ABSTRACT
Jack had a striking appearance. His hair was straight and long, past his shoulders, and blond, sun-soaked from long summer hours of working construction outdoors. His skin was tanned baseball-glove brown, and he had a brownish beard of perhaps two weeks' growth. He had had a tough and chaotic life so far, this eighteen-year-old who was already thinking about how he wanted his coffin to be decorated. The music clearly had an ideological significance for him. To him, the dark music and pessimistic lyrics of heavy metal songs reflect the harsh reality of life. Jack spoke glowingly of the experience of attending heavy metal concerts and the exhilarating sense of being united there with fellow metalheads. For Jack, as for many of the other metalheads, the music was an expression of anger—and a way of purging it. Also like many metalheads, Jack's anger also had a source closer to home—in his family life.
