Running with the Devil. Robert Walser
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on MTV and at huge arena concerts. On the other hand, a different camp disparaged the newfound popularity of what they call lite metal or the music of “posers.” These fans and bands attempted to sustain the marginal status metal enjoyed during the 1970s; they shunned the broad popularity that they saw as necessarily linked to musical vapidity and subcultural dispersion. The “underground” metal scene was, until the late 1980s, based in clubs rather than arenas, in subcultural activity rather than mass-mediated identity. Its literature often took the form of local, self-published fanzines instead of slick, full-color, national publications like Hit Parader or Circus. Sometimes lumped together as “speed metal” or “thrash,” these underground styles of metal tended to be more deliberately transgressive, violent, and noisy.
The thrash metal style coalesced in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles in the early 1980s, with groups like Metallica, Slayer, Testament, Exodus, Megadeth, and Possessed. The musicians who created thrash were influenced by both heavy metal and punk; Motörhead, an important pioneer of speed metal, has played for both punk and metal audiences since the 1970s. The punk influence shows up in the music’s fast tempos and frenetic aggressiveness and in critical or sarcastic lyrics delivered in a menacing growl. From heavy metal, thrash musicians took an emphasis on guitar virtuosity, which is usually applied more generally to the whole band. Thrash bands negotiate fast tempos, meter changes, and complicated arrangements with precise ensemble coordination. Speed metal was in part a reaction against the spectacular dimension of other metal styles; thrash bands appealed to “a new generation for whom Zeppelin and Sabbath were granddads but Quiet Riot and Motley Crüe were too glam.”41 However, though it is often compared to punk rock because of its speed, noise, and violence, thrash metal contrasts with punk’s simplicity and nihilism, both lyrically and musically. The Ramones and the Sex Pistols placed musical amateurism at the aesthetic core of punk rock; but to be considered metal, bands must demonstrate some amount of virtuosity and control.
Bubbling underground since the mid-1970s, thrash or speed metal broke through to the surface of popular music in the late 1980s, with successful major-label releases by Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer, at that time the Big Four of thrash metal.42 The breakthrough came in 1986, when Metallica’s Master of Puppets, their first album on a major record label, began to receive the acclaim that would make it thrash metal’s first platinum album. Metallica’s success sparked increased interest in speed metal among the major record companies, who developed promotional tactics to help bring underground bands to mainstream attention. Until then, speed metal bands had recorded on independent labels like Combat, Megaforce, and Metal Blade, relying on a loyal underground of fans to spread the word. In 1989, MTV sponsored their “Headbanger’s Ball Tour,” which gained wide exposure for Anthrax, Exodus, and Helloween.
By the end of the decade, thrash metal had successfully challenged the mainstream of metal and redefined it. Metallica and a few other bands were able to headline arena concerts and appear regularly on MTV, although radio play remained incommensurate with their popularity. Other styles of metal coexisted, despite a slump in heavy metal record and ticket sales in 1990, which was explained by music industry figures as the result of the economic recession and overexploitation of the metal market—too many bands signed, too many records released, too many concert tours—as the industry scrambled to cash in on the boom of the late 1980s.43
Throughout the 1980s, the influence of heavy metal on other kinds of popular music was pervasive and substantial. On what became the best-selling record of all time, Michael Jackson (or his producer Quincy Jones) brought in guitarist Eddie Van Halen for a cameo heavy metal solo on the song “Beat It” (1982). Just as Jackson and Jones used Vincent Price’s voice on “Thriller,” on the same album, to invoke the scary thrills of horror films, Van Halen’s noisy, virtuosic solo fit well in a song about danger and transgression. As the 1980s went on, heavy metal guitar sounds became well enough known to be used in all sorts of contexts, to evoke danger, intensity, and excitement. Rappers Run-D.M.C. brought metal guitar into hip hop in 1986 with their remake of Aero-smith’s “Walk This Way,” and Tone Loc had a huge hit in 1989 with “Wild Thing,” a rap song built around guitar and drum licks digitally sampled from a song on Van Halen’s first album. Pop stars frequently used metal guitar sounds to construct affective intensity and control, as in Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible.” By the middle of the decade, metal sounds had begun appearing often in advertising jingles. Even ads for the U.S. Army (“Be All That You Can Be”) featured metal guitar in a kind of subliminal seduction: military service was semiotically presented as an exciting, oppositional, youth-oriented adventure. Rebel, escape, become powerful: join the army!
Like the boundaries of the genre, the history of heavy metal is widely contested. In October 1988, MTV conducted a survey of its viewers, asking the question “What was the first metal band?” The bands most often named were Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, and Metallica. The first of these is not a surprising choice; the others perhaps are. But Kiss and Alice Cooper did found that type of heavy metal that is heavily dependent on spectacle, while Black Sabbath initiated dark metal, oriented toward the occult. Even the choice of Metallica can be understood, as it was that band that brought speed metal to the attention of a wide audience.
The ancestors chosen by fans and musicians reflect the characteristics of metal they valorize. Some want to connect metal closely to the history of rock music, while others emphasize that metal is something new and original. Heavy metal vocalist Dee Snider stresses connections to rock’s roots and an “authenticity” grounded in protest: “Heavy metal is the only form of music that still retains the rebellious qualities of’50s rock and roll.”44 Responding to the common perception of technological mediation as artifice and commercial mediation as ideological compromise, critics sometimes minimize metal’s musical and technical complexity:
While modern musical technology continued to gather praise from the elite caught up in its spell, a special breed of musicians remained true to “the roots.” Instead of layering their sound with electronics, they chose to turn it up! Rock and Roil, they said, was raw and gritty; a means of escape; an uncomplicated element whose purpose was to entertain. Those groups, the survivors, upheld “the roots” in their original form, delivered at blistering volume, filled with urgency and fury. They earned the title Heavy Metal.45
Here metal fans are hailed as hardheaded realists, members of a grassroots community unswayed by the false hype that has lured “the elite” away from the clear purpose and simple means of early rock. Yet such explanations obscure aspects of metal that are equally important and collapse tensions that are mediated by metal, for much heavy metal places a great premium on virtuosity and innovation, on spectacle, on effects that can be created only with the help of very sophisticated technology. Heavy metal history, its genre distinctions, and the interpretation of its texts and practices all depend upon the ways in which metal is used and made meaningful by fans.
Headbangers
I Metallari di Salerno Salutano i Metallari di Firenze—Graffito scrawled on the Uffizi Museum in Florence, July 1989.46
Who is the audience for heavy metal? As recently as 1985, Billboard asserted that heavy metal fans were still most concentrated in “the blue-collar industrial cities of the continental U.S.”47 A different marketing study, conducted at about the same time, concluded that the metal audience lived in “upscale family suburbs.”48 Probably both are correct; class background correlates, to some extent, with preferences for different kinds of metal, but heavy metal in the 1980s claimed a huge audience that overruns these categories. And they are an active audience; the fans I surveyed claimed, on the average, to buy a new metal recording every week, even though many of them have little money.49 Heavy metal fans are loyal concertgoers, too; many metal bands, long denied radio airplay, have built their audiences through touring, and according to Billboard, metal “attracts a greater proportion of live audiences than any other contemporary music form.”50
Fans of heavy metal are also, overwhelmingly, white. Neither the lyrics nor the fans are noticeably more racist than is normal in the United States; in fact, the enthusiasm of many fans for black or racially mixed bands, like Living Colour