The Speeding Bullet, the Smoking Gun: Tracing Metal Trajectories, from Sabbath to Satyricon

Abstract

Heavy metal has been proclaimed dead and buried at least twice during its 40-year history, only for the corpse to be re-animated, confounding industry experts and music commentators alike. This characteristic of persistence or indestructibility - of the beast that refuses to die or the scary monster that lurches ever-onwards - often leads fans, musicians, journalists and academics to assume a continuity; or to fashion a case for one. It is these acts of theorisation, claims to trace the arc or parabola of trajectory of metal music that I want to examine in this chapter. How many types of narratives or kinds of models are there? What principles of explanation underpin or organise their unity and in what respects do they differ? I argue there are 3 kinds of recognisable narratives or models of persistence. All of them depend on some sort of claim for continuity but also draw on ideas of discontinuity or rupture; that is, sudden or dramatic change, or a claim for hybridity or ruptural-unity: of re-unification through division. The first is a variety of rockism or the ideology of rock music. Let us call it The Church of Metal or the Old Testament of Heaviosity. Its unity is to be found in the values of the metal subculture and the betrayal of those values by commerce and incorporation, which can only be countered by a new revolution or resurgence, which reaffirms the core values and renews the relationship over again. Weinstein’s Heavy Metal is a classic example of this model. The second is popular musicology’s New Testament of Rhythm and Cultural Reading. This set of perspectives seek or discover continuity in shared musical practices, of how metal musicians conceive and produce metal musical sounds on the guitar, bass and drums and via vocal techniques which articulate a cultural engagement with identity and place. A recent example is Cope’s Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music. The third emanates from post-subcultural theory and scene studies. The Scenesters or New Prophets of Sub-Genre Variation and Hybridity, describe the reconfiguration of the aesthetics and politics of metal music culture in ways which announce a ‘break’ from the past or an avant-garde re-distillation of the genre in ways which are both exclusionary and purist. A recent example is the AgSIT typology of genre trajectory, by Lena and Peterson.

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