The concept of a 'Taste Vocabulary'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85c-P9hbmBg

The other word used was "angst" actually.

And now this is going to become "a defense of metal, part 2000" and I'm not really very interested in that. People are allowed to dislike what they dislike, and they do not have to explain themselves to you.

Actually for the most part metal can take a flying leap, I'm a DJ.

C'mon now WCC, that's not what I'm here for.

Well, this is what often seems to happen. I say "I don't like metal. I just don't." And then they ask "oh, but why is it that you don't like metal?" and whatever explanation you give, they try to turn it into reasons that you should like metal and somehow it is your genre descriptions that are inaccurate, rather than your emotional response.

And I think I've said what I need to say.

i completely understand why people don't like metal. it's not like i even want to listen to it all that often - i'll go months without putting a single metal track on, so no one's saying you ought to like it or that you have to like it or that you're wrong for not liking it.

going on the description given (again), there's prolly not much to be gained from getting dl's bandmate to like metal, but he could probably stand to be a bit less of a wang about it

And also, really, in my statement about Disco, I said *nothing* that implied a knowledge of Disco and its stylistic components (syncopated snare, 16th note hi-hats, octave-hopping basslines) - all I did was rephrase the idea that it contained -women -gay people -dancing in a way that was generally positive towards women, gay people and dancing.

It's repositioning the attitudes, rather than saying anything at all about the music and what constitutes it.

It might be more helpful for your bandmate (or you) to say exactly what they don't like in musical terms ("distorted guitars" or "loud/shouted vocals") rather than the emotional descriptors. But it sounds like you have a pretty good idea of what they don't like ("heavy") even if they don't have an ~acceptable~ way of phrasing it.

And also, really, in my statement about Disco, I said *nothing* that implied a knowledge of Disco and its stylistic components (syncopated snare, 16th note hi-hats, octave-hopping basslines) - all I did was rephrase the idea that it contained -women -gay people -dancing in a way that was generally positive towards women, gay people and dancing.

You do realise when I said "people mincing around and pointing their fingers in the air", that it was meant as an example of a base perception of disco formed from, I dunno, the front cover of the Saturday Night Fever album. By incorporating women, gay people, shaking your booty etc, you've unwittingly added three important and valuable vocab items to the disco 'definition' - items that will help towards the understanding of the genre, like learning the word for "hello" or "very well thank you" in Spanish.

You don't think the word "mincing" has any connotations at all?

Also, if "women, gay people, dancing" is part of your accepted definition of "disco" rather than "syncopated hi-hats, octave hopping basslines" then why is "teenage angst ramped up as anger" not considered an accepted part of the whole definition of metal? So who listens to disco is important, but who listens to metal is not? Come on.

Also, if "women, gay people, dancing" is part of your accepted definition of "disco" rather than "syncopated hi-hats, octave hopping basslines" then why is "teenage angst ramped up as anger" not considered an accepted part of the whole definition of metal?

Because it's reductive and inaccurate. As is "women, gay people, dancing" reductive and inaccurate of disco.

But you just told me that my reductive and inaccurate description of disco was evidence of knowledge of the "kind of terms that someone who appreciates and knows about disco would use."

I give up.

I feel like I'm being unwittingly steered into a conversation about social prejudices, rather than an exploration of how taste in music comes to us and how it develops which was the original intent of this thread. WCC - I do agree that no one ought to be forced to listen to a style of music until it clicks - that would be some bullshit and it's not my position to argue it. I understand why a lot of non-metal fans see that music as angry/angsty/ragey, either because of the abstruse textures of the music itself, or because of a pre-conceived notion of what that kind of music is trying to emote.

What I am saying is that metal (like any other genre), if the listener is willing to try it, can evoke certain emotions/reactions that other genres simply don't have a lexicon for. So while you might have a band, like Nile, trying to describe the terrifying majesty of an Egyptian deity through pummelling double-pedal drums, upward spiralling solos and and emphasis on high-speed but technically elaborate riff structures, the likelihood is that someone who is not versed in death metal will say "This music just sounds angry. It is music for angry people".

I feel like I'm being unwittingly steered into a conversation about social prejudices, rather than an exploration of how taste in music comes to us and how it develops

You say this like these two things are totally and utterly disconnected, and not intimately linked. Taste does not develop in a vacuum and cannot be addressed in a vacuum. This applies to everything, whether it's metal or disco or whatever.

...this is similar but not exactly the same as someone who only has a peripheral idea of what disco is all about might reduce it to "this is music for women and gay people to dance to". Let's assume that this example is being said as an observation, not a prejudice.

First of all, it addresses the fact that disco largely originated from the gay scene - this is accurate and also alludes to opening up a huge window into the history of disco and its role in the gay rights movement (for example). Similarly it also addresses the popularity of disco with females as often the lyrics relate to female desire - and this is often true as well. Most importantly, 'dancing' is integral to disco by definition. It is dance music and largely designed for dancing. But this is also a very narrow definition. Reducing disco down to "music for gay people and women to dance to" elides so much about disco that makes it interesting - its relation and influence over techno, house, funk and post-punk; the warm, dusty production values; the musical and technological innovations pioneered by Russell, Moroder, Rodgers and Edwards; the birth of the DJ beatmatcher and the rise of the nightclub...

However, mentioning women, the gay rights movement and the dancefloor to describe disco isn't a bad description - these are three ineffable factors contributing to disco music.

When we talk about metal, all too often the description boils down to "angry shouty music that begins and ends with rage", which is a thorough misunderstanding of metal as a genre. In fact most metalheads I have met are intelligent, reasoned and fairly calm people - not hyper-tensile brutes who go round picking fights and shouting at people. Why would someone like this want to listen to angry music all the time?

xpost

potentially interesting discussion here that's not really at all about what people "like" or "dislike" so much as the challenge of a musical terminology that communicates in the absence of a technical language or shared formal understandings

however I guess we'll be having a "well, I just don't like it!" discussion instead - terrific

For me a lot of the gradual changes in my taste have been the result of learning to pick up on the different components of a song, so I suppose in genre terms I’ve maybe noticed things that I might not have done before because I was too busy listening for something that was never going to be there in the first place. I remember when I was 11 we had a Casio keyboard and I’d try and play along to songs on the radio – I was usually able to work out the topline but the idea of forming chords was completely beyond me, I just didn’t understand harmonics at all. Polyrhythms would be another thing it probably took me a while to appreciate. A few nights ago I was playing bits of the first Goldie album, which I hadn’t heard in about ten years – it was one of the first five or six CDs I owned so I’d heard it plenty but hearing it back, even though the songs were familiar, there were so many sonic details I’d never noticed before, mostly harmonic stuff. It’s hearing individual elements in a piece of music as opposed to a big mass of sound. Whether all this means I’d been listening to things in the *wrong way* before is a different matter I think.

I really hate it when people take *examples* and treat them as *the entire issue*. I thought the opening post was very interesting, and I'm not sure why people have read that and then thought the thread was about whether or not people should like metal.

jungle is a big one where at some point at about month two into listening to it heavily the actual sound of the music (to my ears) seemed to change. At the early stages I didn't really draw any distinctions b/w the stuff that was rhythmically intricate and more straightforward material.

I sorta wish I could go back and hear it through my pre-"click" ears so I could properly measure the shift...

The thread isn't about metal. Metal was the example used. Disco was another example used. But as soon as you start actually picking apart what it is one dislikes about another person's particular chosen thing, it stops being about "I don't like syncopated basslines" and starts being about the assumptions that people bring to their chosen genre.

I don't think that having more specific technical musical language to describe what it is one just fails to respond to is going to help if the bone of contention is actually about the set of assumptions floating around.

(Also my negative experiences of passionate fans who refuse to take "I don't really like genre X" as an end of the conversation, and keep demanding "well, what don't you like?" until, casting about, I say "well, I don't like specific quality Y" and then they immediately bombard me with a dozen examples of Genre X without Specific Quality Y. When they flat out blankly refuse to listen to genres that I deeply love and appreciate, because they "don't like genre Z" but I'm not going to push the issue.)

^^^^that doesn't even have to be metal. It has also been Jazz, and the Grateful Dead, and several other things over the years.

I find these days that my dislike of a particular piece of music is more often down to the absence of 'good' qualities rather than the presence of 'bad' ones, like I'm just waiting for *something* pleasing to my ear to occur in the song and it never does and I might as well be listening to silence.

So in terms of a vocabulary I think I've at least expanded my personal the list of 'good'/pleasing qualities might be.

Gavin, that is actually a v v salient point.

Crap. "...my personal list of what the 'good'/pleasing qualities might be" I mean.

For me a lot of the gradual changes in my taste have been the result of learning to pick up on the different components of a song, so I suppose in genre terms I’ve maybe noticed things that I might not have done before because I was too busy listening for something that was never going to be there in the first place. I remember when I was 11 we had a Casio keyboard and I’d try and play along to songs on the radio – I was usually able to work out the topline but the idea of forming chords was completely beyond me, I just didn’t understand harmonics at all. Polyrhythms would be another thing it probably took me a while to appreciate. A few nights ago I was playing bits of the first Goldie album, which I hadn’t heard in about ten years – it was one of the first five or six CDs I owned so I’d heard it plenty but hearing it back, even though the songs were familiar, there were so many sonic details I’d never noticed before, mostly harmonic stuff. It’s hearing individual elements in a piece of music as opposed to a big mass of sound. Whether all this means I’d been listening to things in the *wrong way* before is a different matter I think.

― Gavin, Leeds, Wednesday, 15 August 2012 13:33 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is absolutely spot on.

In a way I wonder if this is part of the reason people bemoan the death of the album cover, because often the cover gives the listener a jumping-off point regarding what to listen out for. I'll use Nile again as an example. If I were to play Nile to someone who was not conversant with their style of music, without telling them anything about the band or showing them a picture of them or giving them a lyric sheet or a band photo, it's likely that person will ask "Why are they so angry?". The answer here is "They're not - you are simply interpreting this sound as anger because your musical lexicon isn't accustomed to what is actually being denoted here." You might then show them an album cover and a lyric sheet and explain that "Nile's music is of the death metal genre - a style that explores lyrical themes of death and the occult much in the way a good horror movie might, except with this particular band they specify a romanticised view of ancient Egypt as a main source of creative inspiration. Although the music is loud, fast and the singing is characterised by the trademark "Cookie Monster" growl, "anger" is not what is being expressed here - the actual emotions and themes are those of power, auspiciousness, fantasy, dread etc - all descriptors that you might have trouble finding in other styles of music outside of the classical realm."

After that, whether the listener gets it or not is entirely down to them. Something that made me laugh when I was trying to get my mate to find a jumping off point in metal, he asked "is there any metal that isn't (powerful, auspicious, fantastical or terrifying)?" and I said "What you're asking for here is something that isn't metal".

I don't think that having more specific technical musical language to describe what it is one just fails to respond to is going to help if the bone of contention is actually about the set of assumptions floating around.

There is no "bone of contention" - you seem to be thinking of discussing music you don't like in an attack/defend mode? I don't doubt that you've had many experiences of that sort in talking about music, who hasn't, but descriptive language is what "taste vocabulary" seems to mean, or that's how I take the initial post & the thread concept. "Failing" to respond isn't an issue at all - it's about being able to talk about what it is musically that is or isn't doing the trick for a listener & fleshing out those ideas. Not necessarily even why - there's a certain harmonic range that I just am hard-wired to not enjoy, so the Beach Boys just sound terrible to me. I wondered whether it was something about them I disliked until I heard the Four Freshmen - who I do like better, but those same ranges: it's almost like they're in a specific Hz pocket that sounds like cats to me. Having a specific vocabulary/terminology won't "help" anybody like anything they don't like, but who cares what anybody likes? That isn't what's at issue afaict, this is a much more interesting question than x person does or doesn't like y music.

nb I like cats just fine though

That was actually my "way into" whole realms of music which I previously hadn't got. That I used to always say that I was all about "texture" and "harmonies" and I had a lot of trouble finding something to sink my ears into when I was listening to music which was focused mostly on "beats" or "lyrics." I'm never going to be that bothered about "beats" but finding textures to hook my ears into while learning to spot the subtle differences of rhythms helped me explore music that had previously passed me by before.

x-post to Gavin

Another analogy could be used with food - you might dislike aniseed until you taste it in a meal that just happens to be served at the right time with the correct flavour combinations and suddenly "wow, I actually LOVE aniseed". Next you find you can eat it pretty much all the time, and you might even start actively seeking out aniseed-flavours in other areas whereas before it was anathema to you. The same could be said for a musical descriptor, say, "majesty" - you might not have thought you liked music that sounded "majestic" until you heard Emperor - later on you might find that this is the quality you appreciate in another style such as, I dunno, trance for example. Up until then "majesty" wasn't part of your musical lexicon - you'd have heard something else or had difficulty processing it.

You said it better here: "What you're asking for here is something that isn't aniseed".

I hate aniseed btw. Have you got anything that doesn't make your mouth feel all weird and like you've got three thin tongues instead of just one regular sized one?

I just think, WCC, you're reading the issue as 'you should expand your taste vocabulary because you should like genre x' (apologies if I've read this wrong - it's what it seems like to me). Whereas the people who are defending the concept are talking more as 'taste vocabulary is a tool that means you can gain access to genre x, at least potentially'. Gaining access doesn't mean you have to like it, and the tool being available doesn't mean you even have to use it...

dance metal break!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZedLgoZospo

okay, continue.

I understand all that, emil.y though thanks for explaining it so eloquently.

My point is, that there are some things to which one has such an immediate emotional visceral "no!" reaction to (e.g. the taste of aniseed or the sound of cookie monster vocals) that no amount of understanding the musical vocabulary is going to make you appreciate. And it's perfectly fine to have those reactions. (Though in some cases one might want to interrogate the assumptions behind them to make sure it's "I hate disco because I loathe hi-hats" rather than "I hate disco because I am suspicious of stuff gay people like.")

but there are so many cases where knowing more and being educated about something - like jazz or opera or classical or lots of other things - really can help you like it and get over initial distrust or even distaste. there are loads of musical sounds that aren't going to sound appealing at all to you if you aren't familiar with how they work.

Yeah, that is true, and is actually quite interesting - aerosmith brings up the idea of having a particular frequency that he cannot stand, and I wonder if there is something to the individual physical side of hearing that affects this, or if this is still somewhat culturally formed. (Probably a bit of both, as these things often are.)

xpost

sometimes appreciating something is work. most people don't want to work that hard.

sometimes appreciating something is work. most people don't want to work that hard.

This is total bullshit IMO. And the ways in which it gets trotted out, and in support of whom, make me really, really suspicious of anyone who uses this line.

i think it's true. the vast majority of people on earth don't want to take a lot of time learning about things that they don't immediately enjoy or are interested in!

or have an interest in. need more coffee.

you should be very suspicious of me though. at all times.

I do think it is true for a fair number of people. But I think it is highly dodgy to attempt to apply on an individual level rather than the macro level.

most of the things I like best are things I had some resistance to initially - my yes-I-like-this-right-away centers are less interesting to me than the places that're about what feel, to me, like more complex reactions. Mahler for example is probably my favorite composer, but he's not immediately exciting a lot of the time like Beethoven or bracing like Mozart - it's music I had to absorb, which at first to me sounded like film soundtrack for a film I hadn't seen. And then once I locked in, whole worlds opened. Glad to know that my way of enjoying music makes me a totally suspicious person though, it's like getting a rep without having to work for it

it took me over 30 years to truly appreciate polka. who would attempt to appreciate polka - on and off - for that amount of time? me. that's who. because i realized that i wasn't really hearing it. and that i needed to really listen to it. and hear it in different circumstances. and get over my initital distaste for accordion-based musics. fortuitously, i moved to an area with two excellent local radio shows that played many different styles and eras of polka music and THEIR enthusiasm for the music coupled with the stellar polka history lesson they were giving me (hearing the music change from the 50s to the present day) opened my eyes and ears in all kinds of ways.

long story short: i never gave up on polka. i would hear it for years here and there and groan and roll my eyes. not anymore! decades of paying attention paid off.

sometimes appreciating something is work. most people don't want to work that hard.

This is total bullshit IMO. And the ways in which it gets trotted out, and in support of whom, make me really, really suspicious of anyone who uses this line.

― Shepton Mullet (White Chocolate Cheesecake), Wednesday, 15 August 2012 14:39 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can you explain why this is total bullshit? IMO of course appreciation of art and music takes work, or else it would all be easy listening. There would be no concept of "difficult" music. Once you get to a certain point as a listener, have the fun is the pursuit of new tastes and experiences, but you do have to get off your butt and seek them and challenge yourself, and not everyone has the will to do so.

But I think the sort of vocabulary and syntax that I mentioned are important for listeners. It's not that important to know what the clarinettist is doing with his tongue when listening to the first movement of a symphony but I do think that it makes a difference to e.g. hear the sections of sonata form, to be aware of the key relationships between the different themes, even to recognize dominant-tonic resolution.

I don't know, I think that's an entirely different can of worms. But maybe it's safe to say that sometimes it's important and sometimes it's not?

I totally get off on the fact 'Ignition Remix' or 'Hey Ya' have unorthodox time signatures, in fact i might say it's these songs that helped to gain me a better appreciation of pop-r'n'b, but I totally get that most people like these songs because they're fucking cool catchy tunes.

i think it probably works for everything. "artist" and "genre" are just among the most obvious categories to which we might apply it.

Maybe. But I'm kind of struggling to see how it applies to say Dylan taken in isolation. An artist is always a part of a larger formal or stylistic context. The idea that there would be a unique "vocabulary of Dylan" that you would need to understand in order to appreciate his music implies that he sprung up totally unique, individual and fully formed.

If someone hates Dylan because they hate his voice that's understandable but then I would ask if they can understand his importance as a songwriter by appreciating other people's covers of his songs. If they still say no, and they actually dislike his lyrics and songwriting, then I would have to ask what familiarity they have with folk music in general, the songwriting of some of his contemporaries, etc. I don't think you're going to find somebody who truly understands the full context of the "vocabulary" that Dylan was working within but doesn't see why he's considered great.

Come to think of it, even Dylan's voice is part of a larger vocabulary of folk music. Somebody who can't stand the sound of his voice probably doesn't like Woodie Guthrie or Clarence Ashley either. I think our tastes can prevent us from developing vocabulary in certain areas. I personally hate cookie monster vocals, so I'm never really going to understand death metal or black metal or grindcore or what the differences are between all of those things, and I would never be able to pick any of those bands out of a lineup.

it can consist of things as simple as "i like it when the bass does that."

You know, this isn't necessarily that different from some of what I'm talking about, just without using the terminology. Something like dominant-tonic resolution is something that most people grow to recognize intuitively through hearing countless pieces of music in Western culture, even if they don't know the term.

I've known people into metal getting into dirgey/drone metal and then drone electronic stuff and on through that route. Listening to different artists added to their musical tastes and the overlaps or similarities can make someone want to seek out other sounds that they've heard. On the flip side, there are bands where certain songs don't appeal to me in that they're influenced by tastes that I don't find appealing.

Maybe. But I'm kind of struggling to see how it applies to say Dylan taken in isolation. An artist is always a part of a larger formal or stylistic context. The idea that there would be a unique "vocabulary of Dylan" that you would need to understand in order to appreciate his music implies that he sprung up totally unique, individual and fully formed.

― wk, Wednesday, August 15, 2012 10:10 AM (43 minutes ago)

i mean that like genres, we can be more or less ignorant about artists, judging them only by the surface qualities we think we perceive upon first encountering them. if we were to spend more time with their work, our response would necessarily become better informed - our "taste vocabulary" would become more sophisticated - though we might still dislike it.

i mean that like genres, we can be more or less ignorant about artists, judging them only by the surface qualities we think we perceive upon first encountering them. if we were to spend more time with their work, our response would necessarily become better informed - our "taste vocabulary" would become more sophisticated - though we might still dislike it.

But going back to Phil D, he said that "no amount of 'you should really listen to X album' or an expansion of my vocabulary is going to get me [to like Dylan]" So you're saying that if he did spend more time listening to Dylan, it would in fact expand his "taste vocabulary" even if he ended up still having an extreme distaste for Dylan's music? I don't get how that expanded taste vocabulary would manifest itself then, if not in an appreciation for the music. I'm kind of backpedaling and confusing myself now.

Do we need to understand the vocabulary of a particular music in order to develop a taste for it, or do we need to develop a taste for a type of music in order to listen to it enough to understand its vocabulary? I guess both ways are possible. But I still don't see how you can logically link those two concepts into one.

It depends if the vocabulary is the way you express your tastes, or if it's the words to describe music.

neither, the vocabulary should be inherent to the music

I don't get how that expanded taste vocabulary would manifest itself then, if not in an appreciation for the music. I'm kind of backpedaling and confusing myself now.

Do we need to understand the vocabulary of a particular music in order to develop a taste for it, or do we need to develop a taste for a type of music in order to listen to it enough to understand its vocabulary? I guess both ways are possible. But I still don't see how you can logically link those two concepts into one.

i questioned the word "vocabulary" a while back (after initially accepting it) because what i'm describing as a "vocabulary of taste" isn't necessarily linguistic. nor is it only expressed in liking things. we come to understand the working language of a genre or artist by immersing ourselves and listening carefully. that's one kind of metaphorical "vocabulary": the external structures around which bodies of work seem to be organized.

as we come to know those vocabularies, we necessarily increase the number of things we might possibly relate to in them. in this sense, we construct our own internal vocabularies of taste. if you've heard dylan only in passing, you might reject him simply because his voice annoys you. but if you were to spend time with dylan, you'd likely gain an informed understanding of what he was trying to do and what other people enjoy in his music, even if you still didn't like it yourself. having that understanding, that new "vocabulary" programmed into you by exposure, it might open you up to other music you might not have otherwise been prepared to enjoy. i guess that i'm only saying that personal taste is at least partially dependent on information, exposure and understanding.

the vocabulary should be inherent to the music

i would say that a vocabulary of taste must be inherent to the listener. taste does not exist in music, after all, but only in our relationship to it.

e.g. what is happy metal?

Andrew WK? Depending on what you consider to be metal, plenty of music that precedes Andrew WK that was considered metal at one time was happy (e.g. Kiss - "Rock and Roll All Night").

I still don't see the value in linking those two concepts, so I didn't mention taste. To me musical vocabulary is something inherent to the music, related to its form, history, and context. All of the subjective stuff about anger and violence has nothing to do with musical vocabulary. It sounds like you and mh are simply talking about the actual vocabulary people use to discuss music and musical tastes, but I don't think that has anything to do with what dog latin was talking about. It's not that his bandmate thinks metal is all just angry because he lacks a better vocabulary to describe what he's hearing. He isn't properly understanding what is going on musically, as evidenced by the fact that his attempted mimicry of metal is all wrong.
xp

Furthermore to what contenderizer just said, a taste vocabulary (or 'lexicon' or 'index') doesn't necessarily inform positive opinions. Being immediately repelled by a particular sound so much so that you never want to be in its presence again is a rarity (for me at least - I mean, dogs barking, alarm sirens and screaming babies, yes I have trouble with those noises, but music?). But there's stuff I don't like too. Like the Grizzly Bear album my housemates are playing right now. I can probably list the reasons why and make comparisons but these'll be much more influenced by how I think there are other bands who do that kind of thing a lot better.

To me musical vocabulary is something inherent to the music, related to its form, history, and context. All of the subjective stuff about anger and violence has nothing to do with musical vocabulary. It sounds like you and mh are simply talking about the actual vocabulary people use to discuss music and musical tastes, but I don't think that has anything to do with what dog latin was talking about. It's not that his bandmate thinks metal is all just angry because he lacks a better vocabulary to describe what he's hearing. He isn't properly understanding what is going on musically, as evidenced by the fact that his attempted mimicry of metal is all wrong.

i think that the violence and anger of metal are legitimate components of heavy metal's thematic/conceptual/cultural identity as a musical genre. they're different from but not less relevant or meaningful than traditionally & technically "musical" objective characteristics like like tempo, volume, timbre, tone, rhythm, arrangement, and so on. they're part of what we have to understand to really get heavy metal.

i agree that DL's point was that his bandmate lacks understanding, but this was reflected in his supposed errors of description as well as poor mimicry. DL rejects the word "angry" because he feels that it's inaccurate, while i just see it as imprecise (though still generally valid). anyway, this conversation concerns means by which we acquire familiarity with different types of music, and that must include subjective/conceptual/cultural stuff as well more objectively measurable qualities.

this thread seems dedicated to spiking stet's chart

i think that the violence and anger of metal are legitimate components of heavy metal's thematic/conceptual/cultural identity as a musical genre. they're different from but not less relevant or meaningful than traditionally & technically "musical" objective characteristics like like tempo, volume, timbre, tone, rhythm, arrangement, and so on. they're part of what we have to understand to really get heavy metal.

OK, I would agree with that. Subjective vs. objective wasn't the right way to frame it. But you're confirming what I'm saying about vocabulary having to come from the music rather than from the listener as opposed to mh's definition of vocabulary as "the way you express your tastes, or if it's the words to describe music." You're saying that a sense of "anger" in metal is an integral part of the language of the genre right? It's an emotion that's explicitly tackled in concrete forms like lyrics or album artwork so it's probably not too much to infer that some of metal's harsh sounds are sometimes meant to evoke that emotion as well. The idea of anger isn't something simply added by listeners who are making an emotional interpretation of abstract sound without any conceptual context.