Running with the Devil. Robert Walser
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to the 2014 Edition
Harris M. Berger
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Toward the end of Running with the Devil, Robert Walser engaged ideas from Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982) to understand the ways in which the musicians and fans of heavy metal use their music to come to term with the dynamism and dislocations of modernity. Exploring the imperative for relentless transformation in contemporary society, Berman was an apt touchstone for Walser, who argued that Guns N’ Roses’s explosive musical energy chronicled how late capitalism’s turbulent and oppressive qualities are experienced by American youth in everyday life, even as that music recapitulated capitalism’s strident individualism. Rereading Walser’s now classic study over twenty years after its initial publication, I am struck by how much things have changed in the world of metal and in popular music studies—how much the solid has melted into air—but also how contemporary Running feels, how many of its interpretations continue to capture the affective character of social life in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
At first glance, it is the transformations within metal that capture one’s attention. It has been widely and rightly observed that innovations from African American popular musics (ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, hip hop) have long been co-opted by an American music industry dominated by white artists and white executives. What is less widely acknowledged are the ways in which musical innovations from heavy metal—a music that is often understood as “white” but which has, from its inception, been produced by artists from a wide range of racial and ethnic groups—have been incorporated into mainstream styles and contexts. The distinctive timbral qualities of metal’s heaviest guitar players, the rhythmic textures and styles of ornamentation of its most aggressive drummers, and the harmonic ideas of its most creative composers, musical elements that were once auditory icons of unredeemable transgression, are now common in the music of television, movies, and advertising, and even appear occasionally in the soundtracks of the most unobjectionably G-rated children’s series, from My Little Pony to Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse. Within metal itself, the musical vocabulary has expanded dramatically, with a vast proliferation of subgenres and a wide array of metal styles hybridizing with other musics. While music genres are best conceptualized as historically emergent bundles of expressive resources and social features that participants use to guide the production and reception of music, the shear variety of genre categories that have emerged in metal’s discourses indicates at least some of the musical scope here: English language, fan or journalistic sources such as the Encyclopaedia Metallum (2014), Wikipedia (2014), and AllMusic (2014) typically list from ten to twenty-five metal subgenres, while the finer-grained divisions within these subgenres extend out into a distant sociomusical horizon.1
If the music style of metal has expanded, its social base has grown and changed dramatically as well. From its inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s, heavy metal has always been a transnational music, but the 1980s and 1990s saw a vast globalization of the genre. The contemporary world of metal is a multipolar one, with influential scenes stretching from its original source countries in North America, Western Europe, and Australia to Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa, with new scenes developing today in sub-Saharan Africa as well. But perhaps the greatest changes to the music have come in its class associations. It is widely agreed that metal emerged from the declining industrial heartland of the United States and the UK, and while many of its audiences still hail from working-class backgrounds—Deena Weinstein has recently argued that metal should be viewed as the music of the global proletariat (2011)—the relationship between the music and its social base has become more complex. As Paul D. Greene and David R. Henderson have observed (2003), the metal of 1990s Nepal was the music of that country’s young technical elite, not its working classes, while in the contemporary US, both the black and the death metal styles have been incorporated into avant-garde postrock genres whose class associations are far from blue collar. Indeed, many years after my initial fieldwork in the working-class death metal scene of Akron, Ohio, I have heard young scholars casually contrast the contemporary subcultural formations that they study with “old school, blue collar death metal scenes,” social worlds so traditional and well understood that they serve as a reference point for music participants and scholars alike.
While it is clear that the world of metal has undergone enormous transformations, Running with the Devil has not been shamed by the passage of time. Far from it. Grounded in a nuanced reading of Marx’s cultural politics (1977) and notions of polyvocality from Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Valentin Vološinov (1986), Walser chose to interpret metal, not as an expression of working-class culture but as a distinctive musical and social discourse framed by the larger ideological imperatives and structural constraints of late capitalism, imperatives and constraints operating on those from a broad range of class backgrounds. Read in this light, metal’s themes of heroic individualism and transcendence speak equally to the alienation of working-class youth in the deindustrialized cities of the 1980s and early 1990s as it does to the experiences of middle-class youth in late 1990s South Asia or the Brooklyn of the 2010s. Likewise, while Walser’s study is grounded in North America, he acknowledges the transatlantic roots and newly widening transnational dimensions of metal, and his discussion of metal’s complex relationship with hard rock and the Western art music tradition certainly leaves room for understanding the incorporation of metal techniques into the standard musical vocabulary of soundtrack composers worldwide.
The interpretations of metal in Running are powerful ones, but they did not exhaust the cultural significance of metal or examine the breadth of its musical and social phenomena. Ranging widely across scenic and generic boundaries within metal that later scholars and fans would find to be more sharply drawn, Walser analyzes the appropriations (perhaps he would prefer merely to say “uses”) of rhetorical gestures from the Western art music canon by Eddie Van Halen and neoclassical virtuosi such as Yngwie Malmsteen, the gender dynamics of metal’s glam tradition, and the musical, narrative, and visual evocations of horror and insanity by thrash musicians and other performers from metal’s heavier strains. In the last twenty years, studies of individual artists (for example, Fast 2001; Pillsbury 2006), particular scenes and styles (Berger 1999, 2004; Wallach 2008; Baulch 2007), the social dynamics of metal’s global spread (Kahn-Harris 2007; Wallach, Berger, and Greene 2011), gender (Wallach 2011; Wong 2011; Vasan 2011), and race/ethnicity (Mahon 2004) have greatly expanded our understanding of the music. The last six years in particular have seen a series of international scholarly conferences on heavy metal, a burgeoning of articles and monographs on the music, and the formation of the International Society for Metal Music Studies, with its own journal (Metal Music Studies) and an exhaustive online bibliography. Virtually all of the research in this area cites Running as a foundational study, along with Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (1991), an essential but very different work from Running that Walser engages repeatedly (and often critically) in the course of his discussion.2 But while Running with the Devil was one of the fundamental documents in the study of heavy metal and contemporary popular music in general, its impact has in fact been much broader. The book did more than justify academic research on a reviled music genre; it offered a method of cultural analysis whose aim was nothing less than the transformation of musicology, music studies, and perhaps cultural criticism. It was the power of Walser’s theoretical and methodological approach that allowed his insights into metal to be so penetrating and that gave the work an impact on fields across a broad spectrum of the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Although the popular music studies of the early 1990s was dominated by scholars from sociology, communication, literature, and American studies, Running was not the first monograph on a popular genre to engage in music analysis. But pop music research that addressed the particulars of music sound and music structure were decidedly in the minority at the time, and many of those scholars that did engage musical analysis struggled to make sense of popular styles by using the analytic tools created for the study of the Western art music. Hampered by a deeply ingrained belief in music’s autonomy, others were uncertain how to connect music sound to its social and cultural milieu. In this context, Running offered a very different approach. A leading voice in what was