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Introduction

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In the catacombs of a nineteenth-century warehouse, hulking in a rundown riverfront district, passageways wind through rough stonework to connect small rooms, each fronted by a sturdy iron door. Behind these doors musicians compose and rehearse through all hours of the day and night. Wandering the crooked hallways, I hear waves of sound clashing and coalescing: powerful drums and bass, menacing and ecstatic vocals, the heavy crunch of distorted electric guitars. In some rooms, lone guitarists practice scales, arpeggios, heavy metal riffs, and Bach transcriptions. Occasionally, I pass an open door, and musicians who are taking a break consider my presence with cool curiosity.

I am struck by the resemblance of these underground rehearsal spaces to the practice rooms of a conservatory. The decor is different, but the people are similar: musicians in their late teens and early twenties, assembled for long hours of rigorous practice. There is a parallel sense of isolation for the sake of musical craft and creativity, a kindred pursuit of technical development and group precision. And like conservatory students, many of these heavy metal musicians take private lessons, study music theory, and practice scales and exercises for hours every day. They also share the precarious economic future faced by classical musicians; in both cases, few will ever make enough money performing to compensate them for the thousands of hours they have practiced and rehearsed.

There are important differences from the conservatory environment, too, not the least of which is the grungy setting itself, which underlines the fact that this music does not enjoy institutional prestige or receive governmental subsidy. The musicians must pool their funds to pay for rental of the rooms, and the long hair that marks them as members of a heavy metal subculture also ensures that they are not likely to have access to jobs that pay well. On the other hand, many of these people are actually working as musicians, at least part-time. Unlike most of their peers in the academy, they know a great deal about the commercial channels to which they hope to gain access. Some talk of not compromising their art for popular success, but there is little evidence of the music academy’s pretense that art can be pursued apart from commerce. This is in part because they are more closely connected with their potential audiences, through their own fan activities and those of their friends, while relatively few aspiring classical musicians actually belong to the moneyed class that underwrites the performance of classical music. Heavy metal musicians are, in fact, strongly influenced by the practices of the musical academy, but their activities also retain the priorities of collective creation and orality derived from traditions of popular music making.

The noisy vaults of that warehouse and the musicians who haunt them evoke images and raise issues that will be central to my discussions of heavy metal. If metal could be said to have gotten started in any single place, it would be Birmingham, England, the industrial city whose working class spawned Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That heavy metal bands now labor in spaces abandoned by industry is particularly appropriate for a music that has flourished during the period of American deindustrialization. And just as the labor of industrial production is invisible in mass media representations of consumer products, the musical labor that sustains and reinvents mass-mediated popular music often takes place in such marginal locations. Heavy metal is perhaps the single most successful and enduring musical genre of the past thirty years; yet it is in such dank cellars that many of its future stars serve their apprenticeships. This noisy basement is a good analogy for the position heavy metal occupies in the edifice of cultural prestige.

When I began writing about heavy metal in 1986, it seemed a strange thing for a cultural critic—let alone a musicologist—to do. Metal has been ignored or reviled, not only by academics of all stripes but even by most rock critics. Yet in the United States and many other countries, heavy metal was arguably the most important and influential musical genre of the 1980s; throughout the decade, it became increasingly clear that, between them, hip hop and heavy metal were redefining American popular music. Moreover, the debates surrounding heavy metal and the people who make it—over meaning, character, behavior, values, censorship, violence, alienation, and community—mark metal as an important site of cultural contestation. This is most obvious when attacks come from groups with overt moral missions, such as the Parents’ Music Resource Center, Christian fundamentalist groups, rock critics, or academics. But intense reactions to heavy metal are widespread: a recent marketing survey found that ten million people in the United States “like or strongly like” heavy metal—and that nineteen million strongly dislike it, the largest backlash of any music category.¹ People care deeply about heavy metal, one way or another, which suggests that it engages with some fundamental social values and tensions.

Such strong reactions, along with heavy metal’s sheer popularity, might seem sufficient justification for the study of heavy metal, since the genre embraces such a significant portion of the musical activity of our time. However, I was initially drawn to writing about metal not because of such a sociological or political mandate. Rather, I became interested in exploring heavy metal because I found the music compelling. Already active as a professional musician on other instruments, I began playing guitar in the late 1970s. I moved among bands and musical styles for several years, learning on stage rather than in a practice room, from other musicians instead of from sheet music or recordings, and in 1980 I found myself playing heavy metal before I had actually listened to much of it. As a performer, metal granted me access to its power almost immediately—it doesn’t take long to learn to play power chords—yet its musical subtleties and technical demands continued to inspire and challenge me a decade later.

I once heard a prominent sociologist of popular music tell an audience that he actually had no interest in the music he had been studying for years. The reason he gave for having become involved with studying popular music, rather than some other “product,” was that all of the other industries were taken. He was not embarrassed by this admission; rather, he seemed to take it as a point of pride, perhaps because he thought such objectivity would enhance his scholarly rigor. It seemed appropriate to have no particular investment in the products of the industry he studied; he thought it no more important to discuss or discriminate among musical texts than it would be to analyze individual tires or refrigerators.

To be sure, scholars who interpret cultural texts should notice the commercial processes and power struggles that make those texts available to their attention, as well as the social structures and tensions that make them meaningful. But to analyze popular culture only in terms of the commercial structures that mediate it is to “imagine markets free of politics.”² Economics becomes an autonomous abstraction from a conflicted society, and the hard-nosed study of institutions and monetary power is but a false veneer of political engagement, masking a refusal to confront the political dimension of economic choices. As Christopher Small asks those who discuss popular culture only in terms of production and consumption,

How do you “consume” music, when (a) music isn’t a thing and (b) it’s still there after you’ve used it—or you think you’ve used it. Just because the industry markets it as commodity doesn’t mean we have to accept their terms of reference. It’s time people stopped talking about “consuming” art and culture and so on and started thinking of art as an activity, something you do. Even buying and playing records are activities; the record is only the medium through which the activity takes place.³

Just as important, most scholars of popular music assume that recent mass-mediated music is somehow more “compromised” than earlier music by its involvement with commercial structures and interests. This is simply not true. Music has always been “commercial,” at least since the Renaissance; that is, music has always been supported by the interests and patronage of particular social groups and enmeshed in institutional politics, mechanisms of distribution, and strategies of promotion.⁴ If it makes sense to study specific operas as sites of the exchange and contestation of social meanings, rather than as interchangeable epiphenomena of a patronage structure, it makes equal sense to treat more recent popular texts with similar specificity and care.

As a musician, I cannot help but think that individual texts, and the social experiences they represent, are important. My apprenticeships as a performer—conservatory student and orchestral musician, ethnic outsider learning to play Polish polkas, jazz trumpeter, pop singer, and heavy metal guitarist—were periods spent learning musical discourses. That is, I had to acquire the ability to recognize, distinguish, and deploy the musical possibilities organized in styles or genres by various communities. Each song marshals the options available in a different way, and each musical occasion inflects a song’s social meanings. Becoming a musician in any of the styles I have mentioned is a process of learning to understand and manipulate the differences intrinsic to a style, which are manifested differently in each text and performance. Unlike many scholars, I think it is possible to analyze, historicize, and write about these processes.

Moreover, I find some songs powerfully meaningful and others not; so do all of the fans and musicians I know. Some of us are better than others at explaining why we care about this song and not that one, but for most people, music is intimately involved with crucial feelings of identity and notions of community. This is where sociological approaches to the study of popular music have so often failed. For while I do not suggest that either technical training or performing experience are necessary prerequisites for insightful writing about popular music, one must be able to experience—not just discern—differences among musical texts, in order to avoid imposing an interpretation of monotony and singularity of meaning that fans and musicians do not recognize.

Accordingly, I have integrated methods of musical analysis, ethnography, and cultural cricitism in this study. Following the example of scholars of popular culture such as Janice Radway and ethnomusicologists like Steven Feld, I have tried to find out what real listeners hear and how they think about their activities. Along with those working in cultural studies, like John Fiske and George Lipsitz, I want to situate the texts and practices I study within a forthrightly politicized context of cultural struggle over values, power, and legitimacy. And finally, I owe an important debt to the few musicologists, such as Susan McClary and Christopher Small, who have discussed musical structures as social texts imbued with political significance.⁵

My interest is less in explicating texts or defining the history of a style than in analyzing the musical activities that produce texts and styles and make them socially significant. I find Christopher Small’s notion of “musicking” helpful. Small revives the idea of music as a verb rather than a noun in order to challenge our common practice of analyzing and understanding music in terms of objects, which encourages abstract stylistic description and effaces the social activity that produces musical texts and experiences.⁶ “Musicking” embraces composition, performance, listening, dancing—all of the social practices of which musical scores and recordings are merely one-dimensional traces. To understand heavy metal as musicking, I studied it from many aspects. I attended concerts, studied recordings, interviewed fans and musicians, took heavy metal guitar lessons, and read fan magazines, industry reports, and denunciations.⁷ My goal was to find answers through a kind of cultural triangulation, using ethnography as a check on textual interpretation and developing ethnographic strategies out of my own and others’ cultural analyses.

I have chosen to focus on the most popular examples of heavy metal—the bands with multiplatinum record sales and arena-filling concert tours, the bands named as exemplary by fan magazines and by the fans I consulted through questionnaires and interviews: Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Poison, Van Halen, Megadeth, Guns Ν’ Roses, etc. While much interesting work could be done on less popular, “underground” metal subcultures, this study concentrates on massively popular heavy metal because that focus enables engagement with important contemporary debates over music, mass mediation, morality, and censorship. Like Stuart Hall, I see “the popular” as an important site of social contestation and formation, and I find unconvincing the common assumption that culture that exists either at the margins of society or among a prestigious elite is necessarily more important, interesting, complex, or profound than the culture of a popular mainstream.⁸ Popular culture is important because that is where most people get their “entertainment” and information; it’s where they find dominant definitions of themselves as well as alternatives, options to try on for size.

I have elected to concentrate primarily on music of the 1980s, since that is the music both my informants and I know best, and because that is the decade of heavy metal’s greatest popularity and influence. I have not tried to write a full history of heavy metal, nor have I attempted a comprehensive study of its most important artists or works. Neither have I pursued a more tightly focused study of a particular style or performer. Rather, I have tried to begin establishing an analytic context within which such work could be undertaken by examining several aspects of heavy metal that I feel are crucial to its success and meaningfulness—to its power.

Most important, perhaps, I have tried to pay particular attention to the music of heavy metal, in ways that are both textually specific and culturally grounded. For like most musicians and fans, I respond more intensely to music than to words or pictures. Before I knew any lyrics, before I had even seen any of the major performers, I was attracted to heavy metal by specifically musical factors. Within the context of the other kinds of music I knew, I found the “language” of heavy metal—the coherent body of musical signs and conventions that distinguished it as a genre—powerful and persuasive. Much of this book will be concerned with what has been conspicuously absent from discussions of popular music, whether academic, journalistic, or moralistic: analysis of the specific musical choices embodied in individual songs and organized by genres. Musicians take such conventions and details seriously, and fans respond to them; critics and scholars cannot justify continuing to ignore them.⁹

Chapter 2 prepares for such discussions by sketching the terms of heavy metal as a discursive practice, as a coherent, though always changing, universe of significant sonic options. I examine heavy metal music as a social signifying system rather than an autonomous set of stylistic traits, employing an approach to musical analysis that construes musical details as significant gestural and syntactical units, organized by narrative and other formal conventions, and constituting a system for the social production of meaning—a discourse. This chapter dissects and discusses heavy metal music as a discourse, with reference to an example that is in many ways paradigmatic for the genre. Both this and the following chapter are fairly “guitarocentric,” since the point is to get “beyond the vocals,” and guitarists have been the primary composers and soloists of heavy metal music.

Chapter 3 focuses on the intersection of heavy metal and classical music, an example of what I call “discursive fusion.” Makers of popular culture have always thrived on borrowing, customizing, and reinterpreting other peoples’ cultural property; yet this aspect of popular music has received little analytical attention, for many critics remain influenced by ideologies of authenticity that accord a higher place to supposedly pure popular creations (e.g., “folk music”). Heavy metal musicians have appropriated musical materials from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concert music, reworking what is now the most prestigious of musical discourses to serve the interests of what is now the least prestigious of musical communities. Chapter 3 examines this appropriation of musical signs as a case study in cultural politics, comparing means and ends across the sacrosanct boundaries of classical/popular and high/low culture.

In comparing the techniques of heavy metal musicians to those of classical musicians, I am not simply making a bid for academic legitimacy on behalf of the former. The point of such comparisons is to pursue what Bakhtin called “interillumination,” his method of “de-privileging languages,” or what Marcus and Fischer characterize as “defamiliarization by cross-cultural juxtaposition,” part of their plan for remaking “anthropology as cultural critique.”¹⁰ It is to contribute to demystifying classical music’s aura of transcendent autonomy and to debunking stero-typical notions of heavy metal’s musical crudity. Arguing for the worth of popular music in the terms of valuation used for more prestigious music is not without risk: jazz has gained a certain amount of academic respectibility through such toil by its defenders, but at the cost of erasing much of the music’s historical significance, its politics, its basis in non-European modes of musical thinking and doing. (Indeed, this is precisely what has happened to the many different kinds of historical music making that have been collapsed into “classical music” by our century.) However strange it might seem to compare heavy metal and classical music, heavy metal musicians themselves have already accomplished this juxtaposition, and we must reach beyond accepted cultural categories to understand what they are doing. Such comparisons reveal much about both musics and challenge hegemonic assumptions about “trained” musicians and “serious” music.

Chapter 4 takes up issues of gender in heavy metal. Since the social contexts within which heavy metal circulates (primarily Western societies in the late twentieth century) are highly patriarchal, it is not surprising to find that an important concern of metal is to represent male power and female subordination. Music, lyrics, visual images, and behavior serve to construct gender identities, infusing them with power and implying that they are natural and desirable. These representations primarily serve the interests of the male musicians who dominate heavy metal performance and the male fans who until recently were their primary constituency. Through discussion of heavy metal songs and videos, I trace four strategies for dealing with the “threat” women embody to patriarchy. But as a genre that now boasts a gender-balanced audience, heavy metal depictions of gender identities and relationships must offer credible positions for women. In small part this is accomplished by female metal musicians, who search for a style that will articulate their contradictory position as women and performers. But women are more often offered heavy metal empowerment through adaptations of the ideology of romance, the ambiguous implications of androgyny, and their increasing ability to identify with constructions of power that had previously been understood as inherently male. This chapter, more than the others, explicitly analyzes music videos because of the connections that exist in contemporary Western cultures among music, gender, and spectacularity.¹¹

Chapter 5 assesses the significance of violence and mysticism in heavy metal. I begin with recent critiques, controversies, and court cases involving heavy metal, including debates over suicide and censorship. Through discussions of selected songs, I argue that while it is clear that some heavy metal music does articulate struggle, madness, violence, and disorientation, metal does not invent or inject these affective states; instead, it mediates social tensions, working to provide its fans with a sense of spiritual depth and social integration. Many people who condemn heavy metal accept historically contingent formations of youth, socialization, and deviance as absolutes: “Heavy metal’s subject matter is simple and virtually universal. It celebrates teenagers’ newfound feelings of rebellion and sexuality. The bulk of the music is stylized and formulaic.” ¹² But such characterizations essentialize the category of youth, removing it from history and depoliticizing it. Heavy metal fans do tend to be young, and this is surely relevant to any explanation of its appeal; but youth itself must be understood within a larger social framework, as a category constructed by ideological labor. And the rebellious or transgressive aspects of heavy metal, its exploration of the dark side of social life, also reflect its engagement with the pressures of a historical moment.

For rebellion and escapism are always movements away from something, toward something else. Rebellion is critique; whether apparently effectual or not, it is politics. But even more important, what seems like rejection, alienation, or nihilism is usually better seen as an attempt to create an alternative identity that is grounded in a vision or the actual experience of an alternative community. Heavy metal’s fascination with the dark side of life gives evidence of both dissatisfaction with dominant identities and institutions and an intense yearning for reconciliation with something more credible.¹³ To explain this side of metal as the pathological imprint of malicious musicians or as adolescent socialization gone awry (as is often done) is to dehistoricize the specific forms and practices of heavy metal.

For I simply don’t find persuasive arguments that explain heavy metal in terms of deviance. The context for this study is the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, a period that saw a series of damaging economic crises, unprecedented revelations of corrupt political leadership, erosion of public confidence in governmental and corporate benevolence, cruel retrenchment of social programs along with policies that favored the wealthy, and tempestuous contestation of social institutions and representations, involving formations that had been thought to be stable, such as gender roles and the family. This social climate, besides shaping lyrical concerns and distributive networks, provided the context within which heavy metal became meaningful for millions of people. Heavy metal is intimately embedded in the social system of values and practices that its critics defend.

Chapter 1, then, situates heavy metal as a cultural practice that is historically constituted and socially contested; it examines how “heavy metal” means different things to the variety of people who are involved with it—fans, musicians, historians, critics, academics, censors. I trace the history of heavy metal as it has been assembled by critics, fans, and musicians and then discuss ongoing disputes over the boundaries of the genre, emphasizing the divergent interests of fans, musicians, critics, fan magazines, and other commercial mediators. A summary of the characteristics, activities, and beliefs of heavy metal fans is followed by discussion of the very different interpretations of those activities provided by academics and rock critics.

I have intersected the texts and debates of metal fans and musicians with analytical and historical perspectives that are sometimes foreign to that experience but find common ground in my arguments for the cultural coherence of that experience. This study is organized around the issues that fans and musicians, through their activities and statements and the music itself, have indicated are central to the power and meaning of heavy metal. But it also reflects my own position as an academic and cultural critic, and it engages with ongoing arguments about music and culture that not all readers will find interesting or important. In some circles, for example, it is still necessary to argue that music can be analyzed as having social meaning; readers who are willing to grant this point may wish to skip over parts of chapter 2.

In my attempts to make sense of heavy metal, I have learned from and taken issue with the arguments of sociologists, musicologists, rock critics, and cultural theorists because I have found such interdisciplinary inquiry the only adequate approach to the study of something as complex as popular music. While heavy metal appears as the object of study of my cultural and musicological investigation, I have tried through my engagement with heavy metal to raise larger questions about the politics of culture, recent American history, “classical” music, and the nature of musical discourses, experience, and analysis.

The specific sites of metal activity—concert arenas, clubs, record stores, warehouse rehearsal rooms, fans’ bedrooms and cars—may be distant and unfamiliar to many people. Similarly, the musical discourses of metal are grounded in semiotic codes that are widely shared but often drawn upon by metal musicians precisely to articulate alienating noise and exclusivity. Running with the Devil attempts to resituate heavy metal within contemporary debates over music and cultural politics without muting that noise. It offers some explanations of how heavy metal works and why people care about it.