Peter Pichler – Stahl

Tag: writing

  • Writing about writing about heavy metal, part three: the Mexican experience

    Over a month ago now, I had the great pleasure of attending the fifth conference of the “International Society for Metal Music Studies” in Mexico City. This central event of Metal Studies usually takes place every two years, but in this case was held this year instead of last year due to the Corona pandemic. In this blogpost, I want to reflect on how this event – possibly – changed my own writing about metal, especially about the history of the Styrian metal scene, which I have been researching intensively for two and a half years now.

    The conference in Mexico City, which was attended by about seventy of the leading researchers in Metal Studies, was dedicated to the topic of “Heavy Metal in the Global South: Multiregional Perspectives”. I gave a presentation on my research project on the Styrian metal scene. My central thesis was that the theoretical worlds of “Global South Studies” could potentially help to better explain cultural transfers between metal scenes across the “Iron Curtain” before 1989/90. My talk can be seen online here.

    With the temporal distance of about a month that exists today for me to this conference, it becomes more and more clear to me that in a certain sense it has had an influence on my thinking and writing about metal. One could speak of a “Mexican experience” that has had an impact – possibly not only on me – on personal and individual Metal Studies discourse. How can this be and what kind of change is it? What is this “Mexican experience” supposed to be?

    Basically, there are two points to be made in the reflection. The first is a sociological one of scholarship, the second a thematic one in the choice of the research object. On the first level of this conference as a collective academic experience of the participating researchers, it is hardly surprising that such a major event has an influence on the personal metal paradigm. At this conference, the latest findings in the field were presented and discussed, renegotiating the way scholarship writes and talks about metal. It is compellingly logical at this level  that paradigmatic shifts manifested here individually and collectively.

    The second point is then particularly interesting – and I think also particularly transformatively effective. In Mexico City, the “southern” perspective on metal and Metal Studies was in the foreground. For me, as a scholar from the “global north,” the themes and the values and notions of norms that were linked to the study of metal at this event made a crucial thematic aspect much clearer. It is always dangerous to speak of historical tendencies, as they invite stereotyping and essentialization of complex historical processes.

    If one nevertheless attempts such a historiographical trend survey, it can be summed up as follows: in the “global north” metal has already become much more commodified, an expression of northern affluence saturation. Here, metal is only “dangerous” or profoundly socially transformative in exceptional cases. In the “south,” on the other hand – and this was the “Mexican experience” that for me still burned itself in much more strongly than before – metal and Metal Studies are still inextricably linked to the struggle for social equality, decolonization, and protest against injustice. Here metal is even more socially transformative.

    For my own writing about metal, this Mexican experience is extremely enriching and important. For the remaining stages of my book on the Styrian metal scene since 1980, which I am currently working on, it follows that I should look in particular at those historical times and spaces where metal had a liberalizing and socially transformative effect in this sense. For example, in the confrontation with still existing catholic-conservative traditions in Graz in the early 1980s, when the scene was founded, or in the fight against right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi tendencies in the 1990s. The Mexican experience is a call to write about metal again more strongly also as scientific-cultural empowerment, enlightenment in the most original sense.

  • Writing about writing about heavy metal, part two: theories and methods

    In the weeks since my last blog post, the central work in my project on the history of the Styrian metal scene has continued to be writing down the book resulting from the project research. During this period, a first draft of the chapter on the “foundations” of the narrative that will be unfolded in this book has been written down.

    These “foundations” concern the theories and methods used to construct the narrative, as well as the type of data from historical sources that were evaluated. Writing on this has been both instructive and challenging. In this blog post, I want to share some reflections on writing about theories and methods in metal studies.

    Theories and methods

    As is customary in scholarly books, my narrative opens with an overview of the state of research as well as the theories and methods incorporated into the presentation. In metal studies, there is (still) no consensus on how to write a history of a scene. There are very different scene, genre, and music concepts, as well as a wide range of methods that researchers can use.

    For writers in the field, this is both a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, it allows for innovative and original work. On the other hand, as a writer you are automatically caught between all the theoretical and methodological fronts. Plus, as far as genuinely historiographical work in the field is concerned, there are only a few points of reference.

    Relying on the familiar…

    Reflecting on the writing phase to date on these theoretical and methodological foundations, two aspects seem crucial to me. First, it seems to have proved successful for me, as far as the selection of theories and methods is concerned, to rely on historiographic approaches that are established and have been successfully applied many times. As specifically historiographical methods, oral history and cultural-historical discourse analysis also proved to be profitable perspectives for researching the Styrian scene since 1980.

    …and going new ways

    Secondly, however, there was then the necessity – I am dealing with metal, a musical culture – to also include the musical language itself. This meant including in the writing, in addition to theories and methods that were familiar to me, musicological approaches that were new to me. The experienced musicologist Charalampos Efthymiou had undertaken the analyses of relevant pieces of music for my project.

    For this stage of writing, it turned out to be fundamental to consciously take a “naive” perspective on the subject again. In particular, the theoretical and methodological approaches, which were unfamiliar to me, brought new and exciting insights. The new ways paid off!

    To summarize the writing experiences of the past few weeks on the topics of theories and methods: a balanced mix of conservative-familiar and innovative-bold personal writing paths seems promising to me in metal studies.

  • Writing about writing about heavy metal

    The past year in my project on the history of the law myth in the Styrian metal scene was dedicated to empirical research. Discourse-analytical, oral-history and musicological data on the history of this scene was collected.This phase is now over and the third and last year of the project, which just started, is dedicated to writing up the results in a book.

    I have just started writing this book. This also changes the function of the posts in my blog. Whereas previously they had the function of documenting the project, its genesis, and then the empirical research, now they are about reflexively accompanying the writing process. It is about writing about writing; more precisely, it is about writing about writing about heavy metal.

    Such a reflection of one’s own academic writing activity on the meta-level is nothing new. Pierre Bourdieu already held a famous leçon sur la leçon, and history as an academic discipline in particular is increasingly engaged in research on such writing. ((See Pierre Bourdieu, Leçon sur la leçon, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982; Wolfgang Schmale, Schreib-Guide Geschichte, Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 2006.)) The new book series Meta/Metal: Exploring the Complexities of Metal Cultures will also make a contribution in this regard of the meta-level of Metal Studies.

    I don’t yet know exactly where this writing journey will lead. But it’s clear to me that I don’t think much of the famous quote “writing about music is like dancing to architecture”. I am much more interested in looking for discursive points of contact for reflecting on the radiations of this subculture – also the radiations into the universities of Austria and the world.