Peter, What Are You Reading? № 8
An occasional series featuring the books I'm either reading or have just finished
I have been reading a lot about Medical Aid in Dying and other bioethical issues, so I wanted to take a bit of a brain break and read some other things. I realized that while I love heavy metal, I’ve never actually read much about the music, its (a)politics, or its culture. So I downloaded a couple of books that I thought might be interesting. The book Death Metal and Music Criticism looks at the academic community’s propensity to analyze music in terms of its supposed progressive politics, and argues, using Death Metal as an example, that sometimes people just, you know, like the music they’re listening to. The second book, which is for a more general audience than the previous book, deals with the history of the notorious National Socialist Black Metal scene, an obscure variety of Black metal that revels in all things white supremacy. Turning then from music, I offer a short review of a book about the Bacon Brothers, three wannabe gangsters from my hometown of Abbotsford, B.C. that conducted an all-out gang war in broad daylight during the late 2000’s. Finally, I go back to one of my favourite topics, and highlight a book that I’m just starting about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, written by Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy.
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Death Metal and Music Criticism: Analysis at the Limits - Michelle Phillipov
This is a fascinating book that looks at the value of death metal as a musical genre as opposed to a political statement. Extreme metal music is often criticized because it seems impervious to the political movements of the day, both in that it doesn't attract the political criticism that other popular styles of music attract, and that it simply doesn't care about politics in the first place. From the introduction:
Critics have tended to be far less forgiving of metal than they have been of other popular genres. Because metal fails to channel its energies into recognizable forms of political activism and resistance, it is thought to foster a political apathy unconducive to positive social change. The emphasis on technical skill is criticized for inscribing hierarchical and anti-egalitarian social relations, including oppressive forms of masculinity. Metal fans are frequently understood as unwilling to interrogate, or even identify, structures of power and inequality within the scene. This tendency to assume that music should in some way address and resist social inequality means that such approaches often serve less as an explanation for metal than as an evaluation of it. Political questions are important, but any approach which views musical and cultural conventions only, or primarily, as measures of political radicalism is inevitably limiting.
Phillipov’s primary aim, as far as I've been able to gather so far, is to show that death metal in particular has musical qualities about it that make it pleasurable to listen to. That is, to look primarily for political meaning in death metal music is to miss what makes death metal pleasurable to listen to. Again from the introduction,
Chapter 7 explores the music of British deathgrind act Carcass. It suggests that by paralleling lyrics which explore the dissolution of the body with fractured, unpredictable song forms, Carcass offers images of corporeal destruction not as opportunities for identification, but as sites for exploring aesthetic experiences of death and bodily disintegration. This emphasis on musical and lyrical disruption offers listeners fractured, ambivalent listening positions, and invites them to experience corporeal dissolution as a source of pleasure and play. In this way, the music can be seen to offer access to a musical becoming in which listeners can explore alternative responses to, and experiences of, ordinarily contentious subject matter. The music of American death metal band Cannibal Corpse, in contrast, is much more aggressive and “brutal” than the music of Carcass. Chapter 8 argues that rather than a means of imagining pleasurable experiences of corporeal destruction, Cannibal Corpse invites experiences of listening in which the “technicalities” of musical composition are a central focus. Instead of narratively coherent song texts, songs are offered as a series of pleasurable, but largely discontinuous, musical moments. In such cases, technical skill may be reconceived not as an oppressive masculine mastery, but as a means of enabling particular kinds of musical appreciation.