Metal Music Studies - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2020

The Shoah is an historical event that leaves its marks on Jewish memory and thought to this day. Broadly speaking, there are two lessons of the Shoah: a particularistic one – relevant to Jews only – and a universalistic lesson, for all peoples. This article examines how the memory of the Shoah and these lessons contribute to the formation of Jewish identity. Works considering the Shoah of three metal bands with prominent Jewish members will be used: one Israeli-Jewish band – Salem; and two multireligious American bands – Anthrax and Disturbed. I will start by analysing songs about the Shoah and continue with a broader look at their entire catalogues and interviews. The ideas expressed will be understood on the background of theories considering Jewish identity and metal music and culture. This qualitative research is therefore grounded in the methodology of the history of ideas. My main findings are: (1) Most metal songs about the Shoah were written by a band with prominent Jewish members. (2) It indeed functions as a living memory affecting Jewish identity – that is, values and sociopolitical beliefs. (3) All the songs analysed create engagement by arousing an emotional response in listeners. (4) While Jewish identity is clearly manifested in Salem and Disturbed’s David Draiman, it is almost absent from Anthrax’s works and Scott Ian’s ideas. (5) A stronger connection to the political realization of the Jews in Israel is likely to strengthen Jewish identity.

Prompted by the Meads of Asphodel album Sonderkommando (2013), this article considers ways in which the Auschwitz Sonderkommando (SK) figure in extreme metal. While there are not many metal songs about the SK, they feature far more in metal lyrics than in almost all other music genres. Attracted by obscure and difficult parts of history, metal bands draw on their practices to ‘embody’ the SK: not simply representing them, but feeling and acting out their plight to excess. The article examines a number of these practices: difficult to decipher vocals, the use of global Englishes and a bookish attraction to the arcane and the bizarre. It argues that metal’s embrace of intense feeling in the lyrics and vocal and musical styles can be interpreted as an exploration of embodiment and materiality, allowing a consideration of mediation, the matter through which the SK might be felt and understood. Embodying the SK in metal, then, does not merely comprise an eccentric example of Holocaust memory at work, but takes on central issues of Holocaust representation.

The Swedish power metal band Sabaton can be referred to as an established act within the international metal scene. Though the band is known for the utilization of war in most of its songs, it is remarkable that Sabaton is one of the few bands in the metal ‘mainstream’ that also address the Holocaust in their output. In this article, I will trace Sabaton’s musical treatment of the Holocaust in the song ‘The Final Solution’, and subsequently question it critically. Using Linda Hutcheon’s model for the analysis of irony in aesthetic products as a frame for this investigation, a trans-medial music analysis of visual, auditive and contextual aspects will be carried out. With the resulting observations on the phenomenon, I will broaden the focus to present four suggestions on how ‘The Final Solution’ can be read, taking into account both metal insider and outsider perspectives, as well as German and non-German points of view.

The article seeks to examine why heavy metal bands used history and imagery associated with the ‘Schutzstaffel’ (SS). This includes the reasons for the focus on this particular organization as well as the intentions behind it: are compositions about historical facts or rather fictitious topics, that is, are they an accurate analysis, a provocation or just entertainment? The article takes a closer look at the historical background and the content of the songs; it also questions the awareness of the criminal character of the SS displayed by the musicians. The time span covered by the songs in question reaches from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s. Thus, it can be asked if the attitude of musicians changed over time and if they included the current state of research in their lyrics.

The article examines how the Holocaust is addressed in the extreme right wing sections of the larger black metal culture. Drawing from an extensive pool of primary sources the authors analyse how the Holocaust features in song lyrics, album artworks and interviews with artists. They argue that references to the Holocaust in extreme right wing black metal follow the logic of the culture’s aesthetics, which regularly employ symbols of fantastic or factual atrocities in order to express statements of misanthrophy, hatred and male strength. At the same time, the references are non-metaphorical and in that sense political. The artists often do not attempt to minimize the magnitude of the Holocaust but they celebrate the event exactly for the brutality it represents. In other instances, the idea of Holocaust is approved while its factuality is denied. Historic denialism and affirmation of the Holocaust can go hand in hand. While crass antisemitic statements can be found in other extreme right wing cultural realms, extreme right black metal might be the cultural sphere in the contemporary western world that articulates the harshest type of antisemitism.

While genocide, killing and transgressive acts of violence are common themes in metal, there is a relative absence of metal lyrics and other ways of engaging with the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews as a theme. This stands in contrast to premodern genocides that are often the subject of fascination. Even when the Holocaust is apparently ‘celebrated’ by neo-Nazi metal acts, some of the specificities of the genocide, together with its applicability to Jews today, may be elided and effaced. When the Holocaust is engaged with in non-neo-Nazi metal lyrics, it is usually with great care and the victims themselves are rarely mentioned. The Holocaust constitutes a ‘problem’ in metal that makes silence and absence a preferable option to engagement. The reasons for this lie in part in metal’s self-conscious avoidance of ‘politics’, the lack of salience of Jews and antisemitism, and the excessive nature of the Holocaust itself.