Sean T. Murphy (Southern Utah University), "Why Delight in Screamed Vocals? Emotional Hardcore and the Case Against Beautifying Pain"
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2024
Living the life of person can be painful. Art can help. Not just by distracting us, but by inviting us to confront, sit with, and listen to expressions of physical and emotional pain. But this raises a question: how should art express pain? Many think that artistic expressions of pain should sound, look, and feel good. These artworks should generate aesthetic experiences that are more pleasant or uplifting than disturbing; and they should conform to conventional notions of beauty. Otherwise, we may not take up their invitation.
To take just one example, when discussing the dramatic arts, the modern German philosopher and aesthetician G.E. Lessing (1729-1781) says that ‘[the] closer the actor approaches nature, or reality, the more our eyes and ears must be offended; for it is an incontrovertible fact that they are offended in nature itself when we perceive loud and violent expressions of pain’. In a word, Lessing advocates for the beautification of pain.
But maybe some of you are like me. Maybe you like to listen to heavy, aggressive, and what many popularly call ‘hardcore’ music. This music contains a whole lot of elements that do not align with this talk of beautification. In fact, there’s a particular genre of hardcore music I love that aims to go directly against the beautification idea, or so I argue in my recent paper in the British Journal of Aesthetics. This is what is often called emotional hardcore music.
In the paper, I characterize the genre as follows:
First, it sounds pretty loud, dissonant, and chaotic, almost to the point where you (and your parents!) wonder how ‘skilled’ the musicians who play the music are. ‘What is this?!’, so my Dad – the classic rock fan – used to ask.
Second, looking at emotional hardcore thematically, we see that the lyrics engage with themes like self-disappointment, anxiety, abandonment, love, loss, longing, existential emptiness, sadness, nihilism, and a slew of other emotional and existential maladies. A heavy sound for some heavy feelings.
Third, and most importantly, the majority of emotional hardcore vocals are screamed (although sometimes they’re yelled or groaned; and other times they might be better classified as whimpered).
But if this isn’t helping, here are some bands: Indian Summer (1993); Portraits of Past (1993); You and I (1996); On the Might of Princes (1999); Hot Cross (2000); Touché Amoré (2007); State Faults (2010); Frail Body (2019).
I am particularly fascinated by the third feature of emotional hardcore music – screamed vocals. I love a good scream. And for most of my life as a fan of this music – special thanks to Eric K, who burned me a copy of On the Might of Princes’ album Where You Are and Where You Want to Be in 9th grade – I never thought this was strange. But recently, in my capacity as a philosopher who thinks a lot about art and aesthetics, it occurred to me that this is all pretty strange. The emotional hardcore screamer, after all, often aims for a vocal scream that is very close in sound to what we would hear if an ordinary human being in emotional distress were to let out a pained scream. In fact, this is a distinctive feature of the genre, something that sets it apart from, say, death metal or grindcore. These other heavy genres feature musical screams, but they have a different sonic aim: the demonic, the ghoulish, the anti-human.
OK, so the emotional hardcore screamer aims for a sound that is sonically very much like the natural screaming human voice. And I like this? Now I found myself puzzled, and so I wrote a paper trying to sort out my thoughts. The problem I posed for myself was this one:
The screamed vocals problem: Why do appreciators of emotional hardcore music value screamed vocals, to the point of positively delighting in hearing them, while acknowledging that it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart, i.e. actual human screaming?
Here’s how we address the puzzle. We show that fans of emotional hardcore music value the vocal component for the way it embodies a rejection of beautification. In other words, the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics conveys to the listener the value in allowing painful feelings and emotions to be expressed in a way that is closer to their original reality. It’s not that I think someone can’t be beautiful when they cry, or yell, or scream. Instead, what I want to say, and what I argue screamed vocals mean, is that no one should feel pressure to conform their expressions of negative feelings to social norms of emotional expressiveness. If this is what musical screaming means, then it obviously has a different value than ordinary human screams of pain.
More often than not, what an everyday scream of emotional pain means is that someone is in emotional distress, plain and simple. When this is the case, the correct value to be acknowledged or appreciated is the humanity and dignity of the person screaming. And it is your job as a fellow human being to respond to their situation in an appropriate way. You probably shouldn’t take aesthetic pleasure in what it you’re hearing. Yet maybe you can carry a lesson from art over to life in this case. Maybe the appropriate reaction, one which learning to love aggressive music makes possible, is to let them have their moment before rushing in to tell them how their feelings should look.
Typo? "Living the life of person can be painful." -> Living the life of *a* person?