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.

Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. ↩
Cf. Tau Cross, Pillar Of Fire, Relapse Records, released 21/07/2017. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
Source: ‘Pillar Of Fire’, released on ibid. ↩
Source: Ibid. ↩

Between scholarliness and fandom: on distance and closeness, objectivity and subjectivity in Metal Music Studies

July 9, 2017 — Leave a comment

In my last post, I reflected on the identities of Metal scholars, in terms of the transgressive potential of Metal Music Studies, as an academic discourse. This discourse is constitutively interdisciplinary and breaks disciplinary boundaries. I stressed that this situation of an emerging filed of study requires its scholars to work self-reflexively. We have to construct our subject and our ‘Metal scholar-identities’ between and often in conflict to traditional disciplines.

These conflicts make the emergence of our field a deeply ambivalent and ambiguous process. On the one hand, we need to employ the theoretical approaches of ‘conservative’ academic fields (in my case again the theories of cultural history) to find our own subject and areas of research; on the other hand, at least in the long run, we have to build our own ‘toolbox’ of theories, at least of own theoretical approaches which fit our interests of research.

This ambivalence of an emerging field of scholarship is the reason why we should put a strong focus on theorizing in our work. Of course, there is theoretical work in Metal Music Studies¹ but most of it follows modes of thinking which try to adapt successful and established theories from other fields on Metal music. However, our discourse as an emerging field ought to find its own theoretical tools – at least in a long-term perspective.

In this respect, I want to put forward the hypothesis, or to be more precisely, the hypothetic thought that the identitary situation of most Metal scholars is an important source of reflection, maybe even of theorizing; or at least, a point from which to start theoretical self-reflection. Most Metal scholars are both: ‘Metalheads’ and academic researchers and/or teachers. In their hearts and in their heads, there are, usually, both identities which regularly come into conflict.

Why do they come in conflict? This identitary situation is very ambiguous: we have to find a balance between scholarliness and fandom, between closeness and distance to our subject of research. We have to find identitary ways to balance the fan’s subjectivity and the scholar’s objectivity. I think, this situation – as complicated, conflictuous, ambivalent and even paradoxical it may be – actually favours theoretical progress in our discourse.

This situation forces us to find theoretical and formal language to express the newly found balance between the fan and the scholar. In most cases, this new formal vocabulary to describe our own transgression from subjective interest to ‘objectified’ scholarly work is nothing else than a theory.² In a nutshell, the identitary situation of scholars in Metal research drives them to formalize their language; thus, what we ought to do is not to come up with brand new or unprecedented abstract vocabulary but just try to find formal language which suits our reflection and thoughts; vocabularies which create the Metal Music Studies scholars inside us.

Cf. Stephen Hudsons blog ‘Metal In Theory. Sourcebook for Scholarship on Heavy Music’ at: http://metalintheory.com/about-metalintheory-com/, retrieved 9.7.2017; also, cf. the distinct and own discourse of a blog and journal of ‘Black Metal Theory’ at: http://blackmetaltheory.blogspot.co.at/, retrieved 9.7.2017; another fine example is this article: Martin Morris, Extreme Heavy Metal Music and Critical Theory, in: The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 90, 4 (2015), pp. 285-303 ↩
For instance, again the example of ‘Black Metal Theory’ can be seen from this angle; again, cf. http://blackmetaltheory.blogspot.co.at/, retrieved 9.7.2017 ↩

Metal Music Studies go global: academic boundaries, ties and identities

June 19, 2017 — Leave a comment

From June 6th to June 16th 2017, I had a rather long travel: from Graz, Austria, to Victoria, British Columbia, Canada; then heading over to Norwich, Great Britain, and finally going back to Graz. In Victoria, at the University of Victoria (UVIC), I had the immense pleasure to be a part of the International Society for Metal Music Studies’ (ISMMS) 2017 conference, devoted to the topic of ‘Boundaries and Ties: the Place of Metal Music in Communities’. Over three exciting days, scholars, musicians and practitioners from all over the world, had intriguing talks on different facets and aspects of the liaison dangereuse between the local and the global in Metal culture.

Many talks focussed on Extreme Metal culture. My own talk took up the topic of one of my blogposts from 2016. I tried to conceptually come to the terms with the relationship between globalization and localization in Metal culture, taking the Metal on the Hill 2016 Extreme Metal festival as an empirical example. After the conference on Metal in Canada, I flew straight to London, passing on to Norwich where I had a talk at the annual conference of the Research Network on the History of the Idea of Europe, devoted to the subject of ‘Europe and the East: Self and Other in the History of the European Idea‘.

(Re-)Reflecting on this ten days, flying almost over 20.000 kilometers and having scientific talks on two very different topics, on two continents, in front of two very different academic communities, I do not want to analyze or present my talks themselves. Much more, to me, the interesting aspect of this (rather exhausting) trip is how it happened: a cultural historian from Graz, Austria, who normally teaches und publishes on European Union Cultural History, left his European (home-)continent to fly to another continent, Northern America, where he gave a talk on his local Metal scene.

After this ‘breaching’ of my used geographical, thus spatial and temporal, even topical boundaries in academic discourse, I went back to my home-continent (after the ‘Brexit’, I still consider Britain to be a part of Europe) to have a talk on my home-topic of EU studies. I feel, this is a very interesting combination of spatial and temporal structures of discourse in itself. What happened?

As a scholar of the rather ‘conservative’ and ‘established’ field of EU studies, I left behind my used academic territory of the ‘EU scholar’, also leaving the continent linked to this discourse (Europe). By flying to Canada, I spatially and temporally ‘stripped’ myself of my ‘EU scholar’- videntity and literally dressed up in the clothes of a ‘Metal Music Studies scholar’: when speaking in Victoria, I wore a Metal t-shirt of German band ‘Tranquillizer’.

In a nutshell, this on a first glance rather mundane process of breaching temporal, spatial and identitary boundaries can tell us something important about scientific discourses in general, and Metal Music Studies as a discourse of its own. (1) First, it shows very clearly that scientific discourses (like EU studies) are closely linked to spatial and temporal contexts. Most of all, EU studies as a discourse, takes place in Europe itself, and the identity of the ‘EU scholar’ is tied to his subject-continent.

(2) Second, Metal Music Studies as an emerging scientific discourse had the power to make me break my usual boundaries in academia. It made me go to North America, leaving Europe behind, and somehow even forced me to strip off my used scholar’s identity. This is a very symbolical hint at the often subtle transgressive power of Metal: it pushes forward to transgress existing boundaries, something Keith Kahn-Harris tried to capture in his concept of ‘Metal beyond Metal’.

This leads to a simple yet exciting thought and argument which needs much more further reflection and work on it: Metal Music Studies implements the globalizing and identity-shaping potential of Metal (‘Metal beyond Metal’) into academia. It is not only mere scientific reflection and writing but the construction of a new global research identity, having practices of its distinct own.

However, this means this new field is not very conscious of itself yet – it needs a lot more of theoretical self-reflection. For example, it would form an exciting project to edit a volume on different theoretical approaches in Metal Music Studies, shaping its subject from the various involved disciplines’ (musicology, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, history, communication studies, business studies, gender studies) perspectives.

The author giving his talk at UVIC’s conference on ‘Boundaries and Ties: the Place of Metal Music in Communities, 11th June 2017, potograph by Anna Chilewska. ↩

Black: notes on the transcending cultural history of a colour in Metal music (and beyond)

May 16, 2017 — Leave a comment

In my last post I dealt with the role of Foucauldian thought in the cultural history of Metal music. I want to take up this perspective and apply it to another, rather ‘fuzzy’ subject of Metal music research. In 1998, the Dutch female-fronted group The Gathering, on their album ‘How to Measure a Planet?’,¹ released a song called ‘Red Is a Slow Colour’. This title seems to be enigmatic, even paradoxical: how can a colour have a speed as one of its constituting, maybe metaphysical or ontological qualities? Yet, the song’s title, in its proper context, seemed to ‘work’. It was well received, the album critically acclaimed.

Thinking of this supposed paradox is my starting point. I want to focus on a fundamental element of Metal culture, since its historical origins: the colour black. I want to put forward the hypothesis that this colour (as an essential discursive quality in music, texts, aesthetics, in all form of practical, mental and physical practices) had a constitutive and, later even transcending historical quality in Heavy Metal. This colour made Metal become Metal, and, later, it opened up discursive links to other fields of culture, in popular music, society, literature, everyday practices. From the view of cultural history, the colour black is a transcending historical force in Metal music’s past and present.²

Constructing the colour framework of Metal music

It is rather obvious that, since the late 1960s and early 1970s, black is the central optical quality (in terms of colour) in Metal music history. The ‘godfathers’ of Heavy Metal, Black Sabbath, made this colour, taking up the title of a 1963 horror movie directed by Mario Bava,³ a part of their name. Thus, since its ‘birth’ Heavy Metal was associated with blackness as a constitutive quality of its aesthetics, lyrics, musical qualities; its discursive culture of imagination.

Later in Metal history, in the 1980s and 1990s, Metal music took up inspiration from bands of the ‘New Wave’ and ‘Gothic Rock’ music genres – subcultures which are part of what is called ‘Die Schwarze Szene’ (literally: ‘the Black Scene’) in German language until today. In the 1990s, in Gothic, Death and Black Metal subcultures, black, again, was a central point of reference – in terms of mood, melancholy, identities and practices. That the latter subgenre even was called Black Metal is the most obvious hint at the central role of blackness in Metal music history.

And, on 12th August 1991, Thrash Metal pioneers Metallica released their eponymous album which commonly is simpley refered to as the ‘Black Album’.⁴ Its famous cover is painted in monochromical black, showing, rather hard to see, a snake and the band’s logo. Historically speaking, the colour framework of Metal (in terms of aesthetics, narratives of mood, practices in concerts etc.) is the result of a process of over 47 years of discursive construction since arond 1970. It is the history of a cultural framework of interpretation which made black become a central quality of its discourse. Black, as a word, a narrative, a mood, a sheer mass of practices, encodes central aspects and facets of Metal.

Cultural history makes us aware that, following Foucauldian paradigms, this history did not happen ‘automatically’ or ‘by itself’; but was the history of ever and ever again constructing the black framework of Metal, in negation processes between artists, fans and all agents involved. Cultural and socological research in Metal Music Studies is able to show this central sztructural quality of the colour black.⁵ But, only history and especially cultural history as a scientific mode of historical narration, really can show its deep historical roots in the 20th century and earlier epochs – by telling this history scientifically.

Black as a culturally transcending force in Metal music history

This is where my perspective as a cultural historian comes in. By applying this view, we can tell the history of the colour black in Metal as the history of a cultural element which has a special and own historical quality. Not only is the history of black in Metal the history of one of its constitutive codes of cultural logics; historically, seen from a view of longue durée, black was a historical force which broke boundaries and transcended from earlier and synchronical cultures into Metal, and diachronically, later, went past Metal.

Black Sabbath defined Metal and took their colour inspiration from a 1963 horror movie: here, black served as a tool to historically transfer moods of horror from movie and cinematic cultures into Metal – and beyond, until today. The ‘Black Album’ by Metallica, historically seen, was not only the record which made them burst into mainstream: here, in 1991, the aesthetics of the album, its cover and discourse of blackness, build the historical force that made possible the transgression into mainstream. From a historian’s view, for the band, stressing blackness was a cultural key move to wider acceptance, recognition and fame.

Concluding, this leads me to a cultural-historical hypothesis on the role of the colour black in Metal: since around 1970, black has not only been a constitutive cultural code for Metal identity itself. More than this, it has been a temporally, synchronically and diachronically, transcending force of culture. Historically speaking, the colour black drove Metal music history.

Cf. The Gathering, How to Measure a Planet, released 9th November 1998, Century Media Records ↩
For the discourse on colours, cf. Harald Braem, Die Macht der Farben, Munich 2003; Harald Küppers, Die Logik der Farbe. Theoretische Grundlagen der Farbenlehre. Callwey and Munich 1981; especially, on the colour of black, cf. Michael Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Colour, Princeton 2008. ↩
Cf. Black Sabbath, original title: I tre volti della paura, directed by Mario Bava, released on August 17th 1963 by Emmepi Cinematografica e.a. ↩
Cf. Metallica, Metallica, released 12th August 1991, Elektra/Vertigo Records ↩
For instance, cf. Deena Weinstein, Rock’n America. A Social and Cultural History, New York 2015; Jeremy Wallach e.a, (eds.), Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World, Durham 2011. ↩

A short conceptual note on ‘Foucauldian’ and ‘Neo-Foucauldian’ thought in Metal Music Studies

March 9, 2017 — Leave a comment

Today, Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984), as a theorist of post-structuralism, is one of the most well-known sources of conceptual reflection in cultural history. In current cultural-historical debates, his notions of ‘discourse’, ‘archeology’, ‘genealogy’ or ‘governmentality’ are amongst the most freuently used ones.¹ They are used to tell the ‘histories’ of very different subjects and topics, from a broad variety of perspectives.

All those seemingly Foucauldian macro-, meso- and microstories of historical reality share, despite their different narratological subjects and objects, the ontological background of post-structuralist theory. However, we have to be aware that today’s common understanding of a ‘Foucaldian’ methodology in cultural history, is not exactly and ‘originary’ Foucauldian, strictly clinging to the philosopher’s intentions. Foucault claimed himself to be a ‘positivist’² who examined discourses as positive and empirical formations of performative ‘speech acts’ in history.

In the context of current historical theorizing this seems to be an ironic or even awkward claim. We construct Foucault to be the main ‘hero’ of constructivist and deconstructivist cultural history. This, frequently projects an ontology of constructivism onto the discursive ‘screen’ of Foucauldian thought and concepts; yet, the French theorist himself , especially during the development of his core-framework of ‘discourse analysis’ int the late 1960s, saw his work as one of an empirical positivist.³

Thus, when telling cultural history by using Foucauldian concepts and methods, such as ‘discourse analysis’, ‘archeology’ or ‘genealogy’, we have to be aware – and honest to ourselves – that we use and re-use, hence modificate these notions, depending on our own specific interests of research. So, maybe it is unfortunate to speak and write of ‘Foucauldian’ thought in cultural history. Probably, to define current theorizing in cultural research as an ‘Neo-Foucauldian‘ framework would maybe be more accurate: we overworked Foucault’s theories by projecting our own historiographical demands upon his work.

Supposedly, Foucault himself, a strongly pragmatic and non-systemic thinker, would not mind. He wanted his theoretical notions and concepts to be seen as a ‘toolbox’, from which everyone should take the tools and notions she or he needed; adapting them to her or his needs in analysis.⁴ Exactly, this is the actual and strictly Foucauldian approach: it is not an approach that glorifies (de-)construcitivism but an endless play and re-play of rethinking theoretical terminologies.

The actual ‘constant’ (Foucault would strictly avoid this notion) in Foucauldian thought is a pragmatic and ontological one, a specific ‘flexible’ perspectivism. All through his professional life, his work was an examination and cyclic re-examination of the theorectial notions he had used before. So, actual Foucauldian cultural theorism is one which puts terminoligical self-reflection into his main focus. It is a perspective which, again and again, returns to its core notions, re-works and over-works them, making them better suitable for its relevant empirical needs.

Hence, we could define actual Foucauldian thought in cultural-historical theorizing as one which has the endless modification, the constant critique of its own terminology as its conceptual core. To think in Foucauldian ways, therefore, means to lead a discourse of terminological critique. In Metal Music Studies, as a specific research field in cultural studies, Foucault is a frequent point of reference, too.⁵

Taking up my differentiation between ‘Foucauldian’ and ‘Neo-Foucauldian’ thought, could be a way of making theorizing in Metal Music Studies more accessible and clearer – by being more exact and self-reflexive, taking the self-critique of terminology as a more important point. When speaking of ‘discourse’, ‘archeology’, ‘genealogy’ or ‘governmentality’, we should exactly define how we use these notions; maybe giving an exact point of reference in Foucauld’s own texts, clarifying which phase of Foucauld’s own self-critique of theory we intend to operationalize.

For an introduction to Foucault, cf. Leonard Lawlor/John Nale (eds.), The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, Cambridge: University Press, 2014; Clare O’Farell, Michel Foucault, London: Sage, 2005; Sara Mills, Michel Foucault, London: Routledge, 2003; Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1988; for a broad introduction to Foucauldian thought in history, cf. Paul Veyne, Foucault. Sa pensée, sa personne, Paris: Albin Michel, 2008. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
Cf. Jeremy Wallach e.a. (eds.), Metal Rules the Globe. Heavy Metal Music Around the World, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011;Deena Weinstein, Rock’n America: A Social and Cultural History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. ↩

Getting naive in Metal Music Studies: can (Metal) music change the world?

February 6, 2017 — Leave a comment

In my last post, I reflected upon cultural-historical tendencies and processes in the year of 2016. I tried to elaborate on the question how this year, with its seemingly fundamental political ruptures, in a global and European perspective, could be told in scientific historical storytelling. Already this essay, as I ‘dared’ to measure the relevancy of one year in history without the advantage of temporal distance (I wrote my post on January 1st 2017), did not lack a certain degree of naivety. In this post I want to take, so to speak, ‘naivety as an epistemic tool’ and reflect upon a seemingly highly naive question: can (Metal) music change the world?

Yet, I think this a question, if our theoretical and methodological prerequisites of cultural history are presented and used self-reflexively, being aware of the fundamental limits inherent to them, can be elaborated on in a scientifically serious way. I suggest, trying to think of a conceptual answer to this question might add ‘ontological awareness’ to the research agenda of Metal Music Studies.

Getting naive…

Our starting point is a very simple thought: in the year of 2017, having in mind the first weeks of the new Trump administration and its policies, the coming important elections in France and Germany, the overall global network-like atmosphere of tension, uncertainty, even fear and panic, we could want to live in a better world; culturally, socially, legally, politically and economically. All the frictions and tensions of discourse in early 2017 – i.e. terrorism, migration, political radicalization, war-like conflicts – could make us long for a better world. And, this being the decisive fact, wanting concepts from science to get into such a world.

So, the question, leigitimized culturally and morally, we have to think about, in ontological and discursively structural terms, is: can science provide us with ways to get into this ‘better world’? And, for Metal Music Studies, and cultural history in this subfield of academie, that question is to be modified to its specific subject of research: can Metal music change the world?

As mentioned above, this question seems to be one of purest naivity, even if taking it as ‘innocent’ naivity. How should music, even Metal music as subcultural field of popular culture, be able to change the world for the better? I think, on the very contrary, this naivety could be a good starting point for ontological reflection in Metal research; namely suggesting this naivety as an epistemic tool which enables us to open up for fresh perspectives.

…in Metal Music Studies

When we see this question as a a legtitimized one, this opens up a series of questions which penetrate into the deepest layers of the discourse of Metal Music Studies, its ontological prereqisites . Asking whether Metal music can improve the world’s current historical condition, we ask for a new evaluation of the theoretical core notions of cultural history in Metal Music Studies. These questions include the following: (1) what is Metal music in cultural history?; (2) how does Metal music connect and interfere with global discourse of culture?; (3) does this interference allow Metal music to change the world?

What is Metal music?

I address these very serious ontological questions (they basically define the subject of cultural history in Metal Music Studies as a field of research) in exactly the order mentioned. Ad (1): trying to give a definition of Metal music in cultural history, means to give a preliminary description of a conceptual and empirical field of global history, since at least the 1970s. Starting in the early 1970s (having roots in the decades before), bands like Black Sabbath created a new, ‘heavy’ sound. Since then, this ‘heavy’ discourse emerged as an own cultural discourse. It developed its own narratives, imaginaries, style of clothes, gesticulation and networks to institutionalize them.¹.

So, from the broadest possible perspective, Metal music can be understood as an own and distinct cultural discourse of popular culture. Today, it has its own history (and self-narratives of this history) since over four decades.² It is a structural sphere of culture, having its own rules of creating meaning, in its styles of clothes, music, practices, marketing and performing. In a nutshell, for cultural history Metal music is a discourse which globally creates meaning in an own way – according its protocol of the new cultural style encoded as ‘heavyness’.

How does Metal music connect and interfere with global discourse of culture?

Now, we can address the second question, again rather globally. Ad (2): The core argument of my ontological definition of Metal music is the adjective of ‘global’. This adjective, indeed, is of utmost importance for the second question. Here, we want to find an answer to the question how Metal music does interfere with global discourses of culture – the ones like politics, media, society etc. The adjective ‘global’ gives us the ontological key to find an cultural-historical answer.³.

This short word, ‘global’, implies that Metal music itself spans around the world. It is not only a product of this world, or a by-product of discoures lying hierarchally above it, but an own and, scale-wise and hierarchically, equal discourse. Metal music acts globally, therefore, it has the same and exactly equal rights as other discourses – such as politics, media, society etc. It may not have the same ‘discursive power’ but from a structural perspective it is global, and thus has the equal rights: to construct meaning, to construct the world. In a nutshell, aiming to formulate an answer to this second question: Metal music inteferes with global discourse of culture on an equally-righted base. Its demands of identity and narratives are no less important than any other – but not more important either.

Does this interference allow Metal music to change the world?

Ad (3): our third and final analysis is, probably, the most important one. Taking Metal music in global history as an eually-righted one, this leads us to formulate an answer which is promising and disappointing at once. It is promising because, when conceptualizing Metal music as an equally-righted sphere of culture, that implicates that it is on same hierarchical level as other discourses; hence, it, logically and normatively, can influence the world. The disappointig aspect is that, because it is one discourse among myriads of others, is potential of influencing the world is limited.

So, our answer to the third point is: Yes, Metal music has the potential to change the world; to be more specifically: it has the potential of changing its world. As an emancipative discourse, it can create (and indeed does create)⁴ its own visions and utopias of a better world. To me as a cultural historian, the most challenging task of examining these questions is to reflect upon the limits of cultural history in Metal Music Studies: where does the influence of Metal discourse meet its imits? Which limits and boundaries are the ones, maybe imposed by other discourses, which restrain its influence? How are these limits and boundaries, identities and non-identities, negotiated and fixated?⁵

Cf., for instance, Jeremy Wallach e.a. (eds.), Metal Rules the Globe. Heavy Metal Music Around the World. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011; also, cf. Deena Weinstein, Rock’n America: A Social and Cultural History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.; and: Dietmar Elflein, Schwermetallanalysen: Die musikalische Sprache des Heavy Metal. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011; finally: Rolf Nohr and Herbert Schwaab (eds.), Metal Matters: Heavy Metal als Kultur und Welt. Münster e.a.: Lit, 2012. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
cf. ibid. ↩
Source of the title image of this post: http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/d2/d2c1e23ecee906584f0a6844db58aa2070bf0666afe7407a7df27caf07937087.jpg, retrieved 6.2.2017. ↩

Darkthrone, ‘Brexit’ and Donald Trump: Was 2016 the Year of the Birth of ‘Homo conservativus hystericus’?

January 1, 2017 — Leave a comment

Recalling the past twelve months of 2016, trying to tell it as a history of an end-of-year review is not an easy task. 2016, as a remarkable year in recent history, globally, had in petto some tough ‘surprises’: first, here we can think of the ‘Brexit’-vote in Great Britain in June; then the election of Donald Trump for president in the USA in November. Always, it is very difficult to ‘judge’ historical events that still are very close to the present. Yet, I think there are certain cutural aspects and trends making the year of 2016 a remarkable one.

In this post, to be seen as a cultural historian’s end-of-the-year review in Metal Music Studies, I will try to highlight these trends and discuss their possible discursive meaning. To do so, I will start by discussing the cultural history of these two political events, the ‘Brexit’-vote and the election of Trump, then going on by contextualizing it with very similar discursive patterns in Metal Music discourse. Seeing those discourses together, should allow us to make sense of 2016 cultural-historically – at least for the moment.

‘Brexit’

On 23 June 2016, British voters decided, by 51.9% to 48.1%, to make the ‘Brexit’ become political reality. This historical event was new and different, therefore, a shock in several ways: (1) It was the first time a country decided to leave the European Union. (2) It was one of the first times that a political campaign, inspired by populism, harsh emotions, nationalism and conservatism, led to a big political success, sealing the further way of a whole country or nation. (3) It was one of the first events in which, on a macro-level of cultural discourses, the cultural trend called ‘postfactualism’ gave a highly important political process its central cultural features.

Taking these three points together, we can call this event of June 23 one in which the cultural discourse of conservativist populism became successful, politically. One central thing was really new about this discourse: it was not ‘common’ conservatism but conservatism that substituted its rational core in narrative by an emotional stream of passion. In Nigel Farage’s discourse, conservatism of a nationalist kind was painted in the colors of xenophobia, national pride, fear of the ‘other’ and guilt. In short: it was the real debut of ’emotional conservativism’ in Great Britain. Its structure as a historical event is to be found in the linkage of common conservativist topics and emotional language.

Dartkthrone’s new album ‘Arctic Thunder’

On 14 October 2016, Norwegian Black Metal-veterans Darkthrone released their new album ‘Arctic Thunder’. When Darkthrone, as an artistic collective consisting mostly of guitarist/vocalist Ted ‘Nocturno Culto’ Skjellum and drummer Gylve ‘Fenriz’ Nagell, started out to establish Black Metal in the early 1990s, this discourse was fresh, rebellious, ‘dangerous’ and new. But, that was more than twenty years ago. Meanwhile, Darkthrone are still releasing albums on a regular base but their music is not pure Black Metal anymore. It is a hybrid form of Rock’n’Roll, Crust Punk , Heavy and Black Metal.

Their 2016 album is, seen in the context of overall-cultural history of this year, a remarkable one. It still is that new style cultivated by Darkthrone since several but its aesthetics changed. This is the record’s cover:

The music on the records is not an essential change but the aesthetics hark back to the band’s own history. The cover shows a campfire in the night, dark woods, the band’s classic logo and the record’s title. This composition, as a discursive move, takes up classical Black Metal aesthetics which Darkthrone were famous for in the 1990s. Dark forests, night, campfire are key symbol in this discourse’s conservative aesthetics. However, there is one central difference between 2016’s Darkthrone cover and the ones from the 1990s: they feature the very same symbolism but ‘Arctic Thunder’ is pictured in colour while the old ones were black and white.

This, from a cultural historian’s point of view, is a remarkable shift which appears to be a ‘logical’ event in 2016’s history: discourse stuck to its conservativism, politically with UKIP and Nigel Farage, musically with ‘Arctic Thunder’, but it was painted with colour – which stands for emotions, passion, more liveliness and an overall new discursive approach stressing the role of emotions in postfactualism. Hence, the political programme of the ‘Brexit’-campaign had the same cultural structure than Black Metal discourse. As an event, it brought the dawn of ’emotional conservativism’ which is in Darkthrone’s case some sort of ‘colourful Black Metal’

Donald Trump

On 8 November 2016, Donald J. Trump, American businessman and television star, was voted to become the United States’ 45th president. This was a political event, not predicted by mainstream media and discourses, which was called upon ‘historical’ from the very first minute. A former businessman and ‘celebrity’ who cultivated a highly emotional discourse of populism, taking up narratives of xenophobia, nationalism, misogynism, sometimes even racism, was elected to become president. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, predicted to become president, lost the battle.

I do not want to join the global debates on that event, being shocked or delighted, pleading for political ‘revenge’ on the ‘establishment’, but to examine this event’s discursive structure. At its core, Trump’s political campaign and discourse was highly conservative, often right-wing, being embedded in the traditional Republican Party’s programme. Yet, this discourse had, on its surface, a very different appearance: it was aggressive, passionate, always full of emotions. Trump’s election is yet another example of the linkage of conservative thought and emotional language in 2016.

The birth of ‘Homo conservativus hystericus’?

Recalling this three very different historical events of 2016, the ‘Brexit’-vote in June, the release of Darkthrone’s ‘Arctic Thunder’ in October and the American presidential elections in November, two political decisions and one artistic speech act, they feature the same structural characteristics. They are conservative ‘to the bone’ but on the surface, concerning language and symbolism, their discourse is emotional, aggressive fresh and passionate. All three of them are ’emotional conservativism’.

So, when summarizing my thoughts in this post, the year of 2016 seems to be indeed a remarkable one. Recently, cultural historian Wolfgang Schmale published a monograph² which has the theoretical concept of ‘collective historical performative speech acts’ at its center. It theorizes identities and narratives innovatively as ‘collective performative speech acts’ (i.e. ‘Eurocentrism’, ‘European Identity’, ‘Enlightenment’) which become influential points of reference – and Schmale thinks of our recent period as a history of change towards ‘post-performativity’.

We can take up this thougt for a cultural-historical end-of-year review of 2016 in Metal Music Studies. Seeing the similar structures in discourses in politics and music, too, we can think of 2016 of a year in which a new ‘collective historical performative speech act’ entered the cultural stage. Satirically, this new figure of discourse may be called ‘Homo conservativus hystericus’: he is, most of all, white and male, gains attraction by yelling emotionally; yet he sticks to his conservative roots.

Source: http://www.nuclearblast.de/static/articles/253/253324-1.jpg/1000×1000.jpg, retrieved 12/10/2016. ↩
Wolfgang Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism. A Conceptual Approach to European History. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016. ↩

Paradox, Ambivalence and the Rise of the Unexpected: What Do the Presidency of Donald Trump and Metal Music Have In Common?

November 11, 2016 — 1 Comment

On November 8, 2016, former businessman and reality televison-star Donald J. Trump won the 45th presidency of the United States of America. Being a white male of the age of seventy years, from early 2017 on, for at least four years, he will be the oldest ever elected president of the country. Recently, German historian Wolfgang Schmale gave an analysis of what Trump’s unexpected success does mean for the European Union in its state of crisis.

Globally, there have been many different forms of commentaries on Trump’s success, from very different angles, a large part of them harshly critical, some ‘celebrating’ the event. However, virtually all of them share the opinion that it was unexpected. Political and cultural discourses call it a ‘surprise’, ‘shock’, even a ‘catastrophy’ or the ‘dawn of a new era’. All of these political and cultural speech acts¹ share the cultural narrative and tendencies of superlatives and ‘extremisms’ in giving an account of this event. The main question that arises from this is: what does that the mean for our future?

In this post, I try to reflect on this question, framing a possible way to an answer from the perspective of cultural history – more precisely, from the perspectives of the cultural history of Heavy Metal and European cultural history. (Of course) I have no definitive or concluding answer to this question; yet, I think comparing key cultural processes in Heavy Metaland the rise of Donald Trump offers us a view of striking structural similarities that are, somehow, the epitome of the early 21st century.

Paradox, ambivalence and the rise of the unexpected

At a first glance, it does not seem to make any sense to compare the Trump’s rise to presidency and the recent history of the culture of Heavy Metal. Yet, it does make sense, from a cultural-structural point of view. First, Trump’s political discourse is a cultural one of populism, hence, he is a figure of popular culture. And: Heavy Metal, since the 1960s and 1970s, growing bigger and more ‘mainstream’ since the 1980s, is a discourse in post-modern popular culture. Therefore, we can compare them, diachronically and synchronically, as fields of the production of cultural meaning.

Second, and this is my key argument of framing a possible way to a cultural-historical answer to my above question, there are striking similarities, even parallel structures in both histories- the history of Trumps rise to presidency since June 2015 and the cultural history of Heavy Metal’s way into mainstream and to scientific attention since 2014. I try to compare them from this point of view, not wanting to give a clear answer, but a framework of possibly coming to such one in the time to come.

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced he would be running for president in 2016. In the primaries, he was one among sixteen other Republicans who wanted to become the United States’ new leader. Trump ‘celebrated’ and ‘conducted’ a very intense media campaign, and, by early 2016, the race became one between Trump and Ted Cruz, on the side of the republicans. Finally, in May 2016, the former businessman and reality television-star became the presumptive Republican canditate. All of this process, until the very event of hiselection, featured harsh debates, causing frictions in the candidate’s party and the country’s whole political culture.

Seen from a cultural historical point of view, this history between early summer of 2015 and fall of 2016, is strutured by two main features: (1) first, Trump’s rise to presidency has not been expected. (2) Second, the discourse revolving around the politician’s candidacy and final success, has been characterized (until this very day) by paradoxicalities and ambivalences. The United State’s cultural identy, stemming from the myths of its constitutional and overall history since the eigteenth century, sees liberalism, democracy, in short: the values of rational Enlightenment, as its core values.

Still, theses valuessuit the identity of U.S.-citizenship; however, Trumps campaigning and discourse turned this political upside down, too: his political style is one of focusing on emotions (patriotism, revenge on the ‘establishment’, xenophobia etc.), ‘machismo’ and the longing for the ‘the great leader’ solving the country’s suppossed problems. Despite this discourse, he was able to rise to presidency. So, America’s current political culture is one of paradoxes and ambivalence – and it became a popular culture, enshrining the medial axiomatics of populism.

Now, let us go to the history of Heavy Metal since 2014. As written in a previous post, the contemporary history of this subculture of music has been characterized by two main tendencies: first, since 2014, the history of Heavy Metal, and even its Extreme sub-genres like Death and Black Metal, more and more became part of cultural ‘mainstream’. It is, growingly, accepted as an own and ‘meritful’ way of perfoming art. Not only ‘big’ acts like Metallica are seen as key-figures of popculture, basically all of its culture is getting integrated into mainstream, as a form of the ‘current of tradition’. We only have to mention that German ‘Schlager‘ veteran ‘Heino’, before seen as an archetype of cultural conservatism, published a ‘Metal-style’ album in 2014.

Second, since 2014, Heavy Metal, and in many texts Extreme Metal, has gained a lot more of scientific attention. Since 2014, there is an own peer- reviewed journal, called ‘Metal Music Studies’ and, already established earlier, the ‘International Society for Metal Music Studies’. Not only, as had already been the case before, there are sparse monographs articel, but, as of today, there is a full-blown own discourse of Heavy Metal in science, Metal Music Studies. Growingly, it is seen as being ‘worth’ of scientific scholarship.

So, let us read this history of Metal Music since 2014 from a cultural-historical angle, focusing on its structural features. (1) First, its emancipation into mainstream, but, most of all, the full development of the discourse of an own scientific discipline of Metal Music Studies has not been expected. We did not see that come in science. (2) Second, these intertwining processes, Metal (and even Extreme Metal) getting integrated into the main currents of popculture and its identities produce structural paradoxicalities and ambivalences.

Up to 2014, Metal Music identiy was one of being a ‘rebel’, being critical of society or even of opposing society and its key discourses of popculture. This has changed fundamentally, being aware that even artists like ‘Heino’ enjoy Metal aesthetics. For ‘Metalheads’ this means essential paradoxes and ambivalence: they have to re-negotiate their cultural identity.

Framing the way to possible answers to today’s main questions: dealing with paradoxes and ambivalence as the result of the unexpected

Hence, suprisingly, the key question in American, European and global political (pop)culture and Metal Music is pretty much the same: we have to deal with the rise of the unexpected and to re-negotiate our identities in the light of new paradoxes and ambivalences. From a cultural historian’s point of view, the way to answer the question of how to deal with these unexpected histories could be the same: we have to find structural tactics, discursive strategies to perform new narratives and cultural texts that integrate the new ambiguity into a new identity. In a nutshell, Americans, maybe, coud learn a lesson from Metal Music and, vice versa, ‘Metalheads’ from American citizenship in a post-modern age.

Cf. Wolfgang Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism. A Conceptual Approach to European History, Stuttgart: Steiner, 2016. ↩

Narrations, narratives and emplotment: is Hayden White’s narratological theory of history a suitable source of research in Metal Music Studies?

October 27, 2016 — Leave a comment

American historian Hayden White (born 1928) is one of the most influential theorists of narratological theory and pilosophy of history since the 1970s. His widely read (and citicized) Magnum opus ‘Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe’ (1973)¹ provided historical research with a thoroughly self-reflexive theoretical account of its subject, the classic European historiography of the 19th century.

Applying the theory of ‘tropology’ to history, White intended to show that historiography is always a kind of narrative and linguistic discourse. According to him, historiography is at least as much art as science – it is a kind of ‘protoscience’ which gains its theoretical legitimization from only narrativism.² Thus, he put the theory of ‘tropes’ and, most of all, ‘emplotment‘ (which means the narratological modelization of explanation in any historiographical narration) into the centre of his book.³

In this theoretical framework, historiographers can use only four ‘archetypes’ of plot structures which White defines as the archetypical genres of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire.⁴ These types of plot construction correlate to four positions of ideological discouses which White defines as anarchism, conservatism, radicalism and liberalism.⁵ Alltogether, White’s theory can be summarized in a table which is the visualization of Metahistory’s analytical and descriptive of core:

⁶

This visualization shows how Hayden White, as a somehow post-structuralist, somehow yet structuralist theorist of the historian’s language,⁷ imagined historiography to be: the first place, according to him, it is a narratological structure, a narration. Hence, it is part of broader cultural discourses and contexts. It is part of contemporaray social, cultural and political life (i.e. ideologies such as anarchism, liberalism, conservatism or radicalism). White provided us with a deeply-grounded theoretical argumentation that historiography is never ‘neutral’ or ‘value-free’ but has to be seen in the context of contemporary cultures.

However, this argument has become a commonplace in historico-theoretical debates⁸ but, still, discussion is open-ended – and, probably, cannot come to an end.⁹ At this point, our summary is (and this cannot be emphasized often enough) that history is always a kind of narration. We do not have to follow White in his full implication, calling history a ‘protoscience’,¹⁰ but with Metahistory we gain a lot of theoretical ground in historical theory, concerning the nature of any historical narrative. In short, today, we also have to always ask for history as narration and narrative, too.¹¹

Historical narrations, narratives and emplotment in Metal Music Studies: gaining more clarity

To deal with historical narrations and narratives is not new in Metal Music Studies: many recent works ask for narrations or narratological backgrounds of historic lyrical motives or aesthetics in Metal music.¹² But, from a cultural historian’s point of view, current discourse lacks a sense of clarity: the terminology of ‘narration’ but, most of all, of ‘narrative’, is usually used in more implicit than explicit ways.¹³

What I want to reflect upon in this post, is a mode of ‘going back to the roots‘ of White’s theory in Metahistory. The metaphor of ‘going back to the roots’ is a common topos in Metal culture, bringing to the fore associations of conservatism but also of going back to the authentic quality of excellent music. I intend to go back to White’s definitions of ‘narration’/’narrative’ and, in the first place, ’emplotment’, to gain more clarity in Metal Music Studies. I want to help to find out whether White’s theory is an atheoretical way of analyzing historical representation¹⁴ in Metal Music Studies.

To do so, we have to re-read his book. The core text of White’s theory is found in his introduction to Metahistory, his ‘poetics of history’.¹⁵ This barely more than fourty pages contain a theory of historical narrativism which became highly influential since the early 1970s,¹⁶ the era when Metal Music itself emerged in post-1968 Great Britain with bands like Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Saxon amongst others.

White develops his theory in these introductory sections. The most important one among his theoretical notions is the one of ’emplotment’. Defining this notion, he describes the techniques historians use (in the case of Metahistory, the great historians of the 19th century) to construct the meaning of their narrations as part of their disciplinary discourse. And this is the key to understand this theory: to construct something means to perfom an act of composing, in more or less concious ways. Therefore, the first important parameter to read White’s book is to read it as theory of historical perfomance and agency. Historians act, poetically and concstructively, in their writing of history.¹⁷

The terms of ‘narration’ and ‘narrative’ depend on this parameter: they describe the result of the historians’ agency as writers of history. Narrations and narratives are the performative result, the way and form the construction of meaning takes in history (i.e. in a text or other forms of statements, such as in a historically themed song in Metal Music) .

According to White, historical narrations and narratives are the cognitive form the production of meaning takes when historians (or other historical ‘storytellers’, like artists in Metal music) perform their acts of emplotment. Thus the second parameter to read this theory, is to see historical narrations and narratives as performative results of the agency of historians. They are contigent forms of coherence, constructed at a certain point in space and time, out of the contemporary world of culture. The author of Metahistory develops this theory in the mentioned introductory section but its most concise formulation is found in the book’s preface:

In this theory I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse. Histories (and philosophies of history as well) combine a certain amount of ‘data’, theoretical concepts for ‘explaining’ these data, and a narrative structure for their presentation as an icon of set of events presumed to have occured in times past. In addition, I maintain, they contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic (…)¹⁸

This theoretical and ontological position enables White to characterize the historians’ agency in their performative acts of emplotment:

Explanation by Emplotment

Providing the ‘meaning’ of a story by identifying the kind of story that had been told is called explanation by emplotment. If, in the course of narrating his story, the historian provides it with the plot structure of a Tragedy, he has ‘explained’ it in one way; if he has structured it as a Comedy, he has ‘explained’ it in another way. Emplotment is the way which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind.¹⁹

This citation contains White’s definition of the historians’ work and task: they produce, as the results of acts of such ’emplotment’, a historical (hi)story whose ‘effect of explanation’ relates to its mode of plot structure. In short, a historical narrative’s form and meaning depend upon how it is told. Emplotment is the theory of a ‘performative speech act’ that describes this process.²⁰ Going ‘back to the roots’ in Metahistory means to understand historical storytelling as an act of agency of performative emplotment. Now, we can the address the question whether this theory of historiography suits the demands of Metal Music Studies, and in particular those of a cultural history of Metal Music.

The questions of ‘materiality’ and modality: approaching historical emplotment in Metal Music Studies as a ‘sonic historical emplotment’

Dealing with historical storytelling in Metal means to deal with (hi)stories that take the shape of music. At a first theoretical stage, we can define this as a ‘sonic discourse’ – however neglective such a description should be. But, this first approximative argument already contains, in an implicit way, the characterization of a theory of historical emplotment in Metal Music. It consists in the modal question of the ‘materiality’ and the ways of the modalities the narratives are presented to the audience.

The audience of Metal Music consists of listeners. The ‘material’ form, the modality that is decisive, strucurally and cognitively, in Metal is its sonic shape. The narratives the music contains may be a composite of visuals, lyrics, stage performance and the music itself, but the definition of this discourse is that it is a music discourse. Thus, we have to ask whether Hayden White’s theory of emplotment is suitable for the demands of a music discourse.

There are a number of monographs and articles which deal with the narratology of Metal Music.²¹ However meritorious these works are, they do, as a rule, approach narratives in Metal from a musicological perspective, combining it with a cultural perspective.

Asking for the suitability of Hayden White’s theory for Metal Music Studies, requires us to concretize and specify this theoretical question: we have to go a step further in theory by, first, shaping these narratives as historical narratives; and then, second, to go ahead by asking for these historical narratives as historical emplotment, perfomative acts of agency in the construction of meaning, that takes place in the ‘material’ form and modality of music.

For cultural history as a starand of interdiscliplinary Metal Music Studies, we can take up the discourse of the history of sound(s) that emerged in recent time.²² The theoretical foundations of ‘sound history’ enable us to approach the ‘materiality’ and modality of sonic discourses.

Now, we can answer the question whether Hayden White’s theory of history is suitable for research of cultural history in Metal Music Studies: yes, it enables us to understand historical storytelling in Metal music. However, we have to understand it as emplotment in a sonic discursive culture – we are required to develop a theory of ‘sonic historical emplotment‘ in Metal Music Studies.

Cf. Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 3rd printing 1980. ↩
Cf. ibid., most of all, pp. 1-42, 426-434. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
Figurative table of Hayden White’s theory of narrativism in 19th century historiography; for the text in the book itself, cf. ibid.; especially White’s own figure, p. 29; table: Peter Pichler. ↩
Cf. Frank Ankersmit, Narrative Logic. A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. The Hague: Martinus Niijhoff Publishers, 1983. ↩
For instance, from the German discourse, most recently, cf. Jörn Rüsen, Historik. Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft, Köln e.a.: Böhlau, 2013; for recent debates, as the most read research journals, cf. History and Theory. Studies in the Philosophy of History. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1960 ff; also, cf. Rethinkin History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1997 ff. ↩
Cf. White, Metahistory, pp. 1-42, 426-434. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
Cf. ibid.; Ankersmit, Narrative Logic. ↩
For topics of the research debate, most of all, cf. Metal Music Studies, Bristol: Intellect, 2014 ff; also, cf. Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger and Paul D. Greene (eds.), Metal Rules the Globe. Heavy Metal Music around the World. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. ↩
Cf. ibid.; for an ‘essay’ in this direction, also, cf. Peter Pichler, The Power of the Imagination of Historical Distance: Melechesh’ ‘Mesopotamian Metal’as a Musical Attempt of Solving Cultural Conflicts in the 21st Century. Metal Music Studies, forthcoming. ↩
For the discourse on historical representation, cf. Frank Ankersmit, Historical Representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford Universoty Press, 2001. ↩
Cf. White, Metahistory, pp. 1-42. ↩
Discussing White’s reception, cf. Richard T. Vann, The Recption of Hayden White, in: History and Theory 37, 2 (1998), pp. 143-161; and, also, cf. Frank Ankersmit, Hayden White’s Appeal to the Historians, ibid., pp. 182-193. ↩
Cf. ibid. ↩
White, Metahistory, p. IX. Emphasis in the original. ↩
Ibid., p. 7. Emphasis in the original. ↩
Cf. Wolfgang Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism. A Conceptual Approach to European History. Stuttgart. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016. ↩
Cf. Méi-Ra St. Laurent, Finally Getting out of the Maze: Understanding the Narrative structure of Extreme Metal Through a Study of ‘Mad Architect’ by Septicflesh, in: Metal Music Studies 2, 1 (2016), pp. 87-108; and: Dietmar Elflein, Schwermetallanalysen. Die musikalische Sprache des Heavy Metal. Bielefeld: Transcipt, 2010. ↩
From the German discourse, cf. R. Murray Schafer, Die Ordnung der Klänge. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Hörens. Mainz: Schott, 2010; Gerhard Paul and Ralph Schock (eds.), Sound der Zeit. Geräusche, Töne, Stimmen – 1889 bis heute. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014. ↩

‘Colourful Black Metal’: Darkthrone’s New Album ‘Arctic Thunder’

October 12, 2016 — Leave a comment

On 14th October 2016, Nowergian Black Metal veterans and pioneers Darkthrone will release their new full-length record ‘Arctic Thunder’. It is the follow-up to 2013’s ‘The Underground Resistance’. Having only two constant members, Gylve Fenris ‘Fenriz’ Nagell (born 1971, most of all known as the band’s drummer) and Ted ‘Nocturno Culto’ Skjellum (born 1972, most of all acting as the group’s vocalist and lead guitarist), the band is considered to be one of the pioneering und most important acts of early 1990s’ Norwergian, then European and global Black Metal music and culture.¹

Their early albums, such as ‘Panzerfaust’ (1995) or ‘Transilvanian Hunger’ (1994), clearly made references to fascist, Nazist and racist ideologies. Still, there is a lot of dispute and discussion if this is to be seen as ‘provocation’ or as ‘authentic’ political statements. The latter album even had printed ‘Norsk Arisk Black Metal’ (‘Norwegian Aryan Black Metal’) on it. So, from my point of view, this aspect of the band’s cultural history is to be seen more than critically; it has to be rejected. In Black Metal discourse, as an artistic and ‘rebellious’, therefore, emancipative discourse, there can be no discursive space for racism.

This said, there is a an aspect in the band’s cultural history of identity, taking a very clear form in the aesthetics of ‘Arctic Thunder’ (at this time, the promotional release of the album is available already). Darkthrone started out as a Death Metal outfit in 1986, turning to Black Metal aesthetics in 1991. The ‘blackish’ design of the band’s identity, claiming it to be a ‘true’ Black Metal group, was kept up to around the year of 2005; with the album ‘The Cult Is Alive’ (2006), the two artitsts decided to incorporate Punk, Rock and Classic Metal elements into their music. They became a ‘Black’n’Roll’-band which they can be seen to still be in 2016.

Yet, reflecting on the band’s history of identity, a ‘micro-macro-history’ of their cultural identity from 1986 until today, focusing on the ‘microscopic’ topic of the band’s identitary aesthetics, the new album is – in a certain way – an extraordinary one. The music heard on the record seems to be a progression of what the band is doing but the overall aesthetics hark back to the band’s classical black metal phase from 1991 to 1995. This is the record’s cover:

This cover’s features are, in a cultural ‘micro-macro’ perspective of the band’s history of identity, very interesting – and, special. The cover shows dark woods, fire (I guess, a campfire), the band’s logo and the record’s title. This is a very straight codification of early 1990’s Black Metal aesthetics: the topics and metaphors of fire and woods have become standout topics of Black Metal in its cultural orthodoxy. But, when looking back at the band’s classical records from 1991 to 1995, they all had a black and white outfit. So, what is, in a certain way, the key move on ‘Arctic Thunder’ is to use a orthodox, very traditional and classical black metal identity but to paint it colourfully.

This move can be seen in both ways, literally and metaphorically: literally the band follows, now, a more colourful approach in their aesthetics of identity. Metaphorically, and this is from the mentioned ‘micro-macro’ perspective of history the more interesting one, the band breaks classical Black Metal monochromy and re-composes it in colour. Black Metal is – self-conciously, and, somehow, courageously – hybridized with Rock’n’Roll. The band did so since ten years but, in 2016, they start to do it more explicitly. So, from this allegorical perspective, we can see a new era beginning in the group’s cultural history of identity. In 2016, the band plays ‘colourful Black Metal’.

So, reflecting on it in a broad cultural historical perspective, this is a tempting move. In 1966, exactly fifty years ago, the Rolling Stones wanted to ‘paint it black‘, releasing a single of this title. In 2016, the seemingly most extreme one of popular music cultures, Black Metal, at least one of their key-players, wants to ‘paint it colourfully‘. I am eager to see and listen what kind of broader trends in cultural history this can be seen to represent metaphorically.

For Black Metal and Extreme Metal cultural history, cf. Keith Kahn-Harris: Extreme Metal. Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford 2007; Dayal Patterson: Black Metal. Evolution of the Cult. New York 2013; also, cf. idem: Black Metal. Prelude to the Cult. N.p. 2013; idem: Black Metal. The Cult Never Dies. N.p. 2015; idem: Black Metal. Into the Abyss. N.p. 2016. ↩
Source: http://www.nuclearblast.de/static/articles/253/253324-1.jpg/1000×1000.jpg, retrieved 12/10/2016. ↩

Stahl

Scientific Blog on the Cultural History of Metal Music