Music

Extreme metal music, a conglomeration of metal subgenres unified by a common interest in transgressive sounds and imagery, is now a global phenomenon with thriving scenes in every inhabited continent. Its individual subgenres represent a range of diverse aesthetics, some with histories spanning over thirty years. Scholarship on extreme metal now boasts a similar diversity as well as its own history spanning nearly two decades. With the rise of metal studies as an emerging field of scholarship, the scholarly literature on extreme metal has increased exponentially within the past seven years supported by annual conferences, the establishment of the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS), and a specialized journal (Metal Music Studies). Despite this growth, the field is still characterized by what sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris has called “undoubtedly the most critical weakness in metal studies as it stands: the relative paucity of detailed musicological analyses on metal” (Kahn-Harris 2011, 252). This blind spot in the literature is so pervasive that Sheila Whiteley began her preface to Andrew Cope’s Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music with the exclamation, “At last! A book about heavy metal as music” (Cope 2010, xi).

As the first book-length musicological study of extreme metal, this dissertation responds to this critical gap by outlining, in previously unattempted detail, a wide range of genre conventions and semiotic codes that form the basis of aesthetic expression in extreme metal. Using an interdisciplinary mixture of literary genre theory, semiotics, music theory and analysis, acoustics, and linguistics, this dissertation presents a broad overview of extreme metal’s musical, verbal, and visual-symbolic systems of meaning.

Part I: Interconnected Contexts and Paratexts begins with a critical survey of genre taxonomies, showing how their implicit logic masks value judgments and overlooks aspects of genre that are counterintuitive. This leads to an investigation of boundary discourses that reveals how fans define extreme metal negatively according to those subgenres and categories of identity that they treat as abject Others: nu metal, screamo, and deathcore as well as their associations with blackness, femininity, and adolescence. Part I concludes with a thick description of death metal and black metal that shows how its lyrics, album reviews, album artwork, band logos, and font styles collectively provide messages about the semantics of genre, most notably by drawing upon archetypes of the sublime and, in the case of raw black metal, the dystopian imagery of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century woodcut engravings.

Part II: Analyzing Musical Texts synthesizes large corpus studies of musical recordings with close readings of individual songs. This section begins with a demonstration of how technical death metal bands Cannibal Corpse, Demilich, and Spawn of Possession play with listener expectations towards meter, syntax, and musical complexity to create pleasurable forms of disorientation that reward active and repeated listenings. It proceeds to investigate musical accessibility and formal salience in melodic death metal, showing through examples by In Flames and Soilwork how the notion of melody pervades this music and contributes to its sense of rhetoric. Part II concludes with a study of musical expression in extreme metal vocals. Using discussions and recordings from a vocalist participant, a corpus study of eighty-five songs that begin with wordless screams, and close readings of excerpts by Morbid Angel, Zimmers Hole, and At the Gates, I demonstrate that the acoustical features of vowel formants are central to vocal expression in extreme metal, enabling vocalists to mimic large beasts in a way that fans find convincing and powerful.

The unusual complexity of two recent recordings by the extreme metal band Meshuggah has resulted in a strongly divided reception amongst fans, providing the opportunity to reconsider some common conceptions of metal aesthetics and to contribute to subtler ways of understanding taste and social demographics. Spanning twenty-one and forty-seven minutes respectively, I (2004) and Catch Thirtythr33 (2005) surprised fans with their unusual lengths (both recordings considered by the band to be single songs), complex song writing, and, with Catch Thirtythr33, the band's use of programmed drums. In response to interviewers' questions about each of these factors, the members of Meshuggah have made remarks that have been widely accepted among fans and rock journalists but that also seem to contradict their compositional practices and sometimes even their own previous statements. In my thesis, I investigate this discrepancy and its implications for how the concepts of authenticity and aesthetic values vary in metal discourses using concepts derived from critical theory, music theoretical analysis, and sociology. By uncovering several diverse aesthetic values through these discourses, I argue for an alternative to traditional class-based models of metal fans, one that will acknowledge the wide variety of aesthetic values found amongst metal audiences in this study.

During the 1980s Metallica developed a loyal fan base who championed them as distinct from the most popular heavy metal bands of the period. As Metallica began in the 1990s to experiment with songs that were increasingly introspective, drawing from blues and country music, many fans accused the band of "selling out." After the band’s lawsuit against Napster and three universities, news stations broadcast public CD smashings and testimonies of angry fans who felt they were victims of the band’s greed. The outrage felt by Metallica fans is remarkable in its endurance and publicity and, I argue, cannot be explained by reference to any single event.

To explain the magnitude and endurance of fans’ frustrations, I pursue a reception study of fan and media discourses surrounding Metallica’s major controversies between 1991 and 2008. Drawing from Glenn Pillsbury’s study of Metallica and sell-out accusations (2006: 133–81) that focuses on racial, class, and gender codes, I synthesize these factors within an account of subcultural prestige using theories from Pierre Bourdieu’s “Field of Cultural Production.” As the accusations mount, Metallica and their angry fans move further apart in Bourdieu’s field, in which economic success is inversely related to artistic prestige. Fan complaints about monetary greed, particularly those directed at commercially successful producers Bob Rock and Rick Rubin, suggest that many fans share Bourdieu’s opposition of prestige and popularity, despite media scholars’ criticisms that it relies on an outdated, simplistic model of cultural production stemming from the nineteenth century (Hesmondhalgh 2006).

Extreme metal genres such as death metal and black metal force music analysts to seek alternative methods to Western notation-based analysis, especially when one asks what means of expression their vocalists may draw from in order to seem convincing and powerful to fans. Using spectrograms generated by AudioSculpt, a powerful sound analysis, processing, and re-synthesis program, this paper demonstrates a mixed application of spectrograms and conventional music analysis to vocals in two separate contexts: an a cappella recording in a soundproof laboratory and a commercial recording with a full band. The results support an argument for the utility of spectrograms in revealing articulations and expressive nuances within extreme metal vocals that have thus far passed unnoticed in popular music scholarship.

In place of the pitched singing found in most genres of Western popular music, extreme metal vocalists use specialized screaming techniques that emphasize timbres associated with aggression, anger, power, alarm, and other emotionally charged utterances. Largely because these techniques resist established methods of music analysis, scholarly writings on heavy metal music have not yet acknowledged several of the most important acoustical and expressive features of the extreme metal voice. Using spectrograms generated with AudioSculpt, a powerful sound analysis, processing, and re-synthesis program, this paper argues that the acoustical properties of vowel formants serve a primary expressive role in enhancing the uncanny timbral qualities of extreme metal vocals.

We begin from the performer's perspective, addressing the physiological mechanisms involved in the production of extreme metal vocals as well as their primary acoustical characteristics. Because, as we argue, the formant frequencies of vowels are amongst the most important—and under-researched—of these, we demonstrate in two separate contexts how vocalists have sacrificed the intelligibility of their lyrics by expressively altering their vowels. Finally, to demonstrate further expressive resources used by extreme metal vocalists, we show how rapid and large fluctuations in a first formant frequency envelope support arguments made by Williams and Stevens (1972) on the acoustical correlates of emotions and speech.

This is an unpublished review I wrote in 2007 when Kahn-Harris’ now famous book had just been released. Looking back now, I think I would be less critical and idealizing. I now recognize more value in different disciplinary orientations and priorities (re: sonic transgression). I also sympathize more with the pragmatic constraints of travel costs (re: North American scenes). Now also, I think the wealth of metal studies that explore power imbalances with respect to gender and race have made me more cognisant of the identity politics that I originally called into question at the end of the review. Reflecting ongoing cultural changes more generally in society writ large, it seems that extreme metal scenes are indeed becoming gradually more open to marginalized identities in ways that Kahn-Harris originally predicted. I leave my original criticisms in the review as something of a time capsule. I hope my reaction at the time shows how Kahn-Harris’ book challenged readers at a pivotal time, just prior to metal studies becoming an internationally recognized phenomenon.

As Paul Théberge has pointed out, Michael Jackson was never quite treated by critics as a “mature” artist in the ways that more recently deceased stars like Prince and David Bowie were. Following Jackson’s death in 2009, that history of critical dismissal became obscured by the mass media’s reluctance to speak ill of the dead. One of the important contributions of Susan Fast’s Dangerous in the 33 1/3 series of books on individual albums is to remind us of how widely and ruthlessly people criticized Michael Jackson during his lifetime. By engaging closely with the arguments of Jackson’s contemporary critics, alongside her own close readings of individual tracks, Fast shows how the extent of Jackson’s unfair treatment extended beyond the tabloid press to affect his critical reception. Her sensitive analyses of each song on Jackson’s 1991 album Dangerous reveal how his music and music videos played a more active role in the cultural politics of race and sexuality than he is usually credited for.

This chapter explores how medieval signifiers function in black metal's musical style, lyrics, and album imagery, specifically albums using woodcut engravings. It analyzes how the word "medieval" functions in discourses about those albums, including reviews, magazines, forum discussions, and YouTube comments. The analysis combines qualitative close readings with quantitative analyses of word frequencies, indicating which albums have provoked the term "medieval" most. I then show which other terms are closely paired with it—descriptive adjectives, analogies and associative imagery, and various aesthetic judgments. I compare these findings with close music analyses to offer stylistic explanations for black metal's enduring fascination with the medieval. Finally, the chapter explores how black metal's associations with the medieval also intersect with notions of cultural purity and political controversies within medieval studies itself.