Metal Music Studies - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019

This article explores the music and transgressions of Norwegian black metal in the early 1990s. Facial and vocal masking, emblematic in corpsepaint and screaming, lay at the intersection between these two modes of existence, musical and criminal. Masking in black metal leads to the creation of a new persona, what I call the ‘black metal double’. This double enacts a splitting of subjectivity between personal and public personas, and the vocal scream comes to navigate the space between these personas. This bifurcated existence predicates an alternate, abject mode of being for black metal performers. Masking becomes a theoretical means for living two lives: one as private citizens and the other as black metal musicians who transgress criminal and musical limits. By collapsing the boundaries between abjection and subjection, black metal musicians create new spaces of political and cultural meaning-making through masking.

This article discusses the previously unexplored intersection of the reception of classical antiquity in extreme metal with Satanic and anti-Christian themes. It is demonstrable that the phenomenon has roots in the genesis of extreme metal itself, especially in its inheritance from biblical and literary history of the associations between Satan and Roman emperors. As extreme metal evolved over the past three decades, that theme combined with the perception that imperial Rome had undertaken widespread and sustained persecutions of Christians, including spectacular executions for the sake of popular entertainment, throughout the three-century history of the early Church. This is despite the consensus of many modern historians that the Romans were largely tolerant of Christians and persecutions were brief, isolated, more humane, and cost much fewer lives than early Christian sources suggest. It is evident that metal artists inherit, and thereby perpetuate, a tradition manufactured by Christian sources that have largely been debunked; yet these artists depart from those Christian sources by denying the appeal of martyrdom and shifting sympathies to imperial Rome and its ‘Satanic’ emperors. Like Satan himself, these emperors function as symbols of masculine aggression and liberation of the passions from contemporary political and moral systems. Such anti-establishment sentiments, especially among Italian artists, can manifest in fantasies of a Roman Empire reborn. By their artistic license, extreme metal artists continue to reshape a literary and artistic legacy of the imperial Rome and constructions of persecution narratives developed over the course of the late antique, medieval and modern periods.

Innovations in music technology have the potential to change practices of music making and to contribute to the development of new forms of music. In 2011, a ‘profiling’ technology was released, capable of copying any valve guitar amplifier and shaping every detail of its sound. Many rock and metal guitarists and producers embraced this new technology, and the renowned producer Michael Wagener even claimed it to be ‘the biggest innovation for recording at least for the last fifteen years’. Building on an initial study on the quality and public reception of profiling technology in a metal music context, this article explores the attitudes of metal music producers towards new guitar amplification technologies, their uses thereof, and their conceptions of future music including the role of technological inventions. The findings indicate that although most producers experiment with modern technologies, they regard these as special effects or backup solutions. Traditional guitar sounds and engineering practices are still preferred, partly as a strategy to retain distinction between their established businesses and new enterprises. Developments in music technology are viewed sceptically regarding its positive contribution to future music.

This article sketches Slayer’s phenomenology in close connection with Hegel’s philosophy. It argues that, while the conceptual and teleological distance between the two parts is definitively a very large one, there are also important and rather unusual points of convergence on several topics, religion and war being the most prominent of them. Taking into account other seminal themes existent both in Slayer’s lyrics and, to a certain extent, in Hegel’s philosophy – like evil, criminality, scepticism and nihilism, besides the already mentioned religion and war, the article tries to introduce possible common grounds between these two radically different continents, arguing that Hegel’s dialectical method can be successfully extended also to apparently ‘exotic’ themes, as Slayer’s phenomenology, among many others.

This article presents a case study of how obsolete vinyl records are transformed into concert souvenirs through fan labour, using it as a springboard for an enquiry into fan creativity – both in terms of making do with a culture that excludes materially disenfranchised fans, and also in terms of re-purposing objects and discovering new ways of deriving pleasure from their use. It shows how embodied knowledge and dispositions are deployed to casually resist an economy of alienation and obsolescence, how fan productions are often exchanged in both the cultural and financial economies, and, in so doing, makes an intervention into an under-researched aspect of metal culture and fan cultures more generally.