"Blacker than Death: Recollecting the 'Black Turn' in Metal Aesthetics" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Genre and Expression in Extreme Metal Music, ca. 1990–2015
Extreme metal music, a conglomeration of metal subgenres unified by a common interest in transgressive sounds and imagery, is now a global phenomenon with thriving scenes in every inhabited continent. Its individual subgenres represent a range of diverse aesthetics, some with histories spanning over thirty years. Scholarship on extreme metal now boasts a similar diversity as well as its own history spanning nearly two decades. With the rise of metal studies as an emerging field of scholarship, the scholarly literature on extreme metal has increased exponentially within the past seven years supported by annual conferences, the establishment of the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS), and a specialized journal (Metal Music Studies). Despite this growth, the field is still characterized by what sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris has called “undoubtedly the most critical weakness in metal studies as it stands: the relative paucity of detailed musicological analyses on metal” (Kahn-Harris 2011, 252). This blind spot in the literature is so pervasive that Sheila Whiteley began her preface to Andrew Cope’s Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music with the exclamation, “At last! A book about heavy metal as music” (Cope 2010, xi). As the first book-length musicological study of extreme metal, this dissertation responds to this critical gap by outlining, in previously unattempted detail, a wide range of genre conventions and semiotic codes that form the basis of aesthetic expression in extreme metal. Using an interdisciplinary mixture of literary genre theory, semiotics, music theory and analysis, acoustics, and linguistics, this dissertation presents a broad overview of extreme metal’s musical, verbal, and visual-symbolic systems of meaning. Part I: Interconnected Contexts and Paratexts begins with a critical survey of genre taxonomies, showing how their implicit logic masks value judgments and overlooks aspects of genre that are counterintuitive. This leads to an investigation of boundary discourses that reveals how fans define extreme metal negatively according to those subgenres and categories of identity that they treat as abject Others: nu metal, screamo, and deathcore as well as their associations with blackness, femininity, and adolescence. Part I concludes with a thick description of death metal and black metal that shows how its lyrics, album reviews, album artwork, band logos, and font styles collectively provide messages about the semantics of genre, most notably by drawing upon archetypes of the sublime and, in the case of raw black metal, the dystopian imagery of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century woodcut engravings. Part II: Analyzing Musical Texts synthesizes large corpus studies of musical recordings with close readings of individual songs. This section begins with a demonstration of how technical death metal bands Cannibal Corpse, Demilich, and Spawn of Possession play with listener expectations towards meter, syntax, and musical complexity to create pleasurable forms of disorientation that reward active and repeated listenings. It proceeds to investigate musical accessibility and formal salience in melodic death metal, showing through examples by In Flames and Soilwork how the notion of melody pervades this music and contributes to its sense of rhetoric. Part II concludes with a study of musical expression in extreme metal vocals. Using discussions and recordings from a vocalist participant, a corpus study of eighty-five songs that begin with wordless screams, and close readings of excerpts by Morbid Angel, Zimmers Hole, and At the Gates, I demonstrate that the acoustical features of vowel formants are central to vocal expression in extreme metal, enabling vocalists to mimic large beasts in a way that fans find convincing and powerful.
Black Metal Soul Music: Stone Vengeance and the Aesthetics of Race in Heavy Metal
Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures, 2013
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The emergence of Black Metal in Scandinavia in the early 1990s as a genre with pronounced ideological commitments to anti-Christian sentiments and Norwegian nationalism arose as a response to what the young, brash early Black Metal musicians saw as a puritanical, oppressively Christian social democratic state. As heavy metal grows and spreads at a global level, the established metal genres maintain a consistency in sounds while local variations on a theme alter their styles as they are conceived. In metal’s proliferation and with the ever-increasing sheer abundance of metal to listen to, many bands simply echo what has come before them, as can be seen in the advent of ‘retro’ bands and genres; even when not a trend, for some genres mimicry is the normal state of things. However, some bands in the American Black Metal scene seek to innovate the genre as a whole by creating a distinctly American sound influenced by its roots in this different context.
Producing Music (Perspectives on Music Production), 2019
This chapter continues my ongoing research into the DAW and its role in reconfiguring popular music practice (see , with particular reference to genre characteristics in heavy metal music. My focus is on the manner in which those "rules" that determine the "compositive" elements of the metal genre (see are "transgressed" as a result of their interaction with new technological forms. These ideas are applied specifically in relation to DAW-based practices, highlighting the manner in which this medium might be regarded as an agent of genre deconstruction and destabilization. Key to my argument is the hypothesis that the DAW is essentially a genre-specific medium in the sense that it foregrounds specific notions of creative practice associated with the aesthetics of electronic music. To illustrate this, I trace the route by which the DAW and its inherent electronic music aesthetics have become gradually integrated into metal music practice, from metal musicians' uses of the DAW during the mid-1990s through to the activities of DAW-based metal practitioners during the mid-to late 2000s and the hybridized forms of "electronic" metal that emerged at this time, including djent, djent-step, and cyber-grind. The concluding part of the chapter discusses situations in which older metal bands have attempted to incorporate, from outside their idiom, the traits of DAW-derived genres, with a particular focus on the dubstep collaborations on Korn's 2012 album, The Path of Totality. The chapter's key assertion is that metal artists who have gravitated toward either the DAW, or DAW-based practitioners, are all engaging to some degree with the aesthetics of electronic music and, while this has enabled the domain of metal music
Sound, Symbol, Sociality: The Aesthetic Experience of Extreme Metal Music
Based on ethnographic research within the extreme metal community, Unger offers a thought-provoking look at how symbols of authenticity and defilement fashion social experience in surprising ways. Exploring the many themes and ciphers that comprise this musical community, this book interprets aesthetic resonances as a way to understand contemporary identity, politics, and social relations. In the end, this book develops a unique argument: the internal composition of the community’s music and sound moulds symbols that shape, reflect, and constrain social patterns of identity, difference, and transgression. This book contributes to the sociology of sound and music, the study of religion in popular culture, and the role of aesthetics in everyday life. It will be of interest to upper level students, post-graduate students and scholars of religion, popular culture, and philosophy.
The Aesthetic-Sonic Shift of Melodic Death Metal
Metal Music Studies, 2018
This article examines the shift in aesthetics and sound that occurred during the development of what came to be called Melodic Death Metal, a sub-genre of Metal that developed in the 1990s in Gothenburg, Sweden. I consider the musical aesthetic dimensions of the music such as instrumentation, production style, and timbre alongside extra-musical aesthetics such as lyrics, cover art and band logos. Thus, I demonstrate how Melodic Death Metal develops its aesthetics and sound in order to differentiate itself from its main influences of Swedish Death Metal and the New Wave of European Heavy Metal. This article aims to contribute to a growing body of works that is focused on analyzing the music at the core of popular music, in particular Metal, and develop methods of analysis that deal with musical aesthetics on an equal ground with extra-musical aesthetics. Furthermore, this article aims to discuss in detail specific features of Melodic Death Metal and establish a basis for further examination of the developments of the genre
Metal Music Studies, 2021
(no abstract printed) While it may be tempting to some listeners to hear the album Metallica (1991) as watered-down metal and excise it from the genre, this album is not peripheral to metal music studies. Metallica’s ‘Black Album’ played a key role in creating a new archetype of American rock/metal music and masculinity. It may have had the most impact outside of the truest, most conservative, underground styles, but metal-influenced rock is just as important to the legacy and status of metal. Perhaps even more so given that some of these rock-oriented bands have larger audiences than any metal group. The album influenced the American alternative metal scene and metal bands now linked to the alt-right; both are part of the history and legacy of metal. Even if we as individual scholars or fans would not embrace either of these developments, we must devote more effort to examining them if we wish to understand metal’s evolving shape and place and influence in society.
Review of Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. By Keith Kahn-Harris. New York: Berg, 2007.
This is an unpublished review I wrote in 2007 when Kahn-Harris’ now famous book had just been released. Looking back now, I think I would be less critical and idealizing. I now recognize more value in different disciplinary orientations and priorities (re: sonic transgression). I also sympathize more with the pragmatic constraints of travel costs (re: North American scenes). Now also, I think the wealth of metal studies that explore power imbalances with respect to gender and race have made me more cognisant of the identity politics that I originally called into question at the end of the review. Reflecting ongoing cultural changes more generally in society writ large, it seems that extreme metal scenes are indeed becoming gradually more open to marginalized identities in ways that Kahn-Harris originally predicted. I leave my original criticisms in the review as something of a time capsule. I hope my reaction at the time shows how Kahn-Harris’ book challenged readers at a pivotal time, just prior to metal studies becoming an internationally recognized phenomenon.