Peter Pichler – Stahl

Tag: History

  • 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.

  • Oral history as a method in research on local metal scenes

    This week, I started working in the research project ‘Norm-Related Sonic Knowledge in Heavy Metal Culture: A Case Study of the Heavy Metal Scene in Graz and Styria‘ at the University of Graz. I have thematized it in a post some months ago. In this project, we want to find out how law-related phenomena (for instance, the topos of ‘Breaking the Law’ as a cultural narrative in metal since the early 1980s; the local scene ethics as ‘scene-laws’; the thematization of law and justice in local metal music; attitudes to law in the scene) affected the distinct cultural history of the local heavy metal scene in Styria, a ‘Bundesland‘ in the Southeast of Austria.

    Asking for the ‘longue durée’ dimension of a scene history

    In our research, oral history is one of the methods, that will be applied in the second, empirical phase of field work in 2021. With scene-members and stakeholders but also with professionals from the legal field (for instance lawyers and other professionals in the judicial system) from outside the scene, we will conduct interviews on their narratives of law (in metal). Already at this early stage, at the point of re-reading the crucial literatures in the field, it is necessary to reflect upon the question how exactly oral history can be applied fruifully in our research. ((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.))

    For us, one of the critical aspects of present scene research is the sometimes rather ahistorical conceptualization of the histories of  local metal communities. From the point of view of trained historians, current scene theories tend to rather oddly isolate scenes from the broader historical flux of culture and their surrounding contexts. ((See. E. Baulch, Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; A Bennett, and R. A. Peterson (eds.), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004; K. Kahn-Harris, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge, New York: Berg, 2007;  J. Wallach and A. Levine,‘“I Want You to Support Local Metal!”: A Theory of Metal Scene Transformation’, in Popular Music History 6, 1/2, 2011, 116-34.)) In a nutshell, metal music studies needs ‘more history’. In this respect, we see our expertise as a chance to better grasp the longue durée dimension characteristic of history.

    For this purpose, oral history – a methodological and theoretical discourse developed mostly in English-speaking academia since the 20th century – makes a ‘weapon of choice’. Qualitative interviewing is broadly used in many branches of cultural research nowadays. What we aim at is unwrapping the long-lasting narratives of scene ethics and ‘scene-laws’ in the Styrian metal community, as they seem to have continuties since the early 1980s. Today, they are deeply routed in this community.

    Does metal have a long-lasting history in Styria?

    Thus, the pivotal matter in applying oral history in this case is not only about the selection of interviewees; above all, it matters to develop a set of questions that makes scene-members and stakeholders remember their versions of these narratives since the early 1980s. Summarized in a short formula we have to ask our interviews right at the start: “Does metal have a long-lasting history in Styria?” This is the opening question for our oral history inquiries.

  • ‘Fandom’ and ‘scholarship’: Comparing two cultural-historical institutions

    I ended my last post on the paradox at the heart of metal studies with the suggestion that cultural history, as one individual discipline in the transdisciplinary field of metal studies, could become an exciting enrichment. It gives us the promise of a structurally exploration of the the intertwined histories of fandom, scholarship and ‘fan scholarship’ in the field. In this (admittedly rather short) blog post, I take up this thought and attempt a first comparative analysis of ‘fandom’ and ‘scholarship’ as historically constructed cultural institutions. Once more, I take and stress the point of view of a historian.

    There seems to be a consensus in metal research that the nexus between metal fandom and metal scholarship is a crucial one. In Salzburg, Keith Kahn-Harris and Rosemary Lucy Hill encouraged us to proactively embrace the arising tension between both by self-reflexively asking diffictult questions on racism, sexism, bigotry, misogyny, nazism and other critical phenomena in the scenes. In this, history with its focus on developments over periods of decades (for metal studies this means to study the whole period since the inception of metal culture around 1970) can provide a helpfully orientating narrative. ((Peter Pichler, Metal Music and Sonic Knowledge in Europe: A Cultural History Since 1970, Bingley: Emerald, forthcoming.))

    Seen historically, both fandom and scholarship are not essentialist roles or identities but social formations, that both have long histories. The habitus, rituals and practices of that structure them can be traced back deep in history. If we view them as such complexes of historically constituted roles, the hybrid zone formed by them together in metal studies receives sharper contours. I start with fandom.

    Fandom

    Usually, metalheads are stereotyped as male, long-haired (semi-)adults wearing band t-shirts and battle vests. ((Once more, refer to Weinstein’s classic work: Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture, Boulder, CO: Da Capo Press, 2000; also, see Bettina Roccor, Heavy Metal. Die Bands, die Fans, die Gegner, Munich: Beck: 1998.)) Practices such as the formation of moshpits or showing the ‘metal horns’ at concerts complete the stereotypical imagery. They are expressions of scene members’ feelings of belonging to their communities, performed in public and addressing audiences within the scence as well as outside the scene.

    If we take the point of view of cultural history things appear in another light. Popular culture – and fandom as a crucial functional position of people in it – have a history that in some of its forms can be traced back to early modern periods; at least to the 19th century, when mass media established new forms of public spheres for mass audiences. The masses became literate. ((For introductory texts, see LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2009;  John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, Harlow: Person, 2009; Kaspar Maase, Populärkulturforschung: Eine Einführung, Bielefeld, 2019.)) Thus, fandom is a cultural construction that, today, takes varying forms in different pop cultures (e.g. literature, music, film, gaming, sports etc.) but all of them stem from one root of comparable processes over decades, sometimes even centuries (as in the case of soccer culture or the passion for classical music).

    Taking this view very much relativizes the allegedly absolute newness of metal fan culture since the 1970s. Yes, the practices installed over almost five decades in the global metal scene produced some innovative patterns; however, only being constructed after 1970, the new rituals, practices and scene rules built there heavily relied on what has been learnt, experienced and practiced in other fan cultures before Black Sabbath took the stage. So, metal fandom is a cultural institution that can best be studied in comparison to other forms of fandom in history. And even more crucial, it has to be compared to other cultural institutions.

    Scholarship

    Let us come to scholarship. At first glance, scholarship seems to be something completely different. Scholars usually are seen as rational, well-educated and distinguished personalities. Once more, the stereotype is a male one. Scholars wear glasses, speak of almost non-understandable things and live in the ivory towers of their universities. Yet, also scholarship – and the modern intellectual as a role in it – are historically constructed phenomena. The role of both cannot be separated from the history of the university in Europe and the world since the Middle Ages. ((For introductory texts, see Hilde de Ridder-Symoens et al., eds., A History of the University in Europe, 3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992-2004; Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010; Dietz Bering, Die Epoche der Intellektuellen 1898–2001. Geburt – Begriff – Grabmal, Berlin: Berlin University Press.)) Since the Middle Ages, philosophers, scientists, theologians and intellectuals – scholars in a most broad sense – tell us how to make sense of the world.

    As said before, this role appears to be very different from fandom. Nonetheless its realities work – basically and structurally – in ways comparable to any other spheres of community-building. Academia knows rituals, do’s and dont’s, forms of identity-building and othering. ((See Anthony Becher and Paul R. Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories, 2nd edn., Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001.)) The essential question here is what sets this cultural institution, grown out of the tree of a history of almost thousand years, apart from other cultural institutions such as fandom.

    Seen from this angle, what separates them and what makes them comparable at once belongs to the same sphere: their historical backgrounds. How, on the one hand, scholars use the centuries-old narratives of scientific wisdom in their lives and how, on the other hand, metal fans use their  decades-old narratives of metalness can be compared, but only historically so. Both have come together in the history of the field of metal studies.

    Metal studies as a transgressive laboratory of cultural institutions

    What can we learn from this? If we take the point of view of history, metal music studies is they structural point where both histories come together. Seen this way, metal studies is nothing else than a cultural discourse, in which the insitutions of metal fandom and scholarship – with all their heritage – build a ‘match’. Thus, we should see the field as a transgressive laboratory, in which we work on these cultural institutions in the long term and, arguably, shape the new ‘sub-institution’ of the ‘metal scholar’. It is not about playing off one against each other but much more about thinking this new institution in visionary yet critical ways.

  • On the history of the ‘metal ear’ and methodological ‘distant listening’

    Currently, I am in a phase of revising some older texts on metal cultural history. During these revisions I realized that over the last five years since I started this blog, my approach to heavy metal records, as sonic sources of history, has changed quite a bit. In 2014, when I set out to write first pieces on albums like Behemoth’s The Satanist or Temple of Oblivion’s Traum und Trauma, I listened to those records like I did in the 20 years before – as a metalhead who happens to also be a historian.

    When reading an older piece on Panopticon’s Revisions of the Past, I acknowledged that my identity as a metal listener developed into a new direction. There are times when I listen to Panopticon (or Behemoth or Temple of Oblivion) as a metalhead but there are also times when I listen to them intentionally as a metal scholar. Over the past few years, I developed a second, more ‘methodical’ mode of listening to records, as sonic historical sources. Herein, I do receive the music as ‘data’ and ‘process’ it in my texts.

    I do not mention this career of my personal ‘metal ear’ ((I would like to thank all the participants at the ‘History’ panel at the ISMMS conference in Nantes on 19th June 2019 for sharing their thoughts on this matter.)) in order to celebrate it. I do so because, arguably, there is a significant methodological aspect hidden within such kind of self-reflection. Sound history, as a recent discourse of the new cultural history ((Burke, P. (2004). What is cultural history? Cambridge: Polity Press; Langenbruch, A. (2018). Klang als Geschichtsmedium. Perspektiven für eine auditive Geschichtsschreibung. Bielefeld: Transcript; Schrage, D. (2011). Erleben, Verstehen, Vergleichen. Eine soziologische Perspektive auf die auditive Wahrnehmung im 20. Jahrhundert. Studies in Contemporary History 8(2), 269-276.)) showed instructively that our ways of listening have changed significantly over the course of history. For instance, the sound of the motorization of modern cities in the early 20th century with car engines and car traffic changed how the inhabitants of the cities experienced urban worlds.

    Analogically, in metal sound history, the structural situation of the metal ear in 2019 is very different from that of the early 1970s, i.e. when metal was ‘invented’. In 1970, fans listened to Black Sabbath’s debut on vinyl albums, at live concerts or on the radio. Today, we can listen to the debut and to their last LP 13 (and all of other recordings in their back catalogue) on one of the digital, globally available music platforms that are available via our smartphones. If we grow tired of Sabbath, it takes just a moment to jump to Rihanna, to Miley Cyrus or even to spoken content like comedy or audiobooks. Thus, our medial and structural situation of listening to metal and hearing metal today involves overwhelmingly more cross-genre and cross-media jumps, and hence there is also much more fluidness and transgression. Arguably, this affects the cultural metal ear.

    On balance, this leads me to suggest to not only think of historical agents as ‘learning listeners’ or ‘conditioned listeners’ but also of ourselves as researchers in metal studies as potentially self-reflexive listeners. On myself, I can observe a kind of ‘distant listening’ when intentionally listening to metal records as a scholar. Having a certain potential of methodological meta-reflexivitiy, this kind of ‘distant listening’ could become an aspect of historical theorizing in metal. Strategically treating metal records as sonic historical sources, one could think of a sort of ‘training program’, in which this kind of listening would be consciously nurtured. This also implicates to claim a deeper interdisciplinary exchange between cultural and musicological research in metal studies.

  • On interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cooperations in metal music studies

    Currently, I am putting final touches on the manuscript of my book on European metal cultural history. ((P. Pichler, Metal Music and Sonic Knowledge in Europe: A Cultural History, Bingley: Emerald, Forthcoming.)) In this stage of revision, I have been thinking a lot about the forms interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cooperations take in metal studies. In the following, I elaborate upon my view of these in our field crucial processes and invite my peers to discussion.

    In each of the currently existing introductory books to our field (and also in more specialized studies), the character of metal research is described as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. It is a discourse, in that since its inception around 1990 scholars from musicology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, the study of religion etc. cooperate and discuss a shared subject: metal.

    However, often we approach the shared subject from very different angles and speak different disciplinary languages. For each of us, the epistemic and theoretical vocabularies we use are informed by our various disciplinary trainings. In my case, I live in the world of an Austrian historian, educated in this small country in central Europe. Thus metal studies, beneath the surface, is not only an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary enterprise but also an ‘inter-identitary’ and ‘trans-identitary’ one, transgressing the boundaries between our sociological, musicological, historiographical, philosophical etc. identities.

    This has serious consequences. In metal studies, at conferences, in book projects, in collaborations and cooperations, we regularly face situations of conflict, of nonunderstanding and of misunderstanding caused by our various disciplinary traditions. From my point of view, there can be only one solution to this crucial issue: more theoretical self-reflection and and a clearly and explicitly defined theoretical language.

    In the sense of Savigny and Schaap’s recent essay on ‘putting the studies back into metal music studies’, ((H. Savigny and J. Schaap, ‘Putting the ‘studies’ back into metal music studies’, Metal Music Studies 4, 3 pp. 549-557)) we should lead an open discussion on key terms like ‘metal’ itself, but also on ‘scene’, ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘sound,’ ‘history’, ‘identity’, ‘culture’…obviously, the list ist opend-ended. The point here is to put more emphasis on explicit work on terminologies – in order to perhaps give birth to an independent language of metal studies.

  • Metal (music) studies: What’s in a name?

    The field we are working in is commonly referred to as metal studies or metal music studies. I prefer the second because it makes clear it is research on a music culture, and in this way avoids already possible questions on the subject of research. Recently, Heather Savigny and Julian Schaap reminded us of  ‘putting the “studies” back into metal music studies’. ((See H. Savigny and J. Schaap (2018), ‘Putting the  “studies” back into metal music studies’, Metal Music Studies, 4:3, pp. 549–557, doi: 10.1386/mms.4.3.549_1.)) In their critique, they demand more methodological rigour and more reflexivety in questions of epistemology. In this short post, I want to take up this point and throw in some questions from the point of view of a trained cultural historian.

    My preferred name of our discourse is metal music studies. It contains three words. ‘Metal’, which is rather obvious (not mentioning the broad debates on the definition of metal) and names the subject of research. ‘Music’, the second element, is significant due to the fact that it tells non-insiders that we examine a popular music culture, i.e. heavy metal music. ‘Studies’, the third and the one which Savigny and Schaap problematized rightly, is the crucial one. It points out that this is an independent academic field.

    From the point of view of a trained historian, the current state of the art is still characterized by a lack of historical awareness and of historic depth. There are books and conferences, which have the word ‘history’ in their titles. ((See, L. Meller (2018), Iron Maiden: A journey through history, Curitiba: Appris; also, see the call for paper for the conference ‘Somewhere in Time: A Conference on Metal and History’, Victoria, BC, 23 to 25 August 2019, at: https://www.facebook.com/download/1138331633226652/Somewhere%20in%20Time%20CFP%20.pdf?hash=AcpU2f1kwval0Th3. Accessed 8 March 2019.)) However, so far the history and cultural history of metal have been written by scholars ouside history as a discipline. On the one hand, this is good think because it sets history on the agenda of our discourse.

    On the other hand, however, ‘putting the “studies” back into metal music studies’ consequently would also mean to take much more seriously the expertise of trained historians. Their expertise and knowledge of reading and examining sources, of historiography as a form narratology, and finally their knowledege of the broad contexts of the global history of the second half of the 20th century is key to writing a history of metal with more rigour. My upcoming book will not fix this issue but I address these questions. ((P. Pichler (2019), Metal music and sonic knowledge in Europe: A cultural history, Bingley: Emerald Publishers, forthcoming.))

  • 1914, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’: How to represent history in (extreme) metal?

    Recently, the Ukranian black and doom metal group 1914 issued their new long-player The Blind Leading the Blind. According to Encyclopaedia Metallum, the band was formed in 2014. ((https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/1914/3540396156, accessed 7 December 2018.)) Including the mentioned recent one, the band has released two albums. What makes the group distinct and interesting for a historian, is their concept. Already shown in their band name, the whole of their creative output is only devoted to themes of warfare in the Great War between 1914 and 1918.

    This concept, for a historian working in metal studies, throws up interesting theoretical and methodological questions. First, on the narratological and discursive level, their conceptual scope is immensely focused, even narrow. Only and strictly re-working narratives of the years between 1914 and 1918 forces them to develop a narrative in metal music, in all of its dimensions (visuals, sound, live performances, medial self-representation), which comprehensibly represents WW I trench warfare. Their answer seems to be to attempt creating an ‘authentic’ atmosphere of a trench in their music and concerts:

    The live video seems to underpin my impression. Yet, as always in art, that remains a construction. However, empirically and methodologically, for the case of 1914, it implies that history is represented in a mode of constructed authenticity, with all paradoxes such a concept brings with it. ((H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.))

    Second, on a more global level, a historian has to ask how ‘accurate’ and ‘reliable’, in a scientific sense, ((M.C. Howell, M. C. and W. Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.)) the representation of history can be or become in metal music. As examined in my upcoming book, ((P. Pichler, Metal Music and Sonic Knowledge in Europe: A Cultural History, Bingley: Emerald, 2019, forthcoming.)) even extreme metal, in an age where we do have the scientific discourse of metal studies and closer links between metal culture and the mainstream, is forced to modify its modes of the representation of history. They have changed towards more rational and ‘scientifically’ operating modes of telling history.

    Also in the case of 1914, this seems to be true. Their approach requires a methodology of representing history that is very clear, focused, delineated from other narratives, and thus rational. The only and strictly work on four years of twentieth century history. They ask how it was to live everyday life in trench warfare in those years, attempt to exploit all resources of extreme metal’s discourse in telling that history. In a nutshell, their approach works like the one of historical anthropologists in scientific history whose gaze at history is as clear, focused and microscopical. ((G. Dressel, Historische Anthropologie: eine Einführung, Frankfurt am Main e.a: De Gruyter, 1996.))

    On balance, we can conclude that things keep beeing exciting in metal studies, in terms of asking for history in metal. The culture of metal moves towards more ‘scientified’ histories of history. As a history of metal by trained historians still remains a desideratum, I want to work on such topics.

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

    Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was one of the pioneers of modern and postmodern cultural history. His narratives, overflowing with colourful, metaphoric and anthropologic plots of history, still inspire today’s scientific historiography. ((For a short portrait of Huizinga see C. Strupp, ‘Johan Huzinga’, in: L. Raphael (ed.), Klassiker der Geschichtswissenschaft, 1, Munich: Beck, 2006, 190-211.; also see W. Otterspeer, Reading Huizinga, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010.)) Originally being a scholar of Indo-European languages and linguistics, he turned to history around 1900. He became a professor of General and Dutch history at Groningen University in 1905, and finally of General history at Leiden University in 1915 (until 1942).

    There in Leiden, he was resistant to antisemitism during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Huizinga’s most famous work is ‘The Waning of The Middle Ages’, first published in Dutch in 1919. ((For the English version, first published in 1924 see J. Huizinga, The waning of the Middle Ages: a study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, London: Folio Society, 1999.)) In this classic book, he described the 14th and 15th centuries as an age of decline, metaphorically expressed in the picture of the season of fall; for Huizinga, they were the ‘autumn of the middle ages’. ((Ibid.)) Other famous and influential works are ‘Erasmus and the Age of Reformation’ (1924), ‘Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century’ (1941), and ‘Homo ludens: a Study of the Play-element in Culture’. ((Idem, Erasmus and the age of Reformation: with a selection from the letters of Erasmus, New York, NY: Scribner, 1924;  idem, Dutch civilisation in the seventeenth century, and other essays, London: Collins, 1968; idem, Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, London e.a.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949.))

    Methodologically, all of those books were highly innovative. They focussed on art, theatrics and discourse – long before the dawn of the New Cultural History at the end of the 1980s. ((L. Hunt and A. Biersack (eds.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989.)) One could go as far as describing Huizinga’s cultural history as ‘proto-constructivist’ or ‘crypto-constructivist’, at least in his deep understanding of the metaphorical and aesthetic constitution of culture.

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

    Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means. ((Ibid., 13.))

    This definition of the plays Homo ludens is playing in constructing culture is (proto-)constructivist and relevant until today in several ways: it stresses the own space and time of plays which basically says that plays have their own discourses; it emphasizes that plays in culture follow fixed rules which is a core feature of discourses, according to Foucauldian theorizing, too. ((A. Landwehr, Historische Diskursanalyse, Frankfurt: Campus, 2009.))

    Finally, the closing remark on the formation of social collectives is nothing less than the thesis that plays have a fundamental role in cultural identity construction; by defining the differences between the collective ‘self’ and the ‘other’, in processes of ‘othering’. ((For a recent example see M. Wintle, ‘Islam as Europe’s Other throughout History: some discontinuities‘, History , 101, 344 (2016), 42-61.))

    These are the kinds of plays which Homo ludens played and plays in the course of cultural history. Already Huizinga observed on several occasions in his book that music and its reproduction is play, too. ((Huizinga, Homo ludens, 42, 158-162, 187-8.)) Applying Huizinga’s key theorem of play on Metal culture, I want to ask whether in Metal Music Studies Homo ludens is to be defined as Homo ludens metallicus. In the following, I want to show that Huizinga’s perspective opens up the theoretical space of cultural history in Metal Music Studies.

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

    As current discourse shows, there still is a lack of a self-reflexive theorizing of Metal and Metal Music Studies, as an emerging discipline, giving or at least aiming at giving answers to the question what Metal and Metal Studies are. ((See for introductory books and texts F. Hösch and A.-K. Höpflinger (eds.), Methoden der Heavy Metal Forschung, Münster: Waxmann, 2014; Jeremy Wallach e.a. (eds.) Metal Rules the Globe. Heavy Metal Music Around the World, Durham, NC: Duke Universtiy Press, 2011; A. R. Brown e.a. (eds.), Global Metal Music and Culture. Current Directions in Metal Studies, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016;  B. Gardernour Walter e.a. (eds.), Heavy Metal Studies and Popular Culture, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; also this special issue on ‘Metal Studies? Cultural Research in the Heavy Metal Scene’: Journal for Cultural Research 15, 3 (2011).)) This is where my current and future research comes in. It wants to help introducing the historian’s gaze to this flourishing discourse.

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

    ‘Sonic knowledge’ means that I tread Metal music and all its surrounding networks as a form of (sub-)cultural knowledge which emerges predominantly from acoustic communication: music. This takes up the perspective of the recent discourse of ‘sound history’ which asks for the role of acoustic phenomena in history. ((See for an introduction to the field, especially in German discourse D. Schrage, ‘Erleben, Verstehen, Vergleichen. Eine soziologische Perspektive auf die auditive Wahrnehmung im 20. Jahrhundert’, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, 2, 8 (2011), online, URL: http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/2-2011/id=4691. Accessed 26.02.2018; also see G, Paul and R. Schock (eds.) Sound der Zeit. Geräusche, Töne, Stimmen – 1889 bis heute, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013.)) From my point of view, the rather neutral term of knowledge already describes the formation of a specific discourse of Heavy Metal (from c. 1970 until the mid-1980s) as something new; but also as something new which only was innovative in its ways of connecting the fresh aesthetics of the ‘heavy riff’ ((For an in-depth analysis see J.-P. Herbst, ‘Historical development, sound aesthetics and production techniques of the distorted electric guitar in metal music’, in Metal Music Studies, 3, 1 (2017), 23-46; idem, ‘Heaviness and the electric guitar: Considering the interaction between distortion and harmonic structures’, in Metal Music Studies, 4, 1 (2018), 95-113; also see D. Elflein, Schwermetallanalysen. Die musikalische Sprache des Heavy Metal, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010.)) with rather old historic elements of culture.

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

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

    Introducing the historian’s gaze

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

    What is particular of this view on Metal? When thinking of current research on Metal, in all introductory texts, the history of Metal and Metal Studies is of utmost importance. For instance, Andy R. Brown (a scholar in Media and Cultural Studies) wrote a genealogy of Metal Studies; ((A. R. Brown, ‘Heavy Genealogy: Mapping the Currents, Contraflows and Conflicts of the Emergent Field of Metal Studies, 1978-2010, in Journal for Cultural Research 15, 3 (2011), 213-242.)) Deena Weinstein (a sociologist) wrote a social and cultural history of Rock and Metal in America; ((D. Weinstein, Rock’n America. A Social and Cultural History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.)) Brian Hickam (being a librarian) described the emergence of Metal Studies as ‘amalgamated anectodes’; ((B. Hickam, ‘Amalgamated anecdotes: Perspectives on the history of metal music and culture studies ‘, in Metal Music Studies 1, 1 (2014), 5-23.)) Nicola Masciandaro (a scholar in English studies) authored a ‘personal archeology of headbanging exegesis’; ((N. Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies and the Scission of the Word: A Personal Archaeology of Headbanging Exegesis’, in Journal for Cultural Research 15, 3 (2011), 227-250.)) a group of social psychologists led by Nelson Varas-Díaz gave a social-psychological reading of the history of the Puerto Rican scene. ((N. Varas-Díaz e.a., ‘Metal at the fringe: a historical perspective on Puerto Rico’s underground Metal scene, in Gardenour Walter e.a, Heavy Metal Studies, 99-129.))

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

    ‘Sonic knowledge’ as a cultural-historical notion

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

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

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

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

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

    We should historically research how the representation of and fascination with violence and war, especially with World War II and Nazi Atrocities, in Thrash and Extreme Metal music since the mid-1980, retells the history of the 20th century. Already the influential British historian Eric Hobsbawm called it ‘The Age of Extremes’. ((Eric Hobsbawm, The Age Of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, London: Michael Joseph, 1994.)) It do not think that the genre name of ‘Extreme Metal’, surfacing in the 1980s and 1990s, came out of the blue – rather this was part of the final phase of the ‘Age Of Extremes’.

    Furthermore, historians should explore how the image of the ‘guitar wizard’ or even ‘guitar hero’, which is prominent in Metal culture, continues writing the history of the musical virtuoso of classical music in the 19th century, with figures such as ‘violin wizard’ Niccolò Paganini, or ‘piano heroes’ like Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt. This is, as known, a thought already to be read in Robert Walser’s seminal book on Metal from 1993, but – again – this book was written a musicologist. ((R. Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Hanover, NH: New England University Press, 1993, 57-107.)) The historian’s gaze would look for a deepeer historical contextualization in the overall history of the ‘Long 19th Century’ (1789-1914). ((E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe: 1789–1848, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962; idem, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975; idem, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.))

    Also, we ought to take a historic look at gender roles in Metal music. There is a lot of ongoing research on gender in Metal Studies. ((For example, see F. Heesch and N. Scott (eds.), Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality: Interdisciplinary Approaches, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.)) However, it also should be deeply connected to concepts like historian Wolfgang Schmale’s theory of ‘collective performative speech acts’, as developed in his recent book ‘Gender and Eurocentrism: a Conceptual Approach to European History’. ((W. Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism: a Conceptual Approach to European History, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016.))

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

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

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

    In a nutshell, taking up the perspective stemming from Huizinga’s Homo ludens, we should use the historian’s gaze in the concept of sonic knowledge to ask whether Metal is a game historically played by a Homo ludens metallicus – a probably new figure in Metal Studies, playing all his way through history, creating new heaviness by combining it with quite old narratives of human history. This is what I want to do in my upcoming monograph on Metal history and also in a proposal for a four-years research project on the history of Metal in Graz, Styria and Austria, in a European and global context. ((P. Pichler,  Metal Music and Sonic Knowledge in Europe, 1970 to the Present: a Cultural History,  Emerald Publishers, forthcoming, 2019; the working title of this project is: ‘Sonic Knowledge in Heavy Metal Music. A Basic Research Project on the Cultural History of a Global Subculture in Styria, Austria and Europe, from the 1980s to the Present.’))