Can I Play with Madness? Metal, Dissonance, Madness and Alienation

Citation preview

Edited by

Colin A. McKinnon, Niall Scott and Kristen Sollee

Can I Play with Madness?

Critical I ssues

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Daniel Riha Advisory Board Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Dr Peter Mario Kreuter Professor Margaret Chatterjee Martin McGoldrick Dr Wayne Cristaudo Revd Stephen Morris Mira Crouch Professor John Parry Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Paul Reynolds Professor Asa Kasher Professor Peter Twohig Owen Kelly Professor S Ram Vemuri Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ The Ethos Hub ‘Heavy Fundametalisms’

2011

Can I Play with Madness? Metal, Dissonance, Madness and Alienation Edited by

Colin A. McKinnon, Niall Scott and Kristen Sollee

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2011 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-057-3 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2011. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction PART 1

ix

Analysing Insanity Goethe vs. Rammstein: Who is Allowed to Play                  3   with Madness? The Influence of Musical Taste on Prejudice against Heavy Metal Lyrics Julia Kneer, Diana Rieger, Lena Frischlich and Daniel Munko

PART 2

PART 3

Death and Life: The Role of Music and Others Rute Rodrigues and Abílio Oliveira

15

Textual Analysis of Song Lyrics Adopting a Mental Health Diagnostic Standard as Method Richard E. Wilson and Mike Thomas

25

Disparate Disciplines: Theoretical Applications of Madness in Heavy Metal Two Steps past Insanity: The Expression of  Aggression in Death Metal Music Daniel Frandsen

35

Can Progressive Metal’s Narrative Inform Social Stigma Theory? Pain of Salvation’s The Perfect Element Parts 1 and 2 as Examples Nelson Varas-Diaz

41

Hysteric Desire: Sexual Positions, Sonic Subjectivity and Gender Play in Glam Metal Kristen Solee

51

More Madness in the Metal Method: A Spectrum Disorder of Theoretical and Applied Research Approaches No Method in the Madness? The Problem of the Cultural Reading in Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil: Power Madness and Gender in Heavy Metal Music and Recent Metal Studies Andy R. Brown

63

Qualitative Research in Understanding the Metal Community Igor Gafarov

73

Heavy Metal, Identity Work and Social Transitions:          79 Implications for Young People’s Well Being in the Australian Context Paula Rowe PART 4

PART 5

Ripping it Up: Metal as a Symptom of a Civilised and Aggressive Disorder Heavy Metal Rituals and the Civilising Process Gary Sinclair

93

Cycles of Metal and Cycles of Male Aggression: Ageing and the Changing Aggressive Impulse Samir Puri

101

Metal Disorder, Metal Disturbance Niall Scott

111

Challenging Perceptions on Metal and Suicide War inside My Head: Metal, Mental Illness and Psychic Energy Colin A. McKinnon

121

Suicide, Metal Music and Expectancy Theory Alick Kay

133

Emo Saved My Life: Challenging the Mainstream Discourse of Mental Illness around My Chemical Romance Rosemary Hill

143

Does Death and Suicide Sound Like the Music You Hear? Abílio Oliveira and Rute Rodrigues

155

PART 6

Positively Mad: Black Metal Health and the Construction of Identity Playing with Madness in the Forest of Shadows: Dissonance, Deviance and Non-Comformity in the Black Metal Scene Karl Spracklen

169

Lord Satan’s Secret Rites and Satanism as SelfTherapy: The Creation of a Masculinity Gender Identity within Black Metal Sanna Fridh

177

‘A Furore Normannorum, Libera Nos Domine!’ A Short History of Going Berserk in Scandinavian Literature and Heavy Metal Imke von Helden

185

Introduction Colin A. McKinnon, Niall Scott and Kristen Sollee Madness has been one of the prevailing themes in metal from the very outset, not only in the lyrical and musical expressions of the artists and bands and the genre’s fascination with insanity, but also as an important feature in how metal itself is perceived by others, whether through the aggressive exuberance of musical and fan expression, in its alienation, in the chaotic theatre of the pit, or the links in the mainstream mind between metal and suicide or mental illness. This eBook gathers together contributions presented at the 3rd Global Conference on Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics, held in Prague in November 2010. The conference drew together scholars from around the world to discuss and present on various topics of metal and madness, including representations of aggression in the music and fans, concepts and portrayals of madness in sub-genres such as black and death metal, gender roles and the subversion of those roles, perceptions and prejudices, heavy metal as self-therapy, and depression and suicidality. The editors are proud to present this collection of chapters; all of those included demonstrate the sociological, philosophical and psychological depth of metal and raise important questions and insights into the future of metal music studies. We open this volume with an analysis of insanity. Two areas still rather underutilised in metal studies are empirical and psychological research. Traditionally, both these areas have been difficult to approach when it comes to studies of musical genres and fans, but recent evidence suggests that this is beginning to change. A good example is the empirical study on perceptions and prejudices concerning metal lyrics by Julia Kneer, Diana Rieger, Lena Frischlich and Daniel Munko in, ‘Goethe versus Rammstein: Who is Allowed to Play with Madness? The Influence of Musical Taste on Prejudice against Heavy Metal Lyrics’. They examined how lyrical interpretation may be biased depending on the perception of the fans or non-fans. They demonstrated this using excerpts from a song by Rammstein and a poem by Goethe on which it was based. Their results showed how perception influences interpretation, leading to biased judgement. Rute Rodrigues and Abílio Oliveira show empirical research framed through social representation theory from a study of 1226 adolescents. In their essay ‘Death and Life: The Role of Music and the Others’ they show how social representations differ according to musical preferences and the opinions of others. In particular, they show the differences in the understanding and representation of death and suicide between girls and boys, and between younger and older adolescents. In the final chapter in this section Richard E. Wilson and Mike Thomas examine the representation of mental illness in rock and metal using the DSM-IV manual as the reference standard. Their research presented in: ‘Textual Analysis of Song Lyrics Adopting a Mental Health Diagnostic Standard as Method’ focuses on lyrics from

Introduction x  __________________________________________________________________ artists who have had documented mental health issues or direct experience of mental illness, on the basis that their portrayal may be more insightful and accurate. The chapters in the second section reveal just a few of the ways that madness and metal music can be theoretically applied to elucidate a variety of complex issues within disparate academic disciplines. In ‘Two Steps Past Insanity: The Expression of Aggression in Death Metal Music’, Daniel Frandsen attempts to uncover the ways in which both the lyrical and musical content of death metal express madness and aggression. He counters formalist arguments within the philosophy of music that say emotions cannot be expressed within purely instrumental music and that lyrics are the only place in which meaning can be found. Frandsen rejects such assumptions and outlines the ways in which the lyrics, vocal delivery, and music of death metal each individually project and invoke feelings of pain, anger, and aggression. Messages of hate toward the world and the desire to harm oneself are delivered in growling vocals atop tremolo picking, distortion, and furious drumming, which serve to create an overall aesthetic of aggression and the emotive content Frandsen argues in essential to death metal. Nelson Varas-Diaz takes a sociological approach in ‘Can Progressive Metal’s Narrative inform Social Stigma Theory? Pain of Salvation’s The Perfect Element Parts 1 and 2 as Examples’ to discuss progressive metal and the ways in which specific albums can illustrate issues of social stigma surrounding health and illness. He outlines a critique of social stigma theory, which can be seen as overly focused on individual responsibility with not enough emphasis on socio-structural factors. The lyrical content Varas-Diaz analyzes equally addresses the individual and social structures that can lead to the stigmatization of people in various situations by tackling issues such as sexual abuse, drug addiction, and the negative effects of consumer culture. The balancing act between the micro and the macro levels in the music Varas-Diaz cites provides a framework through which future social health researchers and workers can integrate both perspectives, which is something that has thus far been highly problematic. Kristen Sollee’s ‘Hysteric Desire: Sexual Positions, Sonic Subjectivity and Gender Play in Glam Metal’ combines a sociological and philosophical approach with a psychological one to analyze the gender bending that is essential to glam metal. She asserts that male musicians in the genre appropriate feminine aesthetics and vocal timbres while simultaneously expressing their desire for women in their lyrics. The fluidity of their identities as desiring sexual subjects mirrors the framework of the mental illness hysteria, which is found in individuals who paradoxically desire the opposite sex and want to desire as the opposite sex. Sollee does not diagnose male glam metal musicians as hysterics, but by using the psychological literature on the subject she is able to reveal their ambivalent positions when it comes to gender, which consequently points to the performative nature of gender itself. Thus, without necessarily intending to do so, male

Colin McKinnon, Niall Scott and Kristen Sollee

xi

__________________________________________________________________ performers in glam metal publicly put into practice the rejection and restructuring of rigid gender binaries that had been confined in theory to feminist academia. As evidenced by chapters such as these, there is no limit to the frameworks of inquiry that can be coupled with heavy metal. Whether in terms of the philosophy of music, the sociology of health, or the psychology of gender, the possibilities for heavy metal studies are revealed to be not only far-reaching but also potentially groundbreaking. Although this volume is littered and in no small measure devoted to research in heavy metal and mental health, specific methods are both criticised promoted and shown how to work in practice in this section of the book. Criticising research method in heavy metal literature is the focus of Andy Brown’s piece ‘No Method in the Madness/ The Problem of the Cultural Reading in Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil: Power Madness and Gender in Heavy Metal Music and Recent Metal Studies’. Here Brown warns the would be metal researcher of the pitfalls open to the fan academic engaging and communicating as a researcher in a practice that most fans do not participate in. In addition he calls for integrity, both in the use and assessment of empirical evidence and respecting the heavy metal scene in the difficult arena of testing theory in the dialogue between the fan-intellectual and fan. Igor Gafarov complements Brown’s stress on the value of qualitative data by outlining how a specific method can be used in heavy metal research, specifically in the analysis artist interview. In ‘Qualitative Research in Understanding the Metal Community’, Gafarov, like Brown recognises the limits of statistical objectivity and displays a research path to follow that will be of value to future researchers in the heavy metal community. The research question formulated in Paula Rowe’s essay ‘Heavy Metal Identity and Social Transitions’ is an example of the outworking of the Brown and Gafarov’s critiques. It is further a study on the mismatch between the positive growth of young people’s identities through heavy metal and policy-based normalisations in the educational setting that ignore individual lifestyle choices. The research into the question that relates wellbeing, metal identity and the social disapproval of the outsider to policy, requires a narrative integrity with the scene for the fan-researcher and quantitative method of the kind discussed above. Moving to rip up preconceptions with a twist to perhaps common perception of the crowd behaviour in the metal scene, opening chapter 4, Gary Sinclair argues that the ritual theatre of violent moshing in the pit at heavy metal gigs is part of a civilising process. Sinclair, in ‘Heavy Metal Rituals and the Civilising Process’, identifies this as a controlled de-controlling of emotions, where apparent rejection of the constraints of external standards and etiquette demands an increase in self control. The calming and civilising effect of age on male aggression in the metal scene conjures up images of head banging in cardigans and slippers. Samir Puri in ‘Cycles of Metal and Cycles of Male Aggression: Ageing and the Changing Aggressive Impulse’ discusses and speculates on the causes of aggression in young

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Introduction

__________________________________________________________________ men and the decline in such aggressive behaviour with age in line with male aggressive behaviour in the heavy metal scene, looking at each phenomenon to inform the other. The anger and disorder expressed in the music of System of a Down leads Niall Scott in ‘Metal Disorder, Metal Disturbance’ to criticise the normalising effect of some scientific, therapeutic and psychological approaches to disordered behaviour. He argues for allowing narratives of madness to be expressed, rather than contained and objectified in a scientific discourse, which often misses the point being made in the total performance of disorder. Part 5, entitled ‘Challenging Perceptions on Metal and Suicide’ examines the popular perceived link between metal fans and suicidal behaviour, depression and elements such as self-harm. Stories in various media concerning the harmful effects of metal have abounded over the years, and some high-profile court cases have unwittingly helped to cement this perceived link. This section therefore examines the evidence for such a connection from the available literature, from organisational behaviour theory, and from the fans themselves. Firstly, Colin A. McKinnon in ‘War inside My Head: Metal, Mental Illness and Psychic Energy’ takes a look at the published evidence for links between metal fans and mental illness or suicidal behaviour, especially studies that claim that metal may be a contributory factor to adverse mental health. Although no such evidence has yet been established, some psychological and neurophysiological research suggests reasons why certain individuals with predispositions to some mental health issues may be more attracted to metal. Alick Kay uses the expectancy theory developed by Victor Vroom to explore the motivational force for suicide. His ‘Suicide, Metal Music and Expectancy Theory’ assesses the motivating force to achieve something that one desires. Using this theory, Kay shows that the motivation to commit suicide on the basis of listening to music may in fact be very low. Rosemary Hill’s ‘Emo Saved My Life’: Challenging the Mainstream Discourse of Mental Illness around My Chemical Romance’ examines the representation of fans of the band My Chemical Romance in the mainstream press in the juxtaposing context of the fans’ own self-perception. Far from being a ‘suicide cult’ followed by misguided innocents, as portrayed in the mainstream press, the fans use the band’s music to enable them to cope with pre-existing conditions and to get them through very difficult times; the positive therapeutic effects of the music are therefore demonstrated. Finally, Abílio Oliveira and Rute Rodrigues address the meanings, roles and effects of music in adolescence, particularly with regard to beliefs and imagery involving, life, death, suicide and parasuicidal (e.g. self-harming) behaviour. They ask the question: ‘Does Death and Suicide Sound Like the Music You Hear? In a large study of adolescents, they found that girls preferred pop and softer music, while boys preferred ‘harder’ music such as grunge, rock and metal. The musical preferences in this age group can give important clues to how they think and feel about topics such as death and suicide.

Colin McKinnon, Niall Scott and Kristen Sollee

xiii

__________________________________________________________________ We close the volume with an abyssal peering into the dark well of black metal. Within the black metal scene, madness is a positive discourse crucial to shaping the identities of both bands and fans. The chapters in this chapter all position madness as a defining factor of black metal – one which functions to separate insiders from outsiders, whether in terms of music or masculinity. In ‘Playing with Madness in the Forest of Shadows: Dissonance, Deviance and Non-Comformity in the Black Metal Scene,’ Karl Spracklen discusses bands that incorporate violence and selfharm in their performances and personal lives, which literalizes madness as mental illness. He reveals the contested space between original black metal and suicidal or depressive black metal (which has musical antecedents in shoegaze), where bands considered depressive black metal are often not deemed ‘true’ black metal because they incorporate lighter sonic aspects infused with a message of self-loathing. This stands in opposition to the aggressive self-destruction in word and deed that is commonly associated with the heavier music of traditional black metal. Even though both camps thematically deal with madness as a prized trope, it is the type of madness and its specific musical expression that signifies a band’s status to fans as being part of or separate from the black metal scene. Sanna Fridh’s chapter, ‘Lord Satan’s Secret Rites and Satanism as SelfTherapy: The Creation of a Masculinity Gender Identity within Black Metal’ looks at black metal masculinity. Fridh points to a perceived ‘feminization of masculinity’ pervasive in Western culture today and aligns it with Christianity. Following that Satanism is in many ways Christianity inverted, the Satanism in the black metal scene serves to bind men together in a kind of kinship, whilst encouraging them to assert individual masculinities that reflect the anti-aesthetics and the madness of ritual self-harm that have been historically pivotal to the black metal scene. Such behaviors affirm stereotypically male attributes, which include the ability to endure pain and to reject fashionable adornments associated with women, gay men, and metrosexuals. She concludes that Satan stands for being true to oneself, whilst Christ stands for allegiance to the status quo. Imke von Helden touches on many of the same themes as Spracklen and Fridh in ‘A Furore Normannorum, Libera Nos Domine!’ A Short History of Going Berserk in Scandinavian Literature and Heavy Metal’. She traces the Norse literary trope of the berserker, the elite, long-haired warriors known for fighting without armor and being completely impervious to pain, and analyzes the motif in metal lyrics. Von Helden also draws comparisons between headbanging and the aggressive physical abandon at metal shows to the behaviors of the berserker, and reveals the ways in which the metaphorical use of this figure allows for bands and fans to feel empowered. von Helden implicitly affirms Fridh’s argument about how men are able to create alternate (and violent) expressions of masculinity through the black metal scene. Whether sonically or behaviourally, madness repeatedly functions to separate what fans consider the authentic from the inauthentic, and

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__________________________________________________________________ plays a vital role in identity formation in a space separate from the oppressive and unappealing dictates of the world outside the metal scene. A note to the reader: the range of voices represented in this work speaks to the breadth of this interdisciplinary collection; authors are not only professional academics, but students, independent freelance writers and fans. Some material here is in the early stages of development, creative and darkly speculative, other material flows from emerging and ongoing research. We have sought to preserve this rich interaction by presenting the chapters close to what was delivered at the conference. The editorial team would like to thank the participants for their hard work and contributions, and those working hard behind and at the forefront of the scenes at inter-disciplinary.net for continuing to place confidence in the project. About the editors: Colin McKinnon has a background in biological science and has been a proud metalhead for over 30 years, ever since having his brain rewired by stumbling upon Judas Priest on ‘Top of the Pops’. He has served on the Steering Committee for two of the ‘Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics’ conferences and works in the science industry in Switzerland. Niall Scott is Senior Lecturer in Ethics at the University of Central Lancashire, and is project leader for I-D.Net’s Music Metal and Politics project and has written widely on heavy metal, philosophy and politics. Niall never had his brain rewired. He was born metal. Kristen Sollee has a B.A. from the New School in Musicology and an M.A. from Columbia University in Gender Studies and Japanese Culture. She currently writes for various arts publications and blogs about New York City music and nightlife at www.ShadowtimeNYC.com. An unapologetic hair metal fan, Kristen’s first tattoo was of course the word GLAM.

PART 1 Analysing Insanity

Goethe vs. Rammstein: Who is Allowed to Play with Madness? The Influence of Musical Taste on Prejudice against Heavy Metal Lyrics Julia Kneer, Diana Rieger, Lena Frischlich and Daniel Munko Abstract For all of its short lifespan, heavy metal music has been regarded as aggressive, depressive and dangerous. Especially people who do not like or listen to this kind of music, seem to have prejudice against the themes of heavy metal songs. One major example is the German rock band Rammstein whose lyrics are often judged as brutal and even right-wing extremist. What is known very well from social psychology is that prejudice influences further information-processing resulting in biased judgements. Therefore, the question arises whether the interpretation of lyrics might be biased, too, depending on the names of authors and subjective musical taste but not on the actual song content. Our explorative study deals with lyric interpretation. In particular, how heavy metal lyrics are perceived depending on musical taste and author name. We chose two different excerpts from a Goethe poem and a Rammstein song. These were presented to our participants who were heavy metal fans and non-fans. They had to read one of the poems and interpret it afterwards. Before reading, they were told that Goethe or Rammstein wrote the following poem, respectively. As expected, fans and non-fans of heavy metal music showed differences concerning their interpretation of lyrics according to the name of the author while actual poem content was not taken into consideration. Specific musical taste seems to influence participants’ perception of lyrics according to author names, resulting in biased judgement. This bias in lyric perception might be due to specific associations with heavy metal music due to prejudice against this kind of music. Key Words: Prejudice, heavy metal lyrics, Rammstein, Goethe, heavy metal music, music preferences, lyrical texts. ***** 1. Sturm und Drang vs. Heavy Metal: Are We Going to Take Hostages? Remember the film Hanna and Her Sisters written by Woody Allen? While watching a group of punk rockers, the main character Mickey tells Holly that he is afraid ‘they’re going to take hostages.’ Being a heavy metal fan and interacting with non-fans can often lead to prejudice and sometimes to discrimination. Why is this? One of the most popular German rock bands, Rammstein, is discussed very ambivalently between fans and non-fans. In fact, the lyrics of Rammstein songs are often inspired by socially relevant topics or even lyrical poems or texts written by poets or novelist such as

4

Goethe Versus Rammstein

__________________________________________________________________ Bertholt Brecht, Johann Wolfgang Goethe etc. Nevertheless, especially non-fans are unaware of this lyrical content and form their own impression on the heavy metal genre and its lyrics. While the band Rammstein is considered to be aggressive and their music is often seen as bad influence, Goethe’s lyrics are seen as intelligent, precious, and as a good influence. We, as media and social psychologists were interested in whether heavy metal fans and non-fans might differ concerning their lyric interpretation when confronted with Goethe versus Rammstein as the pretended author of a given poem. What is know from framing techniques is that the meaning of a sentence never stands alone but always depends on the context it is presented in and on the expression itself.1 In an MTV-interview, Richard Kruspe (guitarist) stated that Rammstein played with heavy metal and rock themes to underline the meaning of their lyrics. What is almost forgotten is that many German musicians and writers always wrote about ambiguous, aggressive, and even pornographic themes. Even historically there has always been a distrust of youth-oriented music. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato said ‘Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state and ought to be prohibited’.2 2. Personal Affection and Stereotypes: Is Goethe Allowed to Play with Madness while Rammstein is Not? Hamilton and Trolier define stereotype as ‘a cognitive structure that contains the perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about a human group.’3 When a stereotype becomes activated, one’s knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about a group are brought to mind. Research in the field of social psychology has shown that activation of stereotypes affects information processing.4 Stereotypes are developed through experience with representative individuals of affiliated social groups. Experience must not only be seen personally but can be mediated by e.g. stories or media reports. More often than not, stories and reports about heavy metal fans or heavy metal concerts include discussions about aggressive, violent behaviour. Even school shootings are associated with this music genre. Therefore, stereotypes about heavy metal fans may be associated with real aggressive behaviour. Popular music has been a target of media critics and scholars ever since its first steps into mainstream media (radio and television), negative attention becoming more prevalent with the popularisation of rock’n’roll and other emerging genres.5 In 1985, heavy metal music, for example, was singled out as the primary target of a movement to regulate what was described as the overly violent and sexually explicit segments of rock and roll music.6 Along with heavy metal music came a new style of image and lyrics, characterised by features such as black leather clothing, long hair, occult references, and darker topics than previously dealt with in popular music (e.g., suicide, insanity and torture). Such images and lyrics serve to guide a general heavy metal philosophy of non-conformity to the greater society, often identified (by outsiders) as adolescent rebellion since a large portion of the

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__________________________________________________________________ fan base is composed of teenagers and young adults. This new (relative to music’s overall history) and continually emerging genre of music brought with it a new culture/subculture and consequently, increased general public and media attention, often negative in nature.7,8,9 Indeed, Bryson statistically identifies heavy metal as the most disliked genre of music using a sample from the 1993 General Social Survey.10 Because of its surge in popularity and mainstream media exposure through radio and especially MTV, extra focus on the music, its artists, and the overall culture became common topics of popular media coverage. Consequently, lawsuits were brought against heavy metal artists such as Ozzy Osbourne in 1986 and 1991 and Judas Priest in 1990. Heavy metal quickly became known to America as the bastard child of the music industry, despised by parents, religious groups, and politicians across the nation largely because of its public rejection and prosecution by authority figures. Still today, heavy metal music and artists are blamed for negative behaviours (cited as common to the culture) such as violence, adolescent rebellion, drug use, and delinquency, despite the failure to document an overwhelming statistically significant causal relationship between the consumption of heavy metal music and aggressive feelings and/or violent behaviours.11,12 For example, Brunner investigated individuals’ own perceptions of lyrical content. When asked what they thought of the stimulus, participants showed a difference in perception of the heavy metal and non-heavy metal stimuli. Lyrics labelled as ‘heavy metal’ were more often perceived negatively and less often perceived positively than lyrics labelled as a genre other than ‘heavy metal’. Additionally, heavy metal lyrics were more often described with extreme negative descriptors such as ‘angry,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘harsh,’ ‘hate,’ ‘evil’, and ‘violent’, compared to only 3 such references for non-heavy metal stimuli. One final point of interest is that only 3 of 26 participants who received the lyrics of Dean Martin’s song ‘In the Chapel in the Moonlight’ stated that its lyrics did not seem like they would be heavy metal lyrics, demonstrating a common genre stereotype that it does not include songs of love.13 Because media stories tend to link heavy metal, but not pop or country music, with antisocial behaviour, the public may form an expectation that heavy metal lyrics are more likely to cause listeners to engage in antisocial behaviour despite the lack of empirical evidence to support such a belief. Concerning specific stereotypes towards music, empirical results suggest that individuals have robust and clearly defined stereotypes about fans of various music genres.14,15 Specifically, in terms of characteristics of potential dating partners, it could be shown that male participants perceived female targets who preferred heavy metal music as rebellious and aggressive.16 What could be shown is that musical preferences play an important role when talking about effects on arousal or even aggressive tendencies. Gowensmith and Bloom investigated the effects of heavy metal music on arousal and anger and found that heavy metal music aroused all subjects, regardless if they were fans or non-fans. However, subjects who identified themselves as heavy metal fans did not show higher effects on anger,

6

Goethe Versus Rammstein

__________________________________________________________________ indicating that one should always take the musical preferences into account.17 Media reports and public debates may influence people who are experienced with heavy metal music as well as, and perhaps more strongly, people who lack any experience with this music genre, resulting in the development of stereotypic knowledge about heavy metal fans. This stereotypic knowledge may be derived from an assumed link between one’s personality and musical preference. Indeed, research on social psychology of music suggests that: (a) individuals believe music preferences reveal information about their personalities; (b) individuals deliberately use music preferences to convey information about themselves; and, (c) music preferences and personality are linked.18,19,20,21 As heavy metal fans are personally concerned with these specific stereotype behaviours, they need strategies to suppress arising negative associations. Recent research on the success of stereotype suppression is ambiguous. Many studies have shown, that attempting to suppress a stereotype results in what is known as rebound effect.22 Just try not to think of a pink elephant - and there it is. Yet, practice makes perfect. Internally motivated people are especially able to suppress thoughts.23 Personal affection by a specific stereotype and related negative associations seem to be a really good reason to learn how to suppress this stereotype. Therefore, the ‘heavy metal music stereotype’ may exist for people with heavy metal music experience, too, but may be suppressed due to negative associations. In the following study we wanted to explore whether prejudice against heavy metal music and especially its lyrics are influenced by being a fan or non-fan, respectively, of this specific music genre. Our assumption was that fans and non-fans differed regarding their interpretation of brutality and emotional affection of heavy metal lyrics. This was varied by given author information (Goethe versus Rammstein) and associated prejudice. 3. Study 3.1 Method We chose two different excerpts of Goethe’s poem ‘Röslein auf der Heide’ (engl. Rose on the Heath) and Rammstein’s song ‘Rosenrot’. These excerpts were selected due to their comparability concerning theme, and content. In fact, Rammstein’s song is based on Goethe’s poem. Participants were heavy metal fans and non-fans who had to read one of the excerpts and interpret it afterwards. The separation of fans and non-fans was accounted for by recruiting at a festival where Rammstein played and on the campus of the University of Cologne and by additionally asking them about their music preferences. The second manipulation was the actual lyrical content, either Goethe’s original poem or Rammstein’s song lyrics. Before reading, they were told that the following poem was written by

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__________________________________________________________________ Goethe or Rammstein, respectively; thus in the third manipulation the label ‘author’ for the text was given. The study comprised four different conditions: 2 (Author: Rammstein versus Goethe) x 2 (Text: Rammstein vs. Goethe). Participants had to write what they felt reading the poem. Afterwards they were asked to judge the poem on the basis of different reading 7-point-Likert-scales (1 = does not apply at all, 7 = totally applies). We selected several representative items out of an instrument, developed to depict reading experiences, differentiating between altogether 14 experiential states during reading.24 We focussed on judgments regarding the poems’ brutality and emotional affection. 3.2 Results We analysed brutality and emotional affection using a 2 (Music Preference: fan vs. non-fan) x 2 (Content: Rammstein lyrics vs. Goethe lyrics) x 2 (Information: Rammstein information vs. Goethe information) ANOVA.

Graphic 1. Ratings for brutality as a function of musical taste, author information, and actual lyrics.

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Goethe Versus Rammstein

__________________________________________________________________

Graphic 2. Ratings for emotional affection as a function of musical taste, author information, and actual lyrics. As expected, interaction effects for brutality and emotional affection were significant. We found a two-way interaction between Music Preference and Information for brutality, F (1, 40) = 8.09, p < .001,  p = .17. 2

ANOVA did not reveal a significant three-way interaction for Music Preference, Information, and Content, F (1, 40) = 1.20, p > .28. Non-fans judged the poem to be more brutal when they were told the respective author was Rammstein (see Graphic 1). We found a three-way interaction for emotional affection, F (1, 40) = 14.54, p < .001, p = .27. 2

Non-fans differed from fans depending on the author information they had. If the author was Rammstein the poem’s emotional affection was rated higher than in any other case (see Graphic 2).

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Discussion As supposed, we found that non-fans experienced heavy metal music lyrics as more brutal than fans did. What is striking about this finding is that the chosen Goethe poem could be interpreted as much more brutal than the Rammstein song. While the Heidenröslein content is about rape, Rammstein’s Rosenrot deals with a young boy’s unrequited love. The label Goethe or Rammstein, respectively, seems to be enough to influence the following interpretation of brutality concerning the lyrics for both groups: fans and non-fans. Non-fans definitely showed thoughtsuppression when confronted with information Rammstein while the actual poem was about rape. The opposite happened for non-fans: the information Rammstein lead to higher brutality ratings while content was irrelevant. As mentioned before, heavy metal has been a recurring topic of negative media coverage. Indeed, when violent incidents, especially those involving impressionable adolescents occur; the musical preference of said offenders is oftentimes investigated in relation to the violent behaviours. For example, Wright notes that heavy metal is often a target for popular media, attracting general accusations that it fosters socially deviant behaviours among its listeners.25 Such claims often depend on tactics of anecdote and insinuation, using extreme examples as the norm, which become influential through negative media coverage.26 Two examples exemplify this negative coverage. The 1999 shooting at Columbine High School quickly initiated an attack on the heavy metal genre when media reports revealed that both shooters were used listening to groups like KMFDM and Marilyn Manson, even though they later stated not to like Manson’s music.27 In ‘Bowling for Columbine’, Moore documents examples of public debates blaming Manson for the school shooting and then interviews Manson for his perspective. In reply, Manson notes that when he was growing up, music was an escape, a place to go where no judgments would be made on its listener. However, he also acknowledges that his public persona and extreme images make for a convenient target: ‘It’s easy to throw my face on a TV because I’m, in the end, a poster boy for fear, because I represent what everyone is afraid of; because I do and say what I want.’28 In this statement, Manson clearly espouses a central tenet (non-conformity) of the heavy metal philosophy. Yet, it remains questionable if in a first step heavy metal only contains brutal and radical lyrics and melodies and, secondly, if a music genre is then able to lead to aggressive, deviant behaviour. Apart from polemical media coverage, especially the assumed causal link between the two has not yet been found. For example, Arnett found cathartic rather than negative effects when listeners were asked for their responses to the music.29 Additionally, Epstein, Pratto and Skipper found no indication that listening to heavy metal had any effect on satanic identification or delinquent behaviour.30

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__________________________________________________________________ Our results show that non-fans still judge bands like Rammstein as being aggressive and brutal and that their music might be a bad influence to young people. This influence, however, occurs due to the existing stereotype towards this music genre since fans did not report the same lyrical interpretation. Moreover, Goethe’s poem which, in fact, should have given rise to more brutal thoughts was free of negative interpretation, due to the positive public stereotype towards this lyrical genre. It seems that Goethe is allowed to play with negative themes, even with rape. Does this mean that heavy metal music will always be seen as satanic? Not at all. Back then, even Goethe was denounced as being satanic and as a very bad influence for young men due to his novel ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werthers’ (The sorrows of young Werther) which deals with lovesickness and ends with its protagonist’s suicide. As a consequence of public debate, the consensus was that young men might copy Werther’s behaviour; thus, this novel was discussed to be banned. As always, public acceptance needs patience and time. Or as Wacken’s current Mayor Axel Kunkel (location of the ‘Wacken Open Air Festival’) stated last year: ‘… we never had any problems with aggression or destruction. Now, our citizens are looking forward ….the atmosphere is terrific! And I am really looking forward to Alice Cooper and Iron Maiden!’

Notes 1

R. Entman, ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of Communication, Vol. 43(4), 1993, pp. 51-58. 2 Plato, quoted by E. Gavish, ‘Music has always been a tuneful force for political change’, Daily News (October 11, 2009). 3 D.L. Hamilton and T.K. Trolier, ‘Stereotypes and Stereotyping: An Overview of the Cognitive Approach’, Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism, J.F. Dovidio and S.L. Gaertner (eds), US Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 1986, pp. 127-163. 4 J. Sherman, ‘Development and Mental Representation of Stereotypes’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 70, 1996, pp. 1126-1141. 5 I. Brunner, ‘Taken to the Extreme: Heavy Metal Cover Songs: The Impact of Genre’, 2006, Viewed on 13 September 2010, http://etd.ohiolink.edu/sendpdf.cgi/Brunner%20Isaac.pdf?bgsu1155518980. 6 J. Lynxwiler, ‘Framing the Picture that Rock Paints: A Frame Analysis of the Porn Rock Movement’, Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Nashville, TN, 1988. 7 C.H. Hansen and R.D. Hansen, ‘Schematic Information Processing of Heavy Metal Lyrics’, Communication Research, Vol. 18(3), 1991, pp. 1126-1141. 8 A. Binder, ‘Constructing Racial Rhetoric: Media Depictions of Harm in Heavy Metal and Rap Music’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 58(6), 1993, pp. 753767.

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__________________________________________________________________ 9

M.E. Ballard and S. Coates, ‘The Immediate Effects of Homicidal, Suicidal, and Nonviolent Heavy Metal and Rap Songs on the Moods of College Students’, Youth & Society, Vol. 27(2), 1995, pp. 148-168. 10 B. Bryson, ‘Anything but Heavy Metal: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 61(5), 1996, pp. 884-899. 11 J. Arnett, Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1996. 12 J.S. Epstein, D.J. Pratto and J.K. Skipper, Jr., ‘Teenagers, Behavioral Problems, and Preferences for Heavy Metal and Rap Music: A Case Study of a Southern Middle School’, Deviant Behavior, Vol. 11, 1990, pp. 381-394. 13 Brunner, op. cit. 14 P.J. Rentfrow and S.D. Gosling, ‘The Content and Validity of Music-Genre Stereotypes among College Students’, Psychology of Music, Vol. 35(2), 2007, pp. 306-326. 15 P.J. Rentfrow and S.D. Gosling, ‘The Do-Re-Mi’s of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 84, 2003, pp. 1236-1256. 16 D. Zillmann and A. Bathia, ‘Effects of Associating with Musical Genres on Heterosexual Attraction’, Communication Research, Vol. 16, 1989, pp. 263-288. 17 W.N. Gowensmith and L.J. Bloom, ‘The Effects of Heavy Metal Music on Arousal and Anger’, Journal of Music Therapy, Vol. XXXIV(1), 1997, pp. 33-45. 18 Rentfrow and Gosling, 2007, op. cit. 19 Rentfrow and Gosling, 2003, op. cit. 20 P.J. Rentfrow and S.D. Gosling, ‘Message in a Ballad: The Role of Music Preferences in Interpersonal Perception’, Psychological Science, Vol. 17, 2006, pp. 236-242. 21 P. Little and M. Zuckerman, ‘Sensation Seeking and Music Preferences’, Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 7, 1986, pp. 575-577. 22 C.N. Macrae, G.V. Bodenhausen, A.B. Milne and J. Jetten, ‘Out of Mind but Back in Sight: Stereotypes on the Rebound’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 67, 1994, pp. 808-817. 23 J.M. Monteith, C.V. Spicer and G.D. Tooman, ‘Consequences of Stereotype Suppression: Stereotypes on and Not on the Rebound’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 34, 1998, pp. 355-377. 24 M. Appel, E. Koch, M. Schreier and N. Groeben, ‘Aspekte des Leseerlebens: Skalenentwicklung’. Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie, Vol. 14(4), 2002, pp. 149154. 25 R. Wright, ‘I’d Sell you Suicide: Pop Music and Moral Panic in the Age of Marilyn Manson’, Popular Music, Vol. 19(3), 2000, pp. 365-385. 26 R. Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, NH, 1993.

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__________________________________________________________________ 27

M. Manson, ‘Columbine: Whose Fault is It?’ Rolling Stone, Vol. 815, 1999, pp. 23-24. 28 M. Moore, (Producer/Writer/Director), Bowling for Columbine [Motion picture]. United States: United Artists and Alliance Atlantis, 2002. 29 Arnett, op. cit. 30 Epstein, Pratto and Skipper, op. cit.

Bibliography Appel, M., Koch, E., Schreier, M. & Groeben, N., ‘Aspekte des Leseerlebens: Skalenentwicklung’. Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie. Vol. 14(4), 2002, pp. 149154. Arnett, J., Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1996. Ballard, M.E. & Coates, S., ‘The Immediate Effects of Homicidal, Suicidal and Nonviolent Heavy Metal and Rap Songs on the Moods of College Students’. Youth & Society. Vol. 27(2), 1995, pp. 148-168. Binder, A., ‘Constructing Racial Rhetoric: Media Depictions of Harm in Heavy Metal and Rap Music’. American Sociological Review. Vol. 58(6), 1993, pp. 753767. Brunner, I., ‘Taken to the Extreme: Heavy Metal Cover Songs: The Impact of Genre’. 2006, Viewed on 13 September 2010, http://etd.ohiolink.edu/sendpdf.cgi/Brunner%20Isaac.pdf?bgsu1155518980. Bryson, B., ‘Anything but Heavy Metal: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes’. American Sociological Review. Vol. 61(5), 1996, pp. 884-899. Entman, R., ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’. Journal of Communication. Vol. 43(4), 1993, pp. 51-58. Epstein, J.S., Pratto, D.J. & Skipper, J.K. Jr., ‘Teenagers, Behavioral Problems, and Preferences for Heavy Metal and Rap Music: A Case Study of a Southern Middle School’. Deviant Behavior. Vol. 11, 1990, pp. 381-394. Gowensmith, W.N. & Bloom, L.J., ‘The Effects of Heavy Metal Music on Arousal and Anger’. Journal of Music Therapy. Vol. XXXIV(1), 1997, pp. 33-45.

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__________________________________________________________________ Hamilton, D.L. & Trolier, T.K., ‘Stereotypes and Stereotyping: An Ooverview of the Cognitive Approach’. Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism. Dovidio, J.F. & Gaertner, S.L. (eds), US Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 1986. Hansen, C.H. & Hansen, R.D., ‘Schematic Information Processing of Heavy Metal Lyrics’. Communication Research. Vol. 18(3), 1991, pp. 373-411. Little, P. & Zuckerman, M., ‘Sensation Seeking and Music Preferences’. Personality and Individual Differences. Vol. 7, 1986, pp. 575-577. Lynxwiler, J., ‘Framing the Picture that Rock Paints: A Frame Analysis of the Porn Rock Movement’. Presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Nashville, TN, 1988. Macrae, C.N., Bodenhausen, G.V., Milne, A.B. & Jetten, J., ‘Out of Mind but Back in Sight: Stereotypes on the Rebound’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 67, 1994, pp. 808-817. Manson, M., ‘Columbine: Whose Fault is It?’ Rolling Stone. Vol. 815, 1999, pp. 23-24. Monteith, J.M., Spicer, C.V. & Tooman, G.D., ‘Consequences of Stereotype Suppression: Stereotypes on and Not on the Rebound’. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Vol. 34, 1998, pp. 355-377. Moore, M., (Producer/Writer/Director). Bowling for Columbine [Motion picture]. United States: United Artists and Alliance Atlantis, 2002. Rentfrow, P.J. & Gosling, S.D., ‘The Do-Re-Mi’s of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 84, 2003, pp. 1236-1256. –––, Message in a Ballad: ‘The Role of Music Preferences in Interpersonal Perception’. Psychological Science. Vol. 17, 2006, pp. 236-242. –––, ‘The Content and Validity of Music-Genre Stereotypes among College Students’. Psychology of Music. Vol. 35(2), 2007, pp. 306-326. Sherman, J., ‘Development and Mental Representation of Stereotypes’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 70, 1996, pp. 1126-1141.

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__________________________________________________________________ Walser, R., Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, NH, 1993. Wright, R., ‘I’d Sell you Suicide: Pop Music and Moral Panic in the Age of Marilyn Manson’. Popular Music. Vol. 19(3), 2000, pp. 365-385. Zillmann, D. & Bathia, A., ‘Effects of Associating with Musical Genres on Heterosexual Attraction’. Communication Research. Vol. 16, 1989, pp. 263-288. Julia Kneer is currently working as a post doc at the University of Cologne. Her field of interest lies within Social Psychology and Media Psychology research concerning social cognition, applied social psychology, and media psychology, e.g. digital video games, advertisement, person perception, and influence of emotions. Diana Rieger is currently working as research assistant at the University of Cologne. Her field of interest lies within Social Psychology and Media Psychology research concerning (political) media effects, cognitive psychology, and emotions. Lena Frischlich is currently working as a student assistant at the University of Cologne and finishing her studies in Psychology. Her field of interest lies within Social Psychology, Media Psychology, and Clinical Psychology, e.g. Terror Management Theory. Daniel Munko is currently working as a student assistant at the University of Cologne and finishing his studies in Psychology. His field of interest lies within Media Psychology and Cinical Psychology, especially effects of violent digital video games.

Death and Life: The Role of Music and the Others Rute Rodrigues and Abílio Oliveira Abstract The main purpose of this empirical research, framed on the theory of social representations, was to understand how life and death are represented among an adolescent population (boys and girls, from 15 to 19 years old). It was our goal, as well, to examine how these social representations may differ according to the adolescents’ musical preferences and the opinions of significant others (such as parents, friends, colleagues, etc). The findings indicate that boys particularly tend to listen to rock/metal while girls show a special predilection for pop and (soft) rock music. Girls, more than boys, are most likely to represent life as the proximity to other people (like friends) but also as a certain uneasiness; and they anchor death, in particular, in feelings of malaise, in its ritualistic dimension and in the departure of significant others. Younger adolescents (15-16 years old) seem to understand life as a personal accomplishment. As greater is the preference for rock/metal, the less significant is the tendency to represent death as a ritual; fondness for classic rock is positively associated with the perception of death as a theme suggesting questioning and transcendence. The opinions of others proved to be relevant not only regarding musical preferences, but also in understanding life and death. Key Words: Adolescence, death, life, music, social representations. ***** 1. Introduction Music plays a major role amongst the most significant activities throughout adolescence. Given its relevant part in identity’s structuring,1 and because music is, for itself, a pertinent agent of socialization, it can2 definitely influence thoughts, and behaviours.3 Rock music serves a bounding purpose, providing relief from boredom, filling in the silence and facilitating expression of feelings and identification towards a particular sound or lyrics.4 Heavy metal has been associated with a tendency for suicidal and aggressive behaviour and with a sense of worthlessness and depression5 particularly in adolescent girls.6 Nonetheless, according to Arnett, metal7 music has a purgative effect, acting as an anger releaser. Furthermore, adolescents who favour heavy metal pay great attention to the musical talent and skill of performers, to the lyrics and the content of the music, and reveal an attraction for social consciousness.8 And what lies beneath those lyrics? Whether they talk about love, violence, drugs, or even satanism, what most of them reveal is a great concern about the

Death and Life

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__________________________________________________________________ meaning of life and the purpose of it all. Adolescence is a fertile ground for the development of major reflections around life and death, which may be thought of as two paired and complementary concepts, keys with which we are able to perceive, interpret and acknowledge our entire existence.9 Although aware of human mortality, adolescents often do not accept their own finitude as factual. Death frequently appears, then, quite stylized and dangerously glamorised.10 It is due to their natural tendency and need to experiment, feel and live everything as intensely as possible, that adolescents sometimes find themselves so close to death.11 Crossing limits frequently implies incurring in some risk behaviours such as alcohol or drug abuse, reckless driving, unprotected sexuality;12 self-harm behaviour13 and even suicide attempts.14 To think such complex phenomenon’s as life and death is only possible through social representations (SR).15 When we study social representations, what we are studying are human beings asking questions and looking for answers, human beings who think, not just handle information or act in a certain way.16 Moscovici’s theory postulates representations as social constructions17 through which it is possible to modulate our perceptions and conceptions of an object and reality itself. The present study aims to: 1) apprehend and analyse the social representations (SR) of life and death amongst an adolescent population; 2) to apprehend and analyse their musical preferences; 3) to understand how SR vary according to gender and age; 4) to verify how SR of life and death may be associated with musical preferences and with the opinion of others. 2. Method and Materials A. Participants A population of 262 adolescents, 54% male, 46% female; 61% between the ages of 15 and 16 years old and 39% between 17 and 19 years old. B. Variables We considered gender and age as independent variables and the dimensions for musical preferences, the opinion of others, as well as SR of life and death, as dependent variables. C. Instruments and Procedure We developed a questionnaire with six groups of items on closed questions, followed of ordinal scales (1 to 5), based on the results collected on another

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__________________________________________________________________ research18 and on a previous focus-group – involving talking to adolescents about life, death and music. The data was collected in a class context, having each student answered it anonymously, in an individual protocol. 3. Results The data was analysed using Factor Analysis (FA) with the items considered for each theme - in order to reduce and reveal the internal structure of the data and Variance Analysis on the factors obtained. Regarding SR of life, a five dimension solution was found: well-being; will to live; personal fulfilment; attachment to others and feelings of malaise. The opinion of others in SR of life was aggregated in two factors: family and friends and acquaintances. In what SR of death are concerned, factor analysis offered us a four-dimension solution: feelings of malaise; ritualism/causes of death; closeness to death; questioning/transcendence. Finally, the FA for the opinion of others on SR of death, revealed a two-dimension solution: friends and family and acquaintances. Given the acknowledged complexity in classifying music by style, largely due to the permeable boundaries between different types and sub-types of music, we chose to classify it according to our participant answers. Hence, FA revealed an eight factor solution in which the first dimension (rock/metal) aggregates bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Guns n’ Roses or Metallica; and the second (NorthAmerican Rock) has bands as Marilyn Manson, The Doors, REM, Led Zeppelin, Smashing Pumpkins and System of a Down. In the third factor (English Metal/Indie) we find Cradle of Filth and Arctic Monkeys and in the fourth (HipHop/New Metal) Eminem and Linkin Park. The fifth (Reggae/Pop) concerns Bob Marley, Ben Harper and Bob Sinclair, the sixth (Classical Rock) is constituted by Queen, Coldplay, Beethoven and U2. The seventh (Emotional Rock) dimension aggregates Jonas Brother, Tokio Hotel, Rhianna and Green Day, and, finally, the last one (Feminine Pop) concerns only Amy Winehouse and Alanis Morissette. The opinion of others in musical preferences was aggregated in three dimensions: friends and colleagues; family members and acquaintances. Through multivariate analysis of variance we have found some significant effects for the several representations. Concerning musical preferences, boys reveal a greater preference for rock/metal music and hip-hop while girls demonstrate predilection for emotional rock as well as for feminine pop. For boys between ages of 15 and 16 years old, North-American rock seems to be of large importance.

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For girls, more than for boys, life anchors in the attachment to others but it is also understood as an uneasiness and malaise. To those adolescents between 15 and 16 years old, life is strongly associated to the desire and will to live as well as to a clear sense of personal fulfilment or achievement. On the other hand, death is represented, in particular for the girls, as restlessness or feelings of malaise. They also related death to its rituals and to the loss of others. When we correlate the musical preferences with what these adolescents think and feel about life and death, results show that those who have preference for reggae, emotional-rock and feminine pop, life is understood as personal fulfilment. A predilection for emotional rock also seems to be associated with representation of life as malaise. The more they listen to rock/metal, the lower the tendency to represent death as malaise and to anchor it in its rituals. For the adolescents who enjoy classic music, death strongly suggests questioning and transcendence. Results also support that for the individuals who enjoy emotional-rock, the preferences of companions is important in their own choices; for those who like North-American rock, hip-hop and classic, so do the preferences of acquaintances. For girls, more than for boys, life anchors in the attachment to others but it is also understood as an uneasiness and malaise. To those adolescents between 15 and 16 years old, life is strongly associated to the desire and will to live as well as to a clear sense of personal fulfilment or achievement. On the other hand, death is represented, in particular for the girls, as restlessness or feelings of malaise. They also related death to its rituals.

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__________________________________________________________________ Representations of life as well-being, will to live and, personal fulfilment and relationships with others, are strongly influenced by the opinions, thoughts and images of family and friends, although acquaintances also play an important role. Representations of life as well-being, will to live and, mainly, as personal fulfilment and relation with others are strongly influenced by the opinion, thoughts and images of family and friends, although acquaintances also play an important role. Regarding social representations of death, once again, adolescents reveal the importance of others in their own conceptions. When death is regarded as malaise, and separation (departure) of loved ones, the opinion of family and friends is of great meaning. When it is anchored in ritualism and questioning, the opinion of acquaintances seems to be more substantial. It is noteworthy that in social representations of life and death, with exception of malaise (in life) and relationship with others, the opinion, thoughts and feelings of others proved to be of hefty value to the way these adolescents think and feel life and death. 4. Conclusions Rock, metal and pop were amongst the most relevant musical preferences of these adolescents and that poses as a valuable tool to scrutinize their social and emotional functioning.19 Death was strongly connected to its ritualistic sense (e.g., cemetery, black, burial, coffin, skull, etc) which may play an important therapeutic role, acting as a social construction that signs the end, the farewell.20 Family and friends proved to be a vital reference in the thoughts and feelings of these young people. They can influence the development of adolescent’s attitudes, values and interests, by acting as role models or ‘yardsticks’ from which adolescents assess their own thoughts, attitudes and behaviours.21 This influence is, undoubtedly, a reciprocate experience, given that the adolescent influences and is influenced himself by those who surround him. And this is a central aspect in the social representations theory, since we are all agents, active and passive, in the creation, manipulation and conveying of social representations.22

Notes 1

C. Barros, Música e Juventude, Lisboa, Vulgata, 2000; A. Rodrigues, Valores e Representações Corporais em Culturas Juvenis Escolares, Tese de Mestrado, Faculdade de Motricidade Humana UTL, Lisboa, 1997; D. Sampaio, Vozes e Ruídos, Caminho, Lisboa, 1993; A. Vallejo-Nágera, Os Adolescentes e os Pais, Presença, Lisboa, 2003. 2 P. Abreu, ‘Práticas e consumos de música(s): ilustrações sobre alguns novos contextos da prática cultural’, Revista crítica de ciências sociais, Vol. 56, 2000, pp. 123-147; C. Borralho, Música, Preferências Musicais e a Ideação Suicida na

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__________________________________________________________________ Adolescência, Monografia - ISPA, Lisboa, 2002; M. Cabral & J. Pais, Condutas de Risco, Práticas Culturais, e Atitudes Perante o Corpo: Resultados de um Inquérito aos Jovens Portugueses em 2000, Celta/IPJ, Oeiras, 2003; A. Oliveira, Ilusões na Idade das Emoções - Representações Sociais da Morte, do Suicídio e da Música na Adolescência, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 2008a. 3 C. Gard, ‘Music’n’Moods’, Current Health, Vol. 2, 1997, pp. 24-26; B. Mills, ‘Effects of Music on Assertive Behaviour during Exercise on Middle-School-Age Students’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, Vol. 83, 1996, pp. 423-426; P. Nunes, A Música no Universo Juvenil: Práticas e Representações, Tese de Mestrado, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas – UNL, Lisboa, 1997. 4 V. Strasburger, Adolescents and the Media – Medical and Psychological Impact, Sage Publications Inc, CA, 1995. 5 L. Martin & K. Segrave, The Opposition to Rock and Roll, Archon, New York, 1988; K. Scheel & J. Westefeld, ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation’, Adolescence, 1999, Vol. 134, pp. 253-273. 6 D. Miranda & M. Claes, ‘Musical Preferences and Depression in Adolescence’, International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 2007, Vol. 13, pp. 285-309. 7 J. Arnett, ‘Adolescents and Heavy Metal Music: From the Mouths of Metalheads’, Youth & Society, Vol. 23, 1991, pp. 76-98. 8 Ibid. 9 R. Kastenbaum, Death, Society and Human Experience, (7ª ed.), Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 2001; E. Morin, O Homem e a Morte, Publicações Europa-América, Lisboa, 1988; A Oliveira, O Desafio da Morte (2ª ed.), Âncora Editora, Lisboa, 2008b; L-V. Thomas, Mort et Pouvoir, Payot, Paris, 1978. 10 R. Frankel, The Adolescent Psyche, Routledge, London, 1999; Oliveira, 2008a, op. cit.; I. Orbach, P. Kedem, O. Gorchover, A. Apter & S. Tyano, ‘Fears of Death in Suicidal and Nonsuicidal Adolescents’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1993, Vol. 102, pp. 553-558; P. Patros & T. Shamoo, Depression and Suicide in Children and Adolescents: Prevention, Intervention and Postvention, Allyn and Bacon, Inc, Massachusetts, 1989. 11 M. Hanus, Estudes sur la Mort: L’Adolescent et la Mort, L’Esprit du Temps, Paris, 1998, A. Oliveira, L. Amâncio & D. Sampaio, ‘Arriscar morrer para Sobreviver’, 2001, Análise Psicológica, Vol. XIX, pp. 509-521. 12 A. Braconnier & D. Marcelli, As mil Faces da Adolescência, Climepsi, Lisboa, 2000; P. Crepet, A Dimensão do Vazio, Âmbar, Porto, 2002; K.R. Jamison, Night Falls Fast - Understanding Suicide, Picador, London, 2001; M. Laufer, O Adolescente Suicida, Climepsi, Lisboa, 2000. 13 J. Hende, Preventing Suicide, John Wiley and Sons, Lda, Chichester, 2008; Oliveira, 2008a, op. cit.; C. Saraiva, Para-Suicídio, Quarteto, Coimbra, 1999. 14 A. Oliveira, L. Amâncio & D. Sampaio, ‘Da desesperança ao desafio da morte… e à conquista da vida: Olhar sobre o adolescente suicida’, Psychologica, 2004, Vol.

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__________________________________________________________________ 35, pp. 69-83; G. Trainor, ‘Adolescents and Developmental Group Psychotherapy’, New Approaches to Preventing Suicide, D. Dufy & T. Ryan (eds.), Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Philadelphia, 2004, pp. 178-193. 15 M. Bradbury, Representations of Death, Routledge, London, 1999. 16 S. Moscovici, ‘On Social Representations’, Social Cognition-Perspectives on Everyday Understanding, J.P. Fargas (ed), Academic Press, London, 1981, p. 182. 17 S. Moscovici, La Psychanalyse, son Image et son Public, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1961/1976. 18 Oliveira, op. cit., 2008a. 19 Scheel & Westefeld, op. cit., 1999. 20 T. Walter, The Revival of Death, Routledge, New York, 1994. 21 J. Nurmi, ‘Socialization and Self-Development: Channelling, Selection, Adjustment and Reflection’, Handbook of Adolescence Psychology (2ªed.), R. Lerner & L. Steinberg (eds), John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York, 2004, pp. 85124; A. Ryan, ‘The Peer Group as a Context for the Development of Young Adolescent Motivation and Achievement’, Child Development, 2001, Vol. 72, pp. 1135-1150. 22 Oliveira, 2008a, op. cit.

Bibliography Abreu, P., ‘Práticas e consumos de música(s): ilustrações sobre alguns novos contextos da prática cultural’. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais. Vol. 56, 2000, pp. 123-147. Arnett, J. ‘Adolescents and Heavy Metal Music: From the Mouths of Metalheads’. Youth & Society. Vol. 23, 1991, pp. 76-98. Barros, C., Música e Juventude. Vulgata, Lisboa, 2000. Borralho, C., Música, Preferências Musicais e a Ideação Suicida na Adolescência. Monografia, ISPA, Lisboa, 2002. Braconnier, A. & Marcelli, D. As mil aces da Adolescência. Climepsi, Lisboa, 2000. Bradbury, M., Representations of Death. Routledge, London, 1999. Cabral, M. & Pais, J. (eds), Condutas de Risco, Práticas Culturais, e Atitudes Perante o Corpo: Resultados de um Inquérito aos Jovens Portugueses em 2000. Celta/IPJ, Oeiras, 2003.

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__________________________________________________________________ Castro, P., Natureza, iência e Retórica na Construção Social da Ideia de Ambiente. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 2002. Crepet, P., A Dimensão do Vazio. Âmbar, Porto, 2002. Frankel, R., The Adolescent Psyche. Routledge, London, 1999. Gard, C., ‘Music’n’Moods’. Current Health. Vol. 2, 1997, pp. 24-26. Hanus, M., Estudes sur la Mort: L’Adolescent et la Mort. L’Esprit du Temps, Paris, 1998. Hende, J., Preventing Suicide. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, Lda, 2008. Jamison, K.R., Night Falls Fast – Understanding Suicide. Picador, London, 2001. Kastenbaum, R., Death, Society and Human Experience (7ª ed). Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 2001. Laufer, M., O Adolescente Suicida. Climepsi, Lisboa, 2000. Lifton, J., The Broken Connection. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979. Martin, L. & Segrave, K., The Opposition to Rock and Roll. Archon, New York, 1988. Mills, B., ‘Effects of Music on Assertive Behaviour during Exercise on MiddleSchool-Age Students’. Perceptual and Motor Skills. Vol. 83, 1996, pp. 423-426. Miranda. D. & Claes, M., ‘Musical Preferences and Depression in Adolescence’. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth. Vol. 13, 2007, pp. 285-309. Morin, E., O Homem e a Morte. Publicações Europa-América, Lisboa, 1988. Moscovici, S., La Psychanalyse, son Image et son Public. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1961/1976. Moscovici, S., ‘On Social Representations’. Social Cognition-Perspectives on Everyday Understanding. Fargas, J.P. (ed), Academic Press, London, 1981.

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__________________________________________________________________ Nunes, P., A Música no Universo Juvenil: Práticas e Representações. Tese de Mestrado, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas – UNL, Lisboa, 1997. Nurmi, J., ‘Socialization and Self-Development: Channelling, Selection, Adjustment and Reflection’. Handbook of Adolescence Psychology (2ªed.). Lerner, R. & Steinberg, L. (eds), John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York, 2004. Oliveira, A., Ilusões na Idade das Emoções – Representações Sociais da Morte, do Suicídio e da Música na Adolescência. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 2008a. —, O Desafio da Morte (2ª ed). Âncora Editora, Lisboa; 2008b. —,‘Da desesperança ao desafio da morte… e à conquista da vida: Olhar sobre o adolescente suicida’. Psychologica. 2004, Vol. 35, pp. 69-83. —, Amâncio, L., & Sampaio, D., ‘Arriscar morrer para Sobreviver’. Análise Psicológica. Vol. XIX, 2001, pp. 509-521. Orbach, I., Kedem, P., Gorchover, O., Apter, A. & Tyano, S., ‘Fears of Death in Suicidal and Non-Suicidal Adolescents’. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Vol. 102, 1993, pp. 553-558. Patros, P. & Shamoo, T., Depression and Suicide in Children and Adolescents: Prevention, Intervention and Postvention. Allyn and Bacon, Inc., Massachusetts, 1989. Reanney, D., After Death: A New Future for Human Consciousness. Avon Science, New York, 1991. Rodrigues, A., Valores e Representações Corporais em Culturas Juvenis Escolares. Tese de Mestrado, Faculdade de Motricidade Humana UTL, Lisboa, 1997. Ryan, A., ‘The Peer Group as a Context for the Development of Young Adolescent Motivation and Achievement’. Child Development. Vol. 72, 2001, pp. 1135–1150. Sampaio, D., Vozes e Ruídos. Caminho, Lisboa, 1993. Saraiva, C., Para-Suicídio. Quarteto, Coimbra, 1999.

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__________________________________________________________________ Scheel, K. & Westfeld, J., ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation’. Adolescence. Vol. 134, 1999, pp. 253-273. Strasburger, V., Adolescents and the Media - Medical and Psychological Impact. Sage Publications Inc., CA, 1995. Thomas, L-V., Mort et Pouvoir. Payot, Paris, 1978. Trainor, G., ‘Adolescents and Developmental Group Psychotherapy’. New Approaches to Preventing Suicide. Dufy, D. & Ryan, T. (eds), Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Philadelphia, 2004. Vallejo-Nágera, A., Os Adolescentes e os Pais. Presença, Lisboa, 2003. Walter, T., The Revival of Death. Routledge, New York, 1994. Rute Rodrigues is a Social Psychologist currently working on Suicide Symbolisms and Representations as a Research Assistant at CIES-IUL Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (Lisbon). [email protected]. Abílio Oliveira is an Assistant Professor at ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute and a Researcher at CIES-IUL Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (Lisbon). He is the author of several books, namely ‘Ilusões na Idade das Emoções Representações Sociais da morte, do suicídio e da música na adolescência’. [email protected].

Textual Analysis of Song Lyrics Adopting a Mental Health Diagnostic Standard as Method Richard E. Wilson and Mike Thomas Abstract We are interested in the way that mental illness is represented in rock music lyrics because we believe that it is important that music fans are not misled about mental illness and that prejudice is not supported through misunderstanding the true nature of conditions such as depression and mania. Our idea is that it is those musicians who have had documented mental health issues that are more likely to write about these issues with real insight and greater accuracy. We have used The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR, 2000) as the clinical reference to assess the extent to which the depictions cited here are accurate. At this stage we have only cited examples of musicians known to have had mental illness. We hope to extend the research to include a comparison group of artists who use imagery of mental illness for effect and in doing so, only serve to perpetuate damaging social stereotypes and myths about people who are mentally ill. Key Words: Music, lyrics, musicians, mental health, depression, depiction, accuracy, Nirvana, Ozzy, stigma. ***** In the late 1960s, the French philosopher, Roland Barthes, shook up the world of literary criticism in his now renowned work The Death of the Author. Barthes separated the idea of an ‘author’ – a god-like creator, a unified psyche from whom authoritative utterances come – from that of a ‘scriptor’ – a writer whose achievement can only ever be to rework ideas and concepts which already exist. The ‘scriptor’ must forever fail in attempting to create something truly original. In an important sense, the musicians we’re going to be talking about today are ‘scriptors’: their music problematises identity in a way that would have delighted Barthes. In writing about mental illness, the lyricists we are going to examine reconfigure their own experiences by referring in startling ways to medical discourses, cultural mythologies and popular misunderstandings. The lyricistscriptors articulate ideas about psychosis – even about their own psychoses – in terms that borrow heavily from the cultures they inhabit. That is, even in the confessional-autobiographical mode of writing, the terms and metaphors the musicians employ are informed by popularly circulating conceptions of mental illness. English critic, broadcaster, and novelist, Howard Jacobson, 2010 winner of the prestigious Man Booker prize for literature recently addressed the widespread

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__________________________________________________________________ inaccurate use of mental health terminology in society. In his 2006 novel, Kalooki Nights, Jacobson writes about a repressed character who unexpectedly cries in the presence of the narrator, Max. When Max discusses these tears with a third character, Francine, the following exchange occurs. ‘I was struck by his tears,’ says Max, ‘So far he hasn’t shown anything you could really call emotion, unless catatonic schizophrenia is an emotion - .’ ‘You think he’s schizophrenic?’ She looked worried […] ‘I don’t know. I just use these terms irresponsibly. They’re all poetically interchangeable to me. Scientifically I’ve no idea what he is.’1 We are interested in the idea that those artists who have actually suffered from mental illness are better able to represent it with some measure of accuracy in their lyrics. Even when we may expect a confessional mode to lend an authenticity to the lyrics being produced, we meet instead only scriptors, not authors: the very language writers and musicians use inescapably distorts the pre-linguistic (perhaps, more properly, a-linguistic?) states of mind that they are struggling to describe. In a state of psychosis, the ego is inhabited to the point where the ‘I’ can only feel, not articulate, what ails it. The source for defining the clinical aspects of mental health is The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.2 However, this manual is itself dynamic and culturally contingent. It has grown hugely in size in the last 50 years: for example, until 1974 it classified homosexuality as a mental health problem. Clearly, in a 20-minute chapter, we can only pick a few songs to illustrate our idea. For every one we select another 10 might be found. We will consider examples by Nick Drake, Ozzy Osbourne, Robbie Williams, Nirvana and Type O Negative. These songs are by artists who have documented mental health issues and who use these as a way of connecting with the sense of alienation common among the target audience of much of rock music: the adolescent male.3 There is nothing to be inferred from the fact that the examples examined here today are all by men. We considered Karen Carpenter, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Nina Simone, Courtney Love and Catatonia among others, but made our final choices based on giving us a focus on references to depression and schizophrenia. Even if lyricists are ‘scriptors’ in the Barthesian sense, their song lyrics often reflect an autobiographical insight into the thoughts and emotional state of the writer, or provide insight into the wider human condition. In the rock/pop category there are lyrics, which attempt to convey the inner mental health condition of the writer, the anxieties of existence, the emotional ups and downs of relationships, alienation or the internal disintegration of the self. These lyrics are sometimes

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__________________________________________________________________ written from the perspective of mental illness, using the analogies of anxiety, depression and schizophrenia, or psychosis and mania. In this chapter, then, a selection of song lyrics, which have mental states as key themes, are analysed using mental health diagnostic criteria and biographical details. This analysis will ascertain the extent to which the lyrics accurately reflect mental health conditions and whether this knowledge and insight are more accurately depicted according to the medical diagnostic criteria as a result of the writer’s personal experience of mental illness. Our first case study is Nick Drake, the English singer/songwriter who suffered from depression for much of his adult life and died of an overdose of the antidepressant amitriptyline in November 1974 at the age of just 26. Whether his death was intended as suicide or was accidental is unclear. Statistics from the DSM 4 indicate that around 12% of men in the US may experience major depression disorder5 and the condition is unrelated to ethnicity, education, income or material status. Drake came from a prosperous, middle-class family and was educated at private school and Cambridge University. Depression may occur at any age, but symptoms typically come to the attention of care services when the individual is in their mid-twenties. Drake’s death at the age of 26 is the same as Randy Rhoads, a year older than Tommy Bolin, and very close to Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, all 27, and Jimi Hendrix who was 28. According to the DSM 6, the criteria for a major depressive episode are firstly that symptoms are not the result of a stressor event such as bereavement, of a medical condition such as hypothyroidism or the result of substance abuse. They include self-reported feelings of emptiness or sadness for most of the day and for most days, insomnia, loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or excessive and inappropriate guilt, diminished ability to think, and recurrent thoughts of death, not just fear of dying. That combination of symptoms causes distress or impairment in normal functioning. We have chosen a track called Day is Done from his first album, Five Leaves Left, which was released in 1969. The lyrics combine the images of dusk and end of day, but also convey the emotions felt about the end of life itself. Drake captures the symptoms of depression in his lyrics, with every verse conveying a feeling of sadness. The 3rd verse alludes to the insomnia common in depression with the words, ‘when the night is cold some get by, but some get old just to show life’s not made up of gold’, whilst worthlessness is evidenced in verse 5 with the words, ‘when the game’s been fought...but much sooner than you would have thought’. Drake also talks, in verse 6, about the regret of life events missed as ‘the party’s through...didn’t do the things you want to do, now there’s no time to start anew’. This theme of depression continues in the 1991 Nirvana song Lithium.7 The title of the song refers to the drug used in the treatment of bipolar disorder. The sense of unworthiness is conveyed in verse 1: ‘I’m so ugly, but that’s okay cause so are you’, and this feeling is compounded by irritability and anger, ‘We’ve

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__________________________________________________________________ broken our mirrors, Sunday morning is every day for all I care...’. The song evokes the time when Cobain was living with the born-again Christian parents of one of his friends after the collapse of his relationship with his parents following their divorce and formation of new family units in which Cobain felt he did not belong. Nirvana biographer, Michael Azerrad claimed the song was an allusion to Karl Marx’s concept of religion as the opium of the masses. In a 1992 interview, Cobain said, ‘I did infuse some of my personal experiences, like breaking up with girlfriends and having bad relationships, feeling that death void that the person in the song is feeling - very lonely, sick’. Treatment of depression is usually psychopharmacologically combined with talking therapies and the title of the song Lithium is used to acknowledge its role in the treatment of severe and enduring depression. Just as Nick Drake appears to have personal insights and experiences of depression, Cobain conveys an inside knowledge of Lithium as a form of treatment in this song. The drug can be used for 3-5 years or longer but has a number of toxic side effects due to disturbances in serum-lithium concentration and blood tests are required usually every three months to measure safe therapeutic levels. The song appears to acknowledge its therapeutic effects: ‘I’m so happy today’ and its negative effects: ‘light my candle in a daze’. Indecision is another symptom of depression and can be seen in verse 2: ‘But I’m not sure’ and ‘I miss you... I love you... I killed you’ which suggests both unclear thinking and anger. A closely associated condition to depression is mania, which although in its euphoric state looks very different to the retarded emotions in depression; it is often viewed as stemming from the same roots. However, there is in the presentation of mania, a persistent, elevated or irritable mood lasting for four days at least, sometimes even for several months and symptoms such as inflated selfesteem or superiority, speed of speech, decreased need for sleep, being easily distracted and an excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences. In mania, the behaviour may be observed as such by others but not be severe enough to warrant hospitalisation and may even be tolerated in certain situations such as public performances or media events. Robbie Williams’ song Me and My Monkey8 captures this sense of mania and its undercurrents of depression in the story of an individual partnered by a ‘monkey’ who engages in a frenetic lifestyle. The monkey is most likely a metaphor for Williams’ cocaine habit. The first verse tells how the subject goes to Las Vegas on a whim and the Monkey then proceeds to gamble, buy cocaine and arrange for prostitutes to come to his room. Interestingly the lyrics in verse 2 also contain the line, ‘Was diggin’ old Kurt Cobain singing about lithium’, which suggests that Williams was aware that lithium can also be used to treat mania. The whole song illustrates with a great deal of humour and emotion, the criteria for mania with all its cognitive speed, thrills and potentially dangerous outcomes in a

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__________________________________________________________________ way that does more than hint at Williams having insight and experience of the condition. Whilst depression and its sister condition, mania, are not uncommon, the mental health conditions centring on psychosis are less prevalent. Schizophrenia, for instance, is thought to be prevalent in up to 5.0% per 10,000 amongst adults in all cultures.9 The condition is found worldwide and usually becomes evidently symptomatic in a person’s mid-twenties. Males tend to have an earlier age of onset and have a worse outcome than females in terms of severity and treatment responses. Complete remission is thought not to occur but an individual can recover many positive social and cognitive processes, which can allow a high degree of stability. It appears to be an inherited condition, and where both parents have the condition, children have a ten times greater risk of acquiring schizophrenia. Many of the symptoms can also be along a spectrum and are not always clear-cut so there is a general view that ‘severe and enduring psychosis’ may be more accurate terminology than schizophrenia. For example, some individuals may present with symptoms which appear to meet some of the schizophrenia criteria but are caused by excessive drug use causing permanent alterations to brain processes. Symptoms include delusional thoughts, that is fixed false beliefs out of synch with a person’s normal cultural or social situation; hallucinations (false sensory perceptions which can be in any of the five senses but are usually found in aural or visual fields); disorganised speech; disorganised behaviour; restrictions in the range of emotional expressions; and a decrease in goal-directed behaviour. We have illustrated this condition with Ozzy Osbourne’s, Can You Hear Them?.10 Osbourne’s lyrics in particular appear to focus on a drug-induced psychosis with the mention of the erroneous, but widely held, social myth that people with schizophrenia have split personalities. The chorus of ‘Can you hear them, all the voices in my head? ... They won’t be happy ‘til I’m dead’ captures the depression and distress that auditory hallucinations may cause to the individual. The allusion to his drug use can be heard in verse 2: ‘Ten thousand million nightmares, temptation by the score, I used to get so high and still I wanted more’. Ozzy appears to demonstrate knowledge of severe psychosis in his lyrics and, although using a more drug-induced psychotic imagery, sings about paranoid schizophrenia with good insight. Pete Steele, the front man of Type O Negative referred to his music as ‘sonic therapy’ – he had a bipolar condition11 and received in-patient treatment for depression in 2006 after severe drug and alcohol dependence problems. In the Type O Negative song, Anesthesia,12 Steele describes the diagnostic criteria for severe depression and encapsulates the despair and anger of this condition. In the final verse of the song, there is the lyric, ‘world-renowned failure at both death and life / given nothingness…’ which demonstrates the helplessness and lack of meaning within the narrator of the song.

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__________________________________________________________________ Mental illness is democratic; it affects someone and pays no respect to class, wealth, gender, culture, creed or race. Inevitably therefore, some musicians will have some type of diagnosable mental illness. Some appear to deal with the negative impact of the condition via their music and lyrics, which add insight and candour to the narrative. The question is whether that produces therapeutic relief or merely demonstrates their anguish. Our argument then, is there are two categories of lyrics. The one we have illustrated in this chapter comes from experience of mental illness itself, either directly or through drugs/substances or knowing a family member/friend and the words portray a realism and knowledge. The other, much larger category is those lyrics, which attempt to use mental health/illness imagery as metaphor or analogy but the knowledge base and experience are lacking and the result tends to be cliché. It is our belief that the accuracy of the representation, especially in an art form like rock music consumed by so many teenagers, is crucial as it is only in this way that the myths and misrepresentations of the mentally ill can be challenged within wider society. At this stage of our research we have focused on artists who have documented mental health issues and we need more time to pursue the extent to which the experience of the writer(s) influences the accuracy of the depiction in the lyrics, according to DSM IV-TR.13 We welcome any suggestions regarding other artists and/or additions to our list of songs for consideration.

Notes 1

H. Jacobson, Kalooki Nights, Vintage, London, 2006, p. 311. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR) (IVth edn. text Revision), American Psychological Association, Washington DC, 2000. 3 C. Stewart, ‘Magazine Journalism: Kerrang!’, Magazine World at the University of Winchester, website, May 2, 2010, http://journalism.winchester.ac.uk/?page =257. 4 DSM IV-TR, 2000, op. cit. 5 Up to 25% for women, according to the DSM. 6 DSM IV-TR, 2000, op. cit. 7 K. Cobain, Lithium, from the album Nevermind, Geffen Records, 1991. 8 R. Williams & G. Chambers, Me and My Monkey, from the album Escapology, EMI Records, 2002. 9 DSM-IV-TR, 2000, op. cit. 10 O. Osbourne, M. Frederiksen, J. Holmes & R. Trujillo, Can You Hear Them?, from the album Down to Earth, Epic Records, 2001. 11 According to the definitions in the DSM IV-TR, 2000. 12 P. Steele, Anesthesia, from the album Life is Killing Me, Roadrunner Records, 2003. 2

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__________________________________________________________________ 13

DSM-IV-TR, 2000, op. cit. and the WHO International Classification of Diseases, known as ICD-10.

Bibliography Azerrad, M., Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Doubleday, New York, 1994. Barthes, R., ‘The Death of the Author’. Image-Music-Text. trans. S. Heath, Hill and Wang, New York, 1968. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (IVth edn, Text Revision). American Psychological Association, Washington DC, 2000. Jacobson, H., Kalooki Nights. Vintage, London, 2006. Jourdain, R., Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination. William Morrow and Company, New York, 1997. Knight, I., ‘Back for Good’ (Interview with Robbie Williams). The Sunday Times Style Magazine. 03 October 2010. Lewis, D., ‘Five Leaves Left’. Record Collector Magazine. Issue 370 - Christmas 2009, Diamond Publishing Ltd, London, 2009. Morris, C., ‘The Year’s Hottest New Band Can’t Stand Still’ (interview). Musician. January 1992. Available online at http://www.nirvanaclub.com/info/ articles/01.00.92-musician.html. O’Donnell, L., Music and the Brain. Available online at, http://www.cerebromente. org.br/n15/mente/musica.html. Osbourne, O. (with Ayres, C.). I am Ozzy. Sphere, London, 2009. Porter, R., Madness: A Brief History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. Sanca, F., ‘Music and the Brain: Processing and Responding (A General Overview)’. Available online at, http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro99/ web1/Sancar.html.

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__________________________________________________________________ Stewart, C., ‘Magazine Journalism: Kerrang!’. Magazine World at the University of Winchester. May 2, 2010, http://journalism.winchester.ac.uk/?page=257. Weinberger, N., ‘Music and the Brain’. Scientific American. November 2004, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=music-and-the-brain. Richard E. Wilson is a Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes and a Study Skills Tutor for students with dyslexia and other learning difficulties at the University of Chester, UK. He has been a rock music fan and record collector for 30 years and is now enjoying researching and writing about music, and had his first published chapter in Led Zeppelin & Philosophy in 2009. Mike Thomas is an ex-submariner who is now a Professor and Dean of the Department of Health & Social Studies at the University of Chester, where he works as a psychotherapist specialising in the treatment of people with eating disorders. He is a musician and music fan, particularly of Bob Dylan, and he has enjoyed his venture into the world of metal.

PART 2 Disparate Disciplines: Theoretical Applications of Madness in Heavy Metal

Two Steps past Insanity: The Expression of Aggression in Death Metal Music Daniel Frandsen Abstract The Death Metal genre is commonly associated with madness and aggression. Among the reasons for this association are the lyrical themes such as violence and murder, the specific style of music both regarding the instrumentation and the specific vocal types normally used within the genre (i.e. growling and screaming), and the gestures normally seen in most live performances by Death Metal bands. While the connection between Death Metal and the expression of aggression may seem obvious, it can nevertheless be problematic for philosophers of music to explain a connection, if any, between music and the expression of emotions. According to Aaron Ridley, part of this problem is grounded in the formalist assumption that philosophy of music should be concerned with ‘purely’ instrumental music and that emotions cannot be expressed in that kind of music. In order to be able to treat contemporary music – in this case Death Metal – in which lyrics and vocals are present and of aesthetic importance, the formalist view will need to be rejected. By rejecting formalism it will be possible to claim both the reality of expressive content in music and its significance as a genre-defining property. The aim of this chapter will be an attempt to show the following: Firstly, how the lyrics can be viewed as a musical element closely connected to the type of vocals used in a song; secondly, how to explain the connection between Death Metal and the expression of aggression; and finally, why this connection is of aesthetic significance to the Death Metal genre. This will be done by reference to songs particularly from the Finnish metal band Children of Bodom and theories from Eduard Hanslick, Aaron Ridley, Jerrold Levinson, Malcolm Budd and Peter Kivy among others. Key Words: Aggression, expression, music, Death Metal genre. ***** 1. Introduction Most literature within philosophy of music is concerned with instrumental music. Partly this is due to the academic tradition of being mainly concerned with classical western music, which traditionally is instrumental ensemble music – that is, music without vocals and lyrics. An unwritten assumption that can be found in literature is that instrumental music is ‘pure’ music and that nothing can be said about vocal music that cannot be said about instrumental music. Vocal music is viewed as being a hybrid between music and poetry. This view is based on false premises.

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__________________________________________________________________ According to Aaron Ridley, we need to reject this hybrid view, since lyrics of vocal music do have some musical elements and therefore has significance for the musical work as music.1 The most obvious place to find a musical feature in lyrics (or poetry) is rhythm. Certain sentences cannot be sung in certain rhythms, because the combination of words in those cases will not keep to the rhythm of the music. The words in lyrics are not chosen strictly based on linguistic meaning, but also for musical reasons.2 2. Expressive Content in Music One of the big issues within philosophy of music is the question of musical meaning. How can music ‘mean’ anything? More specifically, how can music express emotions? According to Hanslick, no such thing would make sense since music has no content except for the musical properties (tones and rhythm).3 The reason why people associate specific musical works with certain emotions (or other kinds of meaningful content) cannot be due to anything in the music, as such. This view is not only counter-intuitive, it also presupposes that only words can be said to have meaning as such. Think of a person crying. When perceiving a crying person, we assume that the person is very sad (or extremely happy). In such cases we ascribe meaning to bodily expression. But this will not do to prove that music can have meaningful content of any kind. When we say that a piece of music is sad, we can mean one (or more) of four things: 1) that the composer at some point experienced that emotion, and composed the music in such a way that it would ‘capture’ that state of mind; 2) that a performer would experience that emotion while performing that piece of music; 3) that listeners get an (imaginary) experience of that emotion, when listening to that piece of music; or 4) that the emotion is (somehow) in the music. It seems unlikely that emotions could be ‘located’ anywhere else as it relates to music. If the composer, performer or listener would never be able to experience (in one sense or another) a specific emotion through a piece of music, it seems implausible to claim that the piece of music is expressive of that emotion. This is not to say that ‘emotional content’ in music is a strictly subjective matter. I strongly believe that there can be both true and false claims about which emotions are expressed in a given piece of music. Imagine a person claiming Children of Bodom’s Hatebreeder to be expressive of happiness. Such a claim would (at least at the surface) seem to be a clear case of the person having misunderstood the song. This is quite straightforward, especially due to the type of vocals used in the song (that sound mad and aggressive and not happy at all). The way we ‘normally’ identify other people’s emotions are through their behaviour, such as facial expressions, other bodily movement, what they say and their tone of voice. When dealing with vocal music it can seem rather easy to identify the emotions since there is a voice present, but if we try to deal with instrumental music, things look more difficult – but not impossible. The main

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__________________________________________________________________ reason why it can be difficult is because of some tendencies in philosophy in general. Firstly, our language seems to be fixated on the visual. When describing some phenomenon in the world, most of our terms refer to visual impressions, or sensations. An obvious example will be terms like ‘high’ and ‘low’ notes, when it relates to music. It can seem that the problem of ascribing expressive content to something non-sentient, in this case music, can be due to lack of visual sensations. Another problem can be to insist that if one piece of music is expressive in virtue of some feature, another piece of music can only be expressive in virtue of having that very same feature. Why would there only be one way for a piece of music to be expressive, when we as human beings can express our emotions in different ways, and many very different works of music are described as aggressive? Hearing what we would normally call aggressive music, such as Children of Bodom’s Towards Dead End or Kalmah’s Time Takes Us All, does not necessarily make us aggressive. If we think of the feeling of sadness, and how that would be expressed through a piece of music, it is likely to have certain features, like being in a slow pace, played ‘softly’. If there is no truth at all to this claim, then it is hard to find a reason why it seems rather clear that Sentenced’s Karu will be described as sad, while Where Water Falls Frozen will be associated with aggression (both instrumental pieces from The Funeral Album). 3. Death Metal and the Expression of Aggression In the remaining sections of the present chapter, the issue will be more specifically about Death Metal and how certain emotions, mainly aggression, are expressed in this genre. Whether it is due to intentions from the composers, or because of association (or both, which seems the most likely), there are a number of features that will need to be examined, in order to understand the nature of the relation between the genre and the expression of aggression. These features include the specific type of vocals, instrumentation, lyrics and performance means – in this case, gestures. One of the most striking differences between Death Metal and other music genres is the vocal type. Non-metal fan listeners normally claim that Death Metal vocalists are not singing, but screaming or roaring. This is partly true. The only thing wrong with that statement is that it is singing, since there are musical features in that type of vocals, just like in other vocal types. However, this is not the issue here – it is just important to note that we should be careful not to disqualify the use of ‘growling’ (as it is called) as real vocals, since it would have unjustified consequences when we make aesthetic evaluations about that specific type of music. What the issue here is therefore not an attempt to prove that growling is a type of singing, but rather to specify the expressive features of this vocal type. So what are the expressive features of growling? When listening to songs from Cradle of Filth or Illnath, for example, the vocals sound like something out of a horror movie. As vocals obviously seem to be the musical element that resemble

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__________________________________________________________________ human behaviour the most, speech in this case, the expressive character of growling will be closely related to that of ‘normal’ screaming and roaring. The obvious associations we have with screaming and roaring are pain, anger, aggression etc. So as far as the vocals are concerned the connection between Death Metal and aggression is relatively straightforward. What about the lyrics? Typically, the lyrics in Death Metal are about death, violence or other similar themes. One example I will focus on here is Children of Bodoms Towards Dead End. The overall theme of this song is, at the face of it, about feeling alone and not caring about the rest of the world. More specifically, there are phrases that indicate anger towards the world, and about getting closer to committing suicide. The only element that could seem positive (from a certain point of view) is the indirect indication that no matter how ‘bad’ the world is, a person is still in charge of his or her own life. However, this ‘power’ is utilised throughout the song, in a manner that can hardly be considered positive. Now, what does this amount to, regarding the aesthetic significance of the relation between vocals and lyrics? As noted earlier, one thing that would be considered aesthetically positive (all else being equal), is similarity or appropriateness of one element to the others in the whole. So, this means that music will ‘work’ if the emotions expressed in the lyrics are similar to the emotions expressed through the vocals. A similar relation can be found in normal speech, when considering voice and words. Think of a person saying ‘I am angry’. These words can be uttered in many different ways. However, the way to make the words believable is to utter the words in an angry fashion. If a person says ‘I am angry’ while laughing, it will not seem trustworthy. But if the person would shout or scream the words out, then it will be believable. So for vocals and lyrics, the expression of emotion seems to be quite clear. With instrumentation the matter becomes a bit more difficult, if we are to fully explain how and why we normally associate (most) Death Metal with aggression. If we can arrive at a solid explanation, we should be able to point to specific musical features of Towards Dead End and remove all possible doubt about which emotions are expressed. But I am not so optimistic. One thing is experiencing the expression of aggression through music, quite another to explain it. However, a few points can be made that will make the (perhaps necessary) connection between Death Metal and aggression probable. The first thing to remember is that most metal music – and Death Metal in particular – is intended to be played at a relatively high volume. Sounds at high volumes are part of what can be categorized as noise, partly because it will be ‘demanding’ the attention of the listener. In short, it will be a type of disturbance. Here one association seems rather clear. When we think of noise, as it relates to human behaviour, one thing we will not associate it with is being calm. When people behave in a fashion that is noisy, they are normally very happy, mad etc. Aggression will normally be perceived as active, and rarely (if ever) as a passive emotion. So why do we associate the ‘noise’ of Death Metal with people being mad, rather than people being happy? The answer

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__________________________________________________________________ to this question will most likely be clear from an analysis of the musical elements that are specific for the Death Metal genre, such as rhythm, melody, timbre etc. Features that can play a major role in the relation is the use of ‘tremolo picking’ on the guitars, distortion, the hectic drums (especially bass drums and the use of ‘blast beats’) and the (at times) unexpected changes in riffs. These features make Death Metal music sound ‘fast’ (without necessarily having a high tempo, in musical terms), with changes that prevent it from appearing as ‘regular’ noise. This is still not enough to prove any necessary connection between Death Metal and aggression, but we have gotten a few steps closer to an explanation of the relation. What we need now, in order to make the argument complete, is a reason why those specific musical features are associated with aggression, and not some other emotion. What we know is that we do associate Death Metal with aggression, and the reasons we can give normally will in most cases refer to the mentioned musical features. Musicians use those features intentionally to get an aggressive ‘feel’ to their music. Carroll Pratt made the remark that ‘music sounds the way moods feel’ and it seems to be correct in some way. The sound of Death Metal feels more destructive than for example Power Metal, and one intuitive thought is that aggression is connected with the desire to destroy something. 4. Death Metal Aesthetics One question that has been lurking in the background so far is that of the aesthetic significance of the expression of aggression in Death Metal. When making value-judgements about music we always relate the work in question to another (perhaps fictional) work. Also value-judgements will always be depending on the context in which the judgement is made. It is my firm belief that when making a value-judgement about a Death Metal song, we evaluate it as Death Metal. In different genres, different features can have different aesthetic qualities. However, one thing that to me (all else being equal) seems to be the case, no matter which musical context we consider, is that coherence in an artwork is aesthetically positive. So what do I mean by coherence here? Consider, again, Children of Bodom’s Towards Dead End. For this song to be coherent, it must be ‘believable’ within its own context. If we try to separate the different elements (vocals, instruments and lyrics) each of them have, as noted above, some sort of aggressive feel to it (growling, the specific instrumentation, and the combination of words). If we try to think away the aggressive mood in any of these elements, the song would be very different. Perhaps it would not even be Death Metal anymore. I will not make any attempt at determining what is good (and bad) Death Metal. The only thing I want to claim here is that in order to evaluate music (and we indeed do) we need to be aware that a work is not judged on the basis of another context but the one it is in (in this case the specific genre). And as we have seen, many things point towards that Death Metal and the expression of aggression are inseparable.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Closing Remarks It is obvious that there is still something missing before we have provided a solid argument for the aesthetic significance of aggression in Death Metal. One thing that is needed is a determination of the genre, and a notion of genre in general that will be useful, without essentialist implications. I am, however, confident that a determination of the genre will involve something about expressive content. Another problem is that of justifying talk of musical expressions of emotion as meaningful.

Notes 1

A. Ridley, The Philosophy of Music: Themes and Variations, Edinburgh, 2004, p. 83. 2 Ibid., p. 83. 3 E. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. G. Payzant, Hackett, Indianapolis, IN, 1986, p. 29.

Bibliography Budd, M., Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories. Routledge, London, 1985. Hanslick, E., On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music. trans. Payzant, G., Hackett, Indianapolis, IN, 1986. Kivy, P., Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford, 2002. Ridley, A., The Philosophy of Music: Themes and Variations. Edinburgh, 2004. Daniel Frandsen, Institute of Philosophy, Education and Study of Religion, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark.

Can Progressive Metal’s Narrative Inform Social Stigma Theory? Pain of Salvation’s The Perfect Element Parts 1 and 2 as Examples Nelson Varas-Díaz Abstract Social stigma theory has re-emerged from the sixties as an important contribution to the understanding of how individuals relate to each other in social settings. From Erving Goffman’s symbolic interactionist approaches, to its more Foucauldian and Social Constructionist interpretations, the underlying shift in the field is the need to focus on the social structures that foster stigmatisation, without losing sight of its consequences on the daily lives of individuals. This balancing act between the micro (individual) and macro (socio-structural) levels of analysis has not come without its difficulties for theorists, researchers and policy makers. Interestingly, this same balancing act has been effortlessly navigated by some progressive metal artists through the use of story telling as part of concept albums that concentrate on individual’s interpretations of their circumstances and detailed explanations of the social world that creates them. One such example is the work of Sweden’s Pain of Salvation entitled The Perfect Element. After eight albums, this band continues to emerge as one of the most varied and constantly changing ensembles in the progressive metal arena. The Perfect Element Part 1, released in 2000, focuses on the individual experience of trauma of two characters throughout their lives. The Perfect Element Part 2, entitled Scarsick and released in 2007, shifts its focus to the socio structural issues that contribute to the experiences of individuals described in the first instalment of the project. Together, they address both the individual and social structures that can foster stigmatisation of individuals (both personal and societal), and therefore provide a valuable framework of how social health related stigma research can move forward with the integration of both perspectives. Key Words: Stigma, health, illness, progressive metal, Pain of Salvation. ***** 1. Social Stigma Theory Probably one of the most important tasks undertaken by the Social Sciences in contemporary thought is explaining how we relate to one another in light of changing times and contexts. After all, it is in this process of human relations that co-existence and conflict, two polarities of everyday life, are manifested. Social stigmatisation is an integral part of these polarities and has become one of the most addressed subjects for applied areas of science, such as those related to health and illness.

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__________________________________________________________________ Ervin Goffman is the most influential figure in the social stigma literature. He defined stigma as a negative mark (could be physical or symbolic) that makes the bearer be considered almost inhuman.1 The stigmatised is socially devalued and is though of as one with lesser value by other members of the social collective. He proposed three sources of social stigma, including: body abominations, blemishes of individual character, and tribal stigmas. These categories aim to explain why individuals are identified as different and subsequently devalued. The implications of Goffman’s work have resonated in the academic community for decades, impacting not only the way we conceptualise stigma, but the importance of the meanings we attribute to each other in social interactions.2 One of the areas in which social stigma theory has contributed widely is human health. Research has documented how individuals who are stigmatised face dire consequences with regards to access to treatment in hospital settings.3 Even more concerning, individuals that feel stigmatised due to their health situations have negative consequences at a biological level, with faster negative outcomes.4 Although the implications of Goffman’s work have been valuable, it has not gone unchallenged in the past decade. One of the most common critical assessments highlight the overtly individualistic perspective proposed in his work. It would seem that social stigma is a situation faced and perpetrated by individuals, or small groups, as part of identifying something or someone that is different. Other authors argue that stigma needs to be understood from a perspective that focuses on the social and structural factors that foster it as a power wielding strategy.5,6 The tension between focusing on individuals and/or socio-structural factors in the stigma debate can be seen in the areas of health and illness. This is not surprising, as social stigma theory has informed health/illness related literature by focusing on the individual feelings of the sick, social interaction with other ‘healthy’ subjects, and the consequences of social stigmatisation for areas of importance such as health delivery systems. In these instances of social interaction, individuals who become ill due to a particular condition can be the focus of negative social judgement and therefore primed for social stigmatisation. Little attention is paid to the socio-structural factors that foster such stigmatisation (i.e. policies, hospitals, professional training of physicians). Let us examine two instances in which the tension between individual focus perspectives can clash with socio-structural explanations in the health field. Obesity is one of the most common health conditions in the western hemisphere. It has severe consequences such as early diabetes, high blood pressure, and a plethora of complications. This phenomenon could be understood from an individual level perspective by attributing the situation to the personal responsibility of individuals (i.e. has little self-control). A socio-structural perspective will focus on the social factors that promote this situation such as lack of access to healthy foods, the low costs of fast foods, lack of education on health related issues, among other socially focused explanations.7 Although both types of

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__________________________________________________________________ causal explanations will come into play to develop this problem, individual level factors cannot be understood or explained in full without taking into consideration the socio structural dimensions that shape individuals possibilities for actions. Another example in which individual and socio-structural factors come into play to explain illness is sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV.8 Women come to mind as a particularly worthy of note example. Their infection can be described from an individual level perspective by focusing on the things they did, or did not do, to become infected. Some explanations will include personal decision to use condoms. On the other hand, research has documented how social conceptualisations of female sexuality tend to foster passive roles for women in which they have little control of these protection factors. Male dominated societies foster their submission to male expectations, which can include risk behaviours for infection.9 Even if females wanted to protect themselves (i.e. individual level), they have a difficult time doing it due to social constraints (i.e. socio structural factor). These two examples evidence what authors within critical social theory have coined as the ‘new public health’ perspective.10 That is, health models that focus on individual responsibility to explain behaviours that make people sick without focusing on the socio-structural level factors that enable such practices to happen. Social stigma theory is a key role in this process, as individuals will be held responsible for situations that they cannot control, and when illness becomes present, it is manifested as personal failure. This tension between individual and socio-structural level factors has been difficult for researchers to include in their studies and it is only recently that is has come to the forefront of the stigma discussion. As in many other aspects in social life, art tends to be ahead of its time, move at a quicker pace, and challenge existing notions. Progressive metal is not exempt from this process and an intimate look at Sweden’s Pain of Salvation as a case study evidences a clear understanding of the individual/social dynamic in health related issues. 2. The Perfect Element: Individuals at the Forefront The Perfect Element is the first part of the concept proposed by the band and it was officially released in 2000.11 The overall narrative of this concept album addresses how individuals cope with events in their early lives that contribute to shape their worldviews. The story brings forth the lives of two individuals who remain nameless throughout the story, being identified as ‘He’ and ‘She’. Their lives have been tragically touched by subject matters that can be described as traumatic such as abuse (physical and sexual) and drug addiction. These subjects are explored both as part of their individual existence and encounters where ‘He’ and ‘She’ interact as part of the narrative. That interaction is plagued with an overall sense of despair, guilt, and loss. Musically, The Perfect Element encompasses all the traditional characteristics of a stellar progressive metal album. A complex yet unified narrative; distorted

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__________________________________________________________________ guitars, synthesizers and unusual rhythmic patterns are part of the musical landscape. Yet Pain of Salvation do not stop there, and allow the listener to engage in a story filled with human emotions. For example, after the opening songs (Used and In the Flesh), which include crushing metal guitar riffs, Ashes starts with a chilling piano melody that echoes what seems to be a music-box, which has provided the background to many childhoods. This focus on human emotion serves as a stark reminder that although social problems have plagued the characters in the story, the narrator wants us to focus on the subjective and personal experience of pain and trauma. It is not enough to explain through a coherent and rational narrative; the storyline needs to be emotionally experienced, just like the individual characters would experience it. The stories presented in The Perfect Element are examples of the multiple meanings that the concept of ‘health’ can encompass. Such a concept is usually tied to a biomedical discourse in which the body is the sole site of illness. More critical explorations of the concept can open up multiple fields of analysis in order to highlight other areas that are also related to health. These can include mental health, the role of the physical environment on disease, violence, and abuse. It is not surprising then that a story of abuse based on the experiences of ‘He’ starts the album with the track entitled Used, by describing a relation of power and abuse. I am the unclean The black drop at the bottom of your cup You’d better drink or throw me up ‘Cause I am on your lip and tongue God I’m not yours as much as you are mine So let me in to be your lung Just breathe me deep and take another sip So still A taste so sweet but so bitter the kill Still on your lip You are so close I’ll let you come Between my legs you are closer death than sun And I’m not your daughter as much as you’re my son I’ll let you come In my mouth on your lip So ready and thirsty for the next sip You let me in, I let you come I’d never let you down You let me win, I let you drown! Getting used to pain

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__________________________________________________________________ The narrative points to the interaction between two individuals embedded in a power dynamic characterised by abuse. It is stressed by the repetitive use of the concept ‘getting used to pain’ throughout the song. What is most important is the use of biological metaphors such as lungs, breathing, consumption, and throwing up. The biological metaphor, based on concepts of illness, is used to explain an abusive behaviour. But what is most important is that actions are only explained within a relation of two individuals, in which other people and context are particularly absent. The same happens with the story of sexual abuse experiences by ‘She’ in the song entitled In the Flesh. In this scenario the individual is presented as feeling responsible for an experience of sexual abuse, and again, context is not present or used to explain her experience. Some wear their bruises on their skin Others hide their scars deep within She has a wound close to her womb Blames herself for letting it in Once these characters meet and social interaction entails (in the song entitled Ashes), the use of metaphors related to illness and health becomes complete. The Perfect Element is manifested as a story of individuals who have been stricken by traumatic events, and in the absence of a social context to serve as an explicative source for their situation, only individual responsibility and guilt prevail. The Perfect Element seems to provide no escape for the suffering of its characters. All that is left is to walk through the ashes together. As we walk through the ashes I whisper your name A taste of pain to cling to As we walk through the ashes You whisper my name Who's the one with the sickest mind... now? This pain will never end Our scars will never mend 3. Scarsick: The Role of Social Context Scarsick is the second instalment of The Perfect Element and was released in 2007.12 Even while the sound and song structure is quite different, it is powerful in its intent to bring to the forefront social issues that contribute to being, as the title suggests, sick of being scarred. In contrast with its predecessor, this album will serve to highlight the socio-structural aspects of being sick. Unregulated capitalism, ideological oppression, religious fanaticism, and consumer culture are

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__________________________________________________________________ just some of the themes addressed. In this album, the detailed description of the individual interpretation of trauma is almost absent. In contrast, the individual is placed in confrontation, as if taking a critical stand, against the social factors that foster his unfortunate social condition. ‘Sick!’ A scream opens the lyrical component of the album as if to state beyond doubt that a health related analysis needs to be carried out. The subject in Scarsick has transitioned from a confused individual to one filled with anger about what he sees around. More specifically, the possibility of losing oneself in a context that stresses the need to conform to social forces that, in the end, don’t have one’s best interest at heart. They will simply make you sick. SICK!!! It’s all sick, I feel sick I'll be sick, then it’s fine I'm conform to your norm With a bucket full for me I’ll be free, finally I will see what you mean with your freedom The concern over health is not only metaphorical; in Kingdom of Loss the lyrical content seems to stress the contradictions between health behaviours and following social norms. This contradictory comparison is not lost on the social literature on stigma and health. Researchers have documented how health campaigns focus on what individuals ‘should do’ to be healthy (i.e exercise, diet) and yet the social context does not allow for it (i.e. cost of food, extended work hours). In the end, the individual is stigmatised for not being able to meet the proposed goals, with little consideration to the context. It is in instances such as this one where progressive metal and social stigma theory collide, even if they don’t even know it. Could someone please just tell me what happened? I mean, first we pay for fast-food that will make us all fat and tired. So then we pay for elevators, so we won’t have to climb the three stairs up to our apartments. Then we buy freaking Stairmaster machines, so we can burn away while watching someone make real food on TV. Now, if that doesn’t make us winners I don’t know what will. Some of the contradictions posed in the previous segment of the song do not remain without potential causal explanations throughout the album’s narrative. For example, fanatical nationalism is proposed as a potential contributor. Such

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__________________________________________________________________ nationalism if fuelled by patterns of consumption, specific body sustenance regimens, all of which can make individuals feel as part of the group… even if it kills them. These political dimensions are described in the song America where Pain of Salvation criticize the monopolistic views of the United States and its role in war throughout the world. The criticism continues in songs such as Cribcaged where consumer culture is scrutinized. Both situations point to the political dimensions that influence individuals’ situations, and in fact, bring to the front issues related to illness and death as its culmination. Yet the most interesting phenomena addressed in Scarsick is related to the role of religion and scars. In the song Mrs. Modern Mary, Pain of Salvation addresses the role of religion in generating suffering. This is particularly interesting as religion is one of the most neglected social subjects with regards to its negative effects on social health. Most social research on health and religion has focused on its positive implications (i.e. social support). Still, other research continues to identify how religious practices foster social stigmatisation of individuals that do not confirm to established norms. It has implications for health as research has shown that professionals that selfidentify as religious hold more stigmatising attitudes towards the homosexual community, drug users, and people with HIV, among others. Religion has the tendency to provide individuals with alleged access to ‘the truth’ and evaluate others through that position of privilege. This stigmatisation process is described in the song from the perspective of the religious person, who now holds a higher moral ground having found God. Life will never be the same I have a better view now There’s always someone else to blame I’m on the winning team now Death will never be the same I’m in the faster lane now No more am I the one to blame I have a juster cause now When interpreted as a whole, Scarsick is very effective in presenting the audience with a plethora of examples in which socio-structural factors influence our daily lives in potentially negative ways. It almost echoes the political dimensions of Megadeth’s Peace Sells, or Pink Floyd’s Animals. Unfortunately, it has taken stigma research and theory more than forty years to come to the similar conclusions. Heavy metal, and later its progressive offspring, has always been ahead of its time.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Progressive Metal and Critical Agency Art is an important field of human inquiry into its existence and has historically had a critical role in questioning normalcy as society’s standard.13,14 Paintings, poetry, and music have helped to advance critical stances on subject areas related to the social. Human relations, and the potentially stigmatising process that are embedded in them, have been present in these mediums of inquiry. Heavy metal music has not neglected these subjects and has, lyrically and stylistically, challenged social norms of its context.15,16 Pain of Salvation’s The Perfect Element continues in this tradition by challenging the listener to understand the role of individuals and social structure on human health, and other social endeavours.

Notes

1

E. Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963, p. 147. 2 N. Varas-Diaz, I. Serrano-Garcia & J. Toro-Alfonso, ‘AIDS-Related Stigma and Social Interaction: Puerto Ricans Living with HIV/AIDS’, Quality Health Resolutions, Vol. 15 (2), 2005, pp. 169-187. 3 L. Nyblade et al., ‘Combating HIV Stigma in Health Care Settings: What Works?’, J Int AIDS Soc, Vol. 12 (1), 2009, p. 15. 4 C. Logie & T.M. Gadalla, ‘Meta-Analysis of Health and Demographic Correlates of Stigma towards People Living with HIV’, AIDS Care, Vol. 21 (6), 2009, pp. 742-753. 5 B.G. Link & J.C. Phelan, ‘Stigma and its Public Health Implications’, Lancet, Vol. 367 (9509), 2006, pp. 528-529. 6 R. Parker & P. Aggleton, ‘HIV and AIDS-Related Stigma and Discrimination: A Conceptual Framework and Implications for Action’, Soc Sci Med, Vol. 57 (1), 2003, pp. 13-24. 7 R.M. Puhl & C.A. Heuer, ‘Obesity Stigma: Important Considerations for Public Health’, Am J Public Health, Vol. 100 (6), 2010, pp. 1019-1028. 8 M.B. Padilla et al., ‘Gender, Sexuality, Health and Human Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean’, Glob Public Health, 2010, pp. 1-8. 9 B. Ortiz-Torres, I. Serrano-Garcia & N. Torres-Burgos, ‘Subverting Culture: Promoting HIV/AIDS Prevention among Puerto Rican and Dominican Women’, Am J Community Psychol, Vol. 28 (6), 2000, pp. 859-881. 10 A.R. Petersen & D. Lupton, The New Public Health: Health and Self in the Age of Risk, Sage Publications, London & Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1996, p. 208. 11 Pain of Salvation, The Perfect Element (CD), 2000, Inside Out Music. 12 Pain of Salvation, Scarsick (CD), 2007, Inside Out Music.

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__________________________________________________________________ 13

W. Irwin, Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery, The Blackwell Philosophy and Popculture Series, Blackwell Pub., Malden, MA, Oxford, 2007, p. 260. 14 G.A. Reisch, Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene!, Popular Culture and Philosophy, Open Court, Chicago, 2007, p. 298. 15 S. Alvi & E. Moretti, Heavy Metal in Baghdad (Collector’s edn), Arts Alliance America, New York, NY, 2008, 1 videodisc (88 min.). 16 I. Christe, Sound of the Beast : The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, Allison & Busby, London, 2004, p. 399.

Bibliography Alvi, S. & Moretti, E., Heavy Metal in Baghdad (Collector’s edn). Arts Alliance America, New York, NY, 2008, 1 videodisc (88 min.). Christe, I., Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. Allison & Busby, London, 2004. Goffman, E., Stigma; Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963. Irwin, W., Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery. The Blackwell Philosophy and Popculture Series, Blackwell Publications, Malden, MA, Oxford, 2007. Logie, C. & Gadalla, T.M., ‘Meta-Analysis of Health and Demographic Correlates of Stigma towards People Living with HIV’. AIDS Care. Vol. 21 (6), 2009, pp. 742-753. Nyblade, L., et al., ‘Combating HIV Stigma in Health Care Settings: What Works?’. J Int AIDS Soc. Vol. 12 (1), 2009, p. 15. Ortiz-Torres, B., Serrano-Garcia, I. & Torres-Burgos, N., ‘Subverting Culture: Promoting HIV/AIDS Prevention among Puerto Rican and Dominican Women’. Am J Community Psychol. Vol. 28 (6), 2000, pp. 859-81. Padilla, M.B., et al., ‘Gender, Sexuality, Health and Human Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean’. Glob Public Health. 2010, pp. 1-8. Pain of Salvation, The Perfect Element (CD), Inside Out Music, 2000.

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__________________________________________________________________ Pain of Salvation, Scarsick (CD), Inside Out Music, 2007. Parker, R. & Aggleton, P., ‘HIV and AIDS-Related Stigma and Discrimination: A Conceptual Framework and Implications for Action’. Soc Sci Med. Vol. 57 (1), 2003, pp. 13-24. Petersen, A.R. & Lupton, D., The New Public Health: Health and Self in the Age of Risk. Sage Publications, London & Thousand Oaks, CA, 1996, p. 208. Puhl, R.M. & Heuer, C.A., ‘Obesity Stigma: Important Considerations for Public Health’. Am J Public Health. Vol. 100 (6), 2010, pp. 1019-1028. Reisch, G.A., Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene! Open Court, Chicago, 2007, p. 298. Varas-Diaz, N., Serrano-Garcia, I. & Toro-Alfonso, J., ‘AIDS-Related Stigma and Social Interaction: Puerto Ricans Living with HIV/AIDS’. Qual Health Res. Vol. 15 (2), 2005, pp. 169-187. Nelson Varas-Díaz is an Associate Professor at the University of Puerto Rico. He is a Social Psychologist by training and heavy metal fan since childhood. He realised early on in his formal training that most of the important theoretical issues raised in his academic training were already addressed in the albums that were the background for his youth, and are still present in his adulthood. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Hysteric Desire: Sexual Positions, Sonic Subjectivity and Gender Play in Glam Metal Kristen Sollee Abstract From its inception, the genre of glam metal has been defined by gender-bending imagery paradoxically paired with lyrics soaked in sex-obsessed misogyny. Jacques Lacan’s 1955-56 Seminar posits hysteria as a neurosis that reveals the structure of desire and concerns the question of the subject’s sexual position, which he poses as ‘Am I a man or am I a woman?’ While stereotypically feminine signifiers are more glaringly incorporated into the visual aspects of the genre, shifting gender identifications are also audible through sonic means via vocal timbre. Thus, glam metal provides a stage upon which the disorienting effects of gender dysphoric and euphoric behaviour can be performed by male musicians, particularly through the fusion of feminine vocal timbres, heteronormative sexual aggression and the fashionable appropriation of a feminine aesthetic. Working with musical material and critical theory texts such as Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, the intersection of ‘the male’, ‘the female’, madness and desire in the genre of glam metal will be analysed from a Lacanian perspective. Key Words: Hysteria, neurosis, psychological androgyny, intertextuality. ***** 1. Intro From its florid infancy in the early 1980’s, the genre of glam metal has been defined by gender bending aesthetics and vocals juxtaposed with an oftenmisogynistic message. These performances, maddeningly paradoxical at times, call into question the sexual subjectivity of the male personas involved. In analysing the major types of neuroses in his 1955-56 Seminar, Jacques Lacan proposes that the central question to hysteria is, ‘Am I a man, or am I a woman?’1 The schematics of hysteric desire can thus be used to analyse and unpack the dysphoric and euphoric types of gender behaviour performed by men in the glam metal genre. But while the stylised appropriation of stereotypically feminine signs is more glaringly incorporated into the visual aspects of the genre, shifting gender identifications are also audible through sonic means via vocal timbre. Julia Kristeva’s assertions regarding subversive aspects of the feminine within music and poetic language in Revolution in Poetic Language further reveal the ‘multiple identifications’2 that define hysteria as disorienting gender role-play. While performers slide between the two signifying poles of male and female, symptoms

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__________________________________________________________________ of unconscious sexual fantasies that mirror the makeup and thrust of Freudian and Lacanian hysterical neuroses are made manifest. 2. Terms & Conditions From its insertion into the popular pantheon, the glam genre has been defined more by aesthetics than by aurality, making definitive labels difficult. In this chapter, I will use both the terms ‘glam metal’ and ‘hair metal’ interchangeably, as hair metal refers to the coiffures of the musicians and is as entrenched in imagery as the word glam is, thereby serving the same denotative purpose. While my characterizations may be contested, the bands I call glam metal have been categorized as such by a majority of fans and critics. In terms of definition, genre and gender are so hard to handle because they are constructed discursively. ‘Genre boundaries are not solid or clear; they are conceptual sites of struggles over the meanings and prestige of social signs’3 Robert Walser writes, echoing Judith Butler’s point that ‘genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity’.4 Genre and gender both function as highly contested illusions that serve as focal points for interpersonal interaction and identity formation, and the apparent volatility within each reflects both the glam metal musician and the hysterical subject’s tenuous sexual position. 3. Neurosis & Sexual Subjectivity ‘If rock ‘n’ roll means sex, the Hair bands rang as the ultimate manifestation’5 Steve Blush proclaims in the introductory pages of his slick pictorial homage to the ‘80s glam scene. With a desiring subject as the focal point of the genre and excess celebrated as a virtue, hair metal performers displayed an indefatigable need for sexual satiation in both their music and their onstage and offstage antics. The primacy of physical desire is also what defines Lacanian neurosis. Lacan describes it is as a ‘predominance of the genital zone over the other erogenous zones’6 with hysteria specifically characterized by ‘an unsatisfied desire’.7 Thus, analysing the makeup of the hysterical neurotic can illuminate the seemingly contradictory (p)layers in the glam metal scene. Although the term has been used to refer to various psychological ailments associated with women since Hippocrates coined it in 4th Century B.C., hysteria gained widespread clinical recognition in the 20th Century with Sigmund Freud’s documented case of Dora. Freud’s famous findings, published in 1905 nearly 10 years after his initial treatment of the teenage girl, set the tone for much later work on the subject, particularly Lacan’s groundbreaking seminars in the mid-1950’s. Freud believed that Dora’s repressed homosexual urges were to blame for much of her suffering, and her simultaneous drives to be desired as a woman and to experience desire as a man manifested themselves in her body in deleterious ways. Furthering his point that hysteria’s foundation lies in displaced sexual desire, Freud

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__________________________________________________________________ noted that a hysterical symptom is actually ‘the expression of both a masculine and a feminine unconscious sexual phantasy’.8 This realization deepened the gendered dimension of hysteria, which was picked up by Lacan in his 1955-56 Seminar. Following Freud, Lacan defines the neurosis as follows: What characterizes the hysterical position is a question that refers precisely to the two signifying poles of male and female. The hysteric addresses it with all his being - how can one be either male or female?9 While hysteria has historically been associated with women, Bruce Fink, who is arguably the foremost English language scholar of Lacan as well as a practicing analyst, confirms the existence of the male hysteric. They often confound modern psychiatry, he explains. The complications that can arise in this kind of crossing over of typical categories are further compounded by Lacan’s distinction between masculine structure and feminine structure, which, according to him, correspond neither to biology nor directly to…hysteria.10 Although it is not my intent to diagnose men in glam metal with any kind of psychological illness, manipulating the makeup of a predominately female neurosis to analyse a genre almost exclusively populated by men will thus mirror the bending of gender by male hair metal musicians. The playful way in which they exploited signifiers could partially be explained by Sandra Bem’s theory of ‘psychological androgyny’, which is ‘essentially the notion that an individual is able to combine both elements of feminine and masculine characteristics in order to achieve optimal functioning’.11 As Blush asserts, The focal point of the scene was alpha males – assertive, athletic, attractive guys who got the girls. They had animal magnetism, not just because they looked great, but because they actually seemed like colourfully plumed birds. Contrary to some of the originators of 70’s glam rock, men in glam metal of the 1980’s were not intellectuals or sophisticates and they were definitely not transvestites; they were simply blue-collar uber-heteros who dressed sorta like chicks because that's what got them laid.12

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__________________________________________________________________ Thus, their performance of the masculine and the feminine would collide and contract in concert with desire, as they chose which sexual position was most optimal for fulfilling their needs. 4. Gender Play & The Male Gaze Male glam metal musicians donned their gender as an aesthetic mantle of many colours, manipulating masculinity to the hilt. Although perhaps unwittingly, they performed gender the way Butler describes it, as ‘a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies’,13 and in the process constructed their own unique gender performance through ‘a stylised repetition of acts’.14 The aesthetic of hair metal ran the gamut from risqué styles, fabrics and colours generally associated with female sex workers and exotic dancers (spandex, leather, lace, animal prints, and neon) to long hair and makeup matched with more masculine rocker attire. Wherever bands found themselves on the spectrum, however, there was a calculated positioning that occurred in which they aggressively put themselves on display in ways that were both objectifying and feminising. This conceit is illustrated by Vince Neil on the back cover image of what is considered to be Motley Crue’s definitive glam album, Theatre of Pain. In the picture, three pairs of manicured, feminine hands clutch at the body of the blonde lead singer, who is dressed in a diamond collar, hot pink spandex pants, white gauzy tank top and white gloves. His accessories allude to the lacy accoutrements of a virginal bride, right down to the white garter belt that flirtatiously dangles below his waist. The composition of the photograph draws your eyes immediately to him; he is positioned as a desirable woman would have been to capture the male gaze in the Renaissance paintings John Berger discusses in Ways of Seeing in which ‘men act and women appear’.15 Next to Neil, his three bandmates are dressed in more sombre and masculine black and white, acting out the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil tableau. This blurring of gender binaries is further accomplished by the contents of the record itself, which include lyrics bursting with misogynistic froth such as ‘The taste of love, it might be yours/Slide down my knees taste my sword’ or ‘Pleasure victim, who’s next to fall/The question is will you please us all tonight?’ from ‘Tonight (We Need A Lover’). Neil forcefully sings about wanting women to do his bidding and thus takes up the sexual position of the heterosexual male while simultaneously being dolled up on display, objectifying himself to an audience of women, which is simulated by the hands that grab at his flesh. Paradoxically, he is also subjecting himself to be viewed in a feminine position, possibly as a receiver of the male gaze as he poses seductively whilst wearing the sexualised sartorial signifiers of ‘the female’. This constant deviation of the subject’s position is also one of the defining characteristics of the hysteric. Freud describes a case where the female patient would play a man, savagely ripping off her own dress, while simultaneously

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__________________________________________________________________ playing a woman protectively clutching it to herself.16 The hysteric both desires his/her partner and desires as if he/she were his/her partner.17 Regardless of intention, Neil’s presentation embodies this perspectival duality, and the omnivorous sexual subjectivity as seen here and in glam metal in general reflects the infinite excesses with which the genre is associated. 5. Vocal Timbre and the Intertextual Tease In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva explores the radical possibilities within poetic language, which are synonymous with those of music.18 Her purpose is to reveal ways in which to transgress the all encompassing and patriarchal Symbolic Order, which is the confining result of structured language. Reworking terms that Lacan initially created, Kristeva defines ‘the semiotic’ as the dimension of language that ‘expresses that original libidinal multiplicity within the very terms of culture’ because within it, ‘multiple meanings and semantic non-closure prevail.’ As it momentarily allows for destruction of the denotative function, poetic language ‘is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, in that it has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law.’19 Music, she says, is constructed ‘exclusively on the basis of the semiotic.’20 Following Kristeva, the music created by men in glam metal is not only inherently gendered female, but also has the potential to access and activate the site of struggle between male hegemony and the original bodily drives associated with both the female and the Lacanian concept of ‘the Real’. These glimpses outside the Symbolic Order into pre-linguistic Reality are not definitive, but have multiple meanings, similar to the hysteric’s multiple identifications, where modulating sonic subjectivity leads to slippery sexual subjectivity and puts a multi-valence spin on gender. Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and Ferdinand de Saussure’s initial work in semiotics, Kristeva defines ‘intertextuality’ as a transposition of one system of signs onto another, a process which creates new meanings and reveals links within and between texts.21 My own application of the theoretical literature on hysteria to the visual culture of glam metal is itself an instance of intertextuality. When extended to the music, this instance of intertextual transposition can expose the clash of message and meaning that occurs when music, i.e. vocals, combine with lyrics. To further complicate matters, this clash of message and meaning is usually delivered in tones that are more naturally suited to the female voice. Although John Shepherd asserts in ‘Music and Male Hegemony’ that there is an ‘exclusion of typically female timbres,’ within ‘cock rock’ (of which he includes Motley Crue as an example),22 most hair metal songs contain the message of desiring a woman in strains that mimic a stereotypical female voice, which is further emphasized by intense, non-verbal ululations.

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__________________________________________________________________ Three songs in particular elucidate the conflict between timbre and topic in glam metal: Mad About You by Slaughter, Long Way to Love by Britny Fox and I Want Action by Poison. Lyrically, each track expresses different types of desire for ‘the female’, which is punctuated by exasperated, high pitched, non-verbal outbursts of frustrated ecstasy. Mad About You properly begins with the smash of broken glass and a woman’s scream before Mark Slaughter opines: ‘I’m mad about you/I go crazy with all of the things that you do/I’m so angry inside and it’s all over you…I keep this brewing inside/I can’t take anymore/Oh girl!’ At the final repetition of this lyric around the 3:38 mark he crescendos into a cascade of oohs, releasing the untamed tension of the track as it comes to a close. Britny Fox’s Long Way to Love voices a similar frustrated need. ‘Long way, long way to love’ Dean ‘Dizzy’ Davidson repeats, ending in a punchy, highpitched scream-as-sigh beginning around 2:42. In Poison’s I Want Action, Bret Michaels sings less of ‘love’ and more directly about sex. He generally keeps a more stereotypically male timbre in Poison songs, but injects a particularly unhinged soprano scream of ‘whah whah whah’ right after he supposedly finishes what he starts in the backseat of his car. However, Michaels’ spoken words right before the outburst starting at 2:10 are ‘Oh come on honey, I wasn’t that bad…Oh well!’ perhaps alluding to the woman’s lack of satisfaction which may have consequently prevented his. Walser chides the musicological establishment for not analysing or experiencing music ‘beyond the vocals’ in Running with the Devil.23 However, he barely mentions vocal timbre in his discussion of gender and glam metal at all. The semiological interaction between a singer’s vocal form and a lyric’s content is a space rife with conflict and ripe for analysis, and it would be a glaring oversight to ignore its relevance. Men in glam metal exacerbate the madness of sexual desire that they sing about as they desire the feminine while vocally and aesthetically embodying the feminine, thereby engaging in the fluid subjectivity and shifting sexual positions of the hysteric. 6. Outro The contrast between the visual and sonic signifiers of the feminine and the lyrical, masculinist narratives of glam metal calls into question the demarcations between the male and the female and reveals an uneasy peace between the poles. The tension within genre and gender, and the pull between the semiotic and the symbolic mirrors the instability of the hysterical neurosis, where identification and subjectivity are constantly in flux. The impetus behind the flirtatious gender bending behaviour apparent in glam metal has more dimensions than a single chapter can address, but its impact has greater complexity and cultural significance than is often represented in academic or popular discourse. Hair metal was forged from excess: of artifice, aurality, and sexuality. To reconfigure Fink’s definition of hysteria: ‘the hysteric makes the [wo]man, and the

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__________________________________________________________________ hysteric plays the part of the [wo]man. [He] makes [her] what [s]he is, bringing out [her] lack/desire; at the same time [he] usurps [her] place or plays [her] role for her.’24 One might argue that the way men in glam metal use female ornamentation for their own devices is far more misogynistic than the exscription of the female altogether. By taking up all possible positions for themselves, they leave no room for women to exist as subjects at all. However, a queer reading of the situation might reveal that their channelling of the feminine is in itself an intimate inclusion of women into their lives. Whatever the case may be, in the process of appropriating the aesthetic and sonic signifiers of women, these male performers reveal gender to be a mere costume that one can wear at will. The result was explosively fecund; through the playfully flamboyant, over-the-top collision of masculine and feminine in the genre of glam metal, gender was ‘rendered thoroughly and radically incredible.’25

Notes 1

B. Fink, A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Pyschological Theory and Technique, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 122. 2 S. Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1963, p. 121. 3 R. Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 1993, p. 4. 4 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1999, p. 174. 5 S. Blush, American Hair Metal, Feral House, Port Townsend, Washington, 2006. 6 Fink, p. 112. 7 Fink, p. 123. 8 Freud, p. 118. 9 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III The Psychoses 1955-1956, J.A. Miller (ed) W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1993, p. 249. 10 Fink, p. 134. 11 Doolin, p. 103. 12 Blush, pp. 14 & 55 13 Butler, p. 174. 14 Butler, p. 179. 15 Berger, p. 47. 16 Freud, p. 121. 17 Fink, p. 125. 18 J. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, Columbia University Press, New York, 1984, p. 80. 19 Butler, p. 102.

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Kristeva, p. 24. Kristeva, pp. 59-60. 22 J. Shepherd, ‘Music and Male Hegemony’, Music and Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 167. 23 Walser, p. 56. 24 Fink, p. 126. 25 Butler, p. 180. 21

Bibliography Auslander, P., Performing Glam Rock: Gender & Theatricality in Popular Music. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2006. Berger, J., Ways of Seeing. Penguin, London, 1972. Blush, S., American Hair Metal. Feral House, Port Townsend, Washington, 2006. Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, New York, 1999. Doolin, S.A., We may Look like Chicks but We can Still Kick Your Ass: Metal Glam as a Reflection of Masculinity in Transition. Seth A. Doolin, Salem, Massachusetts, 2003. Fink, B., A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychological Theory and Technique. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997. Freud, S., Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1963. Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia University Press, New York, 1984. Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III The Psychoses 1955-1956. Miller, J.A. (ed), W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1993. Shepherd, J., ‘Music and Male Hegemony’. Music and Society. Leppert, R. & McClary, S. (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. Walser, R., Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 1993.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kristen Sollee has a B.A. from the New School in Musicology and an M.A. from Columbia University in Gender Studies and Japanese Culture. She currently writes for various arts publications and blogs about New York City music and nightlife at www.ShadowtimeNYC.com.

PART 3 More Madness in the Metal Method: A Spectrum Disorder of Theoretical and Applied Research Approaches

No Method in the Madness? The Problem of the Cultural Reading in Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil: Power, Madness and Gender in Heavy Metal Music and Recent Metal Studies Andy R. Brown Abstract This chapter offers a critical analysis of Walser’s celebrated text, particularly the role of method in offering a dialogue with heavy metal fandom. It suggests that theory building and methodology in conventional academic research are strategies that maintain symbolic boundaries between researchers and research subjects, in the name of critical autonomy. This is a problem when such subjects constitute a class without symbolic power or voice. Walser’s pioneer work recognizes this imbalance and seeks to redress it, offering a defence of heavy metal music and its fandom. However, Walser’s method, combining a virtuoso musicology and cultural criticism of value hierarchies, ends up speaking on-behalf of metal fans rather than to them. This is clearly apparent in his argument that the themes of horror, madness and mysticism in the music of bands such as Iron Maiden and Megadeth, offer a critique of the ‘madness’ of late-capitalism that fans understand. Yet the evidence of dialogue between Walser and his fan-respondents is somewhat sparse. I go on to suggest that the work that follows Walser exaggerates this tendency to offer a ‘cultural-reading’ that rests on no obvious evidence-base beyond that of the authority of the theorist-researcher. In this respect, the emergence of ‘metal studies’ in the wake of Walser resembles that of fan studies, in particular the transition from academic-fan to fan-academic. Fan-academics seek to contest the value-hierarchies that have previously held their tastes in low esteem. But in so doing they end up legitimating their own identities as fan-intellectuals rather than the majority of ordinary metal fans who cannot participate in this critique. I conclude by suggesting that this tendency may be acceptable if it can be shown that the class-profile of heavy metal’s fan-base has dramatically changed, from working to middle-class. Current research, characterized as it is by a focus on geographically dispersed scene-based studies and/or the theoretical-textualism of literary theory and cultural philosophy, is not best placed to reveal the demographics of this process of embourgeoisement; although it may exemplify it. Key Words: Methodology, objectivity, critical authority, symbolic strategy, virtuosity, cultural reading, fan studies, academic-fan, fan-academic, critical madness, class, critique. *****

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__________________________________________________________________ 1. Introduction This chapter critically engages with Walser’s celebrated text, particularly his treatment of power, gender and madness in the performance and reception of metal music, by focusing on the issue of methodology or the politics and philosophy of method in academic research. In the opening paragraph of the book, Walser acknowledges ‘nearly two hundred heavy metal fans from Minnesota, California, Michigan and Illinois who discussed their music and their lives with me’.1 Yet only three pages, out of a total of 222, are given over to examining the thoughts and opinions of such fans. Despite this, in the climax of the book, Walser mounts an impassioned left-critique of the dominant and dominating discourses of power, gender and madness to be found reflected in metal music and in its critical vilification, offering a sympathetic reading which validates the popular reception aesthetics of ordinary metal fans and the claims of the music to critically interrogate the contradictions of late-capitalist modernity. Walser’s authority to speak ‘on behalf’ of metal fans, is no more pointedly apparent than in the critical tour de force mounted against the madness and madness-inducing logic of capitalist rationality and progress (nuclear war, technostatism and ecological devastation), which he asserts is culturally negotiated in the music of bands such as Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth and fan reception. But the problem remains of how such a reading can be said to articulate the actual politics and perspectives of heavy metal fans themselves? I will argue that the politics of methodology in metal studies crucially revolves around the question of: from where does the cultural theorist speak and on what authority? An obvious answer would be that the cultural theorist speaks authoritatively by virtue of possession and display of the credentials bestowed by the academy. But this answer does not exhaust the implications of the question, it simply confirms the fact that the measure of the level of authority of academic knowledge is largely determined by its symbolic positioning within the academy but also, crucially, its critical autonomy from that which it speaks about. Such autonomy or critical distance is realized in two ways. First, by the autonomy achieved through theoretical work: the practice of building models, defining concepts, developing frameworks and abstractions that seek internal coherence and conceptual rigor. The second symbolic strategy employed to achieve critical autonomy centres around attaining a measure or guarantee of ‘objectivity’ via the methods employed to gather evidence from the research subjects or object-world and the extent to which such techniques are contaminated by that world. Academic disciplines may be defined as more or less ‘scientific’ to the extent to which they can demonstrate distance from and a procedural guarantee of a lack of contamination – of various kinds of leaks or spillage, of values, opinions, feelings and emotions – produced by the object-world and the practices of subjects within it.

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__________________________________________________________________ But what of the authority possessed by the research subjects themselves? Here the measure of academic authority might be judged by the degree of alignment with or possession of authentic knowledge of the object of research, even validation or approval given by the research subjects themselves. Here we might suggest that the measure of authority is determined by the degree of recognition or via notions of authenticity in terms of fan experience and knowledge. However, this reception or ‘feedback’ is largely circumscribed by the extent to which the methods employed allow or recognize particular kinds of ‘voice’. In posing the issue in this way I do not want to re-rehearse well-worn debates about the gap between the theoretical and the empirical, qualitative vs. quantitative method or the epistemological vs. ontological status of truth-to-experience claims. Rather, what I intend to highlight is the dilemma of method: or the processes of ‘testing’ theory in providing a means of connection - to communities, to practices, to people - and how such links can act as a means of correction, contestation, critique; however difficult that dialogue might be in practice. 2. Clearing a Space for a Different Sort of Account of Heavy Metal: The FanIntellectual and the Defence of Ordinary Metal Fans Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil,2 along with Weinstein’s Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology,3 represent a watershed in the study of heavy metal music and culture because they offer a research perspective that is sympathetic to the values and/or experiences of heavy metal fans themselves. They do so in the knowledge that previous academic work had been unsympathetic or highly condemnatory of heavy metal fandom, linking it to a number of social problems, types of deviance, ‘risk taking’ and forms of harmful behaviour (both self and other-directed). Such books were also acts of public intervention into a moral panic occurring in the 1983-1990 period, where the figure or ‘folk devil’ of the heavy metal fan was subject to a concerted campaign - given privileged access and secondary definition by national press and media - resulting in an unprecedented ‘signification spiral’ that achieved both real and symbolic outcomes.4 In this context, such interventions were acts of strategic alliance, of intellectual defence and cultural representation, on behalf of ordinary heavy metal fans, who lacked the social status and cultural clout to defend themselves; or the means of access to public media to speak in their own voices. It is also clear that the potential culpability of academics in rubber-stamping elite-engineered campaigns to stigmatise and scapegoat socially marginalized groups - such as the metalheads, burnouts or stoners in this period - had a decisive impact on the mode of scholarship and, in particular, the methodological claims of these studies. Thus, both authors claim to conduct ethnographies, based on attending concerts, listening to multiple recordings, participating in fan clubs and in fan conversation in various locations; conducting interviews and compiling field notes. At the same time, they

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__________________________________________________________________ disagree with each other’s approach, particularly the role of ‘objectivity’ in researching heavy metal music and fandom.5 Focusing on the conception of objectivity developed in Walser’s book, I suggest it represents a decisive shift away from the understanding of it to be found in previous work (broadly psychology and sociology) towards a conception defined by its degree of partisanship or sense of authentic connection to heavy metal fans themselves. Weinstein’s study claims to offer an ‘objective’ defence of heavy metal culture against powerful detractors of the music, from both left and right of the political spectrum, who fail to appreciate the genre ‘for what it is’,6 a complex and long-lived subculture that celebrates the vitality of a blue-collar masculinity. For Walser, objectivity in social science describes an ‘obliviousness to power relationships’ obtaining between researchers and researched.7 He describes a study by Hansen and Hansen as ‘producing an astonishing array of tables and data’ but this apparent statistical objectivity ‘tells us nothing about heavy metal because their premises produced their results’.8 This is a methodological critique, to the effect that ‘most sociological studies offer no integration of ethnographic and textual analytic strategies’.9 Thus he observes ‘Straw gives no evidence of ever having read a fan magazine, talked with a fan, attended a concert, or even listened to a record’.10 Breen’s analysis is ‘unhampered by musical analysis and ethnography’.11 The implication being therefore that they lack validity. Turning to Weinstein: ‘Though her book is nothing if not an impassioned defence of heavy metal, Weinstein, as a sociologist, must aspire to ‘objectivity’, and she even disingenuously claims not to be joining in debates over whether metal is good or bad’.12 This aspiration to objectivity means she must try ‘to efface her own participation in heavy metal’ as a fan. It therefore results in a lack of analysis of ‘women’s responses to heavy metal’ but also a ‘peculiar sort of arrogance: she brags of having browbeaten one fan in admitting that his understanding of some metal lyrics was inadequate’.13 Here objectivity prevents access to genuine fanexperience but also places itself in a superior position to fandom. Walser wants to ‘clear a space for a different sort of account of heavy metal’, 14 ‘my method is to examine carefully the sounds and images of heavy metal, take seriously fans’ statements and activities, and situate metal as an integral part of a social context that is complex, conflicted and inequitable’.15 I will shortly explore what sort of methodology this actually is. But first I want to suggest – and this is my wider concern – that Walser’s study represents a point of transition – perhaps a rubicon - after which a more self-consciously defined ‘metal studies’ arises; but also a type of scholarship (most notably exemplified by cultural and literary theory) which abandon any recourse to methodology whatsoever in favour of a theoretical-textualism; or what I will define as a ‘cultural reading’. Such a reading seeks validation in either its theoretical virtuosity (where validity is measured by the scale or rhetorical power of the performance); or in the increasing tendency to seek validation for the authenticity of a ‘reading’ of heavy metal culture within the

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__________________________________________________________________ personhood of the academic-as-fan or the fan-academic. I will argue that both these tendencies can be traced, at least in part, to Walser’s pivotal study. 3. Eruption: The Cultural Theorist as Virtuoso Walser announces his arrival with the virtuoso piece, ‘Eruptions: Heavy Metal Appropriations of Classical Virtuosity,16 which offers an exposition of the new musicology, transcribing music not just as scored on the page but as performed. This partly text-analytical and partly interpretive analysis constitutes the majority method employed in Running With the Devil. Although musicology is technical, relying on a shared employment and understanding of terms (such as key, tonic, major and minor modes, chords, measure, modality, sequence, etc), it is also, as Walser’s account of the virtuosity of Edward Van Halen makes clear, descriptive: In ‘Eruption’, an initial power chord establishes A as a tonal point of departure. Van Halen moves the first section from bluesbased pentatonic licks in A, through a couple of flashy patterns of less clear provenance, to collapse finally back to a low A, which he ‘wows’ with the whammy bar.17 While this analysis provides a sense of the compositional structure of a piece of performed music, its narrative resolution requires an interpretive move that offers a cultural reading of what it means, what it can be said to articulate. We can see this combination of musicology and the textual interpretive claim of how music articulates social and cultural ‘tensions’, in the following striking formulation: metal guitar solos typically take the form of rhetorical outbursts, characterized by fast licks and soaring, amazing virtuosity that can create a sense of perfect freedom and omnipotence; they model escape from social constraints, extravagant individuality.18 Here, the textual interpretive move follows from and is cued by the descriptive/analytical treatment, which seeks to extend and resolve the sequence. It is nevertheless a claim abut the ‘reception-aesthetics’ of metal fandom; what the musical performance means to the ideal-typical listener, suggesting coherence and significance in how the text is ‘heard’. However, in the climax of the book, in the chapter that deals with madness, mysticism and horror, musicology is noticeably reduced and the interpretive given greater prominence. Here Walser is offering a more ambitious cultural analysis, which offers a particular thematic ‘reading’ within its cultural context. What is carried over is the concern with cultural hierarchy; a feature that is definitive of the then emergent cultural studies, particularly that pioneered by Fiske,19 where the cultural form is able to articulate power relations through its capacity to challenge

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__________________________________________________________________ high\low categorization as hierarchy. Such analysis involves an interpretive effort to show how the popular cultural text can be a radical text, even within a commercially circumscribed context, reflective of ‘relations of domination’. For the new cultural studies, this means that one cannot read-off reception positions in terms of the class, gender or ethnicity of popular music audiences, since such category locations offer a potential for a discursive appeal or articulation, rather than a simple ‘reading-off’ of economic position to cultural reading. What this means is that the play of positions within a discursive performance is not guaranteed but an effect of the articulatory potential of a form to recruit supporters. Therefore a radical text, that which possesses articulatory power, is able to recruit a broad constituency within the terms of a radical project, one that challenges the possession of definitional power or represents the cultural politics of ‘the people’ against the ‘power bloc’.20 ‘Class background correlates, to some extent, with preferences for different kinds of heavy metal, but heavy metal in the 1980s claimed a huge audience that overruns these categories’.21 This quote indicates that, unlike Fiske, Walser wants to retain some sense of heavy metal fandom and its reception aesthetics as grounded in shared community experience, such as class and gender. Surprisingly, in the opening chapter of RWTD, Walser describes the use of a questionnaire, conducted with 136 people by saying, their occupations ranged from car wash attendant to law school student, from computer programmer to construction worker. Their parent’s occupations covered the whole gamut of working and middle-class jobs, with the exception of one sample, collected in bar in Detroit, which was entirely industrial working class.22 Because of the size and administration of this questionnaire (opportunity sampling), it cannot provide a demographic profile of metal fans. Walser acknowledges the sample has no ‘statistical precision’ yet he chooses to ‘summarize the responses I found clear and useful’.23 Why adopt the conceit of employing a quantitative method if you are going to treat it qualitatively? The answer to this question (like the imprecise reference to interviews and focus groups that are also mentioned) is the need to demonstrate a knowledge and sympathetic understanding of ‘nearly two hundred metal fans […] who discussed their music and their lives with me’.24 But the test of this researcher-fan relationship, of how balanced and equal it is, is how this evidence is employed. Only rarely does such evidence find its way into the text. Mostly it is offered as a reference or footnote support for Walser points. For example, ‘one fan told me he respected heavy metal guitar more than any other kinds of music because it has the most ‘advanced’ guitar playing’.25 Of these (n-5), almost all occur as footnotes for the climactic chapter of the book, Can I Play With Madness?

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Critical-Madness  and  Capitalist  Lunacy:  Reading Heavy Metal Fandom  as Cultural Critique In this chapter, Walser offers a cultural reading of how the post-modernist play with the forces of madness, mysticism and horror to be found in the ‘pastiche’-like compositions of bands like Iron Maiden and Megadeth, offer a type of ‘critical madness’ or ‘madness as trope for unconventional thought’26 to their fans. Thus, despite the ways in which the eclectic juxtaposition of literary references and dramatis personae (culled from a plethora of classical and contemporary texts) and the formal complexity and discordant tonal drama of the playing, articulate the dislocated, decentred, discomforting experience of living in late capitalism. The ‘success’ of the music - its ‘formidable ensemble precision’ - offers the listener an experience of ‘coping and control’; an enactment of ‘collective survival’: In their free appropriation of symbols of power, and in their material enactment of control, of hanging on in the face of frightening complexity [..] heavy metal bands suggest to many that survival in the modern world is possible, that disruptions, no matter how unsettling, can be ridden out and endured.27 There is one dissenting voice to Walser’s view. In a footnote, he refers to a fan’s ‘nihilistic’ response to the topic of nuclear war: ‘Just get it over with’. But the other fans in the discussion group, ‘disagreed emphatically’.28 What we never here is whether such fans were asked to respond directly to Walser’s interpretation of Iron Maiden and Megadeth songs. This, recall, was the point of strategic criticism of Weinstein’s objectivity: that it brow-beat fans by demonstrating they had misinterpreted Rush’s concept album, 2112. Walser does not want to replicate this type of elitist ‘objectivism’. But what is his alternative? To offer a reading that is never directly authenticated by evidence of fan responses, mainly because fans are never afforded the opportunity to engage with it.29 The argument that metal music might allow fans to live with the contradictions of capitalism is surely laudable. But it needs to be squared with the narratives of fans themselves. This can only be achieved through types of research that attempt to narrow the divide between academics and ordinary fans. Walser’s methodology operates largely as a rhetorical device that provides a sense of authentic connection to metal fans, without actually achieving this. Academic-fan readings cannot stand in for such evidence but rather serve as a privileged validation of the identity projects of intellectuals.

Notes 1

R. Walser, Running With the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1993, p. vii.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2

Ibid. D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture, De Capo Press, New York, 2000. 4 This successful moral panic episode not only demonized a section of blue-collar, white youth as ‘folk devils’ it also had real consequences for many of them, from having to live with negative stereotypes of themselves (‘burnouts’, ‘dirtbags’, etc), to some being sectioned in psychiatric units and/or processed as delinquents via ‘de-metalling’ programmes (see Brown forthcoming). In addition, the Parental Advisory label on heavy metal recordings initiated by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in response to the panic, also meant that heavy metal music was harder to obtain, since national chains refused to stock ‘controversial’ material. 5 To-date this disagreement has been somewhat one-sided, consisting of the criticisms raised by Walser on Weinstein’s 1991 publication; the 2nd revised edition of Weinstein’s book did not offer the anticipated response to these criticisms. Given that my principal focus here is Walser this not necessarily a problem. 6 Weinstein, op cit, 2000, p. 239. 7 Walser, op cit, p. 21. 8 Ibid., p. 22. 9 Ibid., p. 21. 10 Ibid., p. 23. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., pp. 23 & 24. 14 Ibid., p. 24. 15 Ibid., p. 25. 16 Published in the journal Popular Music Walser, 1992; this article is reprinted as ch. 3 of Running with the Devil. 17 R. Walser, Running with the Devil, 1993, p. 69. Italics mine. 18 Ibid., p. 53. 19 See, for example, J. Fiske, Popular Culture, 1993; Understanding Popular Culture, 1993; see also, M. Hills, Fan Cultures, 2003. 20 J. Fiske, ‘Telelvision: Polesemy and Popularity’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Vol. 3(4), 1986, pp. 391-408. 21 Walser, 1993, p. 17. 22 Ibid., pp. 17-18. 23 Ibid., p. 18. 24 Ibid., p. vii. 25 Ibid., p. 192, n.49. 26 Ibid., p. 155. 27 Ibid., p. 159. 3

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__________________________________________________________________ 28

Ibid., p. 202, n. 75. Surely the alternative to a top-down reading is to build up a deeper understanding of what fans do and don’t believe, however messy that might be and then seek to square this with a theoretical reading? Just how uncomfortable this can become is demonstrated by Harris Berger’s ethnomusicological ‘dialogic’ encounters with the white, working class, death metal musician, Dann Saladin. H. M. Berger, Metal, Rock and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1999, ch. 11. 29

Bibliography Berger, H.M., Metal, Rock and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1999. Brown, A.R. ‘Suicide Solutions? Or How the Emo Class of 2008 were Able to Contest their Media Demonization, Whereas the Headbangers, Burnouts or ‘Children of ZoSo’ Teneration were Not…’. Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures. Equinox, London, forthcoming. Fiske, J., ‘Television: Polesemy and Popularity’. Critical Studies in Mass Communication. Vol. 3(4), 1986, pp. 391-408. Fiske, J., Popular Culture. Routledge, London, 1989a. Fiske, J. Understanding Popular Culture. Routledge, London, 1989b. Hills, M., Fan Cultures. Routledge, London, 2003. Jenkins, H., Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, New York, 1992. Kahn-Harris, K., Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Berg, Oxford, 2007. Walser, R., Running With the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1993. Weinstein, D., Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology. Lexington Books, New York, 1991.

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__________________________________________________________________ Weinstein, D., Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture. De Capo Press, New York, 2000. Andy R. Brown, PhD., is Senior Lecturer in Media Communications, Department of Media and Film Production, School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, Bath Spa University, UK.

Qualitative Research in Understanding the Metal Community Igor Gafarov Abstract The main idea of the chapter is to demonstrate the way the methods of qualitative research used in sociology and anthropology can be applied to the metal community. In my opinion, qualitative methods are much more adequate for studying the metal community than quantitative ones. In the first place, they are more productive when used to uncover or formulate a social problem, as opposed to giving practical advice in problematic situations. Despite growing research, metal is not understood well as a social phenomenon. There is not enough information and understanding from which any long-perspective conclusions based on previous research can be drawn, nor analogies from other spheres. The contemporary social situation is one of almost constant change, described variously in different social theories, giving even more arguments for considering any contemporary social phenomenon as something unique and distinctive, a product of peculiar interaction of meanings. In this light it seems to me that qualitative analysis in the area of the metal community is a worthwhile undertaking. The first phase of my research includes the analysis of interviews of a number of prominent metal bands. Working through an ample selection of interviews it is possible to add qualitative methods to quantitative ones and give a representative picture of meanings permeating the scene. Selecting such material is, in my opinion, more sensible than beginning the work with song lyrics, for example, and more fitting for the initial stage of the research than working with a selection of fan interviews. This is not in the least because band interviews are more easily accessed and would be much more helpful in formulating the initial hypothesis on ‘how’s and why’s’ in the metal scene. Key Words: Qualitative analysis, methodology of social research, textual analysis, identity, metal scene, metal artists. ***** 1. Qualitative Research in Understanding of Social Processes The main purpose of this chapter is methodological rather than empirical. It aims to demonstrate the way the methods of qualitative research used in sociology and anthropology can be applied to studying metal community. One of the biggest problems of any sort of sociological analysis of the metal community is the sheer scope of this global phenomenon. Any quantitative research would by definition be aimed at a particular local scene. Qualitative research as such is used to get the understanding of the how’s and why’s of human behavior, not centering on the

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__________________________________________________________________ aspects, which could be measured with quantitative methods – who, where and when. Qualitative analysis (QA) as a method of research is characterized by the fact that the researcher does not develop a fixed scheme of hypothetical judgments and does not try to make the data statistically persuasive. Instead s/he searches for a deeper understanding of social phenomena. In my opinion QA has much bigger perspectives in formulating high-scope hypotheses that could be used, for example, by social philosophy. Unlike quantitative methods, which are optimal for evaluating different variants of practical action and programs, qualitative methods are more productive when it comes to formulating social or cultural problems. They are especially relevant in the current situation, when societies are characterized by social instability, the fundamental break-up of stereotypes, guidelines and behavior. In this situation the research problem cannot be clarified by familiarization with literature, probing or other quantitative methods, because the starting point of the research is not quite clear yet. The subject of research is a completely unknown phenomenon. Identity in the metal community could be certainly defined as one of the social and cultural problems of current society, one of the broader scope of problems arising new identities in general. Our primary assumption is, that collective entities that subordinate the individual will are not now predominant, but new individualized constellations that are not united by common norms, hierarchies and forms, rather are determined by disintegration, or ‘risky freedom’. Based on this assumption, we assume that the monopoly of dominant culture is replaced by the diversity of cultural expression and the increased importance of small groups and alternative movements, usually dubbed ‘subcultures’. These groups of people with common interests slowly become the main environment of any contemporary human being and serve as a primary source of identity. One such contemporary identity is the identity of a group with common musical preferences, such as heavy metal. Despite the development of such identities and their respective values, they are rarely researched in modern Cultural theory and thus, it is not possible to analyse them using quantitative methods. In quantitative research, on the one hand, the problem is determined by putting out hypotheses that are empirically provable in extensive statistical selections. Such a course is difficult in the case of the metal community, as it is a global one: its members are both globally widespread, numerous and comparatively distant from each other and locally rare. On the other hand, when using qualitative methods, the main hypothesis can be formed based on small pool of statistical information. Especially important for us is the fact that qualitative research underlines the importance of the position of research subjects. The popularity of qualitative research went up in the second half of the 20th century, when the majority of social scientists became disillusioned with the possibility of explaining a ‘human essence’ and social occurrences using macro theories. Such theories are

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__________________________________________________________________ based on the image of society as an organized whole. The life of individuals is seen as a manifestation of objective social laws, and the individual is a representative of a social type. There is almost no way to turn to his/her particular understanding of his/her own activity. Qualitative research, in comparison, is oriented on working with the complex representation of social reality from the position of active individual. The representativity in qualitative analysis is based not on statistical selection, but on the idea of ‘social field’. It is understood as a fragment of social reality, generated by direct or indirect interaction of people. It has its own resources, cultural programmes, language and borders. On an individual level, every member could be viewed as a legitimate representative of his/her cultural group. Thus, the program, language, borders and ideals of a community can be studied based on a limited sample of either ‘marginal cases’, ‘ideal cases’ or ‘good’ informants. 2. Methods of Qualitative Research Donald Ratcliff ,1 a Canadian researcher, had proposed a classification of the methods of qualitative research. It can be briefly summarized in the following 15 points: (A)

(B) (C)

(D)

(E)

Typology – building a system of classifications based on patterns, topics or other groups of data. Ideally these categories should be mutually exclusive and exhaustive; Taxonomy – complex typology with several levels of concepts, incorporating each other; Constants Comparison – a method that is based on the idea of ‘Grounded Theory’ by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, who insisted that theory is supposed to be based on proving the qualitative data received in particular circumstances, for example interviewing.2 Constants comparison includes eight steps 1) turning to the text, 2) selecting indicators of categories and marking them in texts, 3) comparison of codes with the purpose of finding the concordance and differences, 4) adjustment of codes to demonstrate the categories, 5) partitioning the text in accordance with categories, 6) fixation of the occurrence of categories, 7) determining the saturation of categories, 8) selection of the basic categories; Analytical Induction – the methods including the following steps 1) selecting a particular phenomena and proposing an explanatory hypothesis, 2) hypothesis verification on different phenomenon, 3) hypothesis falsification, 4) correction of hypothesis; Logical Matrix Analysis – graphical analysis of causality;

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__________________________________________________________________ (F) (G) (H) (I)

(J) (K) (L)

(M)

(N)

(O)

Quasi-Statistics – statistics of the usage of categories in analysed text; Microanalysis – a temporal analysis of particular event with the marking of it’s beginning and end; Metaphoric Analysis – analysis of the possibility of application of different metaphors; Domain Analysis – analysis of language in cultural context, is based on dividing the terminology in different domain and analysing the cultural patterns in the description of the situation; Hermeneutic Analysis – an attempt to understand the actor’s meaning, not the ‘objective’ one; Discourse Analysis – linguistic analysis of communication, based on discovering regularities; Semiotic Analysis – analysis of the sign and symbol meaning construction and searching the implied meaning in the system of meanings of a particular culture; Content Analysis – selecting the most important implicit topics in the text, is based on fixing a certain number of mutually exclusive categories and counting mentionings in a text; Phenomenologic (heuristic) Analysis – based on the individual life-world perspective of both the researcher and the research subject; Narrative Analysis – the analysis of the ‘plot’ of the ‘tale’ the subject is telling.

The main ways of information gathering in qualitative analysis include observation, participant observation, visual observation with the use of photo and video technology, informal interview, group discussion (focus groups). The methods that can be used are primarily participant observation, group discussion and informal interviewing. Visual observation has only limited use in the case of big group activities within the community or scene and gives little material to the analysis of identity problems. The methods applicable to studying identity in metal community include analytical induction and metaphoric analysis as the main ways of proposing the research hypotheses; hermeneutic and phenomenological analysis as the primarily attitudes of participant observation and interviewing, where the subjects are permitted to their own interpretations of the events; the creation of typology, constant analysis and quasi-statistics as the main formalized methods of interpreting the texts of interviews; domain analysis in the cases where the comparison of the terminology used inside the scene and one used by the outside researchers is necessary; hermeneutic and phenomenological analysis, content analysis and narrative analysis as the primarily strategies of interpretations of the texts (in this case the texts of the interviews).

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. An Example of a Practical Application I have decided to illustrate the possibility of qualitative analysis of identity in heavy metal with the example of the identity of the metal artist. For the purpose of this analysis I had selected a set of interviews of different bands from extreme metal styles, namely: 1349, Akercocke, Bathory, Behemoth, Bolt Thrower, Endstille, Meshuggah, Morbid Angel, Nevermore, Nile, Therion and Vader. Selecting such material is, in my opinion, more sensible then beginning the work with the song lyrics, for example, and more fitting for the initial stage of the research then working with the selection of the fan interviews. Not in the least because band interviews are more easily accessed and would be much more helpful in formulating the initial hypothesis on ‘how’s and why’s’ in the metal scene. The selection was based primarily on the personal preferences and on the evaluation of the artists of these bands as representative subjects, who can give extensive answers on the questions from the following topics: (1) the ‘mission’ of a metal artist, (2) the criteria of selection of lyrical topics, (3) the comparative importance of music and lyrics, (4) the message behind the music. The qualitative methods I have used for analyzing the interviews are as follows:  

 

 

Typology – system of classification of patterns or topics; Analytical Induction –the process of formulating the hypothesis going from the occurrence itself; Metaphorical Analysis; Hermeneutic Analysis – searching not for ‘objective’ meaning, but trying to interpret the implied one; Content Analysis; Narrative Analysis.

By analysing the interviews we can identify several distinct narratives that speak of the relationship of an artist and his music:    

Lyrical message of social criticism; Direct connection between the music as such and values and views of an artist; Honesty and devotion as most important virtues of an artist; Artist’s own preferences as privileged over the desires of the listeners.

Curiously, such approach to art echoes the aesthetic theory of romanticism. Even more interesting is, that in romantic art sound was commonly understood as a primary artistic medium. Drawing parallels between romantic aesthetics and metal aesthetics can give a solution to one of the most important delusion in

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__________________________________________________________________ contemporary small group studies. Leaning heavily on Hebdige’s analysis of the punk movement, most modern ‘subcultural’ theories try to discern the political message behind the movement. Although such post-Marxist analysis is viable, we should not yield to the temptation to reduce all interests to the political, or even worse, economic interests. Thus, qualitative analysis helps us to understand the meaning behind the music and the core of identity in the metal community – not through the statistical analysis, but through the selective reading of chosen texts. It is especially applicable to studying the metal community as a global phenomenon because of the methodological orientation on the analysis of the individual cases and viewing each case as a representative one. The objectivity is reached thus not through the proper or sizable enough selection, but through proper techniques of analysis. Future research could be oriented towards applying these strategies to collecting and analyzing the interviews of metal fans and band members in particular scenes.

Notes 1

D. Ratcliff 15 Methods of Data Analysis in Qualitative Research, Date of access 08.03.2010. http://qualitativeresearch.ratcliffs.net/15methods.pdf 2 B.G. Glaser & A.L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine, Chicago, 1967.

Bibliography Glaser, B.G., Strauss, A.L. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine, Chicago, 1967. Ratcliff, D., 15 Methods of Data Analysis in Qualitative Research. Date of access, 08.03.2010. http://qualitativeresearch.ratcliffs.net/15methods.pdf. Igor Gafarov is a Master of Philosophy of European Humanities University, and a Ph.D. student at the Belarusian University of Culture. His main research area is the metal community as a social and cultural fact.

Heavy Metal, Identity Work and Social Transitions: Implications for Young People’s Well Being in the Australian Context Paula Rowe Abstract Australia brands itself as a multi-cultural society that embraces social and cultural diversity, yet this rhetoric appears somewhat limited to ethnic and religious diversity and less likely to extend to embracing youth cultures and lifestyles on the periphery. This chapter previews forthcoming doctoral research that will investigate the significance of heavy metal music and its culture for young people’s ‘identity work’ in Australia. Specifically, the research aims to investigate how and why young people use heavy metal music and lifestyles to forge ‘chosen’ social identities; and how the process of forging chosen metal identities affects young people’s social transitions through various social contexts, particularly schooling and school to work transitions. The emphasis on transitions through education and employment stems from current Australian policy prescriptions that demand young people to be engaged in either ‘earning or learning’. The focus of these policies is to responsibilise young people towards linear developmental pathways, largely neglecting and/or negating other structural and cultural factors or lifestyle options. In Sam Dunne’s 2006 documentary Metal, A Headbanger’s Journey, Rob Zombie (referring to metalheads)1 suggests that nobody wants to be the ‘weird’ kid, but inevitably there are young people who end up as loners, or outsiders, and are thus drawn to the outsider elements of heavy metal music and its culture. Despite the enduring social disapproval of ‘metal’ as an identity, a core of young metalheads exist in schools across western nations which leads this chapter to preview the following research questions. What do young people perceive to gain from forging metal identities against a backdrop of ‘normalising’ policy regimes; and what are the implications of these experiences for young people’s social transitions and personal wellbeing? Key Words: Youth, social transitions, identity work, heavy metal, wellbeing. ***** 1. The State of Play for Young People’s Social Transitions In western societies, it is widely acknowledged that young people face protracted and problematic transitions through a variety of domestic and social contexts.2 Fractured social institutions and structures combine with dubious educational and employment pathways to create social milieus and contexts that are not conducive for ‘empowered transitions’.3 Adding further complexity is the social dynamics of late modernity which are increasingly characterised by risk and individualisation, a process which thrusts upon the individual the opportunity (or

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__________________________________________________________________ burden) of writing one’s own biography.4 Young people in general are experiencing less certainty about their futures than previous generations; moreover, these changes are felt acutely by young people living in conditions of social and economic marginalisation.5 The breadth of change that has occurred across the Australian political and social landscape over the last three decades has been underscored by fundamental economic and social reforms; moreover, these changes have been fostered by a global resurgence in neoliberal ideology.6 In Australia, neoliberalism has refashioned social and economic policy, especially in relation to rights and responsibilities. Within welfare state reforms, the neoliberal influence has given rise to ‘workfare’ policies, which now focus on full employability rather than full employment. Workfare policies target the most vulnerable recipients of income support (particularly young people) with punitive and coercive programs based on obligations to take up employment or training, regardless of the suitability of these programs for individuals and their circumstances.7 Secure employment for young people has diminished due to changes in the economy and labour market deregulations, yet neoliberal ideology has deflected responsibility for social ‘problems’ away from the state and onto individuals. Concomitant with this is a strong underclass discourse which views social problems as a result of the personal failings of individuals with ‘flawed moral characters’.8 As a consequence of the tremendous social, economic and policy changes over the last three decades in Australia and abroad, much research attention has been focused on the social transitions of young people. Indeed, a major preoccupying theme in youth literature concerns the social transitions of young people living in marginalised communities and the potential negative consequences of social exclusion.9 Whereas the body of social transitions literature is extensive, it has largely focused on the structural determinants of young people’s transitions and has neglected to capture the ways in which young people as social actors exercise agency over their circumstances by constructing and claiming ‘chosen’ social identities. 2. ‘Chosen’ and ‘Unchosen’ Identity Work In navigating one’s way through uncertain social conditions and individualised transitions, young people must increasingly plan their own life course in relation to values, beliefs, affiliations and preferences, which are essentially identity tasks (or identity work). Yet Côté posits that young people’s identity work is shaped and constrained by the social, structural and economic obstacles they encounter.10 In support, Lawler argues that identities are socially produced and that one’s social milieu provides resources to draw on when constructing narratives that tell the story of who we are and how we want others to view us.11 Young people growing up in conditions of social and economic disadvantage are vulnerable to having ‘unchosen’ identities ascribed to them which are positioned in the context of

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__________________________________________________________________ marginalisation.12 For these young people, it is not uncommon to grow up with unchosen identity labels such as ‘at-risk’, ‘povs’, ‘ferals’ and ‘lazy dole-bludgers’. Breaking out of the social and economic constraints of marginalisation is difficult enough, yet these young people must also contend with the psychological constraints of unchosen and disparaging social identities. Despite conditions of hardship and disadvantage, young people still manage to find a space in which to express their identity and live a ‘life of one’s own’, often by constructing ‘chosen’ identities as a means of resistance against ‘unchosen’ identities.13 Lemert14 asserts that a shift in focus from established social systems to the question of identity is warranted given that in a destabilised world, identity has become just as unstable. For young people growing up in social conditions underscored by deindustrialisation and globalisation, the fragmentation of collective sources of (traditional) group identities and declining social norms mean that young people’s identity work is increasingly a process of intersection, combination and conflict with other identities.15 In late modernity, there is less conception of what the future holds for young people. In terms of identity work, the life experiences of parents are of less use to young people now. Instead, young people are more frequently looking to peers, celebrities, sporting identities and popular culture icons when searching for components of their identities.16 Giddens describes this process as becoming the primary architect of one’s own identity.17 For Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, it is a matter of writing one’s own biography; furthermore they caution that ‘do-it-yourself biographies’ are ‘risk’ biographies as it is easier to make poor choices against a backdrop of uncertainty.18 In negotiating risks and uncertainties while writing one’s own biography, young people are in effect engaging with a process of reflexive modernisation. That is, young people are reflexively managing their identity work in a non-linear fashion by engaging, disengaging and re-engaging with a variety of lifestyle choices and cultural affiliations based on their availability and ongoing assessments of the risks, rewards and responsibilities they carry.19 3. Metal Identities, Chosen Identities? In searching for answers to identity questions such as ‘who am I?’, ‘what are my values and goals?’ and ‘what is my life’s purpose?’ young people have regularly aligned with various group affiliations and sought membership within a diverse range of cultural cleavages. Since the mid twentieth century, musical styles have had a profound influence on youth cultures. Contemporary music continues to provide a dominant medium through which young people can develop and express ‘distinct sets of sensibilities, meanings, symbols and practices’.20 Youth cultures based on musical preferences may be profound and enduring, however young people who align with group memberships based on musical genres are socially tolerated in varying degrees. Since its emergence over three decades ago, heavy metal music has been much maligned by dominant and

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__________________________________________________________________ normative social discourse due to mainstream perceptions of heavy metal music as violent, dangerous, anti-social and even ‘satanic’ in nature and content.21 Moreover, the genre has been strongly associated with cultural practices and symbolic expressions of membership (such as body modifications, tattooing, and dress styles) that have been perceived as confronting, deviant, and socially undesirable.22 To date, heavy metal scholarship has produced a modest body of literature from various disciplines and perspectives.23 During the 1980s-90s, heavy metal literature reflected the media driven moral panics of the era following high school shootings in the United States and the highly publicised trials of heavy metal musicians charged with facilitating youth suicides via the lyrical content of their music.24 Arnett25 argued that youth involvement with heavy metal was a result of the failure of US society to ‘properly’ socialise its young citizens and in 1985, the Parents’ Music Resource Centre testified their moral objections to heavy metal before the US Senate in a bid to ban the sale of heavy metal music to young people. The academic gaze became firmly fixed on the possible effects of heavy metal lyrics on youth deviancy while psychologists voiced their concerns about potential links between heavy metal music, substance misuse, and youth suicide.26 The ‘intelligence’ of metalheads has since been researched, as has their mental health.27 Whilst it is unlikely that academia, or society at large, will ever lose their fascination for pathologising heavy metal music, scholarship in the twenty first century has become increasingly interested in the possibility that heavy metal musical preferences may facilitate a range of positive outcomes for its followers. A sense of belonging, community participation, catharsis, empowerment, resilience and agency are all themes that have emerged strongly in contemporary metal studies.28 Notably, Purcell suggests that the metal ‘scene’ is an example of yet another group that young people join to express their individuality and further suggests that metal permits a greater degree of individualism and freedom than other typically restrictive adolescent social cliques. By entering the metal scene, one can gain an identity and join a group without sacrificing a great deal of individuality. Moreover, entrance into the Death Metal scene, or any subculture, which is not deemed socially acceptable, automatically guarantees that the standards and judgements of the outside world will not come into play. For the socially awkward, for those who are not beautiful, for those who could never succeed at sports, the metal scene provides a community that will not judge based on those factors... By its very nature, metal permits individualism by discouraging judgement and declaring acceptance of the socially unacceptable. Metal may thus be a haven for the unique.29

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Metal Identities and Social Transitions If Purcell is correct and metal is indeed a haven for the unique (or socially unacceptable), then what are the experiences of these young people in other spheres of domestic and social life? What influence do social and economic circumstances have on young people’s levels of engagement with metal? How are young people reconciling their metal identities with other social identities and to what end do metal identities impact on social transitions? Whereas the new wave of metal scholarship provides rich and interesting inter-disciplinary insights into the culture and practices of heavy metal, there remains a paucity of literature that specifically addresses the foregoing questions. It would seem critical to investigate how young people manage their ‘metal identities’ in a society that seemingly has little tolerance for heavy metal music and its culture and how this affects their social transitions through school, social networks, community connectedness and employment opportunities. Understanding youth identities and social transitions (especially those on the periphery) is critical at all levels of policy development and service delivery in the areas of family support, education and training for young people as well as policies that target young people’s health and wellbeing. An understanding of the interplay between youth identities and social transitions is particularly important given current Australian policy prescriptions which require young people to be engaged in either ‘earning or learning’. Education policies emphasise school retention as a facilitator of strong pathways into further education, training and employment, however these policies assume relatively uniform social circumstances and do not adequately recognise the tremendous significance of social and cultural factors which may facilitate or impede young people’s educational and employment pathways.30 Bottrell31 suggests that young people’s transgressions of dominant norms and their attempts to counter negative social stereotypes by forging chosen identities necessitates a reframing of these acts of resistance as acts of resilience and selfempowerment. If the process of forging chosen identities is an empowering one for young people, how does it play out against a backdrop of normative policy prescriptions? Are these self-empowering processes negated by dominant social expectations placed on young people? Can ‘being metal’ thus act as a conduit for disempowerment within normative policy frameworks? In Australia, the social policy arena at large is embedded with mixed messages for young people. Australian education policies are particularly rife with policy contradictions in terms of influencing young people’s identity work. On one hand, young people are encouraged to pursue their dreams and be all that they desire to be. Empowerment, recognition, individualism and valued strengths are all concepts that commonly appear throughout strategic direction statements and school mission statements. Yet schools do not typically manage ‘difference’ well. Instead, individualism is paradoxically accepted within normalising parameters. School uniform policies dictate acceptable appearance from clothing through to

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__________________________________________________________________ permissible hair styles/cuts, jewellery and allowable slogans or affiliations that can appear on school bags. ‘Be whatever you want, as long as we like it’ seems to be the tone of contemporary school policies that impact on identity work. Young metalheads bear the obvious brunt of such policies. Choice of t-shirt and/or band logos is anything but arbitrary among metalheads, rather, they are powerful symbols of identity and belonging. Yet these important identity tasks are outlawed in educational settings. On the one hand, young metalheads may feel excluded and isolated by these processes - or - they may feel justified in their affiliation with ‘outsider’ music and forge stronger emotional connections with their ‘outsider’ community. Clearly, research is needed to explore these push-pull factors in order to investigate how ‘being metal’ affects school life - and vice versa. This is particularly important given the growing evidence that identity resources are key determinants of young people’s ability to engage with education and vocational opportunities.32 A strong sense of self-identity (incorporating a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging and self-esteem) is a key factor for young people’s ability to develop long term goals and see the relevance of education and training in their lives.33 A deeper understanding of young people’s identity work and their identity resources thus appears critical for developing robust supports that enhance young people’s ability to remain engaged with schooling and develop long term aspirations. 5. Implications for Well Being The concept of wellbeing has gained prominence in Australian policy mantra, particularly over the last ten years, perhaps due to its more palatable reception than the more socially stigmatised concept of mental health. The World Health Organisation34 defines health and wellbeing as a ‘state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. Despite the clarity of this definition, wellbeing remains a highly subjective concept. For instance, mental and social wellbeing for metalheads could be prioritised (by policymakers) in terms of educational attainment as an insulating factor against the fragility of the youth labour market. It has been widely argued in both Australian and international contexts that education is the key to secure employment and increased earning potential; moreover, secure attachments to the labour market and financial security are arguably the doorway to optimal life chances and a sense of wellbeing for young people.35 Well being, on the other hand, may be prioritised by young metalheads as having its roots embedded in the concepts of community, belonging and acceptance. For young people, respect is first and foremost to be attained where they are known and accepted for who they are; that is, the sense of belonging through claiming and ‘being owned’ by one’s people fosters self-esteem, status and solidarity– all of which are argued to be critical factors for supporting and sustaining optimal wellbeing.36 The concepts of self-determination and

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__________________________________________________________________ empowerment are central to the literature around wellbeing. If in fact young metalheads are reclaiming power through powerful music, if metal is giving them a voice, or if metal provides an opportunity to perform resistance as a means of resilience, then it can be argued that forging metal identities is indeed an empowering process that supports the development of protective factors for mental and social wellbeing. In contrast, if ‘being metal’ excludes young people from education and training opportunities, or if it further positions young people in the margins and isolates them from other lifestyle and developmental opportunities, then it could be counter-argued that ‘being metal’ poses risks to young people’s well being in terms of economic participation, social development and substantive citizenship. Clearly, robust empirical research is needed to investigate these arguments. Further, it is imperative that the forthcoming research introduced in this chapter adheres to its critical orientation and seeks to not only describe the experiences of young Australian metalheads, but also investigates ways in which social and education policy makers might usefully align with the interests of young people and initiate more inclusive policy directions that support, rather than impede, the development of empowered social transitions for young people positioned in the social and/or cultural margins.

Notes 1

The term ‘metalheads’ is used to describe young people with strong preferences for heavy metal music and/or lifestyles. 2 A. France, Understanding Youth in Late Modernity, Open University Press, Berkshire, 2007; A. Furlong & F. Cartmel, Young People and Social Change: New Perspectives, 2nd edn, Open University Press, Berkshire, 2007; R. MacDonald & J. Marsh, Disconnected Youth?: Growing Up in Britain’s Poor Neighbourhoods, Palgrave MacMillan, Hampshire, 2005; R. White & J. Wyn, Youth and Society: Exploring the Social Dynamic of Youth Experience, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 2008. 3 ‘Empowered transitions’ are defined as pathways that maximise young people’s opportunities to engage with a relevant education, develop secure attachments to the labour market, equitably access resources and services, and participate fully in all aspects of social life that they choose to. 4 U. Beck & E. Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, Sage Publications, London, 2002. 5 McDonald & Marsh 2005; France 2007. 6 A. Jamrozik, Social Policy in the Post-Welfare State: Australian Society in A Changing World, 3rd edn, Pearson Education Australia, NSW, 2009; C. McDonald & M. Reisch, ‘Social Work in the Workfare Regime: A Comparison of the U.S &

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__________________________________________________________________ Australia’, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Vol. XXXV, No. 1, 2008, pp. 43-74. 7 S. Shaver, ‘Australian Welfare Reform: From Citizenship to Supervision’, Social Policy and Administration, Vol. 36, No. 4, 2002, pp. 331-345. 8 Jamrozik 2009, p. 44. 9 MacDonald & Marsh 2005; Furlong & Cartmel 2007; France 2007. 10 J. Côté, ‘Youth and the Provision of Resources’, Youth and Social Capital, Tufnell Press, London, 2007. 11 S. Lawler, Identity: Sociological Perspectives, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008. 12 D. Bottrell, ‘Resistance, Resilience and Social Identities: Reframing ‘Problem Youth’ and the Problem of Schooling’, Journal of Youth Studies, Vol. 10, No. 5, 2007, pp. 597-616. 13 Bottrell, 2007. 14 Lemert cited in G. Jones, Youth, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 66-67. 15 Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Côté, 2007. 16 Côté, 2000; S. Miles, Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World, Open University Press, Philadelphia, 2000. 17 A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Polity, Cambridge, 1991. 18 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002. 19 Jones, 2009; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002. 20 White & Wyn, 2008, p. 204-205. 21 D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture, Da Capo Press, USA, 2000. 22 J. Arnett, Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation, Westview Press, Colorado, 1996; R. Recours, F. Assaguel & N. Trujillo, ‘Metal Music and Mental Health in France’, Culture, Medicine, Psychiatry, 2009, pp. 473-488. 23 K. Kahn-Harris, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge, Berg, Oxford, 2007. 24 Kahn-Harris, 2007. 25 Arnett, 1996. 26 D. Snell & D. Hodgetts, ‘Heavy Metal, Identity and the Social Negotiation of a Community of Practice’, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 2007, pp. 430-445; Recours, et al., 2009. 27 Recours, et al., 2009. 28 See Kahn-Harris, 2007; N. Purcell, Death Metal Music: The Passion and Politics of a Subculture, McFarland & Company Inc., North Carolina, 2003; Snell & Hodgetts, 2007. 29 Purcell, 2003. 30 J. Wyn, ‘The Changing Context of Australian Youth and its Implications for Social Inclusion’, Youth Studies Australia, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2009, pp. 46-50. 31 Bottrell, 2007.

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Côté, 2007; J. Smyth & R. Hattam, ‘Dropping Out’, Drifting Off, Being Excluded, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York, 2004. 33 Côté, 2007; R. MacDonald & J, Marsh, ‘Missing School: Educational Engagement, Youth Transitions, and Social Exclusion’, Youth and Society, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004, pp. 143-162. 34 http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/mental_health/en/index.html, Viewed on July 20, 2010. 35 White & Wyn, 2008; MacDonald & Marsh, 2005. 36 Bottrell, 2007, p. 608.

Bibliography Arnett, J., Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation. Westview Press, Colorado, 1996. Beck, U. & Beck-Gernsheim, E., Individualization. Sage Publications, London, 2002. Bottrell, D., ‘Resistance, Resilience and Social Identities: Reframing ‘Problem Youth’ and the Problem of Schooling’, Journal of Youth Studies, Vol.10, No.5, 2007, pp. 597-616. Brown, A., ‘Popular Music Cultures, Media and Youth Consumption: Towards an Integration of Structure, Culture and Agency’. Sociology Compass. 2008. Cadwallader, S., ‘The Darker Side of Bright Students: Gifted and Talented Heavy Metal Fans’. Occasional Paper No.19. National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth, United Kingdom, 2007. Côté, J., ‘Youth and the Provision of Resources’. Youth and Social Capital. Tufnell Press, London, 2007. France, A., Understanding Youth in Late Modernity. Open University Press, Berkshire, 2007. Furlong, A. & Cartmel, F., Young People and Social Change: New Perspectives. 2nd edn, Open University Press, Berkshire, 2007. Giddens, A., Modernity and Self-identity. Polity, Cambridge, 1991.

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__________________________________________________________________ Henry, P. & Caldwell, M., ‘Headbanging as Resistance or Refuge: A Cathartic Account’. Consumption, Markets & Culture. Vol. 10, No. 2, 2007, pp. 159-174. Jamrozik, A., Social Policy in the Post-Welfare State: Australian Society in A Changing World. 3rd edn, Pearson Education Australia, NSW, 2009. Jones, G., Youth. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009. Kahn-Harris, K., Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Berg, Oxford, 2007. Lawler, S., Identity: Sociological Perspectives. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008. MacDonald, R. & Marsh, J., ‘Missing School: Educational Engagement, Youth Transitions, and Social Exclusion’. Youth and Society. Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004, pp. 143-162. MacDonald, R. & Marsh, J., Disconnected Youth?: Growing Up in Britain’s Poor Neighbourhoods. Palgrave MacMillan, Hampshire, 2005. McDonald, C. & Reisch, M., ‘Social Work in the Workfare Regime: A Comparison of the U.S & Australia’. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. Vol. XXXV, No. 1, 2008, pp. 43-74. Miles, S., Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World. Open University Press, Philadelphia, 2000. Purcell, N., Death Metal Music: The Passion and Politics of a Subculture. McFarland & Company Inc., North Carolina, 2003. Recours, R., Assaguel, F. & Trujillo, N., ‘Metal Music and Mental Health in France’. Culture, Medicine, Psychiatry. 2009. Schwartz, S., ‘The Evolution of Eriksonian and Neo-Eriksonian Identity Theory and Research: A Review and Integration’. Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2001, pp. 7-58. Shaver, S., ‘Australian Welfare Reform: From Citizenship to Supervision’. Social Policy and Administration. Vol. 36, No. 4, 2002, pp. 331-345.

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__________________________________________________________________ Shildrick, T., ‘Youth Culture, Subculture and the Importance of Neighbourhood’. Young. Vol. 14, No. 1, 2006, pp. 61-74. Smyth, J. & Hattam, R., ‘Dropping Out’, Drifting Off, Being Excluded, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York, 2004. Snell, D. & Hodgetts, D., ‘Heavy Metal, Identity and the Social Negotiation of a Community of Practice’. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology. 17, 2007, pp. 430-445. Walser, R., Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, 1993. Weinstein, D., Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture. Da Capo Press, USA, 2000. White, R. & Wyn, J., Youth and Society: Exploring the Social Dynamic of Youth Experience. 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 2008. World Health Organisation, http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/mental_health/ en/index.html, Viewed July 20, 2010. Wyn, J., ‘The Changing Context of Australian Youth and its Implications for Social Inclusion’. Youth Studies Australia. Vol. 28, No. 1, 2009, pp. 46-50. Paula Rowe is a PhD candidate in the School of Psychology, Social Work & Social Policy at the University of South Australia.

PART 4 Ripping it Up: Metal as a Symptom of a Civilised and Aggressive Disorder

Heavy Metal Rituals and the Civilising Process Gary Sinclair Abstract This research posits that heavy metal music is part of what Elias refers to as a ‘civilising process’. He argues that as society becomes increasingly integrated we are faced with an increasing web of interdependencies and relationships where a growing intricacy is needed in order to manage one’s emotions. Elias and Dunning argue that a result of increasing restraints and the routinisation of social relationships, sport and leisure have attained a greater importance in society, allowing for the generation and release of emotion and the experience of mimetic excitement. Following an empirical qualitative study, which incorporated semistructured in-depth interviews and participant observation, it was found that heavy metal fans in Ireland use heavy metal music in a similar fashion. Initial data suggests that the heavy metal fans are drawn to the excitement of the music because of their anger towards the repetitiveness and routinisation of popular music and their own everyday lives and social relationships. The music provides a cathartic release for the fans. The live event is a unique structure where fighting and violence can occur in what is seen as a ‘controlled de-controlling of emotions’. This is subject to external controls such as the pace of the music, security, and internal controls with the unwritten codes of behaviour facilitating the survival of the mosh pit. It is argued that the distinctive configuration of the heavy metal ritual does not represent an example of a de-civilising process but is indicative of a more complex progression, which Wouters refers to as ‘informalisation’. This research is unique in that no previous study has examined the consumption of heavy metal music from a figurational perspective and it opens up a new framework for examining music subcultures. Key Words: Figurational sociology, heavy metal rituals, Norbert Elias, sociology of sport, live music. ***** 1. Informalisation: The Civilising Process and Heavy Metal Elias1 examines the historicity of western society’s habitus and the development of social processes and attitudes in the formation of a theory, which led to the development of figurational sociology. His central contention is that in post medieval times individuals developed an inner restraint where changes in standards of etiquette and the advancement of ‘shame’ were symptoms of emerging complex networks of social interdependencies and the influence of social processes such as state formation. As we become embroiled in increasingly complex webs of relationships and interdependencies we must learn how to control

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__________________________________________________________________ our emotions and behaviour in order to survive. In such circumstances, Elias argues that society is engaged in what he refers to as a civilising process. This happens at both a sociohistorical and an individual level. This could suggest that it is a linear theory. This is not the case as it is possible that people become less interdependent over time. How then does a subculture such as heavy metal fit in Elias’s theory of the civilising process? Arnett2 and Weinstein3 have discussed the moral panic that surrounds heavy metal in American society. Kong observes how heavy metal music has been classified in the media as ‘uncivilized and savage, reinforced by the performativity of slam dancing, characterized as violent.’ 4 It would seem that the violence and aggression that is synonymous with heavy metal would represent an example of a de-civilising process. It will however be argued throughout this chapter that this is not the case. Heavy metal culture does not represent a ‘de-civilising process’ but is symptomatic of what Wouters refers to as informalisation.5 This aspect of the civilising process was introduced in an effort to understand the relaxing of restraints in twentieth century society. Wouters argues that the growing influence of the lower classes led to their looser and more informal manners being incorporated throughout society. What heavy metal fans are experiencing is an emancipation of emotions, as there becomes a growing tolerance for foul language and public displays of emotion within modern society. Kilminister examines counter culture behaviour and argues that ‘outsider’ groups feel the need to differentiate themselves as the interdependencies between groups and social classes become increasingly integrated. These groups subsequently separate themselves by engaging in alternative music and experimenting with sex and drugs or in the case of heavy metal violent religious imagery.6 Although diminishing standards in etiquette and manners appear to contradict one of the central arguments of the civilising process this is not the case. The relaxation of standards that we see in heavy metal in fact calls for an increase in one’s self control. According to Wouters, the growing influence of the lower classes led to their looser and more informal manners being incorporated throughout society.7 He observes that the conventions of human relations become increasingly flexible and less routinised as power relations transform. As a result we are bound to deal with an increasingly shifting network of social relationships through developing a more complex method of regulating one’s self. This can be witnessed in the heavy metal scene where the participants have to possess a number of additional social skills to deal with the new and complex situations the metal scene provides with its idiosyncratic unwritten codes of behaviour. This is particularly evident in the heavy metal ritual of ‘moshing’, which will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter. The alternative behaviour of participants in heavy metal culture does not represent the loss of self-control, but in fact calls for individuals to develop a

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__________________________________________________________________ greater level of self-restraint in an environment that is situated in a complex web of social situations and relationships. This process of informalisation is reflective of what Elias and Wouters maintain is the increasing integration of society. Through this integration we are subject to an increasing inner and social restraint. In the following section it will be examined how individuals and groups express themselves as a result in modern society. This will involve a discussion concerning the figurational sociology of sport and how heavy metal subculture fits into this framework. 2. Figurational Sociology of Sport and the Quest for Excitement Elias analyses the social trends that led to the emergence of rule based sport and links the British eighteenth century process of ‘parliamentization’ to ‘sportization’.8 At the same time Elias and Dunning argue that the greater need for leisure and the emergence of rule-based sports is a reflection of an emotional need within western society.9 It has been discussed how with the increasing web of relationships and interdependencies there has been a greater than ever intricacy to how one manages their emotions and their behaviour. Elias and Dunning10 insist that it is important that we find ways in which to express such emotions. Dunning writes that the high degree of routinisation in which people in large numbers are subjected to a complex of externally and internally imposed controls…such people need sports and other more or less exciting leisure activities in order to experience a pleasurable upsurge of emotions, an enjoyable ‘de-controlling of emotional controls.’11 It is through the structure of the sporting field that individuals or groups can create emotion and engage in what Elias and Dunning describe as the ‘quest for excitement’. Sport and leisure, in essence, provide a cathartic release. Individuals engage in mimetic activities in order to take on emotional experiences similar to the actual activities they replicate. Mimetic behaviour revolves around the creation of imaginary situations where individuals experience mimetic emotions in activities where feelings are aroused that closely replicate sentiments felt in nonleisure life. Examples include films or dramatic tragedies where the viewer is subjected to feelings of happiness or anger. This creates tension that is then resolved in one way or another. In other words it is a controlled danger, which serves as a fantasy function representing particular experiences. Elias and Dunning claim that for sports such as football, spectators and participants have a far greater scope for generating and releasing tension. There is a greater connection between motion and emotion. For example football fans can jump up and down on the terraces where as those who attend an opera or a plays are expected to sit quietly

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__________________________________________________________________ and clap at designated intervals. This may be the case, but in more modern and popular forms of music, motion and emotion are intrinsically linked in the live performance. Spectators or fans are encouraged to participate. This particularly seems to be the case for heavy metal music, which makes the figurational sociology of sport an appropriate model for the study of this genre and their fans. In the next section the structure of heavy metal and the live event will be discussed in order to demonstrate how heavy metal rituals are an example of a civilising process and fit into Elias and Dunning’s figurational sociology of sport. 3. Dealing with Anger: Heavy Metal Rituals and the Controlled Decontrolling of Emotions I argue in this chapter that heavy metal fans use the music and in particular its rituals to deal with anger. Anger is the most prominent emotion in the heavy metal scene. The data collected for this research from nine interviews and participant observation indicates that this anger is directed at perceived ‘established’ groups. The participants reserve their anger for religious and political groups and in particular what I refer to as the ‘routinisation of the popular music industry’. Elias and Dunning speak of the routinisation of social processes and social relationships in western society. A consistent theme, however, amongst the participants was their frustration with the popular music industry. They lament the standardisation, predictability and commercialisation of popular music. The heavy metal scene represents an alternative to commercial pop and through engagement the fans can position themselves as outsiders and deal with their anger through participating in heavy metal’s rituals. The cathartic release in a Freudian sense that is generated from such rituals is dependent on the internal and external controls. These controls allow for the construction of an exceptional environment such as a mosh pit where aggression and anger is generated and expressed in what Elias and Dunning refer to as a ‘controlled, de-controlling of emotions’. 12 A. Internal Controls The mosh pit is governed by an unwritten ‘code of behaviour’ amongst the fans, which looks to insure the safety of those who engage in the ritual. Antony (DI)13 holds that ‘you are kind of going crazy but you are not trying to hurt them.’ The pit is all about expressing aggression and physicality, but not in anyway that harms anyone. This seems to indicate that the injuries sustained are unintentional. Each and every participant I interviewed told me that if someone falls over you pick them up. Rory (DI) illustrates this code of behaviour when he says ‘You are jumping into each other and stuff but you are not kicking people throwing fists or anything like that if someone falls over everybody stops helps to pick them up.’ The participants inform me that spitting, punching, using elbows or trying to hurt anyone in anyway is not allowed.

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__________________________________________________________________ The code is reinforced by the potential punishment of exclusion or physical violence that is handed out to fans that don’t adhere. The participant observation and interview data however suggests that the ‘code’ is not as strictly followed at larger heavy metal concerts. This bares similarity to Le Bon’s14 work on crowds. Le Bon claimed that individuals tended to act more randomly and uncivilised in bigger crowds. It could however just be simply due to the greater physical restraints imposed by the larger weight of the crowd. B. External Controls Heavy metal rituals are also subject to external controls. This includes the varying degree of security and supervision that is present at heavy metal events and the influence that the band has on the actions of heavy metal fans at a live performance. These factors all contribute towards the unique environment of the mosh pit. A heavy metal gig or concert can be a dangerous setting and as a result there are security, rules and regulations in place to make sure people do not get hurt. There was again a polarisation observed between the small event (a gig) and the large event (concert). At the larger events there were restrictions concerning the amount of alcohol consumed, moshing was officially banned and the bouncers would stop individuals from crowd surfing. There was overall a greater attempt observed at controlling the fans. However these restrictions failed to stop people from getting drunk, moshing or crowd surfing. There were bouncers present at the smaller events but they made no effort to stop any of the heavy metal rituals that occur at a live event. It was the presence of the stricter internal ‘code of behaviour’ that prevented the mosh pit from getting out of control. It is the band who exerts the greater external control over the crowd. Kieran (DI) explains how ‘you do what the band tells you. If the band tells you wall of death the; wall of death or what have you.’ The ‘wall of death’ is a ritual, which is dictated by the metal bands. David (DI) tells me how when the band Lamb of God start the opening chords of the song ‘Black Label’ the crowd automatically separate into two sides and prepare for the song to break into the chorus. This could be viewed as a consensual signal that is used by the fans to enhance the sense of physicality and aggression. This is the case in some of the live performances I witnessed. It can be seen that the band doesn’t necessarily have to direct the crowd verbally. They can dictate the crowd through the tempo and structure of the songs they play. The fans may know how to act in certain parts of songs through experience but the band has the responsibility of orchestrating the rituals through their music. They opened with a very high tempo fast song with the singer screaming. The song then slowed down in the middle with focus altered to a tense drum beat and bass riff building the song up, which gets the crowd going. They seem to know what is coming

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__________________________________________________________________ and then as the music gets a little bit quicker and then quicker again they launch in a violent chorus where the lead singer screams at the top of his voice. The crowd then begin to mosh near the front of the stage gathering in a circle of around fifteen people barging into each other with their shoulders.15 The above extract is similar to the description of football matches presented by Elias and Dunning.16 They observe the distinct pattern of figurations that the two teams who play against each other conjure up and depending on the circumstances of the match this creates a certain level of tension for the watching audience. An example of tension being released is cheering or jumping up and down when a goal is scored. This is comparable to the way in which metal fans and musicians build up the tension in a song by starting a song slow and building the tension both in the song and in the mosh pit before it is released when the chorus breaks in. Elias and Dunning17 claim that for sports such as football spectators and participants have a far better scope for releasing tension. There is a greater connection between motion and emotion. They had suggested that sport was inimitable from music in that sense. It is apparent however that heavy metal music incorporates a similar relationship between movement and feeling. The influence of the internal (the fans) code amongst the fans and the relative authority of external controls have provided an understanding of the social environment and rituals that take place at a heavy metal event. The creation of this structure provides a platform for the fans to express anger, aggression, and physicality in a configuration that allows for a ‘controlled, de-controlling of emotions’. 4. Concluding Remarks This chapter has examined how the heavy metal scene fits in with Elias’s concept of a ‘civilising process’. Heavy metal with its propensity for vulgarity and violence could potentially be viewed as an example of a de-civilising process. However, it is the case that heavy metal culture is an illustration of how the civilising process works. It was argued that the complex web of emotions, relationships and rituals that exist within the scene is part of a process of informalisation. The public displays of emotions, the violence and aggression of the live heavy metal event do not represent a de-civilising loss of self-control. They signify the development of a high level of self-restraint in an environment that is situated in a complex web of social situations and relationships. Additionally, the growing need for self-restraint and control in western society has simultaneously facilitated a desire for excitement. Elias and Dunning hold that sport and leisure have grown in importance as a result. They argue that the sporting field functions as an environment where mimetic emotions can be experienced. This research insists that the heavy metal scene plays a similar role to sport and that the music

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__________________________________________________________________ and rituals of the subculture provides a cathartic effect for the fans. It shares similarities with sport in its relationship with movement and emotion and the generation and release of tension. This is achieved through the construction of the unique environment of the mosh pit, which is subject to internal and external controls. This enables a ‘controlled, de-controlling of emotions’. This chapter puts forward a new framework for examining music subcultures. Through adopting the theories of figurational sociology heavy metal and other genres of music can be positioned in a wider context of psychic and social trends. This will result in a clearer understanding of how such subcultures developed and what attracts individuals to them both aesthetically and emotionally. It is also recommended that in consideration of how the participants use heavy metal music and its rituals to deal with their anger that further research focuses on the potentially positive use of heavy metal in the treatment of individuals with emotional difficulties.

Notes 1

N. Elias, The Civilizing Process, Blackwell, Oxford, 2009. J.J. Arnett, Metal Heads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation, Westview Press, Colorado, 1996. 3 D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture, Da Capo Press, USA, 2000. 4 L. Kong, ‘’Music and Moral Geographies: Construction of ‘Nation’ and Identity in Singapore’, Geo Journal, Vol. 65, No. (1-2), 2006, pp. 103-111. 5 C. Wouters, Informalization, Sage, London, 2007. 6 R. Kilminster, ‘Narcissism or Informalization? Christopher Lasch, Norbert Elias and Social Diagnosis’, Theory, culture and Society, Vol. 25, 2006, pp. 131-151. 7 Wouters, op. cit., 2007. 8 N. Elias ‘Introduction’, Quest for Excitement, Blackwell, Oxford, 2008. 9 N. Elias and E. Dunning, The Quest for Excitement, Blackwell, Oxford, 2008. 10 Ibid. 11 E. Dunning, ‘Sport in the Quest for Excitement: Norbert Elias’s Contributions to the Sociology of Sport’, Group Analysis, Vol. 30, 1997, pp. 477-487. 12 Elias and Dunning, 2008. 13 (DI) Refers to depth interviews. 14 G. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Dover Publications, New York, 2001. 15 G. Sinclair, Field notes 02/02/10. 16 N. Elias & E. Dunning ‘The Dynamics of Sport Groups with Special Reference to Football’, Quest for Excitement, Blackwell, Oxford 2008, pp. 189-203. 17 Ibid. 2

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Bibliography Arnett, J.J., Metal Heads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation. Westview Press, Colorado, 1996. Dunning, E., ‘Sport in the Quest for Excitement: Norbert Elias’s Contributions to the Sociology of Sport’. Group Analysis. Vol. 30, 1997, pp. 477-487. Elias, N., The Civilizing Process. Blackwell, Oxford, 2009. Elias, N. & Dunning, E., The Quest for Excitement. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2008. —, ‘The Dynamics of Sport Groups with Special Reference to Football’. Quest for Excitement, Blackwell, Oxford 2008. Kilminster, R., ‘Narcissism or Informalization? Christopher Lasch, Norbert Elias and Social Diagnosis’. Theory, Culture and Society. Vol. 25, 2006, pp. 131-151. Kong, L., ‘Music and Moral Geographies: Construction of ‘Nation’ and Identity in Singapore’. Geo Journal. Vol. 65, No. (1-2), 2006, pp. 103-111. Le Bon, G., The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Dover Publications, New York, 2001. Weinstein, D., Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture. Da Capo Press, USA, 2000. Wouters, C., Informalization. Sage, London, 2007. Gary Sinclair is a PhD. student at the Dublin Institute of Technology. His research interests include figurational sociology and music subcultures.

Cycles of Metal and Cycles of Male Aggression: Ageing and the Changing Aggressive Impulse Samir Puri Abstract This chapter draws a parallel between the aggression that is inherent in metal music and aggressive behaviour that is typically associated with young men. It relates one phenomenon to the other in an attempt to better understand both. Of interest is ageing, and how the male impulse to engage in reckless and aggressive behaviour changes between adolescence and the 30s. The behavioural manifestations of this change are clearly visible in society. Younger men exhibit a higher propensity to engage in violence and criminality, to experience car accidents, as well as being considered ripe for military service. In metal music, as a band ages its members may struggle to summon up the same instinctive musical aggression that came automatically with youth. What dynamics are at play in both sets of phenomena, and what can one tell us about the other? Key Words: Heavy metal, music, aggression, war, crime, delinquency, testosterone, fighting. ***** 1. What Metal Tells Us about Male Aggression This chapter draws a parallel between two realms in which aggression is particularly pronounced. It considers the aggression inherent in metal music and the aggressive behaviour typically associated with young men. The concern of this chapter is how ageing impacts the male impulse towards aggression, and how this affects both metal music and men in general. Why examine male aggression through the lens of metal music? Metal relies heavily on its conveyance of aggression and thrill seeking. This is sonically apparent in metal’s fast tempos and jagged sounds; thematically discernible in its lyrics and iconography; and behaviourally noticeable in rituals like mosh pits. Other musical styles – punk, for example – are similarly energetic, but few other genres are so thoroughly pervaded by expressions of aggression in sight and sound. Moreover, metal is principally, although not exclusively, played and listened to by males, with young males particularly associated with its more violent and adrenalin-driven forms. For these reasons, this chapter proposes a novel and admittedly largely analogical metric for observing the changing aggressive spirit within young men between mid-adolescence and their 30s. It examines the demographic correlation between the declining aggression in metal bands’ music as the musicians traverse their 20s, and how this reflects a change in the gut level willingness to fight and

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__________________________________________________________________ engage in recklessly aggressive behaviour that characterises men passing into their 30s. This chapter relates one phenomenon to the other in an attempt to better understand both. Society recognises that the propensity to aggression in the male spirit changes during these years by, for example, charging younger men more than other drivers for their car insurance, recruiting younger men for military service, and targeting certain products and hobbies to younger men. The recklessness and energy of young males is a foundational factor that our social institutions often account for and – in the case of the military – actively use.1 Thus, as men age into their 30s and beyond they will pay less for their car insurance and be of declining utility as an infantry soldier. But for metal musicians, the same ageing process can complicate artistic expression. This is because metal is, at its essence, an adrenalin-channelling art form in which a youthful lack of impulse control might be an asset. This is often implicitly recognized in the critical opinion of metal fans when they complain that a band’s best-loved work might be produced early in its career. Other factors can explain this: as bands age song writing ideas dry up, or the lure of commercial success might encourage the softening of a once harsh sound. In addition of course, aggression does not necessarily equate to good metal music. Underlying these matters, however, is an ageing process that none can avoid and that all are beholden to, whether in the world of metal or not. 2. Cycles of Male Aggression Much behaviour deemed by society to be ‘insane’ might not be clinically so, but instead, might be instinctive behaviour that is unmoderated by social norms or personal restraint.2 Aggression is one such impulse. The propensity to be roused to anger, to engage in life-threateningly reckless action, or to seek redress of injustice by force is a powerful driver and distorter of human behaviour. It is an impulse that exists within us all to varying degrees, but one that we learn to understand and temper in order to function in harmonious relation with those around us. What is meant by aggression? One part can be considered the instinct contained within a person, and another part the manifestation of this instinct through particular behaviours. As the passions are roused by a given stimuli, the instinct impels behavioural responses. For the purposes of this chapter, instinct is broadly understood to be those factors internal to the person, whether comprising of character disposition or biology, while environmental factors are considered to be the stimuli that probe and provoke the instinct. Instinct and environment exist in symbiosis, as van Goozen writes: ‘In considering biological influences on the development of behaviour, in this case aggression, one should always see the behaviour as the outcome of a complex interplay of individual, developmental and social factors.’3

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__________________________________________________________________ As males enter adolescence they typically gain physical strength, enjoy high energy levels, and experience rising testosterone levels that can be twenty times higher than a girl of the same age4 (although whether pubertal increases in testosterone increase physical aggression is undetermined).5 The most readily observable facets of aggression are its more dramatic manifestations in anti-social, reckless and violent acts. Far harder to observe are everyday instances of aggression that define life for all people to varying degrees: It is not difficult to find examples from everyday life showing that aggression and emotion are intimately connected phenomenon. Aggression can result from fear, hate, or even love. Still, the common emotion related to the occurrence of aggressive behaviour is anger.6 Young men are often associated with aggressive, angry, thrill-seeking or reckless behaviour intended to establish authority, defend honour or redress grievances amongst their peers. Examples of such behaviour that readily lend themselves to observation are violent crime and car accidents. Both tend to involve young men more so than other groups. Criminality is clearly driven by a conjunction of behavioural and environmental factors. Nevertheless, the prevalence of general antisocial behaviour changes dramatically over age. One study talks of ‘a steep decline in antisocial behaviour between ages 17 and 30 [that] is mirrored by a steep incline in antisocial behaviour between ages 7 and 17’.7 In the case of gun violence, according to a study by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey: Armed and angry young men are perhaps the most feared element of any society, but they also have the most to fear. Regardless of the countries in which they live, young men represent disproportionately high share of the perpetrators and victims of gun-related violence.8 Road accidents are another indicator of such incidents. The insurance costs for young male drivers (17-25 in the UK) are far higher than any other demographic group. Men, and particularly young men, incur many more accidents and fatalities in motor vehicles than do women because men react more aggressively than women to inconsiderate behaviour by other drivers.9 Insurance companies know this and charge accordingly. Then there is war to consider. Most war is fought by young men in their teenage years and in their 20s. Military recruitment and training effectively treats male physical strength, aggressive instincts and instincts to defend honour as the raw materials from which soldiers can be crafted. Recruitment of young men is an

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__________________________________________________________________ obvious choice for numerous reasons: they are cheap; at the peak of their physical fitness and reflexes; and impressionable by demagoguery. Thus, from the world’s military academies to its terrorist training camps, the task of the recruiter is to mould the male spirit while it is still malleable. This is regimentation of the male instinct, conducted en masse. 3. The Aggressive Instinct Changes But Does Not Vanish It is not that younger men monopolise aggressive behaviour – it is that older men appear less at the mercy of being provoked to react recklessly. Whether moderated through common sense, learned experience, or the belief that they now have more to lose, mature men are less prone to the behavioural spasms of the young in the face of provocative stimuli. As male instincts develop over the course of a lifetime different priorities can command attention and different activities and responses can become preferred over others. Of course, it is not that older men are less aggressive than younger men – it is that the manner in which they express this instinct changes, as Gendreau and Archer claim: ‘Expression of aggression undoubtedly reaches a peak of complexity in adulthood’ as direct and physical forms of aggression are gradually substituted for ‘more indirect, controlled and non physical forms’, such as defaming an opponent, embezzling funds, engaging in litigation or other forms of adult retaliation.10 The central matter here is impulse control. The propensity to engage in risktaking, aggressive behaviour persists throughout life but changes in how it is expressed. A useful distinction to conceptualise this change is between reactive aggression, which is triggered when goals are blocked, or by anger or fear, and proactive aggression, which is behaviour engaged in with aforethought for anticipated reward.11 Put simply, the former is suggestive of an instinctive reaction while the latter is suggestive of calculated action. Each individual is likely to display differing balances between the two, but the latter is more suggestive of how mature men typically project their aggressive or reckless drives. 4. Cycles of Aggression in Metal Music It is far to simplistic to say that as the members of a metal band age their music gets softer, but it is possible to present the hypothesis that: as metal bands age, it become more difficult for band members to naturally project and sustain high levels of aggression and energy in composing and performing metal music. A testable hypothesis this most certainly is not, firstly because it is an entirely subjective observation as to whether a band is getting softer, and secondly, because factors aside from the instinct will affect artistic direction (most obviously, musical changes to sound less aggressive driven by changing taste, fashion or financial pressure).

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__________________________________________________________________ The starting point for considering the role of male instinct in metal is the cathartic function that playing and listening to metal music provides for young men. The aggression of metal music helps pour cold water over the burning flames of young male aggression. Metal – like other forms of high-energy, highly passionate music such as punk and hip hop – is an outlet for earthing the currents of angry passion. So what happens when the energy, rage and restlessness of youth subside? There are some key instances in which metal musicians have very noticeably abandoned a certain path of musical intensity at an identifiable moment. A clearly enunciated example is Devin Townsend describing why he broke up his relentlessly heavy band Strapping Young Lad, who was responsible for the classic City album from 1997. Speaking a decade later: The reason Strapping [Young Lad] came to an end is because I’m no longer in my mid-20’s. The reason Strapping resonated with people is because it was passionate and honest about my circumstance that I’m no longer engaged in. And it’s not because of a choice. The things that made me artistically satisfied when I was 27 years old have been resolved. So if we talk about being untrue or false in terms of what you’re doing, it would have been easy on a financial level to continue with Strapping. I could go out there and be pissed off and telling everyone to ‘fuck off.’ Sure, we’ll market that and put it on shirts. It wasn’t preconceived; it is what I felt like doing. People don’t understand why I can’t do it is because the reason you like it, is the reason I can’t do it. If I was to be untrue to something that meant so much to you, it would be this parody. I would rather dig ditches than be a parody of the music.12 Such an honest exposition is rarely provided. Certainly, for the legions of Metallica fans around the world banging their heads against walls in sheer frustration as to why Metallica abandoned thrash metal in the 1990s, and attributing these musical changes solely to a commercial imperative, were missing part of the puzzle. The artistic axis of the band, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich were 24/25 years old for 1986’s Master of Puppets, 28/29 for 1991’s Black album, and 33/34 for 1996’s Load. A changing musical climate, the rise of alternative music at the expense of traditional rock and metal, and the pursuit of commercial glory and wealth were key factors in Hetfield and Ulrich’s decision-making. But are do these environmental factors have sufficient explanatory power? What of the aggressive instinct, dulled no doubt by luxurious living, but dulled too by the inevitable passage of time?

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__________________________________________________________________ That being the case, what then of bands for whom the maintenance of a given level of aggressive intensity is so integral to their saleability that dissipation must be fought? There are reserves that can be drawn on. As discussed, men in their 30s and beyond certainly retain a propensity to act aggressively but usually learn to disburse this element of their instinct in calculated busts rather than being a prisoner to its random fluctuations. Slayer are a case in point. If ever there was a popular metal band for whom abandoning extremely fast playing and a violently aggressive image was not an option, Slayer are it. Their original run of albums culminated in 1990’s Seasons of the Abyss when the band averaged age 26. Divine Intervention arrived four years later, with its track Dittohead claiming to be: ‘Living with aggression and its everlasting reign’. By the time albums God Hates Us All (2001), Christ Illusion (2006) and World Painted Blood (2010) were released; the band had aged from 36 to 45. Is it the case that some of the more barbed lyrics and sounds in this later work needed to be forced? There is no empirical evaluation possible of such a subjective observation. All that can be said is that to consider the behavioural implications of the maturing process can help one better understand the creation of Slayer’s catalogue of albums. In metal, where the projection of rage through music might once have been an expression of the deepest held feelings, later in a band’s career as the musicians traverse their 30s and 40s, it is likely to be more a calculated feeling that needs to be summoned up and projected when required. In other words, do older metal bands have to calculate rather than feel their way to expressing themselves with the reckless abandon that formerly came more automatically? Space does not permit treatment of the death and black metal genres, again for whom softening their sound is less of an option. Space does permit a tentative conclusion: that the arc of decline in the aggression of a metal band over its career is a bizarre but oddly effective representation for the dissipating and changing aggressive unrest within young males. Art is a form of self-expression. While reference points are sought by artists from the world around them, it is the interpretative framework within each human that makes sense of these objects of inspiration by ordering, ranking, selecting and assigning meaning to them. Herein exists the spirit of a human that is the guiding force in expressing what is felt inside. By spirit, one refers to the energies, ambitions, drives, temperament, and other building blocks that equip a person to negotiate life. It is thus logical to assert that in the case of metal, as an outlet for conveying the energy, restlessness and rage of youth, fluctuations and changes in these aspects of the spirit will effect artistic expression. 5. Generational Recharge ‘Every successive generation of created things equally passes through the same experiences in turn’, observed Marcus Aurelius.13 Two tentative conclusions flow

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__________________________________________________________________ from this. The first is that while metal taps into certain human passions in a particular manner, it is merely the latest vehicle to do so. Considering past movements such as the Teds, Mods, Rockers, Skinheads and Punks, David Downes writes that: ‘revolts into style can only re-transcribe, and not resolve, in any structural sense, the set of contradictions that give rise to them.’14 Metal does not perform a novel function as a cathartic outlet for aggression, although it certainly does so in novel style. Secondly, an undeniable truth about life on this planet is that no matter how the conditions of life change over time, with each successive generation born, the spirit of the species is recharged. The aggressiveness of the spirit can be tempered by the passage of time within individuals and within a single generation, but stemming its replenishment in a new generation is a different matter. There will always be more restless and aggressive young men to replenish the ranks of metal bands and fans, as there will also be to replenish the ranks of gangs and armies. Metal has persisted as a musical form for four decades, and may continue to do so for many more. True immortality, however, resides in the impulse towards aggression. Playing and listening to heavy metal on the one hand, and taking up arms in war and criminality on the other hand, are not in the least comparable acts. And yet the spirit that impels men to act is consistent across such boundaries. Whether expressed through metal or war, young, angry men play a role that older, more assured men do not. The implication for the world of metal relates to how fans articulate their frequently voiced criticism at bands for musically diversifying or wimping out. The implication for humanity relates to the responsibility for older generations to comprehend, tolerate and ultimately direct male aggression in as positive a direction as possible. In society as a whole, directing the aggressive impulse into productive, constructive and ultimately harmless outlets is an essential undertaking. Making its own humble contribution, metal can perform a valuable function as an outlet for the aggressive instincts of those who seek refuge in playing and listening to it.

Notes 1

D.J. Kruger & R.M. Nesse, ‘Evolutionary Life-History Framework for Understanding Sex Differences in Human Mortality Rates’, Human Nature, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2006, pp. 74-97. 2 ‘An impulse, to one who does not share it actively or imaginatively, will always seem to be mad.’ B. Russell, Why Men Fight, General Books LLC, 2009, p. 4. 3 S.H.M. Van Goozen, ‘Hormones and the Developmental Origins of Aggression’, Developmental Origins of Aggression, W.W. Hartup, R.E. Tremblay & J. Archer (eds), The Guilford Press, New York/London, 2005, p. 281.

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R. Tremblay & D.S. Nagin, ‘The Developmental Origins of Physical Aggression in Humans’, The Guilford Press, New York/London, 2005, p. 87. 5 Van Goozen, op. cit., p. 287. 6 Van Goozen, op. cit., p. 282. 7 T. Moffitt, ‘Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course Persistent Antisocial Behaviour: A Developmental Taxonomy’, Psychological Review, 1993, pp. 674701. 8 ‘Few Options but the Gun: Angry Young Men’, Small Arms Survey Yearbook, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, p. 295. 9 M. Wilson & M. Daly, ‘Competitiveness, Risk Taking and Violence: The Young Male Syndrome’, Ethnology and Sociobiology, Vol. 6, 1985, pp. 59-73. 10 P.L. Gendreau & J. Archer, ‘Subtypes of Aggression in Humans and Animals’, The Guilford Press, New York/London 2005, pp. 23 & 38. 11 F. Vitaro & M. Brendgen, ‘Proactive and Reactive Aggression: A Developmental Perspective’, The Guilford Press, New York/London 2005. 12 Devin Townsend interview: http://www.blistering.com/fastpage/fpengine.php/ templateid/18165/menuid/3/tempidx/5/catid/4/editstatus//restemp/b%3A0%3B/fPp agesel/2?PHPSESSID=dbed5e9eab3432757d3e511d007d4df3, Accessed August 2010. 13 M. Aurelius, Meditations, Penguin, London, 2004, p. 108. 14 D. Downes, ‘The Language of Violence’, Aggression and Violence, Basil Blackwell Publisher, Oxford, 1982, p. 41.

Bibliography Aurelius, M., Meditations. Penguin, London, 2004. Downes, D., ‘The Language of Violence’. Aggression and Violence. Basil Blackwell Publisher, Oxford, 1982. Gendreau, P.L. & J. Archer, ‘Subtypes of Aggression in Humans and Animals’. Developmental Origins of Aggression. The Guilford Press, New York/London, 2005. van Goozen, S.H.M., ‘Hormones and the Developmental Origins of Aggression’. Developmental Origins of Aggression. The Guilford Press, New York/London, 2005. Kruger, D.J. & Nesse, R.M., ‘Evolutionary Life-History Framework for Understanding Sex Differences in Human Mortality Rates’. Human Nature. Vol. 17, 2006.

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__________________________________________________________________ Moffitt, T.E., ‘Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course Persistent Antisocial Behaviour: A Developmental Taxonomy’. Psychological Review. 1993. Russell, B., Why Men Fight. General Books LLC, 2009. Small Arms Survey Yearbook. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. Vitaro, F. & Brendgen, M., ‘Proactive and Reactive Aggression: A Developmental Perspective’. Developmental Origins of Aggression. The Guilford Press, New York/London, 2005. Wilson, M. & Daly, M., ‘Competitiveness, Risk Taking and Violence: The Young Male Syndrome’. Ethnology and Sociobiology. Vol. 6, 1985. Samir Puri is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre of International Studies, Cambridge University. He holds an MA in War Studies from King’s College London and has worked as a Defence Analyst for the RAND Corporation.

Metal Disorder, Metal Disturbance Niall Scott Abstract In this chapter I assess Heavy Metal culture in terms of the concept of disorder. Heavy metal as a spectrum disorder is content with its own condition in a manner that holds up a critique against the individualisation of mental health under the banner of the mental as and merely related to categories of perception, volition, cognition and emotion. System of A Down in the song Toxicity question whether you can own a disorder, a question that goes to the heart of the control and maintenance of mental health as a concern of an individual’s condition. The therapeutic expression of the heavy metal scene plays with the paradox of individualism and community, challenging the possibility of the ownership and containment of mental health. The heavy metal scene provides an example of performative engagement that oscillates between the individual and the group, a therapeutic mirroring of speech acts that move from the theatre of narrative to dialogue. As Newman and Holzman, critical of the individuation of mental health, state, ‘our emotional states of mind in late capitalist culture are alienated, individuated and truth referential commodification’.1 In the metal scene the alienated are de-alienated, content in embracing abnormality and disturbance, diagnosing its opposite. Key Words: Heavy Metal, System of a Down, disorder, mental health, therapy, performance, psychology. ***** 1. Introduction A challenge presented to current conceptions and treatments of disorder and mental illness is to challenge the scientific approaches to mental health and therapeutic interventions based on ‘science’. As an alternative to this, narrative approaches and storytelling are presented to complement the therapeutic needs of the self-conscious subject. Although it is the case that the therapeutic context, in dealing with disorders of the mind aim in part at making the alien familiar so that it is not feared, this all too quickly becomes a sanitising process based on conformity to certain kinds of models of behaviour or certain kinds of models of the mind and of mental health. There is a considerable difference in category, Newmann and Holzmann argue,2 between the distant objects of scientific study and the close subject of the human in therapeutic/psychological interest. They poetically present this, stating that stars are not the same as humans,3 the meaning of which will become apparent below. They ask why it is so difficult to accept the difference in the demand between an atomistic, empirical object oriented science and the kinds

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__________________________________________________________________ of demands required by a practice that is concerned with human subjective-social life. Part of this lack of attention given to this difference leads us to accept a language, which suggests that our behaviour divides into neatly defined natural categories. This classification and categorisation in a range of theories in mental health in part individuates the issue of mental health as a health problem- the solution to mental health problems lies in the treatment of the individual, be it through pharmacological, therapeutic intervention or both. The heavy metal sound and lyrics of System of a Down provide a magnifying glass for these issues. Not only do they attack the confidence assumed by science in general, in their song Science,4 but also directly interrogate the relationship between psychiatric diagnosis and intervention, in the track Sugar 5 as well as question whether disorder can be owned at all, in Toxicity.6 Although this chapter criticises the psychological and psychotherapeutic sciences at a general level in the context of therapy, the author does recognise that there are a vast range of disorders and cases to which scientific research has expanded understanding and insight. 2. Stars and Stories Writing on the narrative approach to therapy, Epston, White and Murray hold that where an objective description of the world is not available, the only thing left to us is lived experience, and this is understood and given meaning through the telling and performance of stories.7 The conceptual distance required for a scientific study of an object is not available to matter concerning human psychology according to Newmann and Holzmann.8 Humans as self conscious beings and the condition connected to this predicament is such that there is no distance from which such an object can be studied- nothing can be said about the ourselves in the way that we can say something about an external sense object. They neatly claim, regarding the attempt to make people objects of scientific study on which therapeutic approaches are based, that: ‘when psychologists try to meet the scientific criterion of objectivity, they falsify humans beings.’9 The result is that we are turned into star like objects instead of treating us as human beings. The critique of science in general as having failed is a component of System of a Down’s album Toxicity in the song Science: ‘Making two possibilities a reality/ predicting the future of things we all know/ fighting of the diseased programming of centuries/ science fails to recognise the single most potent element of human existence/ letting the reigns go to the unfolding/ is faith, faith, faith.’10 If this is the case for a large part of therapeutic psychology, in its positing of disorder as a mental health concept, it lies in making the two possibilities of the human object and subject combined as the reality of the object of study, rather than letting each possibility be- the human subject as separate from the human object, the latter of interest to the psychiatric, medical and biological sciences. Newmann and Holzman propose an unscientific psychology with no method;11 instead therapy is treated as an activity when proposing talking rather than talking about as that,

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__________________________________________________________________ which works therapeutically. In an essay on life stories in the context of hysteria, even though a narrative approach is appreciated, Slaveney counter to Newmann and Holzman’s approach, holds that rather than allowing stories to be told and the activity to be promoted, it is the breakdown and analysis of a story’s content and symbolism, according to this or that psychoanalytic theory which takes on more importance than the story delivered. Since many stories can be told for each individual, and since many of those stories can be taken to support differing theories of psychiatric illness, what standards might be employed to judge clinical narratives and the meaningful connections on which they rest?12 Analysis in part then involves the therapeutic intervention. In judging whether a story conforms to a range of expected standards dictated by a framework of normalcy from a privileged assumed position outside the disorder- the story must be assessed to be self consistent, coherent, comprehensive as well as accurate. In other words there is a correspondence challenge to the story between observations on the patient/client and similar individuals and the meaningfulness of the relationship and the meaningful connections of the story.13 Holzman counter this in their approach, alternatively holding that: ‘The value of stories is in their making.’14 One of the strongest features of the metal scene and community is that it is a realm of performing storytellers and listeners. Ronnie James Dio’s works or for example the genres of Viking Metal, amongst many others are fine examples of the storytelling tradition in metal. In addition it is not a scene that easily subjects itself to analysis, definition nor does it open itself easily for atomistic analysis. The immediacy of this non scientific approach to therapy and its imperviousness to analysis is I think a strong feature of the immediacy of expression in the heavy metal world The heavy metal world mirrors Holzman’s demand for letting the activity of therapy simply be instead of objectifying and scrutinising the voice of the storyteller. 3. How Can You Own a Disorder? System of A Down question whether you can own disorder.15 In the song Disorder, the challenge is, as I read it, an anti capitalist one regarding a social anti system/institution reaction. System of A Down’s primary lyrical focus in general is on the criticism of modern capitalist urban and industrial life, as a poisoning problem for communities and individuals in communities. Their lyric Disorder, traces a reflected perspective, reflected by car technology- ‘looking at life through the eyes of a tire hub’, and lamenting a more primordial, simple existence ‘eating seeds as a pastime activity/ the toxicity of our city, of our city.’16

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__________________________________________________________________ Despite the attempt at the commodification and control of populations, and the de-alienating effect of technology as commodity, disorder cannot be commodified. This is the case not only for responses to state and market control, but I suggest also the case for the psychological management of populations and individuals through scientific, object oriented packaging of the human self. The objectification of the human subject as a viable opportunity for classification and study from distance is at the heart of a drive towards alienation from the reflective self that can express itself through stories. This goes to the centre of a control and maintenance of mental health as a concern of an individual’s condition. The therapeutic expression of the heavy metal scene plays with the paradox of individualism and community, challenging the possibility of the ownership and containment of mental health. The heavy metal scene provides an example of performative engagement that oscillates between the individual and the group, a therapeutic mirroring of speech acts that move from the theatre of narrative to dialogue. System of a Down’s performance, style and content arguably is a study in disorder and madness, at the individual and social level. Indeed their music courts this description too from the music press. For example Rolling Stone described their music as manic and schizoid, demonic and doomily ruminative17 as well as dubbing them the lunatic fringe in rock. System of a Down’s direct question: ‘You, what, do you own the world?/ how do you own disorder, disorder/ Now, somewhere between the sacred silence/Sacred silence and sleep/somewhere, between the sacred silence and sleep disorder, disorder, disorder...’18 not only does this refer to social disorder, but also to individual metal disorder and sleep disorder. The eyes that are continuously open to gaze inwardly at the soul staying awake to see these problems can reflect narrate and report on them endlessly. Anyone having heard an System of a Down song will know that there is a considerable amount of chaos, vocal leaps, vocalisation that screech, growl and sing; lyrics often come across as arbitrary sounds rather than coherent words, They appear to be meaningless, and this immediate analysis may lead to agreement with Karl Jaspers’ conclusion regarding meaningfulness being not necessarily present even when it appears to be self evident: ‘The self evidence of a meaningful connection does not prove that in a particular case that connection is really there nor even that it occurs in reality at all’19 In the client/patient’s expression of a story, this allows the therapist to retain a sceptical stance, even a ‘knowing position’ and miss the evidence available in the total performance of a story. In a sense the scientific classification of disorder, is not just a power over others through presumed accurate, workable descriptions of those identified as having mental health problems, but it is furthermore an attempt at owning a disorder.

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___________________________________________________________________ 4. Two Reflections on Madness: One Metal, One Philosophical The attempt to gain control over disorder in the diagnosis of madness (and other descriptions of mental health disorders) in identifying and naming the object of study, rather than maintain the subject as a self, is further an attempt to cope with the relationship of doubt to certainty, from the unpredictable fluid nature of selves to predictability. Here I wish to present some speculations and ruminations that indeed do require a great deal of further development and open the door for discussion at this conference on heavy metal and madness. To explore the criticism I have offered above and its alternative in a narrative approach to therapy, I will present two accounts of an encounter with madness- one encountered through the ingestion of an artificial sweetener, the metaphorical reading of which in the context of consumerist western culture and the commodification and consumption of disorders and subsequent therapy will I hope not go unnoticed, the other a philosophical reflection on gaining confidence in sanity. The location of madness as contrary to certainty through reason is encountered in Descartes meditations. Thus begins a chronicling of a history of madness to a modern day scenario where the discipline of Psychology has in effect invented behaviour. The history of madness in Foucault’s work and in analysis of madness in philosophy and literature testifies to this. The Cartesian cogito/ reflection is not just a selfreflective exploration on how to move from doubt to certainty; it is an attempt to stave of madness.20 It is an attempt to distance oneself from one’s self. Descartes pensive reflections on his location and condition are not dissimilar to System of a Down’s lyric on madness induced through misinformation and the use of Aspartame, instead of sugar, in Sugar: I sit in my desolate room, no lights no music, just anger, I’ve killed everyone, I’m away forever, but I’m feeling better, how do I feel, what do I say, fuck you it all goes away. 21 Descartes writes, reflecting on his possible spiral into madness brought on by the influence of doubt, also sitting alone in his desolate room with no music and darkness save only candlelight: For example there is the fact that I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having this paper in my hands and other similar matters. And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of any sense, whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering or who imagine that they have an

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__________________________________________________________________ earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins made of glass. But they are mad and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant.22 The act of expression here and the reflective content seems to ward of madness, in the manner that in expression there is its connection to sense as opposed to nonsense. However this self-reflective moment places (or is misread as) the ego as an object of observation, a star like object, from which all other external objectobservations can be grounded. The System of a Down narrative is instead a complete performed story, arguably a claim about a self, damaged by Aspartame ingestion, spewing forth a narrative with little reflection. In the song through a poetic story and an ‘insane’ Metal expression, a counter diagnosis is offers to an individual’s descent into madness, by accepting artificial sweeteners rather than sugar. System of a Down’s song is a plea to overcome lies with truth through research, thinking through an issue- in this case the possible health damage done by an artificial sweetener. The tone infers the plight suffered by a myriad of young people ingesting the substance. The System of a Down story provides an alternative diagnosis for a condition counter to scientific objectivity. The artificial sweetener of the psychological classification of the self and its objectification under a range of theories and classifications is such that the self has become alienated from itself – being in a state of disorder, unless it conforms to a scientifically developed understanding of its object condition. In this case, a heavy metal song diagnoses its contrary, but not through any attachment to a method grounded in theory or science. There is madness in its method, which is a story, narrative and performance diagnosing the corrupt and impoverished conformism and blandness of the human entrapped by the categorised and object oriented obsession of scientific study. Newman and Holzman, critical of the individuation of mental health state: ‘Our emotional states of mind in late capitalist culture are alienated, individuated and truth referential commodification’.23 In the metal scene the alienated are de-alienated, content in embracing abnormality and disturbance, diagnosing its opposite.

Notes 1

F. Newman & L. Holzmann, ‘Beyond Narrative to Performed Conversation’, Performing Psychology: a Post Modern Culture of the Mind, L. Holzmann (ed), Routledge, New York, 1999, p. 105. 2 Ibid., pp. 91-98 3 Ibid., pp. 93-94. 4 System of a Down, Science, S. Tankian & D. Malakian (comp), R. Rubin (prod), American Recordings, 2001.

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System of a Down, Sugar, S. Tankian, D. Malakian & S. Odadjian (comps), R. Rubin (prod), American Recordings, 1998. 6 System of a Down, Toxicity, S. Tankian, D. Malakian, S. Odadjian, R. Rubin (prod), American Recordings, 2001. 7 D. Epston, M. White & K. Murray, ‘A Proposal for Re-Authoring Therapy: Rose’s Revisioning of Her Life and a Commentary’, Therapy as Social Construction, S. McNamee & K.J. Gergen (eds), Sage, London, 1992, p. 100. 8 Newman and Holzmann, op. cit., p. 94. 9 Newman and Holzmann, op. cit., p. 94. 10 System of a Down, Science, S. Tankian, D. Malakian & S. Odadjian (comps), R. Rubin (prod), American Recordings, 2001. 11 Newman and Holzmann, op. cit., p. 95. 12 P. Slaveney, Perspectives on Hysteria, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1990, p. 166. 13 Ibid. 14 L. Holzman ‘Life as Performance’, Performing Psychology: A Post Modern Culture of the Mind, L. Holzmann (ed), Routledge, New York, 1999, p. 56. 15 System of a Down, Toxicity. 16 Ibid. 17 Album Reviews, Rolling Stone Magazine, 09/27/2001, p. 70. 18 System of a Down, Toxicity. 19 K. Jaspers, General Psychopathology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1963, p. 303. 20 S. Felman ‘Madness and Philosophy or Literature’s Reason’, Yale French Studies, No. 52, 1975, p. 210. 21 System of a Down, Sugar. 22 R. Descartes, ‘Meditations’, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1967, p. 145. 23 Newman and Holzmann, op. cit., p. 105.

Bibliography Descartes, R., The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1967. Felman, S., ‘Madness and Philosophy or Literature’s Reason’. Yale French Studies. No 52, 1975, pp. 206-228. Holzmann, L. (ed), Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind. Routledge, New York, 1999.

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__________________________________________________________________ Jaspers, K., General Psychopathology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1963. McNamee, S. & Gergen, K.J. (eds), Therapy as Social Construction. Sage, London, 1992. Slaveney, P., Perspectives on Hysteria . Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. System of a Down, System of a Down, Tankian, S., Malakian, D. & Odadjian, S. (comp), Rubin, R. (prod), American Recordings, 1998. System of a Down, Toxicity, Tankian S. & Malakian, D. (comp), Rubin, R. (prod), American Recordings, 2001. Niall Scott is Senior Lecturer in Ethics at the University of Central Lancashire and project leader for Music Metal and Politics at Inter-Disciplinary.Net.

PART 5 Challenging Perceptions on Metal and Suicide

War inside My Head: Metal, Mental Illness and Psychic Energy Colin A. McKinnon Abstract Music has been shown to have many positive effects on mood, and there is much anecdotal evidence in the metal community that, in fans suffering from various kinds of mental distress and illness, metal can help those individuals to get through emotionally turbulent times. However, much has also been made in certain aspects of the media concerning potential links between metal fans and certain types of mental illness. Data from some studies have suggested that metal fans may be more prone to depression, anxiety, suicidality and schizophrenia, for example. Some have suggested that metal is therefore a contributory factor to adverse mental health in these individuals. These studies were therefore objectively evaluated. However, a more recent theory uses the existing evidence that some metal fans may be more predisposed to some mental health issues and disorders, but contends that something about metal may connect with and attract certain people with such predispositions. There may be various reasons for this from both psychological and physiological perspectives, one of which is that metal may tap into the unconscious, which can subsequently communicate to the individual’s consciousness, allowing it to act as a source of psychological energy and power. Another reason relates to feelings of alienation in mental illness, for which metal may act as both emotional release and refuge from the outside world. These theories will therefore be discussed from a psychological perspective. Key Words: Metal, mental illness, suicide, suicidality, depression, brain ***** 1. Introduction Metal has also been accused many times of having an adverse effect on the mental health of its fans, through its perceived use of ‘negative’ lyrics, themes and images. In particular, metal has been accused of promoting and idealizing suicide, violence, misogyny, Satanism, etc. For metal’s detractors, it appears to be considered inconceivable that such themes, combined with the aggressive nature of the music itself, can fail to have an adverse effect on the listener. Much has been made of potential links between metal fans and certain types of mental illness, particularly depression, and the perception of such a connection has been supported by various studies published in the academic literature. Indeed, some studies in the published literature have suggested that metal fans may be more prone to, for example, depression, anxiety, suicidality and schizophrenia, or are more likely to indulge in ‘risky’ behaviour (e.g. alcohol and/or drug abuse, unprotected sex, etc). The clear implication, especially in the media reporting of such studies, is that

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__________________________________________________________________ metal is a contributory factor to adverse mental health in these individuals, even if this is not the clear conclusion of the study being reported. A fairly recent example that attracted much media attention was an Australian paper (and literature review) examining musical preference in students which suggested that significant associations were evident between a preference for heavy metal and suicide ideation, depression, delinquency and drug-taking.1 The purpose of this research, therefore, was to find studies in the peer-reviewed published literature and examine the methodology and results from an objective, scientific viewpoint. 2. Adolescence and Alienation One publication stated that heavy metal was more likely to be the musical preference in white adolescent males among a random selection who participated in five or more risky behaviours (which included sexual intercourse, cheating on school tests, smoking (cigarettes or marijuana), drinking, cutting class, stealing and driving without permission), putting them in a ‘high-risk’ category; among this group, Motley Crue was named as the favourite group.2 However, despite claiming that their results confirmed speculation about the effects of music, and metal in particular, on adolescent risk-taking behaviour, the authors conceded that cause and effect was not established and that adolescents may gravitate towards ‘activities that include use of more antisocial media’.3 Authors who examined a large group of high school students for a potential relationship between metal and delinquency concluded that there was no support for such a relationship.4 However, they did find evidence to support an effect of metal on delinquent behaviour when parental control was low, which begs the question whether insufficient parental supervision is more of a factor in delinquent behaviour than musical preference. A study by a child and adolescent psychiatrist that examined music preferences and drug abuse in 470 adolescent patients in a psychiatric hospital facility, came to the conclusion that heavy metal was the first music of choice for 59.1% of chemically dependent individuals, and was the ‘musical expression of forces at work in their lives - violence, promiscuous sex, and increasingly Satan’.5 The study even advocated epidemiological measures against the ‘public health problem’ of heavy metal, while at the same time conceding that ‘a clear-cut relationship cannot be established between heavy metal and destructive behaviour’.6 Another study a few years later that examined music preferences in adolescent patients in an inpatient psychiatric unit suggested that those whom primarily listened to heavy metal had a history of more preadmission, dysfunctional psychosocial behaviours (PDPB) than those who listened to other types of music.7 However, the authors acknowledged that the results may reflect that emotionally troubled adolescents may be more drawn to music with, as they describe it ‘negative lyrics and themes’.8

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__________________________________________________________________ The fundamental flaw is that the majority of metal-loving individuals who have never spent time on a psychiatric hospital are not taken into account.9 In addition, studies with adolescents carry a number of caveats that need to be considered, partly because a number of changes take place in the brain during this time, and partly because this is a time when individuals are forming and exploring their personal identities in depth for the first time, as well as forming a sense of community and belonging, often expressed through the strong musical preferences that form at this stage.10 We feel strongly attached to the music that we listed to in our teenage years because of deep emotional and also neurophysiological connections, and because music acts as a sign of personal and group identity more so at this time than any other.11 The choosing of music deliberately offensive to adults may be related to adolescent alienation in the sense of an antagonistic attitude towards the ‘moral and ethical duplicity of adult society’12 rather than a barometer of emotional and mental health. 3. Suicidality and Depression Generalizations and suggestions of potential links between metal and mental illness or suicide vulnerability are not new, and have been the subject of several publications in peer-reviewed journals. A number of studies have cited that individuals, particularly young adults, who regularly listen to metal have a higher preoccupation with suicide and higher levels of depression than their peers. For example, Stack and colleagues have suggested a link between heavy metal fanship and suicide acceptability, which they assessed by relating data on heavy metal magazine subscriptions (the magazine ‘Metal Edge was used) to suicide rates in the 15-24-year-old age group in all 50 states.13 The authors used magazine subscriptions because magazines were considered to be a ‘valued cultural object among metal fans’.14 The conclusion was that the rate of youth suicide is higher where the extent of heavy metal subculture (i.e. magazine subscription) is greater. The authors stated that heavy metal may ‘nurture suicidal tendencies already present in the subculture’. However, from the perspective of scientific data, whether such aggregate data can indicate any kind of relationship is highly questionable. Stack and Gundlach previously authored a paper suggesting a link between country & western music and suicide in a similar way, by correlating greater suicide rates in cities where a greater amount of radio airtime was devoted to country& western.15 In both of these studies, such data cannot be related to individuals and it is impossible to infer any degree of causality; as such, these data are of very limited use. A later paper by Stack suggested that the link between preference for heavy metal and suicide acceptability is attenuated if religiosity is taken into account, the implication being that metal fans are lower in religiosity and therefore more likely to have an accepting attitude towards suicide.16 The author himself indicates, however, that such an association may be spurious.

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__________________________________________________________________ Another empirical study of high school students, which surveyed musical preferences and suicidal risk, suggested that reasons for living were less strong in metal fans, especially amongst males, and that metal fans, especially females, had more thoughts of suicide. Although metal preference was indicated as a potential ‘red flag’ for suicide vulnerability, it was recognised that assumptions about individual fans are unwarranted and that familial and personal characteristics probably play a far greater role than the music they listen to.17 Due to the aggregate nature of the data mentioned above, another study sought to investigate whether there was any real link between heavy metal (or country & western) and suicidal tendencies using empirical data from a number of individuals, in this case undergraduate students.18 Interestingly, they found no association between depression or suicidal preoccupation in those with a preference for country & western or for metal, but there was an association between preference for metal and prior suicidal ideation, i.e. had thought about suicide in the past. Correlations were also suggested between psychoticism and preference for jazz and rhythm & blues, and between extraversion and preference for rap and hip-hop. An important point to note, however, is that a preference for one musical style does not exist independently of other music preferences; therefore to suggest an association between metal and suicidality ignores the fact that metal fans listen to other types of music.19,20 Authors of a paper investigating musical preference in Australian high school students found that instances of selfharm or thoughts of suicide were much greater in females with a preference for rock/metal, but that no significant differences were found in males. However, they also suggested that individuals with pre-existing problems may seek out such music because it reflects their own feelings.21 However, results such as these must therefore be treated with extreme caution. Although there may be a widespread perception of a connection between metal and suicidality, establishing a causal link has, for those who would like to show this, thus far proved impossible. Even the authors of the recent Australian paper22 that received so much media attention concede that is not causal but rather may be indicative of an underlying emotional vulnerability. However, the finding about prior suicidal ideation is interesting when one considers the substantial amount of anecdotal evidence along the lines of ‘metal saved my life’. Some evidence has shown that metal fans experience positive shifts in mood and attitude after listening to metal,23,24,25,26 suggesting a cathartic effect. Weinstein notes that ‘for each heavy metal fan who commits suicide there are hundreds who feel that the music has actually saved them from killing themselves’.27 In this context, it would seem to make sense that there may be a connection between prior suicide ideation and metal in some fans – these fans have obviously thought about suicide at some point in their past, but metal has played a role in them not going down this path.

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__________________________________________________________________ There was, however, one very interesting study that stood out from all the others, chiefly because of the way it was conducted. Instead of examining people with delinquent behaviour or thoughts of suicide or mental health problems and finding how many of them listened to heavy metal, the authors of this study exclusively examined a large group of heavy metal fans in France and evaluated their mental health via the widely used Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS).28 They used the largest Internet metal forums in France to administer the survey and received 333 responses, 282 from males and 39 from females. The fans expressed preferences for various types of metal, including death, black and thrash. What they found was that the respondents had generally low levels of anxiety and depression, far below the cut-off levels used to determine mental disorders, and that age, gender, number of concerts attended per year, preferred metal type and tattooing or piercing all had no link to mental health, and pathological symptoms were shown by less than 5% of those surveyed. However, they did find that lower levels of education and employment status did correlate with greater depression and anxiety, and that students with literary or arts backgrounds had higher levels of anxiety than those with science backgrounds. Interestingly, those who wrote metal music lyrics had higher levels of anxiety, as did those who reported greater alcohol consumption, but these findings are ambiguous, since being more anxious may motivate one to write lyrics or drink more, or both.29 In contrast to the Australian paper previously discussed, media reporting of this fairly well-conducted study was practically non-existent. 4. Transformation of Psychic Energy and Neurotransmitter Modulation Although metal may not be responsible for adversely affecting the mental health of an individual, and metal fans appear to be good health at least with respect to anxiety and depression, we have to deal with the tendency for some evidence to suggest that a number of individuals with mental health issues have a preference for metal. The reasonable suggestion is that certain individuals who have, or are predisposed to, such conditions may be more drawn towards metal, partly because they perceive that it reflects their mental state, but also partly because it may act as a connection to the unconscious mind, allowing it to communicate to the individual’s consciousness as a source of psychic (in the strict psychological sense) energy and power. In terms of major Jungian archetypes, there is a potential correlation here with the Shadow, which could be said to lie mid-way between the Persona and the Self, and which is traditionally thought to be the receptacle for the darker aspects of our natures.30 Jung recognised that there is no shadow without the sun and no Shadow without the light of consciousness, i.e. we are incomplete without it. In a sense, denial or repression of the Shadow only makes the Shadow stronger. In metal fans with depression, therefore, the music, through this connection to the Shadow self, can strengthen the individual’s awareness of this aspect, allowing them to

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__________________________________________________________________ recognise the Shadow’s instinctive and impulsive tendencies. Jung recognised that both mental and physical health depend on man’s ability to reconcile and live with his dark side. Psychotherapists also recognise that avoiding certain aspects of the unconscious identity and denying the possibilities of an individual’s psyche can lead that individual into depression. Music can undermine this avoidance and allows the individual permission to get in touch with parts of their nature far away from the perception of self and to experience something very important for the individual’s consciousness. In this way, a release of repressed energy can be channelled, allowing for a healing process. Patterns of movement and emotional ecstasy, both of which can be experienced at concerts, are also important in undermining this avoidance. As well as the psychological perspective, there is evidence from research in the field of neuroscience that music can have a profound effect on brain neurotransmitters. Loud music in particular can overstimulate neural transmitters in the brain, inducing a state that is qualitatively different from the normal situation and even leading to permanent alterations in the neural network.31 Music generally has been shown to have an effect on brain function through improvement of dopaminergic transmission32,33 and modulation of the nucleus accumbens,34 closely involved with opioid production and dopamine transmission. Recent evidence has suggested that the dopaminergic system may play a key role in bipolar disorder35,36,37 and depression.38,39 This may partly explain why an individual’s preferred music can be a very powerful tool in therapy of mental illness and why ‘self-medicating with metal’ can be extremely effective for many individuals. As mentioned previously, we feel very attached to the music and musical genres we discover and embrace as teenagers; most peoples’ musical tastes have formed by the age of 18-20.40 These connections are not purely emotional; the work of the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Eric Kandel has shown that long-term memory involves a change in the number of synaptic connections or functional effectiveness of previously existing neural connections – experiences and emotions develop new neural connections and effectively change a person’s brain state. As Kandel said in his Nobel lecture, ‘we are what we are in good measure because of what we have learned and what we remember’.41 Therefore, if an individual has a strong emotional response to metal in their formative years because it reflects their aggression, frustration and emotional turbulence, it may not be surprising if the same individual gravitates towards the same music that previously made and strengthened those powerful neural connections in the first place. In the words of Devin Townsend, ‘I think a lot of people who really love heavy music love it because it’s a way for them to protect themselves’.42

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Notes 1

F. Baker & W. Bor, ‘Can Music Preference Indicate Mental Health Dtatus in Young People?’ Australasian Psychiatry, Vol. 16, 2008, pp. 284-288. 2 J.D. Klein, et al., ‘Adolescents’ Risky Behaviour and Mass Media Use’, Pediatrics, Vol. 92, 1993, pp. 24-31. 3 Ibid. 4 S.I. Singer, M. Levine & S. Jou, ‘Heavy Metal Music Preference, Delinquent Fiends, Social Control and Delinquency’, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 30, 1993, pp. 317-329. 5 P. King, ‘Heavy Metal Music and Drug Abuse in Adolescents’, Postgraduate Medicine, Vol. 83, 1988, pp. 295-301. 6 Ibid. 7 C.K. Weidinger & A.S. Demi, ‘Music Listening Preferences and Preadmission Dysfunctional Psychosocial Behaviours of Adolescents Hospitalized in an InPatient Psychiatric Unit’, Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing, Vol. 4, 1991, pp. 3-8. 8 Ibid. 9 S.D. Proctor, ‘Heavy Metal Music and Drug Abuse’, Postgraduate Medicine, Vol. 84, 1988, p. 29. 10 B.H. Reddick & E.V. Beresin,’ Rebellious Rhapsody: Metal, Rap, Community, and Individuation’, Academic Psychiatry, Vol. 26, 2002, pp. 51-59. 11 D.J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Plume Books, New York, NY, USA, 2007, pp. 231-233. 12 E.F. Brown & W.R. Hendee, ‘Adolescents and Their Music: Insights into the Health of Adolescents’, Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 262, 1989, pp. 1659-1663. 13 S. Stack, J. Gundlach & J.L. Reeves, ‘The Heavy Metal Subculture and Suicide’, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Vol. 24, 1994, pp. 15-22. 14 Ibid. 15 S. Stack & J. Gundlach, ‘The Effect of Country Music on Suicide’, Social Forces, Vol. 71, 1992, pp. 211-218. 16 S. Stack, ‘Heavy Metal, Religiosity, and Suicide Acceptability’, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Vol. 28, 1998, pp. 388-394. 17 K.R. Scheel & J.S. Westefeld, ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation’, Adolescence, Vol. 34, 1999, pp. 253-273. 18 D. Lester & M. Whipple, ‘Music Preference, Depression, Suicidal Preoccupation and Personality: Comment on Stack and Gundlach’s Papers’, Suicide and LifeThreatening Behavior, Vol. 26, 1996, pp. 68-70. 19 Ibid. 20 M. Burge, C. Goldblat & D. Lester, ‘Music Preferences and Suicidality: A Comment on Stack’, Death Studies, Vol. 26, 2002, pp. 501-504.

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__________________________________________________________________ 21

G. Martin, M. Clarke & C. Pearce, ‘Adolescent Suicide: Music Preference as an Indicator of Vulnerability’, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Vol. 32, 1993, pp. 530-535. 22 Baker and Bor, 2008. 23 M. Wooten, ‘The Effects of Heavy Metal Music on Affect Shifts of Adolescents in an Inpatient Psychiatric Setting’, Music Therapy Perspectives, Vol. 10, 1992, pp. 93-98. 24 E. Lacourse, M. Claes & M. Villeneuve, ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidal Risk’, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Vol. 30, 2001, pp. 321-332. 25 Stack, 1998, op. cit. 26 Martin, et al., op. cit. 27 D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, p. 253. 28 R. Recours, F. Aussaguel & N. Trujillo, ‘Metal Music and Mental Health in France’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Vol. 33, 2009, pp. 473-488. 29 Ibid. 30 J. Schaverien, ‘Analytical Psychology (Carl Gustav Jung 1875-1961)’, Handbook of Counselling and Psychotherapy, C. Feltham & I. Horton (eds), Sage Publications, London, UK, 2000, pp. 293-298. 31 C. McKinnon, ‘Louder than Hell: Power, Volume and the Brain’, Paper Presented at 2nd Global Conference of Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics, Salzburg, Austria, 11-12 Nov 2009. 32 D. Sutoo & K. Akiyama, ‘Music Improves Dopaminergic Neurotransmission: Demonstration Based on the Effect of Music on Blood Pressure Regulation’, Brain Research, Vol. 1016, 2004, pp. 255-262. 33 K. Blum, et al., ‘Do Dopaminergic Gene Polymorphisms Affect Mesolimbic Reward Activation of Music Listening Response? Therapeutic Impact on Reward Deficiency Syndrome (RDS)’, Medical Hypotheses, Vol. 74, 2010, pp. 513-520. 34 V. Menon & D.J. Levitin, ‘The Rewards of Music Listening: Response and Physiological Connectivity of the Mesolimbic System’, NeuroImage, Vol. 28, 2005, pp. 175-184. 35 D.A. Cousins, K. Butts and A.H. Young, ‘The Role of Dopamine in Bipolar Disorder’, Bipolar Disorders, Vol. 11, 2009, pp. 787-806. 36 M. Berk, et al, ‘Dopamine Dysregulation Syndrome: Implications for a Dopamine Hypothesis of Bipolar Disorder’, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Supplementum, Vol. 434, 2007, pp. 41-49. 37 J.K. Zubieta, et al., ‘High Vesicular Monoamine Transporter Binding in Asymptomatic Bipolar I Disorder: Sex Differences and Cognitive Correlates’, American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol.157, 2000, pp. 1619-1628.

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S.A. Montgomery, ‘The Under-Recognized Role of Dopamine in the Treatment of Major Depressive Disorder’, International Clinical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 23, 2008, pp. 63-69. 39 G.S. Malhi & M. Berk, ‘Does Dopamine Dysfunction Drive Depression?’ Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Supplementum, Vol. 433, 2007, pp. 116-124. 40 Levitin, 2007, p. 231-233. 41 E. Kandel, ‘The Molecular Biology of Memory Storage: A Dialog between Genes and Synapses’, Nobel Lecture, Karolinska Institüt, Stockholm, Sweden, 08 December 2000. 42 J. Gill, ‘Devin Townsend: ‘Ghost’ Recording Sessions Video’, Metal Hammer website, accessed 06 September 2010 http://www.metalhammer.co.uk/news/ devin-townsend-ghost-recording-sessions-video/.

Bibliography Baker, F. & Bor, W., ‘Can Music Preference Indicate Mental Health Status in Young People?’ Australasian Psychiatry. Vol. 16, 2008, pp. 284-288. Berk, M., Dod, S., Kauer-Sant’anna, M., Malhi, G.S., Bourin, M., Kapczinski, F. & Norman, T., ‘Dopamine Dysregulation Syndrome: Implications for a Dopamine Hypothesis of Bipolar Disorder’. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Supplementum. Vol. 434, 2007, pp. 41-49. Blum, K., Chen, T.J., Chen, A.L., Madigan, M., Downs, B.W., Waite, R., Braverman, E.R., Kerner, M., Bowirrat, A., Giordano, J., Henshaw, H. & Gold, M.S., ‘Do Dopaminergic Gene Polymorphisms Affect Mesolimbic Reward Activation of Music Listening Response? Therapeutic Impact on Reward Deficiency Syndrome (RDS)’. Medical Hypotheses. Vol. 74, 2010, pp. 513-520. Brown, F. & Hendee, W.R., ‘Adolescents and Their Music: Insights into the Health of Adolescents’. Journal of the American Medical Association. Vol. 262, 1989, pp. 1659-1663. Burge, M., Goldblat, C. & Lester, D., ‘Music Preferences and Suicidality: A Comment on Stack’. Death Studies. Vol. 26, 2002, pp. 501-504. Cousins, D.A., Butts, K. & Young, A.H., ‘The Role of Dopamine in Bipolar Disorder’. Bipolar Disorders. Vol. 11, 2009, pp. 787-806.

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__________________________________________________________________ Gill, J., ‘Devin Townsend: Ghost Recording Sessions Video. Metal Hammer website, Viewed on 06 September 2010, http://www.metalhammer.co.uk/ news/devin-townsend-ghost-recording-sessions-video/. Kandel, E., ‘The Molecular Biology of Memory Storage: A Dialog between Genes and Synapses’. Nobel Lecture, Karolinska Institüt, Stockholm, Sweden, 08 December 2000. King, P., ‘Heavy Metal Music and Drug Abuse in Adolescents’. Postgraduate Medicine, Vol. 83, 1988, pp. 295-301. Klein, J.D., Brown, J.D., Childers, K.W., Oliveri, J., Porter, C. & Dykers, C., ‘Adolescents’ Risky behavior and Mass Media Use’. Pediatrics. Vol. 92, 1993, pp. 24-31. Lacourse, E., Claes, M. & Villeneuve, M., ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidal Risk’. Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Vol. 30, 2001. Lester, D. & Whipple, M., ‘Music Preference, Depression, Suicidal Preoccupation, and Personality: Comment on Stack and Gundlach’s Papers’. Suicide and LifeThreatening Behavior. Vol. 26, 1996, pp. 68-70. Levitin, D.J., This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Plume Books, New York, NY, USA, 2007, pp. 231-233. Martin, G., Clarke, M. & Pearce, C., ‘Adolescent Suicide: Music Preference as an Indicator of Vulnerability’. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Vol. 32, 1993, pp. 530-535. McKinnon, C., ‘Louder than Hell: Power, Volume and the Brain’, Paper presented at 2nd Global Conference of Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics, Salzburg, Austria, 11-12 Nov 2009. Malhi, G.S. & Berk, M., ‘Does Dopamine Dysfunction Drive Depression?’ Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Supplementum. Vol. 433, 2007, pp. 116-124. Menon, V. & Levitin, D.J., ‘The Rewards of Music Listening: Response and Physiological Connectivity of the Mesolimbic System’. NeuroImage. Vol. 28, 2005, pp. 175-184.

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__________________________________________________________________ Recours, R., Aussaguel, F. & Trujillo, N., ‘Metal Music and Mental Health in France’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. Vol. 33, 2009, pp. 473-488. Reddick, B.H. & Beresin, E.V.,’ Rebellious Rhapsody: Metal, Rap, Community, and Individuation’. Academic Psychiatry. Vol. 26, 2002, pp. 51-59. Schaverien, J., ‘Analytical Psychology (Carl Gustav Jung 1875-1961)’. Handbook of Counselling and Psychotherapy, Feltham, C. & Horton, I. (eds), Sage Publications, London, UK, 2000. Singer, S.I., Levine, M. & Jou, S., ‘Heavy Metal Music Preference, Delinquent Fiends, Social Control and Delinquency’. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. Vol. 30, 1993, pp. 317-329. Stack, S., ‘Heavy Metal, Religiosity, and Suicide Acceptability’. Suicide and LifeThreatening Behavior. Vol. 28, 1998, pp. 388-394. Stack, S. & Gundlach, J., ‘The Effect of Country Music on Suicide’. Social Forces. Vol. 71, 1992, pp. 211-218. Stack, S., Gundlach, J. & Reeves, J.L., ‘The Heavy Metal Subculture and Suicide’. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. Vol. 24, 1994, pp. 15-22. Sutoo, D. & Akiyama, K., ‘Music Improves Dopaminergic Neurotransmission: Demonstration Based on the Effect of Music on Blood Pressure Regulation’. Brain Research. Vol. 1016, 2004, pp. 255-262. Wooten, M., ‘The Effects of Heavy Metal Music on Affect Shifts of Adolescents in an Inpatient Psychiatric Setting’. Music Therapy Perspectives. Vol. 10, 1992, pp. 93-98. Zubieta, J.K., Huguelet, P., Ohl, L.E., Koeppe, R.A., Kilbourn, M.R., Carr, J.M., Giordani, B.J. & Frey, K.A., ‘High Vesicular Monoamine Transporter Binding in Asymptomatic Bipolar I Disorder: Sex Differences and Cognitive Correlates’. American Journal of Psychiatry. Vol.157, 2000, pp. 1619-1628. Colin A. McKinnon is an independent scholar with a personal and professional passion for heavy metal. He works in the science industry in Switzerland.

Suicide, Metal Music and Expectancy Theory Alick Kay Abstract Can music have an impact on those contemplating suicide? Considering the wide range of genres of music, metal would have to have the greatest number of references made to death and dying as evidenced by band names such as Death, Suicidal Tendencies and Napalm Death. Would listening to these bands increase the chances of suicide or is there a personality factor that needs to be considered? The research suggests that there is no evidence that would support the notion that any music causes suicide, however, there are reports of metal music being associated with suicide. The expectancy motivation theory developed by Victor Vroom1 is used to explore the motivational force for suicide. Issues such as the strength of desire to suicide as well as the expectation of the ability to carry out the act are considered in application of the theory. Key Words: Death, metal music, suicide, expectancy theory, Vroom. ***** 1. Introduction What is the motivation for someone to suicide? Can it be music? Metal music is associated with sombre, dark images, and death-like themes. A quick glance at the ‘metal’ section of any CD store, or a visit to the websites of metal bands– particularly those categories under the genres of death, black, thrash, doom and goth metal–reveals these bands have names like Death, Slayer, Megadeth, Cannibal Corpse, Suicidal Tendencies, Napalm Death, Obituary, Funeral and Mournful Congregation, which all obviously perpetuate this mood. Even the recent virtual / cartoon / comedy band, Dethklok, has this link in their name. Over a number of years, there have been reports linking youth suicide to metal music.2 However, what has not been covered is the motivation for suicide. This chapter looks at incorporating a well-established theory of motivation to explain how music may be a major contributory factor in suicide through the application of a simplified version of Vroom’s expectancy theory.3 2. Metal Music Life Style For some supporters of metal music, it is a way of life in terms of appearance, clothing, magazine reading and through frequenting certain clubs. Over a decade ago Scheel and Westefeld identified that the fans of metal music are generally adolescent white males, and this could well be the view today of those who are not supporters of this music.4 Although this demographic is obvious at metal concerts, it does hide the fact that there are substantial numbers of older consumers who still

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__________________________________________________________________ buy, and/or download and listen to the music, and who might not go to the concerts in the same numbers. Consider those substantial numbers of older followers who would be in their 50s or 60s, since Black Sabbath, which has arguably had the greatest impact on metal music, began in the late 1960s. This is mentioned since most studies are done on youth suicide, and this writer is not aware of suicide of those over 30 being linked to metal music Lacourse et al., in looking at gender of metal preference, found that girls who preferred this music were higher on suicide risk and more alienated than those who did not prefer metal.5 However, this broad generalisation does not hold if considering the type of metal, and the band members. From observation at metal concerts where there is a female performer - mainly as a lead singer (such as in bands like Nightwish, Lacuna Coil, Within Temptation, Leaves Eyes) - there is a much greater proportion of female attendees. It needs to be noted, however, that these bands are much more melodic with clean vocals and less aggressive music and lyrics than most death metal bands. (An exception is Arch Enemy where lead singer Angela Gossow delivers the traditional death metal growly vocals). 3. Suicide and Death and Music Can music have an impact on those contemplating suicide? Stack et al. researched the Hungarian ‘Gloomy Sunday’ song, which was reportedly a cause of many suicides in Hungary, to the extent that the Hungarian suicide song (as it became to be known) was banned by the BBC until 2002.6 Curiously, however, was the report that it had been recorded 79 times - much more than the controversial Suicide Solution by Ozzy Osbourne or Metallica’s Fade to Black, both associated with suicides. Stack, et al. also added that the music writer himself, Seres, committed suicide apparently as he was depressed that he would never be able to write another hit song.7 However, the authors are quick to add that Hungary has the highest suicide rate in the world, and that there exists a Finno-Ugrian gene, which increases predisposition to suicide. Furthermore, this was all happening during the great depression; so, there are a range of factors at work and not just the music and lyrics. Scheel and Westefeld in their research on metal supporters in high school found they had more thoughts of suicide, and this was higher for females.8 They qualify their findings by saying that although there is a widespread perception of some connection between a preference for metal and adolescent suicide, it is difficult to conclude that there is a causal link and they refer to Stack et al. who suggest that metal reflects, and maybe nurtures, suicidogenic alienation.9 Scheel and Westefeld also talk about moods that fans experience, and that some have positive affect shifts but some feel worse off.10 They found metal music in their study was associated with positive mood if subjects were angry. They also found a greater percentage of metal fans as compared to non fans thinking about

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__________________________________________________________________ killing themselves and concluded that it may well be the pessimism of metal (as opposed to country music) which is likely to attract unhappy and alienated youth: not produces them. North and Hargreaves believe that the music reflects rather than creates.11 In their research they found that telling people a song is suicide inducing may make it so, as would saying a song is life-affirming. On a positive note, Recours et al. suggest that metal music may be perceived as merely a form of entertainment, similar to horror films.12 Furthermore, these authors go on to say that it may be somewhat therapeutic, in that death and black metal portray murder and suicide as everyday events that happen to everyday people. Peterson et al. in their study on listening to music with lyrics about suicide found higher levels in projective story-writing if the subject had low self esteem, as well as knowing a suicide victim.13 Rustad et al. found that in their study participants exposed to suicidal content wrote more scenarios than non-suicidal content in projective techniques but this would not necessarily lead to increased risk.14 Arnott, cited in Rustad et al. refer to research where the effects of suicidal songs were more pronounced in younger, less academically successful, and more alienated, or depressed, individuals.15 Interestingly, some listeners reported prosocial effects–a desire to help those contemplating suicide. Lacourse et al. on studying 275 Canadian secondary school students aged 14-18 found metal music preference was not significantly related to suicidal risk.16 From all this, the research (mainly on school age youths) suggests that there are many issues involved in suicide and metal music and that there is no causal link. 4. Musicians and Suicide Mula and Trimble, in researching musicians and suicide, examined psychopathology and creativity/mood disorders.17 They highlight that although a substantial number of creative musicians are bipolar, not all people with bipolar are creative. They concluded that listening to ‘problem’ music did not precede selfinjurious thoughts/behaviours. Rather, it was an issue of self esteem. Suicides and murders do occur in metal bands, and musicians in the Norwegian bands Mayhem and Funeral have both suffered this.18,19 5. Vroom’s Expectancy Theory What motivates someone to suicide if metal music is a contributory factor for that person? A theory of motivation that appears in just about every management or organisational behaviour textbook for over 30 years is an expectancy theory developed by Vroom.20 It goes by a range of names including Instrumentality Theory, Valence-Expectancy, VIE, and even the lengthy Valence-InstrumentalityExpectancy.21

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__________________________________________________________________ The original model which Vroom developed is quite complex mathematically, however, for the purposes of simplification, most text books present the model in simpler ways such as by the formula22,23,24,25 MF = (E X I X V). ‘MF’ stands for motivating force. ‘E’ stands for the expectancy that one can achieve a specific task; that is, if one puts effort into a task, do they believe they can achieve the performance they are after? ‘I’ stands for instrumentality and refers to whether one believes that if they perform a task they will obtain the outcome they desire. ‘V’ stands for valence or desire and refers to outcomes. If calculations are required, then both E and I may be thought of as probability functions (in the range 0 to +1) and V as a value, which can have any figure, although the range is equidistant about a zero (for example, from -1 to +1). In other words, the higher the positive value in a predetermined range, the greater the desire for the outcome. The more negative the value in that predetermined range, the greater the dislike for the outcome and if the value is zero, it means that the person is indifferent to the outcome. Therefore the motivating force to achieve something one desires is based on having high positive values for all 3 concepts, since if one is low or close to zero, the multiplicative factor would be close to zero and therefore suggest that the person was not motivated to pursue that option. An issue that needs to be mentioned is that the E factor is mainly associated with the person’s own skills and abilities to do the task they are given, so it tends to be linked to internal factors. In contrast, the I factor relates to the trust that if they perform a task they will be provided with the outcome they desire, and so relates to external factors. So, how does this translate to suicide and metal music? The first step relates to what the person desires, based on a high positive valence. This would then identify what the motivating force would be directed towards. In this example, the desire would be to commit suicide so that is what the motivating force would be directed towards. The next focus is the E in the formula. Here this would relate to how much one believed that they had the skills, knowledge, expertise, and, if required, the equipment to commit suicide. Most people would have that. So that would be a ‘given’ and high and positive (+1). If one accepts that a person focussed on suicide has determined the method they will use and that they are confident it will work, whether it be slashing wrists, pills, shootings, hanging, jumping from great heights, lying on train tracks, etc., then the I component can be accepted as ‘given’ also (+1) This means that they strongly believe that the performing of a particular task will lead to the outcome they desire. How much desire does one have to commit suicide? This is where the issue of images, music, etc., might be used to bring the desire to a maximum, but would only be relevant if the person had the predisposition to suicide in the first place. This is the V component. Whether the lyrics increase the desire, the song title, the music itself... it will always be based on an individual’s perception.

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__________________________________________________________________ The formula would be: MF (Suicide)= E (High) X I (High) X V (High)= MF is high OR MF (Suicide)= 1 X 1 X 1= 1 So the motivating force to commit suicide would be very high. The theory is based on perception, and so it is quite explicable that there have been suicides to Ozzy Osbourne’s Suicide Solution in the belief that it is a prosuicide song when in fact it may not be: Ozzy’s own explanation is that the song was about the death of AC/DC singer Bon Scott. However, the explanation that seems most obvious is that the song was written about himself. The lyrics were penned by bassist Bob Daisley who has said the song was actually written as a warning to Ozzy about his own habitual drinking habit (‘solution’ being equated to ‘liquid’). With lyrics like ‘Wine is fine, but whiskey’s quicker, suicide is slow with liquor, take a bottle, drown your sorrows, then it floods away tomorrows...’, this meaning is pretty clear.26 Again the issue here is that if someone is strongly contemplating suicide, then they may well have chosen the method of committing it, and it is up to how strong their desire is at a particular point of time as to whether they go through with the act. On the contrary, it needs to also be noted that listening to metal could actually decrease the desire to suicide since it may help the listener to realise that there are others out there who share similar feelings and thoughts. In other words, they are ‘not alone’. So in the model, the formula would be: MF (Suicide) = E (High) X I (High) X V (Low) = MF is low. Here the motivation to commit suicide would be quite low, if not zero. 6. Conclusion As a motivation theory, expectancy theory has been used in areas such as management, human resources, sport and in most things that people do where they have a choice amongst a range of options. It is also linked to theories of leadership in that a leader should make the path to the goal easier for the subordinates by assisting to build up their E, I and V values as high as possible.

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__________________________________________________________________ Metal music has received a substantial amount of ‘bad press’ and even if the expectancy theory can explain the motivation of why someone suicides, it can never show a causal effect. Burge et al. are quick to point out that one cannot report a direct association between metal and suicide anyway, since if you like metal you very likely also like other types of music and that as Baker and Bor conclude, music preference is more indicative of emotional vulnerability.27,28 They rejected music causes for suicide in favour of suicide vulnerability. Snell and Hodgetts believe that rather than being manipulated, audiences alter and modify products of popular culture for own purposes.29 In other words, it is what we do with the products in the media rather than the reverse, which supports the expectancy model in this situation. Anderson et al. highlight the issue of whether in death metal one can actually hear the lyrics anyway; in contrast, the lyrics are easy to follow in Suicide Solution and Fade to Black.30 So, the whole issue of metal music and suicide can be explained by things such as perception and individual differences. What some may find as reassuring or empowering, others may perceive as increasing a desire to suicide. In conclusion, it needs to be noted that if someone is extremely depressed, they may likely not be motivated enough to do anything, let alone commit an act of suicide.

Notes 1

V.H. Vroom, Work and Motivation, Wiley, New York, 1964. S.S. Stack, K Krysinska & D Lester, ‘Gloomy Sunday: Did the ‘Hungarian Suicide Song’ Really Create a Suicide Epidemic?’ Omega: Journal of Death & Dying, vol. 56(4), 2008, pp. 353-356. 3 VH Vroom, Work and Motivation, Wiley, New York, 1964. 4 KR Scheel and J S Westefeld, ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation’. .Adolescence, Vol. 34, 1999, p. 253. 5 E. Lacourse, M. Claes & M. Villeneuve, ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidal Risk’, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Vol. 30(3), 2001, p. 329. 6 Stack, et al., 2008, op. cit. 7 Ibid. 8 Scheel & Westefeld, 1999, op. cit. 9 Stack et al., 2008, op. cit. 10 Scheel &d Westefeld, 1999, op. cit. 11 A.C. North & D.J. Hargreaves, ‘Brief Report: Labelling Effects on the Perceived Deleterious Consequences of Pop Music Listening’, Journal of Adolescence, Vol. 28, 2005, p. 434. 12 R. Recours, F. Aussaguel & N. Trujillo, ‘Metal Music and Mental Health in France’.Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Vol. 33, 2009, pp. 474 & 488. 2

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R.J. Peterson, M.A. Saferand & D.A. Jobes, ‘The Impact of Suicidal Rock Music Lyrics on Youth: An Investigation of Individual Differences’, Archives of Suicide Research, Vol. 12(2), 2008, p. 161. 14 R.A. Rustad, J.E. Small, D.A. Jobes, M.A. Safer & R.J. Peterson, ‘The Impact of Rock Videos and Music with Suicidal Content on Thoughts and Attitudes about Suicide’, Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior, Vol. 33(2), 2003, p. 128. 15 Rustad, et al., 2003, op. cit., p. 129. 16 Lacourse, et al., 2001, op. cit. 17 M. Mula & M.R. Trimble, ‘Music and Madness: Neuropsychiatric Aspects of Music’, Clinical Medicine, Vol.9(1), 2009, p. 85. 18 Funeral, Accessed 22 September 2010 http://www.funeralband.no/main.php? site=bio. 19 ‘Mayhem: One of Metal’s Most Radical Acts’, Dark Legions archive website, accessed 22 September 2010 http://www.anus.com/metal/about/metal/mayhem/. 20 Vroom, 1964, op. cit. 21 W. Van Eerde & H. Thierry, ‘Vroom’s Expectancy Models and Work-Related Criteria: A Meta-Analysis’. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 81(5), 1996, p. 575. 22 D.A. Buchanan & A.A. Huczynski, Organizational Behaviour, Pearson Education, Harlow, UK, 2010, pp. 273-275. 23 R.B. Dunham, Organizational Behaviour, Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1984, pp. 201212. 24 R. Kreitner & A. Kinicki, Organizational Behavior, McGraw-Hill Irwin, New York, 2010, pp. 223-227. 25 J.E. Champoux, Organizational Behavior, Routledge, Oxon UK, 2011, pp. 172176. 26 ‘Ozzy Osbourne’, No Life Til Metal, Accessed 22 September 2010, http://www.nolifetilmetal.com/ozzy.htm. 27 M. Burge, C. Goldblat & D. Lester, ‘Music Preferences and Suicidality: A Comment on Stack’, Death Studies, Vol. 26, 2002, p. 503. 28 F. Baker & W. Bor, ‘Can Music Preference Indicate Mental Health Status in Young People’? Australasian Psychiatry, Vol. 16(4), 2008, p. 284. 29 D. Snell & D. Hodgetts, ‘Heavy Metal, Identity and the Social Negotiation of a Community of Practice’, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 17, 2007, p. 431. 30 C.A. Anderson, N.L. Carnagey & J. Eubanks, ‘Exposure to Violent Media: The Effects of Songs with Violent Lyrics on Aggressive Thoughts and Feelings’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 94(5), 2003, p. 961.

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Bibliography Anderson, C.A., Carnagey, N.L., & Eubanks, J., ‘Exposure to Violent Media: The Effects of Songs With Violent Lyrics on Aggressive Thoughts and Feelings’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 94(5), 2003, pp. 960-971. Baker, F. & Bor, W., ‘Can Music Preference Indicates Mental Health Status in Young People?’ Australasian Psychiatry. Vol. 16(4), 2008, pp. 284-288. Buchanan, D.A. & Huczynski, A.A., Organizational Behaviour. (7th.Edn.) Pearson Education, Harlow, UK, 2010. Burge,M., Goldblat,C. & Lester, D., ‘Music Preferences and Suicidality: A Comment on Stack’. Death Studies. Vol. 26, 2002, pp. 501-504. Champoux, J.E., Organizational Behaviour. Routledge, Oxon, UK, 2011. Dunham, R.B., Organizational Behaviour. Homewood, Irwin, Illinois, 1984. Funeral, Accessed 22 September 2010. http://www.funeralband.no/main.php? site=bio. Kreitner, R. & Kinicki, A., Organizational Behavior. McGraw–Hill Irwin, New York, 2010. Lacourse, E., Claes, M. & Villeneuve, M., ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidal Risk’. Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Vol. 30(3), 2001, pp. 321-332. Mula, M. & Trimble, M.R. ‘Music and Madness: Neuropsychiatric Aspects of Music’. Clinical Medicine. Vol. 9(1), 2009, pp. 83-86. North, A.C. & Hargreaves, D.J., ‘Brief Report: Labelling Effects on the Perceived Deleterious Consequences of Pop Music Listening’. Journal of Adolescence. Vol. 28, 2005, pp. 433-440. North, A.C. & Hargreaves, D.J., ‘Problem Music and Self-Harming’. Suicide and Like-Threatening Behaviour. Vol. 36(5), 2006, pp. 582-590. ‘Ozzy Osbourne’, Viewed 22 September. 2010, http://www.nolifetilmetal.com/ ozzy.htm.

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__________________________________________________________________ Peterson, R.J., Safer, M.A & Jobes, D.A., ‘The Impact of Suicidal Rock Music Lyrics on Youth: An Investigation of Individual Differences’. Archives of Suicide Research. Vol. 12(2), 2008, pp. 161-169. Recours, R. Aussaguel, F. & Trujillo, N., ‘Metal Music and Mental Health in France’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. Vol. 33, 2009, pp. 473-488. Rustad, R.A., Small, J.E., Jobes, D.A., Safer, M.A. & Peterson, R.J., ‘The Impact of Rock Videos and Music with Suicidal Content on Thoughts and Attitudes about Suicide’. Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior. Vol. 33(2), 2003 pp. 120-131. Scheel, K.R & Westefeld, J.S., ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation’. Adolescence, vol. 34, 1999, pp. 253-273. Snell, D. & Hodgetts, D., ‘Heavy Metal, Identity and the Social Negotiation of a Community of Practice.’ Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology. Vol. 17, 2007, pp. 430-445. Stack, S.S., Krysinska, K. & Lester, D., ‘Gloomy Sunday: Did the ‘Hungarian Suicide Song’ Really Create a Suicide Epidemic’? Omega: Journal of Death & Dying. Vol. 56(4), 2008, pp. 349-358. Van Eerde, W. & Thierry, H., ‘Vroom’s Expectancy Models and Work-Related Criteria: A Meta-Analysis’. Journal of Applied Psychology. Vol. 81:5, 1996, pp. 575-586. Vroom,V.H. Work and Motivation. Wiley, New York, 1964. Alick Kay is a lecturer in management at the University of South Australia with research interests in management across cultures, stress management and creativity in management.

Emo Saved My Life: Challenging the Mainstream Discourse of Mental Illness around My Chemical Romance Rosemary Hill Abstract This chapter examines the role of mental illness in the discourse by and about My Chemical Romance fans in the context of the emo moral panic in 2008. I ask two questions: how were fans represented in the mainstream press; and how did the fans represent themselves at that time? Fans of My Chemical Romance are unusually vocal about their experiences of mental illness. The band was derided in America and the UK as leaders of a ‘suicide cult’ with the fans their victims. This mainstream connection between music and mental illness is not new: researching the American heavy metal moral panic of the late 1980s, Gaines and Arnett found a disparity between the popular image of the metal fan as depressed by the music he listened to, and the reality of fans finding in the music solace from alienation and anger. What is new is the gender of the fans - they are a female and feminised audience - and their angry response to the mainstream press. Building on Gaines’ and Arnett’s work, I analyse readers’ letters to Kerrang! magazine during the late 2000s, data from interviews with fans, the film Emo: The Movie, and articles in the mainstream press. I argue that the mainstream press characterise My Chemical Romance fans as misguided innocents. I contend that My Chemical Romance fans discuss the music of the band as enabling them to cope with pre-existing depressions, to overcome bullying and even to save their lives. There is a clear disparity between the mainstream representation of My Chemical Romance fans and the words of the fans themselves. I conclude that My Chemical Romance fans’ willingness to discuss depression has been misinterpreted by their detractors, and I offer instead a positive story of the therapeutic benefits of emo music. Key Words: Depression, emo, heavy metal, My Chemical Romance, self-harm, suicide. ***** My Chemical Romance, depression and suicide. In much of the popular imagination these terms are not only linked, but causal: it is thought that the emo band My Chemical Romance provoke depression in their fans which can sometimes lead to suicide. Yet for emo fans the narrative links between listening to the band’s music, unhappy emotions and the action of ending one’s life are complex and, indeed, are optimistic and life-giving. In this chapter I focus on UK press reports of the suicide of Hannah Bond, a 13-year-old girl who was a fan of My Chemical Romance and the responses of fans to the press reporting of the

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__________________________________________________________________ suicide. But first I want to offer some context to My Chemical Romance, to ‘emo’ and to the accompanying moral panic. Emo is a contested term among metal fans. It is a genre that grew out of hardcore punk and ‘emo’ is a contraction of ‘emotional hardcore’. Sarah F. Williams describes emotional hardcore bands, such as Dashboard Confessional and Thursday as ‘attempt[ing …] to reconcile the long-established codes of masculinity - musical representations of aggression, pomp, stoicism, misogyny, and determination - with more multifaceted human expressions of heartache, weakness, longing and loss’.1 Emo’s origin in hardcore means that it is not unreasonable to place it under the metal umbrella, but this place is not assured; nor is the current incarnation of emo even guaranteed to be allowed a relationship with earlier incarnations. Furthermore, bands and their fans do not always accept their popular categorisation as emo. Let me introduce My Chemical Romance: they are an American band that are frequently described as emo, and their fans as emos, but the band themselves have described emo as ‘shit’2 and decried any similarities to the genre. In fact the band claim the heritage of Queen. However the ideals that Sarah F. Williams describes as being fundamental to emotional hardcore are clearly evident in the songs and image of My Chemical Romance. They attempt to break down the gendered binaries that have long been lived out by rock and metal bands,3 and incorporate qualities that have traditionally fallen on the feminine and undervalued side of the dichotomy. Whilst using ‘emo ‘to describe My Chemical Romance is therefore problematic, its frequent use by the media and fans themselves makes it a term that must be interacted with when discussing the band. The Daily Mail is a very popular British newspaper with a large female readership. At the time of the coroner’s report on Hannah Bond’s death two and quarter million people were reading the paper. Its political allegiance is Conservative. Its reporting has been criticised as to be sensational, inaccurate and homophobic,4 but nevertheless its popularity means that its force for affecting public opinion needs be taken seriously. In 2006 The Daily Mail described fans of emo as follows: The Emos - short for emotional - regard themselves as a cool, young sub-set of the Goths. […] Although the look is similar, the point of distinction, frightening for schools and parents, is a celebration of self-harm.5 There is a clear emphasis on the manifestation of mental ill health and fashion rather than love of the music. Within the 974 word article alarmist terms pepper the article like ‘razor blade’, ‘appeared to be dead’, ‘coffin’, ‘mutilated’, ‘depressingly’, ‘dangerous teenage cult’, ‘scars on their wrists’, ‘as serious a problem as binge drinking’, ‘secret shame’, ‘inner despair’, ‘slit my throat’, ‘suicide notes’, ‘misery’, ‘morbid’, ‘horror films’, ‘Death Pop’, ‘bloodless’, ‘dark

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__________________________________________________________________ and airless’, ‘self-pity’, ‘what worries me’, ‘cult of suicide’, ‘horrible consequences’, ‘irresponsible’, and frequently ‘death’ or ‘dead’.6 Accompanying the words was a photograph of a young woman wearing a black wig and a sad expression. Although it seemed like a joke, some elements of the UK metal community took it seriously. For instance Kerrang!, a British weekly music magazine, have frequently featured My Chemical Romance on the cover of the magazine, and in 2006 awarded them the title of ‘Best Band On The Planet’,7 referred to the article as ‘horrendous scaremongering’,8 and later used it to contextualise the The Daily Mail’s reporting of Hannah Bond’s death. Emo isn’t seen as problem only in the UK. In the global context, in 2008 a bill progressing through the Russian parliament which would regulate emo and goth websites and ban emo fashions in schools was widely reported in the British press. The Russian Public Oversight Council believed that the genre promotes suicide and self-harm.9 In America Time reported on anti-emo violence in Mexico. Groups of young men physically attacked those wearing emo fashions and Time reported that: ‘the assailants target emos for dressing effeminately, still a provocative act for many in a macho Mexico’, and argued that the violence was ‘homophobic’.10 In Saudi Arabia women emo fans were arrested for revealing emo fashions beneath their abayas,11 suggesting that emo fandom presented a problem for conservative ideas of women’s place in society. In America tv news reports on the dangers of emo have been numerous. In one a member of the Eddy County Sherriff’s department claimed that: there’s no psychological problem in the young children, it’s just for the fashion. The more they cut, the more pills, the more they talk about suicide, the cooler they are.12 The global press presentation of emo positions music fandom as dangerous, making a causal link between listening to emo and becoming depressed. The emo moral panic reached its Zenith in the UK in May 2008. On 22nd September 2007 a young My Chemical Romance fan, Hannah Bond from Kent, UK hung herself. The following May the coroner laid the blame at emo’s door: A girl aged 13 years has […] taken her own life for no reason that could be regarded by anyone as sensible or justified and if in doing so she was thinking about how this would go down with those others who were involved with the emo fad I just believe this a terrible tragic explanation for what happened.13 On 16th May The Daily Mail ran an article under the title ‘Why no child is safe from the sinister cult of emo’. The article echoed many of the sensationalist claims of the 2006 article as it gave the narrative of Hannah’s metamorphosis from ‘a

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__________________________________________________________________ well-liked girl who had many friends and was doing well in school’14 to an emo going by the online pseudonym of ‘Living Disaster’, and cutting her wrists before eventually hanging herself with her school tie. The article also contained information on hospital admissions of children who had self-harmed (three times as many girls as boys), and an interview with the mother of an emo fan girl from a small town in a bleak highland area of England The mother seemed to be extremely frightened for her daughter’s life. The article used language like ‘sect’, ‘cult’, ‘deeply unhealthy undertone’, and described emo as the cause of teen angst rather than a symptom. Following the coroner’s inculpation of emo, the author, Tom Rawstorne, blamed one band in particular for Hannah’s death: My Chemical Romance. The most controversial claim in the article was that the Black Parade is where ‘emos believe they go after they die’15 as if it is some sort of emo Valhalla, but in fact Welcome To The Black Parade is the name of the band’s 2006 album. The Black Parade claim was hotly disputed by a number of fans writing to Kerrang!16 and in them The Daily Mail came in for much abuse. However the claim had been made in an article in British tabloid The Sun on 8th May and in an updated article in The Daily Mail on 9th May. The original report by The Daily Mail on 7th May suggests that the black parade/Valhalla myth may have its origins in some sort of research, reporting that a tribute on Hannah’s Bebo page had ‘referred to the lyrics of [Hannah’s] favourite song’: ‘I’ll hold on to these memories till we meet again in the black parade’.17 Quoting lyrics and stating a belief can be quite different things and it is a clear distortion by The Sun and The Daily Mail to attribute this belief to all fans of emo music. This was not the first time that metal had encountered a moral panic: in the 1980s US right wing conservative criticisms of the dangers of allowing young people to listen to metal were widely reported inside and outside the USA. Criticisms centred around the effects that metal had on its listeners and, leaders of the charge, the Parents Music Resource Centre, achieved a senate hearing on the subject of metal lyrics. This hearing was successful in that the now famous Parental Advisory stickers began to appear on album covers; but not so successful as the stickers became a badge of honour and helped to sell records.18 Donna Gaines opens her book Teenage Wasteland with the mass suicide of four American teenagers in Bergenfield in 1987. They had been listening to AC/DC as they sat in a car in a disused garage waiting for exhaust fumes to put them out of their misery. This was part of what was perceived as a wider trend of teen suicide. The media furore around the suicides focused on the kids’ love of metal and, in some cases, made a causal link between the deaths and the music.19 This relationship between metal and suicide was to become even more famous when Judas Priest were sued for persuading two fans to commit suicide by placing ‘backmasked’ messages in their music. The court decided in favour of the band, but that the case got so far is indicative of the depth and prevalence of the belief in the dangers of metal.20 Both panics assume the listeners to be young and naïve.

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__________________________________________________________________ Music is a scapegoat which allows adults to express their fears and anger, but does not address the real causes of adolescent unhappiness: there is no further investigation as to what may be causing self-harming and depression amongst teenagers. Nor do they attempt to explore why fans would be attracted to such music if it causes depression and instigates suicidal tendencies. Research by Jeffrey Arnett and Donna Gaines shows that metal does not in fact make its fans feel bad. In his interviews with male fans in the 1990s Arnett concluded that far from making fans feel unhappy, listening to metal helped its male fans to cope with feelings of powerlessness, frustration and anger. Angry metal music helped to dissipate the rage.21 Similarly Gaines theorised that structural problems in the schooling, socialisation and ‘normalisation ‘of America’s young people, combined with the lack of job prospects in the particular town in which the suicides occurred, caused strong feelings of alienation and despair amongst the town’s youth.22 Do My Chemical Romance fans use the music to help them deal with emotions in a similar way? Gaines’ ethnographic work and Arnett’s interviews were conducted almost completely amongst or with young white American men. However the focus of the 2008 moral panic was on a young white British woman; the American television news reports featured interviews with young women, mostly white; and the fans ‘response to the panic came predominantly from white British women. Gender is the difference: these fans are predominantly female. Girls and boys are socialised differently and the conditions of their teenage lives are somewhat dissimilar. Gaines’ and Arnett’s findings that young men use metal to cope with anger, suggests that we could similarly explore My Chemical Romance fans’ reasons for listening to the band in the context of their reported self-harming and discussions of suicide. We need to listen to what the young women have to say about their reasons for listening to My Chemical Romance. To return to the controversial 16th May 2008 The Daily Mail article, Rawstorne quoted self-confessed emo girl Levi Harrison: I do get teased for being an emo because some people at school think it’s just about suicide and self-harm. But I think you have to be depressed already to self-harm - and I’m not depressed. I like going out in emo clothes because it causes a stir. There aren’t many emos where I live, so people look at you. It makes you feel individual.23 Jennina Taylor-Wells reflected, I was going through an unhappy period at school. […] I grew up in the wealthy area of Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, and I was surrounded by spoilt rich kids. I felt being an emo gave me a defined individuality.24

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__________________________________________________________________ Both girls highlight their problematic relationships with their peers: for Levi bullying comes as a result of her emo identity; for Jennina feelings of difference and frustration with her peer group were fundamental in seeking an emo identity. For both girls their emo identities allow them to stand as distinct from their peers: neither connect the genre to mental ill health. In the published letters to the editor My Chemical Romance fans’ response to the Mail article was ferocious: What a load of bollocks!25 they obviously haven’t done their research.26 when the hell are these tabloid papers going to realise they know NOTHING?!27 More measured responses such as Adele’s ‘have they actually listened to ‘Famous Last Words ‘- ‘I’m not afraid to keep on living’?’,28 show that many fans are not afflicted by depression and self-harm at all: ‘I listen to the music I do because I love it, it makes me happy and I feel a connection’,29 or reiterate Levi’s feelings that music is not to blame, as Benny does: It’s really stupid that The Daily Mail is saying Hannah killed herself because of MCR. People kill themselves because of their problems.30 Benny’s words are echoed by many fans on the letters pages and in the two Kerrang! articles about the reporting of Hannah’s death. That My Chemical Romance had become a scapegoat for a generation’s misery only perpetuates and entrenches feelings of frustration amongst teenage fans as they continue to be misunderstood and silenced. Whilst some fans expressly do not suffer from mental ill health, some older letters to Kerrang! suggest that some My Chemical Romance fans use the band as a form of self-medicating music therapy: If anything, I think that emo music can stop teens from committing suicide and doing things they are going to regret. Feeling someone else’s pain can help you get over your own. You understand that lots of other like-minded people know what you’re going through and that you’re not alone in feeling down.31

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__________________________________________________________________ Becca in Norwich gives a personal perspective: Thank you so much Kerrang!. You’ve opened up my eyes to good music, which has changed my life. It has helped me through so much, like bullying and depression. I became more confident in myself, and the fuckers who made my life a misery saw that, and the bullying gradually became less and less serious. […] And you know what? One of those bands who helped me through this are MCR. They had been through so much as a band, and they pulled through it all. Their lyrics have such hope, they hold one important message, to keep going, whatever it takes.32 My interviews with fans of the band corroborate these letters: fans discussed how the band had helped them overcome unhappiness, fight despair brought on by bullying, and in one case helped them to come to terms with a debilitating longterm illness. What I have found is that some My Chemical Romance fans find solace in the music when faced with unhappiness. Rather than emo being a fashion that pushes them towards feelings of desperation, into self-harming, to commit suicide, it can help fans to survive mental ill health. This is not the case for all fans of My Chemical Romance, but fans do agree that unhappy emotions may be present before they begin to listen to My Chemical Romance: none claim that the band cause them. To conclude, I argue that the mainstream press still characterise metal fans - in my case of My Chemical Romance fans - as victims and misguided innocents, while fans themselves still have a different story to tell. I contend that My Chemical Romance fans view the group's music as enabling them to cope with preexisting depressions, to overcome bullying and even to save their lives. My Chemical Romance fan’s willingness to discuss depression and other mental health issues has been misinterpreted by their detractors, and I offer instead a positive story of the therapeutic benefits of emo music.

Notes 1

S.F. Williams, ‘A Walking Open Wound: Emo Rock and the ‘Crisis’ of Masculinity in America’, Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music, Routledge, New York, 2007, p. 146. 2 G. Way quoted in B. Sowerby, ‘My Chemical Romance Talks to The Campus’, The Maine Campus, 20 September 2007, Accessed 19th August 2010, http://mainecampus.com/2007/09/20/my-chemical-romance-talks-to-the-campus/ . 3 M. Schippers, Rockin' Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2002, pp. 24-28.

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R. Booth, ‘Daily Mail Column on Stephen Gately Death Provokes Record Complaints’, The Guardian, 16 October 2009, accessed 6th November 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/16/stephen-gately-boyzone. 5 S. Sands, ‘EMO Cult Warning for Parents’, The Daily Mail, 16 August 2006. 6 Ibid. 7 Kerrang!, ‘Best Band On The Planet’, Kerrang!, 24 August 2006, accessed 6th November 2010, http://kerrang.typepad.com/kerrang_awards_2006_blog/2006/ 08/best_band_on_th.html. 8 Kerrang!, ‘My Chemical Romance Blamed by Newspapers for Teen’s Suicide’, Kerrang! 17 May 2008, p. 7. 9 Kerrang!, ‘Emo and Goth to be Made Illegal in Russia’, Kerrang! 23 July 2008, accessed 27th September 2010 http://www.kerrang.com/blog/2008/07/emo_ and_goth_to_be_made_illega.html. 10 I. Grillo, ‘Mexico’s Emo-Bashing Problem’, Time, 27 July 2008, Accessed 27th September 2010, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/08599172583900.html. 11 Breitbart, ‘Saudi ‘Emo’ Girls Busted by rReligious Cops’, Breitbart, 22 May 2008, Accessed 27th September 2010, http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id= CNG.818e03363d37aed733b8e1d6484580c4.8f1&show_article=1. 12 B. Maygra quoted on WDAZ8 News report posted on YouTube.com by jarrettm 23 February 2007 under the title ‘I Must Be Emo - News Report’, accessed 23rd September 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri6ySOHoDfk. 13 R. Sykes quoted in A. Levy, ‘Girl, 13, Hangs Herself after Becoming Obsessed with ‘Emo Suicide Cult’ Rock Band’, The Daily Mail, 7th May. 14 T. Rawstorne, ‘Why No Child is Safe from the Sinister Cult of Emo’, Mail Online, 16 May 2008, Accessed 8th July 2008, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fe mail/article-566481/Why-child-safe-sinister-cult-emo.html. 15 Ibid. 16 Various authors, letters to the editor in Kerrang! 1211, 24 May 2008. 17 A. Levy, ‘Girl, 13. 18 S. Jones, ‘Ban(ned) in the USA: Popular Music and Censorship’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter 1991, p. 78. 19 D. Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids, with a New Afterword, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, pp. 237-261. 20 D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture, Da Capo Press, New York, 2000, pp. 254-256. 21 J. Arnett, ‘Adolescents and Heavy Metal Music: From the Mouths of Metal Heads’, Youth and Society, Vol. 23, No. 1, September 1991, pp. 76-98. 22 D. Gaines, Teenage Wasteland, pp. 237-261. 23 L. Harrison quoted in T. Rawstorne, 2008, op. cit. 24 J. Taylor-Wells quoted in T. Rawstorne, 2008, op. cit. 25 Anonymous, via text, letter to the editor in Kerrang! 1211, 24 May 2008.

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R. Grimsby, via email, letter to the editor in Kerrang! 1211, 24 May, 2008. A. Richardson-Lee, via MySpace, letter to the editor, in Kerrang! 1211, 24 May, 2008. 28 R. Grimsby quoted in E. Johnston ‘To Call us a Suicide Cult is an Insult!’, Kerrang! 1214, 14 June 2008. 29 Abi quoted in quoted in E. Johnston ‘To Call us a Suicide Cult. 30 Benny quoted in E. Johnston ‘To Call us a Suicide Cult. 31 Jodie, Stamford, letter to the editor, in Kerrang! 1165, 30 June, 2007. 32 Becca In Norwich, via MySpace, letter to the editor, in Kerrang! 1164, 23 June, 2007.

27

Bibliography Arnett, J., ‘Adolescents and Heavy Metal Music: From the Mouths of Metal Heads’. Youth and Society. Vol. 23, No. 1, September 1991, pp. 76-98. Booth, R., ‘Daily Mail Column on Stephen Gately Death Provokes Record Complaints’. The Guardian. 16 October 2009, Aaccessed 6th November 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/16/stephen-gately-boyzone. Breitbart, ‘Saudi ‘Emo’ Girls Busted by Religious Cops’. Breitbart. 22 May 2008, Accessed 27th September 2010, http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.81 8e03363d37aed733b8e1d6484580c4.8f1&show_article=1. Gaines, D., Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids with a New Afterword. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998. Grillo, I., ‘Mexico’s Emo-Bashing Problem’. Time 27 July 2008, Accessed 27th September 2010, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/08599172583900.html. Johnston E., ‘To Call Us a Suicide Cult is an Insult!’. Kerrang! 1214, 14 June 2008. Jones, S., ‘Ban(ned) in the USA: Popular Music and Censorship’. Journal of Communication Inquiry. 15, No. 1, Winter, 1991. Kerrang! ‘Emo and Goth to be Made Illegal in Russia’. Kerrang! 23 July 2008, accessed 27th September 2010 http://www.kerrang.com/blog/2008/07/emo_and_ goth_to_be_made_illega.html.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kerrang!, ‘My Chemical Romance Blamed by Newspapers for Teen’s Suicide’. Kerrang! 17 May 2008. Kerrang!, ‘Best Band on the Planet’ Kerrang!. 24 August 2006, Accessed 6th November 2010, http://www.kerrang.typepad.com/kerrang_awards_2006_blog/ 2006/08/best_band_on_th.html. Levy, A., ‘Girl, 13, Hangs Herself after Becoming Obsessed with ‘Emo Suicide Cult’ Rock Band’. The Daily Mail. 7th May. Rawstorne, T., ‘Why No Child is Safe from the Sinister Cult of Emo’. Mail Online. 16th May 2008, Accessed 8th July 2008, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article566481/Why-child-safe-sinister-cult-emo.html. Sands, S., ‘EMO Cult Warning for Parents’. The Daily Mail. 16 August 2006. Schippers, M., Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2002. Sowerby, B., ‘My Chemical Romance Talks to The Campus’. The Maine Campus. 20 September 2007, accessed 19th August 2010, http://mainecampus. com/2007/09/20/my-chemical-romance-talks-to-the-campus/. WDAZ8 News Report Posted on YouTube.com by jarrettm 23 February 2007 under the title ‘I Must Be Emo - News Report’, accessed 23rd September 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri6ySOHoDfk. Weinstein, D., Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture. Da Capo Press, New York, 2000. Williams, S.F., ‘A Walking Open Wound: Emo Rock and the ‘Crisis’ of Masculinity in America’. Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music, Jarman-Ivens, F. (ed), Routledge, New York, 2007.

Bibliography of Letters (by first name) Richardson-Lee, A., MySpace, Letter to the Editor. Kerrang! 1211, 24 May, 2008. Anonymous, via text, Letter to the Editor. Kerrang! 1211, 24 May 2008.

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__________________________________________________________________ Becca In Norwich, via MySpace, Letter to the Editor. Kerrang! 1164, 23 June, 2007. Jodie, Stamford, Letter to the Editor. Kerrang! 1165, 30 June, 2007. Rebecca, via email, Letter to the Editor. Kerrang! 1211, 24 May, 2008. Various authors, Letters to the Editor. Kerrang! 1211, 24 May 2008. Rosemary Hill is a Ph.D. student in the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York, UK. Her research focuses on the representation and experiences in the metal community of female readers of Kerrang! Magazine.

Does Death and Suicide Sound Like the Music You Hear? Abílio Oliveira and Rute Rodrigues Abstract We have addressed some aspects related to music, its meanings, roles and effects, as well as its closeness with emotions, during adolescence. Mood swings are typical at this stage of life. In which music is essential; just as much as the questioning of life and death, in a creative process involving parents, colleagues, friends, idols and all of those that help in gaining autonomy, values and identity.1 A celebrity such as Kurt Cobain could represent any desperate adolescent, facing unbearable pain and pressure, who finds in music a reason for living and trying to be accepted. Our empirical research, developed in two phases (an extensive exploratory research and a set of three experiments), was framed on the theory of social representations (SR).2 SR facilitates the analysis of the complex subjectivities that involve the imaginary relation with death, suicide and some practices (where music occupies a central place). We verified, on a (total) population of 1226 adolescents (comprehending both phases) that musical preferences articulate with the thoughts, feelings, beliefs and symbolic imaginary associated with life, death and suicide, with suicide ideation, the will to die or to live, suicidal and parasuicidal behaviour. Girls tend to prefer soft sounds and music to dance, and boys rather prefer ‘harder’ music, such as grunge, rock or metal. The younger (15-16 years old) listen to harder music that the older (17-18 years old). Musical preferences can also be associated to risk-taking and self-harm behaviours. Key Words: Adolescence, death, life, music, social representations. ***** 1. Introduction Everything is energy. Everything vibrates. Life itself is motion that generates sound, thus life is sound. So, in a certain sense, everything is music and it is natural to communicate through sound. In a simple definition, music organizes the relations between sonorities through the course of time. Sounds (and silences) are combined and threaded forming rhythms, melodies and harmonies. Music acts by the intimate content present in the expression of sound and remits us to the sumptuous manifest order of our cosmos.3 As a universal phenomenon that all humanity can understand, it is, at the same time, an art and a science, that we can appreciate and understand.4 Can we move towards life without referring to music? Usually we prefer to listen to what is in affinity with ourselves at a moment. Music is strongly related to our SR, namely about life, death and suicide.5 Music can help us live moments of great satisfaction or to relief tensions. It can also

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__________________________________________________________________ influence behaviour, emotional and psychological state, given its closeness to emotions or feelings like euphoria, melancholy, joy or sadness.6 Music always relates to feelings, thoughts and even proceedings. The lyrics of the songs and its latent contents, as rhythm, melody or musical style, also have a large importance in what is experienced. Adolescence is, in a large way, a typical age of emotions, where advances, retreats and periods of balance and instability, occur progressively. Music, as a primordial ally, follows intensely the everyday life of teenagers.7 Thus, who better than adolescents will emphasize the feelings that arise with music? How can we understand them if we don’t know the music they listen to? In adolescence we try to answer to the greatest psychosocial questions, in a process of construction that involves parents, peers, friends, idols (namely musicians) and all those that, in some way, help in the conquest of autonomy, in the definition of values and of an identity. Teenagers think a lot about death and suicide.8 Searching for references and values, in a society hidden under the shadow of death, a teenager can take risks beyond the social norms, breaking its own security to see how far can he go or what can he achieve.9 The risk is glorified by adolescents and, also, by a society obsessed by youth and the (illusory) domain of life and death. Certain risks are symbolic of certain kinds of social identity.10 To grow implies taking risks, test ourselves, to find new limits, overtake them and amplify consciences, (...) the search for these emotions, where the young can quickly debate, simultaneously, between living or dying, reveals a predominantly symbolic character of closeness to death and rises a sense of renewed identity.11 Defying death can provide a strong reason to live.12 Here lies one of the reasons for parasuicide behaviour, especially risk-taking behaviour, in which one can risk life without intending to die. This differs from the suicide behaviour, which clearly indicates a will to die. But both can be faced as survival strategies.13 Risk-taking behaviour is considered a form of assertion, valorisation and social recognition, particularly with the group of peers, improving self-esteem and providing some meaning to life. Therefore, parasuicide - namely risk-taking and self-mutilation or self-harm behaviours - is increasingly frequent in our societies. Music is essential in the development of adolescents’ identity, socialization and sociability.14 Adolescents search for authenticity, integration and to be socially distinguished. Their musical tastes, as their feelings, can vary significantly. More than a preference for a musical style, it is important the way preferences are mixed and the contexts in which they are most evident. Even when an adolescent doesn’t

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__________________________________________________________________ identify himself with singers or doesn’t know all the lyrics, music can influence his cognitive, psychosocial and emotional development, and his personal history.15 In Portugal, for more than 90% of youngsters, music is important or very important in their lives.16 There has been observed a relation between vulnerability to suicide and the preference for certain styles, especially heavy metal, also associated with risk-taking behaviours.17 Musical preferences are important as an indicator for health professionals, helping them in primary care.18 Music evidences many of the typical adolescents’ representations of feelings, death, suicide, and life.19 In the history of music, we can find various themes associated to death or suicide, including lyrics used in suicide notes; however, there’s no evidence of a suicide due to the negative content of a theme.20 Can a musical style influence the ideas, feelings and behaviour of a youngster? Does the youngster choose to listen to something related to what he is experiencing? Music may be associated to personal, familiar or social factors. In any situation, thinking of suicide and death is naturally linked to an inner strong will to reach to something different, and to find a way to survive.21 Most of the studies on this area, assume that listening to a predefined style (as heavy metal) can induce suicide. Others have focused their attention in the feelings of adolescents when facing certain types of music, arguing that the way they feel determines their tastes. In our research, we consider pertinent to study significant associations, rather than causalities, between musical preferences22 and other aspects like suicide ideation and parasuicide. 2. Some Notes about the Empirical Research The theory of social representations (SR), as proposed by Moscovici, focuses on the way that human beings think and create their shared realities, as well as their content.23 SR are structures that combine, in an integrated and organized form, cognitions, affections and actions, generated in a given social context, connecting individuals with their environment, status, positions, groups and social belongings, by correlated processes of objectification and anchoring.24 Here we present some of the most relevant results of an extensive empirical research focused on the SR of death, music and suicide in adolescence.25 This research was enclosed in two parts, the first one, exploratory and the second, experimental. From the results obtained in the exploratory part, we extracted, in great extent, the indicators used to construct the questionnaires for the subsequent experiments.26 In the second part we have conducted three experiments that had some independent variables in common, namely gender, age, and experimental context.27 In the first two experiments we have focused particularly in the SR of death and suicide. And, in the third, in the SR of suicide and music, relating them to feelings,

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__________________________________________________________________ musical preferences and other indicators, such as the death ideation, suicidal ideation, suicide attempt and parasuicide behaviours. Among the main goals, this research aimed to: apprehend and analyse the SR of death, suicide and music amongst an adolescent population; explore the associations between the experimental contexts and these representations; understand how SR vary according to gender and age; articulate the musical preferences with the thoughts, feelings, beliefs and the symbolic imaginary associated to death and suicide. In this chapterwe will centre our attention on the third experiment. 3. Method and Materials A. Participants A population of 26828 Portuguese adolescents, 51% girls, 49% boys; 50% in each age group (15-16 years old and 17-18 years old). B. Variables We considered experimental context, sex and age as the main independent variables, and the SR of death, suicide and music, as well as the musical preferences, as dependent variables. C. Instruments and procedure We developed a questionnaire with seven groups of items on closed questions, followed of ordinal scales (1 to 5) based on the results obtained on previous studies.29 The data was collected in a class context, having each student answered it anonymously and individually. Different techniques were applied for the data analysis, such as, principal component analysis, invariable and multivariable variance analysis and correlation analysis. 4. Results Among the most significant representations of suicide, we point out the discomfort, sadness, unhappiness and fear, the compassion with the suicidal person and the fragility that is associated, the external causes of suicide, and the perception of suicide as a resolution or violent death. The suicidal gesture reveals a cry for help, a solution or escape from difficulties or problems, a giving up or denial of life. It is, simultaneously, an act of despair and a (final) wish to survive. In what respects to music, we point out dimensions which are especially related to well-being, pleasure, affections, relaxation, fun and life, but also, in a less extent, to discomfort, sadness and depression. Music is important for the good and the bad moments. In fact, it is related to thoughts, feelings and pictures that are both positive and negative.30

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__________________________________________________________________ We have found many representations according to the social belongings of adolescents. For example, girls, more than boys, point out feelings or thoughts of compassion, fear, loss and discomfort, and a ritualistic meaning in death; experience greater sadness, fear and compassion towards suicide; and highlight music as fun and pleasure, but also as apprehension, a source of affective relationships and sociability. Boys, in the majority of situations, reveal higher motivation for life than girls. Adolescents of 17-18 years old express more proximity, compassion, fear and discomfort, towards death (and particularly suicide), than the 15-16 years old. Among the musical choices of adolescents, we observed variations according to the moment in which data were gathered. But the essential is to understand what music transmits, in terms of sound, lyrics or poems. Between 1999 and 2007, along with the results from different studies, we found some preferences that we called non-circumstantial or convict preferences: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, U2, Offspring, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Metallica, REM, Queen or The Doors, always appeared among the 25 higher preferences of adolescents, which shows certain continuity.31 We found that the more consensual ‘music styles’32 are rock/grunge, punk/rock, and pop/rock. The biggest fans of pop rock and trip-hip/pop also appreciate other styles, but the ones who prefer new metal/punk and rock/metal, only appreciate grunge33 and don’t like pop music. Generally, boys prefer metal, rock/metal, and new metal/punk better than girls. Like the youngsters that never thought about suicide, girls are bigger fans of pop, dance/pop and trip-hop/pop - these preferences34 are associated to a decrease in risk-taking behaviors. As suicide ideation becomes more frequent, the weaker is the choice for dance/pop and the greater is the preference for heavy music, rock/grunge and metal/new metal - this result is especially evident between the youngest, particularly among boys.35 However, between the youngsters who never imagined suicide, the choice for (metal or) harder music tends to decrease as they approach adulthood and become more mature, while adolescents who continue to have suicidal ideation tend to maintain this preference. As the choice for harder music persists, the more frequent become self-harm behaviors.36 A larger preference for rock/grunge also underlines a larger wish to die37 and eventual suicide attempts, being therefore more associated with tension, discomfort, fear, as well as for compassion with suicide - viewed as a resolution or way out.38 5. Conclusions Nowadays, we may hardly talk about death, in particular a death by suicide, our biggest taboo.39 Every death exposes and confronts us, in a society that depreciates

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__________________________________________________________________ imagination but urges to easy pleasure, illusory happiness and temporary glory, where it is more important ‘appear to be’ than ‘to be’. We found that death is more represented as ‘an end’ (distant and unknown), than as ‘the end’ (too final). Suicide stands as a ‘feared end’ or resolution to despair. And music stands in everywhere, every moment. Kurt Cobain,40 who is still one of the greatest references (or idol) among adolescents, can represent any desperate youngster that finds in music some reason to live and, eventually, to die.41 For a youngster, surrounded by doubts with the inherent pressure to grow and ‘be someone’, in the search of values and references, a way to discover and to know is trying to do ‘something else’, appealing to others and to a shamed society in the shadow of death, testing, taking risks beyond the social norms and transgressing his own safety to find other limits and beyond. Therefore, the adolescent’s risk is glorified, in the friends’ circle and in a society obsessed for youth and immortality. In time, the parasuicide gesture can turn into a suicidal attempt. The suicidal adolescent, in the edge of disharmony, reveal us an intolerable inner pain of someone who lost hope and can’t endure tension anymore, unable to find motivation. In desolation, avid for an existential solution and a definition for himself, he challenges death with his behaviours, and risks to die, to feel some strength and a right to live. In the anguish to understand a meaning for his life, from euphoria to melancholy, from exalted share to isolation, it can be just a small step, replete of multiple events, oscillations and transformations. Everything can assume exaggerated dimensions that influence the physical, cognitive and social development.42 Sometimes, the only friends that support him in his demand for answers can be found in a poem, a book... or inside a CD or an mp3 file, maybe continuously heard. Therefore, the adolescents’ musical preferences and the way they think and feel about music, can give us important clues about the way they represent life, death and suicide.43 Music reflects a lot about who composes it and no less on who listens to it, mindfully. Music can communicate what words, emotions and thoughts cannot. We may facilitate the communication with youngsters if we are prepared to listen to them and to the music they hear!

Notes 1

D. Sampaio, Ninguém Morre Sozinho, Caminho, Lisboa, 2002; V. Strasburger, Adolescents and the Media - Medical and Psychological Impact, Sage Publications Inc., CA, 1995. 2 S. Moscovici, La Psychanalyse, son Image et son Public, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1961/1976.

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J. James, The Music of the Spheres, Abacus, London, 1993. R. Stewart, Música e psique, Cultrix, São Paulo, 1996. 5 A. Oliveira, Ilusões na Idade das Emoções - Representações Sociais da Morte, do Suicídio e da Música na Adolescência, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 2008a. 6 K. Scheel & J. Westefeld, ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation’, Adolescence, Vol. 134, 1999, pp. 253-273. 7 C. Borralho, Música, Preferências Musicais e a Ideação Suicida na Adolescência. Monografia, ISPA, Lisboa, 2002; Oliveira, 2008a, op. cit.; C. Richards, Teen Spirits - Music and Identity in Media Education, UCL Press, London, 1998. 8 R. Frankel, The Adolescent Psyche, Routledge, London, 1999; Sampaio, 2002, op. cit. 9 Oliveira, 2008a, op. cit.; A. Oliveira, O Desafio da Morte, Âncora Editora, Lisboa, 2008b; X Pommereau, L’Adolescent Suicidaire, Dunod, Paris, 2001. 10 C. Lightfoot, The Culture of Adolescent Risk-Taking, Guilford Press, New York, 1997. 11 A Oliveira, L Amâncio & D Sampaio, ‘Da desesperança ao desafio da morte… e à conquista da vida: Olhar sobre o adolescente suicida’. Psychologica, vol. 35, 2004, p. 75. 12 A. Oliveira, SobreViver, Âncora Editora, Lisboa, 2001. 13 M. Laufer, O Adolescente Suicida, Climepsi, Lisboa, 2000; R. O’Connor & N. Sheehy, Understanding Suicidal Behaviour, British Psychological Society, London, 2000. 14 V. Strasburger & B. Wilson, Children, Adolescents & the Media, SAGE London Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2002. 15 D. Buckingham & Sefton-Green, ‘Series Editors’ Preface’, Teen Spirits - Music and Identity in Media Education, C. Richards (ed), UCL Press, London, pp. ix-xii, 1998. 16 M. Cabral & J. Pais (eds), Condutas de Risco, Práticas Culturais, e Atitudes Perante o Corpo, Celta/IPJ, Oeiras, 2003. 17 R. Kendall, ‘Adolescent Emotional Response to Music and its Relationship to Risk-Taking Behaviours’. Journal of Adolescent Health, Vol. 23, 1998, pp. 49-54; Scheel & Westefeld, 1999, op. cit. 18 E. Brown & W. Hendee, ‘Adolescents and Their Music: Insights into the Health of Adolescents’, Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 262, 1989, pp. 1659-1663. 19 D. Reanney, After Death: A New Future for Human Consciousness, Avon Science, New York, 1991. 20 S. Stack, ‘Heavy Metal, Religiosity and Suicide Acceptability’. Suicide and LifeThreatening Behaviour, Vol. 28, 4, 1998, pp. 388-394. 4

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E. Shneidman, Suicide Thoughts and Reflections, 1960-1980, Human Sciences Press, London, 1981. 22 Questioning them directly which authors or groups they prefer to listen to, without any previous categorization in styles, types or musical preferences. 23 Moscovici, 1961/1976, op. cit. 24 S. Jovchelovitch, ‘In Defense of Representations’. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Vol. 26, 1996, pp. 121-135; S. Moscovici, ‘The Phenomenon of Social Representations’, Social Representations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 3-70. 25 Oliveira, 2008a, op. cit. 26 In the exploratory phase we have gathered the musical preferences of the participants, and we determined, by free association of words and Factorial Analysis of Correspondences, the SR of death, suicide, music and life. 27 The experimental contexts were operated trough images (three small films that show the death of a person in different situations: surrounded by family or friends, in a private context; surrounded by health professionals, in a public context; and alone after shooting over herself, in a suicidal context) in the first experience; texts (two suicide notes, one of a anonymous young person, in an unknown context; and the other of Kurt Cobain, in a context of a known person) in the second; and music (two songs previously tested: one, Beautiful Day, from U2, associated to a positive ideation of life; and the other, Jeremy, from Pearl Jam, associated to a negative ideation of life and suicide) in the third experience. In any of the studies, beside the conditions in which the participants had these stimuli, there was also a control group, which answered to the proposed questionnaire without previous stimuli (film, suicide note or music). 28 In a total of 1226 adolescents, comprehending all studies on this research. 29 Oliveira, 2008a, op. cit. 30 Scheel & Westefeld, 1999, op. cit. 31 Other bands have been named in almost all studies (like Marilyn Manson, for example), and many appear occasionally, relating occasional preferences. 32 We questioned adolescents about their preferences, and from their answers constructed a list with their favorite bands and musicians, that was included in the instruments we used in the experiments - this list was updated after each study. From those answers we ‘reconstructed’ musical styles according to the meanings and characteristics associated to the groups, the type of music and the intrinsic message. So, we admit that some musicians may naturally belong to more than one ‘music style’. 33 Styles more associated to stress, contesting or ideological speeches. 34 Pop, in general, is a lighter, more danceable and romantic type of music.

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Borralho, 2002, op. cit.; K. Roberts et al., ‘Adolescent Emotional Response to Music and Its Relationship to Risk-Taking Behaviours’. Journal of Adolescent Health, Vol. 23 (1), 1998, pp. 49-54. 36 Kendall, 1998, op. cit.; Strasburger, 19995, op. cit. 37 Punk rock is also associated with discomfort and death rituals. 38 About 40% of our population claimed that they already had risk-taking behaviors, close to 35% declared they had self-mutilation (or self-harm) behaviors, 7% have committed suicide attempts and about half have had suicide ideation (in 30% of cases several times), and also, closeness to suicide situations - about 45% know a person that committed or tried suicide. 39 M. Bradbury, Representations of Death, Routledge, London, 1999; R. Kastenbaum, Death, Society and Human Experience, (7ª ed.), Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 2001; Oliveira, 2008a, op. cit. 40 The suicide of someone like Kurt Cobain is still outstanding; he certainly provided, through his music, a ‘smell’ of euphoria, rage, admiration, compassion and isolation moments; Kurt was, since his disturbed childhood, a very lonely and melancholic person, that slowly lost the hope in his life. 41 As a 17 year-old girl told us ‘Suicide is the only exit when a person is in an unknown world and when the only 'music' listened is the loneliness’. 42 Any adolescent can, frequently, feel anxious or depressed, but that doesn´t mean that he wants to die or kill himself. Kurt Cobain suggested that in a simple question 'Hello, how low?' 43 Musical preferences can also allude to attitudes that reinforce some shared representations, prevalent in what distinguishes individuals and subcultures, offering identification models, integration or social differentiation. For instance, going to a concert, more than a socialization act becomes a ritual of unequalled magnitude.

Bibliography Borralho, C., Música, Preferências Musicais e a Ideação Suicida na Adolescência. Monografia, ISPA, Lisboa, 2002. Bradbury, M., Representations of Death. Routledge, London, 1999. Brown, E. & Hendee, W., ‘Adolescents and Their Music: Insights into the Health of Adolescents’. Journal of the American Medical Association. Vol. 262, 1989, pp. 1659-1663. Buckingham, D. & Sefton-Green, ‘Series Editors’ Preface’. Teen Spirits - Music and Identity in Media Education. UCL Press, London, pp. ix-xii, 1998.

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__________________________________________________________________ Cabral, M. & Pais, J. (eds), Condutas de Risco, Práticas Culturais, e Atitudes Perante o orpo: Resultados de um Inquérito aos Jovens Portugueses em 2000. Celta/IPJ, Oeiras, 2003. Frankel, R., The Adolescent Psyche. Routledge, London, 1999. James, J., The Music of the Spheres. Abacus, London, 1993. Jovchelovitch, S., ‘In Defense of Representations’. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Vol. 26, 1996, pp. 121-135. Kastenbaum, R., Death, Society and Human Experience. (7ª ed.). Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 2001. Kendall, R., ‘Adolescent Emotional Response to Music and its Relationship to Risk-Taking Behaviours’. Journal of Adolescent Health. 23, 1998, pp. 49-54. Lightfoot, C., The Culture of Adolescent Risk-Taking. Guilford Press, New York, 1997. Laufer, M., O adolescente Suicida. Climepsi, Lisboa, 2000. Moscovici, S., La Psychanalyse, son Image et son Public. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1961/1976. Moscovici, S., ‘On Social Representations’. Social Cognition-Perspectives on Everyday Understanding. Fargas, J.P. (ed), Academic Press, London, 1981. –––, ‘The Phenomenon of Social Representations’. Social Representations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984. O’Connor, R. & Sheehy, N., Understanding Suicidal Behaviour. British Psychological Society, London, 2000. Oliveira, A., SobreViver. Âncora Editora, Lisboa, 2001. –––, Ilusões na Idade das Emoções - Representações Sociais da Morte, do Suicídio e da Música na Adolescência. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 2008a. –––, O desafio da Morte (2ª ed.). Âncora Editora, Lisboa, 2008b.

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__________________________________________________________________ Oliveira, A., Amâncio, L., & Sampaio, D., ‘Arriscar morrer para Sobreviver’. Análise Psicológica. Vol. XIX, 2001, pp. 509-521. Oliveira, A., Amâncio, L., & Sampaio, D., ‘Da desesperança ao desafio da morte… e à conquista da vida: Olhar sobre o adolescente suicida’. Psychologica. Vol. 35, 2004, pp. 69-83. Pommereau, X., L’Adolescent Suicidaire. Dunod, Paris, 2001. Reanney, D., After Death: A New Future for Hhuman Consciousness. Avon Science, New York, 1991. Richards, C., Teen Spirits - Music and Identity in Media Education. UCL Press, London, 1998. Roberts, K., Dimsdale, J., East, P. & Friedman, L., ‘Adolescent Emotional Response to Music and Its Relationship to Risk-Taking Behaviours’. Journal of Adolescent Health. Vol. 23 (1), 1998, pp. 49-54. Sampaio, D., Vozes e Ruídos. Caminho, Lisboa, 1993. –––, Ninguém Morre Sozinho (12ª ed.). Caminho, Lisboa, 2002. Scheel, K. & Westfeld, J., ‘Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Suicidality: An Empirical Investigation’. Adolescence. Vol. 134, 1999, pp. 253-273. Shneidman, E., Suicide Thoughts and Reflections, 1960-1980. Human Sciences Press, London, 1981. Sprinthall, N. & Collins, W., Psicologia do Adolescente - Uma Abordagem Desenvolvimentista. F. C. Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 1999. Stack, S., ‘Heavy Metal, Religiosity and Suicide Acceptability’. Suicide and LifeThreatening Behaviour. Vol. 28, No. 4, 1998, pp. 388-394. Stewart, R., Música e Psique. Cultrix, São Paulo, 1996. Strasburger, V., Adolescents and the Media - Medical and Psychological Impact. Sage Publications Inc., CA, 1995.

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__________________________________________________________________ Strasburger, V. & Wilson, B., Children, Adolescents & the Media. SAGE London Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2002. Abílio Oliveira is an Assistant Professor at ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute and a Researcher at CIES-IUL Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (Lisbon). He is the author of several books, namely ‘Ilusões Na Idade das Emoções Representações Sociais da morte, do suicídio e da música na adolescência’ and ‘O Desafio da Morte’. [email protected]. Rute Rodrigues is a Social Psychologist currently working on Suicide Symbolisms and Representations as a Research Assistant at CIES-IUL Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (Lisbon). [email protected].

PART 6 Positively Mad: Black Metal Health and the Construction of Identity

Playing with Madness in the Forest of Shadows: Dissonance, Deviance and Non-Comformity in the Black Metal Scene Karl Spracklen Abstract Pino has argued that music is the site of a struggle over the meaning of deviancy in what Urban calls metaculture: the culture of culture. This struggle might be described as a Foucauldian struggle over what constitutes deviance, as well as what constitutes acceptable, (high) cultural taste. Sandlin and Callahan have noted the importance of deviance and dissonance in the counter-hegemonic scene of culture jamming. In this chapter, I use these frameworks of deviance in music and dissonance in counter-culture to explore the intentionality of playing with madness in the black metal scene. Methodologically, the chapter will follow the discourse tracing approach used in my previous research on black metal. Specifically, I will examine the discussions of fans on an internet forum about madness and bands that deliberately play with madness, deviance and dissonance over a period of twelve months. Material produced by those bands in the form of records and websites, and interviews with those bands in fanzines and magazines, will be also utilised. In the chapter I will argue that the concept of madness is utilised in a communicative way to suggest dissonance, deviance and resistance against the instrumentality of what Rojek, borrowing from Sennett, calls the new capitalism of leisure. Key Words: Foucault, dissonance, deviance, black metal, power, leisure, intentionality. ***** 1. Introduction In this chapter, I use frameworks of deviance in music and dissonance in counter-culture to explore the intentionality of playing with madness in the black metal scene. Methodologically, the chapter will follow the discourse tracing approach1 used in my previous research on black metal.2 Specifically, I will examine the discussions of fans on an internet forum over a period of twelve months – as well as in fanzines and magazines – about madness and bands that deliberately play with madness, deviance and dissonance: Shining and Mayhem being two pertinent exemplars. Material produced by those bands in the form of records and websites, and interviews with those bands in fanzines and magazines, will be also utilised. In the chapter I will argue that the concept of madness is utilised in a communicative way to suggest dissonance, deviance and resistance against the instrumentality of what Rojek,3 borrowing from Sennett,4 calls the new capitalism of leisure.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. Theoretical Framework Sandlin and Callahan5 have noted the importance of deviance and dissonance in the counter-hegemonic scene of culture jamming. Pino6 has argued that music is the site of a struggle over the meaning of deviancy in what Urban7 calls metaculture: the culture of culture. This struggle might be described as a Foucauldian struggle over what constitutes deviance, as well as what constitutes acceptable, (high) cultural taste. Foucault’s discussion of madness and power begins with Bentham’s panopticon (the Big Brother of the 19th Century).8 He argues power is not simply imposed on individuals by institutions, individuals accept responsibility for their control. Power is not hegemonic, but is spread out in various centres in social structures. Increasingly, Western civilisation is about how our bodies are institutionalised. The body and mind are places of contestation between individual wills and the power of institutions, and madness is increasingly a label assigned to any metal states or attitudes that are not useful to the State. The genealogical story of the West is the increasing number of ways in which minds and bodies are controlled. Bodies themselves become subjectified – defining our status and power (or lack of it). Identity then is corporeal (of the body) as well as social. Foucauldian analyses move away from ossified structures to map out instances of control (conforming) and challenge (resistance). Applications on Foucault to leisure are limited (to sport and other activities where the body is central, such as alternative lifestyles).9 Foucault’s ideas about the distribution of power and the importance of the body could be used to map out a Foucauldian response to the paradox of leisure.10 We are all involved in creating the structures that constrain us, and gender (for example) is still central to this construction even if we have moved away from stories of agency and structure. Whatever rationalities we have in choosing our leisure, Foucault would still point out the awful gaze of the Panopticon that makes us choose a certain way. 3. Methodology This chapter maps and analyse discussions about suicide, madness, mental health and deviance over a 12-month period on one black metal internet forum (blackmetal.co.uk). This forum has been used before by this researcher in exploring ideologies of black metal,11 reactions to National Socialist Black Metal,12 and sexuality.13 There is an epistemological and methodological debate about the truth-value and utility for researchers of debates on Internet forums.14 There is no doubt that users of on-line forums do not necessarily represent the views of a wider population: users of forums are more likely to be passionate, opinion-setters. There is no doubt also that users of on-line forums do not necessarily post what they actually feel about a particular topic. These problems, however, should not concern us. On the matter of representation, this chapter does not claim to provide a definitive scene ‘response’. Rather, this chapter explores responses made by those fans who care enough about black metal to post on the forum – these fans are not

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__________________________________________________________________ representative of all fans, but they are de facto serious and passionate about what constitutes true or ‘kult’ black metal. On the matter of the truth-value of their comments, it is indeed true that we do not know whether the fans actually mean what they write. They could be lying, or unclear, about their private thoughts; it is impossible for us to be confident about the mapping of their actual thoughts on to these public opinions. This problem is especially true where fans post under pseudonyms. That said, truth-value is only a problem if we are concerned with truth. In this chapter, I am not concerned about whether the fans actually mean what they say – but I am interested in what they think they have to say to be a part of black metal’s insider scene, and what they think is acceptable to post on the forum. In addition to the debates on the forum, I have undertaken discourse tracing, a triangulated range of methods applied to provide an account of discourses at a number of intersecting levels.15 Those levels are fanzine writers, those in the music industry, the author as a researcher, and the serious consumers of black metal who write on internet sites. In this case, then, the Discourse Tracing allows a range of sources, voices, texts and other data to build up a reliable account (‘trace’) of debates surrounding the discourses of dissonance, deviance and madness surrounding the bands Mayhem and Shining; and the subgenre called suicidal or depressive black metal. 4. Mayhem and Shining Mayhem, one of the key bands of the second-wave of black metal, have a long history of madness, deviance and dissonance. The stories have become folk tales in the black metal popular imagination. One of their vocalists, Dead, committed suicide. Their guitarist was killed by their stand-in bass player, who was associated with the church burnings and extreme ideologies that dogged Norwegian black metal in the 1990s. The re-formed band enjoyed notoriety for singer Maniac’s onstage self-harm and cutting. Even in 2007, when promoting their latest album Ordo ad Chao, madness and dissonance were cited as crucial creative sources: frontman Attila Csihar explained in an interview that: We have this very similar craziness artistically, or whatever… It’s like the songs started to affect us, so we were almost depressed… The second half [of the album] is more like an inner world – the inner fuck-up, let’s say – it’s about mind manipulation and psychic techniques and the triggering of the brain.16 Shining are a Swedish black metal band who are often referred to as being creators of ‘suicidal black metal’, or ‘depressive black metal’. The band’s lyrical themes support self-harm, suicide and other forms of nihilistic destruction. They

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__________________________________________________________________ have been hugely influential on a whole subgenre of depressive black metal. Their frontman Kvarforth has courted controversy and publicity through self-harm on stage, picking fights with members of the audience, encouraging his fans to cut themselves, and staging (faking) his own suicide. Even though he has now distanced himself from these antics he still embraces the deviance and dissonance of the band’s notoriety: It’s a bit of a problem for me, but I make my own bed, so I have to lie in it. I’ll try in the coming years to see that was part of our past. It’s nothing that I regret; I just don’t want to do that anymore.17 5. On the Forum and in the Fanzines Madness, dissonance and deviance are subjects of a number of postings on the black metal fan forum. One thread, entitled ‘Depressive Black Metal’, was obviously the focus of an exchange of information abut the most underground, invisible bands that are in the subgenre.18 Posters on the thread were keen to describe the music in ways that made one band sound more miserable than another – there was a tendency to ‘trump’ bands listed by previous posters with bands that were more underground, more black, more depressive. Only one poster to the thread actually said they did not listen to depressive black metal. There was no ideological challenge to the music from Satanists, heathens or National Socialists, who might have been expected to criticise the subgenre for being too self-centred, emotional or ‘emo’: a surprise, given the extent of such extreme ideologies in the normative discourses elsewhere on the forum and in the Black metal scene more widely.19 Depression and madness did appear in another short thread entitled ‘We need a thread on music and mental illness’.20 The thread was started by a poster called CorpsepaintSmurf, who expressed some cynicism about the connection: I suppose there’s some merit to the old myth that creativity and sanity seldom walk as one. ‘A man is less likely to become great the more he is dominated by reason: few can achieve greatness – and none in art – if they are not dominated by illusion.’ But that could also be because the plebeians have a dreadful quality of considering things insane that they can’t comprehend.21 The theme was picked up by a number of childish posters, before the first and most considered response from someone who had already talked to the first poster argued that seriously, the reason I mentioned this to the corpse painted smurfman is because it arose out of a conversation we were

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__________________________________________________________________ having about Shining and other Swedish/Finnish bands he claims, wrongly, are ‘shit.’ From there we got onto Shining and whether they are depressive black metal. I say ye, because Kvarforth is a well known nutter. Smurf says nay, claiming Shining are just a gimmick and can’t be classed as true depressive BM. He also claims they’re ‘shit’ too, including V Halmstad.22 These two posts exemplify the claims about depressive black metal being a true reflection of the scene’s dissonance: only madness is the true inheritor of the madness and fascism of the 1990s. This connection is also present in a thread called ‘Schizophrenia and the speed of thought’, where the conversation normalises mental illness as a true inspiration for black metal, and psychic and mental dissonance as a true state of mind for the black metal musician and fan.23 In the fanzine Asgard Root, there is an editorial stance that questions the evolution of depressive black metal and its appeal to people from outside black metal and heavy metal (‘scenesters’, ‘shoegazers’, ‘emos’). Mental illness could be seen as a weakness in the opinion of more traditionally elitist black metal fans. However, the fanzine acknowledges the great number of influential and aesthetically interesting bands that straddle the line between acceptable black metal and unacceptable shoegaze. In interviews with these bands, the musicians get to articulate their belief in self-loathing and nihilism. For instance, Andrew from Caina says, I think starting to play music probably saved my life… it allowed me to focus on creation rather than destruction… The first Caina demo… is basically a concentrated dose of my rage and pain… I was never on hard drugs, but was so bent on my own obliteration through various others substances and means – not to mention goodold-fashioned self-hatred – that I am certain that I would have taken my own life if I hadn’t started Caina.24 Such themes of nihilism and self-hatred, all things associated with mental illness and the stereotype of the teenage emo kid, also appear in an interview with one of the members of the band Lyrinx.25 But in this interview, there is also a gradual realisation by the band member that ‘depressive black metal’ is a fashionable (‘trendy’) tag, associated with outsiders. He makes it clear that although he is driven by a deep selfloathing and anger at the modern world, he is suspicious of the trend to diminishing the extreme nature of black metal through some bands adopting a ‘soft’ depressive edge, rather than a ‘hard’ deviance of (self) destruction. 6. Discussion and Conclusions This chapter shows how the concept of madness is utilised in a communicative way to suggest dissonance, deviance and resistance against the instrumentality of

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__________________________________________________________________ what Rojek calls the new capitalism of leisure. To survive in the new capitalism of leisure, Rojek suggests we navigate through a series of interactions with leisure activities that provide us with intentional constructions of who we are as social selves. This intentionality – the communicative making of identity through leisure – plays with and subverts Foucault’s thesis that the definition of madness is in the power of the State, and is a definition that is used to imprison those bodies and kinds unacceptable to the State. Rather, in black metal, madness is a positive discourse, something seen as part of the extreme ideology of misanthropy explicit in the scene. There are, however, limits to the madness. When the madness becomes self-pitying shoegazing, rather than a glorious, deviant Nietzschean destruction of the modern world, the dissonance and mental illness become Othered.

Notes 1

M. Le Greco & S. Tracy, ‘Discourse Tracing as Qualitative Practice’, Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 15(9), 2009, pp. 1516-1543. 2 K. Spracklen, ‘Leisure, Consumption and a Blaze in the Northern Sky’, World Leisure Journal, Vol. 48(3), 2006, pp. 33-55; K. Spracklen, ‘True Aryan Black Metal: The Meaning of Leisure, Belonging and the Construction of Whiteness in Black Metal Music’, The Metal Void: First Gatherings, N. Scott (ed) I-D Press, Oxford, 2010a, pp. 81-93; K. Spracklen, ‘Gorgoroth’s Gaahl’s Gay! Power, Gender and the Communicative Discourse of the Black Metal Scene’, Heavy Metal Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics, R. Hill & K. Spracklen (eds) I-D Press, Oxford, 2010b, pp. 89-102. 3 C. Rojek, The Labour of Leisure, Sage, London, 2010. 4 R. Sennett, The Culture of New Capitalism, Yale University Press, New York, 2006. 5 J. Sandlin & J. Callahan, ‘Deviance, Dissonance, and Détournement: Culture Jammers’ Use of Emotion in Consumer Resistance’, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 9(1), 2009, pp. 79-115. 6 N. Pino, ‘Music as Evil: Ceviance and Metaculture in Classical Music’, Music and Arts in Action, Vol. 2(1), 2009, pp. 37-54. 7 G. Urban, Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 2001. 8 M. Foucault, The History of Madness, Routledge, London, 1961:2006. 9 S. Holland, Alternative Femininities, Oxford, Berg, 2004. 10 K. Spracklen, The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009. 11 K. Spracklen, ‘Leisure, Consumption and a Blaze in the Northern Sky’, World Leisure Journal, Vol. 48(3), 2006, pp. 33-55. 12 See note 2 and 10.

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K. Spracklen, ‘Gorgoroth’s Gaahl’s Gay! Power, Gender and the Communicative Discourse of the Black Metal Scene’, Heavy Metal Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics, pp. 89-102. 14 J. Fernback, ‘Beyond the Diluted Community Concept: A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective on Online Social Relations’, New Media and Society, Vol. 9(1), 2007, pp. 49-69. 15 See note 1. 16 Attila in the magazine article: W. Pinfold, ‘A Sort of Homecoming’, Zero Tolerance, 17, 2007, p. 53. 17 Kvarforth in the magazine article: C. Harvie, ‘Reflections’, Zero Tolerance, 33, 2010, p. 22. 18 Found at http://blackmetal.co.uk/forums/10-general-music-discussions/434265depressive-black-metal.html#434265. 19 See note 2. 20 Found at http://blackmetal.co.uk/forums/10-general-music-discussions/508126qwe-need-a-thread-on-music-and-mental-illnessq.html#508126. 21 CorpsepaintedSmurf, initial posting in thread ‘We need a thread on music and mental illness’, blackmetal.co.uk public forum, posted 3 May 2010, 09:00. The quote has spread like a virus across hundreds of metal and goth web-sites. It is a phrase seemingly first used by the Slovenian experimental rock band Devil Doll in 1987. 22 Inquisitor, response to thread ‘We need a thread on music and mental illness’, blackmetal.co.uk public forum, posted 3 May 2010, 11:52. 23 Found at http://blackmetal.co.uk/forums/8-philosophy-and-religion/514680schizophrenia-and-speed-of-thought.html#514680. 24 Andrew in the magazine article: ‘Caina’, Asgard Root, 2, 2009, p. 60. 25 L in the magazine article: ‘Lyrinx’, Asgard Root, 2, 2009, pp. 32-35.

Bibliography Fernback, J., ‘Beyond the Diluted Community Concept: A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective on Online Social Relations’. New Media and Society. Vol. 9(1), 2007, pp. 49-69. Foucault, M., The History of Madness. Routledge, London, 1961:2006. Holland, S., Alternative Femininities. Oxford, Berg, 2004. Le Greco, M. & Tracy, S., ‘Discourse Tracing as Qualitative Practice’. Qualitative Inquiry. Vol. 15(9), 2009, pp. 1516-1543.

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__________________________________________________________________ Pino, N., ‘Music as Evil: Deviance and Metaculture in Classical Music’. Music and Arts in Action. Vol. 2(1), 2009, pp. 37-54. Rojek, C., The Labour of Leisure. Sage, London, 2010. Sandlin, J. & Callahan, J., ‘Deviance, Dissonance, and Détournement: Culture Jammers’ Use of Emotion in Consumer Resistance’. Journal of Consumer Culture. Vol. 9(1), 2009, pp. 79-115. Sennett, R., The Culture of New Capitalism. Yale University Press, New York, 2006. Spracklen, K., ‘Leisure, Consumption and a Blaze in the Northern Sky’. World Leisure Journal. Vol. 48(3), 2006, pp. 33-55. Spracklen, K., The Meaning and Purpose of Leisure. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009. Spracklen, K., ‘True Aryan Black Metal: The Meaning of Leisure, Belonging and the Construction of Whiteness in Black Metal Music’. The Metal Void: First Gatherings. Scott, N. (ed), I-D Press, Oxford, 2010. Spracklen, K., ‘Gorgoroth’s Gaahl’s Gay! Power, Gender and the Communicative Discourse of the Black Metal Scene’. Heavy Metal Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics. Hill, R. & Spracklen, K. (eds), I-D Press, Oxford, 2010. Urban, G., Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World. Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 2001. Karl Spracklen is a Principal Lecturer in Socio-Cultural Aspects of Sport and Leisure at Leeds Metropolitan University (United Kingdom), and the Chair of the Leisure Studies Association. He is interested in leisure theory, Jurgen Habermas and, in his spare time, real ale.

Lord Satan’s Secret Rites and Satanism as Self-Therapy: The Creation of a Masculinity Gender Identity within Black Metal Sanna Fridh Abstract Satanism and anti-Christianity have always had prominent roles in black metal, expressed in such a way that it has usually been understood as a cult movement. While most musicians and fans today would claim that true evil is organized religion and even more so Christianity, the Satanism in black metal can also be interpreted as a new religions movement, making this statement highly paradoxical. This chapter will investigate how it is possible to understand the black metal movement as a new religious movement by applying Peter Clarke’s concept of the true self to act as a catharsis to separate the individual from the collective. By comparing the true self to ‘being true’, a complex notion of gender roles within black metal will be revealed, where Christianity can be seen as a metaphor for the consumerist society and how it emasculates men through the feminization of masculinity. By being evil through an extreme use of violence, Satanism therefore works as a tool for black metal men to free themselves of the metrosexual shackles and experience themselves as authentic in a world where everyone is supposed to be the same. Key Words: Black metal, Satanism, new religious movements, true self, masculinity, feminization of masculinity, authenticity, metrosexuality. ***** Contrary to popular belief, there is little to no evidence to support the idea that theistic Satanist movements have existed throughout history.1 This means that the Satanism that appears in black metal would be the first popularized form of theistic Satanism to emerge, and as such it can be understood as a new religious movement. The concept ‘new’ is a very important keyword, and here it will be understood as a religious movement that has appeared during the past century. However, the word ‘new’ also implicates many other qualities when discussing religious movements. While scholars sometimes disagree over the definitions of a new religious movement, the definitions that are usually generally agreed upon include the charismatic leader, decentralization and syncretisation of various ideas and philosophies.2 While it is possible to study the black metal movement based on these three definitions and see that the early black metal movement resembles that of a new religious movement in ideology and structure, the term which will be studied and applied in more detail is Peter Clarke’s true self, because it is the true self, more than the other definitions available, that can lend a hand in

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__________________________________________________________________ understanding how it is possible to create a gender identity with the help of religion. 1. The True Self So what is a true self? As the attentive reader might have noticed, the word true self strongly resembles the typical metal jargon of being ‘true’, and this not without reason. According to Clarke, the true self is a term used to describe new religious movements that in particular focus on self-improvement and self-empowerment. Many, if not all, of these religions start with the premise that humans are weak for not being able to realize their true inner potential, and this weakness is the cause of many of the world’s problems like war and pollution. The religion solves this problem by forcing the individual to introspect so one’s true inner potential can be found, such as being a god or an extraterrestrial. By realizing one’s own true potential, it becomes possible to transcend the idea of being a mere mortal. By converting to a religion of the true self, an individual can therefore go from a state of dissatisfaction with him- or herself and/or the current state of the world to a feeling where he or she has transcended the mortal plane into something much greater. This causes a feeling of being unique and special which in turn leads to a sense of authenticity. The reason for this lies in how the practitioner(s) of the religion in question has actually achieved this very special metaphysical state while the rest of humanity has not.3 As such, ‘true’ can and should be understood as ‘authentic’ in this context. When applied to black metal, the premise assumes that humans have become weak because of religion, and most of all Christianity. This has led humans in following a sheep-mentality, and the reason why the world is politically corrupt is because people do not question the current world order. The idea of finding one’s true self therefore means the realization that every human being is by nature actually evil where evil can understood as a kind of primordial force in the universe, created from Satan (one can argue that Satan is evil). A person who has realized his or her true self will thus be able to constantly live out these evil urges, and this will lead to the person to break out of his or her sheep-mentality and become truly individualized, experiencing a sense of authenticity. 2. Gendered Conceptions in Black Metal An authentic identity can in turn be understood in many ways, and humans usually like to emphasize different parts of our identity in different social contexts depending on how we want to be perceived but also how we perceive ourselves. As such, identity is something we constantly create within each given cultural context. However, what constitutes a ‘part’ of someone’s identity is not that easy to pinpoint, especially because it does indeed vary between different social contexts, and it’s not the large events that necessarily matter, it’s the small ones. Consider the text below:

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___________________________________________________________________ The male truck driver may similarly experience his [...] identity in different ways when talking to fellow male truckers, to waitresses, to the odd female trucker, and to his wife on the phone, all at the same truck stop along the highway. Such examples could be multiplied endlessly.4 Even though the way we behave and the way we want others to behave towards us may differ between each social context, there are still some factors that can be considered more ‘constant’ than others, such as gender for the simple reason that all humans are gendered. When studying the black metal movement from a gender perspective, it becomes evident that a vast majority of the musicians are men, and while the number is somewhat less among the fans, the trend is pretty much the same. The movement itself also clearly exhibits certain gendered attitudes, particularly towards homosexuals, where such words as ‘fag’ or ‘gay’ are constantly used in a derogatory sense towards anything that does not fit the criteria of being true. This seems to indicate that in order to be true, one can for example not be homosexual by espousing certain characteristics that we may associate more strongly with homosexuality. So when men use words such as fag or gay, especially when aimed at another man, they question that man’s sexuality and hence, also his gender identity, since the men who are often accused of being homosexual are usually heterosexual men (or at least they are believed to be). Since only true men can act like heterosexual men, those can also only be the ones that possess an authentic masculine identity. While sexual orientation is one part of a gender identity, it’s far from the only one, even though Westerners usually like to think it is.5 As I have been trying to hint so far, what really constitutes gender identities are personal characteristics. One such characteristic is aggression. Violence is for example a very permeating feature in black metal, and many lyrics express violent ideas or ideas about violence (murder, war, Armageddon...). It is also common to pose with medieval weapons in promotional photos, and ritual self-mutilations may be a part of a band’s stage performance/appearance either on or outside the stage. And of course, let’s not forget the murders associated with the genre which goes beyond any kind of metaphorical violence. Indeed, even though death metal might have taken the descriptions of violence in its lyrics to the extreme, it was black metal that lived them out. This might not be so strange when studying the connection between masculinity in violence, as it becomes evident that violence has historically been associated with masculinity for a very long time. The most typical examples include how boys must undergo violent rites of passage in order to become men. However, no matter how mindless and destructive violence may appear, violence can also carry social meanings to create something new by destroying that which already exists. Gry Mørk argues that this is the case with black metal, and she

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__________________________________________________________________ describes how creative violence, and more specifically, a subcategory called progressive violence, can be applied to understand the black metal movement. Here violence serves a function to carry messages about ‘alienation, pain, thirst for vigor, force and self-fulfillment, while simultaneously launching critical perspectives on Western civilization’.6 Progressive violence in particular specifically criticizes how the current consumerist culture is watering down the male into something that is no longer perceived as masculine. If homosexuality is associated with femininity and thus attributes such as care and nurture, then a true black metal musician or fan is violent by nature and he has no fear to inflict violence on others or to himself, which proves his heterosexuality, regardless of whether he is actually heterosexual or not. Ritual self-mutilation is not only interesting but also an important aspect of the black metal movement, in that it affirms how men should constantly attempt to experience pain but not show that they do. The lack of emotion is of course also another typical feature of the stereotypical man, and here violence can serve the purpose to train this particular feature, especially when aimed towards others. This leads me to another aspect of gender, namely appearance. Who has missed the picture of the sleek, young, long-haired, pale man dressed up in black clothes, spikes and chains, carrying a medieval weapon with corpsepaint in his face? When the aesthetic goal is to appear as ugly and repulsive as possible, it’s usually referred to as anti-aesthetics and this is exactly what black metal attempts to do. Even if calling it fashion might be going a bit too far, there is certainly an apparent dressing code that fans and musicians should follow, and breaking this code might lead others to yell ‘fag’ at you, as Mikael Sarelin duly noted in his study of Enochian Crescent and Black Dawn.7 While Gry Mørk argues that the development of the black metal anti-aesthetics was mostly a way to counter the ‘trend kids’, I would like to go further with her assessment and argue that the antiaesthetics is a counter-aesthetic to the metrosexual man. This becomes apparent when noting how the metrosexual man is usually described. One example for example states that the term metrosexual by definition is generally applied to heterosexual men with a strong concern for their appearance, and/or whose lifestyles display attributes stereotypically attributed to gay.8 The word ‘gay’ is an important signifier in this context, because what it assumes is that men who are considered metrosexual naturally act more feminine or are associated with behavior that is usually considered feminine. Such examples include almost a narcissistic attitude towards one’s looks, acting emotional, caring and appearing as a nurturing person, while at the same time being sexually available and considered physically attractive by the opposite sex.

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___________________________________________________________________ Even if there might still be some reluctance of men admitting to be metrosexual, metrosexuality is all over us, especially when it comes to the mass media like TV adverts and giant posters. Metrosexuality can therefore be considered the new masculine ideal, and this goes in line with the idea about progressive violence, in how metrosexual men ultimately are victims of the consumerist culture. If progressive violence is meant to criticize the Western society and how it emasculates men, then progressive violence can be considered a critique against metrosexuality in particular. 3. Satan the Man, Christ the Woman? So if the black metal movement is mostly a critique against current masculine norms and ideas, then how does the religion come into all this? I already established that true self can be understood as ‘true’, and ‘true’ in turn as ‘authentic’. Then who is the most authentic man in black metal, the man every other man in black metal looks up to? Seemingly, that would be Satan or any other names that may refer to the same mythological figure. This becomes apparent when studying the lyrics of many songs, where Satan is often referred to as the narrator’s master, king, emperor or any other title that refers to a person with great social importance. In interviews with prominent musicians, it also becomes clear that many idolize Satan or see Satan as a great source of strength and power, just like how Christians might see Christ in a similar manner. The peculiar part about the Satanism in black metal is that it is not metaphorical like LaVey’s modern Satanism, but theistic; meaning that it is more or less Christianity inverted. This in turn means the inversion of all Christian ideals, like loving your neighbour like you love yourself, help the poor and sick and so on, and a person who exhibits these traits is considered feminine based on the idea that only women are nurturing by nature. The conclusion would be that Christianity promotes femininity as an ideal that goes in line with the idea of metrosexuality as the new masculinity since metrosexual men are heterosexual men who act as if they were homosexual. Since the metrosexual man is highly narcissistic, he is considered extremely superficial. What this implies is that the meterosexual man is an object rather than a subject, and an object among many other objects, since every man should aspire to be like the metrosexual man. There is thus a loss of individuality and hence, authenticity, since a feeling of authenticity often stems from a feeling of uniqueness. So what Satanism in black metal does is that it offers an alternative by presenting an idea of how men should be but currently are not. Metrosexuality can thus be understood as what is commonly known as the feminization of masculinity, which describes an ongoing process where previously typically masculine traits such as aggression (violence) are progressively devalued into something negative. Since the theist Satanism in black metal is an inverted version of Christianity, it is possible to understand Christianity as a metaphor for the feminization of masculinity. The true self in black metal therefore revolves

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__________________________________________________________________ around how the feminization of masculinity (i.e. Christianity) has weakened men into lesser beings, and by understanding this, their true inner masculine potential can be unleashed. This also explains why many men within black metal like to describe themselves as evil, because by doing so they affine a supernatural power which they have gained thanks to realizing their true selves. 4. Conclusions In this chapter I have argued that it is possible to understand the Satanism in black metal as a new religious movement by drawing a comparison between Peter Clarke’s concept of the true self to the typical metal jargon of being ‘true’. By investigating what it means to be true, it becomes evident that true seems to be strongly connected with gendered concepts within black metal, and particularly, masculinity. By studying certain aspects associated with gender, it becomes possible to understand black metal as a stark social critique against current masculine ideals, and most notably the phenomenon of metrosexuality. By using Christianity as a metaphor for the feminization of masculinity, the Satanism in black metal expresses a desire for many men to find an authentic gender identity in a world where being ‘manly’ seems to be the same as ‘womanly’. More than just being a sonic assault, black metal therefore fills a void where men can be men, even if it just means the one hour and thirty minutes it takes to attend a concert.

Notes 1

J. Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts, Indiana University Press, USA, 1985. 2 P. Clarke, New Religious Movements in Global Perspective: A Study of Religious Change in the Modern World, Routledge, New York and London, 2006. 3 Ibid. 4 A. Gottlieb, ‘Interpreting Gender and Sexuality’, Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Frontlines, J. McClancy (ed), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002, p. 171. 5 D. Kulick, Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes, The University of Chicago Press, London and Oxford, 1998. 6 G. Mørk, ‘With my Art I am the Fist in the Face of God: On Old-School Black Metal’, Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology, J.A. Petersen (eds), MPG Books Ltd., Cornwall, 2009. 7 M. Sarelin, ‘Masculinities within Black Metal: Heteronormativity, Protest Masculinity or Queer?’ The Metal Void: First Gathering, N.W.R. Scott (ed), InterDisciplinary Press, Oxford, 2010. 8 S. Blu, Bang: True to the Streets 103.6 http://www.bangradio.fm/index.php/ 2009/02/08/metrosexuality-porn.

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Bibliography Baddeley, G., Lucifer Rising: A Book of Sin, Devil Worship and Rock’n’Roll. Plexus Publishing Limited, London, 1999. Bossius, T., Med framtiden i backspegeln: black metal- och transkulturen.Ungdomar, musik och religion i en senmodern värld. Bokförlaget Daidalos, Göteborg, 2003. Bowie, F., The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2006. Clarke, P., New Religious Movement in Global Perspective: A Study of Religious Change in the Modern World. Routledge, New York and London, 2006. Edwards, T., Cultures of Masculinity. Routledge, New York and London, 2006. Geertz, C., ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’. Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2006. Gootlieb, A., ‘Interpreting Gender and Sexuality’. Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002. Iida, Y., ‘Beyond the ‘Feminisation of Masculinity: Transforming Patriarchy with the ‘Feminine’ in Contemporary Japanese Youth Culture’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Vol. 6, 2005, pp. 56-74. Klaits, J., Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts. Indiana University Press, USA, 1985. Kulick, D., Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. The University of Chicago Press, London and Oxford, 1998. Moynihan, M., Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground. Feral House, Los Angeles, 2003. Mørk, G., ‘With my Art I am the Fist in the Face of God: On Old-School Black Metal’. Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology. Petersen, J.A. (ed), MPG Books Ltd., Cornwall, 2009.

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__________________________________________________________________ Sarelin, M., ‘Masculinities within Black Metal: Heteronormativity, Protest Masculinity or Queer?’ The Metal Void: First Gathering. Scott, N.W.R. (ed), InterDisciplinary Press, Oxford, 2010. Sanna Fridh is a graduate in the Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg. Her primary research interests include the anthropology of religion and gender studies.

‘A Furore Normannorum, Libera Nos Domine!’ A Short History of Going Berserk in Scandinavian Literature and Heavy Metal Imke von Helden Abstract The motif of the berserker (‘one whose actions are recklessly defiant’) and of ‘going berserk’ (‘going mad’, ‘to become violent and uncontrolled’) has a longstanding cultural history, especially in old Scandinavian literature. It is in hm. The following chapter aims to portray the history of the motif from Old Norse literature to its presence in today’s culture and particularly in heavy metal music. I aim to show how the motif is used to act as both a channel for aggression and as social criticism. Key Words: Berserker, heavy metal, madness, Manowar, Thyrfing, Månegarm. ***** 1. Multifarious Metal Madness Madness and Heavy metal seem to be the perfect match: It is evident at metal concerts, where the crowd goes wild and bang their heads or perform the ‘Wall of Death’; it can be found on album cover designs and lyrics, in breakneck guitar solos and sometimes even in the ideological excesses of fans and musicians. To the outsider, this world often seems threatening and nihilistic. Critics generally assume that heavy metal has a dramatic effect on teenagers as well as ‘causing madness and death’,1 or at least that it negatively influences young people’s lives to a great extent. Some regard metal music as an attack on traditional values. Metal indeed seems to glorify violence, death and negativity itself, with band names such as Slayer, Mayhem, Twisted Sister and Napalm Death – let alone album titles like Massive Killing Capacity or Butchered at Birth – titles that can hardly be enjoyed by a healthy mind. Robert Walser, however, suggests to perceive the phenomenon as critical madness: heavy metal does not intend to spread madness, but utilises it as a means of reflecting and criticising the insanity taking place in society, such as the effects of social indifference or violent conflicts. Deena Weinstein suggests a ‘figural and contextual interpretation rather than a literal reading’2 of heavy metal. Weinstein, while saying that there are basic similarities among themes of songs, states that there are ‘significant core thematic complexes’, namely clusters of the Dionysian and the Chaotic. Surely, the madness-motif and with it, the berserker, belongs to the latter. Like Walser, she views in motifs such as disorder, conflict, opposition and contradiction a readiness to acknowledge the facts of life and try to deal with them. Thus, the berserker-motif is a way of expressing both madness and social criticism in heavy metal songs and thereby a medium of coping with the world. In

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__________________________________________________________________ order to facilitate text comprehension, the following section will help to explain the literary and historical background of the berserker. 2. The Berserker in Literature and History Descriptions of fierce heroism and wild fury as being peculiar to the Germanic people already appear in the writings by and records of ancient authors. A Nordic phenomenon among their fighters is the berserker, who is said to be a long-haired, huge and vigorous warrior fighting in uncontrollable anger and who is reputed to be insensitive to pain. Old Norse sagas, Skaldic verses, annals and historical works contain a great abundance of berserker characteristics. Snorri Sturlusson’s berserker-definition in the Ynglinga Saga portrays them as mad, inhuman fighters without body armour: Woden’s men went without hauberks and raged like dogs or wolves. They bit their shields and were strong like bears or bulls. They killed men, but neither fire nor iron could hurt them. This is called berserksgangr.3 Furthermore, berserker characteristics include howling, flashing eyes, twisting faces and bodies and foam coming from the berserkers’ mouths, whenever they are irritated or enter battle. The berserker appear mainly in stereotypical roles: They are often a king’s bodyguards or belong to an elite troop. Being often considered as outlaws or troublemakers, they appear as unwelcome suitors4 or heathen demons, too. In terms of etymology, the meaning of the prefix ber- can be connected to the Old Norse noun berr/beri (bear), resulting in the thought that berserker were ‘bearfighters’ and particularly brave and/or carrying wolf skin. Another assumption connects the figure to the adjective berr, meaning bare or naked, and refers to the lack of armour. The actual existence of similar warriors outside of literature is highly contested. Klaus von See,5 who does not doubt the existence of these warriors, places the berserker in medieval literature rather than in real life and regards the word in the ‘Haraldskvæði’ as being not an established term, but an invention and addition of a later poet. According to von See, there are neither runic inscriptions, nor are there any occurrences of the word in the collection of medieval Scandinavian law texts. Even proponents of the assumption that the berserker existed in history, like Clive Tolley, assign most of the cultural aspects, like initiation rites, to the world of literature.6 They appear as a motif in Old Norse literature, more specifically in Eddaic poetry, Skaldic poetry and sagas. However, there are an immense amount of sources that display these grim warriors, the earliest reference deriving from the already mentioned poem ‘Haraldskvæði’. Later, the word mainly appears in Eddaic-Skaldic poetry and Icelandic prose from the 12th century onwards, for

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___________________________________________________________________ example the Íslendingadrápa (approx. 12th century) and Grettis Saga (approx. 14th century). Michael P. Speidel builds up a slightly different picture of the berserker by tracing their history back to the timespan between 1300 BC to 1300 AD. He draws on archaeological evidence from the 13th century BC, which suggests an origin of an alleged berserker-tradition in the late Bronze Age. The warriors of the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta fought the Hittites and the Babylonians as berserk-like fighters. They shed their armour and part of their clothing in sight of the enemy.7 This was an uncommon phenomenon in the Babylonian-Assyrian tradition where warfare included orderly rows of heavily armed and disciplined soldiers and might have shocked the combatants. Speidel’s reference is an epic that describes and praises the berserk fighting style. They are furious, raging, taking forms strange as Anzu. They charge forward furiously to the fray without armour, They had stripped off their breastplates, discarded their clothing (…) The fierce heroic men danced with sharpened weapons.8 Speidel’s argumentation connects the long-lasting tradition of this fighting style and their code of honour and behaviour to the tribal culture the people lived in.9 However, their downfall came with growing influence of the Romans’ armies: With their more civilised warfare came simplified clothing and lighter weapons which made fighting easier. But even some time after this change, berserk troops were hired from outside to support the soldiers.10 According to Hermann Güntert, the berserk tradition died out with the arrival of Christianity.11 The sources differ on what made people become berserker. Güntert claims the rage to be inheritable and come out when a person was thwarted or slightly irritated, whereas others have suggested various medicinal explanations12 such as fungi, roots or intoxicating tonics, and even witchcraft.13 The rage was, according to Speidel, roused by shouting and singing or screeching like raucous birds, war songs were sung and dances on the battlefield fanned fury and bonded the warriors together.14 3. Heavy Metal Berserker The berserker-motif can be found in various fields of contemporary culture. It appears in many different contexts and forms in films, video games and role-plays. Even more frequent is the utilisation of the berserker as a motif in song lyrics, especially in heavy metal music: The online reference work Encyclopaedia Metallum lists 19 band names that include the word; furthermore 12 album titles and 115 song titles. That indicates the importance of the motif to the genre. In the following, my aim is to analyse exemplarily the lyrics of heavy metal songs by

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__________________________________________________________________ Manowar, Thyrfing and Månegarm that feature the berserker-motif and to find out in what ways it illustrates a connection between heavy metal and madness. Manowar’s lyrics generally focus on heavy metal and fantasy stories about war, heroes, loyalty. In recent years, the application of Norse mythology has increased within the band’s textual and visual concept. In the song ‘The Sons of Odin’15 from the album Gods of War the first person narrator seems to walk alone through the night, thinking proudly of an already fought battle and the day he himself may die in combat. In addition, the song lists facts and fiction known of the Viking Age, among them above mentioned aspects of berserker history: The lines ‘Killers of men/of warriors friend’ indicates the historical assumption that berserker were hired by kings or jarls to support their troops. The missing facts are filled with concepts of honour and fame that are consistent with Manowar’s general view on war themes: Courage and loyalty to fellow fighters are important to the narrator (‘sworn to avenge our fallen brothers’), whose thoughts oscillate between thoughtfulness and pride, as well as the awareness of his own mortality and the day he will join the einherjer (fallen Viking warriors) in Valhalla. This personalisation of history through the display of thoughts and feelings of supposedly historical characters is frequently used in glocal metal.16 One verse of the lyrics is decidedly dedicated to the berserker rage and their fighting style: And in their hour of need He sent forth unto them The Berserker Rage Now gods and men They rose up from the ground Screaming like wild animals Such is the gift of absolute power No blade or weapon could harm them They killed men and horses alike And all who stood before them died that day Hail Gods Of War. The berserker here serves as an escapist motif that is confined to world of fantasy and stories, so there is obviously no connection to the real world. However, there are numerous examples in other metal songs that suggest a connection between the ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ berserker in that the authors of the lyrics make him a character whose rage is aroused by a certain matter and who fights against everything without caring for social rules and frameworks, thus constructing an outlet for social criticism in the widest sense of the term: Social criticism could be anything from unease about other people’s behaviour to the critique of society. In the following, I will briefly discuss two such examples.

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___________________________________________________________________ Especially in the Nordic viking and folk metal subgenres, there are numerous albums and songs that include the motif of the berserker without explicitly mentioning the word. Among these albums is Vansinnesvisor (Songs of Madness) by Thyrfing from Sweden.17 The lyrical concept is dedicated to negativity and the darker side of mankind that can be resolved only by ‘kick[ing] the walls [of the dark tunnel] out and create that light yourself’.18 Since the band members state that they are very interested in the Viking Age, a connection between the lyrics of the title song ‘Vansinnesvisan’ (The Madness Song)19 and berserker can be made, even if there is no mention of the word itself in the text: the first person narrator is angry to a degree bordering on madness and is expressing his will to slay people around him. Not much more information on the circumstances and people involved is given during the song: It is not clear though why the narrator is killing and why the death of these people will not or cannot be mourned by their relatives and beloved, as the text also states. The only person who is able to stand by the graves and mock the memory of the dead is the slayer himself. It is neither clear whom the aim of all this aggression is, nor is it obvious who the ‘I’ in the song is. Even in terms of time and place, the song is universal, since there are no references whatsoever. ‘Ingen hjältars sal, ingen himmelsk fröjd när makter (na) (era) öden utmäta/Blott spott och spe era eftermälen färga ‘(No Hall of Heroes, no heavenly joy when the powers rate your fate/Only mockery and scorn will be your remembrance) may give a hint that the slain are no followers of Odin (Hall of Heroes meaning Valhalla, where those who died in combat are guided by the Valkyries), but Christians who tried to convert the heathens to their faith. The descriptions of the state of the first person narrator are strongly reminiscent of the berserker characteristics. One of the band members says about this song in an interview: It’s about all those feelings inside when you loose your fucking mind with rage and anger and how you’d like to piss on the graves of those who have ever done you wrong.20 Indeed, the lyrics include signals of excessive hate, like ‘Länge nog har era maskätna huvuden vilat på era veka axlar’ (Long enough has your worm-eaten head rested upon your weak shoulders) and there are various other indications concerning the berserk state ‘En längtande känsla sprider sig I mina nävar och lustan brinner’ (A longing feeling is spreading in my fists and belligerence is burning) and fight ‘Klinga stolt när ben möter stål, klinga stolt när sårsvetten droppar’ (It is a mighty sound when bone meets steel, the blade is proud when the blood is dripping from it). The last line of the lyrics, ‘I mitt vansinne fann ni livets ruttna slut’ (In my madness, your life found its rotten end), gives a final hint on the person as acting as slaying berserk. The above mentioned statement also points to a transference of the berserker motif from a historical or literary context to a contemporary one, perhaps a problematic everyday situation.

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__________________________________________________________________ In the song ‘Vredens Tid’ (Age of Wrath) from the homonymous album21 by Månegarm from Sweden, there is no appearance of the word berserker either. Here, the figure of the berserker seems to arise from memories, thousands of years after his ‘actual’ existence, a memory, the narrator can take comfort from: ‘Minnen svunna stiger åter ur tidens vittrande stoft./Ur leden stiger de fram, en gyllene flamma av hopp.’ (Lost memories arise again, from the withering dust of time/They step forth from the ranks, a golden flame of hope.’). Again, these figures are threatening and powerful: ‘Ett föraktets dova töcken, närd av nid och hån./Bländad av raseri, på hämndens vinger buren’ (The dull haze of disdain. Nourished by spite and scorn/Blinded by fury. Borne on the wings of vengeance). They bear the characteristics of the berserker in literature: ‘vredens herrar’ (masters of wrath) and ‘skapare av vanvettets kaos’ (creator of the chaos of madness), they act brutally, and are blind to helplessness ‘Vanmakten inför vredens hand, speglar/i blinda ögon.’ (The powerlessness before the hand of wrath, is mirrored in blind eyes). The lyrics thus connect the saga berserker with a contemporary character who is bursting with anger, but who is beyond that able to come to terms with his problems by using the berserker motif as a means of channelling his aggressions. 4. A ‘Social’ Berserker? In the lyrics discussed above, the berserker-motif appears as an escapist element and metaphor for finding a vent for disappointment or unjustness one has experienced. The motif appears as a flame of hope and a consoling remembrance of a reputedly glorious past, where loyalty and honesty were values that counted and where you could fight for something that was even worth dying for. It is about criticising others without caring for the right words, of finding a vent for aggressions. It also mirrors the state of headbanging and ‘going berserk’ in the moshpit at concerts, drinking mead or other alcoholic drinks, and maybe a dream of not being as civilised as you have to be in everyday life. And, eventually, the motif is a way of expressing both anger and social criticism in heavy metal songs and thereby, a medium of coping with the world, of coping with annoying comments of people around you or anything that makes a person go ‘mad’.

Notes 1

R. Walser, Running With the Devil, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1993, p.146f: Walser is referring to the lawsuit against Judas Priest where the band was accused of driving two young men to suicide. 2 D. Weinstein, Heavy Metal: A Music and Its Culture, DaCapo Press, 2000, p. 34. 3 S. Sturlusson, Heimskringla, Ynglinga Saga 6. 4 See B. Blaney, ‘The Berserk Suitor: The Literary Application of a Stereotyped Theme’, Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 54, 1982, p. 279.

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K. von See, ‘Berserker’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung, Vol. 17, 1961, p. 129. 6 C. Tolley, ‘Hrólfs Saga Kráka and Sámi Bear Rites’, Saga Book, Vol. 31, 2007, pp. 6 & 18. 7 See M. Speidel, ‘Berserks: A History of Indo-European ‘Mad Warriors’, Journal of World History, Vol. 13, 2002, p. 254f. 8 See Speidel, op.cit., p. 255. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 280. 11 H. Güntert, ‘Über altisländische Berserker-Geschichten’, Beiträge zum Jahresbericht des Heidelberger Gymnasiums, Vol.10, 1912, p. 22. 12 A. Guðmundsdóttir, ‘Um Berserki, Berserksgang og Amanita Muscaria’, Skírnir, Vol. 175, 2001, pp. 317-353. 13 See M. Speidel, op.cit., p. 274. 14 Ibid. 15 Manowar ‘The Sons of Odin’, Gods of War, Magic Circle Music, 2007. 16 I apply the term glocal metal to all bands that deal with local elements (history, national literature & symbols) within the global context of metal music. The term glocal was introduced by R. Robertson and serves as corrective to the term globalisation. See also von Helden 2011. 17 Thyrfing, ‘Vansinnesvisan’, Vansinnesvisor, Hammerheart, 2002. 18 Interview with Thyrfing on Metalkings.com, accessed 20th September 2010), http://metalkings.com/reviews/thyrfing/thyrfing-eng.htm. 19 Thyrfing, Vansinnesvisor, op.cit. 20 Interview with Thyrfing on Voices from the Dark Side, accessed 21st September 2010, http://www.voicesfromthedarkside.de/interviews/thyrfing.htm. 21 Månegarm, ‘Vredens Tid’, Vredens Tid, Displeased Records, 2005.

Bibliography Blaney, B., ‘The Berserk Suitor: The Literary Application of a Stereotyped Theme’. Scandinavian Studies. Vol. 54, 1982, pp. 279-294. Guðmundsdóttir, A., ‘Um Berserki, Berserksgang og Amanita Muscaria’. Skírnir. Vol. 175, 2001, pp. 317-353. Güntert, H., ‘Über altisländische Berserker-Geschichten’. Beiträge Jahresbericht des Heidelberger Gymnasiums. Vol.10, 1912, pp. 6-33. Månegarm, ‘Vredens Tid’. Vredens Tid. Displeased Records, 2005.

zum

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__________________________________________________________________ Speidel, M., ‘Berserks: A History of Indo-European ‘Mad Warriors’. Journal of World History. Vol. 13, 2002, pp. 253-290. Thyrfing, ‘Vansinnesvisan’. Vansinnesvisor. Hammerheart, 2002. Tolley, C., ‘Hrólfs Saga Kráka and Sámi Bear Rites’. Saga Book. Vol. 31, 2007, pp. 5-21. von Helden, I., ‘Glocal Metal: Lokale Phänomene einer globalen Heavy MetalKultur.’ Metal Matters: Heavy Metal als Kultur und Welt, LIT-Verlag Münster (in press). von See, K., ‘Berserker’. Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung. Vol. 17, 1961, pp. 129-135. Walser, R., Running With the Devil. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1993. Weinstein, D., Heavy Metal: A Music and Its Culture. DaCapo Press, 2000. Imke von Helden is a PhD student and a member of the research group History in Popular Cultures of Knowledge at Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany. Her research deals with cultural and national identity in heavy metal music. She is also a member of the MMP steering group.