Running with the Devil. Robert Walser
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for cultural criticism because music sound and music structure are the means by which so many of our most fundamental social relationships are negotiated and made meaningful. Musical works are neither sonic objects awaiting dispassionate analysis on the musicologist’s dissection table nor timeless aesthetic objects erupting from some universal human urge to create beauty. To the contrary, Walser, like many of the new musicologists, saw music as a historically and culturally situated form of rhetoric—a means of stirring powerful emotional forces, articulating values and subject positions, crystallizing social formations, and making sense of the world. This is as true of the works of Bach and Brahms as it is of those by Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult. Walser did not use formal analysis to legitimate the study of metal as good music or “raise” Metallica to the level of Mahler but to understand the meanings that composers, audiences, and musicians find important enough to build their lives around.
Treating music analysis as the Geertzian interpretation of culture (1973) could only be a starting point, however, and the theoretical and methodological tools that Walser brought to bear on his project came from a broad range of thinkers and disciplines. As a baseline, Walser’s background as a musician and training in musicology provided him with the fundamental understanding that music was just as amenable to analysis as any other mode of expression (a notion that, disturbingly, is still counterintuitive for some in the Western academy). Walser was deeply critical of much work in musicology, but that discipline offered him a language for addressing structure and sound in music, and he joined with other new musicologists such as Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Leppert and McClary 1987; McClary 1991) in seeing music as a form of expression that is always shaped by historical context and large-scale relations of power. From ethnomusicologists like John Blacking (1973), John Miller Chernoff (1979), and Steven Feld (1990), Walser borrowed ethnographic techniques, an emphasis on the role of cultural context in the shaping of musical meanings, and an understanding that, while culture does not display what the structuralist once saw as a totalizing systematicity, the meaning of any given expressive form is shaped by the tightly woven network of social and ideological elements in which it is situated. And like many ethnomusicologists of the period, Walser was inspired by Christopher Small’s work (1980, 1987), which viewed music as a kind of social activity rather than an object or a product, and Small’s powerful insights proved to be pivotal for all of Walser’s research.
Walser’s relationship with those fields outside of music studies that engaged popular music was complex. He was as critical of the decontextualized content analysis pursued in sociology as he was of the Adornian impulse in popular music studies that dismissed audience perspectives or any scholar that founded music’s meaning solely on its mode of distribution, rather than its sonic particulars and situated reception. But at the same time, Walser drew liberally from the best work in the cultural studies of the day, using the ideas of Simon Frith (1981), John Fiske (1987, 1989), and Stuart Hall (1981) to think richly about the problem of genre and the ways in which expressive culture is shaped by power relations. More important for Running, though, was the work of Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Vološinov (1986). Understanding that any act of individual expression depends fundamentally in form and meaning on a pre-existing lexicon of expressive resources, responds dialogically to opposing voices, and is inextricable from a historical and social environment of domination and resistance (indeed, that such expression is partially constitutive of those environments), Walser showed how Bakhtin’s and Vološinov’s ideas about the discursive nature of language could be extended to serve as a framework for the interpretation of music. While Running is certainly a study of one particular musical form, its unique synthesis of musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and discourse theory illustrated a powerful new method of research and offered a theoretical orientation that transcended its immediate topic and has served as a model for scholarship in a wide range of areas—within music studies and beyond. Not merely suggesting that music could be construed as discourse but showing how it operates as such, Running made a contribution to the humanities and humanistic social sciences that is still deeply felt.
But Running with the Devil was more than just an illustration of a method or an abstract work of theory; it was also a form of cultural intervention. Seeking to articulate the alienation and rage of metalheads living in the deindustrialized America of the early 1990s, Walser’s work engaged directly in the heated culture wars of its day. With deep research and cogent analysis, Walser debunked the worst distortions of the Parents Music Research Council and their allies, those who sought to make heavy metal the scapegoat for America’s ills. Metal is not an expression of adolescent rebellion, satanic depravity, or unrestrained hedonism, Walser argued; to the contrary, the horror and madness that metal depicts is the true face of late capitalism. Articulating this critique, Walser employed a prose style that was perfectly suited to his project. Consistently clear and accessible, his writing balanced heavy-hitting theory with evocative interpretations, painstaking descriptions of fact with devastating arguments against metal’s detractors.3 In recognizing that works of scholarship can serve as a significant voice in the broad cultural dialog of a society, Walser didn’t just talk the talk of discourse theory, he walked its walk as well. In so doing, Running with the Devil took up George E. Marcus’s and Michael M. J. Fischer’s call for using ethnographic work as a form of social criticism (1986), and its powerful cultural work inspired a generation of activist scholarship in music studies.
In 2014, the moral panics around metal have partially subsided in the United States. I am aware of no current investigations by the U.S. Congress of metal’s corrupting influence on the country’s youth, though the music’s heaviest styles still operate as dissident voices in America’s cultural discourse (the incorporation of certain musical tropes from metal into the soundtrack of some My Little Pony episodes not with standing). And when viewed from a global perspective, heavy metal is even more clearly seen as a vital site of contestation. Throughout the new century metal musicians have been censored and jailed in a variety of countries, and Mark LeVine’s 2010 report for the music and free speech advocacy organization Freemuse details a complex and uneven global terrain in which metal performers and fans face repression in some countries and greater tolerance in others. In the past, metal has tended to avoid an explicit engagement with politics, but it is now at least somewhat more common for the music to proffer specific ideological positions. Metal’s connection with the far right is still limited,4 while its link with liberatory movements seems to be growing. What remains for those working in metal studies, and for any group of researchers who see music as a discursive formation, is to continue listening to music as dialog—understanding how it fits into the lives of its participants, articulates their experiences, and speaks back to the larger social worlds in which they are embedded. But more than just listening to those dialogs, we scholars of metal, and those who study any form of expressive culture, must carry those dialogs forward in our own interventions, amplifying those voices, interpreting them with a sensitive but critical ear, and engaging in the struggles that gave those musics life and continue to make them meaningful.
Notes
1. Some musicologists and music theorists may be dismissive of the generic schemes constructed by the fans who have developed the Encyclopaedia Metallum or Wikipedia’s “Subgenres” article. It is true that, with the exception of those writers that release their work in the kind of specialist publications like Guitar Player and Guitar for the Practicing Musician that Walser discusses, fan and journalistic sources generally do not produce the explicit, systematic analyses of music structure that academic musicologists or music theorists prize. But, I would argue, such fan sources (and many journalistic writings) deserve careful attention from scholars because they offer crucial insights into insider views of the organization of musical discourse. In addition, they often reveal dimensions of structure that outsider perspectives fail to discover. In this context, their generic systems are a useful index of the breadth of musical diversity in contemporary metal and esoteric perspectives upon it.
2. Weinstein published a revised edition of this book under the new title Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (2000).
3. Walser’s writing was occasionally lighthearted as well. The title of the final section of Running’s last chapter, “Guns N’ Roses N’ Marx N’ Engels,” may be the best A-head that the field of popular music studies