The Black (Metal) Plague

The Black (Metal) Plague

Nerd Shit

Run to the hills! Run for your lives!

Luke Ottenhof

The year is 1509, and life is alright. You’re farming delicious, non-GMO corn on a small fief in the peaceful English countryside, and the hip, youthful King Henry VIII has just taken the throne. Your landlord is kind of an asshole, but you steal a flagon of his shitty moldy ale every night to stick it to him. On Friday nights, you pop down to the tavern with your buddy from the next farm over who, despite his hideous breath, is a pretty fun hang. There’s a resident lute, recorder, and hurdy-gurdy trio who absolutely shred. Sometimes the music is hard to hear over the clamor and clanking of stone mugs, but it’s a good scene.

One Friday, your farmer pal pulls you outside behind the public house and asks if you want to hear some real music. This is some powerful shit, he warns you. He produces a ring-shaped contraption that fits around your skull, with two comfy cups that cover your wax-packed ears. He presses a button, and suddenly, a molten lava flow of sound blasts through the inch-thick layer of dirt and earwax in your puny canals. There are thundering, ungodly sounds, tones like the sound of hammer on steel at the blacksmith’s, and melodies that seem passed down from the pagan demons of old. It’s “Angelic Fabrications” by Toronto death metal band Tomb Mold. Your brain flickers with all sorts of chaos and horrible premonitions, and your heart thumps and races like a jackrabbit. Is death drawing near? Maybe...

The quip that certain modern phenomena could kill an ancient being has captured the sharpest minds on Twitter for roughly four whole years. The extremely unserious joke has produced some of the most important questions of our time: Could a single bite of a Dorito actually send a Victorian child into a coma? Could a stanza of a Megan Thee Stallion song extinguish the life of a medieval peasant? Could drag queen slang literally slay the Dark Ages house down?

I figured that if any modern music would have the power to knock a medieval peasant dead, it would be from the heavier end of the genre spectrum. Hardcore, black metal, and other styles whose names alone are enough to make a pious Christian shudder still occupy a special niche. Rendered in complex arrangements and visceral instrumentation, their brutality and aggression can be arresting for even contemporary listeners. This music sparks religious panic in the here and now, so it's not totally ridiculous to think they could go toe to toe with plague and sweating sickness as a leading cause of death in the 1500s.

The first and most obvious question is whether the music—that is, the sound waves alone—could trigger rigor mortis. The short answer? Not likely. “I think that the chance is very, very, very small, but I don’t think it’s zero,” says Chicago-based audio engineer Melissa Ewing. “From an acoustic perspective, the sound would not kill you.”

Sound creates invisible waves of pressure that make our eardrums, inner ear bones, and tiny hair cells vibrate, which all convert the movement into an electric signal that’s sent to our brains and experienced as music. But sound waves act upon the rest of our bodies, too. Ewing gives the example of standing near speakers at a concert: You can feel the sound, and especially the bass frequencies, in your chest, pushing on your body. “Your body is having these physical reactions to pressure pushing in on you from the loudness,” says Ewing.

The only way that sounds can physically kill us is if those pressure waves are strong enough to damage not just our ear function, but our internal organs, and especially our lungs. Ewing says that scenario isn’t really in the realm of possibility. Explosions and shuttle launches register around 170 or 180 decibels, she says, and around 185 decibels seems to be where these pressure waves can start damaging us internally. But Ewing says that a sound would likely have to hit 240 decibels to instantly kill someone, and that’s significantly louder than standing near a space shuttle taking off. “I don’t even know if anything on earth can make that sound,” says Ewing. “Maybe a volcano.”

So even with state-of-the-art, over-the-ear headphones (which Ewing notes are often engineered to play music at levels above 100 dB, which will damage our hearing), the sound pressure wouldn’t be enough to vacuum out a vassal’s guts. Not even a stadium-ready sound system would be likely to hit the mark either. The loudest concerts in history, including a few Guinness World Record-breaking gigs from American heavy metal band Manowar, just barely scratch the 140-decibel mark. (The Guinness record keepers nixed the “loudest show” category in the ’90s, fearing correctly that the pursuit of that title would eventually cause a whole lot of hearing loss.)

In context, though, the possibility of death by death metal inches up a bit. Dr. Debra Lacoste, who heads up both the Institute of Mediaeval Music and the ecclesiastical chant database CANTUS at the University of Waterloo in Canada, notes that the Middle Ages weren’t as quiet and serene as we might imagine. In towns, trumpet players signaling from towers would be heard for miles, and the clatter of blacksmiths, carpenters, wagons, and market haggling would create a significant layer of ambient noise. Church bells would pierce the day at hourly intervals too, and secular jams definitely took place in taverns on stringed and wind instruments. Social dancing for both the rich and the poor would have been soundtracked by tunes, most likely with a drum keeping the beat. Plus, in times of conflict, a drum complement would’ve been standard for many armies.

Lacoste says that modern music with what we’d consider “coherent melodies” wouldn’t have seemed all that foreign to our ancestors. The surviving melodies from the medieval era indicate that they existed in musical schema—basically, musical patterns—that aren’t too dissimilar from our own. But Lacoste allows that heavier music could have unsettling effects. Amplification, distortion, and screamed or growled vocals might seem so unnatural that they would put the fear of God and the devil combined into the minds and hearts of the superstitious people of the Middle Ages. “If they could handle listening to these sounds, they would be extremely suspicious about what caused the sounds, and the fear of the unknown would be a cause of great anxiety,” says Lacoste. “This was a time before science, before people started asking questions, and before the age of reason, and so there would be no way to explain any of it.”

In this interpretation, death might come later, a knock-on effect of the spiritual crisis spurred by the malevolent music, says Lacoste: “The repercussions of the experience throughout society could create an intense fear in the people that might cause some to eventually die—from the anxiety of not understanding the sound, from the heartfelt shock at its loudness and sinister quality, as well as being stricken with overwhelming fear of God’s punishment for some sin that they had committed.”

Kern Haug, who plays drums with the Los Angeles metal band Agriculture, imagines his group’s music causing death in a less direct manner. Haug hopes that hearing Agriculture’s obscene, pummeling chaos (preferably at a punk-ass generator show on the outskirts of some 16th-century town) would be, in a roundabout way, freeing. Perhaps peasants would hear the sounds and question the essence of their reality: Is there really a God? Does the king really deserve my allegiance? Why the fuck am I forking over my money to my asshole landlord? In Haug’s dream, the music could inspire broad social and political revolt against the strictures of the church and the state in a struggle for liberation. “I hope that in the context of the medieval village, that people would feel inspired to do their thing, to be like, ‘Oh, I have this expanded capacity to act, I’m able to do more,”’ says Haug. But more likely than not, that campaign of peasant rebellion would end in a whole lot of hangin’ and guillotinin’. “That’s probably pretty bad for that time,” says Haug with a grin. “Like, probably not good for survival.”

Tomb Mold, too, think their music would probably end up getting a bunch of medieval people killed—though maybe by accident. “You ever see that movie The Mist?” says guitarist Payson Power, referencing the end of Frank Darabont’s 2007 adaptation of the Stephen King book: In a fit of despair and fear, and believing a horrific death to be near, Thomas Jane’s strapping protagonist shoots his son and three friends to spare them. Turns out he’s jumped the gun a bit (literally) when, seconds later, the mist clears off. “It would be like that,” continues Power. “The person hearing [Tomb Mold] would assume the world was ending and kill their family to spare them from a more painful death, the tragedy being that there was no real threat.”

But Power warns that Tomb Mold’s records could also be a medieval tool of mass control and destruction if used uncarefully. “Used as a holy war weapon, Phosphorene Ultimate could inspire suicide in an opposing religious sect,” he adds. “Headphone-quality-dependent.”