Death Metal Junky

Two of my friends, Jori and Angela are high school teachers.  One of their students is in a Christian death metal/scream band, and, as they are cool teachers, they were invited to come to their concert. Angela and Jori invited me to go and because I thought it sounded hilarious and fun, I agreed to go.

Outside the concert, kids dressed in black are milling around.  The first thing we clearly see is a kid slunking around without his shirt, despite the fact that it was very cold and drizzling.  Had I known then that this was a sign of things to come, I probably would have stayed in the car. 

After paying the entrance fee and getting hot pink wrist bands, we enter a large room that had been segmented off by carpeted room dividers. As my eyes adjust to the light, they are met by a random disbursement of high schoolers.  Some are standing in awkward groups, a few stand scatter out alone, and some are clinging to each other like depraved koalas along the outskirts of the room doing things that should not be done in public.

 

I felt like a pervert taking this picture, but it had to be documented. 

All these kids are wearing Converse and black.  Nearly all have elaborate haircuts or hair that is very sharp at the ends.  Most boys have long hair and chains draped on some part of their body.  Most girls have unnaturally colored hair and faces filled with strangely placed silver studs. Aside from the shocking homogeneity, I observe two trends new to me:

1)     Boys simultaneously wearing skinny jeans and sagging.  It looks like they have full, heavy diapers. I didn’t even know they made pants that shape.  And it is indeed a shape.

2)     Boys not wearing shirts in public (see above picture).  I do not understand this. There are about 6-10 of these creepers sporting this inexplicable fashion. Perhaps the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is popular?

I dislike the atmosphere immediately. It is a faint, uncomfortable dislike – the same abstract, nagging feeling I had throughout high school.  The best way I can think to describe it is how you feel when you smell a school cafeteria. All sorts of feelings of insecurity and uneasiness flood over me.  It smells like grey carpet in high school classrooms.  It is easily the most painful display of awkward adolescence I’ve ever seen.  Everyone around you is desperate for validation, and therefore inherently unstable and unpredictable.

Then the music starts. It’s so loud that it’s moving the clothes on my body.  Luckily, I had the foresight to grab a wad of toilet paper in the bathroom and was able to fashion makeshift earplugs. Here is actual footage of the ghastly "musical" offerings - it mostly sounds like belching and yelling:

Mere moments after the music starts Jori and Angela quickly back away from me and start laughing hysterically.  I cannot actually hear their laughs, but I can see their faces.  They point to the area near my behind. I glance back to see a kid in tripod - bent at the waist with hand on the floor, bracing himself - majorly head banging.  His hair is whipping mere inches away from my booty. He is head banging SO NEAR MY REAR.  I spring out of the way before something horribly awkward happens. The rest of the evening, I stay near the Perverted Koalas on the wall, feeling that I’d rather risk being licked than have my butt bashed in by a teenager’s forehead.

From the safety of the perimeter,  I observed all forms of head banging: solo standing up, one kid braced between two, a head banging circle, and the tripod-based head banging -  you name the head banging stance, it was on display.  It was interspersed by jumping, flashing lights, moshing/body surfing, and just terrifying music. There was lots of really weird flail-dancing.  If you would like to see what I'm talking about, just youtube screamo dancing.

As the stories of my friends' apparently dumb students suddenly begin to make sense, a dazed young woman approaches her two teachers and asks if she had a black eye. They ask what happened, and she proudly explains that someone punched her in the face during something called, “The Wall of Death.” We inquire about The Wall of Death.  Apparently, people run full-tilt and hurl their bodies at each other. Anything goes during this horrifying ritual – punching, jumping, kicking, launching – anything.

My eye is caught by a few individuals breaking away from the crowd running lightning fast in a circle around the core of the group. In what still seems like a strange dream, more join in, some whizzing by in the opposite direction, all randomly slicing through the center group, all liable to collide. It was utter chaos. It was as if the Tazmanian Devil and the Roadrunner combined to make one senseless breed of creature disguised in a human teenager’s body.

Suddenly, the crowd begins chanting with growing intensity, “Wall of death! Wall Of Death! Wall Of Death! WALL OF DEATH!” and begins to form a large circle around the room. Through my tp ear plugs I detect a countdown coming from on stage. Suddenly, everyone rushes to the center, throwing their bodies at each other.  This insanity continues for some time.  In the aftermath, there are shoes, shirts, and bodies lying in the center of the floor. A shirtless young man runs from the center of this group to the Koala Wall and immediately lays down with his girlfriend (who is either pretending to sleep through this horrific noise, is actually a realistic ragdoll), to remain motionless until the next choreographed group disaster. 

 This video does not capture in violence and absurdity of the reality.

You cannot fully imagine what this evening was like.  As Jori said, “it was experiential.”  For the first time in my life, I felt old.  I had toilet paper in my ears. I sheltered my eyes from the bright flashing lights. I looked at the young people around me and grumpily wondered what the appeal of all of this was.
Jori always tells me their frontal lobes aren’t developed (which is scientifically accurate), and as I watched the evening unfold, this is exactly what it was like; a bunch of people with underdeveloped brains and boundless energy gathered together unsupervised in the dark.