Crossover: Where Metal and Hacking Met and Mixed
Underground movements are by definition networks of people doing what is not officially approved of. This usually has a scent of some truthful or realistic activity that society refuses to endorse. Hacking during its formative era formed an underground, as did a related movement: heavy metal.
Born from a frustrated generic blues-rock band amongst a sea of similar bands, heavy metal arose when Black Sabbath began combining horror movie music with the heavy guitar rock of Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and Cream. The result displeased parents and the music industry alike by refusing to get on board with songs of love and peace. Heavy metal is the music of the brutal truth hidden right beneath the shared illusion of consensual reality.
As one early textfile writer said:
One might call a headbanger 'dumb,' but nine times out of ten, the guy will survive the onslaught of political mindgames better than the smartest 'normal' person would. It is much harder for a 'headbanger' to be brainwashed by politicians because of the music he or she has listened to for years... It is the true reason heavy metal, acid rock or whatever you call it, came around. To make people aware and to keep people from being brainwashed into mindless cyborgs that revolve around one who can afford the company."1
While this seems like an extreme statement, it is a parallel statement to the fundamental idea of hacking, which is that "information wants to be free." Free means an absence of unnecessary control. Early computational and network resources were controlled through software and social limits that hackers quickly obliterated.
In the same way, most of our society is kept under control. We are told that there are hard limits to reality where no such limits exist in actuality. However, it is perceived that these limits are necessary to keep society from falling apart. Back in the 1980s, one limit was a fear of heavy metal's grim and startling realism: sex, drugs, occultism, and distrust of authority.
Not surprisingly, hackers and heavy metal found each other. Not only were many hackers inspired by heavy metal nomenclature and its spirit, but others used the early network of bulletin boards and AE (ASCII Express) lines to transmit information about the music and to help each other find new music. The result was a fertile cross-influence between the two undergrounds, heavy metal and hacking.
"My primary exposure to music through BBSs in the 1980s was through two AEs. On the west coast there was Dark Side of the Moon (408-245-SPAM). On the east coast there was the Metal AE (201-879-6668 PW:KILL). Until then, my only music exposure was via early MTV (A Flock of Seagulls) or Houston classic rock (Beatles). Dark Side exposed me to industrial and EBM bands such as Throbbing Gristle and Ministry (and its offshoots). The Metal AE was pure metal. The Neon Knights text file group also released most of their files there first so you would occasionally find files like 'How to F*ck the Dead' among Metallica S.O.D. lyrics," said Reflexive_Arc, a third-coast hacker known for penning anarchy files and deep penetrating of academic networks during the late 1980s.
Hackers named their groups after metal themes. Groups were how hackers associated to share information that was not for general public consumption, but which could aid them in pursuing individual learning and accomplishments. Two hacker groups who openly displayed their influences from heavy metal were the Neon Knights, named after a Black Sabbath song, and the Cult of the Dead Cow, who use the slogan "Bang the Head That Doesn't Bang," which was borrowed from the back of Metallica's 1983 debut, Kill 'Em All.
Hackers also wrote about heavy metal in textfiles. Textfiles were both the newspapers and the research libraries of hackerdom, often including high-density material like technical instructions on equipment or software, but also containing lighter fare. Designed to be transmitted quickly, they were often short and written in an information-heavy and effective style. To a textfile writer of the past, blogs today would be both wordy and low in content. Both the Neon Knights and Cult of the Dead Cow published both metal-themed textfiles, such as lyrics files, and textfiles on other topics which would frequently use metal lyrics and imagery, although they were not the only two groups to do so.
Some hackers named their boards after heavy metal. The Metal AE was an ASCII Express line, or a board with no usernames and a single password for access. These types of "remote" systems were basically file servers, allowing users to anonymously upload or download files. To send a message, you typed it into a text file and uploaded it with a filename created from the name of the person you wanted to receive it and the subject of the message. Hackers from all over the world popped into the Metal AE for its plausible deniability, active user base, and steady stream of fresh textfiles2. The hacker named The Mentor, whose lengthy screed "The Hacker's Manifesto" was used in the movie Hackers, mentioned the BBS "Metal Shop Private" as having "a metalhead or two" on its staff. As Erik Bloodaxe of Legion of Doom and later Phrack e-zine pointed out, the name of the board was derived from a radio show, Metalshop, hosted by DJ Charlie Kendall from 1984-1995.
In addition, many hackers enjoyed metal. Bloodaxe said, "My life's ongoing soundtrack back then was Metallica, Queensryche, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, etc."
Grandmaster Ratte', a longstanding member of the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), said his group was very influenced by metal. "I'd say within cDc, appreciating metal aesthetics is almost universal. Though we draw from other wells too," he added.
It's hard for us to remember then how hard it was to find information about music. The average city had two chains of record stores, a Sound Warehouse or Hastings and Sam Goody or Tower. These stocked releases from major labels, of which there were many, but these formed pyramids of ownership which tracked back to a handful of big media conglomerates. Thus, for all the variety that was available, there was no music that was not under their control and, as a result, some genres got excluded, notably metal, some Gothic music, industrial, and hardcore punk.
A dearth of music information made it hard to know what to even ask for, and even at one of the rare specialty record stores that ordered from smaller labels, if you did not know the name of an artist to request, it would never come your way. The major music magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin covered almost anything but metal for most of the 1980s, and when they did cover metal, it was with scorn and bemusement. Academia and news media viewed metal as some sort of million moron march, and in popular entertainment, liking heavy metal was a signal for a character's clueless rebelliousness.
"Most of this music was beyond the scope of mainstream media at the time. Even MTV wasn't playing metal (other than hair metal) until years later," said Reflexive_Arc.
With the rise of the home computer, the affordable 1200 baud modem, and the bulletin board (or AE line), the average computer-savvy hobbyist could access information that others could not. At a time when CDs from Europe were tagged "imports" and sold for 40 percent more, and long distance calls across the ocean were prohibitively expensive, finding information on international music was difficult. Bulletin boards, however, had an international audience, even if many of that audience borrowed other people's long distance codes to get there. And unlike news magazines or music media, bulletin boards had no financial incentive to do anything but tell the narrow truth and leave the hype and deception outside.
Bloodaxe explained why the BBS was central to hacker culture. "In the 1980s, BBSes were the most important thing to the hacker world. They were where people met, talked, exchanged information. They were the central meeting places where you could find those people who actually cared about the same things you cared about," he said.
The world created by hackers allowed users to find new music and spread it to friends through copies. "[I]n the early days before thinking about copyright infringement, we'd type up lyrics and upload them to the metal-themed BBSes. It was a common practice, because a lot of kids were trading tapes and didn't have access to album covers to read," said Ratte'.
"We swapped video and audio tape-trading lists and traded a lot within our small community," said the hacker known as Mightypeniz. He referred to a bulletin board he had joined where he and the sysop found musical taste in common. He later founded his own BBS, "Blood Fire Death," named after the album of the same name by Swedish death/black metal pioneers Bathory.
"Most of the people in my peer group would be calling bulletin boards daily and were phone phreaks, so their long-distance calls were free. It was basically like being a regular on 4chan or Reddit, but 30 years ago. So we would talk about niche topics like metal that were very hard to find out about unless you, say, lived in a big city or college town and knew the right people/right places to go. Instead, you had access to people from all over the world, many of whom were very knowledgeable," added Ratte'.
Even more importantly, there were parallels between hacking and the mental process of enjoying the more complex forms of heavy metal. Both were undergrounds, isolated from a society that feared and rejected them, which then required their users to find ways around the methods of control. However, as the hackers spoken to for this article revealed, there were internal parallels as well, both in the realm of similar spirit and similar types of complexity between the two.
"[F]or some of the more complex and extreme forms [of metal], there are a few parallels that could be drawn. Both require concentration and attention to detail, both rely on near blind devotion to achieve something interesting or truly worthwhile," said Simple Nomad, an Apple ][ hacker who specializes in forensics. "Both are about an underground person bending the rules, in some cases fairly severely from what society says is normal or acceptable behavior. Thing is there is large push for conformity in numbers even while rejecting societal standards," he added.
Ratte' took more of a Nietzschean perspective. "I'd say they do have a similar spirit, but it's more nuanced. A lot of hacking is about solving tough problems, mostly by yourself, requiring intense effort and isolation. The metal that resonates the most with me has a similar vibe, where you feel the visceral impact of a difficult problem and the struggle to triumph over it. Eventually leading to victory or failure. The mindset of a hacker is inundated with this cycle day-after-day, so I think both hacking and metal are a natural fit," he said.
"To me that was one of the most interesting aspects of the music at the time - a source of inspiration for writing philes," said Reflexive_ Arc. "I liked to picture someone in a dark room, in front of a black screen with 80 columns of green text, an intense song blasting in the background as the soundtrack for a phile on how to blow up the world. Within hours the phile snakes its way from AE to AE."
"Maybe it was just the 'in your face' teenage rebellion thing. Your parents hate it, so it must be cool. Also, young hackers tend to imagine themselves as renegades living outside the law, so the music associated with that at the time was certainly heavy metal," said Bloodaxe. Some time later, he elaborated: "I think there was just a natural cultural overlap as 'outliers' (like young computer hackers) went about finding ways to fit in with new people and make new friends. In my case, mix typical hormonal teenage rage against parents, teachers (or any authority), rules and laws perceived as arbitrary and stupid, groups like the PMRC saying 'this is bad,' etc., so once someone handed me a copy of Metallica's Ride the Lightning, it just sounded right to me in ways that nothing else at the time did."
In a time when all music is a quick search away, and we wear more computing power on our wrists than those old big mainframes could pump out on a good day, we are drowning in an abundance of information. It is perhaps why this age is less friendly to any but the professional hacker, since any information that wants to get free has found a way and then been commercialized as a method of control, instead of using prohibition-based rules. Media has diversified and will gladly sell you any form of metal you desire.
And yet, the same problem remains. Sale is control. Popularity is control. And public opinion is control. As the next generation of hackers rebels against that tendency, they may find inspiration in the past, where hackers escaped control by setting up their own information network and using it to spread the word of heavy metal.
The author of The Heavy Metal FAQ, Brett Stevens writes about underground death metal and black metal in addition to computer-mediated communication and information security. He began writing about music on the Metal AE and others BBSs, including his own "Apocalyptic Funhouse," uploading textfiles in the dead of night extolling the virtues of Slayer, and later branched out to the web, editing the oldest and longest-running metal site at the Death Metal Underground in addition to freelance writing.
Notes
- Starmaster, "Heavy Metal: The Untold Truth," January 25, 1990 (retrieved from www.textfiles.com/music/metaltru.mus on April 1, 2014) (as quoted in "Defending Metal Before the Internet", retrieved from www.deathmetal.org/news/defending-metal-before-the-internet on April 1, 2014).
- Author's personal experience. I began writing about metal when I was uploading message files, lyrics, and reviews to The Metal AE. In many ways, it was one of the best audiences a writer could ask for: already primed for the subject matter and concise writing, they were heavily involved as readers.