Abstract In this article, I raise a simple but surprisingly vexing question: What makes heavy metal heavy? We commonly describe music as “heavy,” whether as criticism or praise. But what does “heavy” mean? How is it applied as an aesthetic term? Drawing on sociological and musicological studies of heavy metal, as well as recent work on the aesthetics of rock music, I discuss the relevant musical properties of heaviness. The modest aim of this article, however, is to show the difficulty, if not impossibility, of this seemingly straightforward task. I first address the difficulties of identifying the defining features, or “Gestalt,” of heavy metal that would allow us to treat heaviness as a genre concept. Next, I discuss both the merits and the limits of analyzing heaviness in terms of an aesthetics of “noise” in rock music developed in recent philosophy of music. In the remaining sections, I consider other nonaesthetic features relevant to aesthetic judgments of heaviness and show that the term ‘heavy’ is conceptually inarticulable, if not irreducible. This, I conclude, has partly to do with the radically different, sometimes incompatible, musical properties present in the perception of musical heaviness.

中文翻译：

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是什么让重金属“重”？

摘要 在这篇文章中，我提出了一个简单却又令人费解的问题：是什么让重金属如此重？我们通常将音乐描述为“沉重”，无论是批评还是赞美。但“重”是什么意思？它是如何作为一个美学术语应用的？借鉴重金属的社会学和音乐学研究，以及最近关于摇滚音乐美学的工作，我讨论了沉重的相关音乐特性。然而，这篇文章的适度目的是展示这个看似简单的任务的难度，如果不是不可能的话。我首先解决了识别重金属的定义特征或“格式塔”的困难，这将使我们能够将沉重视为一种流派概念。下一个，我讨论了从最近的音乐哲学中发展起来的摇滚音乐中的“噪音”美学来分析沉重的优点和局限性。在剩下的部分中，我考虑了与重的审美判断相关的其他非审美特征，并表明“重”这个词在概念上是难以表达的，如果不是不可简化的话。我的结论是，这部分与存在于对音乐沉重感的感知中存在的完全不同的，有时是不相容的音乐特性有关。