on Love in the Time of... Hatebreed

Often resulting in injuries [4], the collective mood is influenced by the combination of loud, fastmusic (130 dB [5], 350 beats per minute), synchronizedwith bright, flashing lights, and frequent intoxication [6].This variety and magnitude of stimuli are atypical ofmore moderate settings.Jesse L. Silverberg, "Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts."  Cornell University, 2013. 

The week before Valentines Day the top of the Billboard charts featured plenty of easy songs about romance - The Lumineers Ho Hey, Calvin Harris Sweet Nothings, Taylor Swift I Knew You Were Trouble.And for the first time in their 15 years of touring, the furious tracks by metal rockers Hatebreed crashed into the Billboard top 20.  On a night that some people reserve for Sinatra and soft lighting, the band spent this Valentines Day screaming from a stage in Virginia to a wild crowd.Whether in Buffalo or Raleigh, Jacksonville or Norfolk, metal music attracts a specific type of black t-shirted, red-blooded American male, content to skip buying roses and pouring wine, and enthused to ball up a fist and take a stagedive.As retailers push pink hearts and flowers and chocolates, Hatebreed offers an alternative to the rosy-cheeked glow of commercialized passion. In the song "Between Hell and a Heartbeat," vocalist Jamey Jasta growls:

"One last nailIn the coffin of all your trustWhere there once was love now lives total disgust"

The crowd this February 14th was about 90% single white men under 30, none of whom seemed to find it overly ironic when Jasta said, between thrashing songs: "Happy Valentines Day, if you came here with somebody you love!"A sparse number of calm and seemingly affectionate couples meekly mixed into the crowd, and they always do at metal shows, Valentines Day or not.Jesse Silverberg, a graduate student in physics at Cornell, was at a metal concert with his girlfriend when he first made a connection between 'moshing' and the behavior of gas molecules.Silverberg's observation inspired him to study crowd behavior, and publish a paper titled "Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts." He hopes to influence architectural design standards: it would be unethical to trap people in a burning building as a test to study behavior in a panic situation; analyzing metalheads in a mosh pit is apparently the next best thing.Finding a mathematical formula for saving lives in a parade of screaming men taking swings at each other: I guess that's one version love, in the time of Hatebreed.