Academic books on heavy metal are finally surfacing at an increasing rate. As a musical genre, heavy metal has long suffered from a number of prejudices, including disparagement of the IQ of its fans, critiques of the noise it makes, and – from a musicological perspective – its alleged simplicity as a musical form. For too long there were only two notable pioneering works, Deena Weinstein's Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (Reference Weinstein1991), and Robert Walser's Running With the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Reference Walser1993), both of which are still important points of reference. The situation of metal within academia has improved more recently with works such as Keith Kahn-Harris' study of metal subculture Extreme Metal (Reference Kahn-Harris2007) and Gerd Bayer's edited volume Heavy Metal Music in Britain (Reference Bayer2009). More works seem set to follow at an increased rate and these two volumes add to this scholarly legacy, albeit from very different perspectives.
Cope's book is on heavy metal as music and as such it is an important contribution to a field which has previously been mostly studied through subcultural readings. Cope is not the first to discuss heavy metal from a musicological perspective, however, as Esa Lilja's Theory and Analysis of Classic Heavy Metal Harmony was published in Reference Lilja2009. Walser also wrote partly from a musicological perspective, as did Harris Berger in his Metal Rock and Jazz. Perception and Phenomenology of Musical Experience (Reference Berger1999).
Both books are the results of doctoral theses. Moberg's is a large study of the Finnish Christian metal music scene, mixing comparative religion approaches, ethnography, cultural studies and cultural musicology. I have to say I find Moberg's work the more convincing of the two, not only because it allies more closely to my own study background in cultural history, but also because Cope's book contains some regrettable interpretational flaws and cultural simplifications. Moberg is more at home with his much more limited subject matter and focus.
To simplify a bit, Cope's central thesis is that Black Sabbath are the origin of all heavy metal as a musical form. He argues this by contrasting their style with that of Led Zeppelin – whom he sees as offering the musical model for hard rock. Cope sees Birmingham as the suitable location for the birth of heavy metal and many bands did indeed come from there. Black Sabbath came from the city's Aston area, two of Led Zeppelin's four members, Plant and Bonham, were also from the Birmingham area, while other Birmingham acts include Judas Priest. Located between London and Liverpool, Birmingham was in a good position to receive influences from both places in the 1960s. The bleak working class realities, industrial landscapes and the anxieties of poor youths living in the area arguably mixed well to produce hard-hitting and distorted music.
Black Sabbath's angular and modal based riffage can be contrasted with Led Zeppelin's bluesy hard and art rock and Cope notes this in order to criticise both Weinstein and Walser, who see metal as originating from both bands. Of course one could claim that there is also a healthy amount of blues in Black Sabbath. They were, after all, originally a blues band called Earth and a lot of their material has blues rock structures. However, I sympathise with Cope's reasoning here as there indeed is a bigger transgression in Black Sabbath's ‘coding’ of the blues rock legacy towards down-tuned power chords. This idea and its musicological documentation might be the most rewarding part of the book, as the comparison is certainly interesting. However, can there ever be a strict dichotomy between heavy metal and hard rock? It could, for example, be claimed that Led Zeppelin were a great influence on 1980s hair/glam metal bands such as Whitesnake, Ratt, Poison, etc. The line between metal and hard rock became blurred at that time. Even Ozzy Osborne wore make-up and had his hair done in a more ‘girly’ fashion in the 1980s. The distinction Cope makes with ‘misogynist’ hard rock and ‘anti-patriarchal’ heavy metal becomes very strange indeed. Twisted Sister, anyone?
Cope claims that Black Sabbath are both Satanic and anti-patriarchal. Both of these claims are somewhat dubious, and the reasoning seems to follow from very selective work on source material. Evidently the members of Black Sabbath, especially bass player Geezer Butler (originally the main lyricist) were interested in the occult. But they were also the first to publicly claim they were ‘More Brum than Beelzebub’ (as Keith Altman put it in Record Mirror, 30 January 1971). They took their sinister-sounding name from horror fiction, a Boris Karloff 1963 film Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura, by Italian director Mario Bava). In addition, a lot of their songs, especially ‘After Forever’, give a slightly different perspective from that of Satanism:
A lot of the satanic imagery in the songs like ‘Black Sabbath’ (1970), ‘Lord of This World’ (1971) and so on, could easily and plausibly be interpreted as a warning against dealing in the black arts and Satanism. In the infamous title track ‘Black Sabbath’, singer Ozzy Osborne cries to God to help him and there's the warning to ‘turn round quick and start to run’ after coming face to face with an infernal figure. The strangest thing is that Cope uses ‘War Pigs’ from Paranoid (1970) as his prime example of a Satanic song. However the song is quite clearly about mundane warlords or politicians who send innocent men to their deaths in wars, but in the end the perpetrators are sent to hell by ‘hand of God’. This could just as well be interpreted to be stereotypical Judeo-Christian imagery, where the bad get their just deserts. The original song title ‘Walburgis’ did refer more to the actual witches and, as Cope writes, the band members were into occult fiction such as Dennis Wheatley and had probably read some Aleister Crowley. But there is a big jump from four Aston blokes' interest in horror fiction and some elements of the occult to claiming that they were on a Satanic mission. It is actually rather hard to find a clear coherent message from Black Sabbath output, other than a predilection for a variety of dark issues, hippie psychedelic fantasies and drug culture.
Similar counter-arguments can be made for Cope's arguments about the band's alleged anti-patriarchal stance. Cope is anxious to interpret Black Sabbath as some kind of harbinger of the feminist movement in metal – there was not that much talk about women in their lyrics anyway – paving the way for female metal front-women such as Arch Enemy's Angela Gossow and Nightwish's Tarja Turunen. Yes, Black Sabbath certainly referred to Wiccan deities ‘Mother Moon’ and ‘Father of Creation’ in their lyrics to ‘Symptom of the Universe’ (from Sabotage, 1975), but originally they were cursed by the Wicca leader Alex Sanders, after which they started to use huge crosses (not inverted, mind you) as protection. The song probably owes more to hippie ideology and cocaine use by band members at the time of recording than it does to an effort to create a society based on Wiccan ideas. It would also be interesting to ask how the openly misogynistic lyrics of later bands such as Venom fit into this alleged anti-misogynistic metal legacy. Cope claims that Venom's anti-Christianity – which to him needs to be anti-patriarchal – is weakened by it. I guess, following this logic, Venom are less heavy metal because they do not fit well with Cope's arguments.
The list of references is quite modest. The discography is more impressive, even if it seems to follow more commercial trails. But where are the discussions about other influences on metal, such as punk (there is a whole chapter on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal without mentioning it, when most researchers would claim that it was an essential influence), rap, funk, techno? Cope's treatment makes things simple, as almost everything just neatly follows from Black Sabbath's legacy. Even then – and this is most striking for me as a doom metal musician – there is the complete non-existence of this metal sub-genre in this book. This is a particular omission given that it is the one that truly followed the Black Sabbath legacy most strictly. Bands like Candlemass, Pentagram, Saint Vitus and Witchfinder General (who truly sound a lot like Black Sabbath and were from Stourbridge) are a big omission in the book on Black Sabbath's influence, as is doom metal's later evolution towards new distinctive styles which took elements from death metal, avantgarde, gothic rock, and so on. These are just examples of the kind of variations which might escape – or possibly even be knowingly ignored by – a musicologist who is chasing the genealogy of a strict set of musical ideas.
Marcus Moberg's theoretical approach to the musical and religious field of his study is a mixture of social constructionism and discourse analysis. Using the concepts of ‘identity’, ‘scene’ and ‘subculture’, he draws on interviews he conducted with Finnish Christian metal musicians from bands such Deuteronomium, Hilastherion, Lumina Polaris, Megiddon and Sacrecy. The ethical considerations and self-positioning Moberg makes are particularly praiseworthy. He is indeed one of the architects of the ‘Christian metal’ which is discussed in the interviews and, as a result, in the book itself. However, he still defines himself as an outsider in this scene, as his interest is clearly scholarly in its nature.
Moberg's contextualisation is long, almost to a fault. He starts from very general considerations and moves slowly towards smaller things and localities. Instead of just focusing on Finnish Christian metal bands, Moberg begins with takes on religion in the contemporary West, the secularisation of culture, the relation of religion and popular culture, metal music and culture, and the fragmentations, diversifications, controversies and forms of resistance within metal. Despite getting to the actual thesis topic as late as page 125, by then Moberg has offered the reader a wide range of research literature which is introduced in quite a critical manner. He also offers many useful conceptual definitions. Because of this the book can be recommended to many more people beyond those who simply want to know more about the Christian metal scene in Finland.
To conclude, both books demand attention for those interested in heavy metal music from an academic perspective. I find Moberg's book the better study and most to the point. However Cope's book is also extremely interesting. One just needs to remember he is seemingly writing to prove a musicological point, and so ignores a lot of culturally complex issues on the way.
