Death Metal Breaching Experiments
By: Doga Kerestecioglu
Tags: Metal, Sociology

Over the weekend I came across this post in MetalSucks, where they have a video of the metal band Allegaeon playing one of their songs in NYC Subway to promote their new album.

Metalsucks have been doing videos similar to these for a while, where they go around Times Square or other places in New York and make people listen to some extreme metal band and get their reactions for it. In this video, they seem to take one step further where they are broadcasting death metal in public for the first time. The band first plays an old pop song just like most other mundane musicians in a subway station would do, but then turn it up to 11 and play one of their own songs. I don’t know if any of the Metalsucks crew are sociologists or have taken any sociology classes at any point, but what is happening here is a textbook case of breaching experiment, which was first implemented by Harold Garfinkel to mostly test Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theories.

Erving Goffman was quite a known figure in 70s and 80s and if you ever watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and glad things have changed since then he had something to do with that. Even if you weren’t around in that era to be familiar with him you might be vaguely familiar with his work from Netflix’s amazing show Mindhunter even though it might not have done a great job explaining his theories. Goffman have conducted extensive ethnographies and found that as they go through their daily lives individuals build a back stage and front stage where they represent themselves through differing scripts. Front stage is a shared public space, where individuals are distributed their roles and expected scripts that follow from them. Back stage is more private and a different looser script follows. Sometimes these stages are separate by physical spaces and presences such as the kitchen and dining room in a restaurant other times they are more contextual as when someone is alone on their own compared to when they are around other people or when patients in a mental hospital are in front of the presence of a doctor or by themselves. Through his lengthy observations Goffman describes in great detail on how these scripts allow societies to function and presents a theoretical framework for sociological study.

One strong point he makes is that these scripts are pretty rigid and persistent. People are taken aback when scripts are broken and try really hard to improvise and bring the script back to its course. If somebody sneezes in the middle of an important speech, they say, ‘bless you’ and move on. If there is a slip of a tongue, they laugh it off. My advisor Randy Collins has some extensive work detailing how to make good scripts and what happens to pepole when scripts get broken, but in short, it makes people depressed and as Goffman argues people will try very hard to fit things into the script.

I’ve read Goffman multiple times since my undergrad years over a decade. It’s great for reading and re-reading every once in a while, but I remember the first time I really was discussing him, my reaction was pretty much, ‘cool story, bro, but you’re pretty much presenting us with an unfalsifiable theory pulling all these scripts out of thin air, we can’t prove or disprove that these imaginary scripts exist or not!’ The thing about grad school is you’re always the smartest, the less time you spent on it. That question is exactly, where the breaching experiments come in. When I brought this up in class, the professor mentioned that you know scripts exist because you can break them and when you do you see what happens. She gave me the example in the class we were at about 8 people sitting around a table making polite conversation discussing sociological theories if I were to suddenly jump on the table and start screaming that would break the script and would get consequences. Of course, she was referring to the breaching experiments, where Garfinkel would send his students around the campus or at home to do weird shit to break scripts and make observations on how people respond (True story: a couple years after this conversation in that class, some other grad student, who is a very successful professor in an elite university, in some other class made the same point, and I was so smart again when I put him in his place with the exact same example of jumping on the table and screaming…). So if you’re feeling really sociological next time you go back home pretend like it’s a hotel and it’s your first time there. Ask your significant others if you can eat something from the fridge, can you watch the TV, is there a curfew? See how they react…

So if you watch this video from Metalsucks here closely, you’ll see that people play along. They are surprised at first at what’s happening, but then they start participating. They realize the script is somewhat changed due to the content of music, but pretty much overall pretend like it’s business as usual clap along and applaud in the end. If anything they double down on the script of enjoying a street musician, which under normal conditions they would ignore. I guess they even made some money in the end so good for them!

One parting thought would be why metal is so outside any public scripts. Metalsucks obviously totally buys into the idea that metal shouldn’t be public as they do these funny bits where they expose people to metal as such an unusual weird thing, but what is so different about metal music that puts into the underground behind closed doors. It might be the inappropriate content, but I totally get more TV-MA content from the mainstream pop songs that I hear in my corporate gym than most metal bands. It might be the level of noise, but it’ll get pretty loud at times in the Subway from some other musicians as well if they’re playing Rock or Techno or if they just have some really bad poor equipment. It’s mostly because the script metal builds for itself is so out there that it likes to keep itself backstage, but I guess that’s a topic for another post. In the meanwhile, I’m looking forward to more breaching experiments or any other good sociological and/or data science concepts covered by MetalSucks so I can do more of these cross topic posts!