Metal Music Studies - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2018

In this article I examine the nature and meaning of two different types of rhythmic difficulty – extreme metric malleability and non-metricism – in examples taken from the music of Meshuggah and The Dillinger Escape Plan, respectively. While the two bands have different rhythmic styles that create distinct rhythmic difficulties, I claim that in both examples the rhythmic difficulty enhances ‘heaviness’ through various enactments of sonic metaphors for size, weight, density, power, transgression and seriousness, characterizing the creation of rhythmic difficulty as simultaneously a transgressive practice that deforms metal’s technical boundaries and one that fundamentally reaffirms metal’s most central aesthetic.

Metal magazines have been shown to play a significant role in communicating and shaping heavy metal culture. And, since the masculinist nature of heavy metal is perhaps its most discussed and agreed upon feature, scholars have argued that heavy metal magazines also reproduce masculine hegemony. Focussing on cover images from Kerrang! magazine, this study utilizes a mixed methods approach to examine how heavy metal masculinities are represented over an extended number of issues (from 1981 to 1995). Utilizing existing scholarship on heavy metal magazines and drawing on celebrity identification theory, I argue that many of the prevailing studies that discuss heavy metal masculinities are essentially flawed in their reliance upon particular traits. Instead I show the ways that media images can come to both reproduce and resist masculine gender norms in the context of heavy metal culture. By considering how representations are formed over an extended period and in relation to particular heavy metal icons, I show that certain arguments and assumptions about masculinity and male privilege in heavy metal culture are oversimplified.

This empirical study explores the guitar profiling technology and its consequences for metal music production. After briefly introducing this technology, the article investigates its public reception in reviews and online discussion boards to explore the subjective perspectives. A subsequent acoustic experiment tests the capability of the technology. The findings show that many guitar players and producers have been highly sceptical of digital amplification technology because of tonal shortcomings. However, meanwhile many musicians seem convinced of profiling technology due to its good sound quality that has been confirmed by the experiment too. Since for most metal music genres the sound quality of the electric guitar is very important, the creative practices and economic conditions of its production may likely be hugely affected by this technology. The article concludes by discussing the consequences of profiling technology regarding issues such as democratization of production tools, changes in professional services, creative potentials and future applications of the technology that may radically change metal music production.

In this article, I focus on the specific language of the Hungarian rock/metal discourse community. With Simple Concordance Program I analyse the posts from the two most active Hungarian music themed blogs (Lángoló Gitárok and Rockstation), which were written in April 2016. My functional–cognitive pragmatics and corpus linguistics research focus on the occurrence of the music genre names, ‘metál’, ‘metal’, ‘rock’, ‘punk’, ‘-core’, ‘jazz’ and ‘blues’ and their subgenres (for example, ‘black metál’, ‘death metal’, ‘desert rock’ – ‘sivatagi rock’, ‘deathcore’). This range of naming has been motivated by the categorization and schematization processes of the interlocutors and the conventionality of the discourse community’s terminology. My main questions are as follows: (1) ‘Is there a linguistic difference between the Hungarian and the global rock/metal discourse communities in terms of music genres and subgenres?’ and (2) ‘Are the music-related identity practices similar in these two similar subcorpuses?’

Despite its origins as a hybrid genre, death metal is often subject to discourses of purity, and the inclusion of diverse influences is not always looked upon favourably. Indonesian death metal bands, however, often combine elements of different styles ranging from traditional Indonesian musics to contemporary global popular genres, revealing an incorporative approach typical of modern Indonesian musical practices. This article explores musical hybridization in Indonesian death metal using the band Siksakubur as a case study, examining the ways they negotiate relationships with the overlapping contexts of death metal as a global genre, Indonesian death metal as a localized phenomenon and popular music in postcolonial/post-Soeharto Indonesia. Throughout, I consider the implications of these practices on postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity.

Conventional wisdom suggests, and scholarship confirms, that the distribution of heavy metal music across the world is uneven. Previous studies show there are more metal bands per capita in Europe and North America than in other regions, but it is not clear what country-level factors explain that distribution. Drawing on data from the Encyclopaedia Metallum, I replicate a 2014 study and find weak support to connect heavy metal and religion, legal history and other social factors. In this article, I present an alternative model to explain the distribution of metal bands and show that wealth and political freedom are highly predictive of metal music, not only across the world, but also within regions.

Gorguts’s May 2016 EP, Pleiades’ Dust, is a one-movement work reminiscent of the tone/symphonic poem found more often in classical tradition, due to its content and compositional structure. My research explores how the compositional techniques found in the piece, specifically the use of a recurring theme and varied metric structure, reflect the narrative of the House of Wisdom. I believe that these techniques were used intentionally by the band, specifically by main songwriter Luc Lemay. Lemay has said in the past that he often does not use his compositional training when writing for Gorguts, but when writing for Pleiades’ Dust he consciously sought to incorporate classical idiom. This article is adapted from a lecture given on 2 December 2016 at the Extreme Music: Hearing and Nothingness Conference at the University of Southern Denmark – Odense.