Peter Pichler – Stahl

Tag: Scene Research

  • 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.

  • 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.