Nicola Masciandaro continues his series of heavy metal glosses with a bravura deduction of High On Fire’s Yeti as the figure of unfreezable being beyond all predicative fixity.

I’m reminded by this of Douglas Oliver’s meditations on the unconscious self, which persists beyond all self-shattering and rises up in times of existential crisis as a kind of guardian angel of the organism. In An Island That Is All The World, Oliver recounts an episode when he was in danger of drowning, panicked and out of his depth, and felt that something deeper than his conscious self took over his body and impelled him to swim to safety. This deeper self is “an entity that persists, minutely changing, very minutely, as our conscious self goes through its wilder swings of mood. Much modern linguistic philosophy argues this large entity out of all real existence, but I simply don’t believe it”.

Heavy metal stages a self-shattering, variously imagined at the crushing, mangling, morcellation, drowning, implosion, disembowelling, fatal exposure or vapourisation of the listener. Douglas Oliver imagines, grandly, a “philosophy of the knockout” in boxing, according to which “a punch can impose on the victim an experience of an instant without content”: “the knockout catches the mind between its tiniest islands, in a moment when the instant has not quite entered memory to be filled with form”. A similar goal perhaps is envisaged in the exertions of masochistic sexual practices; certainly it is there in Leo Bersani’s evocation of fucking as irrecuperable self-shattering (although I’ve always wondered: for whom is this what sex is actually like? It seems like a male fantasy of feminine jouissance).

Megadeth’s Good Mourning / Black Friday invites identification with both the deranged killer who has taken over the body of the singer (who begins, in Good Mourning: “Hey, I don’t feel so good…something’s not right…something’s coming over me…what the fuck is this?”) and the victims whom he bludgeons and dismembers with frantic glee (“pounding, surrounding, slamming / through your head!”). The threat, “I’m out to destroy and I will cut you down!” is addressed to the listener; however, ultimately the song is more about the abandonment of the sadist, delighting in the “cold piece of blood-lethal steel” that he uses to smash through his victims’ skulls, than it is about the experience of being bludgeoned by the music. As a “technical” thrash metal band, Megadeth have always included their audience in their own narcissism, their delight in being able to play complex riffs and solos at high speed. Certainly the point, for me, of devoting myself to their music as a teenager was to learn how to play it myself. I have no idea what Megadeth fans who don’t play the guitar actually get out of listening to them.