It is not suprising that academics have ignored or misconstrued heavy metal, although it seems curious that few professional rock critics have found anything interesting to say about what was, in the 1980s, the most popular genre of rock music. For many academics, denigration of metal is a necessary part of the defense of “high” culture, while for rock critics it is as an easy route to hipness: their scorn is displayed as a badge of their superiority to the musicians and audiences of heavy metal. All see metal as a travesty of various dearly held myths: about authenticity, beauty, and culture, on the one hand, and authenticity, rebellion, and political critique on the other. If neither academics nor rock critics have had much impact on metal’s popularity with its fans, they have helped to shape the dominant stereotype of heavy metal as brutishly simple, debilitatingly negative and violent, and artistically monotonous and impoverished. Thus it is necessary to examine their views criticially in order to clear space for a different sort of account of heavy metal.
For both careless condemnations and flip celebrations can have serious effects: especially since the mid-1980s, heavy metal has been at the center of debates over censorship. Rock critics and academics have the power to sway public opinion on issues of real consequence, for their access to effective and prestigious channels of mass mediation makes their opinions more influential than the writings of fans and musicians. It is clear from the ongoing public furor that attends metal that this music matters: around it coalesce cultural crises in authority, threats of breakdowns in the reproduction of social relations and identities.72 Besides the sociological significance of heavy metal as a phenomenon that absorbs the time, energy, thoughts, and cash of millions of people, it is a site of explicit social contestation that can tell us much about contemporary American society. As with country music, such critical dismissals as I have cited are the product of a prejudicial view of metal as something monolithic and crude; many casual condemnations of heavy metal depend upon misunderstanding its complex status as a genre. But the significance of heavy metal, including the opportunities it creates for important debates over social values and policies, makes it imperative to sort out the social and commercial tensions negotiated by heavy metal musicians and fans.
Several recent attacks on heavy metal have made the import of these issues very clear; they will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 5, where I critique several influential denunciations of heavy metal—by Tipper Gore, Joe Stuessy, and others—and propose what I consider more sophisticated explanations of the violent aspects of some metal. My task throughout this book has been to work toward such explanations, and my method is to examine carefully the sounds and images of heavy metal, take seriously fans’ statements and activities, and situate metal as an integral part of a social context that is complex, conflicted, and inequitable. This chapter has explored the interests and tensions that have defined “heavy metal” as a genre with a history. In it, I have taken a functional approach to the study of metal, stressing the ways that genres are constituted through social contestation and transformation. The following chapter takes a more structural tack, investigating the specific musical characteristics that underpin heavy metal as a discourse.
CHAPTER TWO
Beyond the Vocals
Toward the Analysis of Popular Musical Discourses
*
Beyond the vocals, it’s the way a guitar makes you feel when someone hits a particular chord, the way a snare drum is cracked.
—Rob Halford of Judas Priest.1
When asked if he thought his mother would approve of his band’s lyrics, guitarist Eddie Van Halen replied that he had no idea of what the lyrics were.2 Many people talk about the “meaning” of a song when what they are really discussing is only the song’s lyrics. But verbal meanings are only a fraction of whatever it is that makes musicians and fans respond to and care about popular music. This chapter is a prelude to the musical aspects of the chapters that follow, where heavy metal songs will be analyzed within the context of social practices and ideologies. It is also meant as a contribution to an underdeveloped strain in academic work on popular culture: analysis of the music of popular music, in which discussion is grounded in the history and significance of actual musical details and structures, “beyond the vocals.” Specifically, it sketches a view of metal as a discourse by analyzing the signifying practices that constitute heavy metal music. But first a more general argument must be advanced: that musical details can be evaluated in relation to interlocked systems of changing practices and that shifting codes constitute the musical discourses that underpin genres.
This chapter has three parts: It begins with discussion of some theoretical bases for the analysis of musical meaning in popular music; then it proceeds to analyze certain generic features of heavy metal and related musical styles, with reference to a single example, a song by Van Halen; finally, a more integrated analysis of that same piece of music appears, as a way of connecting musical details with genetically organized social experience.
Genre and Discourse
Nowhere are genre boundaries more fluid than in popular music. Just as it is impossible to point to a perfectly exemplary Haydn symphony, one that fulfills the “norms” in every respect, pieces within a popular genre rarely correspond slavishly to generic criteria. Moreover, musicians are ceaselessly creating new fusions and extensions of popular genres. Yet musical structures and experiences are intelligible only with respect to these historically developing discursive systems. As Fredric Jameson argues,
pure textual exemplifications of a single genre do not exist; and this, not merely because pure manifestations of anything are rare, but … because texts always come into being at the intersection of several genres and emerge from the tensions in the latter’s multiple force fields. This discovery does not, however, mean the collapse of genre criticism but rather its renewal: we need the specification of the individual “genres” today more than ever, not in order to drop specimens into the box bearing those labels, but rather to map our coordinates on the basis of those fixed stars and to triangulate this specific given textual moment.3
Jameson reminds us that genre categories are fluid and that individual texts are never static fulfillments of conventional norms but rather are understood with reference to other texts.
Yet Jameson’s concept of genre seems to operate only at the level of texts. We can profitably add to his model Bakhtin’s idea of genre as a “horizon of expectations” brought to bear on texts by historically situated readers. Genres are never sui generis; they are developed, sustained, and reformed by people, who bring a variety of histories and interests to their encounters with generic texts. The texts themselves, as they are produced by such historically specific individuals, come to reflect the multiplicities of social existence: in Bakhtin’s view, language is irreducibly “heteroglot,” and dialogue takes place not only between genres, as Jameson points out, but also within them. Bakhtin contrasts formalistic genre categories with what he calls “speech genres,” relatively stable types of utterance. “Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication.”4 Thus, we might say that a C major chord has no intrinsic meaning; rather, it can signify in different ways in different discourses, where it is contextualized by other signifiers, its own history as a signifier, and the social activities in which the discourse participates.
Simon Frith has recently called for renewed genre analysis of popular music, at the same time that he has