Metal music studies at the intersection of theory and practice (original) (raw)

Metal Music Studies 5.3 'Metal and Musicology' Editorial

Metal Music Studies, 2019

Given its short history as a self-conscious academic field, metal studies' interdisciplinarity is impressive. Metal studies actively draws upon and engages sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, history, geography and, of course, musicology. This special issue of Metal Music Studies, 'Metal and Musicology', is primarily concerned with the latter discipline and its interaction with metal studies. This is the editorial for the 'Metal and Musicology' special issue of Metal Music Studies journal, co-edited by Lewis F. Kennedy and M. Selim Yavuz (2019). The rest of the issue can be found here: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/mms/2019/00000005/00000003\. Members of the International Society for Metal Music Studies have access to the entire back catalogue of Metal Music Studies journal. Join the society here: https://www.metalstudies.org/membership

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.

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

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.

Counter…what? Metal Music and Its Culture in the 21st Century

Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis | Studia de Cultura

The author of this article seeks to verify the thesis that proclaims that metal culture can be classified as counterculture. The author supported her arguments with research she conducted in Poland in 2018–2020. The main research questions concerned controversy in metal music and manifestations of social discord, as well as other issues that might constitute the recognition of metal culture as a counterculture. Based on the research, a redefinition of the term was proposed to make it more useful today.

(No?) Adventures in Recording Land: Engineering Conventions in Metal Music

Rock Music Studies, 2022

Inspired by claims that metal music production has become standardized, this article draws on interviews with eight internationally recognized producers examining whether a uniform methodology in recording metal exists and where creative freedom remains. The findings suggest that although recordists must abide by electroacoustic laws and metal music’s pursuit of ever-heavier music, which entails some best practices, decades-long careers build on creative experimentation and sustained curiosity. The individuality of bands, songs, arrangements, and recording conditions requires individual production approaches, and most successful producers experiment to develop professionally and stay at the forefront of contemporary metal music production practice.

The Ever-Evolving Maze – The Analysis of Metal Genres

Rocznik Komparatystyczny, 2020

The analysis of Metal genres Most scholars define metal music as a genre of rock music that separated from the mother genre in the early 1970s (Weinstein: 11). In the book Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Subculture, Deena Weinstein also states that both rock and roll and rock are "far too broad to be considered genres themselves […] Neither rock and roll nor rock have a standard definition. Each is a bricolage that can only be defined or totalized from one of its aspects" (Weinstein: 11). Therefore heavy metal is a genre within a greater musical current, not a subgenre of rock music. However, this kind of music turned out to be particularly prolific and gave birth to numerous genres, subgenres, and fusion genres on its own. Therefore, modern metal music may be treated as a meta-genre since it encompasses many distinct genres that evolved from a common stem-heavy metal of the 1970s. In this article, I intend to explore and describe metal music and its internal subdivision to demonstrate that despite its harsh façade it is, in fact, an intricate, eclectic, and ever-evolving genre. But first, it is necessary to define the key features of metal.

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.