Bibliographic record
Abstract
Death metal is the most brutal music in existence. It is a subgenre of music that seeks pure heaviness punctuated by guttural vocalizations more akin to a wounded beast than a human singing lyrics. To the mainstream world, death metal is sometimes misunderstood and enigmatic: how do people listen to such harsh, aggressive music? Death metal fans create a unique corner of fandom, an insular group joined together by a passion for music that is frequently rejected and feared by normative society. This fandom has developed into much more for many fans: it has become a community that has further developed into a world-view. This research aims to argue the theoretical connections between the fandom of death metal music and the studies undertaken through terror management theory (TMT). The central idea of TMT is that our fear of death serves as the primary driver of our actions. The primary aim of this article is to explore the question of how a genre of music that is focused primarily on death serves as a buffer against existentialist dread and considerations of our own mortality? Death metal fandom occupies a unique, dichotomous territory within TMT, as it serves as both a mortality salient (MS) (a threat to the world-views of the mainstream) and a preventative measure against Death Thought Accessibility (thoughts and considerations of our own deaths). Death metal fandom, often vilified by mainstream culture and frequently perceived as a monstrous and violent outlier to normative society, is ironically non-political and not a true threat to the establishment and its tenets. The death metal community does not attack the mainstream, but it is attacked by the mainstream. Threatened by the rejection of beauty and musical normativity exhibited by death metal, the world-view of the mainstream is threatened, causing it to lash out at that which differs from it. This research intends to explore potential assemblages through a mapping of connectives untethered by methodological expectations. It will explore this irony through a developed exploration of death metal fans, the music and the brutality that has helped create a community of fandom that is more supportive and effective at warding off fears of mortality than might initially be expected.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".