The numbers speak for themselves: emperors are metal. But why?
In a 2019 article on ancient Rome in metal music, Spanish classicist Helena González-Vaquerizo suggests some succinct answers: masculinity, escapism, empowerment, and nationalism, laid over a musical genre that defines itself by extravagance and intensity in sound, imagery, and language. Roman emperors—or rather popular conceptions of them filtered through hostile and sensationalizing ancient accounts—more or less fit these criteria in their antipathy to modern sensibilities. They are male fantasies in which the total domination of others is paired with personal freedom to indulge in every bestial passion. The long ancestry behind the fantasy makes it all the more attractive.
Fascination, sympathy, and even identification with the “bad guys” of history goes at least as far back as the charismatic Satan of Paradise Lost and subsequent Byronic heroes. By the end of the 1960s, affinities for archetypal rebels and villains would prove congenial to the bad-boy attitude of rock and roll with the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” Two years after the debut of Mick Jagger’s satanic swagger, the tritonic diabolus in musica—a discordant interval traditionally taboo in Western music—that commences Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut album inaugurated a genre, later dubbed heavy metal, whose sounds, words, and images transgress established norms, resist order in favor of chaos, and celebrate total liberation of the individual from the bounds of religion and morality.
Black Sabbath’s moniker is inspired by cinematic horror; the band wanted to transmit the strong and negative emotions of films like 1963’s Black Sabbath and 1968’s Witchfinder General to their audience through Ozzy Osborne’s melodramatic and tortured vocals and Tony Iommi’s heavy, distorted guitar riffs, played in a new way by fingers disfigured by an industrial accident. Heavy metal bands were disenchanted with working-class life in the political and economic conditions of the 1970s and set out to confront the “generals gathered in their masses / just like witches at black masses” who plotted nuclear apocalypse. Hard and heavy rock music owes a large debt to blues artists drawing from a long African American tradition of deploring social conditions through song, and early metal channeled its rebellious energy into a new form of protest music. At this early point, its satanic figures had yet to transform from the antagonists to the protagonists of their narratives.
In the English group Judas Priest’s 1976 song “Tyrant,” vocalist Rob Halford revels in the unbridled exercise of authority and cruelty. Only the layered dirge of the song’s bridge, like the chorus of a Greek tragedy beneath the hubristic characters on stage, reminds us that Halford’s ventriloquizing of a tyrant is no endorsement of tyranny: