Between transgressive gender constructions and hypermasculinity: the recent balancing of gender in Scandinavian Extreme Metal music.

August 30, 2018 — Leave a comment

In this post,1 I want to examine recent Scandinavian Extreme Metal music as a discourse, where gender balancing acts became a crucial field of negotiating the sub-genres’ structures. On the one hand, there is a growing number of female artists who perform harsh, “guttural” style vocals, which was  a strictly male-connoted style of singing until about a decade ago.

This means there are transgressive gender constructions, which allow women aggressive, powerful and empowering enculturations of their gender identities. However, on the other hand, still hypermasculinity is prevailing in the field, being a major part of the genres’ codes of stylistic definition since the 1980s. I want to examine how this immensely conflictual contemporary history is kept in balance by artists, mediators, and their audience.

I start by giving a sketchy introduction to the field of Metal Studies and how contemporary history has an important position within its debates. I proceed by giving two examples of artists in the field: one of a female artist who represents the transgressive pole of the spectrum; and a second example of male gender constructions standing for the persisting and defining hypermasculine keycode. Third and finally, I will give a cultural-historical reading of this history, explaining how both can historically “work” and occur synchronically and meaningfully in a single regional discourse – with European and global implications.

Metal Music Studies and contemporary history

“Metal Music Studies” is a label for a global network of scholars who work on Heavy Metal music and culture, their interconnections, publications, conferences, and workshops. Roughly, research on Metal can be divided into three phases.2 A first phase between the early to mid-1990s saw pioneering monographic books by sociologists, anthropologists and musicologists. This was followed by a second phase of more intensified research and publications after 2000, but there was no such thing as Metal Studies yet.

This has changed since 2008. This year saw a conference called “Heavy Fundametalisms” in Salzburg, Austria. It catalysed the official launch of a learned society called the “International Society for Metal Music Studies” in 2013.3 Since 2015, there also is an own peer-reviewed journal entitled “Metal Music Studies”.4 In 2016, British sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris gave a description of the emergent field of Metal Studies:

 

What is the aim of metal studies? (…) At the one level the answer to this question is obvious. The aim of metal studies is to engage with metal in a scholarly fashion. This project needs no justification. (…) Yet there can also be a greater purpose for metal studies than simply the worthy creation of scholarship. The position of metal studies in relation to metal itself offers the opportunity for engaged scholarship. Most metal studies scholars are also engaged with metal as fans and metal scene members – but critically so.5

 

This is a thoughtful commentary on the current state of Metal scholarship. It is a discourse on the brink of – probably – becoming an own specialized discipline or, at least, a highly specialized subfield. According to Kahn-Harris,6 Metal Music Studies should promote reflexivity by (1) nurturing resilience, (2) nurturing memory, (3) nurturing critique and (4) looking to the future.  

All four of those goals can take several different forms. However, the second one, nurturing memory, is deeply connected to the engagement of historians. There exist many historical reflections on Metal and Metal Studies yet these histories have been written by sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, musicologists or other disciplinary scholars. As in any other specialized discipline, historians ask their own questions, different from the ones in those disciplines. Thus, the nurturing of memory in the field needs reliable scientific narratives of Metal history by historians, too.

This is the background of my own research, which tries to help introducing the “historian’s gaze” to the field.7 In our context, we can suppose a fundamental importance of two key research questions to be formulated by historians: (1) What have been the major historical developments of gender constructions in Heavy Metal music in recent years? (2) How has this particular history interfered, contrasted, or come together with a broader view on global and European gender history?

Two examples of Scandinavian Extreme Metal

In this respect, I choose Scandinavian Extreme Metal as an empirical example because it is a sub-discourse, where gender balancing happens in a dense, crystallized and symptomatic manner. This has at least three major reasons: (1) a first one being that specifically genres such as Thrash, Death Metal or Black Metal feature a pronounced gesture of hypermasculinity as one of their genre codes since the 1980s; (2) a second, regional reason being that several of the most influential forms of both Black and Death Metal music emerged in Scandinavia in the 1990s.

Finally, (3) a third can be found in the fact that, despite its hypermasculinity, Extreme Metal codified permanent transgression of the status quo, also concerning gender roles, as one of its other keycodes. Hence, in Scandinavia, the origin myths of Extreme Metal, its defining code of hypermasculinity as well as its permanent striving for transgression of boundaries form three highly conflictual strands interacting in a single regional discourse.

I want to give two examples of artists who represent both poles – one of empowering and transgressive female gender representation and one of persisting fundamentalist hypermasculinity; the latter should rather be called a “toxic” form of masculinity.8

Myrkur

The first example, Myrkur, is a Black Metal project from Denmark, led by songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun. In 2014, Myrkur released an eponymous EP, followed by the debut album “M” in 2015, and a live EP, “Mausoleum”, in 2016. All of Myrkur’s records and live acitivities gathered rather wide attention, were partially well received by critics. However, moreover they were partially criticized as being “superficial”, “not real Black Metal” or a “sell-out”.9

All the way through those debates, the fact that Myrkur is led and controlled by a woman build one of the most intensely discussed issues. Bruun even received death threats on her Facebook page.10 Following this discourse, Bruun as Myrkur released her second full-length, “Mareridt”, in 2017. This is the videoclip to the track “Ulvinde”, which accompanied the album’s release:

Representing Myrkur‘s identity after receiving death threats, the clip features differentiated strategies of female gender performance. At a first level, Bruun is shown as the conservative stereotype of a “soft woman” in a bright dress; on another, there also are sequences of female aggression, where blood is dripping from the artist’s mouth and she is screaming furiously. Both modes of female gender construction are shown alternating throughout the clip.

Here, the usual stereotype of male, Northern gutturally screaming Black Metal artists is transgressed, played with; in some ways, it even is dealt with and discussed in a parodistic and ironic manner. Myrkur can be both: “tender” woman and aggressive Black Metal frontwoman. The death threats sent to the artist give this cultural history of gender a very bitter taste; they show that this trend of transgressive and empowering female gender performance was partially perceived of as a “threat” to Extreme Metal’s definitional code of hypermasculinity.

Amon Amarth

Now, I go to my second example, representing the traditional gender codes of Extreme Metal, especially of the subgenres of Melodic Death Metal and Viking Metal. In these subgenres, Swedish band Amon Amarth is one of the most successful ones. Being founded in 1992, the group, so far, released ten albums. Their music fantastically constructs a vision of a pre-Christian, Viking Northern world.

Amon Amarth tell a history of the Vikings, in which brave and “real” men, weak women, violence, wars, and authenticity appear as the defining ingredients. In 2016, as a forerunner to their album “Jomsviking”, the band released a videoclip to the track “First Kill”:

The clip tells a very simple plot: a Viking man commits his first act of killing another man when this other man attempted to “steal his woman”. This form of hypermasculinity implies a representation of gender roles, in which women are men’s property; they can be “stolen” and a “real man” is forced to prevent other men from “stealing his women”. “he story gets even more extreme. After telling their audience of this “first kill”, the group continues the song with these lines:

 

(…) The first blood I spilled was the blood of a bard

I had to wipe the smile away

I was not yet a man, nor was I a boy

But still, I made that bastard pay (…)11

 

In this quote, the “first kill” is told as a story of male initiation. A man’s first act of killing another man is narrated as a prerequisite of becoming a man. And the cause of committing this murder is that another man acted as a “threat” to his maleness.

Of course, Amon Amarth produce music as entertainment and fiction. However, in a frighteningly coherent way, this representation of toxic hypermasculinity, where a threat to one man’s maleness is perceived of as a matter of life and death, even of killing the supposed rival, also is a symptom of the logics of the death threats towards Myrkur. In her case, the artist was threatened to be killed because she invaded “male territory”.

In “First Kill”, the fictional story goes that one man must kill another man to defend or even in the first place achieve his full masculinity. Both cases follow the same logics of discourse: a threat to hypermasculinity requires such drastic reaction – but, shamefully and dangerously, the death threats towards Myrkur happened in the real world and today.

“Enter history”: making sense of the paradoxes

At this point, we know that the recent history of performances of gender in Scandinavian Extreme Metal music is one of the co-existence of seemingly binarily opposed poles: there is the transgressive pole represented by female artists like Myrkur; moreover, the toxic hypermasculinity which re-surfaces in “First Kill”. How can we make sense of this? How are those sharply divisive and contra-dictional gender performances balanced in a single discourse? My thesis is that we need deconstructive European cultural and gender history to start answering such questions.

In 2016, German historian Wolfgang Schmale published a thought-provoking book called “Gender and Eurocentrism: A Conceptual Approach to European History”.12 He put forward the hypothesis that, since Ancient times, a deep structural connection was established between performative discourses and gender discourses of masculinity. His theory of “collective performative speech acts” states that, since Antiquity, performative discourses were constructed to intrinsically, almost “logically” need such gender images to work at all.

This seems to be true for the Ancient performative speech act, which Schmale coins “homocentrism”, implying a dominance of the male. Most of all, this holds true for European cultural history since the 18th century and Enlightenment: since then, until very recently, history knows a collective performative speech act to be called “Eurocentrism”: performative discourses have needed visions of white, European and male hegemony to work at all.

This is a provocative claim because it states a deep and strong, almost “logical” discursive connection between male gender and performance at large. But this is not Schmale’s final conclusion. He comes to the argumentation that, today, history moves towards a new discursive structure of “post-performativity”, in which the almost “logical” connection between male gender and performance gets, step by step, discourse by discourse, deconstruction by deconstruction loosened – because of the disappearance of working speech collectives.

This thought-provoking result needs further research. However, this mode of explanation proves to be illuminating for our case study: it states that, since over 250 years, performative discourses were strategically constructed to need logics of white, male and European hegemony to be able to balance their sense-making.  This is no legitimization of any form of violence or discrimination arising from this; on the contrary, it emphasizes the constructivity of any gender constructions.

This can be applied straight-forwardly to our case: since its inception in the 1980s, Scandinavian Extreme Metal has continued the performative logics of hypermasculinity s to be able of performing performative speech acts at all. Nevertheless, today, we witness an emerging history of “post-performativity”, in which the strict coherence in sense-making between male gender and performance becomes loosened.

Exactly this is the way how artists like Myrkur and Amon Amarth can perform meaningfully in a single discourse. This, the slow trajectory towards a loosening between gender and performance is the way how the paradoxes are balanced. To conclude, this leads me to two main points as my result, perhaps furthermore significant for other discourses:

First, to balance gender and music in Scandinavian Extreme Metal, we need to establish a discourse in which the long-standing connection between hypermasculinity and performance since the 18th century can be discussed critically and historically. So to speak, Scandinavian Extreme Metal is a discourse in which, still today in 2018, the 18th century and the 21st century happen in the same place at the same time – however puzzling that is.

Second, even more puzzling, we need to examine exactly which inventory of strategies makes possible successful transgressions, which could even more loosen the shameful and dangerous connection between Eurocentrism and gender. In Myrkur’s case, it seems to be the trope of courageous irony, strategically juxtaposing hypermasculinity and female aggression.

  1. It is based on my conference talk at the conference “‘Music and Gender in Balance 2018”, Arctic University of Tromsö, Tromsö, Norway, 6 April 2018. ↩

  2. Important works in the field are: D. Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids, New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1990; D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology, New York, NY: Lexington Books, 1991; R. Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993: K. Kahn-Harris, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge, New York, NY: Berg, 2007; H.M. Berger, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press 1999. ↩

  3. www.metalstudies.org, accessed 31/03/2018. ↩

  4. https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=236/, accessed 31/03/2018. ↩

  5. K. Kahn-Harris, ‘Introduction: The Next Steps in the Evolution of Metal Studies’, in B. Gardenour Walter e.a. (eds), Heavy Metal Studies and Popular Culture, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 1-2; for introductory texts to the field see besides this anthology also A. R. Brown e.a. (eds), Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies, Milton Park: Routledge, 2016; F. Heesch and A.K. Höpflinger (eds), Methoden der Heavy Metal-Forschung: Interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Münster and New York: Waxmann 2014; and the special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research 15, 3 (2011), devoted to ‘Metal Studies? Cultural Research in the Heavy Metal Scene’. ↩

  6. Kahn-Harris, Introduction, pp. 3-7. ↩

  7. http://www.peter-pichler-stahl.at/artikel/homo-ludens-metallicus-on-huizinga-cultural-history-and-sonic-knowledge-in-metal-music-studies/, accessed 31/03/2018. ↩

  8. A. Anderlin-Mahr, Vielfalt und Diversität anstatt toxischer Männlichkeit, in Blog W. Schmale, Mein Europa, https://wolfgangschmale.eu/andreas-enderlin-mahr_ueber_vielfalt-und-diversitaet-anstatt-toxischer-maennlichkeit/, accessed 02/04/2018. ↩

  9. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/6vgqe8/myrkur-facebook-threats, accessed 31/03/2018; http://www.metalinjection.net/hateorade/one-woman-black-metal-band-myrkur-is-tired-of-getting-death-threats-from-men, accessed 31/03/2018; http://www.toiletovhell.com/stangry-manchildren-send-myrkur-death-threats/, accessed 31/03/2018. ↩

  10. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/6vgqe8/myrkur-facebook-threats, accessed 31/03/2018; http://www.metalinjection.net/hateorade/one-woman-black-metal-band-myrkur-is-tired-of-getting-death-threats-from-men, accessed 31/03/2018; http://www.toiletovhell.com/stangry-manchildren-send-myrkur-death-threats/, accessed 31/03/2018. ↩

  11. Lyrics to Amon Amarth, “First Kill”, released on the album “Jomsviking”. Metal Blade Records, 2016. ↩

  12. W. Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism: A Conceptual Approach to European History, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 2016. ↩

“Why does that guy research heavy metal?” – A short note on metal studies’ acceptance and self-representation within academic discourse

July 8, 2018 — Leave a comment

I just returned from an intriguing conference on Mediterranean Europe(s): Images and Ideas of Europe from the Mediterranean Shores in Naples, Italy. There, I gave a talk on how European Union historiography could look in times of existential crisis. Before my talk, I was introduced and my chair also mentioned my upcoming book on a cultural history of metal in Europe.1 In fact, in the exact moment when my chair mentioned this book, I did not look at the audience; but the mentioning of a  “cultural history of metal in Europe” caused some laughter, however, most of all it caused interest and paying attention to my speech.

This is a situation, almost in a paradigmatic way, which I experience at practically every conference, lecture, course or other academic event outside of metal studies itself when my research on metal is mentioned. It causes a mixture of laughter, ignorance, however, predominantly it is a trigger of immediate attention. Here, the label “metal studies” becomes a signifier of novelty, interdisciplinarity but also of all stereotypes of metal culture. Hence, the question is how – strategically and proactively – metal studies should present itself to other academic discourses.

My “answer” also takes up an individual experience I had at the Naples conference. After the keynote on the event’s first day, I had an informal chat with the keynote speaker; she gave a really convincing lecture on theoretical issues of Mediterranean history, showing how personal stories and scientific historiography interact in historians’ individual careers and lives. After I gave her a short feedback, she told me that after hearing that I work in metal studies she had been asking herself: “Why does that guy research heavy metal?”

Again, here metal studies triggered immediate attention. However, this shows a fundamental lack of knowledge. I answered in a twofold way. First, I replied that most of all since about ten years metal studies has become a serious emerging field of research. So, I tried to give basic information. Second, I felt it was even more important to give a sense of how a European cultural history of metal is connected to the discourse discussed in Naples. In this respect, I anwered that – basically – a European cultural history of metal is part of a broad cultural history of Europe since the 1970s, of Europeanization, globalization and regional integration in the EU.

I mentioned two examples how metal history could give new insights: I told her that metal history in the 1980s was a cultural phenomenon in Europe, which crossed the Iron Curtain before 1989 – Iron Maiden toured Poland as early as 1984. I compared this phenomenon to other forms of culture such as cross-bloc-contacts in literature, academia or music. Like this, I tried to show how metal history was a form of subcultural European integration even before 1989.

Then, I told her about the development of extreme metal as a whole spectrum of subgenres since the 1980s. I mentioned that for a historian it is rather evident that extreme metal emerged in a decade which was the fin-de-siècle of an epoch which Eric Hobsbawm called the “Age of Extremes“.2 For me, there is a rather obvious, already linguistic connection between the emergence of extreme metal and the Age of Extremes. The latter is the context of the birth of new musical subgenres.

After this informal talk, the keynote speaker told me that this sounds highly interesting and she will look out for my book. One can intepret this as collegial practice of informal etiquette; yet this anecdote proves that metal studies causes interest. My idea is that to further nurture our field we ought to meet this interest strategically, proactively and respectfully. This means to provide basic knowledge about our field. Then, explaining the field’s aims and ambitions by describing cross-linkages to other discourses and giving empirical examples appears to be helpful.

  1. Peter Pichler, Metal Music and Sonic Knowledge in Europe: a Cultural History. Forthcoming: Emerald Publishers, early 2019. ↩

  2. Erich Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, London: Michael Joseph, 1994. ↩

A subtle gesture of irony? On sonic knowledge and the cultural history of the (mis-)uses of country music in metal culture.

June 23, 2018 — Leave a comment

The topic of a recent metal studies conference was ‘going to the country’, being focussed more precisely in the title’s second part ‘pastoral, national, musical’. 1 I am a contemporary historian who works in metal music studies; my aim is to write pieces of a scientific historiography of metal music as a ‘glocal’ subculture, giving it a scientific narrative.

When I reflect on the phrase of ‘going to the country’, my central thought is to narrate a history of ‘going to the country’ in metal. I ask myself: could this phrase be the ‘emplotment’ of at least a part of a cultural history of metal? My thesis is that, somewhat paradoxically, the phrase gives an answer to the question how musical, topical and aesthetical aspects of country music were integrated into metal culture. I argue that this processes between metal and country discourses, blending and hybridizing both, happened in a form of a historic emplotment, which Hayden White described as ‘satire’.2

l will go three steps to prove my thesis: as steps one and two, I discuss two empirical examples of recent metal culture, where country music was used in metal and hard rock music. By conceptually analysing both examples in a third section, I will try to show that this has the cultural-historical form of emplotment of ‘satire’, using irony in ‘going to the country’. This is an aspect of recent metal history’s development, being reflected in the emergence of an own academic discourse of metal music studies.

In these emerging debates, I introduced the term of ‘sonic knowledge’ to characterize the historian’s gaze on metal, which sees it as a historically shaped form of cultural knowledge in music. We can call this sonic knowledge.3

Steve ‘n’ Seagulls, ‘Farm Machine’ and ‘Brothers in Farms’

In 2015, the Finnish band Steve ‘n’ Seagulls (a pun on actor Steven Seagal) released their debut album ‘Farm Machine’.4 The group played classic heavy metal songs like Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’ and ‘Seek and Destroy’, or Iron Maiden’s ‘The Trooper’ and ‘Run to the Hills’, and hard rock classics such as AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ and ‘You Shook Me all Night Long’ on bluegrass instruments. They stripped the songs of their typical guitar-driven, distorted and heavy sound, and represented them as country music versions.

This redressing and reshaping of central musical and discursive elements of metal culture can be seen as acts of translation. The trope in which the final versions –  bluegrass versions – appear is irony: playing originally heavy and aggressive tracks like ‘Seek and Destroy` or even Rammstein’s ‘Ich will’ in this style, prompts a caricature of metal culture and country culture. It creates a new space in which the stereotypes of metal (aggressiveness, anger, hyper-masculinity, satanism, etc.) as well as the cliché of country (farm life, rural styles of clothing, ‘primitiveness`, ‘backwardness’, etc.) are exposed as such constructions. This is the debut album’s cover:

Cover of Steve ‘n’ Seagulls, Farm Machine, released 08.05.2015 on Spinefarm Records.

Already this cover shows very clearly how the band sees ‘going to the country’: as a means of satire and irony; of satire of both – metal and country. This becomes even more obvious watching their Youtube clicks. Some of them went ‘viral’. Here is their version of Iron Maiden’s classic song ‘The Trooper’, which achieved no less than over 11 millions of views:


What is happening here? Being able musicians, they take a metal anthem, strip it of its core musical language of roaring guitars, speed and high-pitched vocals; instead of using this musical language of metal,5 Steve ‘n’ Seagulls redress the song, sonically, as a bluegrass song. Their habitual appearance, which is a quite awful cliché caricature of farm life, makes fun of both – metal and country. In this case, ‘going to the country’ means going to the country via the history of Metal. The form, in which this cultural-historical detour is gone, is irony and satire. This going-to-the-country-as-detour also was the case on the band’s second album ‘Brothers in Farms’ from 2016.6

Behemoth, Me and that Man and ‘Songs of Love and Death’

Let me analyze a second empirical example. In 2017, Adam Michal ‘Nergal’ Darski, singer and creative head of the Polish extreme metal group Behemoth, released a country-inspired album called ‘Songs of Love and Death’.7 In this musical project, Darski joined forces with British rock artist John Porter. Working together on dark country and folk-inspired, more or less acoustic guitar music, they called the project Me and that Man. Evidently, Nergal called himself ‘me’ whereas Porter was referred to as ‘that man’. Hence, this implies that Nergal is to be seen as the project’s actual protagonist, as the duo’s ‘self’ and ‘me’.

In this respect, forming a project which plays dark folk and country music, at the same time being the leader of a Polish extreme, black and death metal group whose latest album (‘The Satanist’ from 2014)8 was widely received as a seminal one, maybe even a future genre classic, becomes a remarkable symbolic act in discourse.

Nergal escapes his discourse of origin, which is extreme metal, and ‘goes to the country’. However, he does so by joining forces with an artist from the new field but at the same time sticks to his used dark lyrical and aesthetic contents. Somehow, one can see the album of ‘Songs of Love and Death’ as a reciprocal case of Steve ‘n’ Seagulls: Nergal used an optical travesty of metal themes to translate their core narrative of darkness to country. This is the album’s cover:

Cover of Me and that Man, Songs of Love Death, released 24/03/2017 on Cooking Vinyl Records.

The cover’s contents embody the project’s artistic mode of operation. It shows an old man and a wolf. So, most of all the project works allegorically. It is a metaphor-in-music of metal culture, translated to country culture. This is its mode of ‘going to the country’. It becomes especially obvious in the clip to the song ‘My Church is Black’, featured on the album:

In the setting of a red-light strip club, it shows pictures of striptease, physical abuse, darkness, being bracketed together by a short storyline. Optically, this clip is quite easily to identify as metal, yet acoustically it renains country and folk.

Cultural-historically, in its discursive mode of operation, ‘Songs of Love and Death’, being released just a year ago, builds a very interesting example of ‘going to the country’. It imports, via imaginary and allegorisms, metal culture to country culture. It substitutes country images (which in the case of ‘Farm Machine` and ‘Brothers in Farms’ was obvious humour and irony, in the shape of kitsch and cliché) with metal images. However serious this meant darkness does appear, its mode of operation is the same – satire and irony. The discursive and cultural emplotment modes in irony and satire are, amongst others, parody, juxtaposition, comparison, analogy, and double entendre.9

All these techniques of emplotment use the vice-versa-substitution of supposedly paradoxical elements as their key mode of storytelling: in parody, exaggerated protagonists or storylines substitute the original ones; in juxtaposition, reciprocal substitution of antithetic elements is obvious; in comparison or analogy, the substitutional similarity of different narratives is the core; finally, in double entendre, different meanings are played with and can be substituted with each other. Thus, the supposed seriousness of the country culture in ‘Me and that Man’ is satire, too. How can we use these findings for a cultural history of metal – and popular music at large?

Sonic knowledge: ‘Going to the country’ as irony and satire in the emplotment of metal history

As historian, I ask myself: how can these two examples of ‘going to the country’, standing for a broader trend of looking for connections to other cultures of poplar music in metal history, be interpreted? How are they to be interpreted using the historian’s gaze in metal music studies?

My hypothesis is we can only historically meaningfully do so by applying Hayden White’s narratology  on metal history. In his groundbreaking book ‘Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe’, the author showed that basically all scientific historiography is narrative and narratological construction, too. ‘Emplotment’, White’s key term, was defined as:

Providing the ‘meaning’ of a story by identifying the kind of story that has been told is called explanation by emplotment. (…) Emplotment is the way by which a sequence of event fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of particular kind.10

Reading this quote, we do not have to descend into the depts and apocryphes of the philosophy of history. Historians themselves barely dare do to theory. But it tells us that in history, and thus also in metal history, we ought to ask how a particular narrative is constructed. We ought to ask for its mode of emplotment: in its musical language, its lyrics, its imaginaries etc. Doing so for the case of ‘going to the country’ in recent metal history, we see that the core mode of emplotment is satire and irony. In recent metal culture, ‘going to the country’ means to use irony and metaphor as deconstructive ways of storytelling to give an epistemological travesty of both: metal and country.

And, finally, this gives us a clue on how to better historically understand metal (and maybe other discourses of popular music) in their historic dynamics. Basically, emplotment and narratives, as introduced by White, are notions of knowledge. Telling a history, fashioning events into a narrative, is a way of gaining and presenting historic knowledge. This could be a historical agenda, applying the historian’s gaze on metal music: seeing it as sonic knowledge which is constructed in certain historical spaces at a certain historical time. This is what historians of metal can meaningfully ask and aim for.

  1. Conference ‘Going To The Country: Pastoral-National-Musical’, 8 to 11 March  2018, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee; http://iaspm-us.net/2018-iaspm-us-conference/, accessed 23/06/2018. ↩

  2. H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973; idem, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. ↩

  3. P. Pichler, ‘Homo ludens metallicus? On Huizinga, the historian’s gaze and sonic knowledge in Metal Music Studies’, in Stahl, 26.02.2018. Online, Url: http://www.peter-pichler-stahl.at/artikel/homo-ludens-metallicus-on-huizinga-cultural-history-and-sonic-knowledge-in-metal-music-studies/, accessed 06/03/2018. ↩

  4. Steve ‘n’ Seagulls, Farm Machine, released 08/05/2015 on Spinefarm Records. ↩

  5. D. Elflein, Schwermetallanalysen. Die musikalische Sprache des Heavy Metal, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. ↩

  6. Steve ‘n’ Seagulls, Brothers in Farms, released 09/09/2016 on Spinefarm Records. ↩

  7. Me and that Man, Songs of Love Death, released 24/03/2017 on Cooking Vinyl Records. ↩

  8. Behemoth, The Satanist, released 03/02/2014 on Nuclear Blast Records. ↩

  9. White, Metahistory; more broadly see B. Connery and K. Combe (eds.), Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1995; M. A. Seidel, The Satiric Inheritance: From Rabelais to Sterne, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. ↩

  10. White, Metahistory, 7. ↩

‘Multilingual metal’: does metal have an own cultural-historical language?

May 1, 2018 — Leave a comment

Doubtless, metal music studies with its accelerating sequence of scholarly events, also its intensification of publication streams, is an emerging discourse in academia. Within these debates, an upcoming conference in London on 20th and 21st September 2018 will be devoted to the topic of ‘Multilingual Metal’.1 The information on the event states:

(…) the purpose of our multi-disciplinary conference is to explore further the textual analysis of heavy metal lyrics written in languages other than English. In cases where the primary language of the lyrics is English, loans or elements from other languages can be the topic of investigation.2

From a cultural-historical perspective, this is a very interesting approach to metal history. Seeing metal as a a multilingual discourse, at least in its lyrical and textual qualities, logically implies that this is a multilingual history. And, seeing metal as a multilingual history forces us to think of metal history as a transnational and transcultural history, whose defining character also is to be found in processes of translation. That said, historical research on metal has to apply a genuinely transnational approach, taking inspiration from discourses such as world history, entangled history, and – probably most important – postcolonial history.3

This need of thinking of metal history in a postcolonial perspective is urgent and reflected in current research.4 It leads to new, maybe fundamental questions on the history of metal. Conceptually, having to theorize metal as a discourse which hybridizes myriads of different, multilingual histories, narratives in their own languages, can we historically make sense of it in a single discourse in academia? Does metal have an own cultural-historical language? Something like a global cultural code which enables it to work in Birmingham and New York as well as in Borneo and  Malaysia?5

I guess, at this point of research we cannot seriously answer these questions definitely. But we have some serious hints in current research where we could go to better answer them. Already in 1991, Deena Weinstein identified metal as a cultural ‘bricolage’ having a more or less conservative ideology at its core.6 More recent research also stresses the transgressive traits of metal history.7 In 2010, Dietmar Elflein published his important book ‘Schwermetallanalysen. Zur musikalischen Sprache des Heavy Metal.‘, which already in its title hypothesizes that metal does have an own musical language.8 However, ironically the book was published in German language which does not work globally.

Concluding, asking for multilingual metal leads to a very important historical research perspective. It forces us to ask whether metal is a cultural phenomenon which developed its own historical language of a gobally working ‘bricolage’ of texts, riffs, music, sounds, practices, institutions, clothes, places, sites etc. To ask for the lyrical aspects can be just the beginning. Future research should strategically employ this conception of multilingual metal to get a better historical understanding of its subject.

  1. https://www.facebook.com/events/166129170755040/?active_tab=about, accessed 01/05/2018. ↩

  2. Ibid. ↩

  3. J. H. Bentley (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of World History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; D. Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; P. Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; K. Hock and G. Mackenthun (eds.), Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference, Münster: Waxmann, 2012; J. McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. ↩

  4. J. Wallach e.a. (eds.), Metal Rules the Globe. Heavy Metal Around the World, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011; A.R. Brown e.a (eds.), Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies, New York and London: Routledge, 2016. ↩

  5. Ibid. ↩

  6. D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology, New York: Lexington Books, 1991. ↩

  7. B. Gardenour Walter e.a. (eds.), Heavy Metal Studies and Popular Culture, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ↩

  8. D. Elflein, Schwermetallanalysen. Zur musikalischen Sprache des Heavy Metal, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. ↩

Homo ludens metallicus? On Huizinga, the historian’s gaze and sonic knowledge in Metal Music Studies

February 26, 2018 — Leave a comment

Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was one of the pioneers of modern and postmodern cultural history. His narratives, overflowing with colourful, metaphoric and anthropologic plots of history, still inspire today’s scientific historiography.1 Originally being a scholar of Indo-European languages and linguistics, he turned to history around 1900. He became a professor of General and Dutch history at Groningen University in 1905, and finally of General history at Leiden University in 1915 (until 1942).

There in Leiden, he was resistant to antisemitism during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Huizinga’s most famous work is ‘The Waning of The Middle Ages’, first published in Dutch in 1919.2 In this classic book, he described the 14th and 15th centuries as an age of decline, metaphorically expressed in the picture of the season of fall; for Huizinga, they were the ‘autumn of the middle ages’.3 Other famous and influential works are ‘Erasmus and the Age of Reformation’ (1924), ‘Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century’ (1941), and ‘Homo ludens: a Study of the Play-element in Culture’.4

Methodologically, all of those books were highly innovative. They focussed on art, theatrics and discourse – long before the dawn of the New Cultural History at the end of the 1980s.5 One could go as far as describing Huizinga’s cultural history as ‘proto-constructivist’ or ‘crypto-constructivist’, at least in his deep understanding of the metaphorical and aesthetic constitution of culture.

In this blog post, I want to take up the methodology and questions Huizinga treated in ‘Homo ludens’. In this study, the author states that basically all culture has a an element of play. Play and playful elements, elements of game, are present in knowledge and science, law, art, languages, warfare.6 He gives  a reading of Homo sapiens as Homo ludens. This is his operational definition of play:

Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.7

This definition of the plays Homo ludens is playing in constructing culture is (proto-)constructivist and relevant until today in several ways: it stresses the own space and time of plays which basically says that plays have their own discourses; it emphasizes that plays in culture follow fixed rules which is a core feature of discourses, according to Foucauldian theorizing, too.8

Finally, the closing remark on the formation of social collectives is nothing less than the thesis that plays have a fundamental role in cultural identity construction; by defining the differences between the collective ‘self’ and the ‘other’, in processes of ‘othering’.9

These are the kinds of plays which Homo ludens played and plays in the course of cultural history. Already Huizinga observed on several occasions in his book that music and its reproduction is play, too.10 Applying Huizinga’s key theorem of play on Metal culture, I want to ask whether in Metal Music Studies Homo ludens is to be defined as Homo ludens metallicus. In the following, I want to show that Huizinga’s perspective opens up the theoretical space of cultural history in Metal Music Studies.

Using the metaphor of Homo ludens metallicus, this post wants, on the one hand, to summarize my (so-far) results of research in this blog, in conceptual ways, showing that Metal Music Studies is a field on the brink of becoming an own discipline. Yet, Metal and Metal Music Studies are a culture and a scientific community which know that they have a past but which do not know this past in professional, scientific and cultural-historical ways – an argument to be proven.

As current discourse shows, there still is a lack of a self-reflexive theorizing of Metal and Metal Music Studies, as an emerging discipline, giving or at least aiming at giving answers to the question what Metal and Metal Studies are.11 This is where my current and future research comes in. It wants to help introducing the historian’s gaze to this flourishing discourse.

On the other hand, I also want to concretize this new perspective, already starting to apply it to Metal and research on Metal. I do so by introducing my theoretical notion of ‘sonic knowledge’.  Using this notion, I want to help starting a historian’s narrative of Metal music and its study. Directing the historian’s gaze to Metal and Metal Studies, the notion of sonic knowledge wants to give a genuinely historic reading of its object, connecting it to large- and small-scale historical processes of world history. In some cases, Metal harks back to the Age of Enlightenment since the 18th century, but also to 19th century Classicism and Historism. In other cases, Metal even takes up the roots of ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian and other oriental discourses of culture and knowlegde.

‘Sonic knowledge’ means that I tread Metal music and all its surrounding networks as a form of (sub-)cultural knowledge which emerges predominantly from acoustic communication: music. This takes up the perspective of the recent discourse of ‘sound history’ which asks for the role of acoustic phenomena in history.12 From my point of view, the rather neutral term of knowledge already describes the formation of a specific discourse of Heavy Metal (from c. 1970 until the mid-1980s) as something new; but also as something new which only was innovative in its ways of connecting the fresh aesthetics of the ‘heavy riff’13 with rather old historic elements of culture.

Just to mention some historic discourses being already there in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, until today, which were picked up by Metal history: dark lyrics and atmosphere (this can be traced back, for instance, to Gothic novels and many other forms of literature); rebellion and revolution (rebellion is a key topic of any broad history of Europe and the world, like the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the struggle for Scottish independence and many others; there are countless examples).

Other discourses would be: violence and war (the fascination with violence and violent behaviour, for example, is a key topic in the development of the modern state which should canalize and prevent not-justified violent force; history is, basically, in many cases structured by wars, like the 20th century as the ‘Age of Extremes’ of two world wars); satanism (satanism, i.e. embodied by figures such as Anton Szandor LaVey or Aleister Crowley, was long there before Metal); the virtuosity of the musician (a core topic in the 19th century and its cult of the ‘genius’); the cult of the male (which is there since Ancient times) …

Introducing the historian’s gaze

So, what’s that, the ‘historian’s gaze’? Since poststructuralist theorizing, we know that every scientific discipline has its own discursive strategies and framework, leading to an own construction of its subject, also in theory. This can be charaterized as a discipline’s gaze on its subject. This, of course, is true for history, too. The historian’s gaze is different from the sociologist’s perpective, also from the philosopher’s or the musicologist’s views. This is, must be the case in Metal Music Studies, too – so the historian’s gaze on Metal also should be fruitful for this emerging discourse, if applied conseqently.

What is particular of this view on Metal? When thinking of current research on Metal, in all introductory texts, the history of Metal and Metal Studies is of utmost importance. For instance, Andy R. Brown (a scholar in Media and Cultural Studies) wrote a genealogy of Metal Studies;14 Deena Weinstein (a sociologist) wrote a social and cultural history of Rock and Metal in America;15 Brian Hickam (being a librarian) described the emergence of Metal Studies as ‘amalgamated anectodes’;16 Nicola Masciandaro (a scholar in English studies) authored a ‘personal archeology of headbanging exegesis’;17 a group of social psychologists led by Nelson Varas-Díaz gave a social-psychological reading of the history of the Puerto Rican scene.18

There is nothing wrong with these histories, and also similar ones – yet, they are written by culturalists, sociologists, librarians, linguists, psychologists and so on. In a nutshell and put consciously provocatively: from a historian’s point of view, Metal and Metal Music Studies are a culture and its study which know that they have a history but which yet do not know this history in scientific and self-reflexive, in historic ways. This is where the historian’s gaze comes in.

‘Sonic knowledge’ as a cultural-historical notion

So, what is then ‘sonic knowledge’ and how does it bring in the historian’s gaze? In a pioneering text from 2011, Dominik Schrage (ironically a sociologist again) wrote in a special issue of Studies in Contemporary History on the sound history of the 20th century:

The musical mode of hearing enables us as subjects to comprehensibly experience the effects of sounds and rhythms, be it contemplatively or expressively – plunging into music or dancing to it. Like images sounds cannot be transfered to linguistic meaning without fractures; but, both are experienced as being in harmony with each other, and correspond with moods, affections, and emotions in the experiencing subject. Sounds, melodies, chords and rhythms share a fundament across cultures; but in different musical cultures they are encoded, systematized and linked to harmony theories in different ways.19

Linking this core statement of sound history to the genuine interest of a historian working in Metal Music Studies, implies we have to write a history of the sound of Metal – connecting it to the overall history of the world; to our current era of postmodernity, but also to other eras like the 20th before ‘1968’, the Age of Enlightenment since the French Revolution, the Early Modern period since about 1500, sometimes also to Medieval and Ancient epochs. The key is to see today’s Metal as a historically formed set of elements of cultural knowledge – formed predominantly in acoustic musical communication. We can start introducing the historian’s gaze to Metal Music Studies by seeing it as sonic knowlegde in that sense.

Using the notion of sonic knowledge, we can historically ask how the acoustic encodement of sadness, darkness and gloomy atmospheres in Gothic Metal music is linked to the history of the ‘Gothic’ culture of the Victorian Age of the 19th century.

We can historically ask how the identity of the metalhead as a rebel in a social revolution, acoustically encoded in Metal, is connected to historical narratives of revolutions, such as the French, American and Russian Revolutions in the 18th and 20th centuries, but also the cultural revolution of ‘1968’, or the history of Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ – there are myriads of historic interferences.

We should historically research how the representation of and fascination with violence and war, especially with World War II and Nazi Atrocities, in Thrash and Extreme Metal music since the mid-1980, retells the history of the 20th century. Already the influential British historian Eric Hobsbawm called it ‘The Age of Extremes’.20 It do not think that the genre name of ‘Extreme Metal’, surfacing in the 1980s and 1990s, came out of the blue – rather this was part of the final phase of the ‘Age Of Extremes’.

Furthermore, historians should explore how the image of the ‘guitar wizard’ or even ‘guitar hero’, which is prominent in Metal culture, continues writing the history of the musical virtuoso of classical music in the 19th century, with figures such as ‘violin wizard’ Niccolò Paganini, or ‘piano heroes’ like Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt. This is, as known, a thought already to be read in Robert Walser’s seminal book on Metal from 1993, but – again – this book was written a musicologist.21 The historian’s gaze would look for a deepeer historical contextualization in the overall history of the ‘Long 19th Century’ (1789-1914).22

Also, we ought to take a historic look at gender roles in Metal music. There is a lot of ongoing research on gender in Metal Studies.23 However, it also should be deeply connected to concepts like historian Wolfgang Schmale’s theory of ‘collective performative speech acts’, as developed in his recent book ‘Gender and Eurocentrism: a Conceptual Approach to European History’.24

This is what I imagine the notion of sonic knowledge to do and to be. It should approach Metal and Metal Studies historically, seeing it as a contingently formed set of elements of cultural knowledge, constructed in the sound history of Metal. In this understanding of the term, knowledge is not only seen as a purely cognitive phenomenon but also as a discursive, praxeological, physical and sensual, most of all acoustic phenomenon in history.

Finally, taking Metal as sonic knowlegde probably enables us to think new inter- and transdisciplinary research options in Metal Studies. So far, the most prominent disciplines in our field are social and cultural studies, philosophical reflections and musicology. Seeing Metal as such a form of knowledge opens up gateways to other discourses of knowledge, which are deeply linked to sociology, philosophy and musicology, for instance law and politology.

The perspective of law is especially important because the philosophical and sociological foundations of law are intrinsically linked to key topics of Metal such as rules, norms, rule-breaking and law-breaking. For instance, it would be extremely tempting to do a discourse analysis of the representation of law, human rights and the rule of law in Heavy Metal lyrics –  just think of Judas Priest’s classic anthem ‘Breaking The Law’ from 1980, which often is refered to as defining Priest’s identity. Another well known example is Metallica’s album ‘…And Justice For All’ from 1988, whose cover portrays the Roman figure of Justitia as a blindfolded statue.

In a nutshell, taking up the perspective stemming from Huizinga’s Homo ludens, we should use the historian’s gaze in the concept of sonic knowledge to ask whether Metal is a game historically played by a Homo ludens metallicus – a probably new figure in Metal Studies, playing all his way through history, creating new heaviness by combining it with quite old narratives of human history. This is what I want to do in my upcoming monograph on Metal history and also in a proposal for a four-years research project on the history of Metal in Graz, Styria and Austria, in a European and global context.25

  1. For a short portrait of Huizinga see C. Strupp, ‘Johan Huzinga’, in: L. Raphael (ed.), Klassiker der Geschichtswissenschaft, 1, Munich: Beck, 2006, 190-211.; also see W. Otterspeer, Reading Huizinga, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. ↩

  2. For the English version, first published in 1924 see J. Huizinga, The waning of the Middle Ages: a study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, London: Folio Society, 1999. ↩

  3. Ibid. ↩

  4. Idem, Erasmus and the age of Reformation: with a selection from the letters of Erasmus, New York, NY: Scribner, 1924;  idem, Dutch civilisation in the seventeenth century, and other essays, London: Collins, 1968; idem, Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, London e.a.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. ↩

  5. L. Hunt and A. Biersack (eds.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989. ↩

  6. Idem, Homo ludens. ↩

  7. Ibid., 13. ↩

  8. A. Landwehr, Historische Diskursanalyse, Frankfurt: Campus, 2009. ↩

  9. For a recent example see M. Wintle, ‘Islam as Europe’s Other throughout History: some discontinuities‘, History , 101, 344 (2016), 42-61. ↩

  10. Huizinga, Homo ludens, 42, 158-162, 187-8. ↩

  11. See for introductory books and texts F. Hösch and A.-K. Höpflinger (eds.), Methoden der Heavy Metal Forschung, Münster: Waxmann, 2014; Jeremy Wallach e.a. (eds.) Metal Rules the Globe. Heavy Metal Music Around the World, Durham, NC: Duke Universtiy Press, 2011; A. R. Brown e.a. (eds.), Global Metal Music and Culture. Current Directions in Metal Studies, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016;  B. Gardernour Walter e.a. (eds.), Heavy Metal Studies and Popular Culture, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; also this special issue on ‘Metal Studies? Cultural Research in the Heavy Metal Scene’: Journal for Cultural Research 15, 3 (2011). ↩

  12. See for an introduction to the field, especially in German discourse D. Schrage, ‘Erleben, Verstehen, Vergleichen. Eine soziologische Perspektive auf die auditive Wahrnehmung im 20. Jahrhundert’, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, 2, 8 (2011), online, URL: http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/2-2011/id=4691. Accessed 26.02.2018; also see G, Paul and R. Schock (eds.) Sound der Zeit. Geräusche, Töne, Stimmen – 1889 bis heute, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013. ↩

  13. For an in-depth analysis see J.-P. Herbst, ‘Historical development, sound aesthetics and production techniques of the distorted electric guitar in metal music’, in Metal Music Studies, 3, 1 (2017), 23-46; idem, ‘Heaviness and the electric guitar: Considering the interaction between distortion and harmonic structures’, in Metal Music Studies, 4, 1 (2018), 95-113; also see D. Elflein, Schwermetallanalysen. Die musikalische Sprache des Heavy Metal, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. ↩

  14. A. R. Brown, ‘Heavy Genealogy: Mapping the Currents, Contraflows and Conflicts of the Emergent Field of Metal Studies, 1978-2010, in Journal for Cultural Research 15, 3 (2011), 213-242. ↩

  15. D. Weinstein, Rock’n America. A Social and Cultural History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. ↩

  16. B. Hickam, ‘Amalgamated anecdotes: Perspectives on the history of metal music and culture studies ‘, in Metal Music Studies 1, 1 (2014), 5-23. ↩

  17. N. Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies and the Scission of the Word: A Personal Archaeology of Headbanging Exegesis’, in Journal for Cultural Research 15, 3 (2011), 227-250. ↩

  18. N. Varas-Díaz e.a., ‘Metal at the fringe: a historical perspective on Puerto Rico’s underground Metal scene, in Gardenour Walter e.a, Heavy Metal Studies, 99-129. ↩

  19. Schrage, Erleben, Verstehen, Vergleichen. My translation. ↩

  20. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age Of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, London: Michael Joseph, 1994. ↩

  21. R. Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Hanover, NH: New England University Press, 1993, 57-107. ↩

  22. E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe: 1789–1848, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962; idem, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975; idem, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987. ↩

  23. For example, see F. Heesch and N. Scott (eds.), Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality: Interdisciplinary Approaches, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. ↩

  24. W. Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism: a Conceptual Approach to European History, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016. ↩

  25. P. Pichler,  Metal Music and Sonic Knowledge in Europe, 1970 to the Present: a Cultural History,  Emerald Publishers, forthcoming, 2019; the working title of this project is: ‘Sonic Knowledge in Heavy Metal Music. A Basic Research Project on the Cultural History of a Global Subculture in Styria, Austria and Europe, from the 1980s to the Present.’ ↩

Scientific Concert Review: Batushka, Schammasch, Trepaneringsritualen

January 23, 2018 — Leave a comment

This blogpost has a rather peculiar title – what is a “scientific concert review”? Isn’t a review a genre of text, a piece which treats concerts normatively, depending on their quality? What I want to try here is something else. Last Saturday, 20th January 2018, I visited the Vienna club gig of Polish Black Metal outfit Batushka, supported by the Swiss band Schammasch and Swedish project Trepaneringsritualen. I visited this gig as a fan, my “fan-review” can be read here.

But also I attented this concert at “Szene Wien” as a cultural historian, a scientist who does research in Metal Music Studies. And there was a lot of scientific material to see, experience and think about. Thus, what I want to do here is an experiment: I want to write an essay which uses the methods of the New Cultural History and recent research in Sound History to explain, or at least to take a look at a concert experience as scientific cultural-historical material.1 What I saw, smelled, felt, experienced at Szene Wien was not only leisure fun but also a form of historiographic and ethnologic empiricism.

In this essay, something like a first trial balloon on my blog, I want to approach the culture of Black Metal from an integral perspective; a perspective which takes the feelings of scientific concert visitors not only as immediate emotions but also as a form of cultural practice which is open to discursive meta-analysis. So – maybe and hopefully – this essay can give some fruitful insights to the cultural-historical implications of this gig. Indeed, there was an immense potential of history and historic discursiveness to think of.

As mentioned, last saturday Batushka, a Black Metal band from Poland, played, as part of their “European Pilgrimage” tour, a concert at Vienna’s Szene club. The band had Swiss group Schammasch, also a Black Metal project, and Swedish artist Trepaneringsritualen as their guests and support. I will start my analysis as a historian in chronological order, looking at the historical implications and contents experienced, listened to and seen, individually for each of the three artists/projects.

Trepaneringsritualen is an – at the first glance – obscure project from Gothenburg, Sweden. Soloartist Thomas Martin Ekelund claims to make “ritual music”. What he does on stage is a mixture of Black Metal screaming, performance and ambient music. Being the opener of the event, Eklund did a concert/perfomance of about twenty minutes during which he first covered his head and face with a hood, which he later removed. This is a photograph of his perfomance:

2

At a first glance, there is barely something historical about this show. But, taking a closer look, things change dramatically and give a lot of data for historical analysis. The key is the project’s name: Trepaneringsritualen. “Trepanation” is the still common notion, in medical and also historical discourses, which describes processes in which a human head is (forcefully) opened, using a drill, a knife, a saw or other devices.3 Practices of trepanation, having ritualistic, cultural and/or medical purposes and contexts, can be traced back to 12.000 BC.

Since the late 19th century, evidence discovered in shape of skulls show a vast history of trepanation around the globe. Such practices are often believed to have had ritualistic, cultural or religous characteristics (like metaphorically giving demons the opportunity to leave a head or get into it), but also medical contexts of healing. Too, many persons who underwent such processes survived, with their heads and skulls showing traces of healing.

So, from the point of view of scientific cultural history, what does Trepaneringsritualen do? He performs a solo show of Black Metal or ritual music for which he uses the ancient discursive code or notion of opening heads. By doing so, he performs a very drastic act: One could interpret Eklund’s performance as a process which metaphorically opens his, his audience’s or today’s men’s heads. And he does so, so to speak, via a deep historical practice. In Trepaneringsritualen, history has the role and function of using the past to invade and examine, quasi-culturally and quasi-medically, our current thinking and culture of the 21st century.

After Eklund, Swiss act Schammasch took the stage. This band’s performance was quite another experience. The group used three electric guitars, bass, drums and some additional drums played by their singer/guitar player. They used items like a goat head and the evaporation of thick fog on stage, and close to the stage, to create an atmosphere of ritualism, darkness and trance:

4

Music- and sound-wise, this performance was much heavier, thicker and doomier than the previous one. Consciously, the artists used a climax of slower and then growingly faster and rawer songs to create this experience. The historicism inherent of their concert used the imaginaries and symbols of religion,  predominantly of medieval Catholic tradition. The clothes worn by the artists (as shown for example in the photograph above) reminds us of monasteries, of medieval monks. Too, the hoods covered the faces and anonymized the band, which made their figures even more allegoric in their historicism.

I think it is not exaggerated to state that Schammasch’s stage acting contained and harked back to medieval figures like Saint Francis of Assisi. Combining this dresscode with items like a goat head, gave history a special role: in the anonymizing and conservative as well as metaphorical allegorism of monk’s clothes, it served to construct a juxtaposition of the Middle Ages and the postmodern sound of Black Metal. In this case, history was the optical design of Black Metal, triggering ritualism, darkness and maybe fear.

Finally Batushka got to play their set. This was the second time I saw the group playing their entire “Litourgiya”-album. On this record, their debut, the group used elements of Orthodox liturgies (chants etc.), and combined it with Black and Doom Metal to criticize this discourse of religion. This is a photograph from the concert:

5

History (and its present) cannot be used more explicitly than in Batushka’s stage show. Most of all their singer, wearing a robe ressembling of a priest (but also having the notorious Third-Reich-“SS”-skull printed on the hood), used a very strict and monotonous mode of stage acting (for example shown in the photograph above). The whole show can be read as an “Orthodox Black mass” which used the rich history of the Divine Liturgy since the fourth century AD.6 In this performance, history gets broken up and becomes a tool of critique and parodistic irony.

What can we learn from this? First, history is immensely present in the discourse of Black Metal, at least in these bands’ discourses. Second, we can see the attending of a concert not only as a pure and innocent leisure activity but also as a way of collecting empirical, cultural-historical data. Material which is beforehand seen, heard, smelled and felt, but is open to scientific enquiry and meta-analysis.

  1. See Peter Burke, What is cultural history? Polity Press: Cambridge 2008; and on the recent discourse of sound history see Horst Schulze (ed.), Sound Studies: Traditionen – Methoden – Desiderate. Eine Einführung, Transcript: Bielefeld 2008. ↩

  2. Photograph of Trepaneringsritualen, Szene Wien, 20.01.2018, copyright: Corinna Doppelhofer. ↩

  3. See Robert Arnott e.a. (eds.), Trepanation. Discovery, history, theory, Swets & Zeitlinger: Lisse e.a. 2003. ↩

  4. Photograph of Schammasch, Szene Wien, 20.01.2018, copyright: Corinna Doppelhofer. ↩

  5. Photograph of Batushka, Szene Wien, 20.01.2018, copyright: Corinna Doppelhofer. ↩

  6. See Robert F. Taft, The Byzantine rite: a short history, Collegeville, Minn. : Liturgical Press, 1992. ↩

A ‘trans-scene-ary’ fashion: some notes on the cultural-material history of Dr. Martens boots

December 8, 2017 — Leave a comment

Widely known, Dr. Martens boots (usually refered to as ‘Doc Martens’, ‘Docs’ or ‘Dr. Martens’) are one of the established fashion codes of several different subcultures. Being initially worn in Mod- and Skinhead-subcultures from the 1960s onwards, they were soon worn by Punks, ‘Goths’, and members of the EBM-, Wave- and Dark-Wave-scenes, too. Until today, they also are an established code in Metal culture. Being introduced to subcultural discourses in the 1960s, they until today bear with them an ‘aura’ of protest, proletarian spirit, of noncomformist identities. Given that today they are part of a huge branding and marketing discourse, whose final very conservative purpose is to earn money, it is somehow surprising that this code still ‘works’.

The boots were invented by German medical doctor Klaus Märtens shortly after World War II.1 In 1945, he injured his ankle and was looking for solid yet comfortable boots when recovering from his injury. He designed a boot using soft leather and air-padded soles made of tires. The new footwear was not an instant success; but in 1947, when meeting his university friend Herbert Funck, who was  impressed by Märtens’ invention, things changed. In 1952, they opened a factory in Munich. In 1959, the boots became marketed internationally, and British company R. Griggs Group Ltd. bought patent rights to manufacture the boots in the United Kingdom, where they were sold for the first time in 1960.

The company introduced the until today common name, slightly re-shaped the heel and, most of all, added the trademark yellow stitching. Also, in this first process of branding the soles were branded as ‘AirWair’ soles. Soon, the new shoewear was worn by police officers, postmen and factory workers. By the late 1960s, they were used as a cultural-material code in the early Skinhead-scene. In the 1970s and 1980s, as mentioned, they became part of the Punk-, ‘Goth’-, Wave- and Dark-Wave-Scenes, too. Also members of EBM-groups and Metalheads wore and wear their Docs.

Being a rather late starter, I decided to buy my first Docs this year (being 37 years old, this maybe is one of the first symptoms of a Metalhead’s midlife crisis). Buying these boots made me remember their history; as a cultural historian interested in Metal Music Studies, I am interested in how this shoewear managed to become a ‘working’ code in so many different cultural discourses over five decades. They were common when I was teenager, and still in in my twens. Today, they seem to experience a certain revival.  But, most of all, as a historian in Metal Music studies, I want to ask what these shoes can tell us about writing the history of Metal culture – in the context of a broader historiography of subcultures since the 1960s.

In this context, the mentioned ‘omnipotent’ subcultural capital of the Dr. Martens boots seems to be their most important historical feature. They ‘work’ in at least seven different subcultures: Skinheads, Punks, ‘Goths’, Wavers and New Wavers, EBM-Fans and Metalheads wear their Doc Martens. So, their cultural main feature is that they are a ‘trans-scene-ary’ code of shoewear. They construct these different identities and, at the same time, the transgress the boundaries between the scenes.

What could a cultural historian of Metal music learn from this? I suppose, we can discover two major aspects: first, the history of material artefacts, such as shoes, is a very good way to tell Metal history. Secondly, when writing this history, we have to be aware of these ‘trans-scene-ary’ features of cultural codes. They are liquid, form varying and oscillating circles of negation and the construction of identities. To tell the history of Metal culture, means to deal with material items that bear in them very heterotopic semiotic structures. We do not have to essentialize these codes but to see them as objects of constant definition and re-definition.

  1. For their history, cf. Martin Roach, Dr. Martens. The Story of an Icon. London: Chrysalis Impact, 2003. ↩

A culture contested: is (or was) Metal a ‘youth culture’ and/or ‘subculture’?

October 2, 2017 — Leave a comment

Usually, Metal is referred to as a discourse of popular culture for and/or of young people, called a ‘youth culture’ and/or ‘subculture’.1 Historically, looking at the origins of Metal in the late 1960s and 1970s, then its spread and diversification in the 1980s, this seemed to be the case. Heavy Metal was established, following the discourse of ‘1968’, as a counter-culture.

Metal is supposed to have been ‘invented’, performed and mediated by young, angry and critical people. Most of all, white, young and male artists were seen as the stereotypical carriers of its aesthetics, imaginaries and narratives. However, even in these early days,  starting with the global success of artists like Black Sabbath, economic success would not have been possible if it had not been backed by organizational structures of the music industry, leisure industry and media – and these institutions of (Western) societies were governed by experienced, often older stakeholders.2

Thus, coining Metal a youth culture or subculture, even in its early cultural history, is an abridging hypothesis. Rather, this narrative of youthfulness and a critique of society should be seen as a construction of discourse – constructed by artists, fans, industry stakeholders, media and other instances. However,  until around 2000, this narrative seemed to prevail. Grunge and Alternative Rock as new forms contested Heavy Metal discourse but still it was seen as a realm of young fans and artists.3

Let us take a look at the state of this (self-)narrative in 2017. First of all, the artists who ‘invented’ and popularized Metal in the 1970s and 1980s cannot seriously be called young anymore: the members of Black Sabbath are approaching the eighth decade of their lives; the musicians in Iron Maiden are in their fifties or sixties; so are the members of Judas Priest (with the exception of guitarist Richie Faulker who is not a founding member); also Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield, the creative duo of Metallica, left behind their fiftieth birthdays. We can expect their fans, at least a part of them, to be of a similar age.

The other aspect – interpreting Metal as a critique of society in the shape of a musical subculture – is even more important. In several of my earlier postings, one of my main findings was that since about 2014 Heavy Metal is increasingly accepted as a ‘serious’ form of art. It is seen ‘worth’ being a subject of academic research. Among other processes, this is the context of the emergence of Metal Music Studies as an own discourse in academia. Also, today Metal is seen as integrally linked to a very fragmented and diverse mainstream.

From the point of view of cultural history, these three cultural processes – (1) the (self-)narration of Metal as a ‘youthful’ and ‘critical’ culture, (2) the acceptance of Metal in science and the emergence of Metal Music Studies, and (3) the spread of Heavy Metal music’s imaginary and aesthetics into mainstream – form an interdependent network: the narrative needs acceptance as a ‘serious’ subject of research; research needs the spread into mainstream to ‘prove’ Metal’s global relevance as a subject of scientific inquiry.

From my point of view, this threefold network results in one major cultural-historical consequence: the discourse in its entirety of narrations, imaginaries, aesthetics and sounds, is at a crossroads, where its initial cultural textures – the image of ‘a youth culture’ and ‘subculture’ – is being recoded in this parellelogram of cultural forces.

  1. Cf. Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal. The Music and its Culture. Boulder, Colorado, 2000; Rolf F. Nohr, Rolf/Herbert Schwaab, Herbert (eds.), Metal Matters. Heavy Metal als Kultur und Welt. Berlin e.a. 2011; Jeremy Wallach e.a (eds.), Metal Rules the Globe. Heavy Metal Music Around the World. Durham 2011. ↩

  2. For an integral approach, cf. Deena Weinstein, Rock’n America. A Social and Cultura History. Toronto 2015. ↩

  3. Cf. ibid. ↩

Gender in Black Metal: a cultural-historical note on Myrkur’s new album ‘Mareridt’

September 16, 2017 — Leave a comment

Myrkur is a one-woman Black Metal project from Denmark. It is the brainchild of songwriter/pianist/guitarist/singer Amalie Bruun. Bruun started out performing with her father and the band Ex Cops as a Rock, Pop and Alternative artist. In 2014, she published, now as Myrkur, an eponymous EP, followed by the debut album ‘M’ in 2015, and a live EP, ‘Mausoleum’, in 2016.1 All of these records gathered rather wide attention, were partially well acclaimed by critics. But also they were partially criticized as being ‘superficial’, ‘not real Black Metal’ or a ‘sell-out’.

All the way through these debates – as a cultural discourse of most recent history of European and global Extreme Metal – the fact that Myrkur is led and controlled by a woman was one of the most intensely discussed issues. Bruun even received death threats on her Facebook page. So, this discourse on Myrkur and her art, first and foremost, is a history of gender in Extreme Metal.

On 15th September 2017, Bruun as Myrkur released her second full-lenght record, ‘Mareridt’.2 From a musical point of view, this album is a progression of her work on the mentioned earlier records. However, aggressive parts of Extreme and Black Metal riffing, blastbeasts and guttural screaming (by Bruun) got fewer; and on two tracks (‘Funeral’, ‘Kvindelil’) the artist cooperates with singer/songwriter Chelsea Wolfe. This new record, at least at its point of release, was well received.3 This is the videoclip to the track ‘Ulvinde’ which accompanied Mareridt’s release:

This videoclip, representing Myrkur’s current identity as an artist, features a combination of hybrid emotional aspects and strategies of narration which are rather unusual in Black Metal: Bruun is shown, on the one hand, as the classic female gender stereotype of a ‘soft woman’ in a bright dress; but then there also are sequences of female aggression where blood is dripping from the artist’s mouth and she is screaming furiously. Both styles and modes of female gender construction are shown alternating throughout the clip. Thus, Amalie Bruun as Myrkur is both: a ‘soft woman’ and a harshly screaming, seemingly suffering female.

From a cultural-historical point of view, especially this videoclip but also the mentioned records and the artist’s live shows are a remarkable strand of discourse. Here, the usual stereotype of male, Northern gutturally screaming Black Metal artists is trangressed, played with; in some ways (ie. the alternating strategies of softness and fury in the ‘Ulvinde’ clip), it even is dealt with and discussed, at least shown visually in a parodistic and ironic manner. The irony is – and remains – that Myrkur can be both: ‘tender’ woman and aggressive Black Metal frontwoman. The death threats sent to the artist by male fans give this cultural history of gender a bitter taste,  yet a transgressive and important quality too.

  1. Cf. Myrkur, Myrkur, released 12th September 2014, Relapse Records; idem, M, released  21st August 2015, Relapse Records; idem, Mausoleum,  released 19th August 2016, Relapse Records. ↩

  2. Cf. Myrkur, Mareridt, released 15th September 2017, Relapse Records ↩

  3. Cf., for instance, the review of the album on the German webzine www.metal.de, receiving a score of nine out of ten points; Url: http://www.metal.de/reviews/myrkur-mareridt-275140/, accessed 15/09/2017. ↩

Tau Cross’ second album ‘Pillar Of Fire’: contemporary history of the world in 2017 as hybrid Metal music

August 6, 2017 — Leave a comment

In June 2015, I published a reflection on multinational ‘supergroup’ Tau Cross’ (with members of Voivod and Amebix) eponymous first album. To me, it appeared to be a reflection of the world in 2015, which already knew developments of crisis in economies, politics, migration scenarios and many other areas of culture and their discourses. I coined their music a brand of ‘new music for a new age’ – but, this phrase and description was followed by a question mark. I was not effectively sure, from a cultural historian’s point of view, whether and how their postulate of ‘newness’ in music, meaning most of all cultural innovation, was really producing innovative patterns of culture.

My uncertainty stemmed from my analysis of the band’s music and discourse. Actually, I came to the conclusion that Tau Cross created a new form of music, and celebrated an innovative cultural-historical discourse. Yet, they used known and well-known elements from different subgenres of Rock and Metal music to create their own hybrid sound. This comprised artistical elements, in both music and lyrics, from Thrash Metal, Punk and Hardcore Punk, Crust, and Folk Music.The most distinctive and hence element that ‘bracketed together’ their music and discourse together were Rob ‘The Baron’ Smith’s unique, monotonous rough vocals.

This cultural mode of production in Metal music, hybridizing elements from Thrash Metal, Punk and Hardcore Punk, Crust, and Folk Music, writing apocalyptic and doomy, most dark lyrics, gave birth to Tau Cross’ own message in discourse. Their singer’s rasp voice was the perfect medium to perform and tell this picture and allegory of the world in 2015: basically, this message was one of hybridity and mélange – to cope with the difficulties of 2015, meant to perform an eclectic set of mind in the construction of identities.

According to Tau Cross’ discourse of cultural history of the world in 2015, to live positively, or to at least be able to survive, one needed to construct an identity which accepted and tolerated facets of belief, behavior, rules, ethics and politics from very different sources. It was a message of existential postmodernism, of relativism, liquidity and an ever-changing flux of identities in which their discourse saw a fitting modus vivendi for 2015.1

However, this was their discourse  of Metal music in 2015. In 2017, Tau Cross released their second album ‘Pillar Of Fire’.2 Again this is a very allegoric and metaphorical title which can be intepreted in many different, positive and/or negative ways. Taken that their debut from 2015 was a statement to cope with the then world by promoting hybrid identities, what is their current discourse about, analyzed from a cultural-historical point of view? The years since then have changed the world – we face Donald Trump as the president of the United States, the ongoing negotiations on the ‘Brexit’ in Europe, globally the rise of right-wing populism and the spread of terrorism.

Is hybridity, or maybe an even greater relativsm and hybridity, in the shape of irony or nihilism, today’s message in ‘Pillar Of Fire’s discourse? At the moment, because of the record’s very mythological and metaphorically open lyrics3, and its very recent release, having only gotten a part of its expectable reception, we do not know exactly. But we can assume that the album’s title track, for it is the song that performs the album’s title-message, contains its discourse’s main narrative:

Oh no, they’re burning their Gods again, the sacred and the profane
A pillar of fire

My my, its crawling beneath my skin. The visions are crowding in
My Heaven and Hell
From the garden of the dawn, to the ocean night

All is said and all is done
And nothing new beneath our sun
All we built and all we knew
Is turned to dust, just me and you
Falling through the universe

Hey hey, the Gods have all gone away
The people have learned to pray
To a pillar of fire
And these dark cathedral spires, point like fingers to the skies
Accusingly accusingly, accusingly, the question always why

I’m looking down, at a body on a table looking up
I’m looking down at the body on the table…looking up
And all we are is held by silver thread
Sewn into the earth, sent back to the dead.4

The lyrics open with the phrase ‘Oh no, they’re burning their Gods again, the sacred and the profane. A pillar of fire (…)’. So, a pillar of fire, is a fire which burns the world’s gods. Gods can be conservative and overcome policies, morals, religions, in a nutshell: worn-out identities. Supposed, in 2017 our culture seems to burn its old identites, it afterwards has to generate new ones. How to find or construct these new ones, in 2017’s world of terrorisms, fear, populism and crisis? Maybe we just have to read on to find the answer, according to Tau Cross:

All is said and all is done
And nothing new beneath our sun
All we built and all we knew
Is turned to dust, just me and you
Falling through the universe.5

If there is nothing new beneath our sun, there are only old and used things of culture – like Thrash Metal which has been there since the early 1980s; like Punk, Hardcore and Crust which stem from even the decade before; like Folk Rock which became succesful in the 1960s. Yet, again Tau Cross hybridize their elements of identities very conservatively – again Rob Miller’s vocals shape their discursive leitmotiv. What does that mean? In 2017, still and even more radical, Tau Cross emphasize postmodernist ‘hybridism’ to be the way of cultural choice. We have to build a ‘pillar of fire’ in which to burn our old identities – just to build new ones from new ways of combinations.

  1. Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. ↩

  2. Cf. Tau Cross, Pillar Of Fire, Relapse Records, released 21/07/2017. ↩

  3. Cf. ibid. ↩

  4. Source: ‘Pillar Of Fire’, released on ibid. ↩

  5. Source: Ibid. ↩