Event Title
Session 12: Defining Metal
Location
Sears Recital Hall
Start Date
8-11-2014 2:45 PM
End Date
8-11-2014 4:00 PM
Description
John McCombe: "The Rhetorical Function of “Glam Metal” in the Heavy Metal 'Canon Wars'”
A word about what this presentation is NOT: an argument about whether or not glam metal/hair metal/pop metal is really metal. For example, I do not intend to make an argument that Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses possess legitimate metal credentials, whereas Poison and Cinderella do not. I will say, however, that such debates on global online music discussion boards have indeed spurred my thinking about this subject. In the larger discourses surrounding metal studies, glam metal is clearly a polarizing subject and one that appears to be central to definitions of what metal actually is or is not.
My presentation will allow me to share some preliminary research into the rhetorical function of glam metal in what I’m calling the metal “canon wars.” A generation ago, books like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind or E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy challenged academics to restrict the curriculum to so-called canonical classics and reject the incursions of women writers, multiculturalism and popular culture. I would argue that an analogous process may be at work within metal studies—glam metal makes many metal fans uncomfortable because it challenges crucial tropes that help many define what metal is. The high culture/pop culture binary that characterized public culture wars debates in the late 1980s might be instructive in considering the role of glam metal’s commercial success and whether or not popular metal is antithetical to how many listeners define metal as a genre rooted in a particular subculture. In similar ways, the complex gendering of glam metal may play a significant role in the resistance of many metal fans and writers in accepting glam metal within a traditionally masculine subculture.
On the basis of studies of metal ranging from Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture to the metal documentaries of Sam Dunn, it is clear that glam metal occupies a position on the “family tree” of metal. However, my presentation will take a closer look at the variety of ways in which glam metal signifies among metal journalists and historians and what the implications of these treatments might be for the future of metal studies as an emerging academic field.
Owen Coggins: "'Music to be Experienced Rather than Understood': Mystical Language and Drone Metal
Drone metal is an extreme form of contemporary metal, regarded by many listeners and musicians as a radical distillation of metal’s sonic foundations in extended, downtuned, distorted droning noise. Religious sounds and symbols are often used in recordings and performances, and listeners employ a vocabulary of ritual, transcendence and mysticism to describe music “to be experienced rather than understood.”
In this presentation, based on my ongoing doctoral research, I investigate the cultural impact of drone metal on audiences, particularly in relation to religious experience, mystical language and spiritual practices. While also analyzing recorded and performed sound, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at more than thirty concerts and six music festivals; more than 400 survey responses; 65 in-depth qualitative interviews with listeners and other participants; and extensive online reviews, discussion and other commentary.
I examine the range of sonic characteristics described by listeners as “drone” or “droning” (beyond the technical sense of sustained, continuous tones), and investigate the correlation between these sounds and “spiritual” descriptions. Then I outline listeners’ varied descriptions of drone metal as implicitly or explicitly meditative, cathartic or therapeutic. Listeners locate the source of these characteristics in the extraordinary physical sensations of drone metal sound: in overwhelmingly loud, collectively-endured concerts; and in the personal, ritualized spaces created by vinyl records and portable music devices.
Descriptions of drone metal are frequently prefaced with claims that such experience is indescribable. I explore appeals to mystical language (as well as to idioms of literary fantasy, exotic travel or narcotic intoxication) as imperfect negotiations of this difficulty, which nevertheless offer important insights into the construction of drone metal experience.
Finally, I note the gradual normalization of once hyperbolic rhetoric concerning religiosity/spirituality (such as the now near-ubiquitous advertising of concerts as rituals) and suggest future implications regarding mysticism in drone metal.
Session 12: Defining Metal
Sears Recital Hall
John McCombe: "The Rhetorical Function of “Glam Metal” in the Heavy Metal 'Canon Wars'”
A word about what this presentation is NOT: an argument about whether or not glam metal/hair metal/pop metal is really metal. For example, I do not intend to make an argument that Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses possess legitimate metal credentials, whereas Poison and Cinderella do not. I will say, however, that such debates on global online music discussion boards have indeed spurred my thinking about this subject. In the larger discourses surrounding metal studies, glam metal is clearly a polarizing subject and one that appears to be central to definitions of what metal actually is or is not.
My presentation will allow me to share some preliminary research into the rhetorical function of glam metal in what I’m calling the metal “canon wars.” A generation ago, books like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind or E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy challenged academics to restrict the curriculum to so-called canonical classics and reject the incursions of women writers, multiculturalism and popular culture. I would argue that an analogous process may be at work within metal studies—glam metal makes many metal fans uncomfortable because it challenges crucial tropes that help many define what metal is. The high culture/pop culture binary that characterized public culture wars debates in the late 1980s might be instructive in considering the role of glam metal’s commercial success and whether or not popular metal is antithetical to how many listeners define metal as a genre rooted in a particular subculture. In similar ways, the complex gendering of glam metal may play a significant role in the resistance of many metal fans and writers in accepting glam metal within a traditionally masculine subculture.
On the basis of studies of metal ranging from Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture to the metal documentaries of Sam Dunn, it is clear that glam metal occupies a position on the “family tree” of metal. However, my presentation will take a closer look at the variety of ways in which glam metal signifies among metal journalists and historians and what the implications of these treatments might be for the future of metal studies as an emerging academic field.
Owen Coggins: "'Music to be Experienced Rather than Understood': Mystical Language and Drone Metal
Drone metal is an extreme form of contemporary metal, regarded by many listeners and musicians as a radical distillation of metal’s sonic foundations in extended, downtuned, distorted droning noise. Religious sounds and symbols are often used in recordings and performances, and listeners employ a vocabulary of ritual, transcendence and mysticism to describe music “to be experienced rather than understood.”
In this presentation, based on my ongoing doctoral research, I investigate the cultural impact of drone metal on audiences, particularly in relation to religious experience, mystical language and spiritual practices. While also analyzing recorded and performed sound, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at more than thirty concerts and six music festivals; more than 400 survey responses; 65 in-depth qualitative interviews with listeners and other participants; and extensive online reviews, discussion and other commentary.
I examine the range of sonic characteristics described by listeners as “drone” or “droning” (beyond the technical sense of sustained, continuous tones), and investigate the correlation between these sounds and “spiritual” descriptions. Then I outline listeners’ varied descriptions of drone metal as implicitly or explicitly meditative, cathartic or therapeutic. Listeners locate the source of these characteristics in the extraordinary physical sensations of drone metal sound: in overwhelmingly loud, collectively-endured concerts; and in the personal, ritualized spaces created by vinyl records and portable music devices.
Descriptions of drone metal are frequently prefaced with claims that such experience is indescribable. I explore appeals to mystical language (as well as to idioms of literary fantasy, exotic travel or narcotic intoxication) as imperfect negotiations of this difficulty, which nevertheless offer important insights into the construction of drone metal experience.
Finally, I note the gradual normalization of once hyperbolic rhetoric concerning religiosity/spirituality (such as the now near-ubiquitous advertising of concerts as rituals) and suggest future implications regarding mysticism in drone metal.