Running with the Devil. Robert Walser
nor even argument: “This is not a music of hope, and in no way is it a music of real freedom, because it firmly rejects the possibility of actual change…. the rules of the form have been established … they cannot be violated.” Moreover, the author assumes that the credibility of this judgment will be unaffected by his nonchalant admission: “I don’t know anything about heavy metal.”57 Articles on heavy metal in news magazines, like the infamous Newsweek conflation of metal and rap as “the culture of attitude,” usually replicate the same combination of derogatory stereotypes and blithe ignorance. In an advertisement for their special issue on teenagers, Newsweek located them in “the age of AIDS, crack, and heavy metal.”58
Those rock critics who actually do know the music have rarely written anything about it that its enemies haven’t already said. Robert Duncan’s vivid description of heavy metal, quoted above, defiantly celebrates an outsider’s fearful view of metal. But his defense is superficial, never really taking the metal seriously as music or politics; he ends up muttering about “draining of hope,” “deadening of passion,” metal as “anaesthetic.”59 Chuck Eddy’s guide to the five hundred best metal albums is filled with virtuosic style analysis; ultimately, though, Eddy seems envious of a nihilism he thinks he sees in heavy metal but that he could never quite dare to embrace.60 Charles M. Young says fondly: “Heavy metal is transitional music, infusing dirtbags and worthless puds with the courage to grow up and be a dickhead.”61 Young makes some good comments about how metal creates feelings of equality and worth, but lacking analysis of musical and social tensions, his article is much better at asking questions than answering them. Other than Philip Bashe’s useful history and some fine analytical and historical articles in guitar players’ magazines, rock journalists have published relatively few insights about heavy metal.62
Academics have achieved much less. The academic study of popular music is in transition; scholarship of recent popular music has until recently been dominated by sociological approaches that totally neglect the music of popular music, reducing the meaning of a song to the literal meaning of its lyrics. This is called “content” analysis, and it assumes that an outside reader will interpret lyrics just as an insider would; it also assumes a linear communication model, where artists encode meanings that are transmitted to listeners, who then decipher them, rather than a dialectical environment in which meanings are multiple, fluid, and negotiated. Parallel to this, it presumes a Parsonian view of society, wherein social systems tend toward a natural equilibrium, instead of seeing society in permanent flux, as various groups strive for equality or dominance. Most writing about popular music also suffers from a lack of history; with little sense of how music has functioned in other times and places, writers often mistake transformations of ongoing features of popular music for unprecedented signs of innovation or decay. Also, most sociological studies offer no integration of ethnographic and textual analytic strategies. Mass mediation is typically assumed to be a barrier, standing between artist and audience with the power to corrupt both. But while it is crucial to acknowledge that mass mediation functions to disrupt a sense of history and community, it is just as important to see how it can make available the resources with which new communities are built.63
Quite a few “content analyses” of heavy metal lyrics have been published. Usually, the researchers who conduct such studies evince an obliviousness to power relationships, which they regard as “objectivity.” They may interview fans at school, with no thought to the constraints on articulation that are already in place in that setting. Students have little motivation to admit to knowledge of lyrics of which their teachers or parents would not approve, and researchers are too willing to see teenagers as inarticulate. For example, Prinsky and Rosenbaum concluded that recent efforts at censorship of rock lyrics are misguided because fans are too dumb to know what the lyrics mean.64 Their study not only ignored the constraints imposed by the classroom environment and the estrangement caused by the researchers’ own “objectivity”; it also implicitly assumed that adults would do better, without considering that classical music audiences, for example, would probably be even less likely to be able to summarize song texts to their satisfaction. Many opera fans prefer not to know what the lyrics are, and the hermeneutic framework promoted by schools and concert halls emphasizes appreciation of sensuous beauty over understanding of meanings.
In another study, Hansen and Hansen assumed that the “themes” of heavy metal (sex, suicide, violence, and the occult, as they saw them) were obvious at the beginning of the experiment. Thus they chose songs they thought fit each category and had four undergraduate research assistants grade heavy metal fans’ understanding of the lyrics. For example, after reading two lines from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution”—“Evil thoughts and evil doings / Cold, alone you hang in ruins”—fans were asked “What does ‘hang in ruins’ mean?” The correct answer was “His life is a mess; every aspect of his world is in shambles.” Thus Hansen and Hansen reduced a haunting image to a platitude, made it sexist by inserting a male pronoun, and went on to generate an astonishing array of tables of data. Their study is framed by the assumptions that the music of heavy metal is irrelevant (they refer to “distractive influences produced by the music itself”); that images can be reduced to singular, literal meanings; that such meanings exist apart from the contexts of their reception; that sociologists and college students understand heavy metal better than metal fans do; that “correct comprehension” of lyrics is a measure of the seriousness and worth of a musical genre or a cultural activity. Hansen and Hansen were arrogantly “objective”; their study tells us nothing about heavy metal because their premises produced their results.65
The growing impact of British cultural studies and new approaches to musicology has so far had disappointingly little effect on the study of rock music, despite the appearance of several pieces on heavy metal that claim that influence. In one of the earliest academic articles about heavy metal, Will Straw argued in 1984 that metal fans do not comprise a subculture because fans don’t engage in subcultural activities, such as record collecting and magazine reading, and because there are no intermediate strata between fans and stars, which indicated little chance for participation. All of these assertions are contradicted by my research, although it is possible that Straw’s assessment may have been partially true of heavy metal at an earlier moment. It is difficult to know how much credence to give to his arguments, however, since Straw gives no evidence of ever having read a fan magazine, talked with a fan, attended a concert, or even listened to a record. The first published version of his paper “explained” heavy metal as an epiphenomenon of record industry shifts, thus removing politics and agency from the activities of everyone except record industry executives.66
Marcus Breen has offered an explanation of heavy metal that combines the worst characteristics of postmodern theorizing. For Breen, metal celebrates numbness and oblivion; it is “a joyride into the spirit of post-industrial alienation.”67 Such conclusions are possible because Breen’s analysis is equally unhampered by musical analysis and ethnography. In an amazing flight of fancy, he imagines that when Axl Rose sang, “I want to see you bleed” (in “Welcome to the Jungle”), he might have been referring to menstruation. Lacking any understanding of how heavy metal could be a vehicle for meaning, he concludes that its popularity is due to the “modern marketing and selling methods” of a show business cabal.
Late in 1991, the first book-length academic study of heavy metal was published, Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal.68 Weinstein is a sociologist, and her book has all of the virtues and faults of most strictly sociological studies of popular culture. It carefully summarizes the details of concert behavior, describing the icons and activities of metal fans and musicians. But Weinstein has nothing useful to say about the music of heavy metal, and her perspective is a familiar Parsonian one, grounded in “taste publics” and structural positions. “Music is the master emblem of the heavy metal subculture,” she asserts, a tribute that makes the latter static and trivializes the former. In fact, Weinstein regards the music as but a distraction from analysis; when she teaches about heavy metal, she no longer makes tapes available, giving her students only lyrics to work with.69
Though her book is nothing if not an impassioned defense of heavy metal, Weinstein, as a sociologist, must aspire to “objectivity,” and she even disingenuously