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ОглавлениеForeword to the 2014 Edition
Harris M. Berger
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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 contemporary 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 innovations 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 heaviest 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 television, 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 historically 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 discourses indicates at least some of the musical scope here: English language, 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 contemporary world of metal is a multipolar one, with influential scenes stretching from its original source countries in North America, Western 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 greatest 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 proletariat (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 formations 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 ideological imperatives and structural constraints of late capitalism, imperatives and constraints operating on those from a broad range of class backgrounds. 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 metal’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 appropriations (perhaps he would prefer merely to say “uses”) of rhetorical gestures from the Western art music canon by Eddie Van Halen and neoclassical 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 understanding of the music. The last six years in particular have seen a series of international scholarly conferences on heavy metal, a burgeoning of articles and monographs on the music, and the formation of the International Society for Metal Music Studies, with its own journal (Metal Music Studies) and an exhaustive online bibliography. Virtually all of the research in this area cites Running as a foundational study, along with Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (1991), an essential but very different work from Running that Walser engages repeatedly (and often critically) in the course of his discussion.2 But while Running with the Devil was one of the fundamental documents in the study of heavy metal and contemporary popular music in general, its impact has in fact been much broader. The book did more than justify academic research on a reviled music genre; it offered a method of cultural analysis whose aim was nothing less than the transformation of musicology, music studies, and perhaps cultural criticism. It was the power of Walser’s theoretical and methodological approach that allowed his insights into metal to be so penetrating and that gave the work an impact on fields across a broad spectrum of the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Although the popular music studies of the early 1990s was dominated by scholars from sociology, communication, literature, and American studies, Running was not the first monograph on a popular genre to engage in music analysis. But pop music research that addressed the particulars of music sound and music structure were decidedly in the minority at the time, and many of those scholars that did engage musical analysis struggled to make sense of popular styles by using the analytic tools created for the study of the Western art music. Hampered by a deeply ingrained belief in music’s autonomy, others were uncertain how to connect music sound to its social and cultural milieu. In this context, Running offered a very different approach. A leading voice in what was then known as the “new musicology,” Walser saw music analysis as significant for cultural criticism because music sound and music structure are the means by which so many of our most fundamental social relationships are negotiated and made meaningful. Musical works are neither sonic objects awaiting dispassionate analysis on the musicologist’s dissection table nor timeless aesthetic objects erupting from some universal human urge to create beauty. To the contrary, Walser, like many of the new musicologists, saw music as a historically and culturally situated form of rhetoric—a means of stirring powerful emotional forces, articulating values and subject positions, crystallizing social formations, and making sense of the world. This is as true of the works of Bach and Brahms as it is of those by Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult. Walser did not use formal analysis to legitimate the study of metal as good music or “raise” Metallica to the level of Mahler but to understand the meanings that composers, audiences, and musicians find important enough to build their lives around.
Treating music analysis as the Geertzian interpretation of culture (1973) could only be a starting point, however, and the theoretical and methodological tools that Walser brought to bear on his project came from a broad range of thinkers and disciplines. As a baseline, Walser’s background as a musician and training in musicology provided him with the fundamental understanding that music was just as amenable to analysis as any other mode of expression (a notion that, disturbingly, is still counterintuitive for some in the Western academy). Walser was deeply critical of much work in musicology, but that discipline offered him a language for addressing structure and sound in music, and he joined with other new musicologists such as Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Leppert and McClary 1987; McClary 1991) in seeing music as a form of expression that is always shaped by historical context and large-scale relations of power. From ethnomusicologists like John Blacking (1973), John Miller Chernoff (1979), and Steven Feld (1990), Walser borrowed ethnographic techniques, an emphasis on the role of cultural context in the shaping of musical meanings, and an understanding that, while culture does not display what the structuralist once saw as a totalizing systematicity, the meaning of any given expressive form is shaped by the tightly woven network of social and ideological elements in which it is situated. And like many ethnomusicologists of the period, Walser was inspired by Christopher Small’s work (1980, 1987), which viewed music as a kind of social activity rather than an object or a product, and Small’s powerful insights proved to be pivotal for all of Walser’s research.
Walser’s relationship with those fields outside of music studies that engaged popular music was complex. He was as critical of the decontextualized content analysis pursued in sociology as he was of the Adornian impulse in popular music studies that dismissed audience perspectives or any scholar that founded music’s meaning solely on its mode of distribution, rather than its sonic particulars and situated reception. But at the same time, Walser drew liberally from the best work in the cultural studies of the day, using the ideas of Simon Frith (1981), John Fiske (1987, 1989), and Stuart Hall (1981) to think richly about the problem of genre and the ways in which expressive culture is shaped by power relations. More important for Running, though, was the work of Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Vološinov (1986). Understanding that any act of individual expression depends fundamentally in form and meaning on a pre-existing lexicon of expressive resources, responds dialogically to opposing voices, and is inextricable from a historical and social environment of domination and resistance (indeed, that such expression is partially constitutive of those environments), Walser showed how Bakhtin’s and Vološinov’s ideas about the discursive nature of language could be extended to serve as a framework for the interpretation of music. While Running is certainly a study of one particular musical form, its unique synthesis of musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and discourse theory illustrated a powerful new method of research and offered a theoretical orientation that transcended its immediate topic and has served as a model for scholarship in a wide range of areas—within music studies and beyond. Not merely suggesting that music could be construed as discourse but showing how it operates as such, Running made a contribution to the humanities and humanistic social sciences that is still deeply felt.
But Running with the Devil was more than just an illustration of a method or an abstract work of theory; it was also a form of cultural intervention. Seeking to articulate the alienation and rage of metalheads living in the deindustrialized America of the early 1990s, Walser’s work engaged directly in the heated culture wars of its day. With deep research and cogent analysis, Walser debunked the worst distortions of the Parents Music Research Council and their allies, those who sought to make heavy metal the scapegoat for America’s ills. Metal is not an expression of adolescent rebellion, satanic depravity, or unrestrained hedonism, Walser argued; to the contrary, the horror and madness that metal depicts is the true face of late capitalism. Articulating this critique, Walser employed a prose style that was perfectly suited to his project. Consistently clear and accessible, his writing balanced heavy-hitting theory with evocative interpretations, painstaking descriptions of fact with devastating arguments against metal’s detractors.3 In recognizing that works of scholarship can serve as a significant voice in the broad cultural dialog of a society, Walser didn’t just talk the talk of discourse theory, he walked its walk as well. In so doing, Running with the Devil took up George E. Marcus’s and Michael M. J. Fischer’s call for using ethnographic work as a form of social criticism (1986), and its powerful cultural work inspired a generation of activist scholarship in music studies.
In 2014, the moral panics around metal have partially subsided in the United States. I am aware of no current investigations by the U.S. Congress of metal’s corrupting influence on the country’s youth, though the music’s heaviest styles still operate as dissident voices in America’s cultural discourse (the incorporation of certain musical tropes from metal into the soundtrack of some My Little Pony episodes not with standing). And when viewed from a global perspective, heavy metal is even more clearly seen as a vital site of contestation. Throughout the new century metal musicians have been censored and jailed in a variety of countries, and Mark LeVine’s 2010 report for the music and free speech advocacy organization Freemuse details a complex and uneven global terrain in which metal performers and fans face repression in some countries and greater tolerance in others. In the past, metal has tended to avoid an explicit engagement with politics, but it is now at least somewhat more common for the music to proffer specific ideological positions. Metal’s connection with the far right is still limited,4 while its link with liberatory movements seems to be growing. What remains for those working in metal studies, and for any group of researchers who see music as a discursive formation, is to continue listening to music as dialog—understanding how it fits into the lives of its participants, articulates their experiences, and speaks back to the larger social worlds in which they are embedded. But more than just listening to those dialogs, we scholars of metal, and those who study any form of expressive culture, must carry those dialogs forward in our own interventions, amplifying those voices, interpreting them with a sensitive but critical ear, and engaging in the struggles that gave those musics life and continue to make them meaningful.
Notes
1. Some musicologists and music theorists may be dismissive of the generic schemes constructed by the fans who have developed the Encyclopaedia Metallum or Wikipedia’s “Subgenres” article. It is true that, with the exception of those writers that release their work in the kind of specialist publications like Guitar Player and Guitar for the Practicing Musician that Walser discusses, fan and journalistic sources generally do not produce the explicit, systematic analyses of music structure that academic musicologists or music theorists prize. But, I would argue, such fan sources (and many journalistic writings) deserve careful attention from scholars because they offer crucial insights into insider views of the organization of musical discourse. In addition, they often reveal dimensions of structure that outsider perspectives fail to discover. In this context, their generic systems are a useful index of the breadth of musical diversity in contemporary metal and esoteric perspectives upon it.
2. Weinstein published a revised edition of this book under the new title Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (2000).
3. Walser’s writing was occasionally lighthearted as well. The title of the final section of Running’s last chapter, “Guns N’ Roses N’ Marx N’ Engels,” may be the best A-head that the field of popular music studies has yet produced.
4. On the role of neofascism in contemporary metal, see Hochhauser (2011).
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