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On the occasion of Ozzy Osbourne’s passing, the Overthinking It podcast piled into a van airbrushed with flaming skulls to discuss the genre of heavy metal music in its heyday. Resident metalheads Pete Fenzel and Mark Lee chose a slate of “heavy metal” tracks (which inevitably tiptoed towards trash and hair metal) and forced non-metalhead Matt Wrather to listen to them. The playlist is below for your head-banging, horn-throwing pleasure.

The panel unpacked the key musical and thematic signifiers of the genre, in particular its obsession with darkness, death, and the occult. Sometimes this is expressed in slightly cartoonish terms, especially as it relates to Satan. Although when taken to its logical extreme, things get a bit uncomfortable as we are forced to reckon with an explicitly Holocaust themed song that happens to absolutely rip.

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Episode 891: What Should I Do at the Slayer Concert? originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]