Running with the Devil. Robert Walser

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