Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music PDF
Preview Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music
With a new afterword Foreword by Harris M. Berger wesleyan university press Middletown, Connecticut Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2014 and 1993 by Robert Walser Foreword © 2014 by Harris M. Berger All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Anita Walker Scott Typeset in Galliard Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. isbn for this edition: 978-0-8195-7514-2 The Library of Congress cataloged the previous edition as: Walser, Robert Running with the Devil: power, gender, and madness in heavy metal music / Robert Walser. p. cm.—(Music culture) Includes bibliographical references, discography, and index. isbn 0-8195-5252-6 (cl).—isbn 0-8195-6260-2 1. Heavy metal (Music)—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. ml3534.w29 1993 781.66—dc20 92-56911 5 4 3 2 1 Acknowledgments for song lyrics quoted: “Electric Eye”: Words and music by Glenn Tipton, Rob Halford, and K. K. Downing, © 1982 emi april music, inc./crewglen ltd./ebonytree ltd./ geargate ltd. All rights controlled and administered by emi april music, inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “Suicide Solution”: Words and music by John Osbourne, Robert Daisley, and Randy Rhoads, tro—© Copyright 1981 Essex Music International, Inc. and Kord Music Publishers, New York, N.Y. Used by permission. Cover photograph of Van Halen by Chris Walter/Photo features. Foreword to the 2014 Edition vii Acknowledgments xvii Introduction xix Afterword to the 2014 Edition 173 Appendix 1: Heavy Metal Canons 181 Appendix 2: Heavy Metal Questionnaire 183 Notes 187 Select Discography 213 Select Bibliography 217 Index 223 Photographs follow page 107 Foreword to the 2014 Edition Harris M. Berger ✲ Toward the end of Running with the Devil, Robert Walser engaged ideas from Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982) to understand the ways in which the musicians and fans of heavy metal use their music to come to term with the dynamism and dislocations of modernity. Exploring the imperative for relentless transformation in contemporary society, Berman was an apt touchstone for Walser, who argued that Guns N’ Roses’s explosive musical energy chronicled how late capitalism’s turbulent and oppressive qualities are experienced by American youth in everyday life, even as that music recapitulated capitalism’s strident individualism. Rereading Walser’s now classic study over twenty years after its initial publication, I am struck by how much things have changed in the world of metal and in popular music studies—how much the solid has melted into air—but also how con- temporary Running feels, how many of its interpretations continue to capture the affective character of social life in the second decade of the twenty-first century. At first glance, it is the transformations within metal that capture one’s attention. It has been widely and rightly observed that innova- tions from African American popular musics (ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, hip hop) have long been co-opted by an American music industry dominated by white artists and white executives. What is less widely acknowledged are the ways in which musical innovations from heavy metal—a music that is often understood as “white” but which has, from its inception, been produced by artists from a wide range of racial and ethnic groups—have been incorporated into mainstream styles and contexts. The distinctive timbral qualities of metal’s heavi- Foreword / vii est guitar players, the rhythmic textures and styles of ornamentation of its most aggressive drummers, and the harmonic ideas of its most creative composers, musical elements that were once auditory icons of unredeemable transgression, are now common in the music of tele- vision, movies, and advertising, and even appear occasionally in the soundtracks of the most unobjectionably G-rated children’s series, from My Little Pony to Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse. Within metal itself, the musical vocabulary has expanded dramatically, with a vast proliferation of subgenres and a wide array of metal styles hybridizing with other musics. While music genres are best conceptualized as his- torically emergent bundles of expressive resources and social features that participants use to guide the production and reception of music, the shear variety of genre categories that have emerged in metal’s dis- courses indicates at least some of the musical scope here: English lan- guage, fan or journalistic sources such as the Encyclopaedia Metallum (2014), Wikipedia (2014), and AllMusic (2014) typically list from ten to twenty-five metal subgenres, while the finer-grained divisions within these subgenres extend out into a distant sociomusical horizon.1 If the music style of metal has expanded, its social base has grown and changed dramatically as well. From its inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s, heavy metal has always been a transnational music, but the 1980s and 1990s saw a vast globalization of the genre. The con- temporary world of metal is a multipolar one, with influential scenes stretching from its original source countries in North America, West- ern Europe, and Australia to Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa, with new scenes developing today in sub-Saharan Africa as well. But perhaps the great- est changes to the music have come in its class associations. It is widely agreed that metal emerged from the declining industrial heartland of the United States and the UK, and while many of its audiences still hail from working-class backgrounds—Deena Weinstein has recently argued that metal should be viewed as the music of the global proletar- iat (2011)—the relationship between the music and its social base has become more complex. As Paul D. Greene and David R. Henderson have observed (2003), the metal of 1990s Nepal was the music of that country’s young technical elite, not its working classes, while in the contemporary US, both the black and the death metal styles have been incorporated into avant-garde postrock genres whose class associations are far from blue collar. Indeed, many years after my initial fieldwork in the working-class death metal scene of Akron, Ohio, I have heard young scholars casually contrast the contemporary subcultural forma- Foreword / viii tions that they study with “old school, blue collar death metal scenes,” social worlds so traditional and well understood that they serve as a reference point for music participants and scholars alike. While it is clear that the world of metal has undergone enormous transformations, Running with the Devil has not been shamed by the passage of time. Far from it. Grounded in a nuanced reading of Marx’s cultural politics (1977) and notions of polyvocality from Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Valentin Vološinov (1986), Walser chose to interpret metal, not as an expression of working-class culture but as a distinctive musical and social discourse framed by the larger ideologi- cal imperatives and structural constraints of late capitalism, imperatives and constraints operating on those from a broad range of class back- grounds. Read in this light, metal’s themes of heroic individualism and transcendence speak equally to the alienation of working-class youth in the deindustrialized cities of the 1980s and early 1990s as it does to the experiences of middle-class youth in late 1990s South Asia or the Brooklyn of the 2010s. Likewise, while Walser’s study is grounded in North America, he acknowledges the transatlantic roots and newly widening transnational dimensions of metal, and his discussion of met- al’s complex relationship with hard rock and the Western art music tradition certainly leaves room for understanding the incorporation of metal techniques into the standard musical vocabulary of soundtrack composers worldwide. The interpretations of metal in Running are powerful ones, but they did not exhaust the cultural significance of metal or examine the breadth of its musical and social phenomena. Ranging widely across scenic and generic boundaries within metal that later scholars and fans would find to be more sharply drawn, Walser analyzes the appropria- tions (perhaps he would prefer merely to say “uses”) of rhetorical ges- tures from the Western art music canon by Eddie Van Halen and neo- classical virtuosi such as Yngwie Malmsteen, the gender dynamics of metal’s glam tradition, and the musical, narrative, and visual evocations of horror and insanity by thrash musicians and other performers from metal’s heavier strains. In the last twenty years, studies of individual artists (for example, Fast 2001; Pillsbury 2006), particular scenes and styles (Berger 1999, 2004; Wallach 2008; Baulch 2007), the social dynamics of metal’s global spread (Kahn-Harris 2007; Wallach, Berger, and Greene 2011), gender (Wallach 2011; Wong 2011; Vasan 2011), and race/ethnicity (Mahon 2004) have greatly expanded our under- standing of the music. The last six years in particular have seen a series of international scholarly conferences on heavy metal, a burgeoning of Foreword / ix
The list of books you might like
