---
title: "Headbangers give the best hugs"
date: "2026-09-29T00:01:00+01:00"
modified: "2026-09-24T12:08:43+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/headbangers-give-the-best-hugs/"
post_id: 10952
---

# Headbangers give the best hugs

![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/09/Ozzy-square-1200x1200.jpg)Credit: Pictorial Press / Alamy Stock PhotoIn 1992, Lemmy and his band Motörhead collaborated with Ozzy Osbourne on the song “I Ain’t No Nice Guy”. A brooding, sombre track, it seemed to encapsulate the darker side of the heavy metal lifestyle. Musicians and their fans weren’t “nice guys”; they were substance-addicted hellraisers, toxically masculine and toxically white, with no loyalty or love for anyone but themselves. The music itself was aggressive and harsh, trading in symbols of violence and death; its values as distorted as the guitar sounds.

Yet my experience of metal in 2026 suggests that Lemmy, who died in 2015, and Ozzy, who died last year, left it a much nicer place than they found it. While metal can certainly be a place for bad guys, and its symbols and lyrics often show a fascination with evil, in 2026 you can donate to the British charity Metal For Good, which raises funds for mental health and youth projects. You can wear the charity’s T-shirt in the publicity photo for a book that makes the case for metal’s power to change the world. You can hold the launch for the book at a metal shop with a “dry” bar, sipping non-alcoholic cocktails and eating from an all-vegan menu. And what’s truly surprising is that none of this is actually that surprising.

The excuse for such blameless revels was the launch of my new book *The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: How Metal Teaches Us to Live*. It isn’t even the first book to make the case for metal as a force for good.

While I don’t shrink from the challenges of eradicating racism, misogyny and homophobia from metal scenes, there’s simply too much evidence of its positive offerings.

Now entering its sixth decade of existence, heavy metal has grown to become a sprawling global culture that offers meaning, community and art in a world in which those things are often at a premium. Far from the stereotype of metalheads as white straight young men, metal has become far more diverse. Vibrant metal scenes exist everywhere from Kenya to Paraguay, while feminist and queer metalheads are challenging stereotypes.

> *Metalheads are running 12-step groups and fighting religious fundamentalism*

As a teenage fan I never imagined that one day I would co-edit a collection of essays on metal and disability as I did a couple of years ago. As someone with a long-term chronic health condition and neuro-atypical children, it has been heartening to see how metal crowds are becoming a welcoming place for those who may not share one kind of mind or body, but do share a burning love for screams and distorted power chords.

Take Ozzy Osbourne’s final gig, at Birmingham’s Villa Park stadium last summer. At first sight, it looked like the more homogeneous community of the past, with short sets from the metal great and good, such as Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Pantera; few were anything other than white and male. But in one key respect the show reflected a changed world: Ozzy, afflicted by a menagerie of complaints, struggled through Parkinson’s tremors, seated on a bat-shaped throne. It was desperately moving stuff, serious and life-affirming.

While this very public show of disability seemed in some ways new to metal, in other respects it felt entirely natural. Ozzy’s own work as a solo artist and with Black Sabbath is filled with anxieties about the body, whether it’s the addicted body (“Suicide Solution”), the monstrous body (“Iron Man”) or the institutionalised body (“Patient Number 9”). Many of metal’s classics are preoccupied with what it is to suffer, to be cast out from society for having the wrong kind of body or mind, as on Metallica’s “Welcome Home” for example. Still, no one would have imagined that Ozzy’s life could have ended this way, or that metal would be quite like this by the time of his death.

Metal has been accused of being the “devil’s music” and Ozzy himself was assailed by the US Christian right in the 80s for his alleged devilishness. Openly Satanist metalheads and artists do actually exist in the underground scene and some of them have done very bad things indeed (including two notorious murders in Norway in the early 1990s, as well as burning down churches). In the mainstream, there are plenty of metal stars who seem far too degenerate to be the good guys.

But these days, while metal at its best still sounds delightfully evil, the metal culture is pushing back against the truly despicable, and even embracing doing good in the world. Bands like System of a Down and Napalm Death have long used their music to speak out against religious fundamentalism, hypocrisy and oppression. And being a Satanist doesn’t always mean causing havoc and pain. It’s often associated with rebellion against arbitrary authority, and the promotion of rationality and bodily autonomy. The venue for my book launch, Raven Records in Camden, was co-founded by a metalhead in recovery and hosts 12-step meetings guided by a specifically Satanist reading of the steps.

Surprise is an important ingredient in sustaining hope for the future. To think that tomorrow may be better than today, that the world can be different to what it is now, doesn’t necessarily require you to know how this better tomorrow might come about. It just requires a capacity to believe that the future may be unimaginable, in good ways as well as in bad ways.

> *Feminist and queer metalheads are challenging stereotypes*

It can be really difficult to sustain hope these days. Catastrophic climate change, rising authoritarianism and alienating tech seem to suggest a future to fear. This sense of hopelessness has been nurtured, quasi-deliberately, through decades of neo-liberalism, to which those who advocate for it proclaim there is no alternative.

The cultural theorist Mark Fisher diagnosed the neo-liberal present as one of “capitalist realism”, haunted by the ghosts of a better future that never arrived. He popularised the quote, whose original author is disputed, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Fisher didn’t have that much to say about metal, nor did many other cultural theorists until pretty recently. Perhaps metal can act as a force for good because no one ever expected it to be. And let’s face it, it isn’t goodness that draws people in. Metal is not an NGO, it doesn’t have a mission statement, and no one makes policies for its strategic development. Metal just *does*. While that doesn’t mean that metalheads are not reflective, it does mean they are free from the yoke of purpose and planning.

It’s striking how much good there is in the world and yet, somehow, the bad guys appear to be in the ascendant. Perhaps this is because when you set out to change the world for the better, you become a target. Metal has sometimes been a target for religious fundamentalist moral panics and attempts to censor it, but not for the same reasons that political or climate activists are targeted. Metal is, in fact, rarely targeted for what it actually is, as opposed to fundamentalist fever-dreams. That is its opportunity and its potential.

If metal has taught me anything, it is to not write anything or anyone off. That’s what Ozzy’s life taught me, too. Why shouldn’t metal save us all? In a world where a military band at Buckingham Palace can play “Paranoid” as a tribute after Ozzy’s death, anything is possible.