Earworms.

[crow]

I wonder, dear metalheads, if the rhythmic noise you prefer to listen to stays stuck inside your heads, after the fact.
Does it go around, and around, after the physical echoes die away?
Does it form a background to your thoughts, during waking hours?
Does it hinder your sleep at night?

I wonder this, because silencing my mind has been essential to my own development, and music made this impossible.
I rarely listen to music at all, any more, and guard my inner silence jealously. For once inserted into my head, music often plays on, for weeks, and months.
Besides, my hearing is so acute, that I hear bats chattering to each other, and noise can cause me pain.
Repetition is the most unpleasant thing, for me. A sort of craziness.

Why do you listen to what you listen to?
What does it do for you?

[Conservationist]

For me, mental silence and music are separate. Mental silence must be imposed since the world is so noisy and many of those noises are enigmatic. However one reason I like death metal and black metal is that I cannot understand the vocals. No language interrupting my thoughts.

[crow]

Ah! Unintelligible vocals. That's a start. Definitely a plus.

[Humanicide]

There's nothing else quite like it. I grew up a punk/hardcore kid that wished for something heavier, and I found it in spades. After a while I stopped looking for "heavy" and started looking for more compositional quality.

It's really a feeling I can't communicate well, other than saying when I hear a record like "From Enslavement to Obliteration" or "Effigy of the Forgotten" I want to conquer shit.

[crow]

I want to conquer shit.

Wow. Now that's a statement
Ok. That's really all I needed to hear, although if anyone else has input, then input it.
I can understand a feeling/drive like that. I've been young and very, very rough.
Feels terrific!
Now I go after peace, since I never did much of that.
Peace is good. But probably only appreciated after the testosterone thins a bit.

[aquarius]

I have become wiser over the years and listen to music less constantly. I'm also more selective about what I listen to but I doubt if I could ever abandon music altogether. To me it's still the highest form of communication and I probably wouldn't see life the same without it.

However one reason I like death metal and black metal is that I cannot understand the vocals. No language interrupting my thoughts.

With black/death metal I enjoy the vocals the sicker the better, and it has always been like war commands or some sort of narration hammering into my subconscious.

I rarely get music playing in my head, at least I've never recognised it as intrusive. I have periods of time listening primarily to ambient/drone oscillating sounds perhaps to help 'clean-out' and reset the conventional idea of 'music'.

[lafindumonde]

Pop music certainly gets "stuck" - repetitive and simple melodies

I am not so much a metalhead as an interested observer, but find that Classical and quality Metal does not get stuck in my head in the same way as pop music (annoying and sometimes difficult to forget when you want to...)

[analrapist]

Now I go after peace, since I never did much of that.

Isn't wanting peace as silly as wanting war? The point is to do what needs to be done. Some people are just bad, so you make war on them. Others are misunderstood so you work for peace. It depends on what the situation calls for. I think wanting to conquer shit is awesome but it doesn't necessarily mean war, sometimes it's just yanking stumps out of the backyard or beating back a difficult problem at school or work.

[Humanicide]

I think wanting to conquer shit is awesome but it doesn't necessarily mean war, sometimes it's just yanking stumps out of the backyard or beating back a difficult problem at school or work.

Damned right. That's what I was referring to. Wage a war against obstacles in your everyday life. Metal helps me do that.

[KingdomGone]

I think there is a significant difference here between metal and... let's say pop. Pop just creates random beats and songs which may stuck in your head for a few days and irritate you while metal creates athmospheres and song structures that'll maybe make you wanna do something... accomplish something. Metal just doesn't stick in your head, it goes deeper and tries to tell you something of life or death.

[crow]

Earworms are debilitating, crazy-making things for some. I am one of them.
They render me unable to think, focus, or sleep.
I absolutely depend upon a clear, calm mind.
I have a pair of custom-made earplugs that I often wear when I go out, against the constant, ever-present canned music that accompanies every activity.
They help, but not enough. I often take restaurant meals outside to eat. In snow, rain, wind...
Sometimes I wear these earplugs and a huge pair of bright yellow chainsaw-operators-ear-protectors over the top
It seems strange that such measures should be necessary, in order to - say - sit in a doctor's waiting room, or visit someone in hospital.
I really hope that death is not a state in which music is present, for all eternity.

[Conservationist]

Sensitive often have this problem. The brain chews on the insane/stupid, trying to make sense of it, and rest is not to come. Earplugs are a good idea.

I think I was OK with music when it was present in elevators and grocery stores. Now it's everywhere, and the proles have added television screens in many stores. Really? I can't get away from the insanity anywhere?

At least the library's still safe -- oh wait, it's not. People on Facebook and Youtube.

FLEE THE ENTERTAINMENT CULTURE

[crow]

Glad you understand
When I do ask for the music to be turned down, or off, when nobody but me is present, I am usually responded to with:
"Nobody else ever complained". Or:
"Other people like it".
It turns out, however, that up to 50% of people don't like it, don't want it.
Business owners, or more often, their employees, are the last to know. Or care.

[lafindumonde]

This appears appropriate

The superabundant display of vitality, which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is true — nay, a great many people — who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the matter, it is only for want of an opportunity.

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/pessimism/chapter8.html

[crow]

Ah! So let us be clear:
In order to confirm my own intellect, I have only this to say:
I fuckin' HATE noise!!!
Pure genius.