The Art of Transgression

Transgression: infringement or violation of a law, command, or duty

I’ve always considered myself to be a transgressive person. Ever since I was young, I’ve had an anti-authority streak and a distaste for living within the bounds expected of me. These jagged edges of my personality manifested primarily in music I’ve listened to and created. I picked up the guitar when I was 13, primarily to channel my teenage angst by playing Linkin Park. As I became more technically skilled at the instrument, my tastes became heavier and heavier. I began listening to classic rock, then metal bands such as Metallica and Megadeth. The biggest leap for me was listening to death metal. Hearing Chuck Schuldiner’s death growls in “Pull the Plug” was a pivotal experience, where I had to reconcile my fear of such harsh and brutal music with the feeling that I had discovered something within myself that deeply enjoys the heaviness of this sort of music. From there on, I fully embraced being into extreme metal. I spent hours playing guitar, learning progressive metal, death metal, and metalcore music and going to metal shows.

In this essay, I want to take you through an artistic tour of my transgression and talk about how I came to be this way and how it affects me in the present. Ultimately, I want to show you that the transgressive is a gateway to understanding parts of ourselves and others that we may opt to hide away, and that engaging with transgressive art allows us to reclaim aspects of our humanity.

Transgression as reaction

I view my interests in heavy metal and transgressive art in general as reactionary first and foremost. It’s a reaction to having who I am defined for me from the very early days of my childhood, where I had expectations to be the perfect Indian son placed on me by my parents alongside pressures of conforming and fitting stereotypes of Indian people that Americans imposed on me in grade school.

My family traces its ethnic roots to Gujarat, the most conservative state in all of India. We went to the temple multiple times a week, had strict taboos against sexuality, and a deep moralistic streak. At the same time, my mother was a deeply narcissistic individual who valued appearances over substance. She was constantly feuding with other Indian mothers about whose sons are smarter and what colleges people are going to get into. She also was very materialistic despite her religious posturing. Her goal for me was to make as much money as possible by becoming a software engineer or doctor and for me to associate with people who would make us “look good”. All of these behaviors were charged with emotional and physical abuse, much of which I’ve written about in other essays in my blog. I followed this doctrine until about the age of 10, at which I started noticing her inconsistencies and spoke back and rebelled. I don’t have many memories from the age of 10-14, but I remember it being a very angry time in my life with my parents repeatedly mentioning how I’d failed them and was becoming a “bad kid”. I never enjoyed Bollywood music or participated in Indian dances and was an angry atheist (I called myself an antitheist) from the age of 10 onwards. My mother would frequently wish I could be like other kids and compared me daily. In my heart, I knew that I was at least living a real life that was true to myself as opposed to going with what was expected of me.

When I think of the insanity of the messages I received from my mother, the song “Finish It” by Car Bomb comes to mind.

If you gave it a listen, you’d probably take note of the harsh vocals, constantly changing rhythm, and heavy guitars. To me, the song represents a mental breakdown. This is the song that captures how it feels to bear the brunt of such intense narcissistic abuse, where somebody tries to tear you to pieces so you fit in the box they’ve defined for you, all while trying to hold onto your own sanity. The repeated line of “this is too much, I’m sick of it, sick of the bullshit” is how I feel when I see hypocrisy amongst the Indian community, when the people in India adorn their temples and mosques with gold while children live outside homeless or when Indian families wax poetic about their family values while they burn away any individuality in their children.

At the same time, this music became the armoring I needed to face bullying at school. Given that I’m a short Indian guy, people have used me as the butt of their jokes. I’ve was spat on, shoved around, and humiliated at school. To this day, I still have a visceral bodily reaction when I’m around groups of white people who I suspect may be conservative. My body simultaneously shuts down and tenses up for the abuse it believes it’s about to endure, even in spite of years of therapy and distance. For this reason, heavy metal was my savior. Instead of being the nerdy Indian kid everybody could pick on, I gave off an air of aggression that told people to fuck off. Lifting weights also helped. My fondest memories of my senior year of high school involved listening to death metal bands like Pestilence and Suffocation and hitting a personal record at the gym. In many ways, I was transgressing what was expected of me as an Indian person. I was aggressive, strong, but also somebody who read math and physics textbooks for fun.

As an adult, I’m much less angry but I still love metal. One of the things I always notice when I go to metal concerts is the number of Indian immigrants who are also there. We listen to the same bands, they often play guitar. These interactions always leave me with a warm feeling that I’m not alone.

Embracing the Ugly

Transgression to me is also about embracing the offensive. My home life and my time in Ivy League schools has one thing in common that I’ve always disdained, and that’s with needing to keep up appearances and sanitizing reality. In this way, heavy metal has helped me stay connected to my story and challenges during my time in higher education, where I’ve felt like a constant outsider.

I don’t feel like I connect to my peers in this current political climate, and perhaps this is a continuation of how I’ve never felt like I’m truly American. Growing up, I would travel to India every year to meet my extended family. While on paper this sounds like an enjoyable yearly vacation, these trips were depressing and engraved into my heart two things: first, that American life was so gentle and easy that it’s not “real life”, and second: that I am immensely lucky to not have been born into the economic hardships that my father grew up in. I distinctly remember seeing children playing in trash or covered in dirt as a child and realizing that I’m no different than them. Naturally, returning to the states was an equally jarring experience. We had a larger house than most in India, electronics and a wealth of toys, and a relatively safe environment around us. At the same time, I went to sleep many nights hearing my parents scream at each other about money problems and my dad sending money back to India. As I grew older, I became more perceptive about the depths of family drama and manipulation that surrounded us sending money back to India along with the severe human rights violations that were common place in India, ranging from child abuse to sexual assault to police corruption. The peak of my ambivalence was watching my uncle slowly die of a genetic disease while he struggled with Visa and money issues in traveling between India and America to get the treatment he needed. There is no happy ending to that story - he left behind a wife and a young daughter, and I still feel devastated.

Given all of these experiences, I feel alienated on political campuses. Despite being a minority who has experienced racism, I find it hard to care about things like microaggressions or white privilege. I understand how these actions and concepts are tied to a history of significant racism in the US, but my heart lies elsewhere. I want to solve problems related to family trauma, poverty, and access to health care in developing countries, yet I feel so alone in these endeavors. In fact, I find it hard to care about much of what people on the political left care about; I feel that the things and people I care about have been abandoned for talking points that upper middle class and upper class liberals can use to gain social credit. There have been numerous times at Brown and Harvard where I hear people talk about social justice, only to learn that they’re going to intern at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. There have been too many instances of people who grew up in comfortable upper class neighborhoods using the same left wing talking points to garner social status will and then naturally picking careers that allow them to maintain their economic status. I also cannot neglect to mention how elite institutions attempt to portray themselves as bastions of human rights and social progress while being deeply money hungry. Transgressive music is how I retain the truth of my story and what I care about while I feel I’m being lied to by much of what surrounds me. It’s a rebellion against the sanitization of reality and my reclaiming the ugly and harsh truth of my and many others’ life.

One of my favorite bands is Earth Crisis for this reason. Earth Crisis is a metal core band with left leaning lyrics covering climate crisis, animal rights, and political corruption. However, the music is rageful and harsh.

I love this band because the fury in the vocalist’s shouts and the searing guitars reflect my view of life - that chaos and pain are inevitable and one should embrace reality as opposed to shy away from it. Earth Crisis also embraces an older left wing tradition that focuses on workers’ rights and the struggles of the lower and middle class. The anger in Karl Buechner’s voice is the most real thing to me as somebody who’s struggled intensely through trauma and family violence to get to where I am.

Embracing the ugly has another part to it - and that’s embracing the ugliness within ourselves. Having spent enough time at Ivy League schools, I’d begun to buy into the ideology that we in the ivory tower can change the world and that we have all of the solutions. My arrogance caused my downfall in my most recent trip to India. I went in with well intentioned, but naive expectations that I could go back and meet some of my extended family to understand the conditions my parents grew up in and connect with the country, reclaiming some part of myself. When I went back however, my desire to connect turned into disgust for the attitudes my extended family had regarding disciplining children and contempt for the average person in India. I was stressed the entire time there and became somebody I didn’t like. I had another dosage of humility. When I returned to the states, I spent time reflecting and realized that I’m not as benevolent and saintly as I sometimes like to think I am. Even if I have good intentions for my relatives back home, I am still human and can become somebody I’m not proud of. Furthermore, trying to help alleviate poverty in India will force me to reconcile many of the negative traits about myself that I like to stay in denial of. I’ve come to accept many of these negative traits of self-righteousness and arrogance to some extent but still desire to face the challenges of poverty and trauma and meet reality on its terms.

Two sides to the coin

If the music I’ve shared with you has made you horrified about who I may be, I think I should be fully honest and share just what lies underneath that armoring of anger and rage. Specifically, transgressive art has always been a way for me to cope with pain. The core of this pain is being separated from others - separated from my family due to trauma and mental illness and separated from the people around me due to socio-cultural differences. Ironically, it’s this music that I’ve used as a sort of battering ram to keep people out that signifies my deepest feelings of wanting to bring people in.

The song “Demon of the Fall” is a prime example of this principle, as it juxtaposes intense metal sections with lamentful ballad.

The song begins as a dark and oppressive death/black metal song. Mikael Akerfeldt’s vocals truly capture the “Demon” part of the song. However, the ending part of the song is a melodic section that conveys deep sorrow, finally finishing with an acoustic guitar part that rings of the sadness the distorted electric guitars were pulsing with moments before. Opeth is one of my favorite bands for this reason exactly, they are masters of this juxtaposition between the rageful, bordering on demonic, and utter sadness. On the surface, the tonal whiplash in the music is jarring and surprising. But growing up feeling unloved by those who were supposed to care for me and put down for who I am, this music is home.

It’s hard for me to share this kind of music for these reasons though. At least with bands like Earth Crisis and Car Bomb, the wall of rage keeps me psychologically safe from any criticism that may come my way for enjoying this music. When I share songs from bands like Opeth or Between the Buried and Me, I feel like I’m showing what lies underneath the anger, and that’s difficult. I’ve always been scared to show people what I listen to since I’ve been fearful of judgment. I’m worried that people would think I’m crazy or broken. It’s ironic because music is also the purest expression of who I am and how I feel. I believe it captures much of what I hide away from people - a mangled mix of sadness and rage.

In the end

I’ve always associated my tastes in art to be proof that I am a freak, but as I come to embrace these aspects of myself I have realized that they’re some of the most steady and wise parts of myself. I’ve struggled with anger throughout my life. It appears as a black hole in my abdomen and a vice grip in my chest, a demon that sits in my mind, lashing out at the world. However, anger, like any other emotion, is not fundamentally bad, but is just a signal that my boundaries have been violated. Looking back on my life, I see how the dots connect regarding boundary violations. Between conservative Indian culture and racially targeted bullying, my child self never had a chance to thrive in the way I needed, and this anger has helped me survive and get to a place where I can finally be myself. At the same time, the sorrow underneath is a signal that I deeply care about relationships. I care so deeply that I had to disconnect from that pain for so long. When I am working through a flashback, I dig through layers of anger and frustration to find wellsprings of tears that allow me to feel grief for the important familial relationships I never had and the safety I never felt.

I am not religious at this point but I do feel that I am deeply spiritual. I’d say my philosophy aligns with affirming life as deeply as possible and embracing the human experience. My personal “god” is natural selection and the randomness of the universe - this isn’t something to be worshipped or have ideology built around, but instead a force that is ultimately amoral and induces the full range of experience. I believe my culture’s conservatism and religious dogmas are a way to cope with this unjust and inexplicable aspect of reality, but I’d rather enter the void of my own confusion and insignificance and see my life play out. I’ve been lucky to have met many amazing individuals along this journey, who have given me the chance to see their human experience unfold in unexpected and exciting ways. While I often feel like I lack a solid intellectual foundation in how to live life and make sense of the world, increasingly I find the inner compass of my emotions and intuition to be a reliable way to navigate the world. If there is one thing I hope that I’ve conveyed through this essay, it is the idea that in transgressing past what is expected of us and what we believe our own limits are that we actually find the most human aspects of ourselves.