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Literacy of Extremity: How Losing My Faith and Embracing
Heavy Metal Shaped My Understanding of Literacy
When you see me on the street, or at home, or in class, there’s a high chance you’ll see me wearing a few things: a metal band t-shirt, jeans, and converse shoes. The most important element of that outfit is the shirt. Metal, the culture that surrounds it, and the aspects of my life that have lead me to this highly expressive form of art and literacy, are some of the most defining and influential features at the center of my human experience. Through this music, I have been influenced to write my own music and lyrics, identify with other people and musicians, and understand different emotions and experiences that are often ignored, dismissed, or buried by the mainstream status quo. It is thus my goal to take you through some key literacy events and sponsors (as defined by Deborah Brandt as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy” (Wardle Downs 46) in my life to explain how this literacy of extremity developed and the value I believe it has in its potential to contribute to society and academia.
I started out with a fairly normal introduction to literacy; my parents would read to me, I would read to them, and I would learn things in class from my teachers and other classmates. I would watch educational videos and listen to books and movie adaptations on tape. One of my earliest memories of literacy was when I lived in Tennessee; my mom and I were sitting on my parents’ bed, and she was having me read to her from these very basic storybooks that would teach vocabulary and grammar, called “Bob books”. I recall sounding out the individual letters of the word “the”, “tuh” “huh” “eh”, and my mom getting frustrated with me: “No! ‘T-H’ makes a ‘thuh’ sound! This isn’t that hard!” I remember being annoyed and frustrated at the English language at that point, but I was still very young, and things would eventually click for me.
Throughout my schooling in Tennessee, my parents didn’t think the state public schools were adequate enough, so I went to private school. This was likely a large factor that contributed to my literacy in those developing years. I went to a Catholic school for pre-k and kindergarten, which introduced me to some elements of religion early on, but I never went to church and never really put too much stock into any part of such things. My family was never very religious (nor Catholic), and so while I eventually learned all about religions and their beliefs, it was never something forced onto me, and so I did not face the censorship that many children might encounter from such an institution.
Beginning in 1st grade and continuing to 3rd grade, I began attending anther private school called Lausanne, which was a collegiate school, meaning that students from 1st grade all the way to 12th attended. There wasn’t much interaction between the various age groups, but they were always present. Second grade was the year I had my favorite teacher at that school, Ms. Zurbruegg. She was a positive sponsor of my literacy in many aspects including encouraging me to read more complex things and having me participate in a summer math camp. Much of the classroom and academic engagement at this time in my schooling revolved around the “gameification” of learning; the math camp I went to would give out awards at the end named after famous mathematicians. I was anointed the title of Archimedes. Reading was also “gameified” through the use of a program called “Reading Counts” wherein one could search through lists of books, read one of the books, and then take a ten question multiple choice quiz on the book to then be awarded points to be redeemed in classroom competition for various prizes. More complex books were worth more points, but if there was ever a crunch where I needed a lot of points quickly, Clifford the Big Red Dog books were my go to for cheap and quick reads.
It was also during this early elementary period that I started to question the world around me. There are a few experiences that I recall specifically that began my inquiry into religion and god. The first was when I was in 1st grade and I was with my mom on our way to my karate class after school. We had stopped at a gas station to get a snack like we would normally when a question popped into my head as I got out of the car: “Mom, how do I know that god is real?” She didn’t really know how to answer me and was probably surprised by the question. She tried to give me a reasoned answer that explained some different perspectives on the subject, but I was already sort of set along my path at that point, unconvinced. The second experience that I remember during this time was at the end of the school day during 2nd grade. All the kids would wait in one room at the end of the day and wait until their names were called to be dismissed to their parents picking them up. I don’t remember how exactly the conversation was started, but one of my classmates, Daniel, and I started arguing about some of the stories in the bible and their status as truth or fiction. It wasn’t a heated argument, just kids talking and raising their voices a little, but I remember telling him, “YOU try parting the Red Sea with a stick” in reference to the story of Moses in the bible. I also recall doubting the story of Noah and his mystically large ark.
I never got in trouble for these conversations, but one can imagine that in a fairly well off section of the South, and soon to be Kansas, one might run into some opposition while going against such an influential part of many peoples’ lives. This was the beginning of my lack of faith becoming a sponsor of my literacy. When I moved to Kansas in the 4th grade things were still pretty normal for me. I did start attending public school in the Blue Valley School District, which my parents had researched to a great extent and actually had some ties with the curriculum creators for Lausanne. In 4th and 5th grade I began reading recommendations from my dad’s collection of books. These books were mainly a lot of sci-fi and adventure books from authors like Michael Crichton, Steve Alten, Ben Bova, and Clive Cussler. There were also classics like the Lord of the Rings series and then whatever I would read from class. These authors created new worlds for me to explore and wonder about, and so I did, but an entirely new world was about to take shape for me in the form of music.
Fifth Grade was the time that I started getting really interested in music; the first Guitar Hero game had just come out, and I asked for it for Christmas. I had already really liked the sound of heavy electric guitars from listening to my dad’s music in the car or at home. That consisted of older 80’s rock and metal bands like Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, and Queensryche, and newer, more modern bands like Shinedown, Staind, and Creed. One might cringe at some of those, but the older stuff was always what drew me in. The guitar acrobatics of Randy Rhoads (who played for Ozzy), combined with this new game inspired me to want to play guitar for real. And so I asked for an electric guitar for my birthday and started playing away and still am ten years later. This began my journey of understanding guitar and metal music as a form of literacy.
As this interest in music started blossoming, I started wanting to go to concerts as well. My dad and I shared a lot of common music interests (and still do), so when Ozzfest came to town in 2006, we were going. I remember looking up the two opening bands, Unearth and Atreyu, on YouTube and being very apprehensive to seeing them due to their harsh, screamed vocals. But when we got to the show and those bands started playing, I remember being blown away by how different they were than anything I had seen before. I remember the energy that they brought to the stage with their fast guitars, machinegun-like double bass drumming, and vocals that sounded more like that of a beast than a human. I was excited by the raw power and intensity they performed with fueled by adrenaline and testosterone. And so as I began my angst-filled teenage years, I began seeking out heavier bands with more to say: bands like Lamb of God, Opeth, Meshuggah, Gojira, and Strapping Young Lad. These bands played music that talked about religion, death, war, anger, depression, and violence—things that are often ignored by the rest of the music industry, and certainly kept away from comfortable mass-marketed pop music stations. This is not to say that pop music is bad or serves no purpose; rather, it is music which misses out on a large part of human experience and is limited in its exploration of the many truly dark things that people go through.
And so as I started noticing the world around me beginning to change, with wars being waged across the middle-east, with conservative religious fervor being ever present in my home state and country, and the divorce of my parents, this extreme music became an outlet for me to express the views that had been building for my entire life thus far. I would see political posts about abortion or Christian values or gay marriage on Facebook and argue until my fingers could no longer type. I would read news stories and feel depressed and angry at the state of the world. And I would feel isolated in a world where I did not seem to fit. These things and this music acted as sponsors of my literacy, inspiring me to write my own songs and poems of which I’ve written hundreds, along with meeting other musicians along the way. They also help act as a cathartic force, knowing that there is an entire culture of music devoted to and made up of people like me, feeling the things that I feel, and seeing the things I see. Mahiri and Sablo describe such a phenomena in their findings with “In their own distinctive way, [students] engage in literacy practices to help them come to terms with these conditions and experiences. In effect, they are writing for their lives” (Wardle Downs 140). None of the things I read or wrote in middle or high school ever came close to offering any of the same inspiration and largely did not help me in my writing except for teaching me that a paper has an intro, body, and conclusion. Even then, this is only a miniscule portion of the written works that have been produced by humans all over the world; there is a fundamental lack of creativity in the classroom and large portions of literacy are left out in favor of a classical canon.
My dad was the root from which these branches of extremity developed in metal, my own music, and other worlds, and eventually became the primary sponsors of my literacy. This culture of the extreme helps me feel normal in a world where I often see myself as other. There is a lot to this world of extremity that could help the spheres of normality and mainstream; there is so much that is ignored and missed by excluding the subjects and feelings portrayed and expressed by extreme music, and I think it would help many people get more in touch with themselves and the full range of human emotion that often go unexplored in mainstream life as well as in the classroom.
