Literate metal bands rock on, read on

So what's with all the head-banging bookworms?

Last month, the Brazilian heavy-metal band Sepultura released "Dante XXI," an album based on the Italian poet's "Divine Comedy." And Mastodon recently became metal's newest stars with "Leviathan," a "Moby-Dick"-inspired album with songs like "I Am Ahab" and "Seabeast."

With its preoccupation with evil, dry ice and alternately shrieking and growling vocals, heavy metal has come by its goofball image honestly. But wearing leather and spikes doesn't mean you don't crack open a book from time to time.

Sepultura and Mastodon are only the latest metal bands to raid their Norton Anthologies for inspiration. Perhaps more than any other genre, heavy metal and the classics are joined at the hip.

"So many of them are so well-read but not university-educated," says Deena Weinstein, professor of sociology at DePaul University in Chicago. She adds that many of the more literate metal bands come from England. "What the British get in their high-school education is what we feed students here in college."

What's next: Ozzy takes on the short stories of John Cheever? Actually, no. Metalheads live suburban angst, but they don't necessarily read it. Leave the navel-gazing ennui to emo bands and Lilith Fair alums.

So if Cheever's not metal, who is? Epic battles of good and evil are very metal, says Weinstein, author of "Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture."

So is man's battle against nature — as in Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," based on the Coleridge poem of the same name (in general, the 19th-century Romantics have staked out a particularly prominent place in metal).

"The Divine Comedy" seems an obvious choice with its visions of hell, but Dante's metal presence has been relatively limited. Same goes for Herman Melville, despite the Mastodon album and the Led Zeppelin instrumental "Moby Dick."

So, to put it in metal terms, which scribes doth taketh the title of Most Metal? With his clumsy prose and often meandering plots, H.P. Lovecraft still struggles decades after his death for respect in the literary world.

But in the metal world, his weird tales blare from Marshall amps the world over. The Rhode Island writer's mystical visions have informed the songs of Metallica, Dead Meadow and plenty of others.

Who else? Frodo and his band of Hobbits have kept a surprisingly tight grip on the collective metal imagination. Everyone from proto-metallers Led Zeppelin and Rush to Norway's death-metal bands have borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien.

"Lord of the Rings," incidentally, is one of the few metal-approved works to come along after World War II. For all their antics and wild attire, metal bands can be a rather stodgy bunch when it comes to their reading material.

In this respect, the guys from England's Iron Maiden prove themselves a literarily adventurous lot. Besides writers like Lord Tennyson (their hit "The Trooper" re-tells "The Charge of the Light Brigade"), they also take on Frank Herbert's "Dune" and other science-fiction works.

And with "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" (based on the Alan Sillitoe short story), Maiden delves into class struggles and marathon running — neither traditional metal themes.

On the other hand, the story embraces rebellion, and Sillitoe was one of Britain's Angry Young Men writers of the 1950s. Very metal, indeed.