The formation of the West German power metal scene and the question of a ‘Teutonic’ sound (original) (raw)
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The Recording Industry as the Enemy? A Case Study of Early West German Metal Music
International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure, 2022
Rock and metal music have a complex relationship with the entertainment industries. They rely on commodified products but are also cautious towards the capitalist system with its instrumentalist mechanisms. This article examines early metal music from West Germany in the 1980s with its rock precursors in the 1970s to shed light on the music industry’s positive side other than the commonly portrayed enemy or villain image. Using journalistic sources, including magazines, biographies, documentaries, besides the music release database Discogs, the research reconstructs the independent recording industry for metal, examining key record companies, distribution channels and production staff, as well as their principles and intentions. The findings suggest that in the formative phase of German metal, the boundaries were blurred between fans, artists and entrepreneurs, most acting out of a passion for music. Fan practices, such as music-making, journalistic writing or tape trading, became serious leisure careers, eventually enabling some of the bands, journalists and entrepreneurs to make a living from their metal-related activities; others remained “semi-professional”. Communal spirit characterised German metal, and most of “the industry” worked together with the scene. The joint efforts made it possible for Germany to develop from a weak production location for subcultural rock music compared to the dominant cultures of the USA and UK to one of the leading recording industries for metal music. Rather than “the enemy” with manipulative intentions, the independent metal industry was a cultural intermediary and enabler of subcultural production and consumption.
From Bach to Helloween: ‘Teutonic’ stereotypes in the history of popular music and heavy metal
Metal Music Studies, 2020
Throughout the centuries, German popular music has caused various foreign reactions from admiration to outright rejection. Sometimes, international audiences perceived it as too ‘Teutonic’; other times, this was exactly the reason for its appeal. This article traces ‘Teutonic’ features in 400 years of German popular music history, seeking to identify the emergence and development of ‘Teutonic’ stereotypes as well as their perception inland and abroad. The metal discourse was analysed based on a corpus of nearly 200,000 pages from magazines such as the British Kerrang! and the German Metal Hammer, Rock Hard and Deaf Forever. Stereotypes such as perfectionism, precision and rigidity seem to stem from historical roots, yet their projection onto ‘Teutonic metal’ is over-simplified and often out of context. History suggests that German metal bands were most successful when they exaggerated Germanness. Occasionally, bands became successful because their German features made them sound unique, even though they did not promote their heritage proactively. More often, though, bands that were unintentionally perceived as typically German were less appealing to a foreign audience. In the magazines, discussion of Teutonic attributes almost vanished in the twenty-first century. Global production practices needing to conform to international expectations of ever faster, tighter and heavier records likely made metal artists around the world adopt qualities that previously defined ‘Teutonic music’. It will therefore be interesting to see if or how German stereotypes in metal music will live on.
From Bach to Helloween. ‘Teutonic’ stereotypes in the history of popular music
Metal Music Studies, 2020
Throughout the centuries German popular music has caused various foreign reactions from admiration to outright rejection. Sometimes, international audiences perceived it as too ‘Teutonic’, other times this was exactly the reason for appeal. This article traces ‘Teutonic’ features in 400 years of German popular music history, seeking to identify the emergence and development of ‘Teutonic’ stereotypes as well as their perception inland and abroad. The metal discourse was analysed based on a corpus of nearly 200,000 pages from magazines such as the British Kerrang! and the German Metal Hammer, Rock Hard and Deaf Forever. Stereotypes such as perfectionism, precision and rigidity seem to stem from historical roots, yet their projection onto ‘Teutonic metal’ is over-simplified and often out of context. History suggests that German metal bands were most successful when they exaggerated Germanness. Occasionally bands became successful because their German features made them sound unique, even though they did not promote their heritage proactively. More often, though, bands that were unintentionally perceived as typically German were less appealing to a foreign audience. In the magazines, discussion of Teutonic attributes almost vanished in the 21th century. Global production practices needing to conform to international expectations of ever faster, tighter and heavier records likely made metal artists around the world adopt qualities that previously defined ‘Teutonic music’. It will therefore be interesting to see if or how German stereotypes in metal music will live on.
Recent international success of German bands such as Rammstein and Tokio Hotel, shows that the German rock scene has known an increasing importance in Europe and in the world. Indeed, German popular culture adopted rock music early, such as other European countries. It created its own rock production, developing its own ‘’cosmopolite aesthetic’’ (Motti Regev, 2007). Such as other Rock scenes (Dutch, Scandinavian) the aesthetics of German rock music imply a dialectical articulation between the national culture and the globalized aesthetic of rock culture. This articulation reveals the remarkable complexity of the representation of the German identity in pop music. Applying a socio-semiotic approach to a corpus of video-clips, I wish to question the main tendencies and forms of representation of the German identity in rock culture. Throughout this paper, I will demonstrate that Germanness in German Rock music is a heterogeneous construction, following two main tendencies. The first one is a « large » conception which considers German identity belonging to European and occidental culture. Another conception focusses more on local specificities of the German culture and the German history. Finally we will show that innovative musical creation and authenticity are the keys to the international success of the German rock scene.
Global Metal Music and Culture
2016
This book defines the key ideas, scholarly debates, and research activities that have contributed to the formation of the international and interdisciplinary field of Metal Studies. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including popular music, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics, this volume offers new and innovative research on metal musicology, global/local scenes studies, fandom, gender and metal identity, metal media, and commerce. Offering a wide-ranging focus on bands, scenes, periods, and sounds, contributors explore topics such as the riff-based song writing of classic heavy metal bands and their modern equivalents, and the musical-aesthetics of Grindcore, Doom and Drone metal, Death metal, and Progressive metal. They interrogate production technologies, sound engineering, album artwork and band promotion, logos and merchandising, t-shirt and jewelry design, and the social class and cultural identities of the fan communities that define the global metal music economy and subcultural scene. The volume explores how the new academic discipline of metal studies was formed, while also looking forward to the future of metal music and its relationship to metal scholarship and fandom. With an international range of contributors, this volume will appeal to scholars of popular music, cultural studies, social psychology and sociology, as well as those interested in metal communities around the world.
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.
Sonic Signatures in Metal Music Production. Teutonic vs British vs American Sound
Samples, 2020
http://www.aspm-samples.de/ Popular music studies have seen a rising interest in what could be called »sonic signatures«. Based on previous research involving interviews with seminal German producers, this article explores sonic signatures of three of the first metal nations. Producing pastiche mixes – ›Teutonic‹ (German), American and British – of the same multi-track recording allowed to directly compare the sonic signatures of the full arrangements and their individual parts. Such an approach further considered practical challenges that real-world mixing and mastering engineers face when crafting music with specific sonic signatures in mind. The findings suggest that the same source material can be modified to create unique sounds as per the mixing engineer’s vision. In the genre’s formative years sonic signatures used to be more distinct due to the smaller number of bands, producers and studios. Capability of modern production tools, the shift from recording to mixing, and access to production knowledge resulted in a multitude of signatures within and across countries and cultures, making it harder than ever before to characterise national signatures in metal music.
Amalgamated anecdotes: Perspectives on the history of metal music and culture studies
Metal Music Studies, 2014
Metal music and culture studies has witnessed rapid growth since its first international scholarly conference in 2008. Six years later, there are regular conferences and symposia; the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS); a refereed journal; archives of primary sources; a comprehensive bibliography; and robust scholarly communication. This article examines the history, status and future of metal studies. Through interviews with several key players, the story of 'how' and 'why' this new field of study emerged is illustrated. introduction 'Through stories, the complexities of human interactions are portrayed.' (Calvert 2007: 606) For many of us in the metal music and culture studies arena, we have reached the state where the number of dissertations, theses, monographs, journal
A European Musical Recognition: How Kosmische Musik Diverted Contemporary Popular Music
The 6th Biennial Conference of the Progect Network for Studies of Progressive Rock - Progressive Rock: Beyond Time, Genre, Geography..., 2024
The paper aims to solve the gap within the questions raised about the inner procedure involved in the recognition of popular music's subgenres functionalities. The Kosmische Musik have been a keystone in the definition of contemporary music through some decisive, internal, happenings. The focus settles on progressive rock in general, to then explore in depth the German ramification of this genre. Three are the main research questions this work addresses: how popular music changed after the rise of progressive rock? How was this accomplished by German progressive rock? And finally, where does it lay exactly the heterogeneity of this genre, so consistent in some of its aspects but also very far from itself? The paper advances Kosmische Musik as a solution to this dilemma. Apart from Great Britain, it is important to consider the phenomenon from a European perspective on account of the fact that progressive rock did not flourish exclusively in the contexts of Leeds and Canterbury. Current literature is increasingly acknowledging how, especially in the last ten years, progressive rock may be considered as a strictly European genre. Kosmische Musik has given an essential contribution to the aftermaths of the further German culture, to such an extent that an investigation on this movement would involve the fields of politics and social studies as well, evaluating how the mingling with cultural, social, historical, political and media contexts influenced the development of this musical genre. According to the musical processes derived from the compositions of the German artists, technology and its chief devices played a crucial and contrasting role in the means of their usage: every musician who took actively part in this matter impacted the near and long coming future of music.