Death Metal at the Limits
The listening pleasures of death metal are multiple and complex, and are not well accounted for by an approach which sees pleasure as a diversion from music’s “real work” of political engagement. In assuming that clear lines can be drawn between the “politically good” and “politically bad” text (see Hills 2007, 39), popular music studies has tended to subordinate pleasure to political concerns in ways that evaluate, rather than explain, the meaning and significance of popular music forms. The political implications of music are obviously important, but what else music might be about is equally important. A productive way forward, then, may be one that acknowledges and explores the specificities of musical genres and their listening pleasures, rather than one that evaluates musical genres according to “how political” they are.
Such an approach would assist in developing more complete understandings not just of heavy and extreme metal, but of other genres conventionally understood as politically progressive. While electronic dance music, hip hop, and punk are each understood as offering liberatory, egalitarian, and radical activist cultures, the question of “politics” is often a starting point for many studies. That studies are so often structured by political concerns means that the aesthetic and affective specificities of these genres are often sidelined by an approach that judges music for its reactionary and progressive representations and meanings. This has contributed significantly to the overrepresentation in popular music studies of genres most readily interpreted as progressive, and the marginalization of genres which are less compatible with critics’ own politics.
The persistently negative characterization of heavy and extreme metal has been one result of this trend in popular music studies. Yet the conventions of death metal—its displacement of the singing voice as an identificatory locus of listening, its disruption of conventional melodic expectations, its adoption of “non-narrative” song structures, its transgressive lyrics, and its reflexive anti-reflexivity—effect a reorientation of listening that means that its politics cannot readily be predicted in advance or simply “read off” musical and cultural practices. Death metal may provide access to a musical becoming in which images and sounds of corporeal dissolution are offered as sites of pleasure and play, or to modes of listening in which the “technicalities” of music composition are the central focus. In each case, the genre’s evasion of politics need not be seen as a deficiency of the music or of the scene, but as a means of accessing alternative forms of listening pleasure. Thinking with the pleasures of death metal, then, may require the suspension of prior judgments and pre-given evaluative agendas.
Zylinska has demonstrated how criticism within the broad field of cultural studies has often been motivated by an ethical imperative, but in seeking to define or fix its object of study so that it might formulate its agendas and politics, cultural studies has not always acted ethically (2005, 34). She argues that a truly ethical cultural studies “will not provide a corrected version of morality in advance, even if it was to come disguised as political intervention. Instead . . . it will call for a permanent vigilance—towards the injustice and power games committed by the third party but also towards our own prejudices” (Zylinska 2005, 60).
One of these prejudices—the fear of apoliticism—has often prevented critics from fully engaging with the complexity and specificity of musical pleasure. This has been the case not just for the scholarship on heavy and extreme metal, but for popular music scholarship more broadly. After all, if the dominance of political criticism has limited the extent to which critics have been able to engage with and explore the pleasures of death metal, then such an approach has likely limited our understanding of other musical genres as well. Critics’ discomfort about the music’s potential for disengagement from progressive politics should not foreclose the possibility of developing an alternative conceptual model that could explain music’s moments of apoliticism without sacrificing an understanding of the complexity of its pleasures. The limits of political criticism reveal the importance of approaching musical genres on their own terms, and not in relation to a pre-determined evaluative framework.
AT THE LIMITS OF DEATH METAL
In October 2006, I had the opportunity to see Cannibal Corpse perform during its first tour of Australia since 1994. At the venue, I was slightly shocked to see a number of the women at the show wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Fucked with a Knife.” The slogan refers to a song on Cannibal Corpse’s 1994 album The Bleeding that depicts a woman being brutally raped with a knife. This was a song that particularly concerned Kahn-Harris in his 2003 article on death metal, in which he worried that such songs could reinforce a misogyny already in place in the extreme metal scene and potentially represent a “sinister [musical] project that strongly affirms both gendered bodies and the violent forms of power through which gender is affirmed” (2003, 87, 92).
What was more troubling than the song’s lyrical content was that these shirts were small and tight-fitting: that is, they had been manufactured specifically for women. I wondered both about the political implications of the shirt and women’s willingness to wear it. What did this shirt say about the gender politics of the death metal scene? What is its impact on attitudes towards women in the scene? What does women’s willingness to wear this shirt say about their relationship to the music and to the scene? I found it profoundly disturbing that these women could be so willfully uncritical of the problematic gender politics of Cannibal Corpse in general and “Fucked with a Knife” in particular.
Intellectually, we can understand this episode simply as an example of reflexive anti-reflexivity par excellence. Given the nature and extremity of the actions depicted in this song, it is most likely that the women were wearing the shirt as an expression of their commitment to the music and the band, and not as a sign of their endorsement of or desire to experience actual rape and brutality. Their willingness to wear the shirt is also an example of how reflexive anti-reflexive practice can be deeply discomforting. To approach death metal on its own terms in the way outlined in this book—to think with the conventions of the genre—requires the adoption of an intellectual politics that is sometimes at odds with our personal politics.
In some ways, this intellectual politics can be difficult, as it restricts our ability to critique the aspects of the music and the scene with which we disagree or find politically or ethically problematic. But it is something that can also be productive. Challenging our customary modes of political critique may combat the overrepresentation of certain taste cultures and challenge the canonization of particular genres in popular music studies. In the end, if we are to fully understand the pleasures of death metal or of any popular music form, a spirit of intellectual openness must be extended to all music cultures, not just to those that we like or that are most compatible with our own politics and agendas. Exploring popular music at the limits of political criticism, then, enables new ways of thinking about musical pleasure and productive ways forward for popular music scholarship as a whole.