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CHAPTER TWO

Beyond the Vocals

Toward the Analysis of Popular Musical Discourses

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Beyond the vocals, it’s the way a guitar makes you feel when someone hits a particular chord, the way a snare drum is cracked.

—Rob Halford of Judas Priest.¹

When asked if he thought his mother would approve of his band’s lyrics, guitarist Eddie Van Halen replied that he had no idea of what the lyrics were.² Many people talk about the “meaning” of a song when what they are really discussing is only the song’s lyrics. But verbal meanings are only a fraction of whatever it is that makes musicians and fans respond to and care about popular music. This chapter is a prelude to the musical aspects of the chapters that follow, where heavy metal songs will be analyzed within the context of social practices and ideologies. It is also meant as a contribution to an underdeveloped strain in academic work on popular culture: analysis of the music of popular music, in which discussion is grounded in the history and significance of actual musical details and structures, “beyond the vocals.” Specifically, it sketches a view of metal as a discourse by analyzing the signifying practices that constitute heavy metal music. But first a more general argument must be advanced: that musical details can be evaluated in relation to interlocked systems of changing practices and that shifting codes constitute the musical discourses that underpin genres.

This chapter has three parts: It begins with discussion of some theoretical bases for the analysis of musical meaning in popular music; then it proceeds to analyze certain generic features of heavy metal and related musical styles, with reference to a single example, a song by Van Halen; finally, a more integrated analysis of that same piece of music appears, as a way of connecting musical details with genetically organized social experience.

Genre and Discourse

Nowhere are genre boundaries more fluid than in popular music. Just as it is impossible to point to a perfectly exemplary Haydn symphony, one that fulfills the “norms” in every respect, pieces within a popular genre rarely correspond slavishly to generic criteria. Moreover, musicians are ceaselessly creating new fusions and extensions of popular genres. Yet musical structures and experiences are intelligible only with respect to these historically developing discursive systems. As Fredric Jameson argues,

pure textual exemplifications of a single genre do not exist; and this, not merely because pure manifestations of anything are rare, but … because texts always come into being at the intersection of several genres and emerge from the tensions in the latter’s multiple force fields. This discovery does not, however, mean the collapse of genre criticism but rather its renewal: we need the specification of the individual “genres” today more than ever, not in order to drop specimens into the box bearing those labels, but rather to map our coordinates on the basis of those fixed stars and to triangulate this specific given textual moment.³

Jameson reminds us that genre categories are fluid and that individual texts are never static fulfillments of conventional norms but rather are understood with reference to other texts.

Yet Jameson’s concept of genre seems to operate only at the level of texts. We can profitably add to his model Bakhtin’s idea of genre as a “horizon of expectations” brought to bear on texts by historically situated readers. Genres are never sui generis; they are developed, sustained, and reformed by people, who bring a variety of histories and interests to their encounters with generic texts. The texts themselves, as they are produced by such historically specific individuals, come to reflect the multiplicities of social existence: in Bakhtin’s view, language is irreducibly “heteroglot,” and dialogue takes place not only between genres, as Jameson points out, but also within them. Bakhtin contrasts formalistic genre categories with what he calls “speech genres,” relatively stable types of utterance. “Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication.”⁴ Thus, we might say that a C major chord has no intrinsic meaning; rather, it can signify in different ways in different discourses, where it is contextualized by other signifiers, its own history as a signifier, and the social activities in which the discourse participates.

Simon Frith has recently called for renewed genre analysis of popular music, at the same time that he has asserted that “we still do not know nearly enough about the musical language of pop and rock: rock critics still avoid technical analysis, while sympathetic musicologists, like Wilfrid Mellers, use tools that can only cope with pop’s nonintentional (and thus least significant) qualities.”⁵ These two needs are connected, for delineating musical parameters may be the best way to distinguish genres, and genre conventions, in turn, can help us to place the significance of musical details. The challenge is to analyze signification dialectically, working between the levels of specific details and generic categories toward social meanings.

Heavy metal seems particularly appropriate terrain for such methods. As it has gained in popularity, metal has grown in stylistic innovation and pluralism. The term “heavy metal” is now used to designate a great variety of musical practices and ideological stances. Moreover, metal has contributed to the development of many discursive “fusions”: metal-influenced pop, rock, rap, funk, and so on. But as Jameson argues, the proliferation of styles within a genre and the concomitant lessened capacity of the norms to explain divergent practices do not mean that genre is no longer a fruitful analytical category. On the contrary, the recent expansion and diversification of heavy metal musical practices and their audiences make it all the more imperative to map the norms that make such fusions and transformations intelligible.⁶

The analytical notion of discourse enables us to pursue an integrated investigation of musical and social aspects of popular music.⁷ By approaching musical genres as discourses, it is possible to specify not only certain formal characteristics of genres but also a range of understandings shared among musicians and fans concerning the interpretation of those characteristics. The concept of discourse enables us to theorize beyond the artificial division of “material reality” and consciousness. Discourses are constituted by conventions of practice and interpretation, and, as John Fiske puts it, “Conventions are the structural elements of genre that are shared between producers and audiences. They embody the crucial ideological concerns of the time in which they are popular and are central to the pleasures a genre offers its audience.” Genre, then, is “a means of constructing both the audience and the reading subject: its work in the economic domain is paralleled by its work in the domain of culture; that is, its work in influencing which meanings … are preferred by, or proffered to, which audiences.”⁸

Traditionally, only language has been thought to be discursive. But recent usage has opened up the concept of discourse to refer to any socially produced way of thinking or communicating. The literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has analyzed the relationship of genre and discourse in a way that helps clarify the relevance of these terms to music.⁹ Building on Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres, Todorov argues that discourses are made up not of sentences but of utterances. That is, they are constituted not of abstract rules or patterns but of the concrete deployment of such abstractions in real social contexts. Sentences are transformed into utterances by being articulated among themselves in a given sociocultural context. For music, this implies that any formal or syntactical patterns an analyst may recognize must be interpreted as abstractions from utterances or speech acts that can only be said to have meaning in particular, socially grounded ways.

Genres, according to Todorov, arise from metadiscursive discourse. The discussion in chapter 1 of the competing definitions and understandings of heavy metal promoted by fans, business interests, critics, and others was meant to demonstrate precisely this point. It is from the discourse about discourses that concepts of genre are formed, transformed, and defended. Genres then come to function as horizons of expectation for readers (or listeners) and as models of composition for authors (or musicians). Most important, Todorov argues that genres exist because societies collectively choose and codify the acts that correspond most closely to their ideologies. A society’s discourses depend upon its linguistic (or musical) raw materials and upon its historically circumscribed ideologies. Discourses are formed, maintained, and transformed through dialogue; speakers learn from and respond to others, and the meanings of their utterances are never permanently fixed, cannot be found in a dictionary. Thus, the details of a genre and its very presence or absence among various social groups can reveal much about the constitutive features of a society.

Like genres and discourses, musical meanings are contingent but never arbitrary. There is never any essential correspondence between particular musical signs or processes and specific social meanings, yet such signs and processes would never circulate if they did not produce such meanings. Musical meanings are always grounded socially and historically, and they operate on an ideological field of conflicting interests, institutions, and memories. If this makes them extremely difficult to analyze, it does so by forcing analysis to confront the complexity and antagonism of culture. This is a poststructural view of music in that it sees all signification as provisional, and it seeks for no essential truths inherent in structures, regarding all meanings as produced through the interaction of texts and readers. It goes further in suggesting that subjectivity is constituted not only through language, as Lacan and others have argued, but through musical discourses as well. Musical details and structures are intelligible only as traces, provocations, and enactments of power relationships. They articulate meanings in their dialogue with other discourses past and present and in their engagement with the hopes, fears, values, and memories of social groups and individuals. Musical analysis is itself the representation of one discourse in terms of another, the point being to illuminate the social contexts in which both circulate.

Many critics and historians of rock music have been dismissive of any sort of musical analysis. Peter Wicke, for example, claims: “Rock songs are not art songs, whose hidden meaning should be sought in their form and structure.”¹⁰ Wicke is right to be dubious of the sort of reductive musicological analysis that simply abstracts and labels technical features, but he is wrong to assume that the specific details of rock music are insignificant. He accepts uncritically a highly problematic dichotomy when he argues, “Rock is not received through the critical apparatus of contemplation, of consideration by visual and aural means; its reception is an active process, connected in a practical way with everyday life.”¹¹ To argue that critical scrutiny of the details of rock music is inappropriate because people don’t hear that way is like arguing that we can’t analyze the syntax of language because people don’t know that they’re using gerunds and participles. But more important, reception of all music is “connected in a practical way with everyday life,” however hard some people may work to hide the social meanings of their music. The danger of musical analysis is always that social meanings and power struggles become the forest that is lost for the trees of notes and chords. The necessity of musical analysis is that those notes and chords represent the differences that make some songs seem highly meaningful and powerful and others boring, inept, or irrelevant.¹²

The split between academic contemplation and popular understanding is not a function of repertoires but rather of interpretive ideologies. As recent musicological colonizations of jazz and even rock have shown, any cultural text can be made over into a monument of neutralized order. But too many analysts of popular music are unaware of the extent to which this process has already remade what is now “classical” music. They assume that traditional musicological methods are simply appropriate for the traditional musicological repertoire and that popular musics do not warrant such analysis. Yet much recent work in musicology has been directed toward undoing the formalist depoliticization of classical music. The problem is not with musical analysis per se but with the implicit or explicit ideological context within which such analysis is conducted. Rock songs, like all discourse, do have meanings that can be discovered through analysis of their form and structure, but such analysis is useful only if it is grounded culturally and historically and if it acknowledges its interests forthrightly.

This is where I differ from most semioticians of music. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, for example, might agree with much of what I have asserted thus far, but there are two important divergences.¹³ First, his concern is primarily metadiscursive; he seems more interested in debating definitions and concepts than in analyzing actual music and musical activities. Second, while Nattiez recognizes the conventional basis of semiological meanings, he seems to want to retain some sort of absolute notion of truth, against which interpretations can be measured. That is, he stops short of recognizing the conventional basis of semiology itself; he is unwilling to acknowledge the ultimate grounding of analytical credibility in nothing more absolute or less complex than social contestation, institutional prestige, and power. But there can be no meaningful semiology apart from ethnographic inquiry, historical analysis, and argumentation about culture. There is no way to decide what something means without making a political statement. Underpinning all semiotic analysis is, recognized or not, a set of assumptions about cultural practice, for ultimately music doesn’t have meanings; people do. There is no essential, foundational way to ground musical meaning beyond the flux of social existence. Ultimately, musical analysis can be considered credible only if it helps explain the significance of musical activities in particular social contexts.

Some semioticians and philosophers of language, such as David Lidov and Mark Johnson, have worked to ground discursive meanings somatically, in terms of (socially constructed) bodily gestures, tensions, and postures.¹⁴ In The Body in the Mind, philosopher Mark Johnson argues that meanings of all sorts, even the ones that seem most abstract and mental, are grounded in bodily experience. While Johnson’s own analyses of artworks are rather simplistic, his epistemological challenge to the Western mind/body split is important. Human experiences of meaningfulness, Johnson argues, are grounded at the level of prelinguistic structures which organize our experience and comprehension, which he calls “image schemata.” These schemata are not concepts; they are patterns of activity, fundamental mechanisms of meaning production that inform the more abstract operations of language and conceptual thinking. Johnson argues that metaphor links these bodily image schemata to language. Metaphor, in this view, occupies a central place in the production of human meaning. It is not merely a kind of poetic expression or a literary figure of speech; rather, metaphor is a crucial process for generating meaning, whereby we come to understand one area of experience in terms of another.¹⁵ It is by means of metaphor that image-schematic structures are extended, transformed, and elaborated into domains of meaning that may seem less directly tied to the body, including language, abstract reasoning, and, I would argue, music.

Attempts to explain “music as metaphor” have appeared with some regularity, but metaphorical interpretations appear to many scholars to be arbitrary: the images you describe in response to a piece of music may be wholly unlike those I would use, and a positivistic orientation would then declare meaning, in this sense, subjective and out of bounds. In rebuttal to what he calls the Objectivist rejection of metaphor, Johnson stresses that meanings at the level of image schemata and metaphor are grounded in physical and social experience that is shared. He argues that image schemata “can have a public, objective character …, because they are recurring structures of embodied human understanding.”¹⁶ Johnson presents his theory of image schemata and metaphoric links as a solution to what he sees as the false dichotomy between objectivist absolutism and “anything goes” relativism. That is, meanings are neither objectively inherent nor subjectively arbitrary; they arise out of human experiences of social interaction with a material world.

As Johnson acknowledges, experiences of the body differ with place, time, and culture; musical meaning can be situated in bodily experience not in any essentialist way, then, but as a reciprocal element in a “web of culture” in which real human bodies are ensnared and supported. Yet even such theorizing cannot ground meaning “below” the level of discourse, for the body and the physical world cannot be experienced or thought outside of discourse. If musical gestures are experienced as physical or emotional gestures, these experiences are dependent on the discursive operation of the concepts and metaphors that make all of these terms meaningful.

In an important intervention in the field of the cognitive psychology of music, John A. Sloboda argues that while some responses to music seem to be consistent across cultures—fast and loud is perceived as arousing, slow and soft as soothing—listeners within a culture can generally agree upon finer readings of the “emotional character” even of pieces they have never heard before. Thus, musical meanings are neither a matter of “conditioning” through nonmusical associations nor of aggregative perception of atomized sound events—both influential formulations in the field. Rather, Sloboda’s arguments point toward the utility of discourse as a way of conceiving of the musical production of meaning.¹⁷

Even while they try to map the terms of a discourse, analysts must keep in mind that a variety of interpretations of musical texts is always possible, for popularity among various audiences arises both from the polysemy of texts and conventions—their potential to mean different things to different people—and from what Bakhtin calls their heteroglossia: their reproduction of multiple discourses and social voices. That is, signs are always susceptible to various interpretations because meanings can never be absolutely fixed. But because the social world is not monolithic, discourses inevitably structure in plural and contradictory meanings; many meanings are contained within any text. And the more popular a text is, the more likely it is to be found relevant in different ways. As Dee Snider of Twisted Sister says of the song “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” “It’s very general—we weren’t specific about just what it is we aren’t taking—work, school, whatever—so you can apply it to anything you want.”¹⁸ And in fact the song has found unexpected utility as the theme song of several workers’ strikes.¹⁹

However, the fact that ideas can be fairly consistently communicated, regardless of the nuances of individual response, is what points to the importance of musical discourses as coherent systems of signification. The range of possible interpretations may be theoretically infinite, but in fact certain preferred meanings tend to be supported by those involved with a genre, and related variant meanings are commonly negotiated. As Fiske says, the text “establishes the boundaries of the arena within which the struggle for meaning can occur.”²⁰ So while meanings are negotiated, discourse constructs the terms of the negotiation. Genres such as heavy meta! are sites where seemingly stable discourses temporarily organize the exchange of meanings. In practice, subcultural and other social alignments play a large role in channeling the reception of popular music. For music is not just a symbolic register for what really happens elsewhere; it is itself a material, social practice, wherein subject positions are constructed and negotiated, social relations are enacted and transgressed, and ideologies are developed and interrogated.²¹

Musical discourses constantly cross national boundaries and revise cultural boundaries, but they signify variously in different contexts. For example, a friend gave me a tape of Pokolgép, a Hungarian heavy metal band, and I discovered that their music is very different from that of the bands that are popular in the United States. It sounds oppressive, lacking what I’ve called the heavy metal dialectic; the guitar solos, which are fewer than is normal in U.S. and British metal, offer no escape, no transcendence. The guitars don’t contribute transgressive fills (harmonics, bent notes, etc.), and the mood is very controlled and mechanical. No harmonic momentum is ever built up; progressions are heavily grounded by dominant chords, which are rare in Western metal. The lyrics, which my friend translated for me, are poignant and desperate, speaking eloquently of a state of alienation where there is no future, no past, no freedom, no security, and also no hope, no fantastic transcendence, no dreams of anything better. The lyrics recount youthful and historical pain but, along with the music, suggest no youthful exuberance, no energetic defiance. I don’t know the context well enough to assert that the implications of this reading are correct; what seems clear is that the international conventions of heavy metal have been strongly inflected by the particular ideological needs of a local community.

Musical meaning, then, has more or less broad social bases and constituencies upon which interpretation is dependent, as well as its associated political economies, the commercial contexts that organize all stages of production and consumption. The latter field has been extensively analyzed by scholars of popular music;²² what has been relatively neglected is the problem of just how popular musical texts produce meaning and how such meanings operate not only within the contexts of political economies but also within social history and lived experience. Specific musical analysis is important because music is social practice. Music and society are not just related phenomena; music is a type of social activity and a register of such experience. John Blacking remarked that it has long been a commonplace of ethnomusicological analysis that, while music is socially grounded, it cannot articulate any new meanings, express anything not already in the mind of the listener.²³ But music can enact relationships and narratives that have not previously been imagined or valued. Its potential to create new meanings for listeners is particularly great in mass media cultures, where music is mobile, sometimes the only means of contact among different ways of life. Thus, musical analysis of popular music can help us make sense of the seemingly fragmented modern world; it can help us understand the thoughts and desires of many whose only politics are cultural politics.

Musicological Analysis

In this section, I want to discuss a few select approaches to musical analysis in order to situate more clearly my own methods and goals. This is in no way a comprehensive or balanced survey; its purpose is illustrative.²⁴ One of the central issues concerns the disabling methodological split between aesthetic and sociological analysis. The continuing prestige and influence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European aesthetics, which relied upon claims of disinterestedness to mask the ideological agendas of its culture, have obscured the fact that this is not typical of how most people have understood the operation of culture throughout history.²⁵