I lived through certain situations with certain people in a certain mental/spiritual state that helped me understand and feel - in a visceral level - what metal is about.
I don't think I've ever been able to appreciate music on a visceral level. When I love music that other people don't understand, it's on some kind of non-rational brain level. I feel it in my head, but I still can't explain it.
This leads me into a whole other subject: multiple subconsciouses. We talk about "the subconscious" as if it's one thing. But we also say both "listen to your gut" and "listen to your heart", so already we're talking about at least two sources of insight or perception, other than conscious rational calculation. And inside the head there are even more subconsciouses, like where dreams come from, or the voices that schizophrenics hear, or how I can look at a pot of soup and know whether it will fit in a jar, or what athletes are talking about when they say they perform better when they get their head out of the way.
I mean, those could be all the same thing, but I find it more helpful to imagine a jungle of mind, in which the abstract-thinking brain is only a single animal.
That's all I've got for now on that subject, so back to music. Today is the summer solstice, and here's a twelve minute anthem from 2013: The Rutabega - Turn On The Summer. And looking ahead, I forget where I found this luminous teen ballad, and the internet doesn't even know what year it was recorded, maybe 1970: Dennis Harte - Summer's Over.