC Radio couldn't help but add some audio to their coverage of the four songs the male suspect, John Nuttall, has on the social media music site ReverbNation.
If Nuttall had done some Justin Bieber covers, well, that wouldn't have fit the picture. Heavy metal, however, is seen (and heard) as violent and extreme, Nuttall is charged with intending to commit a deadly act of terrorism, so there must be a connection.
That thought is as ridiculous now as it was more than 40 years ago when heavy metal was born.
Metal has been both the black sheep and the uncompromising heart of the rock music genre since it started to take shape in the late 1960s. The Beatles took it out for a spin on Helter Skelter and bands like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin are at its roots, taking the rural blues and giving it a massive, urban roar of power. It didn't really become its own genre, however, until Black Sabbath and Judas Priest stripped it of its blues origins and started to develop its theme and culture. That's where the violence crept in - but the rage, the fist pumps and the focus on death and darkness were just part of it. So was the focus with technology, science fiction and alienation that came from Rush, the cartoon fun from Kiss, and the party-hard anthems from AC/DC.
Punk transformed rock music in general and heavy metal in particular. On the one hand, metal went commercial during the 1980s, as the bands inspired by Kiss and AC/DC (Def Leppard, Van Halen, and so on) enjoyed mainstream success but the soul of metal dove deep underground, keeping punk alive by taking the heavy power chords of traditional metal and adding punk's furious beats and howling vocals. Megadeth, Slayer and Metallica led the charge with rough and raw records that spread through word of mouth and college radio stations.
Before Metallica became rock gods in the 1990s, their first release, 1983's Kill 'Em All, depicted a hand over a blood-soaked mallet. That's an angry opening proclamation from a band that's now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Nuttall's four songs on ReverbNation - In The End, In League With Satan, The End of the World and The News - fits right into the early thrash metal tradition of Metallica's Seek and Destroy, which should came as no surprise. Nutall is 38 years old, meaning his teenage years hit just as thrash fragmented into sub-genres - doom metal, death metal and black metal, certainly, but also the less bleak power metal, progressive metal and stoner metal.
Michael Moore did a great job discrediting the link between heavy metal and music in his documentary Bowling For Columbine. Goth and industrial metal icon Marilyn Manson was the most thoughtful and articulate person Moore interviewed in the film. When asked what he would have said to the Columbine killers, his response: "I wouldn't say a single word to them. I would listen and that's what no one did."
Canadian filmmakers Sam Dunn and Scot McFayden's two excellent documentaries - Metal: A Headbanger's Journey and Global Metal - both personalize heavy metal and put it in a broader social and global context. Operating completely independent of mainstream media and popular culture, their films make strong cases that heavy metal is one of the most popular modern musical styles in the world.
Yet the media continue to see heavy metal as the soundtrack of extremism and violent behaviour. Whether it's news outlets, movies or TV shows, the quickest way to illustrate that someone is filled with hate and dangerous to themselves and the world is to play some metal in the background.
Nuttall's interest in heavy metal fits a handy stereotype but it has no connection to the music or its fans. His songs show both a creative mind and someone who wanted to be heard by the world. Most people channel those feelings peacefully, whether it's in art, writing or heavy metal music.
And a sad few express their desires through violence.
