Image has always been a pivotal aspect of heavy music. Dark, creepy sounds are captivating in themselves, sure, but they just don’t hit as hard when the performers are indistinguishable from Steve in accounts or Sue in human resources. Rock and metal artists have done much to make themselves larger than life over the years: growing hair out, donning studded denim and leather, tattooing every imaginable space, daubing bodies in blood red and death white…
Alice Cooper and KISS became different animals when they opened the make-up box. Hell, even the lo-fi outsiders of Norwegian black metal only truly transformed themselves from angry young men to heretical demons when they tapped into the corpsepaint.
There is a breed beyond, however. The willingness to pull on a solid mask is to completely sacrifice the human being within for your time onstage, in service of the symbol you become. That can be to add the ultimate mystique: an acknowledgement that questions are always more interesting than answers. It could be in service of a grand theatrical theme, transforming the players into characters in the outlandish story they want to tell. Hell, it might even be just because certain musicians value their anonymity, whether to stay out of the celebrity spotlight or to avoid the persecution that righteous music still invokes in certain corners of the world.