Peter Pichler – Stahl

Tag: Metal Studies

  • Why we need metal (studies) to survive our present

    We live in uncertain times. Not a day goes by without us being inundated with bad news via news tickers and other digital channels. Ever since Steve Bannon’s dubious success, it has become clear that, in today’s digitally driven and AI-fuelled landscape of polarisation, ‘flood the zone with shit’ can be a recipe for success. Even liberal and high-quality media outlets are now under constant pressure to be visible and to be the loudest and most strident voice.

    From the war in Ukraine and climate change to the decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, we live in a time when bad news is the norm. It’s only common sense that this oppressive atmosphere leaves us feeling affected. The constant feeling of latent danger and the vague sense that the world is hurtling towards disaster can thoroughly ruin our day. Needless to say, this doesn’t exactly put metalheads in a good mood. The world seems to have turned into a death metal song. Every day, it feels as though you could watch Putin, Trump and others pushing the world into the abyss at blast-beat speed. The next generation of extreme metal musicians will regard our era as the finest source of lyrical inspiration.

    Metal as healthy brainwashing

    How can you keep your brain healthy during times like these? I believe that subcultures such as metal, with their scenes and communities, can help us to cope. While metal may not fully prepare us for survival in a Thiel and Musk-esque apocalypse, it can offer some assistance. It provides a shared practice and soundscape for engaging playfully yet reflectively with the less pleasant aspects of this world. This is particularly pertinent when one consciously and reflexively engages with metal as a means of processing the crisis-ridden present and thinking critically about the world. This is precisely what good research in the field of metal studies achieves.

    But what exactly do I mean by that? Metal emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of crisis and cultural reorientation, often referred to today as ‘1968’ and its aftermath. When I say that metal has developed into an impressive global music scene over more than five decades, I am not drawing up a comprehensive family tree of metal history. Nor is it an evergreen family tree, but a black one. Put simply, metal can be interpreted as an attempt to drown out times of crisis and fundamental change with loud riffs. Since ‘1968’, fans of hard rock music have been climbing on top of metre-high Marshall amplifiers to rise above the problems of their time.

    From Reaganomics to ‘Ride the Lightning’

    Back in the 1980s, the sound of thrash metal captured the sense of a world on the brink of change, as the Cold War was drawing to a close. ‘Ride the Lightning’ and ‘Reign in Blood’ were ultimately louder than Reaganomics. After all, Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady, and thus somewhat akin to metal, at least semantically. The extreme metal styles that became popular around the epochal year of 1989, particularly black and death metal, can be seen as reflecting the abrupt end of the era from 1914 to 1991. It is no coincidence that historian Eric Hobsbawm described this period as the ‘age of extremes’. A very rough historical rule of thumb might be that the history of metal reflects the history of the world (and vice versa).

    Why we need metal (studies) to survive our present

    I had the great pleasure of working with the following wonderful colleagues in metal studies: Anna-Katharina Höpflinger, Jörg Scheller, Laina Dawes, and Camille F. Béra. Together, we published the anthology ‘Meta/Metal: Open Questions in Metal Studies’, which was released as open access last week and can be read for free here.

    Drawing on metal and subculture, the excellent contributions in this volume address major issues of our time, such as the search for peace, better coexistence between people of different identities and backgrounds, despair over climate change and the general gloominess of the world, as reflected in black metal music. I believe that we need metal studies like this. They help us survive our present. They enable critical reflection on what is going wrong in the world.

  • Writing about writing about heavy metal, part four: how do you explain (Styrian) heavy metal?

    Since my last blog post on the “Mexican experience” of writing about metal, quite some time has passed. Also in writing my book about the history of the Styrian heavy metal scene. At the moment, the focus of the writing is on the phase of the 1990s with its pluralisation tendencies and the 2000s with the beginning digitalisation of the scene.

    What is formative for this phase and therefore now also characterises the reflection on writing are both continuities and processes of change in the Styrian metalness identity in those years compared to the 1980s as the founding period. The scene consolidated and pluralised in the 1990s, finally becoming digital around 2000.

    In writing, this touches on a theoretical core question of metal studies, namely how heavy metal (in Styria) can be theoretically explained. For these decades, the history of the Styrian metal scene is about determining the interplay of law, morality and sound for the construction of the local metalness identity. There is the “pure” historiographical, the “pure” musicological and the “pure” legal view – or the possibility, which seems wiser to me, of thinking all three integrally and together.

    It therefore seems most appropriate to me at this stage of writing to see the history of metal in Styria since 1990 as a “hybrid” of musical, moral and legal aspects. All together make up the specific “soundness” of this scene. Metal can therefore perhaps be explained as the “trinity” of law, morality and sound – at least in this specific scene at this specific time.