Session 6: Cultural Theory and the Music

Session 6: Cultural Theory and the Music
Chair: Claudia Azevedo

From Forests Unknown: Eurometal and the Audio Political Unconscious
Scott Wilson
Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University, United Kingdom

The idea of an audio political unconscious, of music as a kind of wo es war of political thought is suggested by Jacques Attali when he argues that music, as a particular organization of noise, heralds the coming of a future social order (1977: 4). The extremes of metal, however, push at the intensely pleasurable threshold of dis/organization in which music becomes noise as well as vice versa. Any notion of a future social order promised by metal therefore can only be seen as highly equivocal and as precluded as much as pre-empted. But that does not mean that immanent to metal there isn’t the possibility of some future thinking of the political. Certainly, as this paper argues, the extremes of metal exist in the absence of any political thought adequate to the current state of affairs.
Over the past 20 years metal has become the name under which multiple styles, scenes and festivals have articulated the pleasures, desires and demands of numerous people across Europe, old and new. National and regional varieties of DM, BM, battle, folk, doom, ambient and so on have tracked the expansion of the EU and its borderlands. At the same time, the expansion of the homogenizing force of the techno-bureaucratic EU that is itself a symptom of the failure of the nation-state in the face of global capital, has left a trail of discontents, some of which have found a voice in metal. When considering the reasons why, it is tempting to point to the investment in pagan symbols, figures and aims, and suggest, after Ernesto Laclau, that this betrays a hegemonic process at work since ‘hegemony is nothing more than the investment, in a partial object, of a fullness which will always evade us because it is purely mythical’. It could be suggested that the pagan ‘objets a‘ are the positive reverse of the absence of any European popular culture in which could be located a political alternative to the ‘globalatinization’ (Derrida) represented by institutions like the EU.
Metal has provided a basis for resistance to ‘globalatinization’ however because of the initial displacement represented by metal’s ’satanic’ provocation of Christianity. At the same time, the virulent negativity of metal’s satanic momentum prevents it from coalescing into some reactionary ethnic or nationalist project. Music marks out and traverses territory both psychic and real, individual and collective, and the proliferation of forms and styles (and modes of non-productive expenditure associated with pre-modern European cultures) is an effect of the music itself that unfolds a zone of exploration and experimentation that takes it beyond current social and political formations.

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Modalities of the Avant-garde: The Aesthetic Role of Light in the Parallax of Alexander Scriabin’s Opera, Mysterium and Heavy Metal Performance
Joseph Blessin
McGill University, Canada

It is an inexorable assumption that Heavy Metal as a rock genre be especially poignant in its aggressive stance towards the hallow institutions of all forms of Western hegemony, be they cultural, political and religious. This is accepted with such certainty that some would even say that Heavy Metal as a musical genre offers a legitimate antipodal space to these institutions – a space where Lucifer has deposed the Christian god-king and has effaced his heirs’ “Enlightenment” constitutions with nihilistic expletives and sacrilegious profanities. It is this characterization of Heavy Metal that I wish to challenge. The basis of my challenge comes from my own research into surprising parallels between nineteenth century operatic and modern rock performance. From this research I have discovered three continuities with direct relevance to the conference’s theme: a) the continued lopsided relationship between performer and spectators resembling something akin to Hegel’s “Master-slave” analogy; b) perpetuity of industrial noise – supplanting sublime sounds of storms, waterfalls and tectonic activities, pre-industrial age (Luigi Russolo, 1913) – being articulations of a new class of deities, comprising industrialists whose “work-based practices” in music (Georgina Born, 2005) establish the ubiquitous framework for new Eurological ordinances; and c) alchemic formulas amalgamating sounds, digitalized effects, texts, images, gestures, light and color into new “heavy metallic” compounds with transcendental glow, as alluded to in Douglas Kahn’s 1990 essay, “Track Organology”. Heavy Metal should be looked at within the broader development in the West of “industrialized” music where technological wizardry in production and performance and performers’ own sorcerous stage presence are all really extensions of occultic practices of early practitioners who learned during the Enlightenment how to both reformulate their craft into techniques of science and veil this technological power behind “grids” of the avant-garde (Rosalind Krauss, 1981) so as to maintain its continued mystifying power. The basis of this comparison will be the unrealized early twentieth century performance, Mysterium, by the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and will include exploration of analogous tactics seen in modern rock production and performance.

Slaying the Pulse : Rhythmic Organisation and Rhythmic Interplay within Heavy Metal
Dietmar Elflein
Technical University Brunswick, Seminar für Musik und Musikpädagogik, Germany

I would like to present initial findings of my doctoral thesis in musicology on the musical language of Heavy Metal. My main analytical focus in this paper will be on rhythmic organisation and rhythmic interplay since the importance of rhythm as an analytical parameter in popular music studies has been posited very often but has rarely been put into practice.
The main musical unit of any Heavy Metal song is a riff, that is a short rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic figure played by at least one instrument, mostly the electric guitar. Riffs are repeated and form the structural framework of the song, or the modal structure as Glenn T. Pillsbury called it. But, like Robert Walser wrote back in 1993, Heavy Metal’s rhythmical framework is organised more basically around a pulse than a meter. Therefore, the riff and the pulse relate to each other in different ways.
Riffs can be seen as a special way to organise the pulse. The simplest riff just copies the pulse on one note. Other riffs produce groups of pulses by changing the pitch or the accent of pulses, respectively by combing or silencing pulses in order to create longer notes or pauses. One common feature of Heavy Metal is to deal with a tension produced by groupings of three and four pulses, which are either played simultaneously by different instruments or in succession by at least one instrument. This relates to one common method of rhythmic interplay within Heavy Metal, which tends to double the rhythmic (and melodic) structure of the riff and therefore also doubles this tension. Some selected and typical ways of rhythmic interplay will be analysed and presented – also as a possible expression of ensemble virtuosity within Heavy Metal.

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