Running with the Devil. Robert Walser
to their attention, as well as the social structures and tensions that make them meaningful. But to analyze popular culture only in terms of the commercial structures that mediate it is to “imagine markets free of politics.”2 Economics becomes an autonomous abstraction from a conflicted society, and the hard-nosed study of institutions and monetary power is but a false veneer of political engagement, masking a refusal to confront the political dimension of economic choices. As Christopher Small asks those who discuss popular culture only in terms of production and consumption,
How do you “consume” music, when (a) music isn’t a thing and (b) it’s still there after you’ve used it—or you think you’ve used it. Just because the industry markets it as commodity doesn’t mean we have to accept their terms of reference. It’s time people stopped talking about “consuming” art and culture and so on and started thinking of art as an activity, something you do. Even buying and playing records are activities; the record is only the medium through which the activity takes place.3
Just as important, most scholars of popular music assume that recent mass-mediated music is somehow more “compromised” than earlier music by its involvement with commercial structures and interests. This is simply not true. Music has always been “commercial,” at least since the Renaissance; that is, music has always been supported by the interests and patronage of particular social groups and enmeshed in institutional politics, mechanisms of distribution, and strategies of promotion.4 If it makes sense to study specific operas as sites of the exchange and contestation of social meanings, rather than as interchangeable epiphenomena of a patronage structure, it makes equal sense to treat more recent popular texts with similar specificity and care.
As a musician, I cannot help but think that individual texts, and the social experiences they represent, are important. My apprenticeships as a performer—conservatory student and orchestral musician, ethnic outsider learning to play Polish polkas, jazz trumpeter, pop singer, and heavy metal guitarist—were periods spent learning musical discourses. That is, I had to acquire the ability to recognize, distinguish, and deploy the musical possibilities organized in styles or genres by various communities. Each song marshals the options available in a different way, and each musical occasion inflects a song’s social meanings. Becoming a musician in any of the styles I have mentioned is a process of learning to understand and manipulate the differences intrinsic to a style, which are manifested differently in each text and performance. Unlike many scholars, I think it is possible to analyze, historicize, and write about these processes.
Moreover, I find some songs powerfully meaningful and others not; so do all of the fans and musicians I know. Some of us are better than others at explaining why we care about this song and not that one, but for most people, music is intimately involved with crucial feelings of identity and notions of community. This is where sociological approaches to the study of popular music have so often failed. For while I do not suggest that either technical training or performing experience are necessary prerequisites for insightful writing about popular music, one must be able to experience—not just discern—differences among musical texts, in order to avoid imposing an interpretation of monotony and singularity of meaning that fans and musicians do not recognize.
Accordingly, I have integrated methods of musical analysis, ethnography, and cultural cricitism in this study. Following the example of scholars of popular culture such as Janice Radway and ethnomusicologists like Steven Feld, I have tried to find out what real listeners hear and how they think about their activities. Along with those working in cultural studies, like John Fiske and George Lipsitz, I want to situate the texts and practices I study within a forthrightly politicized context of cultural struggle over values, power, and legitimacy. And finally, I owe an important debt to the few musicologists, such as Susan McClary and Christopher Small, who have discussed musical structures as social texts imbued with political significance.5
My interest is less in explicating texts or defining the history of a style than in analyzing the musical activities that produce texts and styles and make them socially significant. I find Christopher Small’s notion of “musicking” helpful. Small revives the idea of music as a verb rather than a noun in order to challenge our common practice of analyzing and understanding music in terms of objects, which encourages abstract stylistic description and effaces the social activity that produces musical texts and experiences.6 “Musicking” embraces composition, performance, listening, dancing—all of the social practices of which musical scores and recordings are merely one-dimensional traces. To understand heavy metal as musicking, I studied it from many aspects. I attended concerts, studied recordings, interviewed fans and musicians, took heavy metal guitar lessons, and read fan magazines, industry reports, and denunciations.7 My goal was to find answers through a kind of cultural triangulation, using ethnography as a check on textual interpretation and developing ethnographic strategies out of my own and others’ cultural analyses.
I have chosen to focus on the most popular examples of heavy metal—the bands with multiplatinum record sales and arena-filling concert tours, the bands named as exemplary by fan magazines and by the fans I consulted through questionnaires and interviews: Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Poison, Van Halen, Megadeth, Guns Ν’ Roses, etc. While much interesting work could be done on less popular, “underground” metal subcultures, this study concentrates on massively popular heavy metal because that focus enables engagement with important contemporary debates over music, mass mediation, morality, and censorship. Like Stuart Hall, I see “the popular” as an important site of social contestation and formation, and I find unconvincing the common assumption that culture that exists either at the margins of society or among a prestigious elite is necessarily more important, interesting, complex, or profound than the culture of a popular mainstream.8 Popular culture is important because that is where most people get their “entertainment” and information; it’s where they find dominant definitions of themselves as well as alternatives, options to try on for size.
I have elected to concentrate primarily on music of the 1980s, since that is the music both my informants and I know best, and because that is the decade of heavy metal’s greatest popularity and influence. I have not tried to write a full history of heavy metal, nor have I attempted a comprehensive study of its most important artists or works. Neither have I pursued a more tightly focused study of a particular style or performer. Rather, I have tried to begin establishing an analytic context within which such work could be undertaken by examining several aspects of heavy metal that I feel are crucial to its success and meaningfulness—to its power.
Most important, perhaps, I have tried to pay particular attention to the music of heavy metal, in ways that are both textually specific and culturally grounded. For like most musicians and fans, I respond more intensely to music than to words or pictures. Before I knew any lyrics, before I had even seen any of the major performers, I was attracted to heavy metal by specifically musical factors. Within the context of the other kinds of music I knew, I found the “language” of heavy metal—the coherent body of musical signs and conventions that distinguished it as a genre—powerful and persuasive. Much of this book will be concerned with what has been conspicuously absent from discussions of popular music, whether academic, journalistic, or moralistic: analysis of the specific musical choices embodied in individual songs and organized by genres. Musicians take such conventions and details seriously, and fans respond to them; critics and scholars cannot justify continuing to ignore them.9
Chapter 2 prepares for such discussions by sketching the terms of heavy metal as a discursive practice, as a coherent, though always changing, universe of significant sonic options. I examine heavy metal music as a social signifying system rather than an autonomous set of stylistic traits, employing an approach to musical analysis that construes musical details as significant gestural and syntactical units, organized by narrative and other formal conventions, and constituting a system for the social production of meaning—a discourse. This chapter dissects and discusses heavy metal music as a discourse, with reference to an example that is in many ways paradigmatic for the genre. Both this and the following chapter are fairly “guitarocentric,” since the point is to get “beyond the vocals,” and guitarists have been the primary composers and soloists of heavy metal music.