Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes

Cases from Australia and Japan

R. Overell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137406774
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An ethnographic study of gender, place and belonging, Affective Intensities introduces readers to the embodied sensations, flows and experiences of being in extreme music scenes in Australia and Japan.

1

A Grisly Scene? Extreme Metal Music, Belonging and Ethnography

‘Look – I just don’t get your point –’

Tears well up behind my eyes. This is our first fight, I think. Why can’t he understand?

‘You mean you don’t understand why a woman might find the name Vaginal Carnage offensive? That’s seriously unbelievable. Unbelievable.’

My boyfriend shakes his head and gets up from the couch. He walks towards the television cabinet and grabs a boxed set of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit DVDs.

‘I mean – you watch this crap. You think it’s entertaining. It’s all about rape and murder, right?’

I swallow hard – that isn’t the point. There’s a difference between a procedural crime drama and a band celebrating rape in songs like ‘Vagina Bazooka’.

‘Look – seriously – it’s just a joke. They’re nice blokes. Really. Just come along and see what you reckon.’

Within a week I was watching Vaginal Carnage play live. I could not understand the grisly lyrics, distorted by a pitch-shifter, but the beat was strong. My head nodded up and down to the rhythm. How is this happening? I thought. I’m a feminist. And this music is all about rape. How does this work?

Extreme metal music is often dismissed in popular culture as violent, misogynist and dangerous. However, it still draws fans. In this chapter, I explore how I came to grindcore music, and how this book is a highly personal attempt to reconcile the contradictions outlined above.

Extreme metal has also been the subject of a handful of academic studies, most of which approach it as a ‘scene’. Kahn-Harris (2007) draws on Straw’s (1991) work to offer scene as a means of understanding the globalised cultural formation of extreme metal. As Kahn-Harris points out, ‘scene’ is a term used by extreme metalheads to describe the integrated networks of production, distribution and consumption that characterise extreme metal (p. 14). Certainly, participants in both cities used the term ‘scene’ or shîn to describe their local grindcore culture. Kahn-Harris also emphasises that scene is flexible – it accounts for the multiple sites of extreme metal culture – but is also bounded, and characterised by, who is (and is not) a ‘scene-member’ (p. 21).

I agree with Kahn-Harris that a scenic view of music cultures is fruitful. In particular, being a scene member is about belonging. Through participation in extreme metal cultures, extreme metalheads feel at home in extreme metal spaces and experience affinity with other extreme metallers.

Metal and belonging

Heavy metal and belonging

Grindcore is a generic offshoot of heavy metal. However, many of my participants felt that grindcore was a rejection of what they deemed mainstream or commercial metal. Nevertheless, grindcore scene members did demonstrate similarities with more popular metal scenes: in particular, their adherence to an outsider status; their ‘metal uniform’ of denim jeans and band tee-shirts; and the assumption that ‘real’ metal is made up of guitars, drums and vocals. Thus it is important to outline the broader discourses around heavy metal and belonging. Studies of metal music and belonging follow a similar line to those found in studies of other music genres, although heavy metal was mostly neglected in early cultural studies of music, save for a mention in Willis’s (1978) study of bikers. In fact, it was denigrated as middle-class music by Hebdige, and opposed to the working-class subculture of punk. Academic research specifically on metal is relatively recent, beginning in the 1990s, and generally understands metal as a globalised, multi-classed scene. These approaches to metal have borrowed from subcultural studies in their analysis of metal as an outsider culture due particularly to its popular image as a ‘folk devil’. Within the culture itself, however, academics emphasise the sociality of metal. Scenic belonging is discursively built through proclamations that metalheads do not belong to dominant or mainstream culture. Instead, metallers supposedly find belonging with other misfits who share similarly divergent (from the norm) tastes.

The image of metal as an outsider culture is cultivated by metalheads, but is also affirmed and distributed by institutions, such as popular media. The media frame metallers as outsiders due to the genre’s supposed lack of musicality and social conscience and metalheads’ assumed adherence to non-normative ideologies and practices. This constitutes metal as brutally distinct from dominant culture. Beginning with Black Sabbath’s eponymous album (1970a), metal was popularly associated with violent deviance from normative society. In particular, and following the ham Satanic antics of Black Sabbath (parodied in the popular metal ‘mockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap [Reiner, 1984]), metal was aligned with devil worship and the occult (Moynihan & Soderlind, 1998). The outrageous heretical rhetoric of early British heavy metal bands, on and offstage,¹ led to a moral panic in the UK and in the USA (Davisson, 2010). Dominant media represented heavy metallers as homologously deviant. They were long-haired, white men, dressed down in jeans and concert tee-shirts and most likely engaged in delinquent behaviour.

Nevertheless, heavy metal gushed up to chart pop by the late 1970s with Black Sabbath achieving number one in the British charts for Paranoid (Black Sabbath, 1970b). However, the metal fan, though perhaps not underground, retained the negatively framed image of an outsider who deviated from normative society.

Academics, too, shared this image of metal. Less obviously politically radical than punk, and wrongly assumed to be predominantly petit bourgeois,² metal fans were dismissed by Hebdige as ‘idiot[s]’ (p. 155). Spatially, in British cultural studies, metalheads occupied the maligned reactionary sites of organised sports (Hebdige) and, worse, high street record shops. Brown (2010) critiques these understandings of metal, saying that metal was ‘negatively constituted’ (p. 112) as rock music’s inferior alter ego by academia. Further, the elitist discourse of ‘rockism’ (p. 110), found in music journalism, valorised the supposed authenticity of rock music (seen as having musical proficiency as well as a discernible social ‘message’) and regularly positioned metal, and its fans as, to quote one rock journalist, ‘a malformed idiot thing’ (Murray op cit., p. 111).

In North America, heavy metal produced a similar discourse. Thrash bands, like Slayer, sang about taboo topics such as the Holocaust and, like their British counterparts, appropriated from occultist and Satanic imagery (Slayer, 1986). Following the ascent of the Parents Music Resource Centre (PMRC) in the 1980s, which vilified heavy metal along with other music genres,³ and a series of crimes allegedly linked to heavy metal music, metal and its fans became shorthand for juvenile criminality and Satanic worship.

By the 1990s, particularly in North America, metalheads had acquired an image in popular culture as nihilistic and anti-social. MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head (Judge, 1993) is perhaps the best example of the 1990s image of metalheads as vapid, alienated outsiders constituted by, and constituting, sterile lower middle-class suburbia. A similar sentiment was reflected in academic analyses of heavy metal culture published in the 1990s. North American researchers Arnett (1996) and Gaines (1990) suggested that heavy metal fandom was symptomatic of young people’s suburban anomie under capitalism. Weinstein (2000 [1991]) and Walser (1993) found a thriving, cross-classed sociality in the North American scene, but they both categorised this sociality as masculinist and, sometimes, misogynist. Nevertheless, these academic approaches all affirmed the difference, indeed ‘outsideness’, of heavy metal from popular music cultures. This outsideness, however, was not completely discrete from the dominant. Rather, metal existed right in the heart of hegemonic culture – in the suburbs – as a deviant, even resistant, anomaly.

In contemporary popular culture, heavy metal continues to hold an outsider image, even though popular rock genres such as emo and numetal have incorporated aspects of thrash and death metal. Despite the relative chart-based popularity of these metal genres, they remain dependent on the cultivation of an image of metal as outside ‘mainstream’ culture. Again, suburbia (and particularly the teenage male’s bedroom) is presented as the site of metal consumption and production and the constitution of outsider emotions. Nu-metal and emo videos also regularly represent ‘ordinary’ teenagers in the suburbs, experiencing a sense of isolation.

With the increasing speed and ease with which media products are distributed, heavy metal (inclusive of emo and nu-metal) forms a niche market. Major labels interpellate heavy metal consumers as different from, indeed outside of, ‘ordinary’ consumers. This is despite the, seemingly thorough, incorporation of heavy metal into commodity culture in the form of purchasable music downloads and videos, merchandise and spectacular tours and festivals by popular metal bands.⁴ Further, advertisers regularly use metal music to sell particular commodities, even practices, as outside of ‘mainstream’ culture. Most recently, in Australia, a metal soundtrack has accompanied advertisements for men’s clothing, energy drinks and printer paper.

Beyond the loosely formed and multi-platform heavy metal market, popular culture continues to position metal and metalheads outside of ‘decent’ society. Recent examples include the representation of vampiric metallers as a Satanic cult in the popular drama serial Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (Campanella, 2010). Heavy metal also remains in the Western news as a ‘folk devil’ blamed for suicides (Nine Network, 2007); murder (Bagnall, 2005; Robertson, 2011; Rohter, 1990; Steel, n.d.); rape (Janssen, 2011); and even terrorism (Khatchadourian, 2007). Again, metal is characterised as deviating from normative, mainstream culture. These popular images, of course, further cement the music industry marketeers’ image of metallers as outsiders.

Extreme metal and belonging

Apart from the academic work of the 1990s on heavy metal (Arnett, 1996; Gaines, 1990; Walser, 1993; Weinstein, 2000 [1991]), there is also a growing body of recent academic literature on metal and its various subgenres (Avelar, 2003; Bardine, 2009; Bayer, 2009; Bogue, 2004; Brown, 2003, 2010; Dee, 2009; Earl, 2009; Floeckher, 2010; Heesch, 2010; Moore, 2009; Nilsson, 2009; Spracklen, 2010; Taylor, 2010; Weinstein, 2009a). They take various approaches, based predominantly on analyses of representation. These include: belonging as constitutive of an outsider status through the acquisition and display of ‘extreme’ subcultural capital; and extreme metal as an expression of (g)localised belonging. Like the broader metal studies above, these approaches spatialise metal belonging.

Extreme metal studies build on the notion that metal is a music scene outside popular music where belonging is cultivated through extreme transgression. Some articles have suggested that there is radical, resistant potential in metal’s outsider status (Bogue, 2004; Dee, 2009; Floeckher, 2010; Moore, 2009; Nilsson, 2009; Sarelin, 2010; Spracklen, 2010). Dee’s work on grindcore in Britain is illustrative of contemporary framings of extreme metal as presenting an alternative space of belonging that is resistant to dominant culture. In the spaces of grindcore production and consumption, according to Dee, lies a democratic and radical space beyond capitalism. He suggests that grindcore practitioners and listeners occupy a potentially conscious and critical position due to their awareness of the abject reality of capitalism. This is evident, according to Dee, in the overtly radically left songs of Brutal Truth and Napalm Death and the realism of gore grindcore aesthetics. Baulch (2007) follows a similar line, suggesting that Balinese death metal could be read as a form of resistance to Suharto’s promotion of Javanese-Indonesian culture in the early 1990s.

Matsue’s (2009) work on the Tokyo metal and hardcore scene is particularly relevant. She notes that Japanese metallers constituted themselves as outside of dominant culture. They perceived themselves as angura (underground) relative to the Japanese culture of company work and the popular music culture of J-pop.

Matsue’s and Baulch’s work spatialises belonging in extreme metal. To belong in the scene, Matsue writes, depends on a savviness with angura spaces: the venues where the music is performed. For Baulch, the context of Suharto’s New Order Indonesia meant metal spaces became highly regulated due to their designation as too Western and even dangerous. Suharto’s government required gig organisers to obtain a permit for performance. With metal’s negative image, it was difficult for many Balinese scene members to perform live legally. Thus, ad hoc, often private, spaces were required for gigs and rehearsals. These spaces became public sites for the expression of belonging to the Balinese death metal scene (p. 156).

Kahn-Harris also posits extreme metal as an outsider culture. However, he does not frame metal as particularly resistant or radical. He emphasises the role ‘transgressive subcultural capital’ (p. 127) plays in establishing authenticity and finding belonging, particularly for black metal fans. Transgressive subcultural capital refers to the subcultural capital gained via acts which transgress dominant culture norms. These acts range from the mundane – setting up a DIY (Do It Yourself) label,⁵ rather than working a regular job (p. 125) – to the more extreme. In its most extreme form, transgressive subcultural capital in extreme metal manifested itself in the, ostensibly Satanic, ‘true Norwegian black metal’ crimes of murder and church burning during the 1990s (p. 128). These events and practices maintain the scenic discourse of metal as an outsider, deviant culture.

Kahn-Harris also looks at how scene members constitute belonging to particular spaces, through transgressive actions. He traces the link between politicised spatial (local and national) and scenic discourses. Extreme metal’s reputation as transgressive of dominant norms is sometimes enacted through the articulation of nationalist discourses. Here, belonging to a particular national space is more important than belonging to the global extreme metal scene. The obvious example here is Norwegian black metal, whose fascism popular media and non-fiction has well documented (Hunter, 2005; Moynihan & Soderlind, 1998; Mudrian, 2004). Kahn-Harris describes Darkthrone’s pejorative use of the word ‘Jew’ in their liner notes for Transylvanian Hunger (Darkthrone, 1994) as an example of the Norwegian scene’s often explicit Nazism (pp. 152–3). In the same liner notes, Darkthrone assert their members’ identity as ‘Norsk Arisk Black Metal’ (‘Norwegian Aryan Black Metal’) (Darkthrone, 1994). Their allegiance to Nazi ideology is bound to a simultaneous assertion that their identity is ‘True Norwegian’ (ibid.). As well as the blunt declaration that they are ‘Norwegian Aryan[s]’, written in large gothic letters on the back of the compact disc, there is the heading: ‘True Norwegian Black Metal’ (ibid.). These direct assertions of Norwegian-ness are complemented by Norwegian lyrics and the CD’s incorporation of Norse mythology into their lyrical themes. In Darkthrone’s case, their strident claim to belong to a ‘true’, ‘Aryan’ (ibid.), Norwegian identity sits in opposition to a Jewish identity. The liner notes mention that the band would disregard any criticism of the album, as naysayers were ‘obvious[ly] Jewish’ (ibid.). As Kahn-Harris points out, this blunt transgression of taboos regarding Nazism gains Darkthrone a hefty amount of status in the scene. I would also suggest that the discourse surrounding this transgression – the emphasis on ‘true’ Norwegian black metal excluding Jews, and being solely the domain of ‘Norwegian Aryans’ firmly embeds the band as belonging, not only within the black metal scene which, in Scandinavia particularly, favours fascist ideology, but also to the Norwegian nation.⁶

Extreme metal studies have also applied Thornton’s (1996) Bourdieusian (Bourdieu) concept of subcultural capital as a means of understanding how scene members belong. In extreme metal scenes, belonging often hinges on the articulation of specialised metal knowledge associated with the scene as well as in the embodied habitus of ‘knowing’ how to behave in scenic situations (Baulch, 2007; Kahn-Harris, 2007; Spracklen, 2010). Habitus is, of course, mediated by cultural contexts. For example, in Matsue’s account of the Tokyo metal scene, subcultural capital depended partly on one’s competence in Western metal knowledge and prowess. This manifested in the appropriation of Western metal aesthetics and the English language (pp. 128–9). Some local practices, however, remain important for displaying subcultural capital. Across metal scenes, a willingness to ‘put metal first’ is particularly significant.

Sometimes the production and circulation of subcultural capital manifests as elitism. Matsue found that Tokyo metalheads in the late 1990s regarded themselves as more authentic than, and superior to, pop music fans. One raibu Matsue discusses was even named ‘Opposition to Pops’ (pp. 1–4). To belong to the angura scene, members had to rehearse the discourse of their distinction from pop music.

The second approach to extreme metal belonging is more explicitly spatial. Matsue looks at smaller sites, such as venues, for the articulation of belonging to the scene. She notes that the scene adapted to Japanese cultural norms, such as organising gigs early so that audience members can take the train home, and presenting a certain ‘Japanese’ aesthetic through the use of anime imagery. However, to use Baulch’s phrase, the Japanese scene members were also ‘gestur[ing] elsewhere’ (p. 49). Many of their lyrics were in English and some of their sartorial style drew on Western hardcore fashion.

Belonging for Tokyo scene members was translocal. They felt part of the local scene as well as the wider global, particularly Western, metal scene. In fact, in order to belong locally, scene members necessarily displayed proficiency in Western metal cultures. Matsue notes the lyrical similarities between Tokyo and Western metal bands. Imagery of gore and violence, standard in Western scenes, are common to the Tokyo scene. Both these modes of belonging operated on a local and global level, often simultaneously.

Berger’s (1999) study of death metal in Akron, Ohio, departs from understandings of metal belonging as either based primarily on subcultural capital, or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Affective Intensities and Brutal Belonging
• 1. A Grisly Scene? Extreme Metal Music, Belonging and Ethnography
• 2. Brutal Belonging in Brutal Spaces
• 3. Idiots and Wankers: Grindcore Sociality
• 4. I Hate Girls and Emotions: Brutal Sociality and Gender
• 5. Brutal Belonging in Other Spaces
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index