Peter Pichler – Stahl

Blog

  • Heavy Metal historicism? Some reflections on history, primary sources, and methodology

    Ten days ago, I gave an online lecture on history’s disciplinary position in the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field of Metal Music Studies. ((For a first monograph on this from a European perspective, see P. Pichler, Metal music, sonic knowledge, and the cultural ear in Europe since 1970: A historiographic exploration, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2020.)) You can read the German title of this lecture in the featured image above this post. My aim was to show to history students at the University of Salzburg how history with its distinct methodologies can be a useful disciplinary lens for metal research.

    In the online discussion after my presentation, the main issue was the question how the traditional methods of history (i.e. working with historical sources, traditionally mainly texts) can be exploited in researching metal. For two reasons, I have been thinking quite a lot about this question since this discussion.

    The first reason is that the traditional method of history (what is called ‘the historical method’ since the 19th century, when scholars like Leopold von Ranke or Johann Gustav Droysen ‘invented’ the method of ‘Quellenkritik‘) ((See M.C. Howell/W. Prevenier, From reliable sources: An introduction to historical methods, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001; also, see J. Rüsen, Historik: Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft, Vienna: Böhlau, 2013.)) is crucial to history’s disciplinary identity. It seems, without the methodological toolkit of ‘Quellenkritik‘ there would be no academic history at all – at least, history would be a very different discipline.

    The second reason is that if one accepts the heavy traditional burden that comes with this historicist identity claim, then one has to ask whether this traditional toolbox is suited to write a history of metal. Basically, classical historicist source critique focuses on texts. But in metal we have music records, lyrics, clothes, practices, cover images, and several other types of source materials. The cultural fabric of metal is multilayered. Hence, we cannot make sense of metal without intepreting it in integral ways, taking into account all these varying modes of sense-making it has to offer.

    In my lecture, I suggested to use an eclectic approach to metal history. In my current research project on the history of my local metal scene in Graz and Styria, it has proven fruitful to combine three methodological streams: (1) oral history, (2) semiotic discourse analysis, and (3) musicological research. This comes close to what Florian Heesch said about the use of ‘scavenger methodology’ in an inspring recent podcast.

    However, suggesting an eclectic approach does not really answer the question whether the traditional methods of history can be used in metal research; or whether the toolbox has to be expanded. Essentially, this leads to the question how historians (and metal scholars in general) define the primary sources of metal history. Thus, history has to develop a ‘metal Quellenkritik‘, which really would have to take into account the specifities of all these types of sources characteristic of metal history.

    Arguably, the only viable way to solve this tricky methodological puzzle is to re-discuss, rethink, and then expand our concept of historical sources. Since the ‘Cultural Turn’, there has been a broad academic discourse on sources in history as a discipline; however, currently there is no specific discussion on metal. ((See D. Bachmann-Medick, Cultural turns: New orientations in the study of culture, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.; Pichler, Exploration.)) In Metal Music Studies, we lack a convincing semiotic definition of primary sources to tackle this problem. ((See A. Frings/A. Linsenmann/S. Weber, eds., Vergangenheiten auf der Spur:Indexikalische Semiotik in den historischen Kulturwissenschaften, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013.)) In the coming months, I hope to find time to write a journal article on this topic.

  • The Styrian metal scene in 2021: ‘Pandemism’ and localism

    Copyright of the elements of the title image: cover artwork ‘Thrashing Death Squad’ EP © MDD/Black Sunset Records 2021; branding artwork ‘Metal on the Hill 2021’ © Napalm Records 2020.

    In my project on the Styrian metal scene since 1980, I am currently conducting oral history interviews in this local metal community. I have already talked with several stakeholders, musicians, studio owners, record producers, and other community members. I am very grateful to them for beeing so cooperative and open during the interview sessions. While some of my initial assumptions about the scene have proven to be right, others have been corrected or modified. Steadily, the evaluation of the interview recordings opens up new insights. This phase of research will last about a year until early 2022.

    Of course, the Covid19 pandemic has been one of the crucial topics in most of these interviews. Scene members experience the pandemic in different ways, depending on many individual and social factors. However, some shared patterns of experiencing the pandemic seem to be recognizable. Most of the local metalheads share a very understandable frustration about the lack of concerts and scene events. Also, most of them feel an uncertainty or are worrying about the scene community’s future.

    On balance, the pandemic crisis seems to catalyze the trend of digitalization that was already transforming the scene before 2020. Digital concert streams and many other forms of digital scene life are gaining momentum. Because of the present lack of opportunities to play gigs, the scene moreover witnesses a productivity boost. Bands focus on studio recordings – as far as this is possible under the current conditions.

    Fascinatingly, in this phase of a new productitivity in the Styrian metal scene, a new localism is gaining momentum. A number of new Styrian records  – for example, the new split EP by Darkfall and Mortal Strike shown in the title image – thematize local semiotics. They rework cultural themes from Styria and Graz – for instance, the traditional Styrian blazon. Another example is the branding of the ‘Metal on the Hill’ festival scheduled for August 2021, also shown in the title image.

    Intriguingly, the new productivity in the scene promotes feelings of local Styrian beloging, identity, and history. The new music is more ‘Styrian’ than ever before. This recent phenomenon, which I am tempted to call the scene’s ‘pandemism’ (in a sense of trying to culturally cope with the pandemic crisis in form of musical self-empowerment), is crystalizing currently. Hence, from 2021 onwards, the ‘glocal’ character of the scene seems to be even more important than before. We should keep an eye on both the ‘pandemism’ and the localism.

  • Metal scenes: Multi-role agents and scene ethics

    In the last few days, I had quite some intense exchanges with crucial agents in the Styrian metal scene, which I am researching in my project. When reflecting upon how these members of the local scene have constructed their community over now more than fourty years, I realized how diverse their multiple scene roles have been throughout their scene biographies. Many of them have acted as ‘multi-role agents’ in the scene.

    In a single person, they have combined and integrated meaningfully their scene roles as – for instance – musicians, journalists, fans, concert organizers, peers, and so on; usually various scene identites in a single person. Looking at the already dense discourse on scene research, most of all on the early periods and founding scenarios of scene, this finding comes as no suprise. ((Just to mention a few important titles, see the case studies in: Jeremy Wallach e.a. (eds.): Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music arount the World, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011; Anna-Katharina Höpflinger/Florian Heesch (eds.), Methoden der Heavy Metal-Forschung: Interdisziplinäre Zugänge, Münster and New York, Waxmann: 2014; Andy R, Brown e.a. (eds.), Gobal Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies, London e.a.: Routledge, 2016.)) From this research we know very well that metal scenes usually grow out of a DIY ethos but strive intensively for professionalization (whatever it might mean to be a professional metalhead).

    From this finding follow crucial conceptual and emprical implications for the oral history research I am doing on the history of the Styrian metal scene since 1980 (most of all I deal with matters of the scene’s ethics, its values and scene laws, and then how these norm-related aspects depend on global metal’s attitude to law). If  one assumes that the crucial agents of the scene – for example in the founding period in the 1980s – have been such ‘multi-role agents’ then they also must have been equally multifaceted in respect of developing their scene community ethics. The values they attached to their ermerging community were the values of musicians, fans, organizes, entrepreneurs – in many cases all in a single actor. This is key to keep in mind when leading oral history interviews.

  • Covid19, metal studies, and oral history research: A methodological rant

    In my last blog post, I attempted to describe the thoroughly digitalized research environment I discovered in our project on the history of the Styrian metal scene. Our research is progressing very well. My colleague Charris Efthimiou already provided no less less than thirteen very detailled analyses of law-themed metal songs and albums. Besides the crucial referential frame of globally famous classics (such as Judas Priest’s ‘Breaking the Law’) Charris focused on Styrian music. Hence, we now have a good data set on the musical production in the Styrian scene.

    As  the project leader, I spent the last few weeks gathering data on the cultural production in the scene since the early 1980s. I am constructing a permanently growing corpus of cultural artefacts from the scene. I am collecting T-shirts (as crucial pieces of clothing), album covers (as pictorial historical sources that ‘cover’ the music on records), concert flyers, posters, and other forms of sources. This body of sources currently comprises dozens of artefacts, images, and texts. It will grow steadily. Still, I am very thankful to receive information on further source materials.

    Thus, at this point, the project team is in midst of the process of researching our empirical data. Thanks to Charris’ brilliant work the musicological stream is advancing very well. The same holds true for the semiotic discourse analysis of the scene. Most texts and images, in many cases also of T-shirts, are available from the web. As well, many pieces of clothes can be ordererd to really hold them in hands. In this respect, digitalization makes things possible that would not have been possible five or ten years ago.

    Yet, I do face a highly ambivalent situation in respect of the oral history stream of my project. For almost a year now, face-to-face interviews have been difficult, often even impossible to conduct. Currently, we are experiencing (again) a quite strict form of a ‘lockdown’ here in Austria – with an open ending point. Of course, in many other places around the globe the situation is the same or – sadly – even worse. Of course, this is frustrating. Yet, I also think this is a very good occasion to globally rethink using oral history methodologies in metal studies. From my point of view, two aspects are crucial to reflect upon.

    First, there already is a rather dense discourse on experiences and practical information on how to conduct interviews online. For instance, the British Oral History Society gives good advice on this. Also, metal studies scholars have started to discuss this problem in their field. Hence, perhaps relieving the frustration a bit, no oral history researcher is alone with this problem! Nonetheless, we need a broader discussion on this issue in metal studies!

    Second, as a historian it is fascinating to think of the fact that, now in 2020/21, digitalization as the crucial historical ‘mega trend’ of the last two decades has not only transformed the scene I am researching but also the ways I am researching it. Doubtless, both aspects depend on each other. Yet, in the pandemic period, digitalization is more relevant than ever before. Metal studies is almost fully digital – at least for the moment.

    Hence, we should not only see this as a frustrating attack on our used ways of research. Much more it is the historically logical catalysis of a development which already was transforming metal studies before the pandemic. The pandemic did not start the process, it only catalysed it. Hence, for my project, I try to see it as a valuable opportunity to experiment with new forms of conducting interviews remotely. I would expect that after the pandemic we will have gained a big deal of important experiences in this changed world of research.

  • The digital metal historian

    Since about 2000, digitalization has become the major transforming force of our social world. Today, using social media – Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc. – is part of our daily lives. The global digital sphere has become our central source of information and communication around the globe. ‘Digital history’ and the ‘history of the digital age’ research these drastic changes. ((See Constance Crompton e.a. (eds.), Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research, London: Taylor & Francis, 2016.; Claire Brennan, “Digital humanities, digital methods, digital history, and digital outputs: History writing and the digital revolution”, History Compass (Aug. 2018) e12492. doi:10.1111/hic3.12492; Wolfgang Schmale, “Theorie des Digitalen Zeitalters”, in: Wolfgang Schmale: Blog „Mein Europa“, wolfgangschmale.eu/theorie-des-digitalen-zeitalters, accessed 7 December 2020.)) Also the ways in which listen to music and hear music have been affected. Digital streaming services are transforming our listening habits. ((See Peter Pichler, Metal Music, Sonic Knowledge, and the Cultural Ear in Europa since 1970: A Historiographic Exploration, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2020.))

    In my project on the cultural history of the Styrian metal scene, I am currently diving deep into empirical research on semiotic sources of this local metal scene’s history since the early 1980s. I am collecting album covers, flyers, tickets, and t-shirts that will be used as the corpus for a semiotic discourse analysis of the community. I will focus on the scene’s ethos and the attitudes to law and to law-related phenomena. I made three remarkable scientific experiences during the first few weeks of collecting these sources.

    First, basically all information on these sources, on how to collect and on how to access them, in most cases even the sources themselves, were to find rather easily in the digital sphere. Once more, social media, music websites and music networks are dominant. This implies nothing less than that the large part of the collective historical knowledge produced and shared in the Styrian metal scene since 1980 is already digitalized. The scene’s memory and history is constructed online – much more than I had expected.

    Second, it was fascinating to learn that this is not only true for the historical sources from the recent period of the scene’s history; moreover, many sources from the early period of the foundation of the local scene in the 1980s are found online, too. For instance, one can find even handwritten flyers advertising the first heavy metal concerts in Graz and Styria in the mid-1980s on the web. ((See Styrian Metal History, https://www.facebook.com/mm.andikrammer/photos/pcb.593002851373168/593001228039997, accessed 4 December 2020.)) Hence, the digitalization went back all the way to the origins of this community.

    Third, the probably most remarkable aspect is that all these sources have been digitalized, stored, and made accessible to the local metal public by a very small group of local scene members. First this is local musician Andi Krammer, whose Facebook site Styrian Metal History is a seemingly endless and fascinating source of empirical information. Then, there is the Rockarchiv Steiermark, a local digital archive of rock music initiated by David Reumüller, Gottfried Krienzer, and Robert Lepenik. Hence, the almost full digitalization of the historical sources on the local metal history has been undertaken by this quite small group.

    This is very deserving and valuable work. But it also means that the selection, arrangement, and online-presentation of the sources – which appear to stand for the history of all Styrian metalheads – were conducted by only them. Their individual answers to the question “What sources should be stored and presented online?” are key in understanding the local scene’s digital memory building. They have a lot of local power and influence in this process. Seen critically, this could be as much only their narrative as it could be the entire scene’s narrative.

    For the digital metal historian of the Styrian scene these are three remarkable points. These experiences make me see myself as an collector of data on an ‘analogue’ scene building process (in the 1980s and 1990s) and as a collector of data on a digital scene transformation (since around 2000). The cultural historian in me has been transformed into a double-headed creature that wanders through digital scene networks and uses traditional research methods. Empirically, the tough nut to crack will be to balance the combination of both digital and traditional methods and develop a good sense of the individual character of the memory building process in Styria. It feels a bit like the woman depicted in the image above.

  • What lies ahead in 2021: Empirical fieldwork

    For my project on the metal scene in Graz and Styria since 1980, I am currently finalizing the framework for the empirical research in 2021. As written in an earlier post, the overall aim is to reconstruct the history of the ‘local metallic association chain’ in Styria.

    Most of the second year of the project will be devoted to intense empirical work. The project teams employs three methodical streams – musicological analysis, oral history, and semantic discourse analysis – to grasp the multidimensional phenomenon of the Styrian scene. In the following, I give a rough sketch of what lies ahead for the ‘Norikum’ project in 2021.

    Analyzing Styrian metal music…

    As already my terminology of metal indicates (I call it ‘sonic knowledge’), I treat music and sound as the ‘heart’ of metal culture. Everything in metal depends from knowing and experiencing the music and its sonic sphere. My project colleague Charalampos Efthymiou now proceeds to analyze the musical production from the local scene. In his analysis, he will focus on the aspect of ‘law’. Together, we already have set up a corpus of relevant songs and albums. About 15 song will be analyzed formally and in the contexts of their albums – to identify ‘law patterns’ in the musical language. ((See D. Elflein, Schwermetallanalysen: Die musikalische Sprache des Heavy Metal, Bielefeld: 2010.))

    Analyzing how the scene history is narrated…

    Since at least the second half of the 20th century, oral history is one oft he most prominent research methods in contemporary history. ((See L. Abrams, Oral History Theory, London and New York: Routledge: 2010; R. Perks and A. Thomson, The Oral History Reader,  Routledge: London and New York, 2000; D. Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.)) Oral history interviews make open forms of creating the historical source in the dialogue between the interviewee and the researcher. The first must be given the chance to construct his narrative, the latter must nourish this process. I (and another member of the project team) will lead oral history interviews with about twenty interviewees. The sample of interviewees will be constructed to represent the gender and class structure of the local scene as well as include non-scene members with their perspectives on local metal. I already have identified the key interviewees.

    Analyzing the local scene discourse…

    Though music and sound – sonic knowledge – are at the heart of Styrian metal, its history can only really be understood when interpreting its textual, visual and fashion artefacts – tshirts, album covers, texts, flyers – as integral elements of the scene discourse. Music, sounds, images, texts and fashion make a fabric of meanings that has to be decoded integrally. ((See A.-K. Höpflinger, Religiöse Codes in der Populärkultur. Kleidung der Black Metal-Szene, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020;also, see A. Frings e.a. (eds.), Vergangenheiten auf der Spur. Indexikalische Semiotik in den historischen Kulturwissenschaften, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012.))

    I am constructing a corpus of about twenty locally worn tshirts, about fifteen to twenty flyers (refering to crucial events in the scene history since 1980) and about twenty album covers (of well-known local metal records) as semiotic sources. A discourse analysis of the semantic relations between visuals, sound, texts and fashion should enable us to reconstruct this scene discourse for the decades since 1980.

    What lies ahead in 2021

    To sum up, in the ‘Norikum’ project 2021 will be devoted to intense empirical work. Analyzing the local metal music, leading oral history interviews and analyzing the fabric of the local scene culture will provide us with the necessary research data to start writing this history in 2022. Later this year, I will post an research report summarizing the key findings of the first year on the project website.

     

  • “I, the mask”: A concert under the conditions of the ‘Covid19’ pandemic

    Last Saturday, for the first time since March 2020, I attended a metal show at Explosiv youth centre in Graz, Austria. The billing consisted of Alphayn, Groteskh, Heathen Foray and Obscurity. After a concert-less six months, now, slowly, smaller-sized club shows are coming back. The audience has to be smaller than usual and also the fans in the crowd must wear the omnipresent masks. In metal culture, the mask has become a cultural signifier. Many bands offer masks with their logos or album artworks as merchandize. In this shorter blog post, I reflect on two aspects: First, on how these conditions created a very specific and peculiar atmosphere at a metal concert; and second, on how such ‘atmospheric’ aspects can be analyzed in Metal Music Studies.

    I, the mask…

    In everyday culture, the masks haven become day-to-day companions of our lives. Most Austrians wear them, only few refuse to do so. So do most Austrian fellow metalheads agree to wear them, but some are critical about them. On this evening, they had to be worn when entering the concert hall. As written before, the masks – usually in black – have become regular items in metal webshops. Hence, more and more, the masks are part of (commercial) metalness identity-building. At this concert, they were compulsory in the concert hall but in front of the venue and in the bar area people did not have to wear them:

    Concert goers in front of Explosiv youth centre, Graz, 12 September 2020, (c) Peter Pichler.

    In consequence, in front of the venue and in the bar space, things were going usual ways. People were chatting, discussing the perfomances, having drinks or smoking cigarettes. But in the hall, the situation was strangely different from other concerts I had witnessed there before. The audience was about 200 local metalheads, half the size of ‘normal’ shows. So it was less crowded. In the audience space, the masks had to be worn and people were required to keep a safety distance from each other. Both worked quite well. The odd amospheric effect was that the masks – even more than usually – anonymized the fans. They became ‘faceless’. ((For the situation of metal concerts, see D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture, Boulder, CO: Da Capo Press, 2000, 199-235.))

    The fans not allowed to show their faces and directly express enthusiasm, excitement or also disapproval towards the bands via facial expressions, there was quite an odd atmosphere in the audience. Heabanging, showing the metal horns and ‘moshing’ happened, but in strangely anonymized and socially distant ways. Not distant because of the new rules, but distant because the actors in the audience were anonymized into ‘facelessness’. The main effect was that, even more than usually, the artists – who did not wear the masks – became the centre of attention, as they were the only ones who could show their faces:

    Performance by Heathen Foray, Explosiv youth centre, Graz, 12 September 2020, (c) Peter Pichler.
    Performance by Heathen Foray, Explosiv youth centre, Graz, 12 September 2020, (c) Peter Pichler.

    Thus, in an atmospheric way, the current ‘Covid19’ conditions changed the ‘mood’ at metal concerts, at least at this specific, contingent concert as an individual event on 12 September 2020. The cultural key signature of this event was that – much more than already before – there was a clearly palpable hierarchical distance between the artists and the audience. The ones were ‘faceless’, anonymous watchers, they others were in the bright light of attention, showing their faces on the stage. How to make sense of this change of atmosphere in scientific ways?

    Atmosphere, mood, stimmung…

    In  2012, the German literary scientist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht published a book entitled ‘Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature‘. ((H.U. Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, Stanford; CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.)) The notions in his title – ‘atmosphere’, ‘mood’ and most of all the German-language notion of ‘stimmung‘ (a major concept of 19th century German Romanticism) – catch the main qualities of this concert event. ((For Romanticism, see W. Breckman European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.)) Stimmung describes the affects and emotions that followed from the sensual impressions – watching, listening, smelling, tasting – at this event. The impressions of ‘faceless’ metalheads in the audience, of bands performing without masks in the bright light on the stage, but also of the usual routine in front of the venue, created this evening’s individual stimmung. The main point of this stimmung is that it implied a new atmospheric hierarchy at a concert. We should keep an eye on this because it involves matters of power and representation.

  • Styria: the local ‘metallic association chain’

    In my last post, I wrote that in our research project on the Styrian metal scene we  now progress from the European macro-level to the Styrian micro-level. Established in the UK in the early 1980s, the European narrative of law in metal culture was our macro-point of reference. During the New Wave of British Heavy Metal this narrative circulated throughout Europe and became a crucial resource for the construction of local scenes – also for the Styrian metal community. Starting from this we can now ask for local patterns. In this post, I attempt giving a first overview of some patterns of the local metal ethos in Styria and Graz.

    History and memory-building projects in the Styrian scene

    In the past weeks, I have been thinking intensely about what these European macro-findings imply for our research on the cultural history of the Styrian metal since the early 1980s. Where exactly should we start? I came to the result that the best point of departure is the local scene’s own view of its history; understood in a quite literal sense of how the scene visually represents itself today in the discourse in 2020.

    This is is so important, because this constructed gaze at the collective scenic self – in its selection of depicted scene members, of materials, of music instruments, of scene sites, etc. – gives us pivotal clues on how to write this history. It tells a lot about the scene’s ethics and its local version of norm-related sonic knowledge.

    Empirically, research on this ‘Styrian metal gaze’ is in a privileged position. Since about fifteen years, the regional heavy metal scene has discussed its own history and collective memory intensely. Apparently, the scene is discussing how this history should be told and/or memorialized.

    In this respect, two projects are to be mentioned. The first ist Rockarchiv Steiemark, a virtual archive of local bands initiated in Graz already in 2007. ((See Rockarchiv Steiermark, https://www.rockarchiv.steiermark.at/?fbclid=IwAR1B_qSmW1AoctisWNGvIGYGEjBQHwwv9VziZu0fEQS7uOMD2PKyqN3YQJ8, accessed 18 July 2020.)) This project is associated with the local urban and Styrian museums. In a professional manner, it provides users with sources on the history of the Styrian rock scene since the 1950s. However, as the title indicates, metal is seen only as a sub-phenomenon of rock history.

    The second project emerged from the metal scene itself. Styrian Metal History is an online project, which has the ambition of telling the history of “35 years of rock & metal made in Styria”. ((Source of the quotation: https://www.facebook.com/pg/mm.andikrammer/about/?ref=page_internal, accessed 17 July 2020.)) The project was initiated by local artist and scene veteran Andreas Krammer. Currently, the database has about 2700 followers and offers more than six thousand scene-related photographs. (( Source of the statistics: https://www.facebook.com/mm.andikrammer/, accessed July 18 2020.)) We have to consider it the most elaborated attempt at collective memory-building in the local scene.

    Specifically this second project with its massive collection of scene photographs is of great empirical value. First, the photographs themselves as sources, then moreover how these sources have been integrated into a mushrooming online history tell a lot about this community. At this point, the main question is no more how many photographs are already collected in this online-memory. Much more, the crucial matter to address is how they photographs were selected, arranged and fashioned into a seemingly holistic narrative.

    The decisions the contributing scene members made on their way to self-narration tell a lot about the community’s identity – about their ethics, their values, their local norm-related sonic knowledge. On the one hand, those decisions pushed certain actors, constellations, materials, technologies, and values into the spotlight. On the other hand, they also pushed aside other groups, actors and competing visions of the scenic collective self. In the following, I give a first discussion of some aspects that caught my attention. I suggest that (preliminarily) we can identify at least four patterns of the representation of the local scene’s ethos. ((Editorial note: the source of all photographs cited here is Styrian Metal History: https://www.facebook.com/mm.andikrammer/, accessed 18 July 2020. Each respective copyright belongs to the copyright holders. Usually, on Styrian Metal History the copyright situation is not mentioned explicitly. If copyright holders or depicted person do not want their images to be cited here, please contact the author via mail, in case you want the picture to be removed from the post.))

    First pattern: Breaking all the rules…and laws as well?

    A first pattern which dominates the representation of the scene is portraying it as a community of cultural ‘rule-breakers’. Be it at concerts or be it for promotional shots for new releases, always the Styrian metalheads decided to strike poses, that transgressed the rules of mainstream culture. Apparently, those were intentional decisions.

    At concerts, headbanging and forming mosh-pits involved breaking usual conventions of dance and non-violent behavior. For promotional pictures, several artists chose to take poses that only worked in their community. Taken in Styria in the 1980s, the following pictures paradigmatically show how this facet of the local metal ethos was set in scene when celebrating metal:

       

    Apparently, the metal scene wanted to be seen as a community of cultural rule-breakers. This pattern is highly relevant for our research. Probably, this aspect of the ethos opened up a cultural sphere, where – as in many other European scenes in 1980s – the above mentioned European narrative of law could be absorbed.

    Second pattern: Encultivated aggression and readiness to act

    A second pattern shines through in these two photographs:

      

    In the first, we see a group of local artists posing with pitchforks in a farming enironment. In the second, we see the band posing with their instruments in a forest beneath trees, on soil covered with fallen leaves. So, the picture was taken in autumn. The interesting point is the attitude set in scene in both pictures; this attitude forms the semantic bridge between them.

    In both renderings of the Styrian metal ethos, the band always carries their ‘weapons’ with them. This intentionally created attitude of permanently being ready to act, combined with metal’s core emotion of aggression, appears throughout the representation of the scene in Krammer’s collection. Readiness to act, if it must be even readiness to act aggressively, seems to make a second pattern. It is a perfect match with the first pattern of rule-breaking.

    Third pattern: Intimitating the enemies of the scene

    Visually and psychologically, a third pattern catches one’s attention. On many of the pictures in Krammer’s database, scene members are viewed by the spectator from the worm eye’s perspective. Rather intimitating, perhaps even threatening, the Styrian metalheads look down on us from above:

         

    This pattern created an image of the local scene, which seems to intimitate the alleged ‘enemies of metal’. It is a fascinating thought that the worm’s eye perspective – with all its associations of hegemony, domination and aggression – became a cultural institution of the local scene. Once more, this has to be seen in reference to the other three patterns and needs more detailled research.

    Fourth pattern: Traditional gender roles and ethics

    Finally, a fourth pattern is the representation of gender roles of men and women in the Styrian scene, most of all in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Like in many other metal scenes, the pictures seem to once more prove metal’s patriarchic structures and conservative gender roles in these decades. Evidently, the pictures show more male than female Styrian metalheads. As a rule, both of them are shown in the traditional roles of men as the ‘guitar heroes’ or ‘authentic fans’, whereas women are shown as ‘femmes fatales’ in revealing clothes. This part of the Styrian ethos seems to be a parallel to other European metal scenes.

           

    Conclusion: A first description of the local ‘metallic association chain’ in the Styrian scene

    Together, these four patterns made the Styrian metal scene appear as a community of (1) rule-breakers, who (2) always were ready to act. (3) In this construction, the Styrian metalheads never were afraid of their ‘enemies’ and seemed to always look down on them from above. (4) That these patterns appear as rather conservative ethics of male dominance also is a facet of the Styrian metal scene.

    This ethos was constructed by the scene members when they decided how they wanted to be seen. This staged ethos created the local ‘metallic association chain’. It created an associative portfolio of attitudes, symbols and values that should appear in one’s mind when thinking of the Styrian metal community. We can start our research by asking for the practical construction of this association chain. Who decided what, where and when in the constitution of this ethos?

  • Politics, values, norms, and ethics in metal and metal studies: ‘Reflexive anti-reflexivity’ has a history!

    Our project on metal and law at the University of Graz is advancing. We are even a bit ahead of our planned schedule. In the past months, I have worked my way through existing metal research literatures, also paying close attention to older metal studies works’ take on questions of politics, ethics, norms, in short on the norm-related sonic knowledge of metal. ((Once more, here we have to mention the ‘usual suspects’ of classic metal studies works; among them, see H.M Berger, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and Phenomenology of Musical Experience, University of New England Press: Hanover and London, 1999; D. Elflein, Schwermetallanalysen, Die musikalische Sprache des Heavy Metal, Bielfeld: Transcript, 2010; R. Walser, Running wit the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music,Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014; D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture, Boulder, CO: Da Capo, 2000.))

    As explained in my recent last blog post, cultural-historically, we now have a pretty solid impression of how metal culture, most of all since the early 1980s, developed its discourse centered on law and norm-related phenomena, on a European and global level. Starting from this broad framework, the next steps are to engage critically with the key results from this first phase and develop the final empirical framework (questionnaires for interviewees, selection of interviewees) for researching the norm-related sonic knowledge in the Styrian heavy metal scene.

    This is the point where we go from the macrosphere of the European and the global to the microsphere of the local in the Austrian region of Styria with its capital city Graz. In this step, it seems crucial to me to reflect upon an aspect which frequently ‘popped up’ in existing research literatures and also when talking with potential interviewees and local scene stakeholders.

    An apparent blind spot in metal studies …

    Frequently, when re-reading existing works in metal studies, I was struck (or to be more frank: hit) by the fact that actually metal studies has rather serious issues when it comes to addressing the moralities, polictics, values, and ethics of metal culture since the 1970s. So far, it is only clear that metal has its ever-varying values, moralities, and political agendas.

    But as shown brilliantly by Rosemary Lucy Hill in her excellent key note lecture in Salzburg last year, metal studies has serious issues when it comes to developing a convincing grip on phenomena in the culture that belong to the sphere of values, norms, or moralities. We know that there are ‘problematic aspects’ and partially we understand them, but we do not really know how to explain and deal with them in metal studies in a historical longue durée perspective.

    Of course, I have no full solution to this problem in a short blog post. But I want to raise two points that seem to be relevant and so far neglected. Much more than now, we should also take these discussions (and the apparent non-ability of metal studies to deal with them) as historical phenomena, that have a past, yet today still effective history of their own.

    Still, Kahn-Harris’ concept of the ‘reflexive anti-reflexivety’ in the extreme metal scene is the most convincing analysis of how a specific subgenre of metal developed its norm-related discourse. (( K. Kahn-Harris, Extreme Music: Music and Culture on the Edge, London and New York: Berg, 2007, 157-166)) Kahn-Harris showed that extreme metal scene members consciously and reflexively decided to ignore ‘problematic aspects’ like violence, racism, homophobia, or simply hatred in their culture.

    This is true. But if we approach this issue historically, two serious challenges are not solved convingly in his analysis. Reflexive-antireflexivity is a habitus the extreme metal scene seems to have encultured. However, as a first aspect, we have to intepret this habitus as a culminating point of a history of living metal since the 1970s. Reflexive anti-reflexivety did not fall from the sky in the early 1990s. It simply never was the case that extreme metal fans were historically independent from  their contexts and 100% consciously or independently decided to adopt this concept. So far, the analysis is biased towards a rather ahistorical presentism.

    Much more than currently, we have to acknowledge that this way of approaching their own culture has deep roots in metal culture and outside metal culture; it developed at the points where the moral spheres of both touched upon each other. In short: reflexive anti-reflexivety has a history. Unambiguously, it is a history we do not know much about (to formulate it cautiously). ((I hope my  upcoming book on the European cultural history of metal can be a first step into this direction; see P. Pichler, Metal Music, Sonic Knowledge, and the Cultural Ear in Europe since 1970: A Historiographic Exploration, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner, in press, 2020.)) This habitus is a historically created way of knowing metal and we have to research how exactly metalheads learnt to know metal in this way.

    The second point, perhaps, is even more critical for metal studies in its current phase of becoming an independent field of studies. Most metal scholars are metal heads themselves. This fact for itself is no problem; I even think it is a big advantage because with fandom comes a lot empirical knowledge.

    However, with the fact that many metal studies scholars are (extreme) metalheads  reflexive anti-reflexivety found its logical way into metal academia. Hence, the concept Kahn-Harris described could wander beneath the surface into the the moral sphere of metal studies. We should look sharp at this point of moral intersections. I hope a cultural-historical take on this discussion can bring in new insights – by scrutinizing the history of metal’s norm-related discourse.

     

  • Maggie Thatcher made heavy metal (…and she saw that it was good?)

    Original source: cover picture of Iron Maiden, ‘Sanctuary’, (c) EMI 1980.

    Obviously, the title of this new blog post, which takes up the thoughts expressed in my recent post on our project of law-related phenomena in heavy metal culture, is not meant to be taken literally. But if we see it as a cultural-historical metaphor (very much like the above used graphic cover artwork of Iron Maiden’s Sanctuary single from 1980, where ‘Eddie’ kills Maggie Thatcher) it raises crucial research questions for our project. In this short blog post, I will attempt formulating some of these questions.

    Currently, our research focuses on the early 1980s, the years of the climax of the NWOBHM. These years were the ones in that several classic metal songs were released, which centered on law in their musical material, lyrics and imagery. Just to name a few: Judas Priest’s ‘Breaking the Law’ (1980); Iron Maiden’s ‘Sanctuary’ (1980), ‘Running Free’ (1980), and ‘Prodigal Son’ (1981); and Helloween’s ‘Heavy Metal (is the Law)’ (1985). All of these songs treat law as a cultural system of norms and rules, which the metal community had to face in for this community new ways. Usually law was depicted as conservative, liberty-taking, even oppressive.

    Here, the point is how the community faced it in the construction of an ‘imagined community’ in metal’s ‘golden age’. My colleague Charris Efthimiou, a musicologist, spent the past three months analyzing these classics in great detail. ((Charalampos Efthimiou, Musicological analysis of Judas Priest’s ‘Breaking the Law’ (1980); Iron Maiden’s ‘Sanctuary’ (1980), ‘Running Free’ (1980), and ‘Prodigal Son’ (1981); Helloween’s ‘Heavy Metal (is the Law)’ (1985). Not published work. Graz, 2020.)) He focused on ‘law patterns’ in the songs’ lyrics and musical material. We started with these classics, because they also were a main point of reference for the initial construction of the local heavy metal scene in Graz and Styria. Charris shows very clearly that such law patterns were at the heart of the culture in those crucial years.

    This finding raises serious questions. As a rule, in these songs, law is explicitly thematized and pointed out as a system of norms and ethics the emerging metal scene had to deal with. As far as we can say at this point, this rendering of law as a system of oppressive norms is clearly integrated in the emerging musical language of metal in the years 1980-85. The focus on law in the lyrics is matched in the chosen harmony progressions, guitar chords and song construction modes. Obviously, law – as a point of reference – was essential for metal in these formative years.

    As most of these classics by bands like Maiden and Priest were written and performed in Great Britain in the era of ‘thatcherism’, that ideology’s approaches to the legal system and society in general (under the very conservative auspices of ‘law and order’) were necessary elements of the emerging metal discourse. Law was seen and treated as a highly conservative body of outdated and dusty traditions, even as a threatening system of oppressive rules. It seemed to take metalheads’ deserved liberties.

    This narrative of law – thatcherism’s vision of law or what metal suggested it to be ((See Eric J. Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism, London: Routledge, 2013.)) – was the crucial point of reference metal needed to develop its contrasting ethics of liberty. It was the classic ‘Other’ metal needed to construct itself. The artwork of the ‘Sanctuary’ single captures this perfectly. Thatcher’s vision of law was the ‘Other’ metal needed. To continue our research, we have to answer three crucial questions: 1) How did this narrative of law circulate in Europe? 2) How did it advance to the global metal scene? 3) And finally: How was it taken in in the regional metal scene in Graz and Styria? Put ironically, Maggie Thatcher did not make metal but she supported it with her political agenda greatly.

    Edit, 10 June 2020: Engaging with my post, legal philosopher Christian Hiebaum commented that thatcherism was not only about conservative ‘law and order’ ideologies. Thatcherism also promoted individualism and individual liberty, but mainly in the economic sphere – this was key to its brand of neoliberalism. This critical remark made me dig a bit deeper into socio-historical literature on thatcherism.

    In 2010, Brian Harrison published a survey book entitled Finding a Role? The United Kingdom, 1970-1990 as a part of the ‘New Oxford History of England’ series. Strikingly, Harrison described how the law reform movement in the UK in the 1980s saw the British legal tradition as elitist and oudated:

    The parliamentary draughtsmen offered stiff resistance in the early 1970s (…) but during the 1980s pressurce built up for demystifying law in several ways. Its esoteric language – with its archaic forms, Latinisms, and and formulaic phrasing – was now being challenged (…) As for wigs and gowns, more people now felt that these ‘priestly garments’ unduly distanced the judges ‘from ordinary men and women’. ((Brian Harrison, Finding a Role? The United Kingdom, 1970-1990, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010. This volume was published as a part of the ‘New Oxford History of England’ series, ed. by J.M. Roberts.))

     

    What Harrison says here is about the image and narrative of law in the Thatcher era, especially in the early 1980s. Law had to be ‘demystified’. This is very much in line with my argumenation on thatcherism’s take on law. Still, the question how the neoliberal individualism inherent of this ideology affected the narrative of law is not really explained with this.

    I suspect that metal culture at the apex point of the NWOBHM did focus on the conservative image of Thatcher as a public person. Her neoliberalism seemed to be outplayed by this. But we have to continue our research into this. I am also thankful for any feedback on this specific aspect.