This collection of 10 chapters is a welcome addition to the increasingly diverse discourse around aggressive popular music. Two contributors tackle the challenging industrial and noise genres, but in the main this work concentrates on various subcultures in punk rock (four essays) and heavy metal (four essays). There is already a significant body of literature on punk, but encouragingly these chapters examine hitherto overlooked artists and scenes using innovative methodologies. However, the most interesting and rewarding essays are probably those that engage with the ongoing paradigm shift in heavy metal studies.
Barring a few notable and well-thumbed exceptions (Robert Walser and Deena Weinstein both receive multiple acknowledgements) heavy metal has until recently either been ignored, dismissed out of hand, or examined in patronising terms rarely applied to other forms of popular music. Such lacklustre coverage is criticised in the introductory and afterward essays framing this collection, and a quick glance over three decades of peer-reviewed journal papers on the subject does much to uphold the editors’ concerns. Twenty years ago, for example, researchers explored the supposed deleterious effects of heavy metal on ‘adolescents in an inpatient psychiatric setting’; metal's correlation to ‘religiosity, and suicide acceptability’ and specific instances of ‘adolescent suicidality’; ‘juvenile delinquency and satanic identification’ in metal; or the potential connections between aggressive music, ‘arousal’, anger’ and ‘adolescent turmoil’. A more thorough linguistic analysis, or maybe just a simple word cloud, might highlight further commonalities in subject matter. Whatever, the titles alone suggest something of a moral panic comparable to that invoked by rock and roll, psychedelia, punk, or hip-hop across the preceding decades.
A second wave of research took shape during the first decade of the current millennia. However this discourse continued to be hidebound by questions over this genre's ability to cultivate progressive attitudes and behaviours. One paper investigated correlations between gender and power in heavy metal subcultures, while others sought to define fans’ moral boundaries or explored public attitudes towards aggression. Only recently have more fully realised studies finally begun to unpick the profound relationship between the ideas, identities and loyalties of this genre's enthusiasts. At last, it seems, the cross-cultural global significance of metal has attained appropriate recognition. As a result we now benefit from an organised body of scholars (International Society for Metal Music Studies) who publish an eponymous peer-reviewed journal and attend academic gatherings such as the International Conference on Heavy Metal and Popular Culture in Bowling Green, or Modern Heavy Metal in Helsinki. A burgeoning variety of feature-length documentary movies from Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2007) to Arise: The Sri Lankan Metal Music Documentary (2010) celebrate the truly international scope of the genre, and a diverse range of monographs and collected essays (such as this) facilitate more considered reflection.
Eric James Abbey's introduction proffers a manifesto for the new pluralism in this field of study. Having established the case for aggressive music's importance, the essays that follow demonstrate by way of example the value of inclusive, innovative and rigorous analysis. Alongside relatively conventional academic tropes such as ethnography and performativity we find creative approaches including a pioneering example of physiological laboratory research and a surprisingly adept musicological deconstruction of an intentionally inharmonious punk performance. However, considering this collection's ambitious and broad scope, I wondered whether its overarching philosophy might have been more thoroughly parsed. Aggression is defended as ‘a positive and necessary thing in music and in life’ without which ‘people repress emotion and become withdrawn and possibly violent and depressed’ (p. xiii). The editors’ foundational allegiance to Konrad Lorenz's Reference Lorenz1966 ‘steam boiler model’ where ‘the human body consistently builds up an aggressive energy and must release it somewhere’ (p. xiv), seemed to warrant more nuanced critical evaluation given the project's grand scale.
Notable chapters include Evan Ware's essay on Sid Vicious’ cannibalisation of ‘My Way’, which deconstructs the violence of this energetic assault on Sinatra's classic using a deft combination of musicology and cultural theory. The idea of cannibalism as a postcolonial trope contrasting the ‘savage other’ against the ‘civilised self’ offered an unusual perspective on an overtly British classic punk rendition. Similarly, Marcus Erbe's essay on extreme heavy metal vocalisations evokes notions of monstrosity and demonic possession via the contextual framework of early blues singers before segueing into an entirely original study of metal singing techniques using spectrographic analyses of laryngeal configurations. This study is drawn from an ongoing collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Leipzig University School of Medicine, so hopefully more results will be published in due course.
Ross Hagan presents an informed analysis of the dialogue between noise and audio technology incorporating extensive cultural and theoretical reference points, from Jacques Attali and Dick Hebdige to Edward T. Cone and Hakim Bey. I wondered if Marshall McLuhan's hypothesis on the deterministic relationship between cultural practitioners and their use of technology might not also have been relevant. Nevertheless Hagan's ethnographic approach encouraged the exploration of well-chosen esoteric elements in North America's regional noise scenes. Here the more radical practitioners employ apparatus and techniques shared by military and police forces engaged in aggressive crowd dispersal, siege situations and assertive interrogations. Unlike the unfortunate victims of repressive states, paying audiences at noise events willingly submit to extreme psychological and physical disorientation as a necessary ingredient in their escapist search for blissfully transformative transcendent experiences.
Kevin Fellezs constructs an incisive analysis of African American soul metal power-trio, Stone Vengeance. Despite their conspicuous divergence from hard rock's standardised ethnic norms, these determined cultural outliers boast an impressive career longevity spanning five decades. Stone Vengeance consciously and vigorously historicise their music, citing influences from early blues recording artists such as Charley Patton and Lonnie Johnson ahead of later rock contemporaries: ‘We sing about god, the devil, sex – it's the same thing. You can't really get away from it. They can only pull that on people who don't know the history of the music’ (p. 126). Although wary of undermining the achievements of Robert Johnson and Jimi Hendrix, Stone Vengeance resent the blatant fetishisation of their celebrated predecessors. Understandably resistant toward, and suspicious of, popular culture's whitewashing of African American self-expression, the band are acutely aware of their own disenfranchised status in what remains a highly racialised genre.
Colin Helb's closing essay offers another glimpse into the world of eyebrow-raising genre collisions in the form of Hare Krishna hardcore punk. His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhuada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) established numerous connections with popular music, not least via his support from George Harrison and John Lennon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (Harrison and Lennon had previously been the two Beatles closest to their former guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation.) While ISKCON and hardcore punk may seem unlikely cultural bedfellows, enduring connections were established between the two movements when bands allied to the East Coast straight-edge hardcore punk scene found their heartfelt anti-materialist and tribal ideals remarkably consistent with ISKCON's devotional aesthetic. As this book's most beguiling subtitle asserts: ‘Hare Krishna Hardcore Punk … Yeah, That's a Thing’ (p. 141).
Happily this collection of essays has popular appeal and enjoys positive reviews on various blog sites. My most sustained criticism is that while it claims ‘a varied and interdisciplinary approach’ (p. 181), the voices heard in this book are overwhelmingly male: both editors, all eight contributors, the two reviewers quoted on the back cover, almost all of the subject material (Sid Vicious, The Dropkick Murphys, Amon Amarth, Korpiklaani, Deathroes, Stone Vengeance, Shelter …). As the picture on the front cover of a group of young men in a sweating mosh pit under a crowd-surfing male guitarist demonstrates, this book is dripping with testosterone. Even the two bands featuring women musicians boast vulgar masculine names (Cock E.S.P. and Throbbing Gristle). It's doubly ironic that so much of the work cited here is by women (Donna Gaines, Michelle Phillipov, Natalie Purcell, Deena Weinstein), and that the brief reference to 24-year-old Rachel Aspe (who astonished both judges and audience on La France a un incroyable talent with her death growl vocals) captures the diversity and the lived experience of contemporary young practitioners more effectively than any of the other content.
This work closes with a clarion call for readers to actively pursue their own aspirations toward the study of aggressive music. As the editors conclude, they ‘could spend umpteen more pages’ unearthing new foci of study and exploring all the potential commonalities and disparities therein. Now, however, it's our turn: ‘Good. Go with it. Begin your research today’ (pp. 181–2). Hopefully these essays will inspire future scholars in the field to undertake equally ambitious and inclusive projects. In so doing they might give voice to the many enthusiasts and practitioners not yet represented.
