Running with the Devil. Robert Walser

       Introduction

      *

      In the catacombs of a nineteenth-century warehouse, hulking in a rundown riverfront district, passageways wind through rough stonework to connect small rooms, each fronted by a sturdy iron door. Behind these doors musicians compose and rehearse through all hours of the day and night. Wandering the crooked hallways, I hear waves of sound clashing and coalescing: powerful drums and bass, menacing and ecstatic vocals, the heavy crunch of distorted electric guitars. In some rooms, lone guitarists practice scales, arpeggios, heavy metal riffs, and Bach transcriptions. Occasionally, I pass an open door, and musicians who are taking a break consider my presence with cool curiosity.

      I am struck by the resemblance of these underground rehearsal spaces to the practice rooms of a conservatory. The decor is different, but the people are similar: musicians in their late teens and early twenties, assembled for long hours of rigorous practice. There is a parallel sense of isolation for the sake of musical craft and creativity, a kindred pursuit of technical development and group precision. And like conservatory students, many of these heavy metal musicians take private lessons, study music theory, and practice scales and exercises for hours every day. They also share the precarious economic future faced by classical musicians; in both cases, few will ever make enough money performing to compensate them for the thousands of hours they have practiced and rehearsed.

      There are important differences from the conservatory environment, too, not the least of which is the grungy setting itself, which underlines the fact that this music does not enjoy institutional prestige or receive governmental subsidy. The musicians must pool their funds to pay for rental of the rooms, and the long hair that marks them as members of a heavy metal subculture also ensures that they are not likely to have access to jobs that pay well. On the other hand, many of these people are actually working as musicians, at least part-time. Unlike most of their peers in the academy, they know a great deal about the commercial channels to which they hope to gain access. Some talk of not compromising their art for popular success, but there is little evidence of the music academy’s pretense that art can be pursued apart from commerce. This is in part because they are more closely connected with their potential audiences, through their own fan activities and those of their friends, while relatively few aspiring classical musicians actually belong to the moneyed class that underwrites the performance of classical music. Heavy metal musicians are, in fact, strongly influenced by the practices of the musical academy, but their activities also retain the priorities of collective creation and orality derived from traditions of popular music making.

      The noisy vaults of that warehouse and the musicians who haunt them evoke images and raise issues that will be central to my discussions of heavy metal. If metal could be said to have gotten started in any single place, it would be Birmingham, England, the industrial city whose working class spawned Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That heavy metal bands now labor in spaces abandoned by industry is particularly appropriate for a music that has flourished during the period of American deindustrialization. And just as the labor of industrial production is invisible in mass media representations of consumer products, the musical labor that sustains and reinvents mass-mediated popular music often takes place in such marginal locations. Heavy metal is perhaps the single most successful and enduring musical genre of the past thirty years; yet it is in such dank cellars that many of its future stars serve their apprenticeships. This noisy basement is a good analogy for the position heavy metal occupies in the edifice of cultural prestige.

      When I began writing about heavy metal in 1986, it seemed a strange thing for a cultural critic—let alone a musicologist—to do. Metal has been ignored or reviled, not only by academics of all stripes but even by most rock critics. Yet in the United States and many other countries, heavy metal was arguably the most important and influential musical genre of the 1980s; throughout the decade, it became increasingly clear that, between them, hip hop and heavy metal were redefining American popular music. Moreover, the debates surrounding heavy metal and the people who make it—over meaning, character, behavior, values, censorship, violence, alienation, and community—mark metal as an important site of cultural contestation. This is most obvious when attacks come from groups with overt moral missions, such as the Parents’ Music Resource Center, Christian fundamentalist groups, rock critics, or academics. But intense reactions to heavy metal are widespread: a recent marketing survey found that ten million people in the United States “like or strongly like” heavy metal—and that nineteen million strongly dislike it, the largest backlash of any music category.¹ People care deeply about heavy metal, one way or another, which suggests that it engages with some fundamental social values and tensions.

      Such strong reactions, along with heavy metal’s sheer popularity, might seem sufficient justification for the study of heavy metal, since the genre embraces such a significant portion of the musical activity of our time. However, I was initially drawn to writing about metal not because of such a sociological or political mandate. Rather, I became interested in exploring heavy metal because I found the music compelling. Already active as a professional musician on other instruments, I began playing guitar in the late 1970s. I moved among bands and musical styles for several years, learning on stage rather than in a practice room, from other musicians instead of from sheet music or recordings, and in 1980 I found myself playing heavy metal before I had actually listened to much of it. As a performer, metal granted me access to its power almost immediately—it doesn’t take long to learn to play power chords—yet its musical subtleties and technical demands continued to inspire and challenge me a decade later.

      I once heard a prominent sociologist of popular music tell an audience that he actually had no interest in the music he had been studying for years. The reason he gave for having become involved with studying popular music, rather than some other “product,” was that all of the other industries were taken. He was not embarrassed by this admission; rather, he seemed to take it as a point of pride, perhaps because he thought such objectivity would enhance his scholarly rigor. It seemed appropriate to have no particular investment in the products of the industry he studied; he thought it no more important to discuss or discriminate among musical texts than it would be to analyze individual tires or refrigerators.

      To be sure, scholars who interpret cultural