Event Title
Session 4: Extreme Metal and the Aesthetics of Community
Location
Kennedy Union Ballroom
Start Date
6-11-2014 4:15 PM
End Date
6-11-2014 6:00 PM
Description
Overview:
The four papers on this panel all analyze relations between extreme metal and politics, specifically the politics of community. Given the antagonistic mode of address (Ellsworth 2007) offered by extreme metal music—in particular death metal and black metal—it may not be surprising that communities of metal fans and musicians have a dialectical relation to community as something both to affirm and to reject. In the complex interplay between desiring individuality—forms of subjectivity not wholly determined by market forces and traditional communal relations—and desiring alternative forms of community, extreme metal provides the occasion for these papers to address problems of community and politics that are increasingly urgent as cultural work (including politics) becomes digitally mediated and globalized.
Two papers focus on the early death metal underground and its particular aesthetics, social rituals, and material culture. In different ways, these papers examine community formation as it relates to the circulation of demos, zines, touring bands, and a fluctuating and sometimes even ephemeral network of clubs (and sites) willing to host shows. The particular “extreme” aesthetic of death metal required it to formulate its own networks and communal relations at precisely the same moment that its aesthetic is being explored, fine tuned, and consolidated. That is, the aesthetic of death metal and the particular communal formations accompanying it are mutually constitutive. These papers thus examine how political and aesthetic forms operate as inextricably linked problematics of “representation.”
Two papers turn toward contemporary black metal and the relations among economics, community, and aesthetics. One paper zeroes in on the role of “individuality” vis-à-vis community in black metal communities distributed nationally, temporally, and digitally. By looking at a range of sites where black metal musicians and fans engage each other, the authors propose that black metal’s particular subucultural norms reveal a particularly semiotic or aesthetics of community in “signification.” Paradoxically, black metal community seems to emerge of out a denial or negation of community, a peculiar “anti community building” ideology that is nevertheless shared in common. The final paper takes up these same questions in relation to “dark tourism,” a growing niche form of tourism that is preoccupied with the grisly, macabre, and catastrophic. By looking in particular at the Inferno Festival in Oslo, Norway, the authors look at how dystopian representational systems serve as a mechanism for articulating specific forms of community.
Across the four papers—which engage forms of inquiry associated with philosophy, media studies, sociology, anthropology, and political economy—this panel seeks to pose urgent questions of community and politics playing out in a thoroughly global setting (questions we may ask with respect to Russia/Ukraine or Israel/Palestine, to give two obvious examples). These questions bear directly on contemporary geopolitics, and the authors all suggest that our contemporary world may have much to learn from extreme metal communities.
Vivek Venkatesh, Jeffrey S. Podoshen, Kathryn Urbaniak and Jason J. Wallin: "Rejecting Community in Favor of Individuality: Exploring a Key Ethos of Black Metal"
There is a great deal of literature that examines community orientations in particular consumption-based subcultures rooted in appreciation of music scenes such as heavy metal and its myriad sub-genres, including extreme metal. Much of this literature focuses on aspects of community maintenance, reaffirmation of shared identities and building of social bonds. In this presentation, we present the results of a study in which consumption and fandom of a specific genre of extreme metal, namely, black metal, may lead to very unique consumer cultural orientations. Our triangulated analyses reveal that black metal fans’ identities reside in a realm outside of a desired collective identification and tightly-knit community, but rather one that uses signification, or representational means to convey meaning and identification, as a means to signal repugnance with society and a reverence of individuality. Our study engages a mixed qualitative approach utilizing interviews, observational research at extreme metal concerts and festivals across the world, and content analysis of artwork, fanzines and magazines to demonstrate how self-identity related to the black metal music scene can thrive through an ideological and semiotic rejection of traditional community orientations seen in the majority of other extreme metal music scenes. Our research challenges traditional conceptualizations of group identity in music scenes by closely examining aspects of signification and fandom in black metal that represent a unique system of shared identities devoid of community building.
Jason Netherton: "Extremity Reframed: Media and Subcultural Production in the Death Metal Underground"
The intent of my paper is to historicize and contextualize the death metal underground through the material and paratextual forms of its media. In the late 1980’s, the nascent death metal underground developed into an international network that relied heavily upon do-it-yourself media production in the process of integrating and materializing the music into an identifiable subculture. While the music was the unifying focus, the framework of relations that expanded into a global network of social production necessitated material forms by which to situate shared relations. Considering this, I will explore the dimensions of this materiality in order to illuminate the primacy of media in subcultural production, as well as to provide a historical and media-archaeological lens on how the death metal scene operated and articulated itself in its original, analog manifestations. In doing so, the intent is to trace the genealogical development of the death metal underground’s media production through Gérard Genette’s concept of paratextuality, where emerging, liminal relations intersect with subcultural notions of authenticity, identity and meaning formation in the social consumption of media objects. The importance of such artifacts as fanzines, blank cassettes, and hand-written letters were so vital to the death metal underground's material realization, that they were nearly coequal with the music in their sustaining and supporting capacity, providing a shared structure of feeling for an international subculture-in-formation. Ultimately, the intent is to centralize media artifacts and media production in order to better explore how the transition from analog to digital culture transformed the perceived mystique, intimacy and sincerity of the death metal underground, as it existed in its initial form (from roughly 1988 to 1994).
Nathan Snaza: "Community at the Extremes: The Death Metal Underground as Being-in-Common"
My paper explores the politics of community articulated by participants of the death metal underground in its early years. Drawing on the first hand accounts collected in Jason Netherton’s Extremity Retained (2014), I explore how the community emerges 1) in relation to a complex network of media, circuits of international exchange, and preexisting communal spaces that become de- and reterritorialized; 2) through a complex shift in aesthetic attunement where the bodies of musicians and fans adjust to making and listening to sounds that were previously either unmakable or unlistenable; and 3) through the ongoing production of an aesthetic instead of around a preexisting one. By drawing on political philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I argue that the early death metal underground represented an experiment in “being-in-common,” a form of community that holds political promise precisely in distancing itself from “politics” as enacted at the level of the state. While this community has undoubtedly become increasingly commodified (so that being a “death metal fan” today is more a matter of ascription into a preexisting habitus), this early scene reveals how the mediated circuits of international capitalism may—however ephemerally—hold the potential to connect people in ways that radically transform taste, community, and embodiment. Ultimately, the political potentiality of the death metal underground lies not only in its formal structure of communal relation, but in its particular aesthetic and affective commitments: in an affirmation of death, darkness, chaos, and a life lived at the “extreme” edges of Western, global capitalism and what Vivek Venkatesh has called this culture’s “happy curriculum.” The death metal underground deserves attention because it reveals slippages and openings appearing—only to disappear—not outside of capital, but at its extremes.
Jeffrey S. Podoshen, Vivek Venkatesh, Jason Wallin: "Dystopian Dark Tourism: Inferno"
Dark Tourism is a phenomena that is not going away, in fact, it is gaining momentum in practice, in its conceptualizations and in theoretical development. Many have written in recent years how people have been drawn to tourism sites associated with death and disaster (Sharpley, 2009) and this is important in terms of understanding the human condition as Stone (2009) mentions that dark tourism as practice really informs us of the living and their perspectives and motivations related to death consumption. More recently, Stone & Sharpley (2013) address criticisms that some have made that dark tourism is a deviant consumption behavior, but posits that talking about death in public places is becoming increasingly luminous and therefore there’s a flourishing new willingness to interpret the surrounding discourse.
Moving the dark tourism literature beyond existing conceptualizations, this paper seeks to conceptualize and describe a rather new, emergent form of dark tourism that features dystopia as a key underlying element of the destination. We examine a dark tourism festival centered on consumption related to endarkenment (Snaza 2014) - the Inferno Festival in Norway that, we believe, embodies our unique conceptualization of Dystopian Dark Tourism (DDT). Inferno is an annual event in Norway. It celebrates the genre of music known as extreme metal, with a specific focus on death metal and black metal. The festival draws thousands of fans from across the world for multi-day concerts at multiple venues. It takes place over the Easter Week Holiday, when much of Oslo (even some of its largest hotels) is completely shutdown. Fans, mostly male, from teenagers newly embracing the genre, to those over the age of 50 who have been listening to metal for decades, come to converge in the largest and oldest festival that embraces the dystopian vision of cold, pagan-influenced Norwegian winters that predate the rise of Christianity. Bands, such as Helheim, sing about the glorious days of Vikings, while acts such as Taake, take on more recent issues, such as the influx (and disdain) of Muslim immigrants. In the past few years, formal tours of black metal related tourist locales have quickly gained momentum (Podoshen, 2013) as the music genre has grown in global popularity (Weinstein, 2011).
This paper examines the concept of dystopia from an inter-disciplinary perspective. We will provide a description of our venues that conceptualize DDT. Afterwards we describe the key attributes of the respective tourist destinations that relate to their thanatouristic elements and dystopian undertones. This all then culminates in our specific thoughts that relate dark tourism and extreme metal theoretics to practice.
Session 4: Extreme Metal and the Aesthetics of Community
Kennedy Union Ballroom
Overview:
The four papers on this panel all analyze relations between extreme metal and politics, specifically the politics of community. Given the antagonistic mode of address (Ellsworth 2007) offered by extreme metal music—in particular death metal and black metal—it may not be surprising that communities of metal fans and musicians have a dialectical relation to community as something both to affirm and to reject. In the complex interplay between desiring individuality—forms of subjectivity not wholly determined by market forces and traditional communal relations—and desiring alternative forms of community, extreme metal provides the occasion for these papers to address problems of community and politics that are increasingly urgent as cultural work (including politics) becomes digitally mediated and globalized.
Two papers focus on the early death metal underground and its particular aesthetics, social rituals, and material culture. In different ways, these papers examine community formation as it relates to the circulation of demos, zines, touring bands, and a fluctuating and sometimes even ephemeral network of clubs (and sites) willing to host shows. The particular “extreme” aesthetic of death metal required it to formulate its own networks and communal relations at precisely the same moment that its aesthetic is being explored, fine tuned, and consolidated. That is, the aesthetic of death metal and the particular communal formations accompanying it are mutually constitutive. These papers thus examine how political and aesthetic forms operate as inextricably linked problematics of “representation.”
Two papers turn toward contemporary black metal and the relations among economics, community, and aesthetics. One paper zeroes in on the role of “individuality” vis-à-vis community in black metal communities distributed nationally, temporally, and digitally. By looking at a range of sites where black metal musicians and fans engage each other, the authors propose that black metal’s particular subucultural norms reveal a particularly semiotic or aesthetics of community in “signification.” Paradoxically, black metal community seems to emerge of out a denial or negation of community, a peculiar “anti community building” ideology that is nevertheless shared in common. The final paper takes up these same questions in relation to “dark tourism,” a growing niche form of tourism that is preoccupied with the grisly, macabre, and catastrophic. By looking in particular at the Inferno Festival in Oslo, Norway, the authors look at how dystopian representational systems serve as a mechanism for articulating specific forms of community.
Across the four papers—which engage forms of inquiry associated with philosophy, media studies, sociology, anthropology, and political economy—this panel seeks to pose urgent questions of community and politics playing out in a thoroughly global setting (questions we may ask with respect to Russia/Ukraine or Israel/Palestine, to give two obvious examples). These questions bear directly on contemporary geopolitics, and the authors all suggest that our contemporary world may have much to learn from extreme metal communities.
Vivek Venkatesh, Jeffrey S. Podoshen, Kathryn Urbaniak and Jason J. Wallin: "Rejecting Community in Favor of Individuality: Exploring a Key Ethos of Black Metal"
There is a great deal of literature that examines community orientations in particular consumption-based subcultures rooted in appreciation of music scenes such as heavy metal and its myriad sub-genres, including extreme metal. Much of this literature focuses on aspects of community maintenance, reaffirmation of shared identities and building of social bonds. In this presentation, we present the results of a study in which consumption and fandom of a specific genre of extreme metal, namely, black metal, may lead to very unique consumer cultural orientations. Our triangulated analyses reveal that black metal fans’ identities reside in a realm outside of a desired collective identification and tightly-knit community, but rather one that uses signification, or representational means to convey meaning and identification, as a means to signal repugnance with society and a reverence of individuality. Our study engages a mixed qualitative approach utilizing interviews, observational research at extreme metal concerts and festivals across the world, and content analysis of artwork, fanzines and magazines to demonstrate how self-identity related to the black metal music scene can thrive through an ideological and semiotic rejection of traditional community orientations seen in the majority of other extreme metal music scenes. Our research challenges traditional conceptualizations of group identity in music scenes by closely examining aspects of signification and fandom in black metal that represent a unique system of shared identities devoid of community building.
Jason Netherton: "Extremity Reframed: Media and Subcultural Production in the Death Metal Underground"
The intent of my paper is to historicize and contextualize the death metal underground through the material and paratextual forms of its media. In the late 1980’s, the nascent death metal underground developed into an international network that relied heavily upon do-it-yourself media production in the process of integrating and materializing the music into an identifiable subculture. While the music was the unifying focus, the framework of relations that expanded into a global network of social production necessitated material forms by which to situate shared relations. Considering this, I will explore the dimensions of this materiality in order to illuminate the primacy of media in subcultural production, as well as to provide a historical and media-archaeological lens on how the death metal scene operated and articulated itself in its original, analog manifestations. In doing so, the intent is to trace the genealogical development of the death metal underground’s media production through Gérard Genette’s concept of paratextuality, where emerging, liminal relations intersect with subcultural notions of authenticity, identity and meaning formation in the social consumption of media objects. The importance of such artifacts as fanzines, blank cassettes, and hand-written letters were so vital to the death metal underground's material realization, that they were nearly coequal with the music in their sustaining and supporting capacity, providing a shared structure of feeling for an international subculture-in-formation. Ultimately, the intent is to centralize media artifacts and media production in order to better explore how the transition from analog to digital culture transformed the perceived mystique, intimacy and sincerity of the death metal underground, as it existed in its initial form (from roughly 1988 to 1994).
Nathan Snaza: "Community at the Extremes: The Death Metal Underground as Being-in-Common"
My paper explores the politics of community articulated by participants of the death metal underground in its early years. Drawing on the first hand accounts collected in Jason Netherton’s Extremity Retained (2014), I explore how the community emerges 1) in relation to a complex network of media, circuits of international exchange, and preexisting communal spaces that become de- and reterritorialized; 2) through a complex shift in aesthetic attunement where the bodies of musicians and fans adjust to making and listening to sounds that were previously either unmakable or unlistenable; and 3) through the ongoing production of an aesthetic instead of around a preexisting one. By drawing on political philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I argue that the early death metal underground represented an experiment in “being-in-common,” a form of community that holds political promise precisely in distancing itself from “politics” as enacted at the level of the state. While this community has undoubtedly become increasingly commodified (so that being a “death metal fan” today is more a matter of ascription into a preexisting habitus), this early scene reveals how the mediated circuits of international capitalism may—however ephemerally—hold the potential to connect people in ways that radically transform taste, community, and embodiment. Ultimately, the political potentiality of the death metal underground lies not only in its formal structure of communal relation, but in its particular aesthetic and affective commitments: in an affirmation of death, darkness, chaos, and a life lived at the “extreme” edges of Western, global capitalism and what Vivek Venkatesh has called this culture’s “happy curriculum.” The death metal underground deserves attention because it reveals slippages and openings appearing—only to disappear—not outside of capital, but at its extremes.
Jeffrey S. Podoshen, Vivek Venkatesh, Jason Wallin: "Dystopian Dark Tourism: Inferno"
Dark Tourism is a phenomena that is not going away, in fact, it is gaining momentum in practice, in its conceptualizations and in theoretical development. Many have written in recent years how people have been drawn to tourism sites associated with death and disaster (Sharpley, 2009) and this is important in terms of understanding the human condition as Stone (2009) mentions that dark tourism as practice really informs us of the living and their perspectives and motivations related to death consumption. More recently, Stone & Sharpley (2013) address criticisms that some have made that dark tourism is a deviant consumption behavior, but posits that talking about death in public places is becoming increasingly luminous and therefore there’s a flourishing new willingness to interpret the surrounding discourse.
Moving the dark tourism literature beyond existing conceptualizations, this paper seeks to conceptualize and describe a rather new, emergent form of dark tourism that features dystopia as a key underlying element of the destination. We examine a dark tourism festival centered on consumption related to endarkenment (Snaza 2014) - the Inferno Festival in Norway that, we believe, embodies our unique conceptualization of Dystopian Dark Tourism (DDT). Inferno is an annual event in Norway. It celebrates the genre of music known as extreme metal, with a specific focus on death metal and black metal. The festival draws thousands of fans from across the world for multi-day concerts at multiple venues. It takes place over the Easter Week Holiday, when much of Oslo (even some of its largest hotels) is completely shutdown. Fans, mostly male, from teenagers newly embracing the genre, to those over the age of 50 who have been listening to metal for decades, come to converge in the largest and oldest festival that embraces the dystopian vision of cold, pagan-influenced Norwegian winters that predate the rise of Christianity. Bands, such as Helheim, sing about the glorious days of Vikings, while acts such as Taake, take on more recent issues, such as the influx (and disdain) of Muslim immigrants. In the past few years, formal tours of black metal related tourist locales have quickly gained momentum (Podoshen, 2013) as the music genre has grown in global popularity (Weinstein, 2011).
This paper examines the concept of dystopia from an inter-disciplinary perspective. We will provide a description of our venues that conceptualize DDT. Afterwards we describe the key attributes of the respective tourist destinations that relate to their thanatouristic elements and dystopian undertones. This all then culminates in our specific thoughts that relate dark tourism and extreme metal theoretics to practice.