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English Pages 178 [189] Year 2021
How Music Empowers
How Music Empowers argues that empowerment is the key to unlocking the long-standing mystery of how music moves us. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in embodied cognitive science, psychology, and cultural studies, the book provides a new way of understanding how music affects listeners. The argument develops from our latest conceptions of what it is to be human, investigating experiences of listening to popular music in everyday life. Through listening, individuals have the potential to redefine themselves, gain resilience, connect with other people, and make a difference in society. Applying a groundbreaking theoretical framework to postmillennial rap and metal, the book uncovers why vast numbers of listeners engage with music typically regarded as ‘social problems’ or dismissed as ‘extreme’. In the first ever comparative analytical treatment of rap and metal music, twenty songs are analysed as case studies that reveal the empowering potential of listening. The book details how individuals interact with rap and metal communities in a self-perpetuating process which keeps these thriving music cultures – and the listeners themselves – alive and well. Can music really change the world? How Music Empowers answers: yes, because it changes us. How Music Empowers will interest scholars and researchers of popular music, ethnomusicology, music psychology, music therapy, and music education. Steven Gamble is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at University College Cork, studying digital-native hip-hop. His research on experiences of listening and fandom in the Internet age has been published in Popular Music, the Journal on the Art of Record Production, Metal Music Studies, and Palgrave Macmillan’s Pop Music, Culture and Identity series.
How Music Empowers Listening to Modern Rap and Metal
Steven Gamble
First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Steven Gamble The right of Steven Gamble to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gamble, Steven, author. Title: How music empowers: listening to modern rap and metal / Steven Gamble. Description: [1.] | New York : Taylor & Francis, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020046795 (print) | LCCN 2020046796 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367339555 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429323034 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—Social aspects. | Rap (Music)— Social aspects. | Heavy metal (Music)—Social aspects. | Power (Social sciences) Classification: LCC ML3918.P67 G33 2021 (print) | LCC ML3918.P67 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/8424—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046795 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046796 ISBN: 978-0-367-33955-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32303-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra
Contents
List of illustrations Acknowledgements
vii ix
1
Introduction
2
Listening to popular music in everyday life: an ecological-embodied approach
20
3
Individual empowerment in rap and metal music listening
41
4
Music as a lifeline: listening for resilience
66
5
The empowerment of popular music communities
93
6
Can music change the world? Empowerment, politics, and social change
128
Conclusion
156
Index
173
7
1
Illustrations
Music examples 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 6.1
Little Simz (2014): “Bars Simzson”; 0’47”–1’00” Jay-Z (2003): “Dirt Off Your Shoulder”; basic verse pattern P.O.D. (2001): “Alive”; basic riff KoЯn (2002): “Here to Stay”; 0’39”–0’48” Drake (2013): “Worst Behavior”; verse rhymes Talib Kweli (2002): “Get By”; refrain A Day To Remember (2009): “The Downfall of Us All”; 0’07”–0’15” All That Remains (2006): “Indictment”; chorus guitar riff
48 54 56 72 76 83 100 135
Figure 5.1
Abbreviated version of the ICE framework, from Travis and Deepak (2011: 211)
104
Table 5.1
Definitions of empowerment in community psychology
103
Acknowledgements
I first realised I wanted to write a book about popular music during the final year of my undergraduate degree. Under the supervision of Prof. Emeritus Allan Moore, I wrote a dissertation on the analysis of metal music, with way too much research and far too many case studies to actually fit within the modest word limit. It certainly wasn’t bad – in fact, it was a solid piece of undergraduate work – but it was extremely overblown. I made all sorts of bold claims about what existing scholarship was getting wrong and how my provocative new approach would fix everything. Of course, all of it is quite painful to read back in the present day, but what makes me cringe most of all is how earnestly I wrote out an entire page of acknowledgements for what now feels like a thing of such insignificance. And so, I feel that I’ve written out my extensive, heartfelt thanks somewhat prematurely. With that in mind, I’m going to buck the trend of lengthy acknowledgements delaying the good stuff, and simply list people to whom I owe thanks, in alphabetical order by surname. The exception is Alie Garbutt, without whom this book would not exist at all: thank you for your love, support, and laughter. Shoutouts, gratitude, big love, many thanks, much appreciation: Claire Bannister, Cath Berry, Nick Braae, Peter Brietbart, Eric Clarke, Andre Doehring, Adrian Gamble, Dave Gamble, Karen-Marie Gamble, Max Gambleberry, the Garbutt family, Nick Goode, Sam Griffiths, Kai Arne Hansen, Tim Hughes, Leah Kardos, Lewis Kennedy, Tom Marshall, Remy Martin, Allan Moore, Niamh, Pixel, Lydia Popiolek, Griff Rollefson, the Riotous Fist, the anonymous reviewers and fantastic editorial team at Routledge, Sophia Sartre, Dan South, Laura Staab, Jon Stewart, the staff at TECHNE, Isabella van Elferen, Ralf von Appen, Jess West, and Justin Williams. I am genuinely, enormously grateful for your contributions to my thinking and well-being. Now, let’s get empowered, shall we?
1
Introduction
Introduction The bass drum thunders in your chest. Lightning follows, a f lash of distorted guitar or crackling synth, charging its way through your body. An utterance strikes you: it is loud, imposing, uninhibited. Your mouth opens in reciprocation, to be met instantly by a vanguard voice. All around you – with you – allies seem to weather the storm, resilient raindrops in a squall of sonic power. Or maybe you face the gale alone at this moment, but you know you are part of something much bigger. This is your storm, after all: an ensemble of sounds swept up in a familiar environment where strength, survival, and solidarity prevail. This is empowerment. This is rap and this is metal. This book is about the empowering potential of listening to rap and metal music. I approach empowerment as an experiential process, one which intersects with a number of key ideas: listening, the body, perception, cognition, the environment, identity, and community. In everyday discourse, countless people report feeling empowered by listening to music, verging on a cultural ubiquity that is worthy of focused attention. Still, we must proceed with caution. What it means to feel empowered by music is open to interpretation, and understood quite differently from person to person. It is undeniable, however, that music affects us in ways that feel, in some way, related to power. And no music is more commonly described as empowering than the dynamic, vibrant, contemporary genres of rap and metal beloved by fans worldwide. They are loved, but by no means universally. Rap and metal are two of the most controversial and divisive kinds of popular music thriving today. Conservative media sources have labelled them “problem” or “deviant” music (that is, if they are not dismissed outright as “just noise”). Since the development of each genre – roughly concurrent in the 1970s – they have been consistently attacked, censored, and suppressed. Parents have worried about the corrupting inf luence of rap and metal on their children. Authorities have warned of the politicising potential of such music. Others simply cannot bear to hear even a single track of either genre.1 I have long felt that besides cultural fears and anxieties, what initially puts many people off is how they
2 Introduction
sound. Indeed, the extreme antipathy that rap and metal sometimes provoke demonstrates the importance of style as a concept which determines musical experience, taste, and value (Green 2008: 51–59). Disdain for rap and metal as music has encouraged critics to scapegoat their associated music cultures and blame them for a range of social ills. Wellknown clashes between political institutions and metal include the censorship attempts of the Parents’ Music Resource Center (Chastagner 1999), court cases over teenage suicides (Brackett 2018), and media panics in the wake of violent incidents (Wright 2000; Brown 2013). Similarly, rap has been accused of causing violence (Rose 2008: 33–60), used as evidence of criminal behaviour in legal convictions (Dunbar 2018; Nielson and Dennis 2019), and received condemnation from African American cultural commentators, who argue that rap has harmful impacts upon black youth (Kilson 2003; McWhorter 2008). So, in suggesting that rap and metal can empower people, I am starting on the back foot. Political rebukes have been substantiated by psychological research. The size of the literature on rap and metal in the empirical sciences rivals the body of work in popular music studies and its parent disciplines. There is a multitude of quantitative assessments of the damage that rap and metal apparently cause, which Rowe (2018: 12) characterises as “psychopathology”. Experiments tend to rely upon a “hypodermic model” of media consumption, as though music could inject ideas directly into members of the public (Croteau and Hoynes 2014: 235–236). In most of these studies, individuals attend to media which has been predetermined by the researchers as “violent” or “nonviolent”, “sexual” or “nonsexual”. The criteria used to make such categorisations are highly tenuous, if they are made explicit at all (which is extremely uncommon).2 Moreover, the methodology employed by such work is based upon asking leading questions using essentialist and stereotypical definitions, thereby suggesting the answers being sought.3 The Hip Hop Archive (2020), which collects scholarly literature on hip-hop culture, notably omits psychological research of this nature, indicating that it does not meet their criteria for inclusion: “scholarship devoted to the knowledge, art, culture, materials, organizations, movements and institutions of Hiphop”. I stand by this position, and disregard studies that treat rap and metal as social problems requiring resolution. Humanities research provides an important corrective, taking the hand that points the finger at rap or metal and turning it to face the poor social conditions or inequitable political economies that produce “problem music”. Instead, metal – at least, in its earliest form, heavy metal – is characterised as music mostly by and for white working-class youth, predominantly men, initially in Britain (Weinstein 2000; Bayer 2009). Since the 1970s, metal has proliferated into a vast metagenre, with scenes across the globe (Wallach et al. 2011). Rap has been studied as the music of black and Latinx (or otherwise Afrodiasporic) urban youth, originally developed in 1970s’ New York, before quickly spreading across the United States and then the world (Perry
Introduction 3
2004; Chang 2005). Hip-hop culture is understood to constitute (at least) four elements or pillars: rap vocals (MCing), turntablism (DJing), breakdancing, and graffiti (Rose 1994). These four cultural practices can now be found internationally in urban spaces, evidence of the “global Hip Hop nation” (Mitchell 2001; Alim et al. 2009) or “hip hop generation” (Fernandes 2011). The academic fields of hip-hop studies and metal music studies offer a range of culturally informed, insider perspectives that contextualise thinking about empowerment. Some notes on terminology and methodology will be instructive. My use of the term “rap” refers to the combination of the first two of hip-hop’s elements – rap vocals and DJ/producer-made beats – in commercially released, recorded popular music. The metal I discuss is also in recorded form. This is a practical limitation, for analyses of music benefit from a widely accessible, shared source. The approach to listening developed here could be applied, with little modification, to listening in a live context. To provide a central point of reference, however, recordings comprise the “primary text”, as emphasised by Allan Moore (Moore and Martin 2018), and so you are invited to listen along while you read.4 All of the tracks5 analysed in this book were commercially released between 2000 and 2020, which accounts for the “modern” in the subtitle. I am not making any particular arguments about modern rap and metal by contrast with earlier manifestations of the music. The millennium is, however, a useful starting point, given that Adam Krims (2000) and Keith Kahn-Harris (2007) cover rap and metal, respectively, up to this time. A second reason for addressing only this period is that it marks a transformation of popular music consumption into the digital domain (since, say, the Apple iPod launched in 2001). Third, it is the music I grew up listening to, and can therefore attest to some specialist knowledge in discussing it as an acafan (that is, as both academic and fan, putting my professional expertise and personal interests to work in productive dialogue).
Analysis So, what does modern rap and metal sound like? It has been some time since Krims (2000: 3) argued that “the ‘musical poetics’ of rap must be taken seriously”, and Kahn-Harris (2011: 252) called for studies to remedy “the most critical weakness in metal studies as it stands: the relative paucity of detailed musicological analyses on metal”. The rate of change here is evidently slow, as long before that Simon Frith (1987: 145) proclaimed that “we still do not know nearly enough about the musical language of pop and rock”. This is the first book-length analytical study of rap and metal, so I will have to lay out some assumptions that underlie my methods of popular music analysis. The first is that pieces of rap and metal music are, by and large, popular songs.6 This might seem an unusual contention given that both genres often eschew singing, but the point stands that much of the musical interest and pleasure lies in the interaction between the voice and its accompaniment.
4 Introduction
As such, I employ Moore’s (2005, 2012, 2013) theoretical frame, the personic environment, for understanding how the perception of a voice allows listeners to imagine a persona, who is situated within a virtual environment.7 In describing a track’s personic environment as “supportive”, for example, I interpret the non-vocal music to reinforce the persona’s position and substantiate the persona’s claims. This is the normative role for the environment in rap, where we can distinguish between the persona’s f low (everything the vocal does) and the beat, which is not purely the percussive rhythm but “the entire complement to the rapper’s f low” (Williams 2013: 177). There are several conventions concerning the production of modern rap and metal songs, which shape the spatial sonics of the soundbox (Moore and Dockwray 2008; Moore et al. 2009; Dockwray and Moore 2010; Moore 2012: 29–44). Focusing on analysis rather than interpretation, the soundbox addresses how sound sources are arranged in popular music mixes, with norms holding since 1970s rock productions. The lead vocal is typically louder than any other voice, compressed to have a consistent dynamic presence, and situated, immobile, in the centre of the stereo field. Rap plays with this convention, especially through an abundance of auxiliary voices (whether “hype men”, “ad-libs”, or “doubles”). Metal upholds rock’s diagonal mix (Moore and Dockwray 2008): drums mostly centred, but with toms and cymbals spread evenly across the stereo plane, bass more narrowly in the middle, and guitars positioned to the left and right (Mynett 2017: 203–207). The slight diagonal line through kick, bass, and snare seems completely vertical in some modern rap and metal mixes, however, giving a layout I refer to as the “mirror mix”, where equivalent spatial activity is mirrored on either side of the central axis (especially with modern metal’s fondness for double- or quadtracked rhythm guitars hard-panned to each side). The soundbox is thus used to examine virtual recorded spaces as listeners perceive them – encompassing what they expect to hear and where – not as any objective environment “existing as physical space” (Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2013: 72). I have mentioned conventions, norms, and expectations. How well listeners are versed in the sounds of rap and metal is a question of style competence. Music style is “the medium by virtue of which we experience music, and without which we could have no music at all” (Green 2008: 53). Without recognising, for example, how drums carry rhythm, how guitars move in pitch, how the timbres of the voice change, listeners could not identify music “as distinct from non-musically meaningful sound” (Green 2008: 54). Style is a matter of individual judgement and social negotiation based upon heard qualities of music, mediating what listeners anticipate to hear based upon their prior listening experience and familiarity with such music. I must emphasise the importance of this perspective to the empowerment that individuals experience in their rap and metal listening, so I will delve into music style at the end of Chapter 2, before we start our listening proper. There are a few final points to clarify regarding my approach. I am writing in a music-theoretical context where many scholars are still convinced
Introduction 5
of the notion that modern popular music is tonal music, and complies with traditions of common practice era harmony (Everett 2015: 9). I dismiss this argument wholesale. It has been long argued – albeit not acted upon in the main – that applying tools developed for the analysis of Western European art music to songs produced 300 years later in the legacy of African American blues and gospel is inadequate. How convenient it would be if an entirely separate popular tradition cohered to the exact systems in which most classical musicologists are trained! Alas, this is not the case. Popular music is loopbased music that uses short cycles of harmonic motion, as epitomised by electronic dance music (Butler 2006). I take rap and metal to be modal, following Moore’s (2012: 69–89) theory of popular music harmony.8 Ideas of dissonance requiring teleological resolution to consonance, and of dominants needing to return cadentially to tonics, retain little value in my analyses. Much more interesting is how chord sequences inform timbre and virtual space, as guitars leap down dramatically, say, or the bass drives upward, step by persistent step, or the persona fights the environment, with the voice clashing against a neighbouring tone in the guitar. With this point belaboured, I should confess that I retain some extracts of score notation to illustrate particular musical moments. Such excerpts show my own transcription, describing rather than prescribing what I hear, for the benefit of those who read sheet music (and little is lost for those who do not, since the overwhelming majority of my analysis takes the form of prose). Lastly, a note on the significance of lyrics. The hip-hop studies literature features many instances of lyrics transcribed and interpreted either as direct political discourse (Potter 1995) or as poetry (Bradley 2009). While early hip-hop performance can be considered a form of oral expression based in African American traditions, the contemporary, globalised, commercial popular genre that is rap is not so well suited to this analytical method. Although hip-hop studies endeavours to defend rap as creative expression, using a reprint of lyrics to stand in for the meanings of the entire musical source to some extent reaffirms the criticism that rap music does not matter. In this regard, I sympathise with Bramwell’s (2015: 2) “sense of frustration with scholarship that […] looked at rap solely as a poetic form that could be reduced to a text”, excising the music from the very culture that the research vindicates. My study of lyrics draws upon work by Simon Frith (1988, 1996), among others, particularly “his criticism of the ways lyrics have been treated as poetry, abstracted as verse on a page, and equally his debunking of a type of sociological realism that treats lyrics as indicators of values, beliefs and events” (Negus and Astor 2015: 227). I quote lyrics as I hear them,9 as and when they inform interpretations of the music. They appear, after all, as additional information for developing the persona.10 Although the distorted vocals used in metal would seem to render lyrics unintelligible, they remain of great import for many listeners (Griffiths 2013: 270), and can even be made more meaningful by their obfuscation.
6 Introduction
The rap and metal tracks that I analyse are drawn from a range of artists and styles, informed by an aim to present musical and cultural diversity.11 The songs that serve as analytical examples have been carefully selected to illustrate the theories of listening and empowerment: how well they demonstrate such ideas in action is the primary criterion for inclusion, and everything else is secondary. All of the tracks are anglophone, produced and released in Europe or North America, which gives a degree of uniformity to recording and performance conventions. Nonetheless, I avoid a strict approach to genre categorisation. My selection simply contains a variety of valuable snapshots of these vast musical worlds rather than attempting to define rap and metal through my choices.12 Using a broad, f lexible definition of what constitutes rap and metal enables a more inclusive view of how listeners understand (and can be empowered by) their music. In order to avoid contributing to the construction of canons, however, I do not explicitly take into account a track’s popularity, commercial success, or critical acclaim. And yet, there are some big names here, such as Jay-Z, KoЯn, Drake, Missy Elliott, Avenged Sevenfold, Kendrick Lamar, and Chance the Rapper. Artist visibility is helpful for a few reasons, including a substantial listener base and presentation of mainstream cultural values. These are important, because I am more concerned with understanding potential practices of large numbers of listeners worldwide rather than the study of particular scenes in situ. Better-known artists also tend to invite more public (and publicly available) discussion on their music. In the postmillennial period, much interaction with rap and metal takes place on the Internet, with on-demand streaming services, websites, and social media fuelling interactions with the music. For as long as there has been public discussion of recorded music, people have reported on their personal listening experiences, sharing their opinions and feelings about songs. Many listeners in the present day use digital technologies to supplement (or entirely replace off line) discursive cultural interactions, such as by posting on social media pages, writing on lyric websites, and commenting on music videos. I have searched the Internet for such valuable information on listening experiences, employing digital ethnography to bolster my analytical readings (Pink et al. 2016).13 Rap and metal have large global audiences, particularly for digital participation, and I acknowledge this breadth by addressing empowering experiences of listening that take place in individuals’ everyday uses of the music.
Power Fans, sympathetic critics, and academics have tended to adopt a defensive stance in writing on rap and metal because they are responding to the typical tone of writing on this music: widespread condemnation. Consequently, there are now many testaments to the music’s beneficial, emancipatory, and affirming effects. The genres are not actually dangerous – so the narrative goes – instead, they help individuals deal with the dangers of everyday life. Such
Introduction 7
arguments are closer to the truth, I feel, although there is a tendency towards dichotomisation. To counter attacks from the conservative media or psychology of deviance, rap and metal are presented instead as vehicles of resistance, authentic expressions of the disenfranchised, or voices of the voiceless (sometimes all three). Indeed, the dominant perspective on musical empowerment is based on counterhegemonic social mobility, particularly for individuals of racial (usually rap) and class (usually metal) minority groups. But there is a problem here. Cause-and-effect claims – that rap and metal are directly responsible for some morally reprehensible behaviour – often receive the most hostile criticism from the music’s proponents. How could politicians and psychologists be so misguided as to think that music has such direct effects? And yet, making the opposite argument to the “problem music” perspective – that rap and metal can cause positive social change – relies upon the same tenuous reasoning. For instance, Robert Walser has called out academic critics of metal who dress up ideological claims with scientific language. He points out that such commentators want “to have it both ways: heavy metal dissolves the fragile bonds of repression that makes civilization possible, and it unnaturally corrupts human nature itself ” (Walser 2014: 142). In reference to the legal case against Judas Priest using backmasking,14 he identifies that “we as a society have afforded ourselves no other ways [than subliminal messaging] of explaining music’s power to affect us [so] we fall back on a kind of mysticism to explain the effects that music undeniably produces” (Walser 2014: 147). There is similarly duplicitous criticism of rap, with Tricia Rose noting a particular line of rhetoric in media attacks on black culture. She notes that “for the antirock organizations, heavy metal […] fans (e.g., ‘our children’) are victims of its inf luence. Unlike heavy metal’s victims, rap fans are the youngest representatives of a black presence whose cultural difference is perceived as an internal threat to America’s cultural development. They victimize us” (Rose 1994: 130).15 Rap is thereby attributed some special corrupting power comparable to metal’s subliminal manipulation. Individuals apparently listen to rap and become imbued with some rebellious and threatening power based in black American adolescent experience. But how exactly this happens is, again, overlooked. It is as if there is some transfer of power that takes place, as an intrinsic quality of music that travels directly into its listeners. Music’s capacity to empower its listeners is either taken for granted or given over to folk psychology. Arild Bergh (2011: 365) has remarked on this uncritical belief, characterising it as “the ‘magic’ of music”. He argues that “there tends to be a leap of faith from anecdotal/empirical data to general claims about music’s power with little grounded discussion” (Bergh 2011: 368). So the prevailing view of music’s effects is too often simplified, romanticised, assumed, mysterious, and convenient. Moore (2003: 7) similarly observes that “listeners everywhere are encouraged to conceptualize the invention of music as a branch of magic, to believe that musical actions and gestures cannot be subject to any level of explanation, and hence understanding, beyond the trivially biographical”. What this accrues to is a belief system that music
8
Introduction
itself is magic, and what it does to us is magical. There is no possible way, we are told, to understand what happens when we listen, and we may as well give up trying. The argument of this book is that we can do better than that. However, a focus on how individuals experience power is far from the dominant approach to power in the music studies literature. Much more common are social-relational ideas about power (Pratto 2016), viewing power as a force which mediates interpersonal and institutional relationships. Sometimes it is approached as a resource, or else as an ability to deploy resources and control the resources of others. David Hesmondhalgh (2013: 50) associates this conceptualisation of power with “liberal-pluralist communication studies”, emerging from radical media sociology, media studies, and cultural studies, where issues of control, authority, and value are related to the political economy of popular culture. Broadly speaking, such questions of power are based in the Marxist tradition, and developed in the works of Gramsci, Bourdieu, Foucault, Freire, Fanon, de Beauvoir, Adorno, and other writers of the Frankfurt School. Contemporary work of this nature, sometimes referred to as the “production of culture” approach, does not make “a claim for the power of music itself to persuade, coerce, resist, or suppress; rather […] the uses to which music is put, the controls placed on it, and discursive treatments of it” (Randall 2005: 1). In simple terms, power is understood as the structuring principle of relationships between culture, texts, and subjects. Johnson and Cloonan (2009: 4) put it clearly: “that music is complicit in relations of power is a truism of popular music studies”.
Empowerment Post-Marxist perspectives on power alone cannot account for the “magical” effects of music. Established applications of critical theory tend towards defeatism in the face of hegemonic mass culture, thereby rejecting the possibility of individual transformation through music listening. It is important, however, to consider how power exists not just as the control and inf luence that the powerful hold over the powerless, but as characteristics of individual affect, behaviour, and cognition. Listeners everywhere report feelings of power gained through interaction with rap and metal, many examples of which will be cited throughout the chapters that follow. We have all surely heard individuals say things like “this song makes me feel like I can do anything”, or “this record helped me through a rough patch”, or “this track helps me know I’m not alone”. It is time that these reports are taken seriously. What’s more, recent findings about power in cognitive science and psychology provide good reasons to do so. A more specific place to start this investigation is in individuals’ experiences of power in music listening: this is what I mean by empowerment (for now, at least). Addressing such phenomena necessitates adopting ideas outside of the sociological tradition of thinking about power. One precedent for research into musical experiences of power is the field of community music therapy.
Introduction 9
In their landmark edition Community Music Therapy, Pavlicevic and Ansdell (2004: 16) emphasise the metaphor of a “ripple effect”, where instances of musicking have significant knock-on effects for individuals, groups, and societies.16 The individual experience of listening to rap and metal can be the pebble dropping into the pond, with transformative consequences that impact cultural life. Still, it can be difficult to investigate experience, since it is a transient, slippery thing, and particularly tricky to prove. For example, Bergh and Sloboda (2010: 9) take issue with the way that “suggestions such as ‘The arts by nature hold significant power to transform individuals and societies’ […] are made without any proof or further discussion as to what this power is”. The ambiguous claim they target here is a prime example of the mysticism concerning music’s ability to affect us and the world around us. Tia DeNora (2000: ix) is similarly critical of how, “within modern societies, music’s powers are – albeit strongly ‘felt’ – typically invisible and difficult to specify empirically […] this invisibility derives from a far more general neglect of the aesthetic dimension of human agency”. Her remedy is a sociomusicological study of music in specific contexts of use, and much work has been developed which shares this concern for culturally mediated, environmentally situated experiences of music. Take Justin Williams’ (2013: 70) “signifying context” for jazz rap, comprising shared understandings of the music, or Rosemary Hill’s (2016) comparable focus on the “imaginary community” of metal fans. In such studies, DeNora (2000: 24) may still take objection to the “concern with what music signifies, what it may inculcate”, but her reconceptualisation of “musical forms as devices for the organization of experience, as referents for action, feeling and knowledge formulation” offers a useful precedent for analysing the experiences of power that can emerge in music listening. It helps us start to see how music empowers. The focus on potential empowerment is crucial. I introduced rap and metal by suggesting that they can profoundly repel some listeners, particularly critics who are unfamiliar with the music. Listener empowerment is understood to be contingent upon a range of environmental, cultural, personal, and temporal factors. This view is shared by the music therapy literature, which attends to a variety of integrated, contextual circumstances affecting each individual. Research and therapeutic work with participants can provide extremely insightful case studies of specific instances of empowerment (Rolvsjord 2004; Batt-Rawden et al. 2005), albeit limited by the capacity of those involved to describe (often deeply personal) musical experiences. Where this book differs, then, is its attempt to demystify what various listeners can experience – and, crucially, how that experience emerges – rather than what they articulate their experience to be. To account for the mechanisms of empowerment, I draw liberally from ecological, psychological, and cognitive scientific theory. Theoretical developments on the subjects of consciousness, perception, and power over the last sixty or seventy years provide effective ways to understand the process of empowerment through music listening. Following the framework laid out across the subsequent chapters, it is clear to
10
Introduction
see how music empowers (and also how, sometimes, it does not). Just because one listening experience might be empowering for one individual does not mean that this is necessarily the case on every occasion, nor is the case for every listener.
Affordance Recognising that experiences of empowerment differ from person to person, I analyse music in terms of what it affords. The term affordance is drawn from studies of musical meaning based in ecological psychology, especially Clarke (2005) and Moore (2012). In practice, the word plays an abbreviating role: by writing that a song “affords empowerment”, I am suggesting that in certain instances, it is likely that some listeners will feel empowered by listening to it. This much more cautious assertion is also described as music “offering” or “providing” empowerment. I do not endorse any particular reading as the correct experience of music to be sought, as I share Moore’s (2012: 330) view that there is no “right way” to hear something.17 Accordingly, I avoid claiming that music “expresses” and “connotes” and especially “signifies”. My analytical perspective identifies empowerment emerging in the environmental interaction between the track and the listener rather than existing as an immanent property of the music to be decoded or transferred. Empowerment is something that arises from individuals’ listening experiences, something which I have frequently experienced as a listener and observed in others’ behaviour and discourse. The use of ecological psychology and theories of embodiment can be controversial, even divisive. It is fair to ask what exactly music analysis and interpretation can achieve if it neither argues for a single authorial reading nor accounts for a range of actual participants’ responses. Without the theoretical groundwork laid in Chapters 2 and 3, it may appear that I simply point out vague possibilities, rather than examining the ecological affordances of music listening. Chapters 4–6 provide a new, deeply ecological and embodied mode of analysis based on Moore’s (2012, 2013) interrogative hermeneutics. However, because affordances are by definition contingencies and likelihoods (not inevitabilities or predeterminations), they appear hypothetical by comparison to ethnography or experimentation. If the conversations I have had at conferences (and, I regret, dinner parties) are anything to go by, the concept of affordance and the associated change in the way we think about perception, meaning, and embodiment can be frustrating at first encounter. However, it is a groundbreaking tool for music scholars – Prior (2018: 16) describes affordance as “the conceptual third way posited by increasing numbers of scholars to determinist and interpretivist accounts” – and I show just how useful its epistemic humility can be in application to listener empowerment. Sometimes fans simply cannot help but attest to the potential of rap or metal to empower them. When another listener disagrees – when it does not afford them the same empowerment – they are likely to argue (often
Introduction 11
passionately). By investigating how rap and metal afford empowerment, I can more responsibly model the varied experiences of listeners. People across the globe use and understand music in remarkably different ways, and my analyses aim to ref lect that diversity. Giving close attention to the tracks is significant for not only illuminating “what metal [and rap] sounds like” (Kahn-Harris 2011: 252), but underpinning why this music finds such frequent, popular, and varied uses in everyday life. The genres shape critical dynamics of identity, such as race, gender, sexuality, ability, and age, and instigate community formation and movements for social change. While this book delves into the latter aspects of cultural transformation, discussion of the politics of identity is limited, not because they are not important, but as a necessary by-product of prioritising the rich potential for empowering experience (whoever the subject of such experience may be). I acknowledge that not everyone is privileged to the same encounters with music, and my experiential framework recognises this.18 Indeed, the broadly phenomenological approach I adopt establishes a degree of universality, accounting for individual bodily, social, and cultural differences in the processes of perception and cognition. There is a benefit to not concentrating directly on the people that rap and metal empower, albeit one requiring some justification. It involves withholding judgement on the moral value of empowering experiences. Imagine that an individual feels empowered by listening to “Move Bitch (Feat. Mystikal and I-20)” by Ludacris (2001), which reached #10 on Billboard’s (2020) Hot 100 chart. Its well-known chorus celebrates a callous, self-serving, masculinist sense of freedom – “move, bitch, get out the way, get out the way, bitch, get out the way” – that could afford some hypothetical listener empowerment. The track may well be an offensive example of misogyny for another listener, such as Lakeyta Bonnette (2015: 95), who finds that much of Ludacris’ music “can be classified as misogynistic and sexist” (and my typical encounter with the track is much closer to this, but my personal experiences are not a large part of this story). But we cannot shy away from the possibility that music which insults some people empowers others.19 I am most interested in the music and the experience of empowerment that emerges in listening to it. Moral judgements concerning who is justified or entitled to any type of experience obstruct in-depth study of the nature of that experience. Indeed, it can be particularly revealing to engage with what I deem to be ethically problematic experiences of empowerment (although, I reiterate, my empowerment is only a small yet unavoidable part of the discussion). For example, Tricia Rose has justifiably written about feeling: thoroughly frustrated but not surprised by the apparent need for some rappers to craft elaborate and creative stories about the abuse and domination of young black women. Perhaps these stories serve to protect young men from the reality of female rejection; maybe and more likely,
12
Introduction
tales of sexual domination falsely relieve their lack of self-worth and limited access to economic and social markers for heterosexual masculine power. (Rose 1994: 15, my italics) She is discussing rappers who use misogynistic lyrics, although the explanation seems equally relevant to the experiences of listeners. I disagree, however, that the relief that artists and listeners experience in such stories is false. My refusal to reprehend (or deny) affordances of empowerment in these cases permits a clearer understanding of the many ways that rap and metal can empower listeners, even music which is taken to discriminate against others. It is as Walser (2014: 150) wrote in describing metal music’s relationship to suicide: “to talk about something is not the same as promoting it”.20 If we hope to get to grips with the magic of music – to understand how it empowers – then a detached critical consciousness is key.
Chapter outline Throughout this book, I will knit together a theoretical model of empowerment, interwoven with examples of empowering listener experiences.21 Chapter 2 is the only full chapter that does not refer to specific pieces of music, for it is concerned with developing an experiential approach to popular music listening. Brief ly delaying the specific study of rap and metal, I overturn prevailing dualisms of mind/body and nature/culture to consider individual experiences of listening in everyday life. The chapter provides an important review of the ecological and embodied theories of perception and meaning which have increasingly featured in music studies since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on inviting cooperation between disparate research perspectives. With this groundwork in place, we can move on to consider the particularities of rap and metal. Chapter 3 begins to unspool theoretical constructs that inform my approach to empowerment, interspersed with five analytical examples (two rap, two metal, and one stylistic combination). First off the reel is a study of the effects of power on behaviour known as approach/inhibition theory. I tie this psychological advance to the personic environment, considering how listeners imagine the characters they hear to be behaving. Examining the relationship between power and cognition, I introduce the theory of the personal sense of power, which is used to investigate how listeners experience their own power. As the theory of empowerment proposed here is based upon acts of personic interpretation, I consider the extent to which the empowered state of another (imaginary) individual can be taken up by the listener. The neuropsychological processes of mentalising and mirroring cover interpersonal aspects of perception, cognition, and interpretation. This chapter closes by summarising the potential for altered self-perceptions in listening to rap and metal.
Introduction 13
In Chapter 4, I examine notions of popular music as a lifeline, and sew in the theoretical framework developed thus far to evaluate the effects of listening on well-being. This chapter is principally concerned with resilience, a term which is closely related to empowerment (and similarly, a victim of ambiguity and appropriation). Conceptual metaphors, as introduced in Chapter 2, are knotted into everyday commentary on the emotional impacts of rap and metal. Two lengthy analyses unravel the potential of music to provide empowering experiences of resilience. The genres under study differ by shades of realism and fantasy, requiring consideration of how applicable the experiences gained through listening really are to individuals’ everyday circumstances.22 Another two song analyses illuminate such distinctions, followed by a conclusion on popular music’s survivalist narratives and a further final reading of a rap metal (djent and grime-inf luenced) track. Developing upon ideas of individual listening, Chapter 5 adds strands of communal experience to the theoretical meshwork. Untangling several terms for collectives that have been used to study rap and metal – among them subculture, scene, and community – I consider the potential for empowering solidarities experienced through musical and social interaction. An introduction to the field of community psychology is then interlaced between analyses of four songs. The principles and practices of this field, I argue, are pertinent to the study of music communities, particularly how scholars and activists approach the process of empowerment. Raphael Travis’ (2016) Individual and Community Empowerment (ICE) framework is adopted to demonstrate dimensions of empowerment, further nuancing understandings of what exactly individuals and communities gain from their listening. Looking beyond communal experience specific to listening, I elaborate on individual behaviour to examine cultural engagement through fandom, and address two examples of digital music communities. The final full chapter follows the thread running through the fifth chapter, focusing upon what individuals do as a consequence of their listening. If, as the prior chapters have established, music can indeed change individuals in the course of their listening, how does this manifest as social action? In other words, what is the relationship of empowerment to power? Chapter 6 answers these questions by investigating the cultural politics of empowerment. Changes in the way that the term empowerment has been used over the last thirty years obscure the seam between liberating effects and neoliberal pressures in fields including social work, international development, and feminism. Nonetheless, there is a widespread belief that popular music is able to incite social change, and this is worth examining critically. Two analyses first demonstrate how music can be heard to instil a social awareness, and later another pair of examples demonstrate the potential for music to inspire listeners to take social action. Taking inf luence from the contested contemporary notion of women’s empowerment (for one example), this chapter culminates in a discussion of the effects music really can have on our lives.
14
Introduction
In the closing chapter, I offer some conclusions on the different ways that rap and metal can empower. I address the wider significance of my investigation, and suggest new lines of enquiry to extend this research perspective. Two final analyses weave together all of the theory used throughout the book to demonstrate how empowerment can be analysed in music listening, and ultimately shows what is gained from doing so. In particular, this study demonstrates why rap and metal continue to thrive in the present day, kept alive by the passion and perseverance of the people they empower.
Notes 1 Consider the rock radio stations that advertise on the basis of “no rap and metal” (Garofalo 1993: 247). 2 For an illustrative example, Rudman and Lee (2002: 136) classify Britney Spears’ (1999) song “…Baby One More Time” as “filler”, placing it in the control group of songs by contrast to “violent” or “sexist” tracks. However, the song – “Hit Me Baby…”, that is – could be considered violent and sexist, from the title’s suggestive sadomasochism to its patriarchal presentations of a Lolita personality (Lowe 2004: 94). Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” (1992) is categorised as violent and sexist without any justification (a track which specifically emphasises an absence of violence: “today I didn’t even have to use my AK”). It therefore seems that the experiment is designed to demonise a specific demographic of artist and audience from the very start. 3 Furthermore, laboratory-based experiments fail to account for how dramatically they decontextualise individuals’ cultural engagement with music. 4 At the time of writing, every recording that I discuss can be accessed using on-demand music streaming services. Every track can also be found on the most popular video sharing website (although audio quality and the censorship of explicit language are likely to vary). 5 I adopt Moore’s (2012: 15) distinction between song, performance, and track, such that a track is a specific recording of a performance of a song. There may be demos, cover versions, and live performances of a song (which would entail different performances) and recordings could be made of these (which would be different tracks). 6 This excludes pieces in “instrumental” styles that are still associated with rap and metal. 7 The theory of the personic environment is introduced in more detail in Chapter 3. 8 For the most part, this simply means swapping major for ionian and natural minor for aeolian, free of the baggage of linear progressions and plagal cadences. 9 All lyrics quoted in the analyses are my own transcriptions, given in double quotation marks. To help discussions of rhyme, I refer to verbal sounds using the phonetic transcription system presented by Ladefoged and Johnson (2015: 35–51). To identify a sound, I will give its International Phonetic Association symbol in square brackets then quote a word in the lyrics which uses this phoneme, e.g. [1] (“this”). 10 Lyrics are also particularly important to how listeners narrativise songs (Fludernik 1996; Harden 2019). I will borrow insights from cognitive narratology and narrative theory to support my track analyses, although I am not convinced that Moore’s (2012: 180) personic environment is merely “a grossly simplified theory of narrative”.
Introduction 15 11 Where this has been achieved, it demonstrates the multiplicity of ways that music can empower, and where this has failed, this shortcoming is my responsibility alone. I am aware of an uneven gender distribution of artists in the sample, with a preponderance of male songwriters, performers, and recordists. This by no means suggests that the capacity to produce empowering songs is reliant upon sex or gender. 12 No particular typology could claim to comprehensively cover every style of rap and metal, after all: Adam Krims (2000: 55) provides the useful reminder that any genre system is by necessity a “blunt instrument”. 13 All online comments are reprinted precisely, without any changes to orthography or grammar. I cite the authors as complete usernames, as they appear at the time of citation. And so, because I am taking text directly from the online context, you may wish to prepare yourself for some colourful, creative language here and there! 14 Backmasking is the deliberate process of inserting reversed audio into a recording. The sound is heard “backwards” when played normally, and its true nature therefore “masked” unless the recording is played in reverse. 15 Unless specified otherwise, italics are preserved in all quotations throughout this book. 16 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who stressed the importance of this related line of investigation. 17 I have also developed this argument in Gamble (2019a) and Braae et al. (forthcoming). 18 The concepts of style competence and music community also engage with significant means by which listeners develop, express, and understand aspects of identity through specific cultural interactions. 19 It is better to hold both of these possibilities in a productive, critical tension than whitewash the music’s cultural politics. Indeed, Michelle Phillipov (2012: xvii) has critiqued the desire of scholars to “see their own politics ref lected in popular music forms and practices”. 20 I recognise the controversial nature and naïvety of this position, subject to Harris Berger’s (1999: 292) critique that “to be unwilling to criticize elements of a musical culture that contribute to the participants’ own undoing is to be complicit in that undoing”. However, as I am not working with specific participants or music cultures (save some brief discussions of particular music communities in Chapter 5), I am unable to consider or intervene in such undoings. 21 Because the theoretical model builds over the course of the book, the chapters are best read in succession. 22 I have also tackled this problem in Gamble (2019b), querying the relatability of the uses to which Kendrick Lamar’s music is put.
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Introduction 17 Fernandes, S. (2011) Close To The Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation. New South Wales: NewSouth. Fludernik, M. (1996) Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge. Frith, S. (1987) ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Popular Music’, in Leppert, R. and McClary, S. (eds) Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 133–149. Frith, S. (1988) Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. New York: Routledge. Frith, S. (1996) Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gamble, S. (2019a) ‘Listening to Virtual Space in Recorded Popular Music’, in Gullö, J.-O. (ed) Proceedings of the 12th Art of Record Production Conference: Mono: Stereo: Multi. Stockholm: Royal College of Music (KMH) & Art of Record Production, pp. 105–118. Gamble, S. (2019b) ‘Empowerment in Rap Music Listening ft. Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle”’, in Braae, N. and Hansen, K. A. (eds) On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 165–185. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_9. Garofalo, R. (1993) ‘Black Popular Music: Crossing Over or Going Under?’, in Bennett, T. et al. (eds) Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 231–248. Goodman, S. (2010) Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Green, L. (2008) Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology, and Education. 2nd edn. Bury St Edmunds: Arima Publishing. Griffiths, D. (2013) ‘Words to Songs and the Internet: A Comparative Study of Transcriptions of Words to the Song “Midnight Train to Georgia”, Recorded by Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1973’, Popular Music and Society, 36(2), pp. 234–273. doi: 10.1080/03007766.2012.685266. Harden, A. C. (2019) ‘Narrativizing Recorded Popular Song’, in Braae, N. and Hansen, K. A. (eds) On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 39–57. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_3. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013) The Cultural Industries. 3rd edn. London: SAGE. Hill, R. L. (2016) Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hip Hop Archive (2020) Mission, Hiphop Archive & Research Institute. Available at: http://hiphoparchive.org/about/mission (Accessed: 15 December 2017). Ice Cube (1992) It Was a Good Day. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/2GrOq1y5gksYrqkc8Jzl9T?si=r7R2knzVTLGXy5MAgDGOSg (Accessed: 6 March 2020). Johnson, B. and Cloonan, M. (2009) Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence. Surrey: Ashgate. Kahn-Harris, K. (2007) Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford and New York: Berg. Kahn-Harris, K. (2011) ‘Metal Studies: Intellectual Fragmentation or Organic Intellectualism?’, Journal for Cultural Research, 15(3), pp. 251–253. doi: 10.1080/14797585.2011.594582. Kilson, M. (2003) ‘The Pretense of Hip-Hop Black Leadership’, The Black Commentator, 50. Available at: http://www.blackcommentator.com/50/50_kilson.html (Accessed: 23 February 2017).
18 Introduction Krims, A. (2000) Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ladefoged, P. and Johnson, K. (2015) A Course in Phonetics. 7th edn. Stamford: Cengage Learning. Lowe, M. (2004) ‘“Tween” Scene: Resistance within the Mainstream’, in Bennett, A. and Peterson, R. A. (eds) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 80–95. Ludacris (2001) Move Bitch (Feat. Mystikal and I-20). Available at: https://open.spotify. com/track/1Q9b6CeMcDuO0uq5OJCrqu?si=CsW4OuGHSsi62oWQB4BkFw (Accessed: 6 March 2020). McWhorter, J. (2008) All about the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America. New York: Gotham Books. Mitchell, T. (ed) (2001) Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Moore, A. F. (2005) ‘The Persona-Environment Relation in Recorded Song’, Music Theory Online, 11(4). Available at: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.4/ mto.05.11.4.moore_frames.html (Accessed: 28 December 2016). Moore, A. F. (2012) Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Surrey: Ashgate. Moore, A. F. (2013a) ‘An Interrogative Hermeneutics of Popular Song’, El oído pesante, 1(1), pp. 1–12. Moore, A. F. (ed) (2003b) Analyzing Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, A. F. and Dockwray, R. (2008) ‘The Establishment of the Virtual Performance Space in Rock’, Twentieth-Century Music, 5(2), pp. 219–241. doi: 10.1017/ S1478572209990065. Moore, A. F. and Martin, R. (2018) Rock: The Primary Text. 3rd edn. Aldershot: Ashgate. Moore, A. F., Schmidt, P. and Dockwray, R. (2009) ‘A Hermeneutics of Spatialization for Recorded Song’, Twentieth-Century Music, 6(1), pp. 83–114. doi: 10.1017/ S1478572210000071. Mynett, M. (2017) Metal Music Manual: Producing, Engineering, Mixing, and Mastering Contemporary Heavy Music. New York: Routledge. Negus, K. and Astor, P. (2015) ‘Songwriters and Song Lyrics: Architecture, Ambiguity and Repetition’, Popular Music, 34(2), pp. 226–244. doi: 10.1017/ S0261143015000021. Nielson, E. and Dennis, A. L. (2019) Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America. New York and London: The New Press. Pavlicevic, M. and Ansdell, G. (2004) ‘Community Music Therapy’, in Pavlicevic, M. and Ansdell, G. (eds) Introduction: ‘The Ripple Effect’. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, pp. 15–31. Perry, I. (2004) Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Phillipov, M. (2012) Death Metal and Music Criticism: Analysis at the Limits. Lanham: Lexington Books. Pink, S. et al. (eds) (2016) Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: SAGE. Potter, R. (1995) Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. A lbany: State University of New York Press.
Introduction 19 Pratto, F. (2016) ‘On Power and Empowerment’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 55(1), pp. 1–20. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12135. Prior, N. (2018) Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society. Los Angeles: SAGE. Randall, A. J. (2005) Music, Power, and Politics. New York and London: Routledge. Rolvsjord, R. (2004) ‘Therapy as Empowerment’, Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 13(2), pp. 99–111. doi: 10.1080/08098130409478107. Rose, T. (1994) Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Rose, T. (2008) The Hip-Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip-Hop and Why It Matters. New York: Basic Books. Rowe, P. (2018) Heavy Metal Youth Identities: Researching the Musical Empowerment of Youth Transitions and Psychosocial Wellbeing. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Rudman, L. A. and Lee, M. R. (2002) ‘Implicit and Explicit Consequences of Exposure to Violent and Misogynous Rap Music’, Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 5(2), pp. 133–150. doi: 10.1177/1368430202005002541. Wallach, J., Berger, H. M. and Greene, P. D. (eds) (2011) Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Walser, R. (2014) Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. New edn. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Weinstein, D. (2000) Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. Revised edn. Chicago: Da Capo Press. Williams, J. A. (2013) Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wright, R. (2000) ‘“I’d Sell You Suicide”: Pop Music and Moral Panic in the Age of Marilyn Manson’, Popular Music, 19(3), pp. 365–385. doi: 10.1017/S0261143000000222.
2
Listening to popular music in everyday life An ecological-embodied approach
Introduction Humans develop from both natural and cultural inf luences. The mind is not an independent thinking machine engaged by music, but rather part of a body-wide system moved by music. Musical meaning is not embedded in the intentions of the composer, nor the instinctive, hermetic impressions of the listener. These are important propositions of the approaches to musical perception and meaning that I put forth in this chapter. The latter claim – that musical meaning is neither immanently encoded nor acontextually invented by its perceiving subject – is hopefully uncontroversial in the postmodern context of contemporary music studies. Indeed, poststructuralist thinking (especially following Barthes’ (1977) “Death of the Author”) has long ago f lung aside traditional beliefs about musical meaning, among them emphases upon composer biography and intent, the formalism of “sounds themselves”, and the universality of musical topics that purport to resonate with audiences regardless of cultural specificity. I am drawing rather crude lines under entire traditions of musicological thought, but this contemporary context can make it difficult to see what is original and innovative about the ecological-embodied framework I establish in the following pages. One particular claim encountered commonly across current literature is that musical meaning is “intersubjective”: ascribed by listeners, often shared, socially and culturally determined. This term, however, assumes that the meanings of music are relatively fixed or stable, at times leading to problematic essentialisms. Both metal and rap have been understood as liberating expressions of anger in response to the cultural oppression of specific identity groups, generalisations many music scholars (myself included) have been guilty of when justifying the study of such music cultures. These horizon-level perspectives on the meaning of a given music often feel irrelevant to how music is actually used by individuals in everyday life, for it is obvious that not every instance of bumping rap or blaring metal is felt as a socially engaged, cathartic, counterhegemonic protest: the music is understood and engaged with in much more diverse ways. To engage with this diversity, ecological and embodied
Listening to popular music
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approaches to musical meaning can be used to inform a renewed focus on the experience of music listening. Listening to music is a practice, a behaviour, a process, and most importantly an experience. I talk of experience more as a body of experiences, collated memories gained over the course of a life, than any individual event (as when we write of our experience of a certain work responsibility, for example, rather than the amazing experience promised by an upcoming festival).1 Furthermore, music listening is fundamentally a social experience. It is almost a cliché to point out that music listening does not take place in a vacuum, but it is important to keep in mind when addressing any psychology of music. In DeNora’s (2000: 18) landmark study of music in everyday life, she describes (with reference to past research) the social experience that is music listening: There is little doubt that music is experienced by its recipients as a dynamic material […] users highlight repeatedly the ways in which they view music as having power over them (‘music relaxes me’, ‘disturbs me’, ‘motivates and inspires me’) […] The challenge is to unpack those narratives, and to resituate them as musical practices occurring within ethnographic contexts. The sociology of music that DeNora goes on to develop provides one important basis for the perspectives I adopt throughout this book. However, rather than proceed directly down the path of ethnography and observation, I am interested in tendencies of the human listening apparatus. With this emphasis comes a change of focus, away from specific (pseudonymous) humans who participate in the research process and towards potential engagements of posited (but realistic) individuals performing typical behaviours. Ethnographic accounts remain an important source of additional evidence, but my approach spotlights the underlying mechanisms of experiencing music for an important reason. Since the 1990s, significant bodies of research from psychology and the cognitive sciences have trickled into music studies without much of a grounding. This has led to a terminologically convoluted and methodologically imprecise state of affairs, which this chapter sets out to rectify. The two particular schools of thought I have in mind, ecological perception and embodied cognition, focus upon the interactions of individuals with their environment. While there is some important overlap between these slippery terms, I take perception to mean how individuals access or sense the environment, and cognition to mean how they understand it. Behaviour refers to how individuals interact with the environment. Perception, cognition, and behaviour make up experience, and the experience under the microscope here is of course music listening, which is fundamental to my overarching inquiry into empowerment. And so, to understand how individuals can be empowered by listening, it is essential to engage anew with some basic principles of being in the world.
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Ecological perception Ecological theories of perception originated in the work of psychologists Eleanor and James Gibson. Their studies of perceptual learning, human sensory development, and visual perception produced a particular school of thought sometimes referred to as Gibsonian theory (Gibson 1950, 1966, 1969, 1979; Gibson and Pick 2000). The branch of ecological psychology associated with perception has been applied to music in numerous studies since the 1990s (Gaver 1993a, 1993b; Clarke 1999, 2003; Windsor 2004). In his seminal study Ways of Listening, Eric Clarke (2005: 7–8) suggested that ecological theory is an effective basis for addressing musical meaning, challenging established paradigms such as aesthetics, semiotics, hermeneutics, multimedia theory, and social theory. Indeed, many scholars have recently applied principles of ecological theory to the perception and meaning of popular music (Moore 2012; Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2013; Zagorski-Thomas 2014; Rinsema 2017). In such work, the term “ecological perception” has become common, a slightly misleading abbreviation implying that there is one specific type of perception which is ecological. Instead, this abbreviation should indicate the view that (all) human perception can be understood using ecological psychology. The emphasis on perception marks out this strand of Gibsonian theory from broader applications of ecology to music and acoustics. 2 At the heart of the ecological perspective is a focus upon the meaningful relationship between an organism and its environment. It may be helpful to think of this as a human being interacting with their immediate surroundings, taking in the sounds they hear, the shapes they see, and so on. The application of ecological psychology to perception “differs greatly from theories that begin with a motionless creature haplessly bombarded by stimuli” (Gibson and Pick 2000: 14). Instead, the environment is defined in terms of what can be perceived. This marks an important difference from the everyday physicalist mode of description we may be used to, which conventionally addresses “objective” things composed of atoms and molecules. Ecological terms refer to interactive and applied understandings of the environment. The ecological environment is principally conceived of in terms of the interactions it provides, structured into ecological objects, including surfaces and substances. For example, a table, a countertop, and a shelf are all surfaces. Organisms immediately recognise specific properties of surfaces: they are f lat, stable, and weight-bearing, to varying degrees. These characteristics are known as invariants, unchanging ecological qualities of environment objects. This does not mean that an organism’s intervention cannot alter the object altogether. Break a table in half, and it is no longer a functioning surface. 3 Throughout a lifetime, a human undergoes processes of perceptual learning and development, which involve increasing attunement to possibilities for environmental engagement. As bodies grow (or otherwise change),
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organisms gain specific capacities, using them to interact with the environment as they see fit. For a concrete example, let us consider the ground as a basic instance of an invariant surface. The ground is a f loor of relative f latness that enables human locomotion. To a physically able adult human,4 the ground allows walking; to a capable nine-month old, it allows crawling: to a newborn, it allows little locomotion at all, but it does bear their weight. When the organism grows physically and learns new ways to engage with the environment – attuning to ecological opportunities – more actions become possible. What changes in this example is not the (invariant) ground, but the interactions the organism can make with the environment. The ecological view holds that “perceptual learning is a process of differentiation, selection, and extraction of information; the information was always present, just not previously detected” (Adolph and Kretch 2015: 128). Returning to a practical, down-to-earth example (too much?), the hypothetical able human has developed a capacity for bipedal walking in response to an environment’s stable, horizontal plane. Because of the operation of the upright human body and the steepness of the ground, a mountain may make walking impossible. It may, however, facilitate climbing. Upon reaching a plateau, the human may be able to walk again, on the grounds that (last one, I promise) the f latter plane satisfies the organismic requirements of vertical orientation. Crucially, the ecological perspective attends to the mutualism of the organism and the environment. The potential action responses that emerge between the two are called affordances. The verb “afford” substitutes for “allow”, “enable”, “facilitate”, and so on: f lat ground affords an able human walking. Some ecological studies of perception have adopted the supplementary term effectivities to define the capabilities of the organism that enable it to realise environmental possibilities (Turvey and Shaw 1979; Michaels and Carello 1981; Hirose 2002). This addition might pose a dualism where, for example, f lat ground and the human’s effectivities afford them walking. Although Michaels (2003: 139–143) argues that the term helps to characterise a variety of individual, organismic properties, Sanders (1997: 105) points out that no additional terminology is necessary to discuss such capacities, since “the idea of affordance already has within it the requisite subjective aspects” as well as “objective” environmental constraints. I side with Sanders’ view because the term effectivity risks reproducing the materialist subject/object dualism that the ecological approach so elegantly avoids. More fruitful is a mutualistic and interactive perspective that sidesteps an endless back-and-forth debate between experience-content externalism and internalism in the philosophy of perception (Siegel 2016). Ecological psychology conceptualises the environment as a kind of heuristic toolbox, in which organisms try to determine what things there are, and what they can do with them. This framing draws attention to the direct relationship between perception and action,5 since organismic action proceeds from active environmental exploration “in so many ways and so continuously that it is easy
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to overlook” (Clarke 2005: 19). Illustrating this interactive engagement, Clarke (2005: 19) points out that: we detect a sound and turn to it; we catch sight of an object, turn our eyes to it, lean forward and reach out to touch it; we get a whiff of something and deliberately breathe in through the nose to get a better sense of its smell. The example of turning to face a sound helpfully introduces how the basic principles of ecological perception can be applied to acoustics. Hearing a particular kind of loud, spectrally complex transient sound with a long decay time may make an aurally able human notice that a bell is ringing. In ecological terminology, the ringing sound specifies a bell. Environmental invariants, such as acoustic properties of objects, enable interactive possibilities through a process of specification. To complete the cluster of ecological jargon, we might ask: what do the invariants that specify a bell afford? For one, hearing a bell may alert a person that something time-sensitive and worthy of immediate attention is taking place. An alarm clock, sounding a chime in a familiar rhythmic pattern, may afford getting up and blearily switching off the alarm. A tremolo bell may be identified as a fire alarm, inciting instant bodily motion towards a fire exit. This is a more pressing example of the direct relationship between auditory perception and action. But standing and moving upon hearing a fire alarm also emphasises the mutual interaction of the organism and the environment. Say you are aware of a planned fire alarm test. In this case, the same invariant environmental sounds of the bell might cause you to cover your ears, but not to stand: your individual knowledge (informing organismic possibilities for action) alters your motional response to an identical environmental stimulus. For your deaf friend, the bell might not afford any of these reactions, because their specific perceptual capacities differ. Granted, they may take a cue from the visual stimulus that you (as an environmental entity) provide, and thereafter respond to your sudden bodily stirring. Throughout the course of living as listening beings, each organism learns what opportunities for action the environment provides, constantly and actively resonating to available information. Individuals use the very same multimodal perceptual system when listening to music. Listeners may imagine some auditory events to specify certain physical sound sources, whereas other sounds afford a variety of conceptual and metaphorical interpretations. A recorded piece of music is a type of environmental sound source which, when transduced acoustically, provides stimulus information. For example, a digital mp3 file holds a particular invariant structure of data. Upon hitting play, this stream of digital audio affords a range of potential responses affected by (among other constraints) the sound reproduction system, the location of the system in relation to the organism, the organism’s perceptual capacities, and the organism’s prior experience. Hearing human beings are usually able to distinguish between a fire alarm
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and a similar sound reproduced in a musical auditory context, but they can be tricked, such as by the sample of a bell in a particularly well recorded (and reproduced) audio advert for fire alarms. Indeed, this limitation of most individuals’ auditory perceptual systems is recognised by the law prohibiting traffic sounds on British broadcast radio stations (Advertising Standards Authority 2018: 24). It appears that drivers are unable to consistently distinguish between real and recorded auditory events. Similarly, people can become frustrated by the sampling of police sirens in rap music recordings (Keyes 1996: 239–240). Ecological perception draws a direct relationship between perception and meaning because, as these examples show, listeners typically consider what the sounds they hear are the sounds of (Clarke 2005: 3): whether, for instance, a given sound is a fire alarm that requires purposeful movement or simply lively metallic percussion to enjoy. Does it afford us getting out, or “getting down”? The ecological view of perception therefore sets out to avoid the tangles of some dualistic psychological debates and instead places emphasis on a fresh set of questions. Crucially, the application of ecological theory to musical perception differs from certain conventional paradigms of musical meaning such as semiotics. There is no sense in establishing a sign typology because the ecological perspective rejects the arbitrariness of any relationship between a symbol and a referent. Luke Windsor (2004: 180) establishes that the semiotic distinction between (real) sign and (meaningful) signified is circumvented by an ecological definition of affordances as “functional meanings”. A sign, so to speak, is already imbued with contingent meanings in the active process of perception. Consider a chair: a physically able individual might simply perceive that it affords sitting. However, the last unoccupied seat on a bus may not afford sitting so straightforwardly if, say, the individual is obliged by good manners to offer it to somebody else. In this example, the use of ecological theory reconciles another prevalent dualism: between the material and the social environment. Following the ecological approach, the perceptual process is taken to be always-already instilled with meanings, both “natural” and “cultural”, as individuals consider potential engagements with the environment developed over a lifetime of perceptual learning. How conveniently this single theory resolves several major debates around music perception! Clarke (2005: 25) has shrewdly noted that the ecological approach appears “magical” to critics who overlook the importance of perceptual learning. His remedy is a connectionist model of perception by way of metaphor for ecological theory, the body as a self-organising network of nodes that changes over time in response to new stimuli. In the vein of Moore’s (2012) perceptual framework for popular song listening as well as Clarke’s (2013) later work, I consider ecological perception as one important part of an experiential framework for listening, but support its apparently “magical” innovations with a different (but related) theoretical basis. The other key area is the domain of embodied cognitive science, or embodied cognition for short.
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Embodied cognition The philosophy of cognitive science has developed a large field of study that investigates how cognitive processes are fundamentally shaped by the body. The title of Chemero’s (2009) Radical Embodied Cognitive Science is perhaps the most specific and qualified label for this field. Fundamentally, it holds that a representational philosophy based upon a dualist theory of mind does not account for the growing empirical evidence about the importance of the body to human cognition. I opt for the term embodied cognition for its neat symmetry with ecological perception.6 Research on embodied cognition has expanded rapidly to include work oriented towards psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Since the turn of the millennium, theories of embodied cognition have seen increasing use in music studies, and especially music psychology (Zbikowski 2002; Leman 2008; Cox 2016), evidence of the corporeal turn in the wider humanities (Sheets-Johnstone 2009). Some very useful ideas can be borrowed from embodied cognition, especially from two inf luential books by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980, 1999) which synthesise various findings from cognitive science research into language, metaphor, consciousness, neuroscience, and politics. The first, and perhaps the most transformative, idea is the role of conceptual metaphor. Based on rigorous analysis of metaphor in everyday language, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue that the way we speak fundamentally evidences the way we think. In other words, metaphor is not simply a poetic trick of language, but a structuring principle of cognition that underlies human experience and understanding. So when an individual says something like “this song lifts me up”, they are using two conceptual metaphors7: music is a physical force and up is better. Their statement is clearly metaphorical, drawing upon two domains of experiential knowledge.8 The first, that music can physically affect us, should be well known (especially with thoughts of ecological perception still fresh in the mind): like a meteorological force such as a strong wind, music can compel us to move our bodies, whether standing to dance or recoiling and covering our ears. Sometimes listeners find themselves suddenly crying or absent-mindedly singing along to music before choosing to do so, just like being blown around by a gust. The second, that up is better, is similarly understood (albeit perhaps not consciously) based upon embodied experience: things that are physically higher up, or at least further away from the ground, demonstrate better health. Humans are physically at their lowest when dead (recumbent on the ground), low while injured (nursing a broken leg, perhaps), or ill (lying supine in bed, for instance). Being upright (consider “standing tall”) exhibits good health, control, and ability. In everyday exchanges, such uses of language go unnoticed, and the speaker who feels lifted up by music relies upon their conversation partner sharing their conceptual understanding. A literal interpretation is, of course, nonsensical: how could a song lift you? But, knowing what we do from being bodies interacting in the world, their statement makes perfect sense.
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Indeed, conceptual metaphors are based in lifelong, embodied experiences of the world. Such an instance of conceptual metaphor is not exclusive to English, but evidenced across many languages and cultures (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 247–249). Conceptual metaphors rely upon a process known as cross-domain mapping, whereby individuals understand one domain (music), usually something abstract, in terms of another (physical force), which is more concrete (Zbikowski 2002). Again, this exceeds a trick of language. A clear example of this is how pitch is mapped onto spatial verticality (at least in Western cultures), a topic that has been the subject of much music cognition research (Ashley 2004; Brower 2008; Eitan and Timmers 2010): we call sound waves that travel faster higher in frequency, display them as higher pitches, above lower notes on a score, bend a guitar string up to reach them, and so on. Zbikowski (2002: 14) notes that “we are so accustomed to the mapping between concrete physical objects and musical sound that we sometimes have to be reminded that notes are not enduring physical objects”. It feels natural indeed to share the idea of “climbing up to that note” without requiring a lengthy daydream about the last time we ascended a f light of stairs. There still seems to be a touch of the magical in this process, which does not really explain this kind of cognition so much as describe its operations. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) have argued that cross-domain mapping (including conceptual metaphor) is enabled by conceptual blending, a cognitive operation where experiences from different scenarios are blended in a single frame to create meaning. Humans are highly creative and competent mental blenders, although they are not aware of it. However, without this process, “fundamental to all activities of the human mind” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 38), there would be no capacity for metaphorical understanding. Conceptual blending differs from analogy, in that it need not involve mentally projecting inferences from one domain of experience to another. Instead, it depends upon the psychological and neurobiological operations of the body, and the formation of schematic knowledge to structure experience. Image schemata, or frames, are dynamic patterns with which humans automatically structure their encounters with the world. One example is the “container” schema, a basic construct that divides the world into inside and out; creates a boundary between things inside and things outside; can be broken, in some cases spilling out its contents. Many things in the world can be thought of as containers, from the most abstract representation of a circle with a dot inside to cross-domain mappings of various sorts. For example, brackets provide a container for (slightly) less important words in a sentence: “slightly” is bound inside the brackets I just used, other words exist around the bracket container, and I could destroy the container by deleting the brackets. This sentence is a conceptual-metaphorical container of my thoughts, and you might understand your mind as a container of the thoughts that develop as you read it. I am creating explicitly conceptualised containers in these examples, but image schemata are importantly pre-conceptual
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patterns or structures of embodied experience. Perhaps the obvious instance of the “container” image schema is the body itself, physically containing our organs and conceptually containing our feelings. The use of image schemata is not without criticism. Suggesting that there are universal structures of human reasoning and interference may require making untenable or myopic generalisations about experience. Feminist scholars in particular have responded with pertinent concern to the claim that specific experiential gestalts underlie all human cognition. On this line of thinking, everyone reasons in the same way, and all bodies work similarly, reinforcing a hegemonic perspective modelled, perhaps, on the experiences of the theory’s inventor Mark Johnson (Henking 1990; Pitts-Taylor 2015). Universalist claims fail to take into account the diversity of human experience – especially the ways that individuals understand their own experience – which would seem to undermine Lakoff and Johnson’s attempt to attend to this diversity through a radical “experientialist” or “embodied realist” theory. For instance, Johnson’s (1987: 73–100) discussion of the “balance” schema includes several conceptual metaphors based upon the embodied and cross-domain-mapped experience of balance. Of course, there is no single embodied experience of balance. An individual with extreme vertigo relates to their experience of physical balance in a rather different way to the non-sufferer. However, it seems reasonable to argue that the person with vertigo is still able to understand metaphorical applications of the balance image schema across domains, such as a balanced argument, or a moral concept of fairness. Their difficulty with physical balance does not necessarily mean an altogether separate image schema, as they (perhaps even more intensely than able-bodied individuals) understand the “ideal” state. Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 4) state unambiguously that theories of embodied cognition depend upon the “peculiarities of our human bodies”, yet the universalising language of image schemata can inadvertently produce inaccurate, even discriminatory, generalisations. Encountering these ideas from embodied cognitive science requires recognising “things humans do” in the course of cognition, naming and detailing concepts along the way. In each case, there is a sense of revelation, of bringing explicit awareness to processes that do not typically enter conscious experience. Constructs like image schemata form part of the human “cognitive unconscious”, a term acknowledging the empirical evidence that “most of our thought is unconscious, not in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but in the sense that it operates beneath the level of cognitive awareness, inaccessible to consciousness and operating too quickly to be focused on” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 10). Humans use conceptual systems to make sense of their experiences in the world without actively recognising the operation of such sense-making processes.9 In light of this finding, it seems reasonable to ask whether individuals are simply beholden to their neurology: if cognitive processes operate automatically and unconsciously, can you ever be aware of why you experience what you do?
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This quasi-fatalistic view is problematic for scholars of musical meaning. In providing an interpretive account of any given piece of music, we may be unable to accurately suggest why we have come to such an interpretation. Whether we emphasise that some particular meaning emerges from characteristics of a track, aspects of cultural identity, and/or qualities of the listening experience, the theory of the cognitive unconscious would instead locate the creation of meaning in the inaccessible, unconscious functioning of the embodied mind. So goes the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995). If indeed, as Damasio (1999: 42) neatly puts it, “the brain knows more than the conscious mind reveals”, the cognitive unconscious provides a useful model, if not an explanation proper, for phenomenal experience. And while the search for the neural correlates of consciousness proceeds at pace (Koch et al. 2016), there may be some wisdom in Tallis’ (2011) suspicion of “neuromania”, the inappropriate privileging of neuroscience in certain spheres such as the arts and social sciences (Zagorski-Thomas 2014: 30). If only the phenomenal level of experience is available to us for investigation, and with it the personal and cultural particularities of the individual, let us start there: an argument that might just as well be made for carrying out music research through interview-based ethnography as for employing constructs of embodied cognitive science. Indeed, in spite of generalised schemata, the experiential emphasis of embodied cognition embeds a cultural relativism. All cognitive learning and development takes place in specific social contexts, so cultural values should not be seen as simply after-the-fact interpretations of some unmediated “natural” experience. In his embodied theory of language, Feldman (2006: 72) clarifies that “learning does not add knowledge to an unchanging system—it changes the system”. Properly employed, theories of embodied cognition avoid falling into dichotomous trappings of nature and culture, suggesting that it is “more correct to say that all experience is cultural through and through, that we experience our ‘world’ in such a way that our culture is already present in the very experience itself ” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 57). This approach frames the view that specific embodied mechanisms underlie our culturally specific environmental interactions, providing a basis for discussing both commonalities and idiosyncrasies of how individuals listen.
Ecological-embodied framework The two schools of thought under discussion here have occasionally been characterised as separate or even incompatible (Rowlands 2004), leading Moore (2012) to tentatively piece them together in developing his hermeneutic method. Nonetheless, many researchers identify ecological perception and embodied cognition as part of the same tradition, and this seems increasingly the case over time. For a prominent example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on embodied cognition provides a subentry on ecological perception (Wilson and Foglia 2017). In the same vein, Chemero
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(2009) dedicates one of four parts of his book on radical embodied cognitive science to findings of ecological psychology, split between direct perception and affordances. An interesting predecessor spanning the two fields of study, albeit based in the discipline of embodied cognitive science, is the theory of enactive perception (Varela et al. 1991). To give a simple description of enaction that echoes the primary charge of both areas of my framework, this theory holds that meaningful experience emerges in the structural interconnection of the brain and body of the organism and the environment. Varela et al. (1991: 204) slightly distance their work from Gibsonian psychology, but recognise the compatibility of an ecological approach that develops beyond Gibson’s overemphasis on environmental properties. Most important is to emphasise the mutualism – or better still, “codetermination” – of animal and environment as the basis for perception.10 In the following decade, Noë (2004: 17) lists enactive perception and ecological perception as related ideas of cognitive science, on the grounds that “a hallmark of this new work is the idea that the relation between perception and action is more complicated than traditional approaches have supposed”. Another ten years on, Michaels and Palatinus (2014: 19) claim that “ecological psychology is arguably the original embedded, embodied cognition”. Most recently, Hardcastle (2017: 2) describes Gibson’s work simply as the “earliest contemporary incarnation” of the “recent embodied movement”, pointing out that their most significant commonality is a theoretical foundation that challenges computational views of the mind. If indeed these research traditions were ever entirely separate,11 the last forty years has seen a growing trend towards amalgamation. Their combination provides an empirically grounded framework for analysing embodied, interactive, and meaningful experience. Such a claim may be uncontroversial by now within music studies (Zagorski-Thomas 2014: 27; Gamble 2019), but it is worth emphasising their compatibility to demonstrate the benefits of this framework. For instance, Johnson and Larson (2003: 77) assert that Clarke’s ecological theory of musical meaning “provides additional support for our [embodied] argument”. Similarly, Clarke (2005: 203) notes that the theories of embodied cognition which Zbikowski employs can “achieve a somewhat similar outcome” to a Gibsonian approach. Moore (2012) has thoroughly examined the relationship between embodied and ecological accounts, noting that both characterise perception and cognition (or experience and understanding) as deeply and directly linked. As such, he concludes that there is sufficient “congruence between principles of embodied cognition and ecological perception and, thus, that the hermeneutic perspective I adopt here is not self-contradictory in utilizing variously the languages and findings of both” (Moore 2012: 248). Developing an ecological-embodied framework for music listening is not new, then, but the label is, as far as I am aware. By “framework” (or “approach”), I am referring to a composite set of grounding ideas that model experience rather than attempting to explain it: it does not seek to present absolute truth, but to pragmatically conceptualise
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and therefore understand what happens in the listening process. Where a particular tenet of either ecological perception or embodied cognition paradigm seems problematic, resolutions can be sought in the other. For instance, I have discussed how Gibsonian terminology implies that some immanent, predetermined meaning can be located within physical environments. This faulty claim could be corrected by reiterating the ecological (not physical), interactive definition of the environment, but Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of experientialism more emphatically rejects the objectivist account of meaning. Or, to take a problem with embodied cognition and resolve it with the ecological approach to perception: where applications of image schemata generalise about individuals’ embodied processes of reasoning, the ecological sensitivity to the learned capacities of specific organisms provides a corrective. Fundamentally, the ecological-embodied framework locates meaningful human experience in the relationship between the embodied mind and the environment. Instances of music listening are therefore meaningful. Music itself is not. For there to be music, sound has to be perceived and cognised as music. While notions of objective meaning can be thusly dismissed, there is at the opposite end a danger of privileging human subjectivity when it is the significant human-environmental interaction that the ecological-embodied approach illuminates. In this context, Zagorski-Thomas’ claim that “the meaning is in the people, not in the sound” (2014: 244) slightly overemphasises the role of interpretation. My view sees meaning arising in the interaction between people and sound, and residing in neither.12 Both are essential for the emergence of meaningful experience, but since we are aware of no capacity for sound to consciously experience anything, we might say that the meaning is for the people. This is principally how people use music (quite exploitatively indeed for, as far as we know, the music is getting little out of it).13 However, there are capacities of each individual listener (something residing in them, so to speak) that shape the meanings that music affords them. Although humans attune and resonate to music from prenatal stages of development (Parncutt 2016), the cultural specificity of popular music is absorbed throughout early childhood (Trehub 2016). An ecological and embodied theory of development satisfies the demand for an adequate model of music preference development that attends to the “interactions between the person, the music, their social and cultural context” (Hargreaves et al. 2006: 150). Affordances are not static elements of the environment waiting to be discovered by organisms (or, for an equivalent term, animals) from birth. Rather, they are opportunities for interaction that the “animal capitalises upon […] based on the perception, experience, and skills the animal has developed throughout their lifetime” (Marquez-Borbon 2018: 7), as illustrated by my earlier example of the ground and its changing affordances for humans at various stages of development. The theory of perceptual learning originated by Eleanor Gibson applies principles of ecological perception to human development, seeing perception
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as active, functional, and, crucially, a process learned over time. Perception is therefore something individuals do, and they do more of it over the course of a typical lifetime. The ecological approach to perceptual learning can be thought of as “an increased ability to detect information specifying affordances, events, and distinctive features” (Adolph and Kretch 2015: 130). From human infancy onward, Gibson and Pick (2000: 21) observe that: Babies have a great deal to learn about—everything that the world has to offer—and perceptual learning is their way of discovering what particular things and people afford for them, where things and people are in relation to themselves, what is happening, what characterizes their permanent surroundings, and what they can do. This emphasis on what individuals can do aligns closely with Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s work on the moving body and consciousness. She describes a kinaesthetic repertoire of “I cans”, which reinforce the ecological idea of developing capacities in a perceiving body. For Sheets-Johnstone (2011: 118): in discovering ourselves in movement and in turn expanding our kinetic repertoire of ‘I cans,’ we embark on a lifelong journey of sense-making. Our capacity to make sense of ourselves, to grow kinetically into the bodies we are, is in other words the beginning of cognition. This emphasis on action can be clearly related to creative processes, particularly playing an instrument (Cox 2016; Leman 2016). With the application of ecological and embodiment theory, “learning suggests a holistic behavioural change towards the system in which musical and sonic possibilities of the entire ecology of performance are explored and enacted” (Marquez-Borbon 2018: 4). There are, without doubt, empowering experiences of composing, creating, learning, and performing music which are worthy of investigation, especially in the worlds of metal and rap. My investigation is specific to listening, the most widespread kind of interaction with these musics: not every metal listener learns to shred or scream, nor does everyone who has encountered rap learn to make beats or spit bars like the pros. As listening is such a prevalent, diverse, constant activity, one that is not always consensual ( Johnson and Cloonan 2009: 26) but which enables various potent experiences, there is a greater need for an in-depth study of listening using principles of ecological perception and embodied cognition (Gamble 2019).
Listening in style Along with fundamental principles of learning what the body can do, human development involves gaining faculties of speech, language, and listening. Music listening includes a complex process of encultured and bodily learning
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whereby individuals gain particular abilities, preferences, and values. The idea of ability is particularly important for recognising styles of music, which research on “thin slices” has discovered to be one of the most immediate affordances of music listening (Gjerdingen and Perrott 2008). The “near immediacy” (Gjerdingen and Perrott 2008: 100) of this process of recognition is one interesting aspect of music perception, but learning to identify music styles more crucially requires environmental attunement based upon bodily capacities, the auditory context, and previous listening experiences. In short, categorising music by style (a process involving judgements of prototypicality) relies upon individuals’ general ecological learning, understood as an increasing sensitivity to useful information. With more listening experience comes greater attunement to musical tendencies which are the basis of judgements about music style. I hear distinct differences in music style between rap and metal. Do you? As I mentioned in the introduction, for unattuned listeners, both are “just noise”. Music style is the principal frame for meaningful listener interaction with music: without style, there is no meaning. Lucy Green’s study of style (hereafter indicating “music style”) follows naturally from an ecological theory of perceptual learning, observing that knowledge of style […] is learnt through repeated experience of music […] and is gained, to varying degrees, by every normal member of society. […] If it were not so, an individual could not tell a song from the sounds of a cat-fight, let alone distinguish between different musical styles from different times and places. (Green 2008: 53) Listeners make sense of music based upon past environmental interactions with music: certain qualities that have been attuned to time and time again, or differentiated as standout features of a given style by comparison with another. Each individual carries their own listening history, preferences, expectations, capacities, and beliefs that inevitably inform each new encounter with music. Moore (2012: 120) provides the useful image of a constellation by which to conceptualise style: “it consists of individual stars, and everyone can see the same stars, but how they draw the constellation will depend on their perspective.” The asterism “The Plough”, which has been historically interpreted to resemble a wagon, a saucepan, a ladle, or part of a bear, evidences the varied range of affordances of any ecologically available information. Returning to music, what is “nu metal” to me might be “rapcore” to you: such differentiations are ultimately individual, encultured, embodied judgements. They can be shared, of course, and thankfully we often agree on terms. There is, however, no objective quality of style that inextricably links the mediated label nu metal to particular features of music, only affordances of our listening that we report to have in common.
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The more that individuals engage (especially attentively and deliberately) with the music they listen to, the more able they become to differentiate environmentally available information for the ascription of style. Such is the underlying assumption of style competence, a term I draw from Charles Ford (2010) via Moore (2012).14 Just as an expert athlete is more sensitive than the average individual to environmental information that affects their performance of a particular kinaesthetic task, a more style-competent listener is one that attunes with greater sensitivity to perceived musical qualities. To illustrate this point, I have a shameful confession, albeit one I hope will be forgiven in a book on rap and metal. Here it is: I am not a particularly style-competent listener of country music (for instance, the work of Dolly Parton).15 What I mean by this is that I rely heavily upon stereotypes, irrelevant distinctions, and imprecise ascriptions to explain my listening of the popular music known as “country” (Southern US twang, acoustic guitars, and cowboy jargon, maybe?). Gjerdingen and Perrott (2008: 95) describe such (in)sensitivity to distinctions as a fisheye-lens effect. In this case, a more style-competent country listener would be able to identify country’s typical sounds, techniques, subtleties, and narratives. They probably enjoy country music a fair bit more, too. As Green (2008: 54) explains, “the greater the familiarity with style, the more affirmative is the experience”. The ecological view accounts for this, seeing “perceptual learning as progressive differentiation, perceivers becoming increasingly sensitive to distinctions within the stimulus information […] Exposure to the environment shapes these perceptual capacities, and distinctions that previously went unnoticed become detectable […] A cascade of successive differentiations ensues” (Clarke 2005: 22–23). The ability to differentiate in more detail is an ability to discover more affordances, whether inviting stylistic categorisation, new narrative readings, or sympathetic bodily motion.
Conclusion Listening to music is an activity the human body undertakes within an environment, and so the body-environment relation is an important locus for understanding encultured and corporeal experiences of listening. Perception and cognition are active (though not entirely conscious) processes of making sense of stimulus information. Sense-making, including discovering, parsing, patterning, comparing, prototyping, and ref lecting on music are all affordances of listening that make music meaningful. Therefore, musical meaning can be seen to emerge in the moment-to-moment (and subsequent ref lective) experience of the listener, with an ecological and embodied emphasis that invites some new vocabulary for thinking about musical interactions. For instance, hearing a beat affords dancing. Well, not always: the environment matters. Maybe the beat affords dancing at home, but not in public. And to be more precise still, perhaps the beat affords you dancing, but it affords the displeased person next to you turning the music down (or even off ). On another
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day, you might be the one turning it off if, say, you have company that would make playing that track inappropriate. The key definition of affordance is that it does not prescribe or constrain or condition experience with any consistency, but rather describes how ways of being are made possible. Listening to music affords an enormous variety of experiences. Such variety follows from a number of factors, as exemplified throughout this chapter. The ecological approach to perception provides a necessary frame for understanding how perception involves active participation with apparent structures in the environment. The theory I draw from embodied cognitive science lays out principles of conceptual, metaphorical, and schematic reasoning formed from bodily experience. The environment and the embodied mind, both taken at their broadest, critically alter potential experiences of music listening. I am yet to consider how music listening is shaped by states of mind, perceptions of self, and the current functioning of the body in all their cultural conditions. Effectively, these are the domain of psychology (especially social psychology), where recent studies reveal that power changes the way individuals engage with the environment. This finding has far-reaching implications for thinking about how people use music, and it is here that empowerment takes centre stage.
Notes 1 Some particular instances of music listening, such as “the third time I heard this track on my car stereo”, will be of interest in later chapters, but their transience makes for much harder study than typical, average, or repeat experiences of a given track. 2 For instance, studies of sonic ecology investigate the relationship between sound and environment, especially urban spaces (Atkinson 2007; Goodman 2010). 3 Edward Reed (1996: 49) draws a useful distinction between exterospecific information, which “remains invariant regardless of anything that an animal does”, and propriospecific information, which “varies in specific ways as a function of what the animal is currently doing”. 4 This introductory discussion makes (for now) a blanket assumption of human physical ability. Important work on ecological perception and disability includes Bloomfield et al. (2010), Bell and Clegg (2012), Dokumaci (2017). 5 The ecological theory of perception is sometimes called the theory of direct perception, marking it as an alternative to representational perceptual models of mind-theatres and homunculi. 6 As with ecological perception, there is the danger of falsely suggesting that only some of cognition is embodied. Instead, the term indicates the overall approach: let us see perception as ecological and cognition as embodied. 7 Statements of conceptual metaphors, spelling out the metaphorical thought underlying linguistic phrases, are conventionally formatted in small capitals. 8 For additional examples of conceptual metaphor, reread the section “Chapter outline” provided in Chapter 1, as I apply (or f log almost to death) the language of sewing to describe the structure of this book. See also Tim Ingold’s (2015) writing on lines, knots, and the meshwork. 9 The claim that most of human thought is unconscious may clash with the resurgence of research on consciousness which focuses upon thought as brain-generated
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10
11
12 13
14 15
mental activity that does enter awareness (Dennett 1991; Lycan 1996). Equally, the theory of the cognitive unconscious may encounter friction with psychoanalytic models of consciousness (Opataw 1997). Like Freud, however, Lakoff and Johnson characterise consciousness using the image of an iceberg, with conscious awareness represented by the visible tip, and unconscious cognitive activity occupying the majority of the berg beneath the surface. George Lakoff (1987: 215–216) similarly distances his work from Gibsonian theory. He disapproves of the notion of environmental invariance for closely resembling the objectivist perspective which is the historical enemy of his approach. Nonetheless, he recognises that “part of Gibson's ecological approach is absolutely essential to the experientialist approach that Johnson and I have proposed: his stress upon the constant interaction of people with their environment” (Lakoff 1987: 216). The critique boils down to the claim that Gibsonian innovations apply to perception, not cognition. Gibson (1979: 266) quite agrees: “the ecological theory of direct perception cannot stand by itself. It implies a new theory of cognition in general”. As if by luck, the very discipline of cognition attentive to interactions between the body and the environment (embodied cognition) emerged soon after. In their original formations, ecological perception and embodied cognition both betray a dissatisfaction with dominant perspectives in their broader disciplines (i.e., psychology of perception and the philosophy of mind). Furthermore, both are inf luenced by phenomenological writing on perception and experience, particularly the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Sanders 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). In some cases, individuals store experiences of music in memory, but these are recollections of the original moment or some idealised version of it rather than the experienced meaning itself. That said, that there is no known human culture without some form of music significantly evidences the evolutionary role of music (Honing et al. 2015), so it can be considered that what we exchange for the meaningful experience music offers us is its longevity. Similar terms include “style familiarity” and “style literacy”. In case it makes you feel any better, I claim a fair degree of style competence with the postmillennial rap and metal styles I address.
References Adolph, K. E. and Kretch, K. S. (2015) ‘Gibson’s Theory of Perceptual Learning’, in Wright, J. D. (ed) International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. 2nd edn. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 127–134. Advertising Standards Authority (2018) UK Code of Broadcast Advertising. Available at: https://www.asa.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/e6e8b10a-20e6-4674a7aa6dc15aa4f814. pdf (Accessed: 15 February 2018). Ashley, R. (2004) ‘Musical Pitch Space across Modalities: Spatial and Other Mappings through Language and Culture’, in Lipscomb, S. D. et al. (eds) Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition. Adelaide: Causal Productions, pp. 64–71. Atkinson, R. (2007) ‘Ecology of Sound: The Sonic Order of Urban Space’, Urban Studies (Routledge), 44(10), pp. 1905–1917. doi: 10.1080/00420980701471901. Barthes, R. (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, in Heath, S. (trans) Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press, pp. 142–149.
Listening to popular music 37 Bell, B. G. and Clegg, J. (2012) ‘An Ecological Approach to Reducing the Social Isolation of People with an Intellectual Disability’, Ecological Psychology, 24(2), pp. 159–177. doi: 10.1080/10407413.2012.673983. Bloomfield, B. P., Latham, Y. and Vurdubakis, T. (2010) ‘Bodies, Technologies and Action Possibilities: When Is an Affordance?’, Sociology, 44(3), pp. 415–433. doi: 10.1177/0038038510362469. Brøvig-Hanssen, R. and Danielsen, A. (2013) ‘The Naturalised and the Surreal: Changes in the Perception of Popular Music Sound’, Organised Sound, 18(1), pp. 71–80. doi: 10.1017/S1355771812000258. Brower, C. (2008) ‘Paradoxes of Pitch Space’, Music Analysis, 27(1), pp. 51–106. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2249.2008.00268.x. Chalmers, D. J. (1995) ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), pp. 200–219. Chemero, A. (2009) Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Clarke, E. F. (1999) ‘Subject-Position and the Specification of Invariants in Music by Frank Zappa and P. J. Harvey’, Music Analysis, 18(3), pp. 347–374. Clarke, E. F. (2003) ‘Music and Psychology’, in Clayton, M., Herbert, R., and Middleton, R. (eds) The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 113–123. Clarke, E. F. (2005) Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Clarke, E. F. (2013) ‘Music, Space, and Subjectivity’, in Born, G. (ed) Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 90–110. Cox, A. (2016) Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Damasio, A. (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Dennett, D. C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company. DeNora, T. (2000) Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dokumaci, A. (2017) ‘Vital Affordances, Occupying Niches: An Ecological Approach to Disability and Performance’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 22(3), pp. 393–412. doi: 10.1080/13569783.2017.1326808. Eitan, Z. and Timmers, R. (2010) ‘Beethoven’s Last Piano Sonata and Those Who Follow Crocodiles: Cross-domain Mappings of Auditory Pitch in a Musical Context’, Cognition, 114(3), pp. 405–422. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.10.013. Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002) The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Feldman, J. A. (2006) From Molecule to Metaphor. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Ford, C. (2010) ‘Musical Presence: Towards a New Philosophy of Music’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 8. Available at: http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/ pages/article.php?articleID=582. Gamble, S. (2019) ‘Listening to Virtual Space in Recorded Popular Music’, in Gullö, J.-O. (ed) Proceedings of the 12th Art of Record Production Conference: Mono: Stereo: Multi. Stockholm: Royal College of Music (KMH) & Art of Record Production, pp. 105–118.
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Gaver, W. W. (1993a) ‘How Do We Hear in the World? Explorations in Ecological Acoustics’, Ecological Psychology, 5(4), pp. 285–313. Gaver, W. W. (1993b) ‘What in the World Do We Hear?: An Ecological Approach to Auditory Event Perception’, Ecological Psychology, 5(1), pp. 1–29. Gibson, E. J. (1969) Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Gibson, E. J. and Pick, A. D. (2000) An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development. New York: Oxford University Press. Gibson, J. J. (1950) The Perception of the Visual World. Boston: Houghton Miff lin. Gibson, J. J. (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Miff lin. Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Miff lin. Gjerdingen, R. O. and Perrott, D. (2008) ‘Scanning the Dial: The Rapid Recognition of Music Genres’, Journal of New Music Research, 37(2), pp. 93–100. doi: 10.1080/09298210802479268. Goodman, S. (2010) Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Green, L. (2008) Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology, and Education. 2nd edn. Bury St Edmunds: Arima Publishing. Hardcastle, V. G. (2017) ‘The Consciousness of Embodied Cognition, Affordances, and the Brain’, Topoi. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/ s11245-017-9503-7 (Accessed: 16 February 2018). Hargreaves, D. J., North, A. C. and Tarrant, M. (2006) ‘Musical Preference and Taste in Childhood and Adolescence’, in McPherson, G. E. (ed) The Child as Musician: A Handbook of Musical Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–154. Henking, S. E. (1990) ‘Review of the Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 58(3), pp. 503–506. Hirose, N. (2002) ‘An Ecological Approach to Embodiment and Cognition’, Cognitive Systems Research. (Situated and Embodied Cognition), 3(3), pp. 289–299. doi: 10.1016/S1389-0417(02)00044-X. Honing, H. et al. (2015) ‘Without It No Music: Cognition, Biology and Evolution of Musicality’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1664), p. 20140088. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0088. Ingold, T. (2015) The Life of Lines. London and New York: Routledge. Johnson, B. and Cloonan, M. (2009) Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence. Surrey: Ashgate. Johnson, M. (1987) The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, M. L. and Larson, S. (2003) ‘“Something in the Way She Moves”— Metaphors of Musical Motion’, Metaphor and Symbol, 18(2), pp. 63–84. doi: 10.1207/S15327868MS1802_1. Keyes, C. L. (1996) ‘At the Crossroads: Rap Music and Its African Nexus’, Ethnomusicology, 40(2), pp. 223–248. doi: 10.2307/852060. Koch, C. et al. (2016) ‘Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Progress and Problems’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(5), pp. 307–321. doi: 10.1038/nrn.2016.22. Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors We Live By. New edn. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 243–276. Leman, M. (2008) Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lycan, W. G. (1996) Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Marquez-Borbon, A. (2018) ‘Perceptual Learning and the Emergence of Performer-Instrument Interactions with Digital Music Systems’, in 2016 Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts Conference. Irvine: University of California. Available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5p45g68p (Accessed: 3 October 2019). Michaels, C. F. (2003) ‘Affordances: Four Points of Debate’, Ecological Psychology, 15(2), pp. 135–148. doi: 10.1207/S15326969ECO1502_3. Michaels, C. F. and Carello, C. (1981) Direct Perception. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Michaels, C. F. and Palatinus, Z. (2014) ‘A Ten Commandments for Ecological Psychology’, in Shapiro, L. (ed) The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 19–28. Moore, A. F. (2012) Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Surrey: Ashgate. Noë, A. (2004) Action in Perception. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Opatow, B. (1997) ‘The Real Unconscious: Psychoanalysis as a Theory of Consciousness’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 45(3), pp. 865–890. doi: 10.1177/00030651970450030601. Parncutt, R. (2016) ‘Prenatal Development and the Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Musical Behavior’, in Hallam, S., Cross, I., and Thaut, M. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 371–386. Pitts-Taylor, V. (2015) ‘A Feminist Carnal Sociology? Embodiment in Sociology, Feminism, and Naturalized Philosophy’, Qualitative Sociology, 38(1), pp. 19–25. doi: 10.1007/s11133-014-9298-4. Reed, E. (1996) Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rinsema, R. M. (2017) Listening in Action: Teaching Music in the Digital Age. London and New York: Routledge. Rowlands, M. (2004) The Body in Mind: Understanding Cognitive Processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanders, J. T. (1993) ‘Merleau-Ponty, Gibson, and the Materiality of Meaning’, Man and World, 26, pp. 287–302. Sanders, J. T. (1997) ‘An Ontology of Affordances’, Ecological Psychology, 9(1), pp. 97–112. Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2009) The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2011) The Primacy of Movement. 2nd edn. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
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Siegel, S. (2016) ‘The Contents of Perception’, in Zalta, E. N. (ed) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/perceptioncontents/ (Accessed: 11 July 2019). Tallis, R. (2011) Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham: Acumen Publishing Limited. Trehub, S. E. (2016) ‘Infant Musicality’, in Hallam, S., Cross, I., and Thaut, M. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 387–397. Turvey, M. T. and Shaw, R. (1979) ‘The Primacy of Perceiving: An Ecological Reformulation of Perception for Understanding Memory’, in Nilsson, L. (ed) Perspectives on Memory Research. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 167–222. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Wilson, R. A. and Foglia, L. (2017) ‘Embodied Cognition’, in Zalta, E. N. (ed) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2017 edn. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2017/entries/embodied-cognition/ (Accessed: 24 January 2018). Windsor, W. L. (2004) ‘An Ecological Approach to Semiotics’, Journey for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 34(2), pp. 179–198. Zagorski-Thomas, S. (2014) The Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zbikowski, L. M. (2002) Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
3
Individual empowerment in rap and metal music listening
Introduction On record, in associated artwork, across other multimedia, and at live performance events, rap and metal musicians provide spectacular displays of power. Some artists emphasise their own physical, bodily strength. For example, rapper 50 Cent appears on his album covers “in an unashamedly dominant-male pose, his well-built muscular form placed centrally and drawing the viewer’s gaze toward him” ( Jarman-Ivens 2006: 212). Popular musicians may also emphasise their power through considerable wealth: draped in thick gold jewellery, DJ Khaled appears with his face tilted down into his hand in the (now widely memefied) album artwork for 2013’s Suffering from Success.1 Even so, exhibiting one’s material goods is a widespread strategy for self-celebration in various popular music cultures. Recall 1980s glam metal, which epitomised how “the visual language of metal album covers and the spectacular stage shows offer larger-than-life images tied to fantasies of social power” (Walser 2014: 2). Mötley Crüe (1987) typify this trend posing astride f lashy Harley Davidson motorcycles for the album cover of Girls, Girls, Girls. In this example, as in countless rap album covers, the inclusion of vehicles not only demonstrates Mötley Crüe’s ostensibly significant wealth but also suggests the musicians’ driving expertise and skill: they have the bikes, and they know what to do with them. The insinuation is that if they can tame such powerful machinery, they must make light work of mastering their musical instruments, not to mention sexual prowess. Cutting out the material middle-man, numerous rap artists show off cold, hard cash. Raising a wad of printed notes to one’s ear like a telephone, rappers display “the money phone”, described by XXL magazine’s Peter A. Berry (2016) as “the most basic f lex imaginable, but it’s so ubiquitous it feels like a rite of passage for rising rap stars”. Usually accompanied by a boastful grin, the message is clear: I recognise the power that my wealth gives me, and have no inhibitions about expressing it. From exhibiting physical strength to f launting money, rap and metal music features numerous performances of personal power and high self-worth. Boasting and braggadocio have long been examined as crucial elements of
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hip-hop culture (Rose 1994: 54–56; Perry 2004: 200), the thrills of excess have been explored in metal scholarship (Weinstein 2000: 87), and in each case these ideas have been tied to displays of (especially masculinist) power. I extend such arguments to consider how we hear power in music. Notions of significant physical presence, lyrics about economic or sexual power, and performances of bodily ability can travel sonically. This chapter uncovers how individuals are affected by power in the listening process, introducing three ideas from psychology and neurology: the approach/inhibition theory of power, the personal sense of power, and the processes of mentalising and mirroring. These theories of power are combined to form a nuanced account of how listening alters the behavioural systems which determine individual perception, cognition, and action. Five case studies of music analysis and interpretation are included to demonstrate this process in action, bolstered by theories of musical personas. In a nutshell, the chapter argues that rap and metal tracks encourage the imagination of vibrant musical personas who clearly enact power. Much like rap artists visually demonstrate wealth with a stack of banknotes, there is a person’s voice captured on record, one which (it seems) belongs to an individual – the persona – who can express their power with sonic cues. Listeners can become empowered by mirroring or mentalising a persona’s behaviour and perceived state of mind (and body), which allows them to re-evaluate their own abilities, or instils a stronger sense of self-confidence. This chapter will begin to contest the traditional perspectives on power critiqued in Chapter 1 by building upon the embodied-ecological approach to listening developed in Chapter 2. In other words, it is time to address the empowering elephant in the room. I will do so by developing a model of musical empowerment that focuses first upon state change in individuals. Earlier in the book, I discussed how both power and music are thought to have transformative effects upon people. The constructs that this chapter draws from psychology (and related fields) substantiate old wisdom about the transformative or “metamorphic” effects of power (Forsyth 2010: 235) in general, and can be fruitfully related to processes of music listening and interpretation. Additional theories pertinent to the study of empowerment will be woven in throughout the following chapters, whereas this chapter provides a solid basis for understanding how performances of individual power come to affect listeners’ psychological states.
Power and behaviour There are many ways to classify the kinds of behaviour that humans exhibit. I will focus upon a working binary distinction. The approach/ inhibition theory proposes that power affects the activation of two distinct behavioural systems in humans associated with reward and threat. Reward behaviour, known as approach or action, contrasts with threat behaviour, which is also called inhibition or avoidance. These behavioural
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systems – psychological states which trigger specif ic modes of activity – are based upon neuropsychological research into anxiety. When people are very anxious, their inhibition system becomes more active, which produces inhibited behaviour, greater vigilance, and increased focus (Gray and McNaughton 2000: 4). While these systems are essentially descriptive models, they can be def ined functionally by examining responses to environmental stimuli. Experimental studies have long demonstrated that individual affect, behaviour, and cognition are altered by power (Kemper 1991; Fiske 1993; Woike 1994). The approach/inhibition theory, proposed by Dacher Keltner and colleagues, develops upon this evidence to address the interactions between power and psychological state change. Higher power is related to increased activation of an individual’s approach system, and lower power is related to increased activation of an individual’s inhibition system. The operation of these systems can be described thus: The behavioral approach system is believed to regulate behavior related to sex, food, safety, achievement, aggression, and social attachment […] Rewards and opportunities trigger approach-related processes that help the individual pursue and obtain goals related to these rewards. These include affective states that motivate approach-related behavior, cognitive assessments of reward contingencies in the environment, and forward locomotion. The behavioral inhibition system is equivalent to an alarm–threat system. Inhibition is activated by punishment, threat, and uncertainty. The behavioral inhibition system involves affective states such as anxiety, heightened vigilance and inspection of punishment contingencies, and avoidance and response inhibition. (Keltner et al. 2003: 268) Higher power is associated with activation of the approach system for two main reasons. First, having high power entails having greater and more immediate access to resources (such as material goods, money, knowledge, decision-making, and social relationships) than the less powerful. Accordingly, the powerful have less inhibition towards behaviours such as goal pursuit (Guinote 2007; Kunstman and Maner 2011). The relation between high power and approach activity also has modest support from neuroimaging studies (Boksem et al. 2012; Li et al. 2016). Second, higher power individuals have more personal liberty, encountering less interference from others, and facing fewer threats of social fallout resulting from their approach-related behaviour (Anderson and Berdahl 2002). They also have less fear of negative evaluation (Cai and Wu 2017). In general, power “disinhibits” (Anderson and Galinsky 2006: 533). Individuals with lower power demonstrate a more active inhibition system, based upon greater threats of social conf lict. Because they have less access to resources, they
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avoid jeopardising what they do have, or will behave appropriately to gain more resources, displaying inhibited behaviour by staying in line (Keltner et al. 2003). Approach is related to sex, achievement, and aggression: the references to displays of individual power in rap and metal sketched out at the start of this chapter quickly begin to gain colour. Evidently, embodied displays of approach activity in rap and metal are ubiquitous. Putting aside for now whether artists actually possess material power, it is clear that performances of such power in music, artwork, and associated multimedia are central to both genres. One might expect to find extreme goal-direction, reward seeking (and obtaining), and enactments of personal liberty in the musical expression of power through approach behaviour. Compared to lower power individuals, higher power individuals tend to objectify, dehumanise, and stereotype others more (Gruenfeld et al. 2008; Lammers and Stapel 2011). They experience higher self-esteem (Anderson et al. 2012) and take more risks, based on greater optimism (Anderson and Galinsky 2006). They are more expressive and make decisions more quickly (Guinote 2017). Kleef et al. (2015) find that higher power individuals consider their own experiences more inspirational than others’ experiences. Many of these tendencies correlate with processes of musical composition, performance, and production, so it appears that individuals have more active approach systems at the time of creating music. After all, performing suggests the ability to express oneself without inhibition, and recorded music seems to capture higher power individuals undertaking approach-oriented actions. By contrast, Weick and Guinote (2008: 957) observe “the greater tendency of powerless individuals to engage in interpretative reasoning and to go beyond accessible impressions”, behaviours which may correspond with music listening, evaluation, and critique. This finding might support the idea that listeners tend to be less powerful: when people feel powerless, when their actions are inhibited, they turn to others to express on their behalf. The act of music listening can be understood as a kind of reliance upon music to provide higher power, to demonstrate approach activity when individuals feel inhibited. Approach and inhibition behaviours cannot actually be witnessed in music, 2 but they can be interpreted in the listening process. They may not be directly perceivable, but they can be imagined, a point that invites a small development of the ecological-embodied framework for listening. In everyday perception, listeners can detect environmental affordances based upon the behaviour of other people (recall your deaf friend and you responding to a fire alarm). Nearby actors generate possibilities for interaction just like static objects or invisible forces. The approach/inhibition theory of power shows that individuals behave in different ways based upon their power. It is therefore commonplace to intuit, interpret, and judge others’ power. In the act of music listening, individuals may make judgements about the current approach or inhibition activity of implied performers. Such interpretation can be understood in the context of musical personas.
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The personic environment There have been numerous models of personas presented in the study of popular music, amounting to a small but significant field of research (Hansen 2019: 501–502). Getting to grips with listeners’ characterisation of musical sounds can be an exciting but surprisingly slippery endeavour. Characterisation is the key: much popular music listening involves the invention of fictional individuals based upon recorded performances of real humans. Moore’s theory of the personic environment addresses the virtual environment that listeners construct when listening to an instance of recorded popular song. The focus for now is the performed voice, but this theory can be extended to address instrumental personas (Sora 2019). Following Moore (2005, 2012), the perception of a voice in any listening experience affords the imagination of a protagonist: this is a virtual character who appears to be situated within the sonic environment of a track. When listeners identify one protagonist common to numerous songs within an artist’s oeuvre, they are complicit in the construction of a persona, the most general term for an individual imagined in the listening process. The term performer is reserved for the real human whose vocals are used on record. 3 Moore (2012) characterises five degrees of the perceived relation of the environment to the persona: ordered from the most autonomous to the most interactive, these are inert, quiescent, active, interventionist, and oppositional. It is worth emphasising that the personic environment is an interpretive construct: the relationship between the persona and the environment is ripe for judgement by the listener. In this way, the traditional analytical parameters of “vocal melody” and “accompaniment” can be characterised as a perceived relationship between the voice and everything else heard in a track. I hear most modern rap and metal somewhere between quiescent (broadly aligned with the persona) and interventionist (extending personic affordances by, for instance, enacting the lyric). As the subsequent analyses will show, rap music upholds a particular set of personic conventions through which artists typically (but not always) present the protagonist, persona, and performer as coextensive (Hess 2005). Rappers, particularly using lyrics, tend to perform as though the character in a single track is the same as in their other tracks, a person who differs little from themselves as real people off-record. This performance is known as realness, a term which loads signifyin(g) power upon the broader concept of authenticity (Baldwin 2004; Kelley 2004). While this ideological construction does not manifest quite so pervasively in metal, rap takes the “presumption of authenticity” seriously indeed ( Jarman-Ivens 2006: 202). Like Kai Arne Hansen (2019: 506), I view personas as “multiply constructed” – constituted by affordances from various transmedial texts and discourses – but my focus here on how personas emerge in listening means that I maintain the primacy of sonic qualities that enable personic interpretation.
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Moreover, Frith (1996: 198) presaged ecological and embodied perspectives by describing personic interpretation as an activity listeners find significant, noting that: musical pleasure lies in the play we can make of both being addressed, responding to a voice as it speaks to us […] and addressing, taking on the voice as our own, not just physically […]—singing along, moving our throat and chest muscles appropriately—but also emotionally and psychologically, taking on (in fantasy) the vocal personality too. The theory of the personic environment rests upon the ecological-embodied framework, comparable to Clarke’s (1999) account of subject position. As the personic environment is virtual, it can be conceptualised as a substitute environment for our real environment during the listening process. This virtual environment can be addressed ecologically, as listeners enter into some imagined surroundings, particularly through the use of headphones. In this way, people may relate to the persona who manifests in this environment just as they do to others in real life. Often this conception of others involves forming an image of them (as one might attribute a body to a voice heard on the telephone), ascribing them identity characteristics (gender, age, race), and to some extent interpreting their current state. When listeners imagine personas, they may develop a sense of how a given persona feels, what they are doing, what they are able to do. Such considerations relate to a persona’s approach and inhibition activity. It is common to “assign intention” (Frith 1996: 190) to a persona’s interactions with their surroundings through this imaginative process. Perhaps the effects of power upon approach and inhibition behaviours are not common knowledge, but the principles are fairly straightforward, and may be known implicitly. To reiterate, the powerful (by comparison with less powerful individuals) have more self-esteem, stereotype others, take more risks due to greater optimism, make faster decisions, and place greater trust in their own intuitions. Beyond experimental observation, many of these behaviours may be easy to perceive in everyday interactions. So, when listeners hear such actions in performance on record, it is not a stretch for them to make judgements about the persona’s power. Two tracks from Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly epitomise extreme positions with regard to approach and inhibition behaviour. The single “i” depicts first-person power and self-love with strong approach tendencies. The hook’s main phrase, “I love myself ”, is a rather unambiguous celebration of self-esteem and personal positivity (Kendrick Lamar 2015a). The lead vocal blasts over the environmental sounds and echoes prominently (“self… self ”), suggesting significant force and emphasis. By contrast, in “u”, the protagonist berates himself through constant repetition of “loving you is complicated”, slurring and spilling over metric boundaries as saxophones blare to bury the voice (Kendrick Lamar 2015b). Absent is the self-esteem and confidence of “i”, as he focuses instead upon self-punishment, anxiously
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jumping between mumbling and erratic screeching. A more detailed example will help to clarify these relationships. Little Simz (2014): “Bars Simzson” For this first analysis, I turn to the UK hip-hop artist Little Simz. Her early career is marked by a string of independently released mixtapes and EPs. This song, a two-minute bonus track from the longer release E.D.G.E, uses a beat sourced online (originally produced as “West Loop” by Hank Iving) and applies Little Simz’s passionate lyricism and dope f low to act as a “mission statement” for the artist. It is an ideal introductory example of the empowerment model as, from the outset, it is evident that Little Simz knows who she is, her abilities, her power. The listener is undoubtedly encouraged to identify the imagined protagonist of the song (who I label Simz) as the artist herself.4 The song thus complies with the traditional practice of rappers telling firstperson stories in which they purport to be the protagonist (Hess 2005: 299). Throughout the track, Simz demonstrates her potential as a rising rap star and provides a model of empowerment for listeners to enjoy and emulate (or else evade). “Bars Simzson” exhibits Simz’s approach-oriented behaviours through vocal virtuosity and a supportive beat, and listening to the track provides an insight into her apparently considerable power. From the outset, the vocals suggest that Simz is completely in control of her delivery, of her body, and of her general self-presentation. The consistent speed of her rapped f low may be what listeners notice first. She begins spitting even before the beat drops (0’18”), indicating that she has too much to fit into the track, too many bars to deliver (thus living up to the nickname Bars Simzson). It takes a minute of near-constant rapping before she acknowledges this excess (1’27”): “man I got too much to say, let me say it”. Instead, she has been goal-oriented in sustaining the f low, ignoring distractions such as the need to explain herself. In this way, she exemplifies many tendencies of high power individuals associated with approach activity. Simz also presents a masterclass in rhyme and vocabulary across several lines. Between 0’34” and 0’45”, she fits in eight rhymes using the phoneme [ʌ] (i.e., the “u” sound of “much”), and between 0’47” and 1’08”, she includes thirteen rhymes of [ɒ] (i.e., the “o” of “lots”). This rhyming is remarkably frugal, drawing from only a small pool of vocal sounds to string together “cost”, “Lacoste”, “f loss”, “loss”, “locks”, “lots”, “shots”, and “lost” in the space of a few seconds (0’51”–1’00”). Rather than an overabundance of any old words, she provides a sense of self-regulation through the obvious premeditation of these rhymes. She continues to show off her vocal skill by negotiating rapid rhythmic patterns, dancing around the beat first in triplets, then in three-beat phrases (notated in Example 3.1). When changing from the triplet quaver rhythm, Simz opts for semiquavers, rapping faster still rather than slowing down to a quaver-based pattern. This drive suggests a certain confidence, an awareness of her own abilities to exceed expectation, never inhibiting her self-expression. Throughout the
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Example 3.1 Little Simz (2014): “Bars Simzson”; 0’47”–1’00”
track, the mix of duple and triplet rhythms are delivered quite precisely as she sticks tightly to the beat. Her f low falls behind notably at 1’22”, but lands back squarely upon it at 1’27”. The rhythm and the lyric of this moment – “I put my mind in a place where I don’t focus on the time or the day” – enact her ability to dispense with time at her will. Flexibly playing with the pulse of the track is an example of this performative dominance, a power she holds with good humour. At 0’41”, she gives the punchline, “lyrically bury these rappers alive, come back and finish my lunch”. When the bass drops for the latter part of this line, it may seem as though the protagonist acts out the burial, squashing the environment in cartoonish fashion to position her vocal boast centre-stage. As there is the illusion of substantial bass frequencies to the voice as well as notable mouth noise, listeners may identify the protagonist to be fairly close.5
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Her brazen attitude might be considered rather in-your-face because her voice really is positioned “in your face” (or at least as close an approximation as stereo music listening can afford). Consequently, her rapid gasps for breath between vocal phrases are highly audible, reaching their most shrill at 1’28”. These breaths highlight the deeply embodied capacity on display in her performance, as the protagonist appears to make the utmost use of her physical capabilities. Among other constraints, she challenges even the limits of her lung capacity. All listeners have felt out of breath at one time or another, and hearing Simz push past this bodily constraint characterises her as a strong model of approach activity. Her goal-direction, sustained even at the edge of her physical abilities, may encourage imagining a protagonist full of self-esteem. The beat firmly supports this protagonist. It provides an unchanging stability as a backdrop for Simz’s vocal acrobatics. Minimal pitch motion emerges from a short synth line, which reaffirms C♯ aeolian above a prominent C♯ pedal bass. The rhythmic phrasing of the descending synth pattern, particularly the repeated C♯ on beat 3 of every other bar, seems resolute in stressing the tonic.6 At times, the bass slides up loudly to G♯, but the synth melody continues unaffected, thus reinforcing the single-mindedness of the protagonist (and perhaps suggesting that she cannot be stopped by environmental distractions). Apart from the synth line, bass, and percussion tracks, there are no non-vocal sounds, so there is little to pull attention away from the protagonist. This no-frills environment is matched by the track’s straightforward form, lacking a chorus or hook in its two-minute run time. Simz just keeps f lowing, exemplifying the speed, confidence, and lack of constraint of an individual in the midst of approach activity. By interpreting approach behaviour and attributing it to the persona in this way, the listener is invited to imagine “Bars Simzson” as a musical display of considerable power.
Power and cognition So much for behaviour, imagined or otherwise. At this point, it bears thinking about power as more than a purely social variable. Individuals with greater access to resources or greater control over given decisions may draw upon economic and relational power of this kind. However, psychological research has also begun to analyse power as a cognitive construct. Bombari et al. (2017) point out that experimental approach/inhibition research often primes individuals with position power, whereas a person’s experience of power, “felt power”, is affected by additional measures such as relationships within social environments, perceived dominance, and task competence. It appears that how powerful a person feels in a given social interaction might be related to the person’s emotional states more so than position power. Similar to emotional states, felt power is also driven by different aspects of the concrete social setting” (Bombari et al. 2017: 55). Moreover, the approach/inhibition theory has been directly linked to ecological affordances. For instance, Guinote (2008: 238) notes that “power changes the relationship individuals
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have with their environment”. Evidently, there is more that can be understood about the experiential state of wielding power beyond its effects upon behaviour. For such insights, I turn to work on the personal sense of power. Developed by Cameron Anderson and colleagues, research on the personal sense of power endorses studying power not by observing behaviour based upon the allocation of control over resources, but by analysing power as a psychological state, a kind of self-perception (Anderson et al. 2012: 313–314). This perspective provides a significant refinement to approach/inhibition research, responding to evidence that individuals’ self-perception of their power can affect their power in more relational and structural terms. It is the self-evaluation which appears to matter most, as “those who perceive themselves as powerful behave in more effective ways that increase their actual power” (Anderson et al. 2012: 314). In short, people act with the power they think they have. Whereas “traditionally, scholars have emphasized power’s determinants, [this view prioritises] the psychological consequences of power for those who possess it” (Galinsky et al. 2003: 454). Individuals need not possess much power – as recorded by any objective measure – in order to exhibit behavioural and cognitive effects related to high power. Smith et al. (2008: 378) further note that “one’s subjective sense of power often has greater inf luence on behavior than the amount of power one actually possesses”, and Kim et al. (2015: 599) more firmly state that “a person’s perception of power inf luences their behavior more than their actual power”. Embodied cognition argues that much of our thought is unconscious. This is significant for the personal sense of power, as it suggests that power can be activated and can operate on our reasoning without conscious awareness (Smith and Galinsky 2010). In this way, the personal sense of power neatly fits with the ecological-embodied framework: self-perception of power conditions our experience of the environment. In a study on tone of voice recognition, Uskul et al. (2016: 14) discover that “having or lacking power shapes the way people experience the acoustic world, fostering differences in the way people listen to and process emotional language stimuli”. This evidence may be tentatively extended to music listening, suggesting that lower power individuals tend to be more sensitive to aspects of the acoustic environment (including, perhaps, recorded music). Smith and Galinsky (2010) use the term “nonconscious” to describe this operation of power, an alternative to the term “automatic” (Tzelgov 2002), which accords with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) use of the cognitive unconscious. In effect, individuals are not aware of the activation of approach or inhibition systems: it just happens, so to speak. From this perspective, the personal sense of power can also be understood as a part of neural processing that does not typically enter consciousness. Smith and Galinsky (2010: 919) point out that “like other psychological constructs and processes […] power does not have to be conscious for its effects to emerge”. Decelles et al. (2012: 682) describe this view of power as “a psychological state associated with perceiving control, which generates certain action tendencies and affective and cognitive changes”. It can – but does not
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necessarily – correlate with material conditions of power. People do not need to be distinctly aware of having or lacking power in a situation to hold certain beliefs about their own power: the personal sense of power continues to be active, without conscious awareness. Importantly, power is at least “in part a state of mind” (Forsyth 2010: 237). It is certainly possible to hear Simz in this light. The following example will help to address how metal’s personas exhibit power as a psychological construct. Ensiferum (2015): “One Man Army” “One Man Army” offers a wholly different soundworld to the first rap example, but helps to illustrate how the empowerment model operates across styles. It represents many tendencies and features of modern metal music – the obvious things like distorted guitars, punchy drum production, and screamed vocals are there – but also takes a very clear line on self-sufficiency and personal (personic) strength that is worth analysis. The song begins with the rapid guitar semiquavers typical of thrash metal, soon joined by a double-time backbeat. This rhythmic and textural pattern provides a sense of charging forth, as the persistent snare timbre pierces through the wash of guitar strokes. When the protagonist enters – I’ll call him Man – his voice projects fully over the environment’s guitars and drums, partially blocking them with his wide sonic presence. On the third line, additional voices accompany the line exaggeratedly, bursting outward from his central position. It may seem as though this sudden choral timbre illustrates the protagonist’s dominance and prestige, a sense of self-aggrandising which indicates an inf lated personal sense of power. Perhaps this is how the protagonist hears himself, egotistically adopting the grandeur of multiple voices. This accompaniment recurs several times in the track, almost as if this choral multi-voicing is a personic ability that Man can turn off and on at will. His voice reverberates throughout the final minim of the verse, before the additional voices return, such that he is temporally ever-present. This trace of his impact, even when he has finished screaming, suggests considerable power over the environment. From 1’01”, the wide-panned voices now pray to Man, extending beyond the even hypermetre in an indulgent celebration of his might. The lead voice confesses, “I am cursed to be” and, on the repeat, “I am blessed to be… one man army”. The additional voices again synchronise in support of this claim, but since the titular lyric separates Man from all connections, they appear to sing in praise of his potency (rather than being individual personas, members of a collective army, for instance). Such mythology concerning a lone warrior is well known in this style of folk metal and its associated media. The protagonist may be imagined as a battle-worn, Viking-like figure, a hypermasculine hero of legend and folklore. In the chorus, Man’s alternating characterisation of his position as a curse and a blessing makes his independence and personal sense of power appear stronger still: he simply is a one man army, and nothing can be done about it. Thus he marches on.
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In the guitar solo, the virtuosic, often harmonised leads articulate the protagonist’s strength. The solo appears to provide evidence of Man’s capabilities, because his scream introduces this section (2’07”), initially echoing across its opening crotchets. At the same time, listeners may be quite aware of the human(s) playing these guitars, their fingers charging across the fretboards as a testament to approach-related behaviour. The frequent harmony in thirds throughout the solo may offer a sense of mutual resolve or communal connection, but I am inclined to hear it in terms of further self-sufficiency. After all, the protagonist spurns any idea of dependence upon others, goal-directed in his own focus, by reporting his lone behaviour: “I” – followed by spacious reverb, such that his sense of self expands to the entire musical environment – “I will take the lives, lives of my enemies”. The only path for this obstinate Man is “death or victory” (1’58”). His urgent battle cry, exhibiting individual behaviours and cognition associated with power, may encourage the listener to consider their own power.
The transfer of power Listening to this kind of track is all well and good for inhibited individuals looking for inspiration, but one would hope that they do not go out and “take the lives of their enemies”. The folk view of empowerment that sees it as a straightforward transfer of power from music to listener often takes such (violent) narratives seriously indeed, resulting in the criticisms of rap and metal addressed in Chapter 1. For now it is necessary to establish how portrayals of first-person power in rap and metal might affect listeners. The approach/inhibition theory and the personal sense of power cover how listeners interpret other imagined individuals – music personas – as feeling powerful. However, there is no intrinsic reason why this power should instantly manifest on the other side of the speaker. Studies of musical expression often focus upon this part of the process, the representation of some current state of mind (Everett 2012). Consequently, the effects of expression upon listeners are often far more opaque. The alternative starting point of the ecological-embodied framework maintains that individuals are affected by direct environmental possibilities. If what can be heard on record is a kind of empowerment in action, listeners may be able to discover and respond to this power just like any other environmental stimulus. We can examine, therefore, how individuals’ behaviour and cognition are shaped by two neuropsychological processes: mentalising and mirroring (Bombari et al. 2013: 2). Mentalising involves establishing a separate mind model for other individuals, recognising their independent cognition, and evaluating their mind state.7 It can involve speculation in the form, “how do they feel?”. By contrast, mirroring entails understanding another individual’s perspective by simulating their inferred state as it might apply to the perceiver. It covers thoughts of the kind, “how would I feel in that situation?”. The distinction between these two processes is not vital. However, it is useful to understand their operation in the act of listening, particularly how people
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relate to others within their environments. Importantly, mentalising and mirroring processes are deeply mediated by power. Schubert (2005: 17–18) notes that “when a gesture of bodily force (making a fist) is induced unobtrusively, it […] leads to changes in perceptions of power affordances in the environment and to different interpretations of assertive acts performed by other persons”. Carr et al. (2014), in a study of facial mimicry, show that power affects our physiological responses. Furthermore, Hogeveen et al. (2014: 759) observe “a linear relationship between power and the motor resonance system”, which is responsible for mirroring. These processes closely relate to what Cox (2016) has recently described as musical mimesis, a particular type of imitative cognition. Although mimesis is predicated upon the discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque brain, “it is possible to observe areas of the human brain that show similar mirroring behavior” (Feldman 2006: 126). Indeed, there is increasing neuropsychological evidence for the existence of “resonant or vicarious activity, whereby perceiving an interaction partner automatically activates neural circuits that would underlie their experience” (Hogeveen et al. 2014: 756). Applying this finding to music, Moore (2012b: 4) points out that individuals who have been trained to play an instrument resonate differently when hearing that instrument compared to non-players. Trained listeners appear to neurologically mirror the performer, imitating their sound production, understanding their bodily actions more sensitively than untrained listeners. People are not generally aware of the embodied knowledge they hold, including perceptual capacities which are often “invisible” (Zagorski-Thomas 2014: 28). The conceptual processes of mentalising and mirroring usefully unpack such concealed capacities, and help to explain how individuals are affected by musical stimuli even before forming interpretations about any given source. In much the same way, perceivers are able to instantly assess the power that others hold, whether or not they are aware of such capacities. All individuals have experiences of possessing power, inf luencing their behaviour towards approach or inhibition activity and altering their environmental outlook through a modified personal sense of power. In the imagination of some persona with a given power state, listeners variously mentalise and mirror them, forming judgements based upon musical perception of their embodied capacities. One person may not identify positively with some high power persona, perhaps finding them too boisterous (based upon the perception of approach activity or a strong personal sense of power). Another person may feel invited to imagine what it would be like to possess the power this persona ostensibly holds. Yet another person could vocalise along with the persona – sharing the voice, the instrument by which the persona makes themself known – and imitatively adopt the personal sense of power or the approach activity they perform. Listening to music enables a range of potential environmental interactions, with diverse effects upon the power of the listener. As the theory presented here has shown, this change alters the behaviour and cognition of the power-holder. Two track analyses will illuminate this process.
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Jay-Z (2003): “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” First, I consider how listeners can mirror and mentalise the archetypal mogul figure of East Coast rap. In “Dirt Off Your Shoulder”, the protagonist Jay appears to embody the typical “mack rap” pimp persona (Krims 2000: 62– 65). The off hand ad-lib which opens the track, “You’re now tuned into the motherfucking greatest”, seems to precondition the listener’s expectations: it is stated so matter-of-factly that one hardly has time to disagree before the beats drops. As in “Bars Simzson”, the beat comprises a two-bar aeolian melodic descent over a pedal bass, but with busier drums, including consistent, clicky hi-hat semiquavers. Supported atop this steady locomotion, Jay delivers extremely uniform vocal semiquavers, indicating his dominance through sheer environmental presence. The dynamic performance of the lead vocal is highly stable, with rhymed semiquavers generally emphasising a six-note stress pattern. The transcription in Example 3.2 demonstrates this rhythm using example lyrics from three different points in the track. Throughout the verses, the vocal maintains this basic pattern, occasionally adding extra syllables and elongations. The track is fairly unusual in its refusal to deviate from this f low style, sustained through three verses. This encourages me to hear Jay as highly reliable, in charge, intransigent. His perceived stubbornness is reinforced by the undeviating, monotone bass on F and the synth’s constant assertion of this tonic note. Throughout each bar-long loop, the synth lead rarely deviates from this pitch: all other notes stay in line, sticking to F. They comply with the tonic, as obedient to Jay as a mobster is to their don. Many of the track’s lyrics draw upon this musically enacted subservience in order to evidence the protagonist’s dominance. Jay fills this environment, his voice covering the stereo field. The intro’s percussive breaths spread the protagonist widely across the virtual space, making him appear able to be everywhere at once. The lead vocal also packs the verbal space densely (Griffiths 2003: 43–48). Jay is rarely absent, taking
Example 3.2 Jay-Z (2003): “Dirt Off Your Shoulder”; basic verse pattern
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no breaks between verse and chorus, and filling the hook’s crotchets (“get that”) with quaver repetitions which move around the virtual environment (from 1’12”). His presence thus emulates a masterful Mafioso who sees and knows everything occurring in his territory. Such spatial dominance may provide a strong sense of self, and his complete control over resources is evident. As he reels off his accomplishments and accolades with extraordinary self-celebration, attending to the vocal delivery may lead listeners to interpret a playful, smiling shape to the mouth. Accordingly, it may seem he is having fun bragging about his brilliance. This “swagger style” of vocal delivery can provide the listener with a domineering attitude to adopt, guiding them towards a higher personal sense of power and uncompromising approach activity. He even clarifies how to physically embody the power that he presents: all you have to do is “go and brush your shoulders off ”.8 This bodily gesture is a simple grooming motion of self-affirmation and self-respect which trivialises others’ abilities to affect or criticise its performer. Brushing your shoulders off demonstrates one’s infallibility and self-confidence, a mind state which may be some way from how listeners feel when they begin listening to the track. “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” is adamant about the importance of “feeling”, using this word frequently in the lyrics. This emphasises the self-perception involved in the personal sense of power rather than pointing to any objective status of dominance or control. And even though he has listed multiple accomplishments, Jay is concerned with the feelings that these provide above all else. Consider the first line of the hook. It does not matter if you actually are a “pimp”, but merely that “you’re feelin’ like” one. And for such a masculinist claim to domination, it is a more gender-inclusive invitation than one might expect: “ladies is pimps too”. This is the crux of the transformative power that the track offers. No matter how you felt before listening – Jay seems to say – if you feel good about yourself right now, “go and brush your shoulders off ”. This sound bite is repeated with variation, as Jay remains adamant that the dirt be brushed off shoulders everywhere in emphatic self-celebration. P.O.D. (2001): “Alive” Sometimes praise is self-directed, but sometimes it is pointed elsewhere. “Alive” offers an empowering dedication to a higher power, a portrayal of an individual during worship who finds strength in faith. Although the song is typical of nu metal, the religious lyrics make for a less common anthemic emphasis.9 The track employs a stable D aeolian mode, affirmed by the vocal insistence upon F with occasional use of G. In the guitar riff used throughout the introduction and verses, the chunky bar chords are notably thick and supportive within the environment.10 The blocky D–C–D figure affords a deep sense of stability. This environmental support is guided rhythmically by the kick drum, as its strikes precede the streams of guitar notes: the kick placement just before beat 3 of each bar offers a steady forward momentum (as shown in Example 3.3). If listeners interpret the vocals atop this basis, or in
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Example 3.3 P.O.D. (2001): “Alive”; basic riff
some other metaphorical layout upheld by the instrumental textures, the protagonist seems to be supported on firm ground. In this way, the protagonist’s surroundings enact the spiritual support proclaimed in the lyrics. For much of the track, the protagonist Sonny can be heard introspecting on personal experience. In the final line of each verse, however, he turns to a second person, “you”. The bridge lyrics provide a more specific testament to this second person’s omnipotence, and it is straightforward to identify this as the Judeo-Christian God. On the edge of a scream, Sonny vows to “believe no matter what they say”, prioritising the import of his faith over an antagonistic third person (“they”). In the chorus, he ascends up the major III chord to A, climactically interacting with the line, “I feel so alive”. This activates a conceptual metaphor for standing up, as if bodily rising as he gains in strength, ostensibly in preparation to “f ly”. Sonny’s faith-based ascent acts out an increase in his personal sense of power. The release of air which follows his delivery of the words “I” and “time” in the chorus suggests pushing all the air from the diaphragm, affirming a commitment to God through embodied action. His dedication to this spiritual connection provides a clear sense of approach activity. Due to his firm environmental support and upward melodic phrasing, the listener may feel invited to mirror or mentalise this protagonist’s devotion. By imagining the state required for Sonny’s exultation, the listener’s own personal sense of power may be modified as they develop from inhibited behaviour and cognition towards approach tendencies. Numerous online commenters report gaining such empowerment from the song: for example, comments on the YouTube video include “Jesus make[s] me feel alive” (Rych Dragneel 2016), “this song is so soul soothing…” (Cory Kay 2015), and “you don’t even have to believe in god to gain strength from this song” (Amean M. 2016). Responses of this nature, both religious and secular, reveal how the strength that Sonny finds in his belief can be found empowering regardless of the listener’s faith. Taking to the air with environmental support, he demonstrates how to gain power through commitment to something or someone stronger than oneself.
Conclusion Whether through virtuosity, self-reliance, nonchalance, or spiritual connection, rap and metal provide numerous paths to affect individuals’ behaviour
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and cognition. Rather than replace the “magical” narrative of music’s transformative capacities, this chapter has laid the basis for understanding how music can indeed generate feelings of power in listening individuals. The idea that people can modify their own embodied/mental states through listening is both broadly intuitive and rather controversial, a debate I will address in discussing the cultural politics of empowerment (Chapter 6). Throughout the track analyses provided so far, I have attempted to stress the contingencies involved in my readings. The transferrals of power I have posited are possibilities, single instances among many potential listening experiences. Of course, the personal sense of power and the individual nature of approach/inhibition behaviour are strictly personal phenomena: something as richly multivalent as music will not affect all listeners in the same way. As such, the power that rap and metal listening can provide relies upon deeply varied perceptual responses to environmental stimuli. In effect, I have argued that empowerment is something afforded in the act of listening. Empowerment is generated in the interaction between the environment (music) and its perceiver (listener). Most of this chapter has focused upon the potential of the voice (whether rapped, sung, or screamed) to generate affordances, an emphasis that the following chapters will broaden. The personic environment model invites such development, and will continue to serve as a frame for imaginative readings of rap and metal music. I have already interpreted some pertinent roles of musical environments (obedient in “Dirt Off Your Shoulder”, supportive in “Alive”, and so on). This emphasis has allowed substantial insight into rap and metal’s performances of self hood, particularly self-esteem. The rap examples in this chapter afford fairly realistic personas. Since the imagined characters Simz and Jay appear like everyday people, it is easy to infer their emotional state, which may help listeners relate to them. “Bars Simzson” and “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” portray their protagonists in ecstatic moments of self-celebration, which is a common personic position for rap music. Metal’s personas tend to be somewhat more gestural or fantastical. The martial mythology invoked by “One Man Army” is exemplary of metal’s extraordinary narrative worlds, and represents a wide range of metal styles that draw upon the rich folklore of fantasy media. In “Alive”, Sonny can be positioned as a realistic religious person, albeit one that devotes his belief to (and perhaps gains power from) a supernatural source. Much metal – and rap, for that matter – is deeply entwined with spirituality, and ties affordances of power to religious faith. Moreover, as examples in the following chapters will show, the personic realism of “Alive” may be inf luenced by nu metal’s inheritance from rap. Modern metal appears to appropriate a first-person naturalism in part from rap, which can combine with or altogether replace the fantastical epics of traditional heavy metal. Rap and metal have extremely porous stylistic boundaries. Indeed, they have crystallised in established crossover styles. That said, the amount of music which listeners categorise as a distinct hybrid style (such as the predominant classification “rap metal”) pales in comparison to the widespread subdivisions of rap and metal individually. Complicating this picture further,
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hip-hop-metal aggregates such as nu metal are usually hierarchically subsumed under metal (Smialek 2015: 65–114). Despite the recent trend of rap artists incorporating hardcore’s shouts and metal screams, such amalgams have not been strongly associated with a particular label.11 In any case, stylistic combinations raise further questions for the study of empowerment in music listening. Perhaps music that draws together stylistic tendencies from both genres intensifies the potential for empowering experiences, some culmination of their capacity to affect listeners. Alternatively, one might find that empowering experiences are more common in listening to one or another genre. A final analytical example uncovers the transformative potential of characteristic sounds of both rap and metal. Necro (2004): “Push It to the Limit ( feat. Jamey Jasta)” Rapper Necro’s detailed lyrical descriptions of violence and borrowings from horror media have led to his music being dubbed “horrorcore”. The featured artist Jamey Jasta, the vocalist of metalcore band Hatebreed, here contributes vocals in a subversion of the typical meeting between rap and metal (rapped vocals combined with metal instrumentation). Instead, this rarer instance of screamed vocals (and Necro’s rapping) over a rap beat demonstrates the potential for empowering listener experiences even in unconventional encounters between disparate sonic worlds. Moreover, the track provides a dual narrative, presenting both static high self-esteem and the persona’s personal sense of power on the increase. The beat comprises a brass fanfare with subdued string crotchets, a minimal sine bass line, and a regular quaver-based backbeat. The basic loop gives C–E –C–A staccato crotchets in its first bar, rests on G for the second bar, and then ends on a brief swung upbeat from G to A . It falls in this pattern over and over again, but never fails to leap up to the C, presumably heard as the tonic of C aeolian, at the start of every two-bar loop. Its final crotchet anticipates the upward rise, a recurring and inevitable triumphant ascent. This beat is incredibly consistent, repeating exactly throughout the entire track with only three minor alterations or effects. The reliability that this repetition offers is typical of rap’s looped structures (such as in “Dirt Off Your Shoulder”), and its use of limited aeolian 1̂ , 3̂ , 5̂ , and 6̂ pitches is conventional for modern metal (as in “Alive”). In the verses, the rap protagonist Necro delivers dense strings of straight semiquavers. There is very little verbal space left empty by his speech-effusive f low. This indicates significant vocal competencies (the ability to keep going for a long time), import or size (apportioning much time to his persistent f low), and a large sense of self-worth. Necro’s voice is extremely large in the virtual environment, hardly occupying the same space as the beat so much as concealing it dynamically. Nonetheless, he is supported temporally by the snappy percussion layers, and never deviates from his central spatial position nor his high dynamic level. He even seems able to engage the environment to confirm his claims: in the third verse, he mentions “Zildjian cymbals”
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and, sure enough, a crash cymbal sounds out. This is one of three deviations to the beat over the entire track. What seems like a playful summoning of this sound to amplify his rap also indicates that he has such environmental control in the first place. Throughout the verses, he celebrates physical and violent excess in the lyrical detail one often finds in rap, although he draws from death metal’s fantastical, gory imagery. He begins his first verse and ends every verse with a return to “push(ed) it to the limit”. This phrase subsumes both rap’s demand for political action against antagonists and metal’s confrontational axiom to never back down. A deuteragonist Jamey delivers the hook’s pep talk in distorted vocals. Whereas Necro is tied to the centre of the stereo field (and occasionally underlined by another voice), Jamey is split between the mid-left and mid-right of the environment. He appears even larger, or perhaps closer, than Necro, present in both ears, and similarly gives dense, contiguous semiquaver phrases. In the hook, he screams over the second structural change to the beat, where quasi-operatic vocals wail throughout the loop. This vocal layer, sandwiched in between the beat’s textures and the loud voices, indicates the huge size and strength of the protagonists. One can make an embodied assumption that this vocal sample, produced in full voice at a high register, requires great exertion: how powerful must Jamey be, then, that he can be heard so much more clearly, his voice overdriven, and across such a wide stereo space? Some listeners may also find a distinct – and problematic – form of empowerment in the gendered dominance of a male scream over female vocals. Jamey’s sweeping motivational statements contrast with Necro’s precise depictions of violent combat, juxtaposing potential clichés of rap and metal vocals. Although Jamey’s screaming could be heard in the context of pain or personic struggle, his relentless lyrical positivity and the combative stance that Necro has already provided suggest an outward-facing aggression. After three alternations of verse and chorus, the track ends immediately, dropping the beat (the third and final beat change) for the last minim as Jamey’s imperative rings out. In this moment, listeners may feel that he has completely conquered the environment, that a battle has been won, or that he has realised he does not need the support of the environment for his sermon: his strength alone suffices. This moment provides an encouraging reminder of individual capacities, inf luencing attitudes towards approach activity. Throughout, the song’s extreme formal regularity spotlights the contrast between conventional rap and metal protagonists. “Push It to the Limit” provides metal’s vocal distortion as an excess of personic power, rap’s combative self-confidence, and insists that listeners enact its titular line.
Notes 1 For example, the album cover has been posted with the caption “when u make a popular post and it blows up your notifications”. Several examples of this digital commentary practice can be enjoyed on the Know Your Meme (2020) page.
60 Empowerment in rap/metal listening 2 Audio samples of physical combat, for instance, are particularly clear performances – if not exact expressions – of approach behaviour. 3 The theory of the personic environment is broadly compatible with other models of musical personas. Philip Tagg (2012: 344) defines the vocal persona to include “any aspect of personality as shown to or perceived by others through the medium of […] the singing voice”, which appears to combine Moore’s first two levels, protagonist and persona. Simon Frith’s (1996) conception of the vocal personality shares Tagg’s strategy, and classifies the public persona of a singer as the star. Philip Auslander’s (2009) tripartite model uses the term character to cover Moore’s protagonist and persona, distinguishing also the performance persona (the performer as a publicly mediated social being) and the real person (the performer as a private human being). 4 This style of labelling personas is consistent with Moore (2012). 5 This is likely an effect of the vocalist’s proximity to the microphone during the recording process – she is physically close to the mic – but this knowledge does not necessarily manifest in listening. 6 The synth figure strips away any uncertainty that could emerge if the pattern began its melodic fall again, like many other rhythmic phrases which repeat in a 3–3–2 pattern. Consider, as a well-known example, the piano figure that opens Coldplay’s (2003) “Clocks”. 7 It is important to recognise that cognitive processing does not function identically among all individuals. Neurodiversity may affect mentalising skills (Castelli 2005), but there is scant evidence of abnormal mirror neuron systems – the now rejected “broken mirror” theory – in autistic individuals (Hamilton 2013). 8 Barack Obama’s use of the gesture in a 2008 live debate received significant media attention: the then Democratic candidate received a standing ovation from the audience in response to his gesture. For more extensive discussion of Obama’s “complex cool” in relation to hip-hop, see Nielson (2009), Forman (2010), Gosa (2010), Ossei-Owusu (2011), Bonnette (2015: 128–137), and Jeffries (2015). 9 Religion and metal are by no means strangers (Greene 2011; Moberg 2015; Coggins 2018), but P.O.D.’s combination of Christianity and nu metal (and reggae) is fairly unique. 10 These chords are produced by fretting a f lat line across the lowest three strings on guitars down-tuned to “drop C” (and therefore descending below standard tuning pitches). Compare this pattern to “You Really Got Me” (1964): The Kinks’ riff slides between power chords with comparable motion, but the lower tuning, open strings, and thicker overtone palette in “Alive” creates a more supportive, bulkier texture. 11 For instance, in Bones’ (2013) “BringMeToLife”, Scarlxrd’s (2017) “Heart Attack”, and Brockhampton’s (2017) “HEAT”. Terms such as “emo rap” circulate online, but lack clear definitions and terminological specificity. It appears that distorted vocals are not considered foreign or significant enough to warrant ascriptions of hybridity.
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4
Music as a lifeline Listening for resilience
Rap and metal lyrics are packed full of mythologised struggles, survival stories, and imaginative ascents. Hip-hop has a well-trodden tradition of rags-to-riches or “come-up” stories, where individuals born into poor material circumstances accrue wealth by deploying their smarts, charm, and a commitment to hard work (Watts 2004: 594). The narrators of such songs – rap personas – usually look back at past struggles from the pinnacle of success, recalling what they overcame to be where they are today. Whereas rap provides a platform to consider a tumultuous past, metal’s busy sonic environments often act out some current difficulty, strife, or combat. Metal songs are usually situated in the moment of struggle itself. On the music’s loud sonic presence, Weinstein (2000: 23) argues that metal affords listeners “a power to withstand the onslaught of sound and to expand one’s energy to respond to it with a physical and emotional thrust of one’s own. Heavy metal’s loudness is not deafening, irritating, or painful (at least to the fan), but empowering”. Common to rap and metal is the broad idea of withstanding difficulty, whether by simply imagining life without struggle, grasping a brief respite from problems, or escaping constraints altogether. More generally, popular music is often thought about as a survival mechanism. Phrases such as “music gets me through bad times” and “music saved my life” – often more specifically about individual tracks – are widespread in fan commentary. The belief that popular music helps individuals to survive is frequently shared by artists, journalists, and fans. For instance, Good Charlotte’s (2002) “Hold On” offers the anthemic chorus lyric, “Hold on if you feel like letting go/Hold on, it gets better than you know”, the latter line presaging the 2010s non-profit organisation It Gets Better, which aims to prevent suicide among LGBTQ+ youth. The idea valorised in a song like “Hold On” – read rather plainly – is one of persistence through struggle, attempting to persuade listeners to tolerate difficulties and, essentially, remain alive. Beneath this narrative lies the intriguing implication that music can directly motivate listeners to overcome the pain, problems, and powerlessness they experience day to day; that individuals will listen to “Hold On” and feel better able to do so.
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Is this a sound assumption? Once again, this idea channels into the general belief that music transfers something to individuals upon contact. Music is evidently thought of as a magical, mystical force, one which lifts us up when we have been knocked down or, turning to conceptual metaphors about motion, one that helps us through hardship. The previous chapter considered how this belief could be better construed and showed that thinking about music’s effects on us can be nuanced with a new understanding of how music empowers. In particular, it revealed that music has the potential to encourage approach-oriented behaviour, increase one’s personal sense of power, and portray others’ power to be mentalised and mirrored. My charge here is that many tracks offer a similar potential for helping listeners to withstand and survive struggle, activating a set of capacities grouped under the term resilience.
Music and resilience Across genres, fans of popular (and other) music often describe their engagement with music as a positive, healing experience. Listening is described as an act that improves people’s current state of mind, whether soothing their frustrations or helping them to avoid harm. For example, David Byrne (2012: 283) notes off hand that “any kid will tell you that […] their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music gives them hope and inspiration”. The notion of music “giving one hope” implies an unproblematic transfer from thing to person, object to subject, stimulus to perceiver. It certainly feels that way sometimes, for some listeners, but it may be a little trickier to understand how such a transfer could take place. Considering the functions of music more generally, David Huron (2006: 7) views the development of music listening expectations as an ability to predict future events, a necessary skill for survival. On this account, attending to music works as a sort of “drill” or test run for responding to hazards in the environment. While they are writing from different frames of reference, and for different readerships, the views of both Davids are certainly related, whether at the individual level or considering the capacities of an entire species: in each case, music plays a fundamentally protective role.1 It keeps us safe. Or so it seems. Music can make listeners feel protected, and this is certainly one motivation for repeat listenings.2 Fans come to know songs deeply, in all their intricacies, and rely on particular tracks to help them navigate challenging times. But if music helps us face danger, it is worth considering whether an over-reliance on its protective capacities might itself become dangerous (DeNora 2013: 68). For instance, a comment of the sort “I need music to get through the day” becomes quite worrying when taken literally, for access to music is not always possible. The efficacy of music for psychological warfare is well known ( Johnson and Cloonan 2009; Windsor 2019), and a lack of access to music can be similarly damaging. When music is used as a survival mechanism, it may also become a crutch, akin to a safety behaviour. 3 Long
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periods of reliance on listening in order to ameliorate problems can develop into dependence. A study by Tsvia Horesh (2006: 308) on music therapy with addicts reveals how music can become a substitute for substance abuse, as one informant tells her: when I just couldn’t take any more […] I would feel like I was in withdrawal and there was what I needed […] something was missing, I needed something […] so I would go, listen to a song, and go back to work as if nothing happened, feeling better. Because I’m addicted – to music too. Another states, “I need it. Music is one of the obsessions I haven’t overcome” (Horesh 2006: 309). Horesh (2006: 309) wisely speculates that “music fulfilled needs over and beyond what the drugs could do – perhaps distraction, filling an emotional void, calming”. While seeking such intense support may not be a widespread kind of engagement with music, and the use of music by individuals in recovery may require specific consideration, this capacity of music to satisfy and comfort listeners aligns with pervasive psychocultural beliefs about potential dangers of listening. Perhaps the best known is Theodor Adorno’s (1978) writing on the regression of listening, where popular music listeners are merely bodies gratified by, and susceptible to, “music as a source of pleasure, as a token of lifestyle, and as a diversion and a way of coping” (DeNora 2003: 17). The fear is that factory-line-produced popular music becomes a tool of the culture industry for mass manipulation, pseudo-individualism, and the obedient generation of labour. However, a contemporary vantage point (not to mention the contemporaneous children’s music therapy practice of Nordoff and Robbins) has allowed substantial development of Adorno’s important thinking. The many health and well-being benefits of interaction with music are clearly demonstrated across the related fields of music therapy and community music. The emphasis on music’s protective powers particularly comes across in Tia DeNora’s (2013) term “asylum”, indicating circumstances that provide a reprieve from hardship to allow personal healing and growth. In recent years, music therapists have focused upon hip-hop and its ability to instil resilience in its listeners. Taking a lead from Don Elligan’s (2004) Rap Therapy, an emerging field of music therapy employs practices associated with rap within interventions, especially with young people. The impact of such resources is being felt far and wide, spanning academic research, social work, youth work, policy, pedagogy, and activism. In particular, hip-hop scholars find that the music (and) culture provides participants with a sense of resilience to withstand social inequities, such as poverty and discrimination based on race, gender, and age. Lakeyta Bonnette (2015: 3), for instance, describes the US hip-hop community as having “embraced and utilized rap music as a method, space, and organizing tactic not only to fight injustice but to also voice their opinions, detail their grievances, and express their outrage”. Richard Bramwell (2015: 5), looking at London’s hip-hop scenes in
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particular, claims that “one’s sense of self is nurtured and extended through participation in rap cultures”. His study further reveals that individuals: find themselves through this form. They recognise subjective urges and abilities in response to the music and verbal play, and develop them in order to more effectively deal with the social forces to which they are subject. […] The music, lyrics, and movement within rap cultures may provide resources to sustain the pressures of a society that denies them the opportunity to affirm themselves within it. (Bramwell 2015: 34–35) This is one of several pieces of writing across the hip-hop studies literature that emphasises the survival capacities with which rap music imbues its listeners (Rose 1994; Perry 2004). Many a vivid picture has been drawn of the struggle of marginalised youth in the postindustrial city finding a lifeline in the form of rap. Metal has seldom been valorised thus.4 Notable exceptions tend to defend metal on the grounds that it plays with taboo subjects without inciting them, which can be liberating for its predominantly working-class audiences (Weinstein 2000; Pillsbury 2006: 41–53; Walser 2014). Rather than the sense of resistance that rap has been argued to provide, metal is often associated with a safe space for releasing anger, a theme of the literature that might be called catharsis. In Karen Halnon’s (2004: 775) ethnographic study of metal fans, individuals repeatedly bring up a: negative energy that can be safely and therapeutically released in the music scene. They claim repeatedly that the music “gets your aggression out” or that it’s “an aggression releaser.” […] “You get all your emotions out. It’s like therapy.” […] “You can listen to this music and vent without hurting anybody.” […] “If I’ve had a bad day, it gets it out, rather than taking it out on somebody else.” […] Many metal songs allow for the release and transformation of negative energy into something exhilaratingly positive. […] Metal artists encourage fans to tap into and release their everyday rage. This finding aligns with Johnson and Cloonan’s (2009: 193) claim that “metal presents itself as inherently violent, but seems most often to be used cathartically.” In spaces of activity engaging with metal, such as moshpits, participants express violence in relatively safe and rule-bound ways that avoid outbursts of anger in a broader public sphere (Gamble 2019a). Nonetheless, the motivation and aggression interpreted in metal tracks can encourage self-preservation in much the same way as rap. Echoing a theme in hip-hop scholarship, Berger (1999: 271) characterises resilience as an almost inevitable outcome of engagement with metal, which individuals listen to in order to “draw […] anger out, jump-start individual action, and acquire the energy to overcome impediments and restraints”.
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Holding on to resistant feelings, letting go of anger: such everyday phrases reveal a lot about the conceptual metaphors typically used for emotion. Feelings are often thought about like physical forces, mapping across from the domain of hydraulics to understand emotional expression. The commonplace conceptualisation of emotions like anger suggest that the body is a pressurised container, a metaphor based on physiological and bodily experiences that manifest similarly across different cultures (Kövecses 2000: 160). Like a pneumatic force, anger builds up inside, contributing to pressure, until it bursts out, unless an individual can vent to someone else, or find another way to let it out. Music and language that enacts this idea appears very frequently in tracks and lyrics, not to mention in everyday discussion and cultural tropes. Beyond specific listening instances, hydraulic and pneumatic conceptual metaphors of emotion (and other conceptual metaphors) underpin justifications for fans’ engagement with music cultures. And so we encounter ideas along the lines that music helps listeners get anger out to make it through bad days, or fills them with determination to successfully navigate day-to-day difficulties: sometimes both in the same song. KoЯn (2002): “Here to Stay” This track, the winner of the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance, is a prime example of nu metal’s “introspective, emotionally cathartic aesthetic that spoke to the insecurities and emotional extremes of teenagehood” (Smialek 2015: 77). It serves a useful purpose here, highlighting how some listeners can be disempowered by song, yet others find the expression of harmful feelings empowering. The introductory rumble of “Here To Stay” – a gravelly, gloomy, low-pitched fuzz – sets the tone for what’s to come. Devoid of all but its low frequencies, a distorted guitar sounds out impotently to the far right of the stereo image. This low, muffled grumble can be interpreted through a conceptual metaphor for feelings of low mood: it is sonically depressed, pushed down by pitch, lacking mid- and high-frequency content, with barely audible stepwise movement that fails to manifest as clear motion. Like an individual struggling to have their voice heard clearly, “Here to Stay” opens with the oppressive depths of stifled persistence. As the opening riff crashes down, the guitar is balanced by another on the left side, each filling a wall of the virtual environment. These timbres spatially bulge outward, threatening to overthrow every other sound source, even the bass, which roughly doubles the guitar part. The riff comprises two crotchets, a low A and a semitone dragging upward, followed by a short chromatic f lurry ending with a quaver on B, although the notes consistently bend sharp at these low tunings. There is a sense of imprecision to the pitch domain, which can be imaginatively personified as acting out indecision, anxiety, or anguish: it sounds as though it is worriedly seeking a sure path in an unwelcoming, bare-bones environment. The sounds of the drum kit are extremely choked too. It is possible to hear the constant pushing-down of the
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drum sticks on the skins after the attack (rather than conventionally bouncing off ), especially the snare, which fails to cut through the textural dominance of the unison guitars and bass. The cymbals are barely present in the environment, merely a washy layer which creeps above the guitars. When a crash cymbal rears its head on a hypermetric downbeat (0’18”), it provides a stark reminder of what we miss during most of this sludgy riff. The thick motion of guitars and bass drive powerfully onward, a hulking force that simulates goal direction and environmental dominance. Many listeners are afforded nothing but the oppressive, overwhelming pressure of this muffled introduction, sparking a process of disempowerment: lowering their personal sense of power and preventing them from approach-oriented behaviour, where the sound makes them feel incapable to act and brings them down. It can cause others to ruminate on depressive thoughts and feelings, with little hope and no end in sight. It simply alienates some people (as in the familiar image of a bewildered parent encountering their teenager’s new musical discovery). Style-competent listeners, however, find the song’s introduction highly energising, “heavy”, and “brutal”. For instance, YouTube commenter Antikoagulant (2016) associates it with an advance in the metal genre writ large, a riff that “just kicks 21st century metal into the new realm of universe of just evil, brutal, no forgiveness sound! Kill, kill and kill”. Mark Sykes (2016) reports feeling physically empowered by the track, enabling him to “hit an 320 bench pr listening to this song”. Finally, Adam Barthorpe (2016) touches upon the catharsis afforded by music listening in commenting, “I always come here [to the song’s YouTube page] when I’m pissed off. This music has such a positive effect on my mood, which is strange as it’s not a particularly happy song…”. It is significant to talk of “coming here”, because listening to the song is not merely experiencing the audio. Accessing the song on YouTube seems like travelling to a section of cyberspace, an event that this listener habitually (“always”) undertakes in order to improve their mood and gain feelings of resilience. Beyond the opening riff, how might the track enable this process? Two stylistic shifts take place simultaneously at 0’28”: the entire riff rises up a fourth in pitch, and the drums provide an off-beat open hi-hat with a choke. These are common features of blues and disco respectively, which might seem jarring in the stylistic context of nu metal. With lower style competence, these may feel barely relevant to how the track affords empowerment. But the fan commentary makes their importance clear. The allusion to blues makes sense in this downtrodden, oppressive sonic environment, but the ecstatic celebration typical of disco seems inappropriate to the song. Nonetheless, listeners do indeed report feeling ecstatic while listening: “this song sounds soo optimistic” to PinkRobot21 (2010), and yackattack8 (2002) comments that they “LOVE this song so much and it means a lot to me to just turn up and dance like crazy to when i’m depressed and feel like shit, which i often do”. Thus the off beat hi-hat and the harmonic shift, sounding together in the stylistic context of metal, enact a celebration by way of expressing depression. It affords letting go of our blues through dance.
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The protagonist of the track, who I name after his singer Jonathan, enters at a low dynamic level yet swamped in reverb, and therefore seems somewhat lost in this environment at first. He fails to be heard clearly over the guitars, creating a sense of struggle as he is overwhelmed by the environment he appears to occupy. Different listeners will not hear this identically, but I find it rather aurally claustrophobic to attend closely to the voice, particularly on headphones. Style competence with metal production conventions will lead us to expect the voice to be much louder, much more prominent than where Jonathan lingers during the first verse. His opening notes make a slightly uncomfortable step from E to F♯, unanchored from the guitars’ approximate D aeolian, but then fall down for several staggering, rhythmically awkward words tied to B (as shown in Example 4.1). The vocal delivery (and the lyrics) may be felt to express Jonathan’s poor self-esteem, leading to behavioural inhibition. His failure to transcend the other forces in the environment clearly demonstrates inability, which reinforces a low personal sense of power. The awkward semantics of the lyrics offer a sense of self-disassociation, such as in the line, “so I take my face and bash it into a mirror”. The distinction of “taking” one’s face to bash it rather than simply “bashing my face” describes an act of self-harm enabled by feeling outside of one’s body. It is significant that this autoscopy targets a mirror, thereby preventing himself from seeing his ref lection. This implied self-loathing is taken to its logical extreme by commenter PinkRobot21 (2010), who has “gone through that exact phase of fantasizing about suicide… It makes me feel better when I know I’m not alone”. This listener appears to be mirroring the protagonist’s perceived low personal sense of power and considering how they would feel in such a state. In this case,
Example 4.1 KoЯn (2002): “Here to Stay”; 0’39”–0’48”
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PinkRobot21 reports previously feeling a similar way, so listening to the track reminds them of their past experiences and, as they suggest, helps them to feel supported when a persona shares related experiences. The protagonist’s state of mind changes significantly later in the song. In the prechorus (0’57”), the vocal is utterly locked to C♯ quavers, with tension rising in Jonathan’s insistent monotonic emphases. Gaining some traction and control over his circumstances, “this state is elevating” finds a neat rhyming couplet in “as the hurt turns into hating”. The voice suddenly rises up, at its most reverberant, to sound out “the fucked up feelings again”. By leaping upward in pitch, expelling air in the diaphragm, and ringing out into the environment in this way, listeners can imagine that the “fucked up feelings” themselves are being physically expelled from the body: the vocal enacts the conceptual metaphor of releasing “negative energy” discussed by Halnon’s (2004) participants. Immediately after this line, the chorus hits. Seemingly as a result of Jonathan shifting into approach-oriented behaviour, letting loose and expelling his negative feelings, the environment changes altogether. This moment shows the individual empowerment he holds, surviving his difficulties and breaking through a malaise to cathartically overcome his former lowness. In the chorus the guitars play sustained power chords through a four-chord sequence structure, no longer disrupting the environment with busy motion and oppressive force. The protagonist, freer of his emotional difficulties, finds a consonant, phrasal, repetitive melody that begins “the hurt inside is fading”. Most importantly of all, a backing vocal line easily ascends C♯–D–E, substantiating a metaphor of rising above difficulties that would otherwise hold our protagonist down. This additional vocal is particularly noteworthy for its contrast to the track’s many low-pitched, f lat-contour phrases. This wordless rise refuses to succumb to negativity (presented by the directionless or descending melodies littered across the track) and performs a personic endurance through its loud dynamic presence and precise repetition. It epitomises feeling “here to stay”. And it tells us an important tale about the effects individuals can have upon their environments, as Jonathan caused this moment of change through a bodily eruption of depressive emotions. At later points throughout the track, the protagonist explicitly refuses to accept feelings of low mood as the norm. Once he has rediscovered the approach-oriented behaviour of expressing his emotional state, he calmly attests to being “here to stay” (2’34”). The delivery of this final word inf lects a brighter C♯ over a static guitar pedal in A, indicating a more optimistic view towards his subsistence. Jonathan seems to exceed his own expectations, rebelliously rising up to a falsetto A for the line “bring it down”. It is simple to interpret him overcoming his painful emotions through conceptual metaphor: he becomes over them, enacted by a virtual rise within the sonic environment. This reading appears to support PinkRobot21’s (2010) narrative account of the track, in which “after contemplating this [suicide] over and over again he decides: ‘I’m here to stay’ (yay! happy ending; he doesn’t kill himself )”.
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In the riff section which follows, he appears to be in charge of the environmental motion, directing “bring it down” before the drums and guitars drop. He has gained control over the forces which once confined him. The track closes by returning to the opening riff, albeit with two important additions: the protagonist repeats the final line of the chorus, “(I cannot) give any more”, ending around the ionian third C♯, and the backing vocal repeatedly rises up C♯–D–E. Now Jonathan seems decisive, as his former self-loathing has developed into angry dissent. He refuses to give in to thoughts of suicidal ideation. The playout features a brief repeat of the build-up section over which the protagonist first claimed he was “here to stay”, a closing structure that serves as a reminder of the protagonist’s momentous resolution. When thinking about music as a tool to help steel oneself, it could be assumed that “happy songs” lead to “happy feelings”. This is far from accurate. “Here to Stay” does not straightforwardly offer some overwhelming triumph over depression. However, many fans do report similar experiences of empowerment when listening to the track: some are raised from a low mood or calmed from anger, whereas others gain physical motivation to push themselves. Listeners can gain increased self-perceptions of their own power, or may be encouraged towards approach-oriented behaviour, by mentalising or mirroring the protagonist’s own development throughout the track. Initially self-loathing, Jonathan pulls from within the ability to overcome the oppressive environment and its performance of lowness. He acts out this catharsis clearly by swearing off the “fucked up feelings” or being resolutely “here to stay”. Not all listeners will narrativise the song like this, but the relationships played out by the personic environment give rise to this potential transformation. Similarly, rap music is no stranger to the idea that it can be cathartic to say (and hear someone else say, over and over) what you really feel. Drake (2013): “Worst Behavior” Drake’s “Worst Behavior”, a mainstream rap track from the mid-2010s, is a compelling example of the resilience afforded by contemporary rap listening. The track is a fairly straightforward middle-finger to all adversities and adversaries. Like some of the rap tracks discussed in Chapter 3, the beat (and the flow) features extreme consistency and repetition, which positions Drake as acting out self-assurance. However, rather than focusing inward on how the protagonist feels, there is a greater sense of what he does throughout the track, indicating a single-minded coping strategy fuelled by resentment. Drake acts out an emotional process we have surely all undergone in getting over some source of pain, moving from hurt to retaliation or recovery. He reflects on past adversity by causing mayhem, lashing out on his “worst behaviour”. This incitement to disorderly action may be taken as a direct command or otherwise imitated by listeners – as if releasing a range of potential frustrations – to extremely empowering ends. Unlike bursts of anger, which might be more typical of metal, Drake generally keeps his cool, although his annoyance is abundantly clear. He strides
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doggedly across the track, with an almost permanently sustaining reverb on the lead vocal. One can hear how the space that his voice occupies when rapping continues to be filled after the end of any given line, leading to an apparent persistence. On top of this near-omnipresence, a digital delay effect gives three echoes to each enunciation like “remember” (0’56”). Drake is constantly there, even when he is silent. Moreover, it comes across as an easy task for him, as there are no breath sounds in the vocal: whereas we may have felt esteem hearing Simz persevere with shrill breaths in Chapter 3, Drake offers a superhuman resilience, not even needing to breathe, for example between 3’00” and 3’04” where audible breaths might be expected. From start to finish, the vocal f low is quite precisely in time with the beat, as Drake locks on with laser focus. He is not spilling over with emotion, but he is clearly not calm. At 1’31”, the fricative weight of “fuckers” lands in unison with the snappy snare, enacting Drake’s acerbic temperament. His frustration appears to fuel his drive, providing very consistent pitch in the vocal. He barely deviates from C♯ between 1’25” and 1’43”, and when he does get momentarily carried away in the following passage (1’44”–1’52”) he returns to that monotone soon after. Such forceful precision may afford an understanding of Drake as a highly persistent figure who has learned to cope by venting anger freely, striking out at unspecified “motherfuckers” to get by. The track structurally guides such an interpretation. There is a simple verse-chorus alternation up to 2’35”, and the track could be expected to end at that point. But the protagonist is not quite done. He shows up once again with a vengeance, filling the verbal space far more densely with a faster f low from 2’43” onward. Switching up on us like this shows that when our protagonist bounces back, he becomes stronger still. With renewed vigour, Drake turns up the heat with self-directed boasts borrowing heavily from the pimp persona of an artist like Mase. Playing on a line from The Notorious B.I.G.’s (1997) “Mo Money Mo Problems (Feat. Puff Daddy and Mase)”, Drake’s claim to power takes the form, “who else making rap albums doing numbers like it’s pop?”. He backs up this brag with an extended three-syllable rhyme pattern [ɔ]–[ɜ]–[aɪ] (“or-er-i”, like “borderline”) that lands consistently across several line ends (tabulated in Example 4.2). He is able to find five homophones of the syllable “mor”, which demonstrates his ample ability at writing rhymes.5 These bars are delivered as part of a highly stable f low, a repeated seven-quaver pattern laid across the second half of every bar. Drake also f launts his financial stability using wordplay such as “it’s gross what I net”. Such ref lections on wealth afford listeners mirroring or mentalising the “contagious proximity to wealth and attractiveness” (Singh and Tracy 2015: 101) that is part of Drake’s appeal to fans. The vehement f low of this third verse is also symptomatic of Drake’s ability to bounce back, a resilience that emerges whether or not we attend to the lyrics. Busy percussion solidifies the “ground” below Drake. The kickdrum sounds almost like a release of breath – “pah” – in the style of a derisive exhale. It could also be heard as an involuntary exhale, like a sharp loss of breath when
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Example 4.2 Drake (2013): “Worst Behavior”; verse rhymes
winded, but its constant repetition in a specific rhythmic placement in the beat suggests choosing to expel air. It thus affords a constant dismissal, even a mockery, of constraints and environmental stressors, as Drake casts them off and castigates them freely. The percussive clicks scattered across the beat in the role of hi-hats also reinforce the track’s tendency towards sustaining timbres, which portrays ongoing survival in the face of disruptive “motherfuckers”. Keep doing you: they’re not worth the hassle of engaging with them, “remember?”.6 The main melodic layer of the beat imitates an act of survival. A muff led vocal timbre, appearing prominently in the beat loop used for the chorus, falls downward along F♯ aeolian: A–B–G♯–A–F♯–G♯–E–F♯. Every time it descends, it claws back up one step to slow the descent, performing a process of clinging on. It lands on the tonic F#, above a bass note on A that rises prominently to B for the final bar of the loop. Thinking about this sample’s effect on the body, its motion does not seem to enact a sudden plummet but gives a greater sense of controlling a fall. At a broader structural level, the track gains textural layers as it proceeds, including soft string pads from 1’27”, which later provide an extremely repetitive C♯–B loop for forty seconds of the third verse. This structure may provide high resilience over the course of the track as the environment not only survives but thrives, gaining strength in synchrony with Drake’s progression towards the animated third verse. Notably, there is little lyrical variation throughout the majority of the track. It seems that Drake relies upon the repeated phrase “motherfucker(s) never loved us” to get his point across, a line interpolated sporadically throughout the first two verses and used as a backbone for the hook. Such a vague address allows the listener to adopt and imaginatively direct its anger towards any relevant source of frustration. Raphael Travis (2016: 73) suggests that “Worst Behavior” usefully exemplifies how rappers’ “autobiographical narratives […] offer insight into their struggles but also give listeners a template upon which they can project their own stories about surviving and also thriving”. It is precisely this idea of a template that “Worst Behavior” captures so
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emphatically: only the third verse gives Drake’s side of the story in any detail, and the remainder is a diatribe on staying strong by casting off all opponents. Consequently, the track’s vitriol affords a variety of targets. Some online commenters position the hook’s “us” as black folk (or people of colour in general) and the “motherfuckers” in question as racist oppressors.7 Certainly it would provide some catharsis to victims of racism to sound off against those that subjugate, stigmatise, and persecute black people. Drake exemplifies a productive state of mind for doing so: focusing on his strengths, remaining stable, and focusing on his point. Listeners may learn from his lesson, imitate his attitude, and adopt his approach to challenge their own oppressors. Another point of view creates a more personal, familial narrative, expressed by listener emilyrosen (2014) who is “convinced that this is about Drake’s dad”. There is more than enough media reportage and tabloid journalism on the relationship between Drake and his father Dennis Graham to create such conviction: by aligning the Drake on this record with the performer in the public eye, characterising the track as an angry son decrying his absentee father is straightforward.8 Much online commentary on the track simply embraces the ambiguity of the hook, reprinting the lyric as is. Transcribing the line is itself an action of resilience, as listeners sympathetically recognise unjust treatment they themselves have faced almost as a form of therapeutic writing. Using the song’s words to state their own experiences may strengthen their belief that they faced hardship, and listening helps them to endure it, following Drake’s model. It is not just the lyric but the performance of it – the dismissive tone with which Drake constantly repeats “motherfuckers never loved us” – that lessens the need for a specific addressee. The hook simply makes clear that the protagonist has encountered adversity, and affords empowerment in his overcoming of it: “[they] never loved” him, and yet he is still here to tell the tale. As Drake refuses to forgive and forget those who have wronged him, and persists loudly to spite them, listening to the track allows a potent experience of resilience.
Resilience, realism, and fantasy Most online readings of Drake’s “Worst Behavior” are grounded in concrete everyday circumstances. Just as he appears in the music video, listeners tend to conceive of Drake on the street, pacing furiously and lambasting some real (albeit unspecified) entity. The protagonist that struggles with a negative self-image in “Here to Stay” seems equally real. Although both are in actuality fictional – inventions of music interpretation – they are realistic. As Allan Moore (2012: 182) points out, this is only one of many potential personic positions to discover in popular song, as listeners imagine: whether the persona appears to be realistic, or whether it is overtly fictional. A realistic persona is one that requests that we interpret it as coming
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directly from the singer, as a vocalized version of a direct address, through conversation or similar means (and whether or not we choose to believe that it does seem to come directly): a fictional persona is where the singer is unambiguously taking on a particular character, much as an actor does. Of course, in many cases the distinction between these two possibilities may not be immediately apparent. Songs also beg consideration of: whether the situation described, the narrative of the track, is itself realistic, everyday, likely to be encountered by members of the imagined community addressed by the singer, or of which the singer forms a part, or is fictional, perhaps with an imagined historical, or mythological, quality. (Moore 2012: 182) There are other narrative possibilities to explore, such as the persona’s stance, and the apparent temporality and timespan. Although I have presented only one instance of each genre in this chapter, Drake and Jonathan exemplify the standard personic position. Modern rap and metal usually adhere to Moore’s “bedrock” position of the persona, with a protagonist who appears realistic, in an everyday environment, involved in the narrative in the present time and wrapped up in the moment itself. Contemporary rap music clings to realism. The appearance of realistic personas in everyday, often urban, environments is a ground zero for storytelling, an essential facet of hip-hop’s “asphalt naturalism” (Cobb 2007: 109). There are countless quotidian stories of struggle which rap protagonists overcome. Entire traditions of “survival mode” and “come-up” tracks rely upon individual heroism in the context of oppressive sociopolitical environments. Adam Krims (2000) used the label “reality rap” to cover the ubiquitous detailing of everyday problems, pressures, and conf licts addressed by this particular category of music, but its emphasis on what could be real pervades almost all contemporary rap music. Survival strategies for situations that resemble the everyday are natural to share in this context. Protagonists adopt and share a personal defiance to resist challenges posed by the social environment. Many postmillennial metal tracks afford similarly realistic narrative worlds, offering resilient responses to widely relatable experiences such as heartbreak, betrayal, and problems with friends and family. However, metal is also much more likely than rap to diverge from this convention, particularly music in stylistic proximity with classic heavy metal or the cerebral pursuits of progressive, power, and symphonic metal. Many songs that dispense with realism emphasise fantasy. In the absence of everyday social environments that resemble our own, narrative possibilities include myth, lore, history, the occult, and the supernatural. Metal keenly explores the potential for meaningful fiction, drawing upon (and contributing to) traditions of fantasy in literature, film, and television. Scholars have
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discussed this trend in depth. For example, Karl Spracklen’s (2015: 360) work on folk metal points out the empowering potential of “fantasies of drinking and fighting that have no authentic connection to Vikings, Saxons or other (supposed) nationalist patriarchs”. He highlights the imaginative worlds at play in the subgenre that celebrate alternatives to the actual Western sociocultural environment. In folk metal, “the myths that are celebrated are generally myths of masculine prowess and the warrior’s search for glory in a world without the insecurity of neo-liberalism, globalization and the need to ask girls out nicely” (Spracklen 2014: 365). Comparably, Samir Puri (2010) argues for the specific importance of warfare to storytelling styles in metal, both mythological and modern military variants. In warlike narrative environments, metal resilience can take on a fantastical character, ostensibly offering listeners strategies for survival in iconic cultural framings of mass conf lict. Across various styles of metal, Rosemary Overell (2013: 201) makes clear how commonly “the male protagonist is busy ‘doing’—battles, riding motorcycles or, in the case of death metal, killing”. As discussed in the previous chapter, esteem captures aspects of personic feeling: think of Jay-Z’s (2003) “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” protagonist “ feeling like a pimp” and that of P.O.D. (2001), which purports to “ feel so alive”. By contrast, an emphasis on doing is vital to resilience as a dimension of empowerment. Rap and metal both emphasise approach-oriented personic activities to provide a model for behaviour and to spur individuals to action through the process of listening. Sometimes this takes place in everyday surroundings with realistic people in mind, leading to the unruly action intimated by Drake’s (2013) “Worst Behavior”, for example. At first glance, it might seem like bolstering capacities and cathartic expressions would need to relate to listeners’ everyday circumstances. For music to save us, it has to resemble us, the situations we recognise, and the environments we struggle within (and without), even metaphorically. However, rap and metal demonstrate the diversity of interpretative possibilities, and the potential for imaginative mentalising and mirroring. Case in point: as a reader of this book, I assume that you have never died. You have not experienced death and it may be difficult to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who is deceased because, unlike you, they do not think or feel or act. Yet you, like its many empowered listeners, may find that the following song instils a sense of resilience, by narrativising a mythical fight between individual will and death itself. Avenged Sevenfold (2007): “Afterlife” Avenged Sevenfold is a popular US metal band, and their self-titled album won the 2008 Kerrang! Award for Best Album. Rosemary Hill (2016: 122–127) observes how her research participant uses romantic language to describe her relationship to the band, which is representative of the large, visible (especially through merchandising), and mostly teenage fan base the band has accrued. Employing a string section to bolster the typical metal
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instrumentation, the song “Afterlife” dramatically tells the story of someone who finds himself (so gendered by the voice) dead too soon. The protagonist that I imagine is stuck, self-aware, and able to act in some post-death plane of existence. Thinking about this character’s position in the afterlife could well be disempowering, prone to rumination on the end of his life. He might show signs of defeat at the whim of some Grim Reaper figure and angst at the inevitability of death in general (perhaps accompanied by fears of a religious nature, such as Christian hell). For listeners, then, it might not be ideal for one’s self-esteem to relate to an imaginary individual whose life has been taken against his will. But he is not broken in the face of these seemingly insurmountable constraints: he attempts to act against them (enacted throughout the track), declaring his resolve to escape the afterlife and return to his loved ones. This performance of resistance against power personified, taking on the ultimate challenge to his continued survival – death – affords considerable resilience. Over the course of the song, listeners may imagine a battle between dead protagonist M and his captor, who I call Death. At the start of the track, strings scrape past at low pitch, which accentuates their dark timbres. They assert that something is amiss, as compounded by the dissonant E bass note ending the four-bar sequence, which otherwise complies with D aeolian. A full band introduction embellishes the opening string riff, spanning a full metal soundbox of drums, bass, and guitar, before grinding to a halt at 0’35”. The verse features a bubbling guitar riff which dances around the tritone over stomping 4/4 drums. This wily guitar figure moves somewhat awkwardly alongside the straight drum kit rhythm, but it is confidently maintained throughout the first part of the verse. It can be heard to portray the Death persona taunting M as though f lourishing a weapon, while he vocally mocks him: “we’ve been waiting for you” and “you’ll be back here soon anyway”. Each of these biting remarks is panned wide to each ear, which spatially demonstrates this character’s omnipresence. Death is clearly in charge of this environment, and M is comparatively disempowered. When he protests “this can’t be right”, the texture is stripped back to a bare riff in the bass and drums. In response, the doubled guitars give a rising power-chord reminiscent of Death’s taunting. M’s dumbfounded outcry is not for naught. He apparently gathers strength when taking the fight to Death, and makes some clear progress in the chorus. He declares “I don’t belong here” through a mobile melodic line, as if simulating the real movement of his attempt to escape. The chord sequence substantiates his active behaviour, confidently striding through I–V–vi–IV in F ionian.9 Listeners can mirror or mentalise the personic shift towards action in this sudden moment of triumph. Such a change in attitude may provide the therapeutic realisation that they (like M) do not belong, or are being unfairly suppressed, within a given environment or set of circumstances. “Afterlife” endorses combatting such constraints. For example, the harmonic ascent of the prechorus uncompromisingly scales D, F, B , and C. In this moment, the environment supports the protagonist, the thick guitar walls of the virtual
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environment lifting him all the way up. This embodied motion of ascent shows his ability to rise physically, to get back up when knocked down (even all the way into the afterlife). Later in the track, M gains additional support. Whereas in the first verse, the guitars lashed out at his protestations, he now fights back even harder as an additional persona interjects, “with my back against the wall” and “I’m much too young to fall”. In the bridge, this other voice returns with absolute refusal – “I am unbroken” – straining for a high D on the edge of a scream (3’40”). The tension of the voice in this backing vocal is a potent performance of resilience, sustaining determinedly over the shred guitar solo. It is easy to imagine the protagonist giving battle against Death during this section, which concludes at 4’32”. M screams, his voice overdriven, and Death counters with malicious laughter. A final chorus allows M to reiterate his challenge to the unjust death he has been dealt. The closing D chord that rings out after the climactic fight does not indicate any particular narrative resolution. The possibility for gaining resilience from “Afterlife” is therefore especially open-ended. The listener can make sense of this in various ways. Perhaps M never makes it back to life. His ability to challenge Death at all could be found empowering nonetheless. Alternatively, if one imagines M successfully escaping the afterlife over the closing chord – he does go suddenly quiet at the end of the chorus – he has surely performed the ultimate act of overcoming, acting with great power to reclaim his life altogether. Such redemption resonates with the comment by listener Mark Howard (2018), who states that “this song helped me to achieve sobriety”. Just as M refuses to be brought down by circumstantial constraints – as significant as finding oneself dead – individuals may be inspired by the track to live free of dependency. I reiterate here that the value of the theory of affordances lies in its recognition of diverse listening experiences. A quite different hearing of “Afterlife” to the one I have focused upon finds a listener siding with Death. One might think: well, the protagonist is dead, so he should just accept it and give up already! The inescapable power of death personified reminds us of the limits of individual power. Even a hero cannot escape their mortality (or at least that is the limit of fantasy and suspension of disbelief active in this interpretation). Funnily enough, recognising this fact can provide an empowering kind of relief: no matter our human concerns, death is one inevitability. Death’s extreme personal sense of power might be adopted directly by yet another listener, as they imagine enacting the kind of control a Grim Reaper figure holds over its impotent subjects. The track may be particularly moving for fans mourning Avenged Sevenfold’s original drummer, “The Rev”, who died from a drug overdose in 2009. It is his voice that performs the backing vocals, sounding the aforementioned high D in the bridge. Through a real-life enactment of the song narrative and f leshed out with multimediated information about the band, The Rev’s death may highlight the tragedy of a loved one dying prematurely. This example could be taken as evidence for the fictionality of “Afterlife”, serving
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as a stark reminder of the permanence of death. Others may conf late it with memories of the drummer, imagining him fighting back to the very last as a source of inspiration: he must have challenged death too, just as heroically as the song protagonist, in his own afterlife. On the one hand, the possibility of resurrection suggested by “Afterlife” is shown to be artifice, mere fantasy, a sobering thought that negates the resilience modelled by the protagonist. On the other hand, because a listener’s disbelief must already be suspended to engage with a dead-but-conscious persona fighting death personified, it does not matter that the environment is imaginary. The song affords resilience whether or not it is realistic. Such is the strength of song. Listeners turn to music to experience the empowerment necessary to survive day-to-day challenges. Death is, of course, a socially ubiquitous source of fear. “Afterlife” allows individuals to imagine and adopt for themselves the defiant state of mind of a fantastical hero and his force of will in the face of death itself. Rap music similarly inspires a fight for life, encouraging its listeners to challenge constraints to personal freedom and autonomy. However, hip-hop often lacks the luxury to imagine supernatural fights over life. As Cobb (2007: 109) puts it, “the battles to be won exist on the level of tangible, material need”. Talib Kweli (2002): “Get By” “Get By” is an anthem for survival. Talib Kweli, often labelled a (socially) conscious rapper, calls attention to the difficulties particular communities face in trying to persevere despite inhospitable and detrimental sociopolitical conditions. Beyond a single individual’s quest for survival, and couched in the language of street knowledge, the song is motivated by the urgency for collective struggle, a consideration that will come into sharper focus in the following chapter. Like “Afterlife”, “Get By” highlights a belief in personal, internal strength while sustaining a clear critique of the inequitable conditions that disempower drug-addled, exploited, and overworked social groups. Taking the position of insider-cum-narrator, Talib sets the scene with a specific depiction of impoverished, urban, black American struggle: “we sell crack to our own out the back of our homes”. This monosyllabic couplet neatly points to the government-endorsed vicious cycle of deprivation and limited opportunity that plagues housing project neighbourhoods (Neal 2004: 366–370). Little style competence with hip-hop is necessary for understanding the context Talib nods to, especially due to the sonic blackness (Burton 2017) he performs through his rap vocal and the prominent sample of Nina Simone’s voice to introduce the beat proper. The lineage of social critique afforded by Simone’s music travels through the sample (Williams 2013). The beat’s use of gospel voices, soul-accompaniment piano, and hiphop drums place the track squarely within the tradition of black popular music, with the specific production fingerprint of Kanye West. Talib continues to lyrically describe a number of real-world issues at the intersection of social, cultural, economic, and political ideas. Deftly weaving
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Example 4.3 Talib Kweli (2002): “Get By”; refrain
through these difficulties, his voice rhythmically f lows ahead of and behind the beat as he gets carried away in thought or suddenly moves to his next address. The verse is interpolated by a refrain in which he is surrounded by other synchronous voices that, like him, desire “just to get by”. The track’s appeal to persistence revolves around the four-note phrase notated in Example 4.3. The melody ascends in an aeolian contour from the tonic D up to G, with the piano and bass plateauing around D at the end of the vocal climb. Its pattern, repeatedly rising up step by step on “to get”, enacts a kind of communal emancipation. The voices lift up, and lift each other up, to greater and greater heights. With the conceptual metaphor relating height and well-being in mind, it seems as though the environment slowly but surely improves through this melodic rise. The anticipatory rhythm of the phrase – with the word “just” landing before the next beat rather than attaching directly to “to get” – suggests a kind of personic premeditation. The congregation seems especially aware of the need to survive, planning ahead by slipping in an early syllable. The struggle for progress enacted by the melodic ascent takes place before the downbeats and is solidified when each phrase ends in time with the strong kick strikes on beats 1 and 3 (“by”). The intricacies of this phrase aside, listeners are fundamentally encountering a group of voices working together. Imitative of the communal callto-action Talib endorses, the collective raise their voices to be heard. The protagonist shares his own high personal sense of power and outrage-driven approach activity, and the others adopt these as they chime in. Talib elevates his community, identifying dangers in the social environment to help others be more aware of threats to their survival. The listener is invited to join in too. Spurred on by each choral refrain, the protagonist launches back into a variety of other social issues: labour; vanity; consumerism; poor housing; swearing; the plight of single mothers; prisons; and gun violence. Since he spans such a range of topics (all mentioned between 0’25” and 1’01”), it increases the likelihood that listeners will find at least one of them pertinent to their own concerns. At the same time, the track spells out an integrated and nuanced critique of the damage disproportionately inf licted on black American communities around the turn of the millennium. Such sentiments are not frozen in time or space. Online commenter Quintin S (2017) suggests that we “need these types of songs now more than ever”. The suggestion of “need” once again invokes the idea of using songs to survive. In this case, “Get By” prominently has educational and informative functions. The protagonist both encourages civic engagement through recognising various social inequities and provides a model for collective action. Even if we are not
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able to overturn social barriers in the next three minutes, we can at least start by getting together to sing. The persistent semiquaver claps in the primary beat loop reinforce this collective resilience. These handclaps doubling the hi-hats may be interpreted like applause, perhaps cheering Talib along, or celebrating a great political speech. Importantly, they imply the presence of multiple bodies working together. Talib’s resilience is not an individual doggedness but a communal interdependence. It is easy to hear the additional individuals who champion the protagonist’s call. They are in full voice after the first verse, delivering a forty-second hook that again hovers around the step up from C to D. The choral homophony followed by varied vocal polyphony across this section (from 1’04”) attests to the success of their communal survival. These personas constantly thrive in the virtual environment in spite of a social environment that would restrict or restrain their vibrant presence. On a broader structural level, it appears as though Talib’s specific social address builds a collective resistance that then plays out as a chorus. This formal design repeats again from 1’46” with a detailed rap verse followed by a multi-voiced, sung chorus expanding to the general sentiment of simply getting by. The track crucially demonstrates how songs can be healing, not purely for individuals, but endorsed by entire communities. Talib offers a model of social awareness that shows the strength of knowledge as a basis for personal power. By calling attention to very particular, very real problems, he also nuances the strategies for approach-oriented action, combatting possible feelings of being overwhelmed or not knowing where to start. Just as “Get By” plays out the protagonist leading his congregation, Talib teaches listeners how they, too, can inspire and lift their own communities. Awareness begets action as voices rise up from all sides, furthering the potential for empowered survival.
Conclusion Listening to any kind of music has the potential to empower, but rap and metal really emphasise survivalist behaviours and a mindset associated with resilience. Major scholarship on each genre has identified audiences with poverty, the working class, and Otherness whether based on racial identity (Rose 1994) or postindustrial deprivation (Weinstein 2000). These social positions and identities align with first-hand experience of everyday struggle, and it is unsurprising that performances of resilience are inspiring and motivating for listeners. Hearing someone else overcome or withstand a difficulty you also face enables a range of potential changes: feeling in solidarity with another, virtual individual; learning methods for survival; and adjusting the body towards more active pursuits. Due to the loop-based beat structures of rap, tracks tend to be rather formally repetitive. The constant looping of particular material instils a sense of reliability, with predictable structures recurring time and time again. Rappers appear in the same sonic environments as beats (and we often talk of
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rappers f lowing “on”, “over”, or “above” the beat), imbuing the persona with a solid platform from which to perform. “Worst Behavior” is representative of this quality, which appears in much trap-inf luenced mainstream rap of the 2010s. Repetitive songs characteristically reinforce the rap persona who is unperturbed by their environment, making their point with dynamic stability and textural support. Consistency – the ability to keep going – is a key component of resilience, hence the repetitive nature of the tracks that have been argued to empower in this way. The effects of constant repetition on the body should also be taken into consideration, as unchanging or barely changing beat loops provide a sense of stability and predictability that impels regular motion. Such movement may occur at various levels: head nodding, exercise repetitions, beat synchronisation through dance, some forms of labour, and carrying out particular goals. A stable beat can incite action, as individuals are driven by an empowering rap track from lying on the sofa to stand up and begin taking care of household chores, say, or from poring over laptops to protesting police brutality in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio (Gamble 2019b: 182). Metal, by contrast, repeats at longer formal divisions – a zoomed-out sectional repetition – allowing much more unpredictability from second to second. Modern metal features some extremely angular, abrasive, and disruptive riff structures. Listening to this kind of organised chaos in guitar and drum instrumentation, it is often more intuitive to hear vocal personas in conf lict with the tumultuous environments they inhabit or encounter. Tracks that afford resilience tend to resolve such conf lict by demonstrating the striking conquest of the protagonist over some constraints or circumstances. “Here to Stay” is illustrative of nu metal’s cathartic expression of overcoming, whereas “Afterlife” typifies a more traditional heavy metal heroism. Released only five years apart, the two songs could hardly vary more in terms of the perceived obstacles – inner turmoil compared to fighting death personified – yet they are united by a concern for continued existence. The stories are often less naturalistic than those found in rap: a conscious rap track like “Get By”, by contrast, is extremely specific in its tangible, material concerns. Drawing upon imagery from traditional fantasy media and metaphorical, emotional language, metal encourages listeners to consider their own potential to overcome difficulties and (paraphrasing language borrowed from self-help and pop psychology literature) “find the superhero in themselves”. Metal provides a safe space (often physically, as in venues) for releasing pent-up frustration (also physically, in practices such as moshing) outside the restrictive arenas of the everyday (Gamble 2019a: 347–350). A working distinction between aesthetic tendencies is therefore brought to light: generally speaking, postmillennial rap recreates the mundane, the quotidian, the regular, “the grind”, the relentless repetition of everyday life, especially of labour under late capitalism. Looping beats resemble the mechanical repetition of urban industrialism, like the regularities of a daily commute. Modern metal concerns itself with the extraordinary, the
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explosive, catastrophe or triumph, and other outbursts that break from the norm (which do recur in people’s lives, but less frequently). The sudden, chaotic, fantastical ruptures of metal stimulate imagination, varying from external narrative fictions to internal ref lections on feelings and beliefs. These opposing tendencies account for why, in the postmillennial period, rap has been more associated with material aspiration (engaging with neoliberal narratives of success in a market economy) and metal has been more associated with escapism (looking outside actual society to inventive stories that express alternative life experiences). Rap inspires its listeners to get by within the boundaries of contemporary society, and metal invites its listeners to imagine worlds without. Due to the somewhat opposing tendencies of rap and metal, their combination plays out some interesting tensions in stylistically hybrid tracks. In various kinds of music dubbed “rap metal”, the basic instrumental set-up of metal is fused with rapped vocal f lows. Early encounters between rap and distorted guitar-based music include the rap-rock of Run-DMC’s (1986) “Walk This Way (Feat. Aerosmith)” and the parodic quasi-rapped thrash metal of Anthrax’s (1987) “I’m The Man”, before the formula for commercial success with such stylistic hybrids was struck upon by Rage Against the Machine with their 1992 debut album.10 In the postmillennial period, nu metal, and later djent, adopted the empowering rhythmic emphasis of rapped vocals to contrast (or altogether replace) sung and screamed lyrics. Robert Walser (1995: 210) pointed out as early as the mid-1990s that “there is vitality in rhythmic conf lict, and polyrhythmic [rap] music offers opportunities to experience power and diversity in ways that are not overwhelming but rather uplifting and strengthening”. Furthermore, Walser’s interviews with metal fans “found that significant numbers of them knew former fans who had defected to rap, finding in it compatible experiences of power and freedom” (Walser 1995: 210). Although rap-metal hybrids have not seen the long-lasting commercial vitality or mainstream audiences of each genre individually, the idea of compatibility is important for the music’s empowering potential. Resilience is afforded variously by metal’s dynamic, gestural motion and rap vocals’ explicit sociopolitical address. Hacktivist – “Elevate” (2016) “Elevate” epitomises the empowerment that rap-metal hybrids can provide, voicing protest from a disgruntled virtual community. Combining djent (a modern style of technical, progressive metal analysed in Chapter 5) and UK rap vocals, the track stands as a recent manifestation of rap metal that blends hip-hop’s political conscience with metal’s expressive anger. The stomping djent riff of the introduction imitates a unified group in action, as the tightly synchronised strikes of guitar and kick create coordinated movement. While the guitar walls shift in rhythmically uneven phrases, the cymbal-snare backbeat holds the community together in motion. The clear sense of metric
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certainty that can be perceived despite the guitar parts’ angularity suggests continual survival, although this can be heard in different ways. Listeners may find resilience in the constant motion of the backbeat as it transcends the irregular rhythmic phrases, or may imagine a motivating struggle against the status quo focused upon the homophonic guitars’ writhing against the constraining backbeat. However one hears it (given a basic degree of style competence), the instrumental introduction invigorates the body, inviting a fight. Over a verse riff restrained to a single pitch in the bass, two protagonists deliver speech-effusive f lows. Each rapper’s articulation can be associated stylistically with grime, adopting its trademark Multicultural London English dialect, as the words “matter” or “White House” are produced with the glottalised [t]. The first two lines of the track form a rhyming couplet, but the phrasal rhythm quickly speeds up, replacing the repeated [aʊə] (“power”) rhyme mid-line following a loud intake of breath at 0’34”. With this rapid inhale and corresponding rhythmic boundary-crossing, the protagonist continues going regardless of the environmental surroundings, a micro-example of his persistent, individual will to survive. The other instruments proceed consistently throughout the verse, supporting the protagonists all the way up to 1’21” in the manner of a rap beat. Due to its dynamic stability and simplicity (relative to the introduction), the lyrics are offered centre-stage. The protagonists occupy this spotlight by making observations and objections with a tone of disgust. One points out the social deprivation wreaked by inequitable economic policies: “another budget cut, another community centre shut”. The other declaims authoritarian military power: “the system overrun by the power of the gun”. After the second protagonist opens with the latter line, he increases the speed of his f low racing ahead of the riff ’s phrase length. He seems to gain in resilience as he proceeds, conceptually doing better despite the circumstances. Both protagonists testify to their individual capacities, supported by an unobtrusive environment. The second protagonist in the verse pinches the end of each vocal phrase, as though threatening to overdrive his voice. There is the indication that he is withholding a force, one he keeps ready to be unleashed should the need for survival arise. As he delivers a final couplet, the environment gives way entirely. The chorus now hits, adopting the pitch-bending riff of the introduction, with the protagonist’s vocal pitch rising higher still. He delivers four-bar vocal phrasing with an articulation closer to singing. In this section, the dramatic increase of verbal space and the rise in pitch portrays the protagonist acting on a higher plane, as the verse foreshadowed. This shift can be mirrored or mentalised by listeners, who may be similarly driven to action from frustration. The hook ends “we stand firm”, a soundbite testament to collective resistance that combines rap’s realism and metal’s sweeping conviction. The second verse begins immediately afterwards, with the line “there’s strength in numbers” compounding the track’s affordances of communal resilience. The protagonists now trade bars, continuing to avoid end-rhyme phrases as they rush through their numerous plans for survival. In the lead-up to the second
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chorus, the vocalists come together, notably in unison for the first time, on the imperative “fight, ‘cause this is our war”. With this communal motivation enacted, the chorus vocal now lets loose into a full-bodied scream. Each of the screaming protagonist’s lines carry out a pattern of threatening to overdrive (as noted in the first verse) until the shout gains distortion in its final few words. In this way, “Elevate” eventually develops from the controlled patience of rap in favour of metal’s panicked persistence. From 2’40”, the track moves through a vibrant riff in E aeolian that begins up at VII and sinks through V to either iv or i. Since the virtual community of the track has already “elevated”, by taking the metal timbres into full f light, the high VII chord suggests them in their “higher place” during this chord sequence. Finding solidarity in cooperation, they promise “we will stand firm”. The riff in this section comprises a repeated five-semiquaver pattern arranged over 4/4 time, which is cut short to fit a four-bar hypermetre. This jerky passage, with its disruptive snare strikes, portrays a violent rebellion, albeit one which is well organised (synchronised across several instruments) by a group. Interpreting the role of the virtual community here can vary wildly. Free of any particular political charge, commenter someguy827 (2016) reports: “hit my biggest kill streak in the new Doom to this shit. Felt like a badass”. This listener has used the music to motivate their motor skills for video gaming – a specific kind of active behaviour – and gained substantial self-esteem in doing so.11 Another listener is roused by the song’s call for social justice in claiming that “This lyrics fucking INSPIRE” (Armando Pérez 2016). These brief responses exemplify the variety of empowering experiences available in listening to stylistic combinations of rap and metal. Such tracks can alter feelings, behaviours, and actions. The idea of elevating is central to both metal’s fantasies of transcendence and rap’s aspiration to overcome oppressive social circumstances. In the combination of tendencies of metal environments and rap protagonists, the track shows how music affords many kinds of resilience, empowering its listeners to rise above.
Notes 1 Capitalising on this prevalent line of discourse, the US rock/metal label Hopeless Records has released two compilations under the name Songs That Saved My Life. 2 In the abstract, the practice of perceiving a particular three-minute pattern of sound over and over, at different times of day, in different places, throughout a lifetime, seems quite absurd. 3 In clinical psychology, a safety behaviour is defined as something which gives feelings of safety and helps to avoid or tolerate anxiety, but ultimately reinforces the anxious belief that the behaviour itself is necessary to cope (Helbig-Lang and Petermann 2010). For example, an individual with panic disorder may (falsely) believe that they need to listen to music in order to avoid a panic attack when travelling by bus. I am grateful to Alie Garbutt for this observation. 4 Brown (2011) explains that research addressing metal as a social problem and offering causes and solutions for it have been funded disproportionately over critical, cultural, and/or insider studies of the music culture.
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5 The performer known as Drake, like many popular rappers, works with a team of writers, so ascribing writing ability to particular real people may be ultimately unhelpful. In the moment of performance (listening to the recorded track), however, the lyrics appear to be the invention and property of some variously perceived persona Drake. 6 Judging by the interpolation of this lyric in “Bars Simzson” (see Chapter 3), Simz remembers. 7 This reading is given by Genius users test45 (2014) and anom (2014), among others. 8 Such an interpretation clashes slightly with the music video, which features a well-dressed Dennis Graham dancing and performing along to the vocals for the first minute or so. 9 This progression, ubiquitous in postmillennial popular music, seems particularly enthusiastic here for its contrast to the D aeolian pervading the rest of the track. 10 Rage Against the Machine – the textbook example for modern rap metal – is by far the most common artist that comes to mind for others when I introduce my research. 11 This point provides the reminder that developing empowering feelings, thoughts, and actions are not mutually exclusive. Elements of self-esteem and resilience gained in the listening process are deeply intertwined.
References Adam Barthorpe (2016) ‘Korn—Here to Stay’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr3x7tS__dE (Accessed: 4 May 2017). Adorno, T. W. (1978) ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, in Arato, A. and Gebhardt, E. (eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Urizen Books, pp. 270–299. anom (2014) ‘Drake—Worst Behavior Lyrics’, Genius (Comment). Available at: https:// genius.com/Drake-worst-behavior-lyrics (Accessed: 31 March 2017). Anthrax (1987) ‘I’m The Man’, I’m The Man. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/5DWhOMe5c3COEKXl77AEwH (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Antikoagulant (2016) ‘Korn—Here to Stay’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr3x7tS__dE (Accessed: 4 May 2017). Armando Pérez (2016) ‘HACKTIVIST—ELEVATE [2013]’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFUizeNi7SI (Accessed: 14 August 2017). Avenged Sevenfold (2007) ‘Afterlife’, Avenged Sevenfold. Available at: Spotify (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Berger, H. M. (1999) Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Hanover: University Press of New England. Bonnette, L. M. (2015) Pulse of the People: Political Rap Music and Black Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bramwell, R. (2015) UK Hip-Hop, Grime and the City: The Aesthetics and Ethics of London’s Rap Scenes. New York and London: Routledge. Brown, A. R. (2011) ‘Heavy Genealogy: Mapping the Currents, Contraf lows and Conf licts of the Emergent Field of Metal Studies, 1978–2010’, Journal for Cultural Research, 15(3), pp. 213–242. doi: 10.1080/14797585.2011.594579. Burton, J. A. (2017) Posthuman Rap. New York: Oxford University Press. Byrne, D. (2012) How Music Works. Edinburgh: Canongate.
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Cobb, W. J. (2007) To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. New York: New York University Press. DeNora, T. (2003) After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeNora, T. (2013) Music Asylums: Wellbeing through Music in Everyday Life. Farnham: Ashgate. Drake (2013) ‘Worst Behavior’, Nothing Was the Same. Available at: https:// open. spotify.com/track/48RN2EOOyG2Gs5Pyla7ZJj (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Elligan, D. (2004) Rap Therapy: A Practical Guide for Community with Youth and Young Adults through Rap Music. New York: Dafina Books. emilyrosen (2014) ‘Drake—Worst Behavior Lyrics’, Genius (Comment). Available at: https://genius.com/Drake-worst-behavior-lyrics (Accessed: 24 April 2017). Gamble, S. (2019a) ‘Breaking Down the Breakdown in Twenty-First-Century Metal’, Metal Music Studies, 5(3), pp. 337–354. doi: 10.1386/mms.5.3.337_1. Gamble, S. (2019b) ‘Empowerment in Rap Music Listening ft. Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle”’, in Braae, N. and Hansen, K. A. (eds) On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 165–185. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_9. Good Charlotte (2002) ‘Hold On’, The Young and The Hopeless. Available at: Spotify (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Griffiths, D. (2003) ‘From Lyric to Anti-lyric: Analyzing the Words in Pop Song’, in Moore, A. F. (ed) Analyzing Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39–59. Hacktivist (2016) ‘Elevate’, Outside the Box. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/3Tc4zL4rasN9KVFjHrG5BJ (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Halnon, K. B. (2004) ‘Inside Shock Music Carnival: Spectacle as Contested Terrain’, Critical Sociology, 30(3), pp. 743–779. doi: 10.1163/1569163042119868. Hansen, K. A. (2019) ‘(Re)Reading Pop Personae: A Transmedial Approach to Studying the Multiple Construction of Artist Identities’, Twentieth-Century Music, 16(3), pp. 501–529. doi: 10.1017/S1478572219000276. Helbig‐Lang, S. and Petermann, F. (2010) ‘Tolerate or Eliminate? A Systematic Review on the Effects of Safety Behavior across Anxiety Disorders’, Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 17(3), pp. 218–233. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2850.2010.01213.x. Hill, R. L. (2016) Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Horesh, T. (2006) ‘“Music is My Whole Life”—The Many Meanings of Music in Addicts’ Lives’, Music Therapy Today, 7(2), pp. 297–317. Huron, D. (2006) Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jay-Z (2003) ‘Dirt Off Your Shoulder’, The Black Album. Available at: https:// open.spotify.com/track/4DqgmnzCCIv0dbzlFDPJZq (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Johnson, B. and Cloonan, M. (2009) Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence. Surrey: Ashgate. Kövecses, Z. (2000) Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. KoЯn (2002) ‘Here to Stay’, Untouchables. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/66LT15XEqCaWiMG44NGQRE (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Krims, A. (2000) Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Mark Howard (2018) ‘Avenged Sevenfold—Afterlife (Official Music Video)’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIRNdveLnJI (Accessed: 1 October 2018). Mark Sykes (2016) ‘Korn—Here to Stay’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr3x7tS__dE (Accessed: 4 May 2017). Moore, A. F. (2012) Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Surrey: Ashgate. Neal, M. A. (2004) ‘Postindustrial Soul: Black Popular Music at the Crossroads’, in Forman, M. and Neal, M. A. (eds) That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 366–387. Overell, R. (2013) ‘“[I] Hate Girls and Emo[tion]s”: Negotiating Masculinity in Grindcore Music’, in Hjelm, T., Kahn-Harris, K., and LeVine, M. (eds) Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures. London: Equinox, pp. 201–227. Perry, I. (2004) Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Pillsbury, G. T. (2006) Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Production of Musical Identity. New York and London: Routledge. PinkRobot21 (2010) ‘KoЯn—Here to Stay’, SongMeanings (Comment). Available at: http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/73740/ (Accessed: 4 May 2017). P.O.D. (2001) ‘Alive’, Satellite. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/1X4Ntw6Lbaa1ACgilCqMpr (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Puri, S. (2010) ‘Machine Guns and Machine Gun Drums: Heavy Metal’s Portrayal of War’, in Spracklen, K. and Hill, R. (eds) Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, pp. 55–65. Quintin, S. (2017) ‘Talib Kweli - Get By’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr3x7tS__dE (Accessed: 14 August 2017). Rose, T. (1994) Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Run-DMC (1986) ‘Walk This Way (Feat. Aerosmith)’, Raising Hell. Available at: https:// open.spotify.com/track/6qUEOWqOzu1rLPUPQ1ECpx (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Singh, K. and Tracy, D. (2015) ‘Assuming Niceness: Private and Public Relationships in Drake’s Nothing Was the Same’, Popular Music, 34(1), pp. 94–112. doi: 10.1017/ S0261143014000671. Smialek, E. T. (2015) Genre and Expression in Extreme Metal Music, ca. 1990–2015. PhD Thesis. McGill University. someguy827 (2016) ‘HACKTIVIST—ELEVATE [2013]’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFUizeNi7SI (Accessed: 14 August 2017). Spracklen, K. (2015) ‘“To Holmgard … and Beyond”: Folk Metal Fantasies and Hegemonic White Masculinities’, Metal Music Studies, 1(3), pp. 359–377. doi: 10.1386/ mms.1.3.359_1. Talib Kweli (2002) ‘Get By’, Quality. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/1LM6EReMkAxuDXDF26ekl2 (Accessed: 7 March 2020). test45 (2014) ‘Drake—Worst Behavior Lyrics’, Genius (Comment). Available at: https:// genius.com/Drake-worst-behavior-lyrics (Accessed: 31 March 2017). The Notorious B.I.G. (1997) ‘Mo Money Mo Problems (Feat. Puff Daddy and Mase)’, Life after Death. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/4INDiWSKvqSKDEu7mh8HFz (Accessed: 7 March 2020).
92 Music as a lifeline Travis, R. (2016) The Healing Power of Hip Hop. Santa Barbara and Denver: Praeger. Walser, R. (1995) ‘Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy’, Ethnomusicology, 39(2), pp. 193–217. doi: 10.2307/924425. Walser, R. (2014) Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. New edn. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Watts, E. K. (2004) ‘An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption: Gangsta Rap as Cultural Commodity’, in Forman, M. and Neal, M. A. (eds) That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 593–609. Weinstein, D. (2000) Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. Revised edn. Chicago: Da Capo Press. Williams, J. A. (2013) Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Windsor, W. L. (2019) ‘Music in Detention and Interrogation’, in Grimshaw-Aagaard, M., Walther-Hansen, M., and Knakkergaard, M. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 281–300. yackattack8 (2002) ‘KoЯn—Here to Stay’, SongMeanings (Comment). Available at: http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/73740/ (Accessed: 4 May 2017).
5
The empowerment of popular music communities
Introduction What does it mean to be part of a popular music community? A multitude of terms have appeared to describe people’s social engagement with music, encompassing various forms of musicking (Small 1998): community, scene, tribe, subculture, audience, consumer. The terminology wielded is both context- and discipline-specific. Music industry personnel, working daily with commercial music as market products, may be most interested in consumers. Those in the live industry may be especially concerned with an audience. There is undoubtedly overlap here. However, listeners, fans, and others active in music scenes often call themselves just that. Most do not spend much time thinking of themselves as consumers (though they will recognise when they are among an audience). Subculture is a term popularised by academic work developing from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, particularly Dick Hebdige’s (1979) seminal book. However, the tendency of such work to romanticise counterhegemonic politics attributed to young, white, working-class males, and to the omission of all else, has been widely criticised (Hesmondhalgh 2005; Huq 2006: 9–24; Shuker 2017: 334). The term post-subcultural has occasionally been adopted (Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003; Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004) alongside studies which reclaim the term and refine subcultural theory (Hodkinson 2002; van Elferen and Weinstock 2016). Some sociologists have endorsed an alternative, most popularly neo-tribe (Sweetman 2004), after Zygmunt Bauman (1987) and especially Michel Maffesoli (1996). Rupa Huq (2006: 28) explains that “unlike CCCS subcultures which offered collective solutions to problems based on cohesive resistance mounted by their members, neo-tribes are much more temporarily constituted and f luid in composition”. Neo-tribe usefully locates f luctuating groups within the mass cultural complexities of postmodern society, although the undertheorised notion of tribalism is not particularly suitable for understanding specific musicking activities. The term scene is frequently applied to metal music, both in academic work and vernacular discourse. Any study that focuses on scenes typically “takes as its starting point a rejection of the competing concept of subculture”
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(Kahn-Harris 2007: 15). However, an interesting conf lation appears on the Wikipedia entry for “heavy metal subculture” – an important indicator of folk consensus if not a rigorous scholarly source – which discusses “membership in the subculture or scene”, and how “the metal scene, like the rock scene in general, is associated with alcohol…” (Wikipedia 2020). As labels in commonplace usage, subculture and scene are slippery, and apparently interchangeable. Academic research on scenes began in a rather different vein to subcultural work, however, examining intersections between music and geography. An article by Will Straw (1991) introduces scene as a tool for popular music scholars to address cultural spaces of musical activity. Scenes may be viewed as omnipresent and ever-changing sites of enculturation (Heesch and Scott 2016), conceptually capturing the places and people of a given music. Whereas Hesmondhalgh (2005: 29) sees scene as “overly polysemic”, Kahn-Harris (2007: 15) suggests that “for all its vagueness, scene seems to be implicitly holistic in defining something that encapsulates music making, production, circulation, discussion and texts”. This model aligns with everyday use of the term (at least in relation to metal culture), addressing music socialities at various levels from the death metal scene of Akron, Ohio (Berger 1999) to “the Heavy Metal Scene” (Spracklen et al. 2011: 209) as a whole. Scene is of particular use for engaging with online spheres of musical activity, which Bennett and Peterson (2004) categorise as virtual scenes. When there is no physical location within which musicking practices take place, scene is an open-ended tool for analysing the communal sharing of ideas and identities on the Internet. More recently, Straw (2015: 477) has elaborated on his earlier account, providing a useful multifaceted definition of scenes: as collectivities marked by some form of proximity; as spaces of assembly engaged in pulling together the varieties of cultural phenomena; as workplaces engaged (explicitly or implicitly) in the transformation of materials; as ethical worlds shaped by the working out and maintenance of behavioural protocols; as spaces of traversal and preservation through which cultural energies and practices pass at particular speeds and as spaces of mediation which regulate the visibility and invisibility of cultural life and the extent of its intelligibility to others. The first of these conceptions stresses the geographical nature of scenes, suggesting a grouping by locality. This kind of understanding is fairly straightforward, invoked when individuals discuss, say, London’s grime scene (Bramwell 2015) or Oslo’s black metal scene (Moynihan and Søderlind 1998). Continuing Straw’s outline, scenes are understood to assemble cultural practices and objects in distinct ways, which encompasses features like music style. Harris Berger (1999: 60) notes that by “treating style periods as relatively stable patterns of musical practices (such as composition and performance), we can understand how a history of musical styles is
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deposited into the present as a social organization of scenes”. Scenes are also sites for transformative labour and the elaboration of specific ethical structures, exemplified by the conception of a nationwide US rap scene which “revises black cultural priorities via new and sophisticated technological means” (Rose 1994: 65). Finally, scenes are spaces which circulate culture with varying visibility in public spheres. Illustrating this point, Purcell (2003: 67) discusses how the death metal scene’s publicity in the 1990s manifested a “constant tension between the inviting mainstream, which seemed willing to give some Death Metal a try, and the essentially anti-mainstream culture that gave birth to and nourished the genre”. The term is wielded with insight and impact across research on metal. Everyday practitioners will also be well acquainted with discussing the metal scene, whereas hip-hop heads tend to speak more idiomatically of the hip-hop community. Discussions of music communities nonetheless appear in studies of both hip-hop (Alim et al. 2009; Williams 2013) and metal (Riches 2011; Hill 2016; Varas-Díaz and Scott 2016). Much of this work draws upon Benedict Anderson’s (2006) inf luential concept of imagined communities, considering the fundamentally social construction of groups (underpinning nations, interest-based communities, and other social collectives). There are attractive benefits to discussing communities over scenes (Shelemay 2011). A community can be an imaginative construction of an individual, hypothesising shared values, identities, and beliefs among other people. A scene, by contrast, interacts materially with the social environment, as defined above. For example, Wallach et al. (2011: 7) observe that “musicians and fans around the world align themselves with a transnational metal community”. Such alignment maps neatly on to my conceptualisation of personas, as communities are integrated within the imaginative belief system that listeners generally hold about their engagement with popular music and its multimedia.1 Alongside the very real environments of cultural interaction with music (performance venues, studios, educational institutions, eating and drinking establishments) and other people, individuals form broader communal ties on the basis of experience and imagination. Hip-hop communities are typically imagined and enacted by association with social justice (especially racial equality and freedom from oppression), solidarity in struggle, urban thriving, materialist thrift, individual labour, and celebration of the moment. Scholars have keenly insisted upon the significance of communal expression and collective pride to rap music. Tricia Rose (1994: 34) describes how: identity in hip hop is deeply rooted in the specific, the local experience, and one’s attachment to and status in a local group or alternative family […] that, like the social formation of gangs, provide insulation and support in a complex and unyielding environment and may serve as the basis for new social movements.
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Indeed, rap fosters “a powerful sense of group allegiance” (Quinn 2000: 198), as it is “an idiom that could create solidarities beyond the boundaries of faceto-face communication” (Dimitriadis 2001: 27). Even though listeners encounter a single, first-person protagonist in many rap tracks (indeed all the examples of rap analysed thus far), “hip hop music concerns itself with both the self and the we. Its consciousness is both of the ego and the collective” (Perry 2004: 88). Furthermore, my analysis of empowering community affordances corroborates Adams Krims’ (2000: 122) claim that “‘close reading’ of musical processes may hold some promise for those of us who are interested in how rap may help to constitute imagined communities”. Metal shares many qualities of collective identification with rap, although the cultural priorities are far from identical, and could broadly be described as more conservative. Heavy music communities tend to be less welcoming of outsiders, more protective of ritual, dress, and convention, with a (highly varying) stake in upholding metal’s normative identities: white, heterosexual, male.2 Closer to rap are metal’s shared emphases on emotional expression, individual skill, fantasies of heroism, hedonism, and a paradoxical distrust – and adoption – of authority. The group itself is an important and meaningful form of engagement. Joe Ambrose (2001: 3) writes of “a highly structured sense of community within a good [mosh] pit” which provides moshers with “a comforting sense of belonging” (Ambrose 2001: 5). Gabby Riches (2011: 321) supports this view of communal empowerment in the moshpit, where “metal fans are united through participation in a rejuvenating, bodily transgressive practice”. Participants in metal culture thus form an “intensely powerful outcast community of belonging” (Halnon 2004: 756). Such testaments to the value of communal identity have an important basis in music listening. The music analyses in previous chapters have considered the empowering affordances of individual esteem and resilience, as personas provide high personal senses of power and carry out approach-oriented behaviour to be mentalised or mirrored and taken up by the listener. The analyses have also, at times, alluded to the potential for group solidarity and communal sentiment in listening to rap and metal. Belonging to a music community, however real or imaginary it may be, can also be empowering. Hence, Snell and Hodgetts (2007: 444) identify that “the shared appreciation of Heavy Metal music can reaffirm social ties and provide opportunities for expressions of community”, and Alim (2009: 16) comparably notes how hip-hop practitioners across the globe “have turned to a Global Hip Hop ‘Nation’ for a rearticulation of their race, gender, class, and political positions as well as an empowered view of themselves as transnational subjects”. These emic accounts of each genre echo a transactional metaphor that sets the stage for studying empowerment: communities provide listeners with something. In particular, music community participation mirrors the theory of style competence. Just like an individual’s experiences of empowerment in music listening scale with their degree of style competence, engagement with a music community affects the empowerment they are afforded. As
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people become more familiar with the values, history, and traditions of a music community – more specifically enculturated – they can attune to more empowering experiences. Missy Elliott (2001): “Get Ur Freak On” Two brief examples will illustrate the imagined communities of individual listening. This first track focuses on the empowerment that individuals can experience from group belonging through acts of dance in particular. Missy Elliott’s Timbaland-produced, new-millennium dance jam is a consistent call to join the virtual collective on the dance f loor. And while the record may be spun in clubs, at parties, during social gatherings, it may also be listened to in solitude, sometimes in situations constraining expressive dance (playing in headphones on public transport, for example). Quite regardless of setting, listeners use the track to stimulate the body, to adopt the protagonist’s vibrant energy, and to imagine the ecstatic group action of the track’s busy personic environment. The varied timbral borrowing of the beat celebrates international collaboration, creating a crowded, culturally unspecific soundworld. It appropriates Asian sounds in particular, adopting an exoticism or sonic Otherness in the melting-pot of energetic rhythms. Various timbral layers combine to race ahead of a pop backbeat, giving emphasis to beat 2 and the off beat of 3 (leapt to before the typical snare on 4): one, two, three-and four. There are rapid tabla rhythms featured among snappy kicks and clicks and a prominent tumbi, an instrument perhaps most recognisable from bhangra music (Maier 2016: 175–176). Finally, the samples of Japanese and Hindi voices that appear throughout the track clearly emphasise the musical borrowings from around the world, inviting the listener into a global dance-fest. Not long after the festivities begin, the confident voice of the protagonist Missy projects over the crowd and appears in-your-face. The repetitive, simple rhythmic phrases of her f low portray a dance troupe leader spurring a group, including the listener, into action. Furthermore, the many voices in cooperation with Missy bustle in collaborative rhythms (“yes”, “holla”, “go”), always tightly synchronised rather than clashing, as if in competition with one another. These cooperative voices demand imagining a collective of unified personas who act in support of the communal environment. In the hook, Missy’s voice is double-tracked and wide-panned around various ad-libs to the left and right, as if her troupe is moving around the virtual environment, filling all empty space with enthusiastic motion. It is as if a room is full of dancing bodies, and listeners might be compelled to move with them. 3 Others, especially with lower style competence, may just want to leave the room: this party is simply not for them. In any case, the virtual environment offers a whole host of personas working together in “Get Ur Freak On”, encouraging the listener to join in themselves. The high personal sense of power and the approach-oriented behaviour performed by
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the group invite mentalising and mirroring: how must they feel right now, and what would it be like for me to feel that way? Let me groove along and find out… Missy’s verses acquire some slightly combative aggression, indicating the high esteem and approach-orientation of a conventional rap protagonist. Her self-respect is obvious. She explicitly recognises her strengths and skills as “the hottest ‘round’”. In Marita B. Djupvik’s (2017: 121) reading, such a performance is quite radical, as “Elliott operates as a queer trickster, who carves out a space that falls outside the two most common stereotypes in hip-hop: the hypersexual male MC and the sexually aggressive ‘hoe’”. Presenting as neither “alpha male” nor promiscuous female, Missy forges her own path as a self-assured leader of the pack. In every verse, she refers to her collective neutrally as “people”, avoiding the racialised and gendered language upon which rap’s communal sentiments usually rely. She does not adopt an adversarial relationship to her surroundings – it is quite difficult, to my ears, to hear the persona in conf lict with the environment – but works with the beat, transforming into another percussive layer in the soundworld through her percussive [g]–[tʃ ] f lurries of “getcha getcha…”. In response, the commotion of voices and dynamic instrumental lines consistently evoke an active community, emphatically spurred on by their leader. Similarly, in another track, Missy Elliott can be heard to draw “attention to how the crew is constructed and how she can control them with her own voice” (Djupvik 2017: 122). The imperative lyric of the hook – “get your” – is indeed targeted at a second person, one with the listener as the prime target. The song thus persuades listeners to get their own freak on: to dance in synchrony with the beat, to emulate Missy’s active behaviour, to become part of the group. Some people will find themselves imagining the boisterous fun, dancing along (even as minimally as a gentle nod of the head), reciting the vocals, or singing the beat’s six-note tumbi melody. Such experiences can activate (or maintain) the approach system, motivating active behaviour: dance is one obvious example of uninhibited bodily movement. In sum, getting your freak on – being true to yourself, regardless of idiosyncracies – encourages a positive self-evaluation that can increase the personal sense of power. This is but one likelihood of listening. Although my analysis of the track focuses on how the various timbral layers contribute to a collective bustle, Dale Chapman (2008: 163) finds Timbaland’s (Tim Mosley) production working against a sense of community united in time and place: “within the meticulously spare, reverbless sonic environment of Mosley’s production, such references sound oddly abstracted, cut off from their broader resonances”. While the virtual space audible on record can be heard as unnatural due to its amalgamation of ambiences, such analysis might focus on sonic characteristics secondary to the song’s primary force which is, to paraphrase Jason King (2001), how it makes your ass move. In King’s (2001: 434) work on the Timbaland sound as “ass music”, he
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describes how the sparsity of tracks like “Get Ur Freak On” become “very much focused around the power of the beat (always in relation to groove) […] that engages and animates the rump”. The assertion that the beat moves the body – regardless of the samples’ artificial superimposition – is supported by the multitude of choreographers using the song, the DJs spinning the track at clubs, and the many others listening to it in the car. No matter where the virtual community of Missy Elliott’s dance resides, it affords an empowering celebration of self and body among others. “Is you with me now? Then biggie biggie bounce.” A Day to Remember (2009): “The Downfall of Us All” This second instance of imaginary community examines A Day To Remember’s pop-oriented metalcore to demonstrate how individual struggle can be alleviated through musical affordances of collective belonging. “The Downfall Of Us All” begins with a rather unique sound, a tongue-in-cheek synecdoche for late 2000s metalcore in general. For the first six seconds, the track purely consists of a loose choir of male voices (“gang vocals”) performing a breakdown pattern.4 Style-competent listeners will recognise the introduction as a breakdown rhythm, although its production by voices is anything but conventional: it lands in familiar territory transferring to the typical instrumentation at 0’07”. In this introductory moment, listeners can imagine a unified community in action, a group of personas giving voice to the same rhythm. Whereas most breakdowns afford communal empowerment in synchronised guitar and kick drum rhythms – an imaginary troupe in unison contesting an overarching cymbal-snare backbeat – here the voices present the collective directly, cutting out a level of interpretation. The people of the community are imaginable through their most basic, shared, and immediate means of sound production. When the typical metalcore instruments adopt the breakdown, they move it through a C ionian chord sequence, noteworthy for its unusual cheerfulness. Although not explicitly filling out a V chord, either in bar two or implied by the final crotchet of the four-bar sequence, the I–vi–IV pattern here is similar to the common I–V–vi–IV (“four chords”)5 and I–vi–IV–V (“doo wop”) progressions. Contrasting somewhat with the heavy timbres and structures of metal (Berger and Fales 2005), this sequence may provide a sense of comedy or general humour. The community in this environment were previously having a convivial sing, and now the harmonic motion and bouncy rhythm reinforces their cheer. The bodily movement required to produce the repeated guitar “gallop”, a jolting downstroke followed immediately by an upstroke, acts out a kind of stability (perhaps associated more with the domain of resilience) as the hand must be brought back up to where it started after it drops down. Listeners may attend to the varied affordances of togetherness, joy, and persistence in the track’s introduction (sketched out in Example 5.1).
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Example 5.1 A Day To Remember (2009): “The Downfall of Us All”; 0’07”–0’15”
In the verse, the drums pick up the pace with snare beats at four times the rate of the opening breakdown, and the guitars are initially left to ring out. This transfer of rhythmic momentum suggests a communal sharing of roles across the track: voices together, then guitar and kick together, then the snare leads the charge. The protagonist Jeremy provides a more ambiguous perspective upon arrival. While his melody playfully dances down the ionian mode, the lyrics tell a different story by lamenting environmental pressures. In a fairly direct interpretation, we can imagine Jeremy as a performing artist who is dismayed to find that “it’s not easy making a name for yourself ”. Yet, it soon emerges that he is not alone in his struggle, as he suggests “let’s have some fun”. Somewhat paradoxically, the tension he portrays comes to a head in attesting “I’ll live my life alone” surrounded by gang vocals. By imagining that the introductory voices belong to different members of a community, here they reappear to sympathise with the protagonist’s difficulties. This dialogue between Jeremy’s focus on individual problems and the group affirmation continues throughout the lyrics and form as the track proceeds. Each time additional vocals harmonise with, or support, the protagonist’s voice, they provide experiences of inclusivity, shared struggle, and collective self-dependence. The focus shifts from the individual to the communal. Even without specific reference to a community, the song appears to pull listeners out from brooding privately, insofar as YouTube commenter Jude (2015) claims (in almost medicinal fashion), “when ever I depress myself from thinking too much, I listen to this and I feel better”. In response, user Yuffie (2015) exclaims in mutual recognition of this experience, “I thought I was the only one! I’ll never get tired of this song”. This common sentiment of togetherness is potently manifested in the track’s continual emphasis on the sounds of the community. The gang vocals make the collective personification explicit and highly realistic, albeit imaginary. They are at their most emphatic during the bridge breakdown at 2’24”, appearing on all sides of the protagonist, who pushes upward at the top of his range, consistently stressing
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the dominant. His sudden monotone, contrasting with the track’s generally mobile phrases, demonstrates his commitment to the community, as a conceptual metaphor for optimism sees Jeremy at his highest and healthiest when surrounded by his people. The gang chant reinforces part of the line (italicised) with a wider spatial presence: “we made up our minds when we signed three, four, five on the dotted line”. As he reaches the end of the lyric, the guitars and basses also arrive at the ionian V chord, and so the only pitch content beside the complex-pitched drums for a brief moment (2’29” and 2’36”) is a chunky unison on the G in several octaves (the “missing” V that never explicitly arrives in the introduction’s I–vi–IV sequence). This reinforced commitment to the collective – in lyric, in backing vocals, in the breakdown rhythm, in harmony – is an empowering experience of community devotion. Listeners may appropriate this as a commitment to the band (likely how the members of A Day To Remember interpret it), membership of a metal scene, or engagement with a different social group altogether. Personal feelings, such as those of the track’s protagonist, can be expressed by an individual and thereafter adopted by the support system of the community, just as emotions are shared among friends. Singing along with the homophonic instrumental and vocal textures, joining in with the community in voice or in spirit, individual trials and tribulations become the downfall of us all.
Community psychology Although it seems unlikely that social psychologists had rap and metal in mind when developing new research programmes, ideas that emerged in discussing the previous two tracks inform the field of community psychology. Sometimes considered a subfield of social psychology (Freitas 2000), sometimes an offshoot (Orford 2008), sometimes a radical revision of psychology on the whole (Kloos et al. 2012), community psychology emerged in the 1960s and rapidly expanded in the late 1980s, with an emphasis on understanding individuals in their environmental contexts: their support networks, connections, institutions, and well-being. The field does not only comprise theoretical research, but informs practice, an emphasis brought to light by Iscoe (1987). By distinguishing community psychology – a field studying the conditions of individuals and communities – from community psychologists – people who actively try to improve conditions through intervention – the focus on action (and activism) becomes clear (Iscoe 1987). This is one feature that pulls the discipline towards therapeutic practice, community planning, and social activism as well as manifesting a radical politics that underpins study of the cultural contexts for mental illness and social problems such as homelessness (Moritsugu et al. 2016: 28). Empowerment is a particularly crucial aspect of work in the field. Julian Rappaport (1987) provided the original call for empowerment to be the central “phenomena [sic] of interest” for community psychology, and an active
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body of research emerged in response. Drawing together various pieces of related work in an early review of the field, Rappaport (1987: 127) states that “empowerment is what we try to define, understand, explain, predict, and create or facilitate by our interventions and policies”. The latter verbs again emphasise the practical work that many community psychologists undertake, attempting to empower individuals they perceive to be disempowered. Much social work and mental health practice shares this goal (Adams 2003). Because earlier psychological evidence suggests there are significant relationships between an individual’s psychological sense of community, empowerment, and life satisfaction (Maton and Rappaport 1984) and between community participation and disalienation (Zimmerman 1986), empowerment is viewed as the end goal of the field’s research and interventions. The evidence has continued to accrue, and many community psychologists regard empowerment as an urgent contribution to social justice (Orford 2008). There have been several definitions of empowerment that view it as a socio-psychological construct. Most attend to the relationships between individuals and their communal environments, sharing a concern for subject-object mutualism with ecological psychology.6 Definitions of empowerment are highly varied, although they share sufficient commonalities to encapsulate certain guiding principles. However, because community psychologists understand empowerment so differently, no single definition will suffice. Orford (2008: 41) remarks on “what a pluralistic, context-specific, and dynamic thing it is”. It is therefore most practical to approach at the conf luence of several accounts. These combined ideas will inform a communal dimension of empowerment in popular music listening. I reprint several widely cited definitions of empowerment in Table 5.1. Each of these definitions considers empowerment to be a process, or a construct that involves a state change by degree. Empowerment is treated akin to a scale or spectrum or, better still, a series of scales which suggest an overall slider between disempowered and empowered. Some definitions treat the process as a kind of enablement, attending simply to the (new) things that individuals and communities become able to do as they become empowered. However, purely viewing it as a group of capacities overlooks some characteristics specific to power, especially control, which features in most of the definitions and proves central to the relationships between individuals and communities. Although largely implicit within these accounts, many of the communities under study are as a matter of fact marginalised, lacking political and economic control due to inequitable social structures. In close association with this, the individuals of these communities typically face discrimination (based upon race, gender, age, ability, and other facets of identity) which limits their control over conditions. Such people lack a fair say in social matters within their environments, which community psychologists aim to rectify through empowerment. The definitions of empowerment in Table 5.1 operate on the hypothesis that, through participation with their communities, individuals
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Table 5.1 Definitions of empowerment in community psychology Citation
Definition
Zimmerman and Rappaport (1988: 726)
“A construct that links individual strengths and competencies, natural helping systems, and proactive behaviors to matters of social policy and social change […] A process by which individuals gain mastery or control over their own lives and democratic participation in the life of their community” Gutiérrez “The process of increasing personal, interpersonal, or political (1995: 229) power so that individuals, families, and communities can take action to improve their situations” Perkins and “Empowerment is more than the traditional psychological Zimmerman constructs with which it is sometimes compared or confused (1995: 570) (e.g., self-esteem, self-efficacy, competence, locus of control). […] Empowerment as ‘an intentional ongoing process centred in the local community, involving mutual respect, critical ref lection, caring, and group participation, through which people lacking an equal share of valued resources gain greater access to and control over those resources’ (Cornell Empowerment Group 1989) or simply a process by which people gain control over their lives, democratic participation in the life of their community […] and a critical understanding of their environment” Zimmerman “The construct integrates perceptions of personal control, a (1995: 581) proactive approach to life, and a critical understanding of the sociopolitical environment” Travis (2013: “the process by which adolescents develop the consciousness, 144) skills and power necessary to envision personal or collective well-being and understand their role within opportunities to transform social conditions to achieve that well-being” Aiyer et al. “Empowerment is thought to be an active, participatory process (2015: 137) through which individuals, organizations, and communities maximize control of themselves and of their environments, while simultaneously strengthening both individual and community efficacy”
can gain greater access to resources and control over decisions. These resources and decisions, in turn, enable the community to gain more control within the larger sociopolitical environment. Whether this is sound reasoning is examined in detail in Chapter 6. For now, it is worth considering how this understanding of empowerment informs music communities. The work of Raphael Travis (and colleagues) on hip-hop and youth empowerment is a striking example of the empowerment that music listening and communal belonging make possible. Following the community psychology tradition, Travis views empowerment as a positive aspect of adolescent development, and endeavours to show how it can be instigated by hip-hop (Travis and Deepak 2011: 203–204). Taking as wide a scope as any “attitudes and behaviors that feel empowering to an individual or community” (Travis and Deepak 2011: 207–208), the process of empowerment involves “any
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attempt to gain power over decision making, opportunities, or the meaning ascribed to one’s life” (Travis and Deepak 2011: 207). While this wide perspective, interested in nearly anything an individual personally feels is empowering, may seem to have little to do with power itself, Travis’ approach can be supported by the theory of the personal sense of power (Anderson et al. 2012) discussed in Chapter 3. Since it has been shown that individuals act differently according to how powerful they feel (and not necessarily are, when measured by other metrics), empowerment can be studied as a cognitive construct. It is an aspect of self-perception that affects how individuals think, act, and relate to their environments. Demonstrating an ecological awareness, Travis and Deepak (2011: 208) observe that empowerment experiences take place “in a historical, political, and social context which can explain both traditionally defined and vicarious empowerment”. The idea of vicarious empowerment accords with the theory of the personic environment, where a listener’s personal sense of power can change based upon interpreting the empowered state of another individual. Imagining others to act and feel a certain way affects how individuals and communities view themselves. Travis’ (2016) work emphatically situates the potential for empowerment in hip-hop within black American cultural experience, the contextualising environment within which state changes in the personal sense of power typically emerge. Travis’ work culminates in the Individual and Community Empowerment (ICE) framework (Figure 5.1), which divides the overarching process of empowerment into smaller, more manageable subdomains.7 He uses the phrase “narrative dimensions” to describe five groups of qualities that characterise empowerment. Some will seem familiar. At the individual level, Travis describes three dimensions of esteem, resilience, and growth. My treatment of esteem and resilience in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively, drew upon Travis’ definitions of each domain.8 As for the two communal dimensions of empowerment, Travis refers to community and change. Community, the topic of this chapter, addresses collective pride, unity, and solidarity, and concerns aspects of belonging to a group, such as communal resilience and cultural identity. Change refers to social change, as in political developments that empower communities, spanning an awareness of the sociopolitical environment and strategising – or even undertaking action – to improve community conditions.
Figure 5.1 Abbreviated version of the ICE framework, from Travis and Deepak (2011: 211)
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There is tremendous depth to this model, or inventory, which takes into account many things which comprise empowerment for individuals and communities. To my mind, however, Travis takes it in a rather odd direction, turning to confirmatory factor analysis to gather quantitative data on the ICE framework (Travis and Bowman 2011). The issue I take here is almost entirely disciplinary, as Travis and Bowman (2011) seek to counter risk with empowerment to ensure positive youth development. Their aim is to demonstrate that hip-hop has a beneficial impact upon young people, and can help individuals to become empowered rather than at risk (as measured by violence, substance use, crime, and derogation of women). Such work contends with the majority of psychological research that treats hip-hop as a social problem to be treated. Nonetheless, the dualism of empowerment and risk invites some critical consideration, as does the related construct of positive youth development (i.e. positive by whose standards?). For example, high self-esteem becomes less straightforwardly “positive” in excess, leading to arrogance or narcissism. Recreational drug use, especially hip-hop’s overt celebration of it, is another controversial way that individuals may experience empowerment. Say a listener feels empowered listening to hip-hop and smoking marijuana restoratively at the end of a difficult work day: is this positive, because they are gaining resilience, or negative, because they are taking drugs? What about the metal listener of Ensiferum’s “One Man Army” (see Chapter 3) who gains self-confidence in their own identity at the cost of discriminating against others? There can be no straightforward answers concerning the ethics of using music, and any attempt to commend or condemn certain kinds of listening experience will reveal more about the critic’s political and ethical viewpoints than those of the music culture in question (Phillipov 2012: i–xvii). But there is one more cross-disciplinary problem to untangle. The ICE framework suggests that empowering tracks simply have, or express, resilient “themes […] embedded in hip-hop messages” (Travis and Deepak 2011: 210). This characterisation develops from the psychological tendency to view musical meaning as content for consumption. I have instead been formulating a musicological theory of listening experience sensitive to the listener’s embodied cognition, perception, and environment. As I appropriate it, the ICE framework describes a range of empowering affordances rather than immanent meanings. However, this does not prevent us from agreement: Travis (2016: 88) places Talib Kweli’s (2002) “Get By” and Drake’s (2013) “Worst Behavior” in his chapter on the dimension of resilience, and I have similarly analysed how these songs afford listeners resilience. The ICE framework is developed with hip-hop in mind, but it is relevant to metal too, as my analyses (using the terms of the empowerment model) show. Furthermore, in his study of American soldiers’ use of music during the Iraq War, Jon Pieslak (2009: 137) describes how metal and rap are ideologically charged with power, operating “not as a dominating force over the fan, but as an empowering agent”. Recall also Rob Walser’s (1995: 210) observation
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that metal fans find “compatible experiences of power and freedom” in rap listening. Seeing beyond the constraints of genre, music communities are the imagined sites for the communal dimensions of listening empowerment. Whether you barely engage with a music community or are a prominent member of a particular scene, you can listen to music and “use your ‘imagination’ to fill in your own personal narrative […] that is compatible with your evolving but relatively stable personal story of improvement” (Travis 2016: 51). This straightforward idea combines with my ecological-embodied approach to listening and psychological theories of empowerment to form a comprehensive model for investigating the communally empowering potential of rap and metal listening. Waka Flocka Flame (2010): “Hard in Da Paint” Let us consider this in action, in an account of individual listening that nonetheless emphasises community spirit. “Hard In Da Paint” is one of five tracks that Justin Burton (2017: 83) describes as laying the foundations for the modern trap sound, crystallising Southern hip-hop into a more stable set of musical aesthetics. In this track, Waka Flocka Flame takes the stance of a leader. Rather than speaking solo from a soapbox, however, he directly provides the passionate voices of his community within the musical environment. The track begins with a synth brass riff, first darting menacingly around an E m chord, and then repeating the same motion around B m. The producer, Lex Luger, places two separate tags over the lengthy introduction. While a single producer tag is common in the introduction of rap tracks, their prominence in “Hard In Da Paint” demonstrates early on that Waka’s colleagues and collaborators – members of his community – get their voices heard explicitly. Eventually the protagonist, Waka, arrives with the titular line. He is utterly surrounded by a plethora of percussive ad-libs, including forceful repetitions of his name, “yeah”, “what”, and gunshot-like “bah” or “bow” expulsions. He delivers the start of the hook while the beat momentarily pauses, as though he himself has instantly silenced the brass. From then on, his voice sits much louder than non-vocal environmental sounds, appearing on top of everything else and enshrouded by the many other vocalisations. The ad-libs occur incessantly throughout the track to the mid-left and mid-right of the stereo field. Waka thus acts as a solid, consistent, central thread, around which others in the community pop up to have their voices heard. This environment musically plays out the conceptual metaphor of a community forming around an individual. The way that this space is laid out affords hearing Waka as the nucleus of this empowered community. The group of people that he leads appears highly democratic, judging from the constant voicing of others’ contributions. Using the producer tags and information about the track, listeners may also interpret the role of non-vocal persona Lex, who provides the beat. In a sense, he gives the consistent brass fanfare to which the entire community responds with significant energy.
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Waka leads the charge forward from 0’26”, but a larger group materialises throughout the track. There is a great deal of cultural pride found in the community, as specific associations are stated: Brick Squad, Gucci (Mane, the rapper, one would assume), the ‘Dale (Riverdale, Georgia), Hit Squad, and so on. The protagonist points out that “éses and amigos freestyle off the dome”, a line which appears welcoming to Latin Americans and/or names particular street gangs. Appearing as a congenial diplomat and a hustler at the top of his game, Waka reports getting on with everyone, even those with assumedly opposing loyalties: “crips fucking with me, Gs and the Vice Lords”. Later, recalling tragic incidents such as “when my little brother died”, Waka identifies specific events which led to his current circumstances. Detailing his path to popularity, he describes approach-oriented activity that can be mentalised or mirrored for individuals to rise up the ranks in their own communities. The hook’s individualistic boasts provide the linchpin for affordances of communal belonging. It may be Waka’s story, but it is ultimately shared with others, who channel significant pride and cultural specificity. Acting out a process of empowerment developing from individual to community, the group becomes invigorated by Waka’s ability to “go hard in the motherfucking paint”. This expression for being competent or skilful is compellingly broad. But its origin in basketball terminology is particularly significant, since players cannot really succeed in the sport through personal ability: basketball requires good teamwork for individual stars to shine. Waka’s “Brick Squad”, a gang name functioning equivalently to a sports team, is the community in which he can f lourish.9 In turn, he puts his skills to use in order to empower the entire group. The plethora of vocal interjections throughout the track imitates passing the ball collaboratively around the court for the protagonist to score. Something quite special happens from 3’07”. In place of a third verse, the ad-libs proliferate instead of typical rap bars. Waka seems to pass the ball to the listener, but the remainder of the team can be heard calling out encouragement or instruction with shared sentiments. This formal section seems to suggest to the listener, “show how hard you go in the paint”, and the community is still all around, right there with you. Eluveitie (2012): “Meet the Enemy” Metal also bears significant potential for communal empowerment across a range of styles. Eluveitie’s music uses historically specific lyrical references and traditional instruments characteristic of folk metal, although the rapidity and distorted timbres (retaining a focus on memorable melodic phrases) could also place it under the banner of melodic death metal. Rather than a ground zero introduction to a bustling community and its charismatic leader, as in “Hard In Da Paint”, “Meet The Enemy” overwhelmingly offers a narrative of collective self-defence. In making this distinction, it is noteworthy that metal again leans towards fantasy and drama to enact conf lict in contrast to rap’s grounded realism and specificity. This song minimises the role of the
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protagonist in favour of communal activity. Although a distorted vocal persona charges forth from the very beginning of the track, he frequently recedes as instrumental melodies take the lead. The track interweaves distorted guitar riffs with Celtic instrumentation and – since the vocal distortion shares more timbral qualities with the guitar – the hurdy-gurdy or violin occasionally have greater prominence, so there are a few leaders (or perhaps warriors) of this community as they ready for conf lict, and prepare to “meet the enemy”. From the start of the track, there appears to be much at stake for actors within the busy environment. The vocal describes events that can be narrativised as fantastical warfare: “we ventured our lives”. The track speeds ahead at a high rate of structural change, moving through a verse, a stop-start interlude, another verse, and a prechorus within the first minute. This relentless charge, rhythmically carried by the drums, enacts a collective, resilient motion. Whenever switching to another feel, such as the slower snare rate at 0’51”, the kit always returns to its rapid snare pattern soon after (at its fastest in the prior blastbeats at 0’26”, and back to every other semiquaver by 1’18”). The track consistently bounces back to a faster rate until 3’23”, and the busy riffs in each section match this speed to provide a sense of rapid momentum. Such motion throughout “Meet The Enemy” invites the listener a community hurriedly preparing for (and enacting) battle, distributing roles and responsibilities in a shared environment. The varying rate of rhythmic activity impels individuals to their feet, to get doing something, anything, to counter the looming threat. In the chorus (from 0’59”), the antagonist of the community is vaguely addressed as “the enemy”, a positioning which targets some threatening Other to be contested. The protagonist provides the most clearly pitched vocals in the song, maintaining a reassured G as the chords fall B–E m to the lyric “meet the enemy”. The clear melodic statement of the titular phrase invites listeners to join in defending the community. Since it would be unwelcoming, and therefore quite unconventional, to imagine oneself as the enemy in this scenario, the natural position is to identify positively with the group. Get ready for action, they seem to say, and let us help you prepare your defences against whatever ill approaches. An extended instrumental section follows the subsequent verse. From 1’35”, the personic community mounts their defence in full swing. The kick, bass, and guitar neatly align in a breakdown-like fashion. This provides a solid base for the polyphonic whistle and guitar leads to demonstrate collective virtuosity, heroically holding the enemy at bay. The members of the army affirm their communal pride, organised rhythmically in step and united in spirit. Such an emphasis on group action does not prohibit the imagination of individual heroism, but each line does appear in service of a larger whole. For instance, the whistle opts for a mixolydian 6̂ to end the chorus melody, but is quickly tugged back in line with the force’s overarching aeolian strategy. The protagonist continues to narrate the experiences of his community as they defend their territory. He records the events in bardic fashion, storing
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the lore of this mythical conf lict. However, in the brief bridge at 2’58”, an auxiliary protagonist speaks for the group as a battlefield commander (the Gallic tribes defending against Rome, perhaps). She spurs everyone back into action with the inspiring claim “we will not bow”. The vocal phrase develops from speech to scream, musically enacting the declaration as her body refuses any constriction and distorts with rage instead. The community accordingly shows renewed determination to “meet the enemy”, as the pitched instruments forgo individual melody for a goal-directed, homophonic charge propelled by blast beats. All attention is hereafter focused on the collective endeavour, an attitude that listeners can adopt to generate communal empowerment. By screaming aloud the track’s group sentiments in communal listening environments or live performance venues, individuals can gain particularly concrete experiences of empowerment within music communities. Imagining the song’s collective self-defence invites further feelings of belonging and inclusion within a metal scene (and a commitment to maintaining its boundaries). The song helps music communities to believe that they have something worth protecting. There is an even more important consequence of this process. The song actually preserves itself by generating feelings of collective preservation that are acted upon by listeners, who then defend metal music communities by using the track as inspiration to “meet the enemy” of outsider intervention.
Music communities and fandoms “Meet The Enemy” therefore exemplifies a crucial process of how communities use music and, indeed, music uses communities. Music communities naturally uphold canons. Including and excluding specific cultural works can help to delineate the boundaries of a collective, marking the in-group from out-groups. Indeed, communities of people often feel that they depend on pieces of music to embody particular scenes or represent a certain identity, but the music relies upon them, too, if it is to keep being played and heard. Of course, it is not really the music that has any stake in its continual reproduction, but the artists, songwriters, recordists, labels, event managers, streaming services, vinyl presses, and other musickers who create it and make it available. Artists in particular are kept financially af loat by listener investment in their creative work. And, by proxy, it is the artist who contributes to the continual well-being of individuals and communities through uses of music. Sometimes the artist-fan relationship is viewed very directly, as when artists are held responsible for the ill health or behaviour of their listeners. Recall, for instance, the ludicrous 1990 lawsuit against Judas Priest, where the band’s music was accused of backmasking verbal messages that compelled two fans to complete a suicide pact (Walser 2014: 145–146). The evidence that the music caused such an event is deeply tenuous, relying upon several stages of faulty reasoning, as I have discussed. Yet it ref lects an understandable
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suspicion (in this case of the parents of the two fans) about the power that artists hold over fans. Listeners themselves are incentivised to view their engagement with music as direct contact with its creators. This belief conceals the complexities of listening, personic interpretation, and processes of mirroring and mentalising. It also gives a real (albeit still mediated) human target for directing responses to listening: gratitude, admiration, alienation, or anger. In an enjoyable Guardian article, which also labels the artist Lizzo “the messiah” and “a giver of life”, Nakkiah Lui (2020) describes how, at one concert, “her songs of unapologetic self-love and empowerment, usually told through a prism of personal journeys, became songs of solidarity and community”. Not only does this concisely summarise the processes of ICE, but Lui is emphatic about Lizzo’s cultural significance and stresses the artist’s ability to inf luence her audience’s well-being. This piece exemplifies a broader trend in how individuals and communities idolise popular music artists. Collective devotion to popular media personas is principally the focus of research on fandom. Defending the status of the fan from earlier mass culture critiques, studies of popular music fandom investigate the varied manifestations of approval, interest, identity, participation, and community formation committed to celebrating contemporary artists and genres (Duffett 2013; Click and Scott 2018). In the digital age, where the Internet has become intertwined with everyday life, fandom has become remarkably visible (Baym 2018). Moreover, fan activities have become significantly quicker and easier: long gone are the mailing lists and fanzines that depended upon physical mail. Engagement with other fans has been subsumed by instant messaging and social media platforms that facilitate almost immediate, international communication for any individual with use of an appropriate device (e.g. smartphone or computer) and connection to the Internet. In the era of social media, instant communication methods, advertising, and the mass of platform-curated data one encounters in a single session of Internet engagement can feel overwhelming. This could, in time, lead to a declining sense of meaningfulness of labour and participation in community interaction.10 Nonetheless, due to digital fandom’s significant visibility and ease of access, I am particularly interested in tracing the ICE process among participants in online music cultures.11 This focus aligns with my emphasis on affordances – possible experiences of music – that are theoretically (if far from practically) open to all, by comparison with geographically bounded scenes. Rap and metal have extremely large global audiences, with many listeners using digital technology to supplement (or replace) off line cultural interactions with music communities. There is a useful distinction that can be made between individual and communal engagement by distinguishing “between ‘fans,’ understood as individuals who have a passionate relationship to a particular media franchise, and ‘fandoms,’ whose members consciously identify as part of a larger community to which they feel some degree of commitment and loyalty” ( Jenkins et al. 2013: 166). The individual fan is part of the fandom community. As Andy Bennett (2004: 231) notes in his work on virtual
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scenes, “the Internet offers an alternative possibility for articulating […] fandom in a public sphere”. As such, music communities are prime examples of fandoms in action. The online music community of djent It is worth moving on from the listening experience to consider what individuals do next, as an apparent consequence of musical empowerment. Two case studies will demonstrate how individuals empowered by music can collectively empower music communities. In the postmillennial period, a digital-native scene (one born online) emerged around a particular kind of progressive metal music known as “djent”. The previous chapter provided a musical encounter with djent (hybridised with grime-like vocals) in the form of Hacktivist’s (2016) “Elevate”. What started as a handful of guitarists and “bedroom producers” uploading self-recorded riffs, guitar tone tests, and early song demos to music sharing websites in the mid-2000s became a virtual music community built around specific online hubs by the early 2010s, and thereafter melded across the spectrum of contemporary popular music. Inf luenced by the technical virtuosity of metal artists like Meshuggah and SiKth, and “guitar heroes” Guthrie Govan and Mattias Eklundh, Washington-based guitarist and recordist Misha Mansoor shared numerous clips on the site SoundClick under the alias Bulb. Among the tracks he uploaded are examples of guitar tones testing out various pickups, covers of Meshuggah songs and Final Fantasy soundtracks, and demos that would later appear as tracks on his band’s self-titled debut album Periphery. Mansoor’s “about” page, preserved on the site, reports he is “playing out with my band and attempting to make a career out of these projects” (Soundclick 2020). Dating the description somewhat, he provides a link to the band’s all but defunct Myspace page, invites visitors to create and share CDs of his music (in the days before the predominance of mp3 players and on-demand streaming platforms), and claims that “we are always trying to get gigs so if you need a band to fill a slot we will do it!” (Soundclick 2020). After Periphery released their first album in 2010, and toured Europe with other groups under the title The League of Extraordinary Djentlemen, music journalist Jamie Thomson (2011) described Periphery as “dragging djent from the virtual world to the real one”. Mansoor was in regular contact with other bedroom producers, luthiers, and guitar enthusiasts through extended-range guitar forum sevenstring.org (where he continues to post as of November 2019) and other websites including the Meshuggah forum.12 In January 2009, Periphery produced a range of t-shirts with the slogan “got djent?”. The word djent (with a silent “d”), used by Meshuggah’s Fredrik Thordental to discuss recording Destroy, Erase, Improve, was popularised by Mansoor on these forums to onomatopoeically describe the guitar sound he sought. At the intersection of audio production and guitar performance, the djent sound referred to a distorted, palm-muted power chord produced by picking hard while barring the guitar’s lowest four
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strings (usually on a seven- or eight-string guitar). As such, the online scene started life not as: a physical community but rather […] an aesthetic community of geographically dispersed fans whose consumption of [djent] and its expressed political and cultural values gave rise to a sense of shared experience— and a series of lifestyle preferences—through which individual fans were able to create a sense of commonality and unity. (Bennett 2015: 147) Although its meanings continue to be passionately disputed, the word djent was an important tool for naming the community and giving it an empowering identity to rally around. Couched within the broader cultural practices of metal, participation revolved around a normative figure of gear-obsessed guitarist (or multi-instrumentalist), bedroom producer, and music nerd who shared, collaborated (sometimes internationally), and commented on metal music compositions. Most participants are adolescent and young adult suburban males drawn to the graft associated with developing guitar virtuosity, replacing figures of an older era such as Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen with Mansoor himself, Tosin Abasi of Animals As Leaders, and Fredrik Thordendal of Meshuggah. These guitarists are respected masters who appear as empowered personas, demonstrating significant approach-oriented activity through virtuosic instrumental performance, and indicating an extremely high personal sense of power through moments that emphasise heaviness in progressive metal structures. For instance, Misha demonstrates enviable skill as an instrumental persona associated with the dynamic and complex introduction to Periphery’s “Zyglrox” (2010).13 Accompanied by the rapid triplet semiquaver drum strokes and growled vocals, this guitar-led passage invites listeners to imagine an empowered persona in the form of Misha, the apparent “man behind the music”, and mirror or mentalise his state for their own empowerment. Djent provides a point of reference for participants variously involved as performers, commentators, and fans of a particular kind of progressive metal music.14 From the initial terrain of Meshuggah’s web forum to the appropriation of specific musical techniques and sounds from the band’s oeuvre (Pieslak 2007), djent can be described as both a musical community and an offshoot of Meshuggah fandom. got-djent.com, established in 2009, acted as a centralised portal for the community, with databases of bands and releases, reviews, news articles, and discussion forums. The r/Djent subreddit was opened at the end of 2010, hosting user-generated content. The website It Djents also promoted various new releases and connected participants internationally.15 Individuals empowered by the music of emerging metal artists like Periphery took to such communication networks as a form of approach behaviour, reaching out to find others who shared their interests, tastes, and activities. Metal guitarists, especially musician-entertainers on YouTube, ran
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wild with the idea. A particular meme sees individuals preoccupied with the question “does it djent?”, a way of ascertaining the suitability of equipment (Rabea Massaad 2015). Rob Scallion (2015) develops this idea into an interactive game which tests the potential to perform djent riffs on instruments including the banjo, kazoo, cello, and theremin.16 Jared Dines (2019) has provided tongue-in-cheek annual addresses of djent, which typically see him adopting larger and larger extended-range guitars (up to 20 strings on a single-necked guitar in 2019) to play lower and lower strings. This excess serves as a critique of metal’s never-ending quest for heaviness (Berger 1999: 58). Mikael de Médici (2014) built the “djentstick” by attaching a string and a pickup to a thin plank of wood, which similarly parodied djent’s apparent propensity for endlessly chugging the guitar’s lowest open string. Djent certainly gave metal a new lease of life in the 2010s, a momentary obsession with exploiting the potential of extended range guitars and digital production technologies in fan service to Meshuggah. Fuelled by community portals hosted online, the music emerged much like “fan fiction” for Meshuggah and, perhaps unexpectedly, became the face of progressive metal over the first two decades of the millennium. Fuelling a competitive commitment to virtuosic practice and expert use of recording equipment, individuals empowered by progressive metal progenitors became anointed “djentlemen”. Collectively, audiences formed around a new wave of artists like Periphery and Monuments, who increasingly filled the line-up of events like Euroblast, UK Tech-Fest, and Download Festival. Such festival slots acted as off line manifestations of the digital-native scene, special moments of communal celebration that, in turn, increased djent’s significance within the broader metal music community. Now the stylistic quirks of djent manifest in the instrumental funk of Polyphia, the R&B-metal of Issues, and even the experimental pop of Poppy.17 This tale spanning individual inspiration, expressions of shared aesthetic value, and digital scene formation demonstrates the self-sustaining force of music communities. The online fandom of Brockhampton The potential for communal empowerment can also be investigated within the fandom of specific artists. The US group Brockhampton (often stylised BROCKHAMPTON) has been variously described (and self-described) as a boyband, a rap collective, a multimedia company, and an advertisement agency (Kocchar 2017; Tiffany 2017). In the second half of 2017, the group of fourteen young men began to generate significant media hype and reached a growing audience with a large body of creative output, including three albums, more than a dozen music videos and short films, and extensive social media engagement. Throughout this period, dubbed “Saturation Season” after the album trilogy SATURATION I, II, and III, fans gathered online to develop a virtual music community dedicated to mutual appreciation of Brockhampton and related forms of cultural activity. Sites including
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the subreddit for the group, r/Brockhampton, the subreddit’s Discord server, and YouTube comments exploded with fan activity. Brockhampton’s online audience generated an active network based upon common interest, shared cultural priorities, and expressions of collective fandom. During Saturation Season, the Brockhampton fandom became an online social environment affording communal empowerment. Fans often report the music as their first point of contact with the group. The tracks prove highly meaningful for a range of fans who share personal stories of empowerment by Brockhampton’s affordances of high esteem, resilience, and communal pride.18 Focusing on the lyrics of Brockhampton’s founder and de facto leader Kevin Abstract, Joshua Rogalski (2018: 22) has argued that: Kevin Abstract’s inclusion of overt homosexual themes in his lyrics provide rap with a powerfully progressive voice for the LGBTQ community as well as a positive role model for African-American homosexual men. Abstract’s lyrics may also have the potential to diminish mental health issues associated with LGBTQ individuals and their self-esteem. Rogalski’s study supports the idea that Brockhampton’s music is popular among listeners who enjoy hip-hop but object to the misogyny and homophobia colouring most mainstream rap. Taking the idea of “being different” and running with it, the members of the band provide empowering affordances for an audience of “outsiders”. This includes a variety of socially marginalised identities, including LGBTQ+ people, those who suffer from mental health disorders, and youth of colour. Kevin Abstract (2017) is clear about the diversity of his audience, among which he identifies “thirteen-to-nineteen year-old girls and kids of colour; some of them are queer kids; some of them are just like angsty kids who hate their school”.19 Importantly, however, Brockhampton’s aesthetic and political performance of Otherness revolves around expressions of communal belonging. The group conf lates diverse lived experiences of Otherness into a shared set of cultural priorities emphasising self-honesty, inclusivity, and subversion of conventional masculinities in rap. Describing themselves consistently as a “boyband”, the members of Brockhampton therefore spotlight being different together. This is a key point of communal pride for the group and their fans, exhibited powerfully by the use of blueface and boilersuit uniforms (as seen in the “BOOGIE” (2017a) music video, SATURATION III artwork, and live at Brockhampton’s 2017 concerts). The costume ostensibly conceals some visual differences between performing members – particularly skin colour – while drawing attention to the collective of blue-skinned, alien-like convicts. Enabling the performance of identity equity, the group’s black and brown men who face racial discrimination revise the most immediate visual marker of their Otherness with this uniform, whereas the group’s white men gain a degree of hip-hop authenticity by concealing their whiteness (and
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thereby their tacit racial Otherness within the genre). In stark shades of blue and orange, everyone is equally different, an equalising tactic ref lected in the online spheres of the group’s fandom. For example, the Discord server rules include strict policies based on respecting difference and avoiding discriminatory language (kieran 2018). Integral to the Brockhampton fandom is an emphasis on the politics of identity. Kevin Abstract’s lyrics concerning homosexuality, to take one example, are merely one instance of a larger commitment to performances of personal sincerity in the group’s output. For instance, the group’s multimedia works have also tackled topics including mental illness, loneliness, substance abuse, gang violence, masculinity, racism, and sexual abuse. An intolerance for the latter saw the removal of founding member Ameer Vann over allegations of sexual misconduct in May 2018 (Kim 2018; Puckett 2018). The band’s progressive identity politics are not merely performed in creative work (and capitalised upon through the group’s commercial products, to take a cynical view) but acted upon in concrete terms, at the cost of parting with a close friend and creative partner. Since feeling welcome and included is the ground zero of participation in Brockhampton’s sphere of activity, the group could not continue to give an accused sexual predator a platform. Moreover, members of the band appear accessible and authentic, developing relatable celebrity personas through active presence and direct engagements with fans from personal Twitter, Instagram, and ASKfm accounts. As Complex writer Jorge Cotte (2018) astutely observes, “the breadth of content available for exploration fuels Brockhampton fandom. […] their music makes young people feel seen […] the group adeptly maneuvers social media and press without appearing contrived or inauthentic”. Related to Nancy Baym’s concept of relational labour, Daniel Cavicchi notes that “social media appears to enable this ‘maintenance of connection’ like never before” (Baym et al. 2018: 142). The group deployed social media platforms as part of an always-on, hyper-mediated period of creative activity while living and working together throughout the latter part of 2017. The group’s cohabitation in the “Brockhampton Factory” provided the Saturation Season with a staging environment for the group’s Viceland show American Boyband, several music videos, photographs, and the film-length documentary accompanying the album trilogy boxset.20 By living together and working in an environment that “is all art all the time” (Easter 2017), the group were able to generate and disseminate a large online archive of media for fans to explore, bolstered by new media technologies such as Instagram live confessionals where members are authenticated through sharing aspects of their personal lives during a very empowering moment in time. These digital forms of artist-fan interaction, well theorised in fan studies, exemplify Rojek’s (2016) parasocial interaction, which describes the emotional relationships fans develop with performers. The ecological-embodied theory of listening can be expanded to encompass the interpretation of music video, visual art, and social media texts.
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A personal sense of power can be clearly conveyed through image and word as well as through sound. Mirroring and mentalising requires less assumption (than listening to a purely musical persona) when celebrity figures have provided all-access invitations to ostensibly private domains of their experience. Approach and inhibition activity can be intimated in more direct and realistic ways than in popular music, even when there remains a clear sense of fictionality. For instance, the video for “GUMMY” (Brockhampton 2017e) sees the performing members, complete with codenames, celebrating the success of a bank heist. In addition to the music, therefore, empowering affordances are made available by engagement with Brockhampton’s tweets, photographs, and live-streamed videos enacting personal well-being or struggle, graft, creativity, friendship, and collaboration, as they tell their multimediated story of striving for stardom. Indeed, Brockhampton’s 2017 ascent provides an empowering fantasy for independent creatives seeking to follow in their footsteps. The commercial success and critical acclaim of Brockhampton seemingly concludes a rags-to-riches story for the digital age, as reported in journalistic accounts of the group. It starts with Kevin Abstract looking for friends and collaborators on a Kanye West fan forum, involves international relocation to live together in Texas and later Los Angeles (with members reportedly quitting dead-end jobs to commit to their artistic passions), and developing an all-in-house multimedia creative studio, culminating in generating a large audience and signing a reported $15 million record deal with RCA Records in early 2018 (Kocchar 2017; Tiffany 2017; Cotte 2018; Knopper 2018). Engagement with the creative content that narrativised this period may be inspirational for fans, as it mythologises the inevitable outcomes of acting on creative potential, working with close friends, and committing to an ambitious artistic vision (mirroring capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial business growth, an analogy not lost on the group: on “ALASKA” (Brockhampton 2017f ), Kevin Abstract raps, “a young Zuckerberg, I wake up and make stuff ”). The group made good on their plans, but they were not really nobodies who made music together before suddenly winning big. Kevin Abstract developed a successful solo career (using similar strategies to encourage parasocial interaction) between 2010 and 2017, securing the management of Christian and Kelly Clancy (4 Strikes Management), who also guide the careers of Mac Miller, Solange, and Tyler, the Creator. Brockhampton had a calculated and contemporary launch strategy, sensitive to the contours of the digital era. The documentary series contracted by Viceland provided an audience and platform for the group’s mainstream emergence. In particular, the docuseries focused on (and therefore compounded) the narrative that Brockhampton was an artist close to breaking into the popular music mainstream. Despite all of this, it was an extremely exciting moment for fans, who were perhaps witnessing their own dream come true for the group in real time. Something quite special was happening in
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mid-to-late 2017, with weekly music videos that merged the aesthetics of 1990s Nickelodeon with Spike Jonze’s street skateboarding films, an album and various announcements every three months, and extensive behind-thescenes footage of recording sessions. The highest rated YouTube comment on the “GUMMY” video demonstrates the excitement associated with the moment, stating “I would pay so much money to have my memory wiped and feel how it felt to discover Brockhampton all over again” (r2micro373 2017). The group rapidly accrued fans who gained empowering experiences from Brockhampton’s music and other media, then turned to dedicated fan forums such as the subreddit to engage in communal discourse. Alongside appreciation of the group, discussion topics included difficulties with school, parents, addiction, closeted sexualities or gender identities, and expressions of Otherness, loneliness, and belonging among the fandom. Such examples support Nedim Hassan’s (2013: 67) claim that “fans’ activities could form social connections, help people to manage daily life and to develop a sense of identity within domestic contexts”. Moreover, the fandom includes voracious consumers of Brockhampton merchandise (another arm of Brockhampton’s creative production) who wear their affiliation proudly, wrapping themselves up in the welcoming, inclusive, and emotionally sincere ideals of the collective. Since 2017, the group has toured extensively, selling out (to the best of my knowledge) the majority of concerts, as fans are eager to share space with the performers. Grateful for the empowering experiences that the group’s music has provided them, listeners imaginatively build the multimediated personas into heroes (Lacasa et al. 2016): those who were able to find fame and success through their hard work and meaningful art. Concertgoers seek shared experiences of the music in physical manifestations of a community dedicated to shared ideals, aesthetic tastes, cultural priorities, and political values. The individuals empowered by their individual listening to songs of friendship, togetherness, and solidarity concretise such affordances in communal arenas, both online and off line. Moreover, attending live shows and purchasing merchandise (as well as being significant aspects of fan activity) provide major streams of income for the artist. With that economic support, the artist continues to produce content: Brockhampton’s fourth studio album, iridescence, and fifth, GINGER, followed a more conventional promotional schedule of single and album releases and touring. And so the cycle continues. Like djent, the group gained an international audience through creative and continual use of the Internet, which eventually grew into traditional economic relations of artist-fan codependence.
Conclusion Empowered by listening, individuals engage with communities dedicated to appreciation of the music they love. Fans commit time, money, and labour to artists, which provides profits back to fund artistic creation. The
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artists keep creating. The music contributes to the continued well-being of the individuals, enabling them to continue celebrating it in communities of mutual appreciation and support. Seen this way, music is a self-sustaining force. This holds even for tracks that appear vacuous on the surface, like “Get Ur Freak On”. Far from dismissing music designed for cars and clubs, the importance of dance-oriented rap music should be abundantly clear: Missy Elliott’s track keeps bodies moving, and invites listeners to work together. In commercially produced rap, this is usually channelled through the voice of a single individual, a leader speaking on behalf of their community. Hip-hop music can be more explicitly communal, as evidenced by the ciphers on street corners across the globe, and posse cuts, which capture several artists collaborating on record. Waka Flocka Flame retains the typical position of lone speaker, though the dense ad-libs that inform his modern trap style develop rich affordances of communal belonging. Though it is at first glance a very different song, “The Downfall of Us All” positions its protagonist and community similarly indeed. Jeremy recalls personal troubles but decisively turns to face his people during the track’s bridge (and, of course, their voices are directly audible at the beginning). Metalcore is not always collectively oriented, and can be as personally introspective as nu metal, but the A Day To Remember track is a useful example because its significant pop-punk stylistic traits emphasise the importance of cooperation and group loyalty (even if the group in question remains rather vague). “Meet The Enemy” takes this notion of collective self-defence to an extreme, manifested instrumentally as much as vocally. Unlike “One Man Army”, discussed in Chapter 3, Eluveitie emphasise the folk of the folklore that informs their metal music, gesturing towards historically recorded (Celtic) communities that have existed in time and space. In the second part of this chapter, I endeavoured to dig properly into what individuals do after listening, or how else they music (to again borrow Small’s (1998) framing). Many of the songs analysed in this book have a similar story to Brockhampton or djent, as fandoms and communities continue to form around rap and metal some five decades on from when these music cultures first appeared. I have naturally made some compromises here in abbreviating perspectives from fan studies, media studies, and cultural studies to provide a snapshot of music communities in action. But there is a lot of other work that approaches music cultures from these directions and not much that looks at the original encounter: what happens when listeners engage with music in the first instance.21 The field of community psychology provides a wealth of information for popular music scholars to harvest, and its emphasis on empowerment as a process of gaining control, resources, and skills raises an important question about the nature of empowerment at a social level. As an inherently political phenomenon – one entwined with the well-being of individuals and communities – it is next necessary to face up to the politics of empowerment in popular culture.
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Notes 1 With this emphasis, I am essentially espousing a rudimentary theory of parasocial interaction and cultural participation, as elaborated by Chris Rojek (2016). The additional complexities detailed by work in cultural studies and media studies may be used to f lesh out this framework, although the basic principles I outline here are sufficient for focusing on listening. 2 Exceptions to this trend almost outnumber instances of upholding the status quo: glam metal’s androgyny and gendered pastiche (Walser 2014: 124–136); women’s diverse participation in spaces crudely perceived as “masculine” (Hill 2016); and glocal innovation around the world (Wallach et al. 2011). Nonetheless, metal’s frequent and sometimes implicit maintenance of hegemonic identity characteristics should be acknowledged and challenged. 3 Of course, the track has been used precisely in this way, most visibly by dance groups who physically enact the track’s dynamic sonic environment. Numerous choreography videos employing the track are accessible on YouTube. See, for example, UOLDANCESOCIETY (2013) and Dance Fit with Jess (2019). 4 For more on metal breakdowns and listening experiences, see Gamble (2019). 5 This progression, variously rotated to vi–IV–I–V and IV–I–V–vi, is used as the basis for The Axis of Awesome’s (2011) “Four Chords”, which parodies its ubiquity in popular song. 6 Rappaport’s (1987) early call-to-action explicitly draws on ecological theory, which he understands to involve taking the entire environment into account. This enables a more contextualised investigation than traditional person-centred psychology. 7 For other elaborations of the ICE framework, see Travis and Deepak (2011: 210– 218), Travis and Bowman (2012: 464, 2015: 93–95), and Travis (2013: 143–150). 8 Growth encompasses qualities of individual self-development, such as maturity, developing self-control, and having strong interpersonal relationships. However, it proved to be the least distinct dimension of empowerment in my doctoral research, which first applied the ICE framework to extensive musicological analysis. I have instead folded aspects of growth into the other dimensions to ensure a comprehensive portrait of empowerment consistent with Travis’ tried-andtested framework. Travis’ (2016) book similarly weaves the dimension of community into chapters on growth and change, which suggests the malleability of these categories without losing the comprehensive scope of the inventory as a whole. 9 Other listeners will not find this track quite so innocent, and hear it instead as glorifying a gangsta attitude. My reading into the basketball metaphor might be considered naïve, with gang warfare the obvious topic being championed. Making such an interpretation, Waka’s commitment to selling drugs as a route to becoming “hood rich” may not be empowering at all, but exploitative, even disempowering. This path (a long-standing narrative in hip-hop) arguably maintains a vicious cycle that exploits addicts, reinforces unnecessarily violent turf wars, and upholds a Reaganite agenda to exploit poor and racially marginalised neighbourhoods. See, for instance, Bogazianos (2012). 10 See, for instance, Lucy Bennett’s (2012) study on a sub-group of R.E.M. fans who are nostalgic to regain the “ultimate first listen” of a new album, a private listening event uninf luenced by online spoilers and community opinion. 11 For complementary studies of geographically bounded (“off line”) metal and rap scenes, see Berger (1999: 56–75), Bennett (2000: 133–165), Flores-González et al. (2006), Huq (2006: 110–134), Snell and Hodgetts (2007), Webb (2007), Lucas et al. (2011), Varas-Díaz et al. (2014), Bramwell (2015), Overell (2016), and St-Laurent (2019).
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12 Other early members of sevenstring.org include Peter Graves (guitarist of Red Seas Fire), Paul Ortiz (under the artist name Chimp Spanner), and Adam “Nolly” Getgood and Jake Bowen, both of whom would later join Periphery. 13 See Andrei Sora’s (2019) theorisation of instrumental personas in popular music. His study jumps off from Simon Frith’s (1996: 210) intuitive idea that listeners tend to experience “sound as person”. 14 More detailed analysis of djent’s musical and technical characteristics can be found in Shelvock (2013), Marrington (2017), and Moore and Martin (2018: 226–227). 15 In 2018, the site rebranded to Everything Is Noise and expanded its purview to most genres of popular music, calling djent a “fad” that had become a “largely repetitive and forgettable morass of low-tuned chugs” (Böhmer 2018). Got-djent became defunct in December 2018, which perhaps marks the death knell of djent as an active music community. Its leading artists, such as Periphery, Animals As Leaders, and Tesseract, have graduated beyond the perceived gimmickry to become internationally celebrated metal bands. 16 It turns out that “what really djents… is friendship” (Rob Scallion 2015) in the game’s conclusion. 17 For further discussion of djent and metal’s broader potential for stylistic hybridisation, see Fellezs (2016). 18 YouTube comments on the “CANNON” music video provide a representative range of responses. Dert Segway (2017) finds comfort in individualism, posting “y’all have helped me out of my shell. I’ve always been called weird cuz I dressed differently and listened to WEIRD music […] and when I found Brockhampton I realized I need to just keep being myself ”. psychoxgamer11 (2017) points out the resilient affordances of the track: “THIS GOES SO HARD THIS GON HELP ME THROUGH THE YEAR”. Max Hayden (2017) reports communal belonging, asking “does anyone else think that brock hampton sums up our generation better than any contemporary artisit right now? they just make me feel so connected”. 19 I understand the term queer to describe practices of identity expression that question normative sexuality, in a similar sense to that employed by Freya Jarman-Ivens (2011: 13–17). 20 For instance, the house and adjacent roads feature in “STAR”, “GOLD”, and “JUNKY” (Brockhampton 2017b, 2017c, 2017d). Some fans have even tracked down and travelled to the house, making a pilgrimage to visit the location of Brockhampton’s hotbed of creative activity and thus a site of significant symbolic production. 21 Not everyone enters music communities through music first: some do so through fashion, location, sport, or unrelated social interactions. But there are many who encounter music they enjoy and thereafter look to go further in their engagement, such as by finding digital spheres of community facilitated by the Internet.
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10(4), pp. 315–326. doi: 10.1002/1099-1298(200007/08)10:4 3.0.CO;2-L. Frith, S. (1996) Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gamble, S. (2019) ‘Breaking Down the Breakdown in Twenty-First-Century Metal’, Metal Music Studies, 5(3), pp. 337–354. doi: 10.1386/mms.5.3.337_1. Gutiérrez, L. M. (1995) ‘Understanding the Empowerment Process: Does Consciousness Make a Difference?’, Social Work Research, 19(4), pp. 229–237. doi: 10.1093/ swr/19.4.229. Hacktivist (2016) ‘Elevate’, Outside the Box. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/3Tc4zL4rasN9KVFjHrG5BJ (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Halnon, K. B. (2004) ‘Inside Shock Music Carnival: Spectacle as Contested Terrain’, Critical Sociology, 30(3), pp. 743–779. doi: 10.1163/1569163042119868. Hassan, N. (2013) ‘Hidden Fans? Fandom and Domestic Musical Activity’, in Duffett, M. (ed) Popular Music Fandom: Identities, Roles and Practices. New York: Routledge, pp. 55–70. Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Taylor & Francis. Heesch, F. and Scott, N. (eds) (2016) Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality: Interdisciplinary Approaches. London and New York: Routledge. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2005) ‘Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above’, Journal of Youth Studies, 8(1), pp. 21–40. doi: 10.1080/13676260500063652. Hill, R. L. (2016) Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodkinson, P. (2002) Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford and New York: Berg. Huq, R. (2006) Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World. London: Routledge. Iscoe, I. (1987) ‘From Boston to Austin and Points Beyond: The Tenacity of Community Psychology’, American Journal of Community Psychology, 15(5), pp. 587–590. doi: 10.1007/BF00929911. Jared Dines (2019) Djent 2019, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_fyzAXkIJ-A (Accessed: 18 January 2020). Jarman-Ivens, F. (2011) Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenkins, H., Ford, S. and Green, J. (2013) Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York and London: New York University Press. Jude (2015) ‘A Day To Remember—The Downfall of Us All’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN4IIgFz93k (Accessed: 1 October 2018). Kahn-Harris, K. (2007) Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford and New York: Berg. Kevin Abstract (2017) ‘Meetings Suck’, American Boyband. Viceland. . Available at: https://discordapp.com/ kieran (2018) #rules, BROCKHAMPTON channels/319180091076640769/319180091076640769 (Accessed: 18 January 2020). Kim, M. (2018) BROCKHAMPTON Kick Out Ameer Vann Over Sexual Misconduct Allegations, Pitchfork. Available at: https://pitchfork.com/news/brockhampton-kickout-ameer-vann-over-sexual-misconduct-allegations/ (Accessed: 16 January 2020). King, J. (2001) ‘Rap and Feng Shui: On Ass Politics, Cultural Studies, and the Timbaland Sound’, in Miller, T. (ed) A Companion to Cultural Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 430–454.
124 Empowerment of popular music communities Kloos, B. et al. (2012) Community Psychology: Linking Individuals and Communities. 3rd edn. Belmont, California: Wadsworth. Knopper, S. (2018) Brockhampton’s RCA Deal Worth $15M: Sources, Billboard. Available at: https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8280751/brockhamptonrca-record-deal-worth-15-million (Accessed: 13 June 2019). Kocchar, N. (2017) Get to Know the Members of Brockhampton, a New Kind of American Boy Band, the FADER. Available at: https://www.thefader.com/2017/07/13/ brockhampton-members-kevin-abstract-interview-saturation (Accessed: 16 January 2020). Krims, A. (2000) Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacasa, P., Zaballos, L. M. and Prieto, J. de la F. (2016) ‘Fandom, Music and Personal Relationships through Media: How Teenagers Use Social Networks’, IASPM@ Journal, 6(1), pp. 44–67. doi: 10.5429/2079-3871(2016)v6i1.4en. Lucas, C., Deeks, M. and Spracklen, K. (2011) ‘Grim Up North: Northern England, Northern Europe and Black Metal’, Journal for Cultural Research, 15(3), pp. 279–295. doi: 10.1080/14797585.2011.594585. Lui, N. (2020) ‘Lizzo’s Sydney Opera House Performance Was as Close to Transcendent as Pop can Get’, The Guardian, 7 January. Available at: https://www. theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/07/lizzos-sydney-opera-house-performancewas-as-close-to-transcendent-as-pop-can-get (Accessed: 9 January 2020). Maffesoli, M. (1996) The Time of the Tribes. Translated by D. Smith. London: SAGE. Maier, C. J. (2016) ‘Sonic Modernities: Listening to Diasporic Urban Music’, in Papenburg, J. G. and Schulze, H. (eds.) Sound as Popular Culture: A Research Companion. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 173–182. Marrington, M. (2017) ‘From DJ to Djent-Step: Technology and the Re-coding of Metal Music Since the 1980s’, Metal Music Studies, 3(2), pp. 251–268. doi: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1386/mms.3.2.251_1. Maton, K. and Rappaport, J. (1984) ‘Empowerment in a Religious Setting: A Multivariate Investigation’, Prevention in Human Services, 3, pp. 37–72. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1300/J293v03n02_04. Mikael de Médici (2014) After the Burial—A Wolf Amongst Ravens, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhOYf lyfOPM (Accessed: 18 January 2020). Missy Elliott (2001) ‘Get Ur Freak On’, Miss E… So Addictive. Available at: https:// open.spotify.com/track/6zsk6uF3Mxf IeHPlubKBvR (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Moore, A. F. and Martin, R. (2018) Rock: The Primary Text. 3rd edn. Aldershot: Ashgate. Moritsugu, J. et al. (2016) Community Psychology. 5th edn. Abingdon: Routledge. Moynihan, M. and Søderlind, D. (1998) Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground. Venice: Feral House. Muggleton, D. and Weinzierl, R. (eds) (2003) The Post-subcultures Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. Orford, J. (2008) Community Psychology: Challenges, Controversies and Emerging Consensus. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Overell, R., Heesch, F. and Scott, N. (2016) ‘Brutal Masculinity in Osaka’s Extreme-Metal Scene’, in Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality: Interdisciplinary Approaches. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 245–257. Available at: https:// ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/handle/10523/8384 (Accessed: 18 January 2020).
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Periphery (2010) ‘Zyglrox’, Periphery. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/6KT4wVLHzijksY3yGPDXAM (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Perkins, D. D. and Zimmerman, M. A. (1995) ‘Empowerment Theory, Research, and Application’, American Journal of Community Psychology, 23(5), pp. 569–579. doi: 10.1007/BF02506982. Perry, I. (2004) Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Phillipov, M. (2012) Death Metal and Music Criticism: Analysis at the Limits. Lanham: Lexington Books. Pieslak, J. (2007) ‘Re-casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah’, Music Theory Spectrum, 29(2), pp. 219–246. doi: 10.1525/mts.2007.29.2.219. Pieslak, J. (2009) Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. psychoxgamer11 (2017) ‘CANNON—BROCKHAMPTON’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x0Vzf ISF_o (Accessed: 7 June 2017). Puckett, L. (2018) BROCKHAMPTON’s Ameer Vann Responds to Allegations of Emotional and Physical Abuse, the FADER. Available at: https://www.thefader. com/2018/05/14/ameer-vann-abuse-allegations (Accessed: 16 January 2020). Purcell, N. J. (2003) Death Metal Music: The Passion and Politics of a Subculture. Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company. Quinn, E. (2000) ‘Black British Cultural Studies and the Rap on Gangsta’, Black Music Research Journal, 20(2), pp. 195–216. doi: 10.2307/779467. Rabea Massaad (2015) ‘Does it Djent? Victory VX Kraken’, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXfnpgmYACE (Accessed: 10 January 2020). Rappaport, J. (1987) ‘Terms of Empowerment/Exemplars of Prevention: Toward a Theory for Community Psychology’, American Journal of Community Psychology, 15(2), pp. 121–148. doi: 10.1007/BF00919275. Riches, G. (2011) ‘Embracing the Chaos: Mosh Pits, Extreme Metal Music and Liminality’, Journal for Cultural Research, 15(3), pp. 315–332. doi: 10.1080/14797585.2011.594588. Rob Scallion (2015) ‘Does It DJENT? (Youtube Video Game)—YouTube’, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjUjiZGIemI (Accessed: 18 January 2020). Rogalski, J. (2018) ‘How Kevin Abstract’s Lyricism Subverts Homonegativity in Rap Music’, South Central Music Bulletin, 16, pp. 22–30. Rojek, C. (2016) Presumed Intimacy: Para-Social Relationships in Media, Society and Celebrity Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Rose, T. (1994) Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Shelemay, K. K. (2011) ‘Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64(2), pp. 349–390. doi: 10.1525/ jams.2011.64.2.349. Shelvock, M. (2013) ‘The Progressive Heavy Metal Guitarist’s Signal Chain: Contemporary Analogue and Digital Strategies’, in Hepworth-Sawyer, J. et al. (eds) Innovation in Music. Shoreham-by-Sea: Future Technology Press, pp. 126–138. Shuker, R. (2017) Popular Music: The Key Concepts. 4th edn. London and New York: Routledge.
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Small, C. (1998) Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Snell, D. and Hodgetts, D. (2007) ‘Heavy Metal, Identity and the Social Negotiation of a Community of Practice’, Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 17(6), pp. 430–445. doi: 10.1002/casp.943. Sora, A. (2019) ‘Carpenter Brut and the Instrumental Synthwave Persona’, in Braae, N. and Hansen, K. A. (eds) Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 143–163. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_8. Soundclick (2020) Bulb, Bulb. Available at: https://www.soundclick.com/artist/ default.cfm?bandID=147108 (Accessed: 10 January 2020). Spracklen, K., Brown, A. and Kahn-Harris, K. (2011) ‘Metal Studies? Cultural Research in the Heavy Metal Scene’, Journal for Cultural Research, 15(3), pp. 209–212. doi: 10.1080/14797585.2011.594578. St-Laurent, M.-R. (2019) ‘“Ancien Folklore Québécois”: An Analysis of the Phonographic and Identity-based Narrative of the Métal Noir Québécois Community’, Metal Music Studies, 5(3), pp. 379–399. doi: 10.1386/mms.5.3.379_1. Straw, W. (1991) ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music’, Cultural Studies, 5(3), pp. 368–388. doi: 10.1080/09502389100490311. Straw, W. (2015) ‘Some Things a Scene Might Be’, Cultural Studies, 29(3), pp. 476– 485. doi: 10.1080/09502386.2014.937947. Sweetman, P. (2004) ‘Tourists and Travellers? “Subcultures”, Ref lexive Identities and Neo-Tribal Sociality’, in Bennett, A. and Kahn-Harris, K. (eds) After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 79–93. Talib Kweli (2002) ‘Get By’, Quality. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/1LM6EReMkAxuDXDF26ekl2 (Accessed: 7 March 2020). The Axis of Awesome (2011) ‘Four Chords’, Animal Vehicle. Available at: https:// open.spotify.com/track/7DOf lcjjQrC71Lx0AgMO1K (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Thomson, J. (2011) ‘Djent, the Metal Geek’s Microgenre’, The Guardian, 3 March. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/mar/03/djent-metalgeeks (Accessed: 2 May 2018). Tiffany, K. (2017) ‘Boy Band of the Future’, The Verge. Available at: https:// www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16748260/brockhampton-boy-band-interviewkevin-abstract-odd-future (Accessed: 2 July 2019). Travis, R. (2013) ‘Rap Music and the Empowerment of Today’s Youth: Evidence in Everyday Music Listening, Music Therapy, and Commercial Rap Music’, Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal, 30, pp. 139–167. doi: 10.1007/s10560-012-0285-x. Travis, R. (2016) The Healing Power of Hip Hop. Santa Barbara and Denver: Praeger. Travis, R. and Bowman, S. W. (2011) ‘Negotiating Risk and Promoting Empowerment through Rap Music: Development of a Measure to Capture Risk and Empowerment Pathways to Change’, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 21(6), pp. 654–678. doi: 10.1080/10911359.2011.583507. Travis, R. and Bowman, S. W. (2012) ‘Ethnic Identity, Self-esteem and Variability in Perceptions of Rap Music’s Empowering And Risky Inf luences’, Journal of Youth Studies, 15(4), pp. 455–478. doi: 10.1080/13676261.2012.663898. Travis, R. and Deepak, A. (2011) ‘Empowerment in Context: Lessons from HipHop Culture for Social Work Practice’, Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 20(3), pp. 203–222. doi: 10.1080/15313204.2011.594993.
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UOLDANCESOCIETY (2013) ‘GET UR FREAK ON with Tutorial’, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWZ-EwCpEo (Accessed: 18 January 2020). Van Elferen, I. and Weinstock, J. A. (2016) Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture. New York and London: Routledge. Varas-Díaz, N. et al. (2014) ‘Predictors of Communal Formation in a Small Heavy Metal Scene: Puerto Rico as a Case Study’, Metal Music Studies, 1(1), pp. 87–103. doi: 10.1386/mms.1.1.87_1. Varas-Díaz, N. and Scott, N. (eds) (2016) Heavy Metal Music and the Communal Experience. Lanham: Lexington Books. Waka Flocka Flame (2010) ‘Hard in Da Paint’, Flockaveli. Available at: Spotify (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Wallach, J., Berger, H. M. and Greene, P. D. (eds) (2011) Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Walser, R. (1995) ‘Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy’, Ethnomusicology, 39(2), pp. 193–217. doi: 10.2307/924425. Walser, R. (2014) Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. New edn. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Webb, P. (2007) ‘Hip Hop’s Musicians and Audiences in the Local Musical “Milieu”’, in Hodkinson, P. and Deicke, W. (eds) Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes. New York: Routledge, pp. 175–188. Wikipedia (2020) ‘Heavy Metal Subculture’, Wikipedia. Available at: https://en. wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Heavy_metal_subculture (Accessed: 5 March 2020). Williams, J. A. (2013) Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Yuffie (2015) ‘A Day To Remember—The Downfall of Us All’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN4IIgFz93k (Accessed: 1 October 2018). Zimmerman, M. A. (1986) Citizen Participation, Perceived Control, and Psychological Empowerment. Unpublished PhD. University of Illinois. Zimmerman, M. A. (1995) ‘Psychological Empowerment: Issues and Illustrations’, American Journal of Community Psychology, 23(5), pp. 581–599. doi: 10.1007/ BF02506983. Zimmerman, M. A. and Rappaport, J. (1988) ‘Citizen Participation, Perceived Control, and Psychological Empowerment’, American Journal of Community Psychology, 16(5), pp. 725–750. doi: 10.1007/BF00930023.
6
Can music change the world? Empowerment, politics, and social change
Introduction So far, this book has argued that listening to rap and metal music affords empowering experiences for its listeners in a number of ways. Listening can increase people’s self-esteem, leading to more positive self-evaluation and formations of personal identity. It can impact their mental health (and their bodies), helping them to feel more able to face challenges and overcome restraints. It helps them come together, encouraging the formation of communities dedicated to sharing expressions of solidarity, unity, and collective pride. In this final chapter before concluding, I tackle the question of social change, tracing the journey all the way from the listening process to political action. First, it is necessary to analyse the cultural politics of empowerment. I have put this off until now, focusing instead on the ecological, embodied, cognitive, and psychological aspects of music listening. But in addition to these things, empowerment has become an extremely pervasive trope in both academic research and contemporary popular discourse. Moreover, its meanings have morphed over time, with dramatic political consequences for how we currently think about agency, equality, justice, social responsibility, and freedom. Originally, the term empowerment had a straightforward relationship with power. While definitions of power have always varied, referring to someone as empowered simply meant that they gained more power. Recently, however, power and empowerment have diverged to cover different terrain. The prominence of empowerment in government policy and institutional initiatives, for example, is remarkable.1 Such projects do not explicitly mention aiming to make their targets more powerful. They aim to make them empowered.
The politics of empowerment The new emphasis on empowerment is the result of stark changes in the connected fields of social work, international development, and feminism. What the term highlights and conceals has changed during the late 20th century
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(when it began to be used) and the early postmillennial period. Srilatha Batliwala (2010: 115), a social activist and development scholar active in South Asia during the 1980s, defined empowerment as a process that shifts social power by challenging ideology, changing access to resources, and transforming structures. Around the same time, women’s movements similarly understood that “the road toward women’s empowerment had to be paved through structural transformation, through actions that promoted radical changes in the institutions of patriarchal domination” (Sardenberg 2008: 20). These groups initially saw power in a similar way to Max Weber, as something fundamentally based in structures of inf luence, freedom, and control (Mondros and Wilson 1994: 5). A concern for individuals’ feelings of agency chimed with Paolo Freire’s work, and feminists later included Antonio Gramsci’s study of hegemony and dominant ideology (Baliwala 2010: 112–113). Drawing upon post-Marxist theory, the term empowerment was wielded proudly in the contexts of development and social justice in the 1980s, especially in relation to women and gender equality. Programmes for women’s empowerment gained enthusiastic governmental support, which certainly helped grassroots women’s movements, albeit on the grounds that empowered women could better contribute to labour demands and state performance. It was a means to increase subjects’ efficiency and productivity, more interested in how the poor themselves can contribute to development than seeing the reduction of poverty itself as empowerment. Once the term had entered the vocabulary of state institutions, however, the actual processes of social transformation were quickly compromised. Empowerment soon became a mantra wielded in government. Using the word became more important than undertaking any of the hard (and undesirable) work of redistributing power. The term’s dilution has been widely analysed. Batliwala (2010: 116) understood the word as having been instrumentalised into a “magic bullet for poverty alleviation and rapid economic development, rather than a multi-faceted process of social transformation”. Empowerment was something left for communities to do to themselves. The word is used similarly to “autonomy” in institutional language (Thomas 2011: 443). Anne-Emmanuèle Calvès (2009) saw the term used as a way of placating surface issues that concealed a refusal to reform inequitable social structures. The responsibility for social development initiatives was placed upon NGOs and charities rather than taken up by government policies. Most financing went towards initiatives that helped the visible and privileged rather than those most in need (Calvès 2009: 746). Some of the issue lay in its increasing lack of definition. The term became ambiguous and f lexible, rapidly absorbed into the language of political correctness in policy initiatives. Leaving empowerment undefined has many benefits for institutions. Without strict consensus on what it means, there is less pressure to generate indicators of success and measure progress. If empowerment is never defined, it is impossible to implement, and yet lends credibility to the supposed “empowerers” (Baistow 1994: 45). Worse, it has
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become an ethical ideal, the thing that each individual needs to live a full life. It has become a quality of meritocracy. Across the political spectrum, social institutions apply this standard to targeted candidates for empowerment. The liberal left identifies oppressed individuals, systematically stripped of power, who deserve empowerment as a citizen’s right. The conservative right aims to empower for labour efficiency, as those without power are seen as underperforming “organisational resources” (Baistow 1994: 37). In the 1990s, the term entered the vocabulary of human resource managers and neoconservative governments (Batliwala 2010). As a consequence of the increasingly obligatory nature of empowerment, the word also began to appear on job descriptions and in social welfare applications. More recently, it has been used as a marketing tool: a company trying to sell people their products is instead, apparently, empowering consumers to find products that improve their lives.2 Such distortion of the term exemplifies a point made by Calvès (2019) that, when it is defined, empowerment is always determined by the powerful. It can become an extreme act of self-congratulation that actually entrenches existing power hierarchies (Batliwala 2010: 117). In international development, empowerment initiatives are frequently reduced to economic resources, ignoring structural, social, and psychological aspects of power. However, power should not be seen purely as a resource (Thomas 2011: 450–452). Resources such as money and rights are exercises of power, not power itself. Domination is carried out through structures and processes, not purely through the social distribution of resources. Moreover, individuals can be powerful without the possession of many resources. These arguments are not acknowledged within contemporary empowerment programming for women in the developing world, however, which “distributes cows and chickens to rape victims, enrolls former combatants in beauty school, and imposes sewing machines on anyone unlucky enough to be female and in need” (Cronin-Furman et al. 2017: 1). Humanitarian projects that take empowerment as their aim, defined according to the redistribution of resources, evidently miss the point. Forming part of a neocolonial project that relies upon a white saviour complex and ideas of victimhood, such work has a limited focus on immediate, technocratic solutions that lead to superficial economic improvement (Cronin-Furman et al. 2017). Organisations provide impoverished communities with sewing machines and leave satisfied that “making swimwear for young Americans” (Cronin-Furman et al. 2017: 2) has empowered poor women. Prioritising measurable outcomes such as the number of sewing machines or the construction of a new school, this type of “liberal” empowerment ignores women’s accrual of political power in patriarchal contexts (Sardenberg 2008: 20). Nonetheless, the mission of women’s empowerment is promoted as an unquestionable good and therefore a way of prioritising neocolonial values. It is “conceptualised in liberal empowerment as a ‘gift’, or as something that can be ‘donated’ or ‘distributed’” (Sardenberg 2008: 22). However, it more often than not serves neoliberal economic ends (Batliwala 2010: 114). It is not
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only a symptom of neoliberal ideology but informs a process of neoliberalisation, where targets of empowerment are no longer viewed as “‘illiterate’, ‘disenfranchised’, ‘backward’ or ‘exploited’ [… but as …] ‘rational economic agents’, ‘global citizens’, potential ‘entrepreneurs’ [… trained …] to act as good entrepreneurs, wage earners, and consumers” (Ferguson 2004: 6). Alternatively, social justice missions can be legitimised in terms of helping marginalised people through empowerment, but focus on purely psychological rather than sociopolitical interventions (Baistow 1994). Far removed from economic concerns, empowerment can be tied into a quasi-medicinal view of course correction. This perspective holds that all change comes from within, rooted in Western ideas of individualism and self-advancement (Adams 2003: 14). If seeing power purely as a resource is inadequate, so too is viewing empowerment simply as a set of capacities (Thomas 2011: 460). There are no psychological faculties that enable particular competencies in some individuals and not in others. Moreover, such conceptualisations lead, for instance, to corporate empowerment seminars that encourage a change in state of mind. An intervention of this kind evidently does not affect the structures of power within a corporation, but elides empowerment with motivational speaking or an inspirational pep talk. Empowerment has come to be seen as “panaceaic and prophylactic” (Baistow 1994: 40), administered individually as a means of improvement. But this is “empowerment without power” (Sardenberg 2008: 22). “Liberating empowerment”, by contrast, will have to involve social conf lict and coalition, because it is fundamentally about changing social power relations. This is not what empowerment means when the word is used by the neoliberal establishment that comprises international development organisations, business management agencies, and advertising corporations. There has been a similar trajectory in the mainstreaming of feminism, as the term empowerment has become altogether divorced from any notion of women gaining power. Angela McRobbie’s (2009) insightful discussion of empowerment locates this shift in the context of “post-feminism”, which she describes as an environment marked by the undermining of feminist ideas and absorption of feminist language into Western popular culture.3 Post-feminism advertises specific elements of sexual freedom that support white, Western, and patriarchal supremacies rather than encouraging more equitable, postcolonial solidarities between women. The empowerment of women is associated with “the freedoms of fashion-conscious ‘thongwearing’ Western girls in contrast to those young women who, for example, wear the veil” (McRobbie 2009: 27). The emphasis of Western consumer culture on individual choice and buying power leads post-feminist discourse to conceptualise empowerment as an individual phenomenon rather than enabling larger solidarities. Batliwala (2010: 119) notes empowerment’s changing use “from a noun signifying shifts in social power to a verb signalling individual power, achievement, status”. This linguistic dilution forms part of a larger hegemonic neutralising and depoliticising tactic that appropriates the language and discourse used by the marginalised.
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Moreover, neoliberal ideology and consumerism transmute the term into an individual responsibility. In a critique of “women’s empowerment” in the context of mainstream feminism, essayist Jia Tolentino (2019) traces how the term not only ignores women’s accrual of power but has become a perceived quality of successful womanhood. She describes athleisure clothing, beauty work, and barre exercise classes as oppressive requirements of self-optimisation. The term “women need to be empowered” could describe an ethical mission of social justice to improve the lives of marginalised women, or it could demand that women possess some quality of empowerment. Tolentino (2019: 80) concludes that “the timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices— not just our problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of ‘women’s empowerment’ that often feels brutally disempowering in the end”. Women are constantly subjected to the narrative that particular strategies of relentless self-improvement will increase their social standing, well-being, and ability to accrue material power, but this is manifestly not the case. Capital, inf luence, and a platform can only be gained in specific ways that leave women vulnerable to exploitation and discrimination. As Tolentino (2019: 81) points out, drawing upon ethicist Heather Widdows’ (2018) Perfect Me: the beauty ideal […] provides a tangible way to exert power, although this power has so far come at the expense of most others: porn and modeling and Instagram inf luencing are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men. It can hardly be said that such statistics are truly empowering for women. Post-feminist patriarchy may well cite beauty-based work as evidence of women’s potential earning power in particular industries, or narrowing of a wage gap, and therefore women’s empowerment. However, such reasoning closely resembles Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) black feminist critique of the politics of representation. She asserts that “realizing that Black feminist demands for social justice threaten existing power hierarchies, organizations must find ways of appearing to include African-American women—reversing historical patterns of social exclusion associated with institutional discrimination—while disempowering us” (Collins 2000: 284–285). Equally, the contemporary myth of women’s empowerment requires the illusion of women gaining power based on fundamentally disempowering principles, such as narrowly defined sexual freedoms that channel directly back into patriarchal frames. Such linguistic subversion is based on the neoliberalisation of empowerment, which shifts responsibility from something done by the powerful for the powerless to something that the powerless must do to themselves.
Empowered by listening? The way that the meaning of empowerment has changed over the last four decades provides good reason to be sceptical about claims of empowering
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acts or actions today. Following the original definition of the word, disempowered people are disempowered because they lack power, and it is the function of empowerment to give them power. It might therefore seem ludicrous to suggest that listening to a rap or metal track can suddenly upend inequitable social structures of power and domination. Even if such listening makes someone feel a little better, the vast majority of people do not have the ability to single-handedly overturn a society that has been characterised as neoliberal white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchal ( James 2019) or kyriarchic (De Boise 2015: 10–11). Yet contemporary ideas of empowerment perpetuate the myth that power is something individuals can gain through personal effort and sheer force of will alone. Presently, empowerment is understood as self-empowerment. Powerlessness is equally viewed, therefore, as a personal f law of the self-disempowered. This conceptualisation of empowerment can, at worst, be used to blame individuals for struggling with the social injustices into which they are born. And it becomes each person’s responsibility to surmount challenging circumstances, however unfairly they may be treated within inequitable social conditions. The neoliberalisation of empowerment can be seen most clearly in the dimension of resilience (the subject of Chapter 4). Critical theorist Mark Neocleous (2013) notes how the term resilience is wielded by contemporary governments, organisations, and writers to convince citizens to “withstand whatever crisis capital undergoes and whatever political measures the state carries out to save it”. Policies upholding austerity measures and other forms of economic scarcity are being justified on the grounds that resilience, and therefore empowerment, is something entirely personal. Even the goal of this book – to demonstrate how music listening affords individuals empowerment – could be mistakenly understood to support this strand of neoliberal ideology. On the one hand, my thesis seems to resemble something of a dream for corporations and human resource managers: workers can simply listen to a song in order to get by and get on with it, no matter how poor their working conditions. Theodor Adorno’s infamous polemics on standardisation, pseudoindividualisation, and the regression of listening were certainly motivated by concern about the culture industry’s ability to pacify listeners and ensure conformity. On the other hand, state institutions might feel concerned that people could gain the power to create radical change purely from their everyday listening. Such fears may underlie censorship attempts and the general treatment of rap and metal as social problems. Viewing power as “a phenomenon of individual will which can somehow be stimulated or encouraged [… instead of…] the organizing dynamic of society itself, i.e. the very principle through which are social relations are structured” is clearly not tenable (Smail 1994: 7). If power cannot be equated purely with individual agency, however, nor should it be restricted to structural relations. Rosemary McGee and Jethro Pettit (2020: 4) argue that “with a purely discursive and structural view of power as reproduced through hegemonic norms and narratives, the scope for
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individual and collective agency is seen as very limited”. It is essential to consider the way that both agency and structure are experienced through social processes. This is what the readings of rap and metal in the previous chapters have attempted to do, for empowerment is a process that is experienced by real people. The nuanced view of empowerment developed here clarifies that music listening neither imbues characteristics of power nor unsettles social power relations directly, but creates feelings and bodily effects associated with power that can alter individuals’ behaviour and cognition. A change in an individual’s state of mind (and body) is a significant change that occurs in the listening process. But it should not be confused or conf lated with the new popular narrative of empowerment, the approach marked “liberal” (not “liberating”), “neoliberal”, and “post-feminist”. However, as a form of popular culture, music has taken up the myth that listening can impact power structures directly by inciting action. A multitude of songs invoke ideas of power, individual agency, and social change. For example, Michael LeVan’s (2013: 200) work on rap metal group Rage Against the Machine notes that “the band has spent much of the past two decades telling people that they in fact do have a choice about how we order our collective life and encouraging them to make choices for change”. But the tension inherent in viewing power either as a structural relation or as a form of agency is clear even in the band’s name, for it is the machine (hegemonic social institutions) that must be attacked. A person’s rage alone makes no difference, and so “the realization that social injustice is fostered in a system of control—and a contingently produced social order—is what propels the entire aesthetic and politics of the band” (LeVan 2013: 202). Rap and metal songs approach this dialectic in various ways. I will momentarily pause to ref lect on the critique of empowerment developed thus far by analysing contested ideas about music’s ability to create social change in the listening process. As ever, focusing on experiences of listening will help to illustrate the potential for individual and communal empowerment, even if the impact of such empowerment remains unclear. All That Remains (2006): “Indictment” “Indictment” makes an explicitly antitheistic statement. Criticism of religious belief is perhaps not the most obvious sociopolitical affordance of rap and metal, yet the song provides an excellent entry point for considering how music addresses real-world change through furious critique. The track targets religious violence in particular as a social problem, and the personic environment enacts the combative motion of forces in action. In the opening riff, the guitars’ higher-octave notes burst out from a palm-muted tonic note in D aeolian. The alternating high points constantly leap away from the low D pedal, too restless to abide by the tonic for any significant length of time. The full band texture enters for the verse at 0’09”, leaping right in and omitting any lengthier introduction. This formal structure helps get to the
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point immediately, and indicates the urgency of the “indictment” in question. Bass drum strikes, the bass guitar, and a rhythm guitar produce a militaristic rhythm, reminiscent perhaps of percussive machine gunshots, and the lead guitar’s higher-octave notes jump out above this base. The higher notes may be imagined like gasps for air in an oppressive environment, or embodying the act of ducking one’s head in and out of cover, as if avoiding gunfire. Throughout the verse, the tumultuous environment indicates an agitated drive for change, as though working to alter social surroundings through the movement of people (out of churches, perhaps), ideologies (like religious justifications for violence), and structures (towards secularisation, for instance). Listeners can imitate such motion and embody approach-oriented behaviour in order to make a difference in their own environments. The rhythmic structures vary rapidly over the course of the track. The prechorus (0’28”) introduces a new guitar riff, where the drums double the rate of the backbeat. After one cycle through this riff, the snare rate doubles again, landing on every crotchet at 200BPM.4 Erratic semiquaver drum fills drive the track through to the chorus. At this point, the vocal is doubled, and becomes more intelligible through regular phrasing: “this is… my indictment… of your beliefs”. Two voices may be conceptually blended into a single protagonist, aided by their unison rhythm and shared lyric. This provides an enormous personic presence, covering much of the timbral spectrum with a soaring scream and guttural growl. As the protagonist makes this call for change, the environment accordingly acts it out (as shown in Example 6.1). The rhythmically jarring riff comprises several different note values and patterns collected into a tightly bound four-bar phrase. The first bar’s triplets are the first triplet note values that appear in the track, which may cause the listener some surprise and disruption, since the guitar riffs are composed of regular semiquavers up to this point. The triplet crotchets are quickly pulled back into line with breakdown-esque quaver and semiquaver chugs. With its stuttering f low, the chorus riff repeats four times, aligning with two iterations of the vocal “indictment”. It lends the protagonist a supportive quality, structuring his vocal interventions in an organised manner. The chorus is, therefore, less a sudden and angry backlash than a calculated attempt to indict specific targets (who would purportedly justify violent and bigoted acts on the grounds of enacting a god’s will). It appears premeditated. Nonetheless, the personic environment is utterly restless, and will not simply repeat four times in full. After two repetitions, the drums move to a deeper, trashier china cymbal on each minim, and the final bar of
Example 6.1 All That Remains (2006): “Indictment”; chorus guitar riff
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the guitar riff is harmonised in thirds. The chorus begins the four-bar loop at 0’48”, but already makes these changes by 0’58”, and the verse is back in action by 1’08”. Such rapid changes in texture and structure emphasise the urgency of the social change demanded in the lyrics. Changes come quicker still. The track is structurally compacted to reach a second chorus even more quickly by omitting the prechorus. As if to compensate, the drums move to a faster backbeat halfway through the verse, which again avoids any textural consistency for more than a few seconds. The next chorus has already arrived by 1’27”, an unconventionally short period between choruses. Afterwards, the track charges on through a bridge, guitar solo, prechorus, and a slower chorus/breakdown. The guitar solo’s focus on C dorian (among other modal turns) again manifests disruption within the virtual environment, deviating from the track’s harmonic status quo. Each of these factors contributes to an overwhelming impression of commotion, with some extreme rate of change necessary to bring about meaningful action. The action to be taken is, of course, spelled out in the protagonist’s vocal outcries. He targets an unnamed second-person group who “worship gods of violence and bigotry”, holding “wrong ideals” with a “thirst for violence, domination”. Over the bridge, he speaks (clearly, not screams), “my eyes have seen the horrors that you commit in the name of your god”. The ideological position thus becomes quite unambiguous upon listening. Is the song itself an attack on such people, though? It can be heard to express anger at wrongdoers, but does not directly affect them. Supposed religious zealots are unlikely to identify themselves as the targets of such music. The more appealing subject position, and the way listeners tend to place themselves in relation to the protagonist, is in sympathy – or direct identification – with his outrage. “Indictment” may change the minds (or strengthen pre-existing beliefs) of listeners who share indignation at religious violence. Such a change is worthy of attention, for people who engage with the track may experience a shift in outlook towards intolerance for religious bigotry and violence, convinced by the protagonist that his indictment is justified. Listeners are invited to mirror and mentalise an environment enacting significant approach-oriented activity, whether riff structures are imaginatively related to urgent community organising for resistance or taken as the sounds of combat itself. The track can therefore spur listeners to action, equipping them with feelings of strength and ability through the potent timbres of metal instrumentation, identifying an enemy in the form of religious bigots, and justifying opposition to them. There are broader social effects of empowerment to examine, especially because the god or gods in question are left unspecified. This tactic allows listeners to identify the “wrong” god as any which they reject, but there is a problematic ambiguity about the “ignorant followers” targeted by the track. In particular, on lyric and lyric interpretation websites such as Genius and SongMeanings, commenters use the song to express Islamophobic views. Genius poster Beerminator1 (2016) contends that “he might be talking [sic]
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about the Islam extremists. The only way to be spared, is to convert to Islam and join their war against everyone else”. Commenting on SongMeanings, jontyler (2011) hears the track similarly: “The goal of muslims is to rid this world of infidel. Because thats what their ‘god’ tells them to do”. Certainly the track affords such a reading, and can be used to entrench faulty beliefs about Islam that chime with Western Christian imperialism and US white supremacy. And the multimediated nature of popular music matters too, for the song is performed by white American men and women, rebuking some second-person, foreign “wrong beliefs”, in the vein of much anti-Muslim racism. Furthermore, fans may be aware that All That Remains’ vocalist and lyricist Philip Labonte has spoken in interviews about his US military service and support for gun rights, right-wing political standpoints which tend to align with Islamophobia.5 However, the track does not specify Allah as the source of its indictment, and the Judeo-Christian God may be an equally straightforward target. User CannabisandTool16 (2012) relates the track to “the christian religion in America today, how hateful and judgmental most ‘christians’ are, not accepting people for not having a religion, or a different religion”. Popular music is often used to support ideology, and listeners posting online have evidently appropriated the song to enhance their critical views of Islam or Christianity, and their followers. They may gain confidence and imagine communal sentiment in relation to their criticism by listening to the track. While it does not entirely account for the track’s vehemence, pngpng32 (2008) offers a less literal, somewhat anti-consumerist interpretation, understanding “Indictment” as a critique of “how people have their own gods they worship, whether it be a material, a famous person, or money”. The varied affordances of the song undoubtedly engage listeners’ political beliefs, encouraging critical ref lection on religion, violence, and idolisation in general. Might the Islamophobic listener of the song treat Muslims more discriminatively as a consequence, and could it cause the anti-consumerist fan to think twice about an unnecessary purchase? People are affected by the music they use through cognitive, bodily, and behavioural changes that set them up to respond differently to subsequent environmental interactions. Using this understanding of empowerment, it is clear how the scowling personic reprimand and tumultuous soundworld of “Indictment” can create social change. Chance the Rapper (2016): “Angels (Feat. Saba)” Like “Indictment”, rap music can be explicit in addressing social and political issues. In “Angels”, Chance ref lects on his relationship to his city and its inhabitants. Coloured by shades of gospel and footwork, and channelled through an upbeat, poppy style of rap (winning the 2017 Grammy for Best Rap Album), this record leans towards conscious lyrical themes with an emphasis on local responsibility. Before the song proper starts, the track begins with a subtle announcement, one which may be significant for more
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style-competent listeners, familiar with Chance the Rapper’s idiolect. His voice gives the name of the song, then produces both of his trademark ad-libs (a child-like “na-na-na” and a yelped “igh!”), an introduction that sets the scene for a track focusing on Chance’s own personal development and social commentary on his surroundings. If the listener interprets the protagonist as the artist himself, the track can be heard simply as Chance the Rapper (even Chancellor Bennett) serenading his hometown, Chicago. Such a reading is corroborated by the music video, which opens with a view of the city skyline, features Chance and Saba travelling across the city on trains, and ends with them dancing in front of the Chicago Board of Trade building. What is Chance’s Chicago like, exactly? First and foremost, it is full of him. He begins, playfully, “I got my city doing front f lips”. The environment supports the protagonist from the outset, as the opening line is verified by a springy, bouncing synth arpeggio. It enacts the performance of “front f lips” as a f langer effect broadens and narrows the synth timbre. Apparently mirroring this ecstatic motion, at least one listener “can confirm: Currently doing front f lips in the Southside to this song” (KevinCCedillo 2015). Throughout the verse, Chance pleads loyalty to his city amid a profusion of textural layers, including a heavy sine bass joined by a subby bassdrum, clap snares, and widepanned gospel vocals. The protagonist is positioned in the centre, immersed in the virtual city that these sounds create, and reporting on his sociopolitical environment. He situates himself not only as a Chicago statesman but as a superhero to his city (like Batman to Gotham, as YouTube commenter Green Root (2019) points out). He is here because he has stuck around, unlike others who are supposed to be responsible for social development (“when every father, mayor, rapper jump ship”). Part of this claim articulates a conventional hip-hop authenticity – staying true to one’s roots – but it is also particularly emphatic about making a positive change in his hometown. The protagonist puns on the term “where you stay” (usually meaning simply “where one lives”), pointing out his dedication to remain and partake in social activism within the city. He reports taking on significant responsibilities, beyond the typical call of duty for a young adult,6 pledging to “clean up the streets so my daughter can have somewhere to play”. Making good on these commitments, he remains at the very centre of the virtual environment, rarely deviating from a consistent f low pattern, and gathering momentum as he leads towards the chorus. The childlike, singsong melodies of his near-sung rap f low can be interpreted as approach-oriented behaviour, as he is entirely uninhibited in his attempts to tackle the social ills he witnesses locally. As the track proceeds, Chance traces a positive relationship between individual and community empowerment in a strikingly similar way to community psychology definitions. He narrates a process of self-development that will benefit his environment. Listeners are invited to interpret a high personal sense of power in this performance, imagining Chance gaining a greater stake in social decision-making, and improving conditions in his community as it gains a socially responsible member.
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Fans may further substantiate this interpretation using prior knowledge of the artist’s activism.7 Chance provides a personic role model based in patriarchal responsibility in the line “I’m the blueprint to a real man”. The baton is passed to Saba (another Chicagoan musician) for the chorus, who endorses Chance as a city spokesperson. In the hook’s exuberant first couplet, Saba rhymes “woo this, woo wap da bam” (a Chicagoan slang soundbite akin to “and so on and so forth” scattered across the album on which “Angels” appears) with “city so damn great, I feel like Alexand’”. This combination of modern street vernacular with the self-aggrandising mythology of Alexander the Great is an empowering attribution of greatness to both the city and Chance. Using a mythological leadership figure in particular suggests a degree of command or official control in affairs of the city, perhaps, with affordances of military might (held in high esteem in hip-hop). Saba calls upon the song’s title, “I’ve got angels all around me, they keep me surrounded”, which is substantiated by the environmental addition of steel drums. Handing back to Chance later in the chorus, gospel voices and brass instruments swell to surround the protagonist. We may be inclined to imagine these additional timbres as his angels. Once again, he is set deeply within his environment, like a lynchpin of the community. To create social change – this personic-environmental relation seems to suggest – you need to be here, show up, and get stuck in. In the second verse, Chance continues to dance around Chicago, restating his commitment to resolving social issues in the city. He reports that he has used the same phone number “since the seventh grade”, an unchanging commitment to his roots (perhaps despite his commercial success). Whereas most of his vocal melodies revolve around F and E (occasionally dipping to C and B ), Chance notably raises up to G to lament “too many young angels on the South Side”. The song’s omnipresent angels are finally given a more specific identity: young people who have died. External knowledge of Chance the Rapper’s political activism invites a straightforward association between the artist’s campaigns to stop gun violence in the city and the track’s angels. Using the title and providing the highest note of the verse melody, Chance draws attention to the line as a key point of awareness for listeners, imbuing them with specific cultural knowledge. The significance of this moment is not lost on listeners. The one-time top comment on YouTube states, “Damn. that moment when you realize the ‘angels’ are all the children that are victims of gun violence in Chicago” (L Ron Howard 2017). Chance digresses for a moment to consider his personal development as notable textural layers of the beat drop away. The organ, moving through higher-register chords with increased vibrato, indicates the exertion involved in his “growth spurt”. Nonetheless, he is spurred on by positive relationships with “my old church” and family, such as “grandma” and “mama”. He recognises the strong social connections that have supported him, and thereafter gives back, concluding the verse by namedropping Chicagoan radio shows. The second chorus initially trades the main beat for alternative,
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half-time percussion. From 2’09”, the beat adopts a rhythmic pattern typical of footwork, a style of dance music from Chicago (Brar 2016). By the end of this extended chorus (which subsumes the remainder of the track), the environment is extremely busy, as musical timbres surround Chance left, right, and centre. In this moment, it is possible to imagine both the angels – those victims of gun violence – and the city coming together, spurred on by Chance’s efforts to do something about it. Because these textural layers gradually amass around the voice throughout the track, I am given the impression that the protagonist is personally responsible for stirring the community into action. Thus we hear the empowered individual empowering the community, encouraging them towards social awareness and activism. Chance stands up for Chicago, and the city’s inhabitants sing back to him.8 He performs as a paragon of local responsibility and provides listeners with a model for creating social change, as (to borrow a hip-hop tenet) he puts his city on the map.
The change empowerment can create Listening to music cannot directly affect the structure of societies, which are fundamentally organised by networks and relations of power. Any claims of listener empowerment that accept the neoliberal rhetoric about individual responsibility for self-empowerment essentially misunderstand (or overlook) the experience of listening. However, as the previous music analyses show, metal and rap songs invite listeners to develop various narratives related to power, political action, and social change. Music can make people feel that social change is within their power. Such a claim should be called into question, as the dilution of the term and its subsequent status as a buzzword in contemporary popular discourse have shown. Yet the listener’s feeling that social change may be possible must be addressed, for this is a meaningful and momentous affordance of music listening. If our listening leads us to believe that we can change the world, what next? I will clarify and conclude the theory of empowerment mapped out throughout this book by recourse to the social organisation literature, black feminist theory, and studies in social and community psychology. The early part of this chapter showed how processes once associated with giving the powerless more power have been subverted by a neoliberal agenda that assigns individuals the responsibility for empowering themselves. However, it would be unreasonable to dismiss personal agency altogether, and I now want to focus on the individual aspects of empowerment. Recall the discovery of power as a cognitive-psychological state which underpins the action/inhibition theory of power and the personal sense of power, introduced in Chapter 3. In their landmark study of social action organisations, Organizing for Power and Empowerment, Mondros and Wilson (1994: 5–6) establish a prescient distinction between power and empowerment.9 They view power in terms of how it is gained (actions that enable inf luence or control over others) and how others conform to the power-holder’s desires. Empowerment,
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in their definition, is a precondition of power. It is conceptualised as “a psychological state—a sense of competence, control, and entitlement—that allows one to pursue activities aimed at being powerful” (Mondros and Wilson 1994: 5). This definition recognises personal feelings of being powerful, free of the political agenda which has undermined actual social aid for the powerless in international development work. Rather, the authors point out that individuals can possess a great deal of power but lack empowerment, or vice versa. Power is fundamentally a social structure and empowerment is principally a psychological construct. Understanding empowerment as the first step to gaining power (but not conf lating the two) makes good sense, especially when applied to fields such as social organisation and international development. It would hardly be a useful goal to provide marginalised people with significant control over their social environment but without feeling that they have such power. Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) pioneering account of black feminist theory shares this view. She argues that a changed self-definition and individual consciousness is the first step to social empowerment (a term she uses to encompass social justice, collective action, and reduced inequality). It could be argued that her writing appears to fall victim to the already-compromised use of empowerment: for instance, one could interpret as an empty motivational quote the claim that “the path to individual and collective empowerment lies in the power of a free mind” (Collins 2000: 204). However, she is critical of current uses of the term that tend to focus on its inspirational qualities rather than considering the importance of individual consciousness to engage and contest hegemony (Collins 2000: 285). Collins’ work sits in productive dialogue with Paulo Freire’s (2005) “conscientisation” approach, since both are concerned with developing a critical consciousness among the oppressed. As Adams (2003: 66) points out, “the entire thrust of Paulo Freire’s work on consciousness-raising and empowerment was informed by his basic analysis that the individual’s state of mind – the psychological dimension of the process of empowerment – was the priority to be tackled”. This emphasis on individual self-definition is remarkably similar to the personal sense of power, seen as the self-perception of one’s competence, ability, and potential impact. Collins (2000: 36) insists that: speaking for oneself and crafting one’s own agenda is essential to empowerment […] Black feminist thought cannot challenge intersecting oppressions without empowering African-American women. Because self-definition is key to individual and group empowerment, ceding the power of self-definition to other groups, no matter how well-meaning or supportive of Black women they may be, in essence replicates existing power hierarchies. Therefore, how individuals view themselves (and the extent to which they accept or reject the ideas of the powerful about them) is an essential
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quality of empowerment. Challenging hegemonic ideas through a refined self-definition does not appear, on the surface, to be a radical social change. It certainly does not gain people power. But it can gain them empowerment. Power is usually defined either in terms of individuals or groups, which are usually seen as incompatible. They can, however, be combined for a politics of empowerment that informs social justice (Collins 2000: 275). This is a necessary intervention, as systems of domination are based upon intersecting oppressions. Just as individual feelings have little direct effect on social structures, political change is impossible without personal drive. Indeed, Collins (2000: 290) explains that “while individual empowerment is key, only collective action can effectively generate the lasting institutional transformation required for social justice”. Still, the precedent nature of empowerment should not be overlooked, as it includes recognition of, and opposition to, internalised subordination. To challenge patriarchy, first “women must be convinced of their innate right to equality, dignity and justice” (Batliwala 1994: 132). Even in patriarchal structures, where power inequities are fundamentally entrenched, it is crucial to retain a sense of potential empowerment as the basis for social change. As Heather Widdows’ (2018) study makes clear, aspiring to an ideal self feels empowering, and therefore affects individuals’ actions, even though it is ultimately impossible to attain. Empowerment has been defined as a kind of psychological awareness or critical consciousness (Freire 2005) that is necessary for engaging in political action (Gutiérrez 1995: 229). This is a remarkably common-sense finding, since “for individuals and communities to understand that their problems stem from a lack of power, they must first comprehend the structure of power in society” (Gutiérrez 1995: 230). It can therefore be argued that empowerment is not only a facet of individual state of mind, but informs collective awareness and self-identification within groups. The communal possibilities of empowerment have been discussed in the previous chapter, tracing how an individual change can alter the shape of a community, which, in turn, has political effects. Perkins and Zimmerman (1995: 570) show that: empowering processes for individuals might include participation in community organizations. At the organizational level, empowering processes might include collective decision making and shared leadership. Empowering processes at the community level might include collective action to access government and other community resources (e.g., media). Evidently, the approach to empowerment in community psychology becomes more to do with power (conventionally viewed) at more general levels of social structure. It is worthwhile being careful, or sceptical, about such potential development, however. Not every change in a person’s critical consciousness leads to lasting social change or even engagement with a community in the first place.
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There is an illuminating parallel to draw between the power-empowerment dialectic and the ideas of grit and agency in the psychology and sociology of education. Drawing upon Carol Dweck’s inf luential notion of the growth mindset, Angela Duckworth (2016) has introduced to popular discourse the psychological concept of grit. The term describes an individual capacity to persist and persevere with challenges, not unlike resilience. Grit contests competing ideas of talent or luck, or traditional measures of ability such as IQ, focusing instead upon psychological traits associated with goaldirection that lead students to success. This neatly suits neoliberal demands for personal responsibility and individual achievement, yet wisely encourages thinking beyond hereditary intelligence towards competencies like determination as predictors for success. It has been argued that grit fails to consider socially disadvantaged individuals, those in circumstances that make it impossible to develop the inspiration or passion to persevere in the first place. Perhaps the clearest criticism has emerged from Anindya Kundu (2017), who points to the shortcoming of grit in addressing the structural challenges of young people who might be cast off as un-gritty. Approaching grit from a sociological perspective, his work is more concerned with the development of students’ agency, “increasing their ability to enact their own free will towards success” (Kundu 2017: 73). The importance of agency is clarified by Kundu’s (2017: 75) reasoning that: because students who are marginalized (e.g., students of color from low-income backgrounds) experience greater threats to forming their academic identities […], grit alone is unlikely to account for increased upward mobility. Students from low-income households typically begin school with less social and cultural capital than their more advantaged peers, as well as the ability to exhibit capital-related cues critical for academic success. This research highlights that poorer students can greatly benefit from support systems that enable them to think critically about their disadvantages and act accordingly to overcome them. Such opportunities can increase their agency and subsequent grit. The debate can be seen to revolve around different focus points in psychology and sociology, where psychological research identifies characteristics of the individual and sociologists are keen to consider social contexts for adequate explanations. Empowerment and power exhibit the same tension as grit and agency. Research in community psychology has operationalised empowerment as a psychological construct of an individual. However, social work is understandably more concerned with power as the mediating force of society itself. Moreover, each discipline has used both terms to various ends: power and empowerment are “essentially contested concepts” (Gallie 1956). So while empowerment cannot be confused with an individual’s ability to magically shift social structure and power not taken purely as an abstract resource, it is
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understandable that many fields have spent so long talking past each other. Empowerment sits at the conf luence of self-perception, emotion, bodily affect, state of mind, behaviour, and social awareness. Furthermore, it is a change in state that can either “go to waste” or “turn into” power. A useful way to resolve this uncertainty is to view empowerment as the sometime basis for power: often necessary, but never sufficient to create social change. The distinction is well addressed in contemporary community psychology research, where it is understood that a change in self-perception or self-definition does not turn into actionable power without social support. It has been argued that “personal and collective agency and empowerment strategies, central to a liberatory approach, need to be enabled and supported […] This underlines the importance for external agents (e.g., academic researchers) to work alongside communities to activate agency to enable empowerment” (Lazarus et al. 2017: 53). Conceptualising empowerment as the spark, and power as the flame proper, supports the psychological framework encompassing approach/inhibition theory, the personal sense of power, and individual and community empowerment. If we wish to see social change in relation to music listening, there will have to be concrete political action in motion. It is thus possible to see how the idea of music empowering an individual is not magical or mystical: music can indeed affect how listeners understand themselves and relate to their environments. An empowering listening experience might provide the first push to recognise one’s self-worth, or help a listener physically persist through a hard day, or encourage communal engagement, or challenge political beliefs. Each of these effects is significant, actual changes, but they are not equivalent to gaining power. For social change to be seen as a consequence of music listening – for empowerment to become power – the psychological, cognitive, and corporeal effects of listening must be integrated with shifts in the social, cultural, and political environment. The relationship between individuals and music communities is a clear example of how empowerment can come to affect social power relations. Consider, for example, how approach-oriented behaviour, galvanised by personic mirroring in the listening process, might lead an individual to interact with a music scene. Initially, they might be less welcoming to outsiders or other new members who jeopardise their own uncertain position. Over time, they learn more appropriate behaviours and customs which contribute to their sense of communal belonging. As they continue to contribute and gain recognition in the community, their increased personal sense of power aligns with their political capacities in that environment. They may gain additional responsibilities, becoming involved in the management of events, for example, or adopting a socially nurturing role, or moderating the rules of the community. As such, they have become empowered through community engagement (and in everyday contexts, they may exhibit more approach-related behaviours and more self-esteem). Broader social relations are implicated in such a change, as empowered individuals may “bring their heightened energy, clearer insights, and positive emotions to bear on the issues facing the group, and so help the group overcome difficulties and reach its goals” (Forsyth 2010: 236). So an empowered individual can gain
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power through communal engagement, obtaining some control over decisions and a degree of influence. In turn, that individual can empower their community, such that the scene develops (for instance, by contesting hegemonic spaces or partaking in political activism) to more significantly impact the wider social environment through relations of power. Jamie Patterson (2016: 246) describes this process taking place in North Carolina death metal scenes, where: women had used death metal instrumentally to instill a confidence that enabled them to make choices that improved their everyday conditions […] they experienced this sense of confidence, which they termed ‘empowerment’, and which they internalized over years of listening […] not only are these women obtaining power through involvement in the scene, they are using this power to do gender on their own terms in other arenas. It has long been argued that hip-hop music and culture can foster a sense of “social awareness” (Quinn 2000: 198). In particular, Connell and Gibson (2003: 183) note that “the visual and aural elements of hip hop cultures have articulated a mesmerising array of urban American experiences, from contradictory sexisms and anti-Semitic comments to stories of pleasure and violence, alongside militant expressions of black nationalism”. Not purely a historical account of hip-hop expression, contemporary rappers continue to develop cultural awareness in their listeners. Travis (2016: 114) claims that “these artists feel empowered as individuals [and] have continued to create material that falls all along a rich spectrum of empowering content”. Such varied experiences of rap music listening can both activate an informed engagement with one’s sociopolitical environment, altering individual affordances, and encourage listeners to undertake action, moving the body and inciting more approach-oriented behaviour. As for metal, Walser (2014: 162) by and large interprets the music as a remedy to powerlessness, “largely devoted to creating communal bonds that will help fans weather the strains of modernity”.10 Drawing upon Walser’s study, Halnon (2006: 45) understands metal listening “as resistance to and temporary reprieve from the everyday emotional consequences of living in consumer society or amid a fast-paced, impersonal, superficial, and hyper-individualistic society of spectacle and nothingness”. Morris (2015: 301) extends this perspective, claiming that “metal’s ‘cognitive mapping’ of the set of material conditions under which its practitioners and fans operate translates these conditions into fantastical, horrifying visions of domination and the fantasies of empowerment against these forces that motivate the practitioners and fans so strongly”. Evidently, metal is experienced as fundamentally social, not simply as expressions of modern anxieties but suggesting different ways of being in (and affecting) the world. The music alters the listener’s body, behaviour, and personal sense of power, reminding individuals and communities of their ability to create change in their environments.
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Kendrick Lamar (2011): “HiiiPoWeR” Two examples will illustrate rap and metal’s empowering potential for social change. The first hones in on music that “reads as the paragon of hip-hop politics” (Burton 2017: 47). An early track by Kendrick Lamar, “HiiiPoWeR” seeks “to capture the spirit of critical analysis, awareness of opportunities for improvement, and action toward creating better community conditions” (Travis 2016: 125). With the imperative opening, “everybody put three fingers in the air”, declared as if through a megaphone, Kendrick demands that all listeners physically embody the spirit of “HiiiPoWeR”. By displaying the titular “iii”, everyone is invited to create a communal, unifying gesture expressive of a strong personal sense of power. Interestingly, this is not merely an improvised instance of audience participation, as could be imagined in a live context, but forms the introduction of the track on record. The concept of hiiipower that Kendrick goes on to explain involves a multifaceted criticism of contemporary society. He offers a corrective in the form of community organisation based on the ideas of Civil Rights-era liberation. The stylisation of “HiiiPoWeR” invites additional interpretations. Parsing “PoWeR” as “poor we are”, the track title suggests the community introducing itself: “hi, we are the poor”. Equally, it may be read, “high poor we are”, as the impoverished collective report getting high, either on collective spiritual experience or addled by the drug use that Talib bemoans in “Get By” (2002). While Kendrick identifies a multitude of social inequities throughout the track, the environment (as established by the beat) offers a cause for celebration. After all, if struggle is the inevitable state of being, it is preferable to be poor and powerless together. The beat is formally repetitive, with a four-bar pattern that shifts in pitch halfway through. There are consistent semiquavers provided by propulsive hi-hat and ride cymbal samples. The wavering melody repeatedly steps down a third every bar (3̂ –2̂ –1̂ ), but doggedly starts back up at the top again every bar. This pattern shifts up by a third (5̂ –4̂ –3̂ ) halfway through each four-bar pattern, thus forming a “one step back, two steps forward” pattern which may be conceptually mapped onto notions of social progress. Listeners report finding the beat poignant, soothing, and thought-provoking: it “gives me chills” (Kyd Sivix 2015), is “so relieving and so perfect” (Siddharth Jeswani 2020), and is “one of them introspective beats. Make you ref lect on yourself like a mf ” (RagingMinotaurus454 2019). Commenter Acoustik Beats (2014) implies that the track carries with it the legacy of political African American music, describing it as “modern day soul music”. Kendrick immediately connects the putatively soulful beat to the Civil Rights Movement, indicating the importance of black activists to his own personal sense of power. He starts with “visions of Martin Luther staring at me”, and then demonstrates his capable state through the consonance of “Malcolm X put a hex on my future”. His f low later becomes vitriolic, emphatically expelling [p] and [f ] plosives for the line “I got my finger on the motherfucking
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pistol, aiming it at a pig”. Leaving the strictly informational and non-violent expressions of Martin Luther King, Jr., behind, Kendrick’s vocal performance gains a more militant tone, citing “Huey Newton going stupid”. For the most part, he promotes a positive outlook, self-determination, and ambition. At the end of the first verse, he demonstrates his own empowered social actions: “I be off the slave ship, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs”. The second verse ends with this couplet as a second-person command (“so get up off that slave ship, build your own pyramids, write your own hieroglyphs”), providing a model of political leadership and encouraging the listener to emulate his behaviour. Notably, this invitation follows a verse of educational lines about racial discrimination.11 In this way, he first provides socially significant information, then urges the listener to take action based upon what has been learned. The plural third person used for this couplet at the end of the third verse (“write our own hieroglyphs”) further persuades listeners to align with Kendrick and position themselves within the virtual community. By developing this address throughout the song, the protagonist first demonstrates, then appeals for, and finally includes the listener as a part of communal action. Fans appear to deeply experience this invitation, as tony willis (2012) unequivocally labels the track “MOTIVATION MUSIC”. VianelDeLaCruz (2019) gives a more personal account, reporting that “this is the most impactful song of my adult life. I heard it when I was 21 and was mystified (I’m 30 now) it still hits EVERY single time”. Evidently, the song also successfully raises political awareness, especially suspicion of governmental (or other conspiratorial) control: “the reason this song has less views then all his other ones its because it has a message that they don’t want you want to know” ( Jmundo Games 2020). The political awareness and call to action that the track imparts root from Kendrick, but become a proud communal declaration. Additional vocals indicate a sympathetic response to his performance, as though a group of people emerges to communally voice his sentiments in underscoring the hook’s sung “hiiipower”. Moreover, the beat’s structural consistency provides a solid base for Kendrick’s vocals throughout the track, as if it is the soapbox upon which he stands. The affordances of social change in “HiiiPoWeR” substantiate conceptions of rap as a social power movement, pleading with the listener to march alongside the cause. Cradle of Filth (2000): “Cthulhu Dawn” A radically different soundworld and entirely separate fantasy can afford a similar social awareness and encouragement to act. “Cthulhu Dawn” uses the muddy textures and lively structures of black metal to illustrate a fantastical vision of an entirely new world. Absent are the real, everyday concerns of political society, replaced by mythologised demonic worship as a corrective to universal ills (“the pitiful reign of man”). An awareness of the value placed on visual media (album artwork, band logos, merchandise, promotional material)
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in black metal will enhance listeners’ development of apocalyptic narratives in listening to “Cthulhu Dawn”. The analysis I provide assumes little style competence in this regard, and therefore only scratches the surface of the track’s personic environment. Nonetheless, there is much to be gained from interrogating its potential effects upon listener empowerment and power. From the outset, the vocalist’s constricted throat, quick rhythmic barking, and quasi-Biblical lyrics may encourage the listener to imagine the protagonist as a herald of the apocalypse. His environmental position, clear above the busy – and somewhat muddy – instrumental textures, situate him akin to a pastor leading the congregation. He is, apparently, in worship of the imminent eradication of human life. The words are not easily comprehensible, but the protagonist mostly adopts an imperative or descriptive tone, so it appears that he is either directing the catastrophe or watching it unfold with glee. His joy manifests in the varied vocal timbres (low growls, high screams) that alternate suddenly and the consistent excitement of fervent semiquavers delivered throughout the verse. This sense of celebration is shared by listeners, such as one commenter who “can’t wait til the end of the world, i hope i’m alive to see it” (filthybeast 2005). The environment – a full band texture made up of drums, bass, guitars, and synths – acts out some apocalyptic state of affairs. It can be heard to corroborate the protagonist’s exclamation that, for instance, “a great renewal growls at hand”. Formal change takes place suddenly and often, with immediate shifts in tempo, pitch, and texture (0’44”, 1’27”, 2’08”, 3’26”, 3’56”). There is restless instrumental movement as one section moves to the next, usually with no transition. Such an environment can be imagined as cold, emotionless, relentless destruction. At least there is some consistency to this changeability. The track opens with a momentary organ f lurry and drum fill, then charges into a more conventional four-bar riff, which is repeated once in full. A variation on this emerges immediately after, with erratic ride bells and splash cymbals rhythmically clashing against the higher guitar lines. At 0’29”, the opening riff returns, albeit with a sustained vocal scream and blast beats that obscure much of the guitar’s intricacy. Then, as if out of nowhere, a sudden growl gives the song title: “Cthulhu dawn”. These words could be fairly meaningless for some listeners, but others will recognise Cthulhu (and its various spellings) as the name of a mythologised old god, a prehistoric force of evil based in Lovecraftian horror fiction. Like calling this force from the depths, this jarring vocal growl summons a new riff, a new tempo, and a new key from 0’43”. Something dark and mysterious appears to be taking place in this virtual environment, and it is the source of the protagonist’s personal sense of power. He seems to gather energy from the abrupt structural changes. The kinaesthetic effects of these gearstick tempo (and sometimes pitch) changes can cause alarm or discomfort. When a different metric pulse is introduced without preparation, entrainment to the previous pulse is immediately cut short and listeners must suddenly adapt to the new rate. Throughout the track, any regular pulse is deviated from soon after it is established, upsetting consistent bodily motion. Such
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a corporeal attack is fitting for the song’s narrative of total human eradication. From the way that the song jumps from section to section without forewarning, listeners might also sense some inevitability to the protagonist’s cataclysmic oration. By this means, an extremely potent social change is prophesied: what more straightforward reading than the complete destruction of the world? Still, the protagonist revels in the environmental chaos. The distorted voice snaps excitedly over busy blast beats and synth strides (1’27”), demonstrating significant approach activity unhindered by the relative disarray: the rapid vocal, synth, and drum parts are roughly in time during this section, but not at all tightly synchronised. Moreover, there is a kind of triumph to the verse’s aeolian i–iv–VI chord sequence (0’43”–0’48”), charging upward to the iv and dropping only to the major chord of the VI before returning to the tonic. The celebratory tone is further emphasised by the triplet semiquaver kickdrums in the final appearance of the introduction riff (3’40”), a f lourishing finale with the impression of taking a victory lap as the chaos ensues. The cause for celebration – the liberating potential of annihilation – is considered in detail by fans. Commenter cylent watcher (2005) describes the nihilistic joy that the track affords, reasoning that: WE are a speck, a useless, self-destructive (therefore decadent) piece of cosmic shit that quite possibly was never meant to eke out a miserable existance […] What i take from lovecraft is his philosophy about mankind’s issues and shortcomings […] Pure existance is the esssence of life, not limitations we enable. The track’s communal exuberance models taking pleasure in the catastrophic social change. Every element of the environment aligns itself with the imagined omnipotence of the titular deity, a source of unfathomable power not to be feared but revered. Listeners are provided fantastical experiences of change through imagining a new world (or at least a desirable reset of humanity’s historical mistakes and shortcomings). An increased personal sense of power is indicated by the comment, “This song is completely Evil as fuck, I love it!!!!!!” (1969plurlife 2014). Here the poster relies upon the mythologised potency of evil (as interpreted in the track) to find an affirmative experience (they love it). Whatever the constraints one feels in their everyday environment, imagining an alternative world in the process of listening to the song may have significantly empowering cognitive and behavioural effects. As the harbinger of the apocalypse celebrates the end of all things, listeners may develop approach-oriented behaviour, gaining the motivation to create social transformation on their terms. Some might mirror or mentalise the protagonist’s dynamic energy, cathartically expressing dissatisfaction with current social ills. Others still could adopt the song’s nihilistic euphoria to imagine freedom from oppression, developing an inf lated personal sense of power, and becoming aware of the (perhaps limited, perhaps significant) ways in which they can cast off their own chains.
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Conclusion There exist various myths about empowerment in contemporary everyday discourse. Several fields including international development, social organisation, and academic research have also deployed the term to various ends, leading to thoroughly confused ideas about what empowerment could be. Well beyond its deployment and dilution in governmental politics, the term obscures discourses of power in popular culture and informs a neoliberal agenda of self-sufficiency and personal achievement. The issue of how music creates social change requires untangling empowerment from power. There is a sound basis for understanding empowerment as a principally psychological and cognitive state of mind (and body), retaining orthodox approaches to power as a social relation that mediates inf luence, control, and action. Rap and metal can afford listeners empowerment: this has already been demonstrated with regards to self-esteem, individual resilience, and communal belonging, but the music also offers experiences of social transformation. Rap music, especially that which falls under the conscious hip-hop banner, stresses the importance of listener education, cultural knowledge transfer, and political awareness, or “wokeness” (a term which has now seen a similar popular cultural appropriation and dilution to “empowerment”). “HiiiPoWeR” is a modern example of classic hip-hop wisdom, with Kendrick situating himself as teacher-cum-preacher encouraging his faithful to seek liberation. And, like “Get By”, specific names and places serve to emphasise the concrete reality that his lyrics target. “Angels” takes a lead from Kendrick Lamar’s social conscience to address the particular issue of inner-city gun violence. Though Chance the Rapper’s style is notably more pop-oriented and gospel-inf luenced in this track, the focus on local politics is a hip-hop staple. And as the layers of sound swell up around him, it is easy to imagine how individual listeners can make a difference as part of engaged community action. Metal is rarely so explicitly prosocial. We have heard instances of cooperation and collective preservation in Chapter 5, but my invitation here is to listen out for affordances of social change that initially seem frivolous, chaotic, or downright objectionable. The focused anger of “Indictment” does seek its own form of social justice, perhaps less obviously than the rap tracks in this chapter, but nonetheless in a way that can change listeners’ minds and inspire them to take action. Listening is a process that moves the body, and the jarring, jostling structures of “Cthulhu Dawn” can help to energise individuals. Symphonic black metal tends to treat topics of life and death with utmost seriousness, and enjoying fantasies of complete social transformation constitutes a start to the empowerment process not dissimilar to conscious rap’s teachings of freedom. Listening cannot simply imbue power or directly change social structures. Music can, however, affect listeners as far as the personal sense of power, approach and inhibition behaviour, and mirroring and mentalising are concerned. In certain cases, this individual change will lead to actions that upset (or maintain) the structure of society at some level: even small, individual
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acts motivated by music listening make a difference when considered at scale and when the consequences of momentary psychological transformation are examined in depth. The music cultures of rap and metal enthusiastically promote ideas associated with social power, across a wide range of styles, and may even adopt the language of empowerment. But understanding the power of music to change the world fundamentally relies on how humans corporeally experience, inhabit, and interact with their environments.
Notes 1 To give a representative example, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (2018) holds a policy for women’s empowerment, which commits to “realising”, “advancing”, “promot[ing]”, “proactively and publically champion[ing]” the empowerment of women and girls. 2 For example, the vaporiser company RELX (2019) advertises their mission as “empowering adult smokers”. Among the principles they promote in selling tools of nicotine addiction, the brand lists “empathy”, with products designed not “to ensnare, but to empower” (RELX 2019). 3 I use the terms mainstream feminism and post-feminism interchangeably, defined on McRobbie’s (2009) terms. 4 This description counts the tempo at the middle of the three backbeat rates heard within the first minute. Counting the track this way, the prechorus provides Moore and Martin’s (2018: 38–42) standard backbeat, with snare on 2 and 4. 5 For example, jontyler (2011) reads the lyrics as direct reports of Philip Labonte’s experiences: “Phil was in the Marines so what do you think he saw”. Such views appear to ignore Labonte’s anti-imperialist sentiments and downplaying of his own military service (103 GBF 2012). 6 Chance the Rapper was 22 when the song was first performed in October 2015. 7 For example, the rapper was awarded Chicago Magazine’s Chicagoan of the Year in 2015 (Obaro 2015) and has donated to the Chicago Public Schools Foundation (Best 2017). He was interviewed by Bakari Kitwana for the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics on his social activism (UChicago Institute of Politics 2016). 8 Although the use of Chicago slang and locations appear in the lyrics, and Chicagoan music styles are prominent, the song never explicitly gives the city name. This allows the listener to relate the social impetus for positive change to their own environment. 9 Although the top-down perspective might raise some red f lags, the title of Columbia University Press’ monograph series, Empowering the Powerless, could hardly be clearer about the “liberating”, pre-neoliberalised approach to empowerment adopted in these books. 10 Keith Kahn-Harris (2007: 34–35) has provided an important critique of Walser’s emancipatory narratives about metal, supported by Glenn Pillsbury (2006: 30) and Michelle Phillipov (2012: 164). Viewing metal purely as politically desirable expressions of counterculture ignores the transgressive potential of the music. Equally, attempts to dismiss violence in metal as mere fantasy limits understanding of the pleasure experienced in such transgression. 11 For instance, he explains that King Jr.’s perceived message of passive resistance is impossible in such a hostile environment. Increasing police violence against black people justifies his inability to “turn the other cheek; they wanna knock me off the edge like a fucking widow’s peak”.
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Quinn, E. (2000) ‘Black British Cultural Studies and the Rap on Gangsta’, Black Music Research Journal, 20(2), pp. 195–216. doi: 10.2307/779467. RagingMinotaurus454 (2019) ‘Kendrick Lamar—Hiii Power [Instrumental][Produced by J. Cole]’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= spVTdRHgugE&lc=UgzxAyMiJAfpGim8wNN4AaABAg (Accessed: 19 February 2020). RELX (2019) Our Story, RELX. Available at: https://relxnow.co.uk/pages/our-story (Accessed: 1 February 2020). Sardenberg, C. M. B. (2008) ‘Liberal vs. Liberating Empowerment: A Latin American Feminist Perspective on Conceptualising Women’s Empowerment’, IDS Bulletin, 39(6), pp. 18–27. doi: 10.1111/j.1759-5436.2008.tb00507.x. Siddharth Jeswani (2020) ‘Kendrick Lamar—Hiii Power [Instrumental][Produced by J. Cole]—YouTube’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=spVTdRHgugE (Accessed: 19 February 2020). Smail, D. (1994) ‘Community Psychology and Politics’, Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 4(1), pp. 3–10. doi: 10.1002/casp.2450040103. Talib Kweli (2002) ‘Get By’, Quality. Available at: Spotify (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Thomas, B. (2011) ‘Unraveling and Discovering: The Conceptual Relations between the Concept of Power and the Concept of Empowerment’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 14(4), pp. 443–463. doi: 10.1080/09692290.2010.517974. Tolentino, J. (2019) ‘Always be Optimizing’, in Tolentino, J. (ed.) Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-delusion. New York: Random House, pp. 63–94. tony willis (2012) ‘Kendrick Lamar—Hiii Power [Instrumental][Produced by J. Cole]’, YouTube (Comment). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= spVTdRHgugE (Accessed: 19 February 2020). Travis, R. (2016) The Healing Power of Hip Hop. Santa Barbara and Denver: Praeger. UChicago Institute of Politics (2016) ‘Chance the Rapper and the Art of Activism’, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG64tf EjHwg (Accessed: 7 April 2018). VianelDeLaCruz (2019) ‘Kendrick Lamar—HiiiPoWeR’, Genius (Comment). Available at: https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-hiiipower-lyrics (Accessed: 19 February 2020). Walser, R. (2014) Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. New edn. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Widdows, H. (2018) Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
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Allow me to recap how the book has revealed the empowering potential of rap and metal music. The introductory chapter introduced the genres and defined the key terms of this investigation. Next, a framework for popular music listening was outlined based on principles from ecological perception and embodied cognition, one which approaches everyday experience in terms of bodies interacting with environments. I emphasised the significance of music style and the listener’s style competence to the affordance of meaning. Chapter 3 amalgamated three psychological theories to form a model of listener empowerment: the approach/inhibition theory, the personal sense of power, and the processes of mentalising and mirroring. With listening situated in the interpretive frame of the personic environment, analytical readings were used to exemplify how music affects individual behaviour and cognition. In brief, I argued that listeners interpret a persona in a particular state of mind and with a specific behavioural attitude. They thereby imagine themselves in the persona’s position or else situate themselves in relation to (usually in allegiance with) the persona, which changes the listener’s own behaviour and outlook. Chapter 4 discussed the relationships between music, health, and well-being, and extended the empowerment model to consider rap and metal’s affordances of resilience. In the subsequent chapter, the individual focus was expanded to community empowerment, first adopting concepts of music scene, community, and fandom, and later looking at two music communities in action. I introduced the working practices of the field of community psychology, especially the active approach to the process of empowerment. Travis’ (2016) Individual and Community Empowerment framework was used to inform music analyses. The final full chapter delved into the cultural politics of empowerment, clarifying the relationship between power and empowerment. Using examples of music that invoke social awareness and action, I critically examined the potential for music to create social change. There are some broader conclusions that can be drawn from this investigation. First, it bears pointing out that many, if not most, of the song analyses mentioned how the environment has a supportive relation with the protagonist. This could be attributed to (at least) a couple of factors: modern rap and metal have established fairly consistent norms for personic-environmental
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relations, and empowering songs in particular tend to employ supportive environments. In rap, the beat typically sustains the f low, whereas in metal, the voice accords with what is enacted in the environment. Some kind of personic-environmental solidarity is a major factor in songs that listeners find empowering, not least because being safe and supported in an environment is a prerequisite of being powerful. Seeming to be in control of things can be a highly empowering condition, as tracks like “Bars Simzson” and “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” show. Even where there is some conf lict or disagreement, so long as protagonists appear in charge of the action, songs like “One Man Army” (and “Indictment”) can instil a strong sense of self hood. “Alive” cedes personal control to a higher power, but finds an extreme stability in such commitment. A further comment on the role of the voice is necessary. We do not typically sing our daily experiences as we go about them. Yet (or perhaps precisely because of this) the performative voice in popular song is a crucial domain for the imagination of behaviour, personality, and bodily and mental states. Empowerment is understood here principally as the empowerment of a virtual person, although I have made recourse to timbral forces, shapes, gestures, and the like. While I can imagine applications of the empowerment model to instrumental music, the role of the persona remains crucial. I have touched upon the frame of proxemics (Moore 2012: 185–187) – perceived interpersonal distance – without employing its specific language, in discussions of the soundbox and virtual environment. Work adopting relevant tools may uncover the empowering potential of instrumental music in timbre, texture, and space, with routes for such analysis demonstrated by Leman (2016) and Sora (2019). Moreover, there is an interesting middle ground to consider in the form of vocals performed in a language the listener does not understand. I contend that such music can empower listeners, for it is so often how the voice invites personic interpretation that shapes listener response rather than specifically what they are saying. This suggestion coheres with calls for closer attention to the performative voice in metal (Ribaldini 2019) and rap (Burton 2019: 71–82). That said, lyrics retain crucial importance, for they indicate directly how personas are feeling and what they are up to.1 It may be a truism to state that words are important to rap music, but I stress that the patterns of articulation, construction of rhyme, signifyin(g) and wordplay, and storytelling produced through lyrics can be profoundly empowering. Metal does not uphold as strong an emphasis on lyrics, but I have still found much to say about the screamed, growled, and sung words of heavy music. The insistence on their perceived sonic qualities is – forgive me – sound, for it is not as though words on a page could empower viewers in just the same way. The argument here is developed out of an experiential focus on listening, but other research could conceivably build upon an ecological-embodied framework to consider the empowering potential of reading, viewing, and playing. Applications of these kinds would inform the study of literature, film, and video games alongside
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work in these fields that already employs perspectives from ecological perception and embodied cognition (Anderson and Anderson 2007; Kuzmičová 2014; Fahlenbrach 2015). If particular arrangements of sounds can be empowering upon listening, so too can particular arrangements of words, images, frames, and interactions. An emergent theme of my analyses, particularly in the lyrics, concerns violence and death. This makes sense, in a way. Feeling capable enough to protect oneself from (or even commit) violence informs self-esteem, and protecting one’s well-being is a key act of resilience. Death is a potent human fear, and music is an important domain for the expression and alleviation of anxieties concerning death. It might seem as though such morbid ref lections would be found disempowering, although it most often seems relieving for metal and rap to break taboos around death, personal harm, and other forms of violence (as online comments showed). The study of empowerment enables us to see how music engages with sensitive subjects in ways that listeners find meaningful, without succumbing to dualistic claims about music’s corrupting inf luences or purely emancipatory effects. If music can empower, can it disempower? This question deserves some attention, brief ly. For the most part, the track analyses exemplified the empowering potential of rap and metal. Certainly this is the argument I have been most concerned with making and, as it has long been observed, music analysis is not an objective endeavour (Kerman 1985; Moore 2012; Von Appen 2017). Therefore my close personal relationship to rap and metal may have resulted in overlooking disempowering experiences of the music.2 Nonetheless, I remind the reader of the contingency of my analyses, and draw attention once again to how style competence informs every listening experience. In particular, readers unfamiliar with the music are much more likely to find listening to them “aggravating” (Green 2008: 56). With less sensitivity to what affords an empowered persona – how the virtual protagonist’s personal sense of power can be mirrored or mentalised, or how approach-oriented behaviour can be interpreted and imitated – the same opportunities for empowerment may not emerge. And the personic environments I hear as dynamic, consistent, energising, may be noisy, monotonous, and unattractive for others. Ultimately, empowerment is something which is afforded.
Beyond empowerment There are some ways to extend the theories deployed in this book that are worth considering. Although focused on listening experiences of rap and metal, my study significantly informs broader enquiry into these genres and their music cultures. The dimensions of empowerment that have been brought to light invite much commentary on the music’s aesthetics, politics, and uses. Ideas of social change in particular exemplify the cultural priorities uncovered and contested in rap and metal. Many of the tracks I have discussed can provide individuals with a social awareness, especially in digestible
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and appealing ways. They encourage critically ref lecting on the political environment, from a recognition of local problems (“Angels”) to a furious accusation of religiously motivated violence (“Indictment”). Quite often, like in “The Downfall of Us All” and “Get By”, community engagement is promoted as a means to achieving better social circumstances. As such, the music can be argued to have an egalitarian disposition, to a certain extent. This may be fairly limited, however, as both rap and metal are deeply intertwined with capitalist and consumerist values (and they undoubtedly benefit from the communal sentiment that encourages fans to collectively fund the music’s creation, although this economic model is in f lux). Rappers continue to f lash their cash (as in “Worst Behaviour”) and metal artists detail their heroic strength (“One Man Army”) in ways which, while potentially empowering, also advance liberal understandings of self hood and achievement. And music which avoids such ideas altogether tends towards the nihilistic: “Cthulhu Dawn” offers no new vision for society beyond the mythologised end of civilisation, but purely wallows in the end of human life as we know it. These findings, drawn from the listening experiences of specific pieces, substantiate and nuance much of the leading scholarship on rap (Rose 1994; Keyes 2002; Perry 2004; Jeffries 2011; Oware 2018) and metal (Weinstein 2000; Kahn-Harris 2007; Phillipov 2012; Brown et al. 2016). Nonetheless, I would suggest that the approach I have taken is applicable to music other than rap and metal. Because these genres are not rigidly defined, it is straightforward to consider how the empowerment model is applicable to, say, R&B on the border of rap (as well as other hip-hop music) and punk 3 styles closely related to metal. So too for the time period in question: harvesting examples of earlier rap and metal would be likely to produce similar fruits. The breadth of potentially empowering experiences allows for different emphases in other genres. For instance, self-sufficiency may be particularly important to punk’s affordances of resilience, with its emphasis on do-it-yourself ethics. And in anecdotal examples I have developed outside the scope of this book, the methodological basis seems appropriate to music further afield, including rock, electronic dance music, and pop. Something like Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off ” (2014) seems an obvious source of potential empowerment: listeners may interpret a personic environment unambiguous in its corporeal, liberating self-preservation. Moreover, addressing experiences of music video is a particularly attractive theoretical extension of the empowerment model, allowing for transmedial studies of musical personas. Rap and metal are, after all, multiply mediated cultural forms. If I have sufficiently shown the empowering potential of listening, future studies may consider the potential for experiences of empowerment through performing, composing, dancing, dressing, watching, reading, and other ways of musicking rap and metal (Small 1998). As I have elaborated just one theoretical model of empowerment, there remains complementary ways of researching how music empowers. Psychological, phenomenological, and cognitive-scientific research can benefit from
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the theories of empowerment collated here, providing a music-oriented perspective to account for effects on behaviour and cognition. I have combined (broadly) psychological theory and music analysis to demonstrate afforded experiences of empowerment, but future research could employ experiments, collaborations, interviews, and ethnographic research, for example. Such an endeavour has precedents in Gabrielsson’s (2011) “strong experiences of music” project, the collaborative analytical method of Von Appen et al. (2015), and the music and well-being research of DeNora (2013) (and other books in Routledge’s Music and Change: Ecological Perspectives series). Each of these studies, from different perspectives, develops extensive ref lection on musical experience from multiple individuals, whereas I have described the mechanisms of empowerment, filling the gap between stimulus material and interview response or participant data. Further detailed study of particular scenes and music communities would also be very welcome, deploying the empowerment model to consider wider trends of collective empowerment. Such developments would continue the work of Varas-Díaz and Scott (2016) and Rollefson (2017). It goes without saying that rap and metal are well-loved musics, and studies of their globally empowering manifestations help us to understand not only how listeners interact with music cultures, but also what the music gives back to them. Enter Shikari (2010a): “Destabilise” I leave you with two final examples. First, I turn to face my own experiences of music listening and community head-on. In doing so, I do not claim autoethnographic rigour, but assert that even anecdotal comments will support my analysis of the track’s empowering potential. I am able, however, to provide more detailed accounts of my personal engagement with the music because, well, I was (and still am) the one listening. Hence, no need for online commentary here: I will pull from my memories. “Destabilise”, an exemplar of rap and metal’s (combined) capacity to empower, helps me to draw together all of the various strands of the empowerment model. And, illustrating possible stylistic extensions of the book’s purview, the song draws widely from metal, rap, punk, and electronic dance music. The track starts on an off-beat (or so I later realise). That percussive sound we hear eight times in the opening few seconds takes the role of the snare, and is marking beats 2 and 4, but at first I hear it more like a cymbal and kick, which would usually mark 1 (and often 3) of metal in 4/4. The backbeat that enters at 0’05” may cause a metric fake-out (Biamonte 2014), requiring listeners to entrain to a new metric pulse. Such a corporeal adjustment is disruptive and surprising, and as we catch up to the now-consistent backbeat, we have our first sign of the song’s ability to “destabilise”. Hearing the synth riff in C aeolian, our protagonist Rou is introduced shouting at approximately B and B, so the stability of the pitch world here is in question too. Agitated, he pushes up and away from everything else. The track leaves a gulf between the
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voice, synth, bass, and drums, lacking the textural layers that might reasonably be expected from any rock, punk, metal, or hip-hop style. Consequently, there is a sense that the environment is empty, frozen, and bare, enacting the lyric that describes “this cold stasis”. Things begin to change as the protagonist addresses “Rory C”, just as a rapper engages in call-and-response with their “hype man”, to ask, “what’s your thesis?”. The reply, positioned further to the right of the stereo field, and distinguishing a second protagonist in alliance with the first, half-rhymes: “I don’t fucking believe it”. Spurred on by this cooperation, Rou doubles the speed of his f low. This change of pace demonstrates a clear development towards approach-oriented behaviour: he raps faster, uses a more spoken than shouted articulation, and therefore seems more in control of what he wants to achieve. It also appears somewhat like passing the baton momentarily to Rory C has given Rou the time to prepare his next steps, making good on his guarantees about “planning” and “locking together”. This moment models the process of communal empowerment in action, as Rou calls upon a friend for support and demonstrates more goal-directed behaviour as a consequence. The protagonist’s voice now reverberates across the stereo space, as if projected from a loudspeaker at a protest, with lyrics condemning the social status quo. A filter sweep rises and drops to an explosive bass drum at 0’26”. But all is not lost. A brassy synth sample emerges from the ashes, gradually contesting its low-pass filter over the next fifteen seconds. Moreover, the melodic contour of this new riff gives the impression of constantly rising. The four bar pattern falls E –D–C (the opening riff in reverse) twice, then on the third bar shifts up to G–E , before digitally gliding upward in the final bar. That it both shifts pitch after two bars and then dismisses the repeated figure altogether provides a clear indication of unrest. But at a structural level, the synth brass repeats constantly, present in the track from this drop, through the verse, and all the way on to the end of the first chorus. Its bright timbre has a militaristic quality, as enabled by cross-domain mapping from brass instruments’ use in contexts of discipline, organisation, and combat. It is invigorating to imagine the personas taking up arms of their own as they sound the trumpets of war. From 0’39”, in what most resembles a verse (albeit a brief one), full band timbres stomp beneath the animated synth layers. Rou seems furious, moving from the clearly articulated speech of rap vocals to hardcore-inf luenced shouts. The lyrics similarly tread a careful line between styles. The line “you can’t contain us” offers metal’s aphoristic defiance, but the second-person address and verbal specificity brings “you can’t destabilise, divide, or label us” closer to rap’s communal social consciousness. The more complete texture that has just been established disappears again at 0’51”, assaulting any conventions of a sustained environment. In this shift and the accompanying lyrical protest, we may interpret an assault on the status quo, the personas breaking free from confinement and an established social order. The lyric “destabilise” is now given in an imperative robotic crackle.
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The chorus which follows is full of the voices of the collective. Rou leads the charge, singing comfortably in chest voice from the centre of the soundbox. A shouted vocal interjects towards the left side of the stereo field, then Rou finishes the line in agreement, aided by a vocal harmony at the third above. The same pattern repeats with the shouted vocal emerging from the right instead, as though the personas are present from all sides (or at least that they can move to cover the whole terrain). The protagonist settles upon a sentiment of communal resistance: “we don’t belong here”. The drums double in pace. Now a new, timbrally distinct voice – neither Rou nor Rory C – reinforces the vocal phrase in canon. He then collaborates with Rou, synchronising in thirds to provide an extended final repetition of the line. Finally, Rou returns to his “loudspeaker” effect soapbox, erratically spilling words at a faster pace than the sung phrases. Despite all of this notable personic movement, the chorus is the most formally regular section thus far. A four-bar pattern is played four times, with chords changing mostly once per bar. There are occasional textural interjections and an altered final bar, but the environment generally proceeds with formal consistency. Evidently, we are engaging on the personas’ playing field now. Their significant personal senses of power can be assumed from the clear and confident vocal articulation, spurred on by the collaborative, harmonised interaction. Rou loses his temper, descending into a full-bodied scream during the final bar of the chorus – “we need to fucking erupt” – which evaporates the chorus textures in favour of a short breakdown lead-in. This breakdown is far from typical,4 though. While the kick and most guitar chugs are in unison, and the snare and crash provide a backbeat as expected, nothing else fits together like it should. Things are firing at different times and in different places rather than providing the synchrony that breakdowns typically do, which dissipates the synchrony established in the chorus that precedes this section. Synth lines run astray, the guitar does not always reinforce the bass and kick patterns, and Rou is resigned to speaking slowly, ranting as though to himself (“crafty fucking tyrants…”). These utterances echo into the void unaided by the others in this disorganised environment. But the destabilisation enacted here does not seem to be the disassembly of oppressive institutions which Rou and co. are calling for: it is their own. The members of the collective do not have a specific strategy to create change, they are not working together productively, and so they themselves have lost stability. They rallied in the chorus, but failed to achieve their goals, as evidenced by this irregular breakdown. Eventually, we arrive back at the chorus, where the protagonists again pass phrases around democratically. In doing so, they work together to begin regaining their strength. The subsequent bridge continues the chorus’ chord sequence in hushed timbres. Rou rebuilds their strategy from the ground up. Gone are the triumphant brass timbres (they have nothing to celebrate yet), replaced by more cautious slow-attack synth notes. Rou turns to face his people, working on “one last siege to break the norm”. The change of address is significant. The “you” he targets is no longer those who “can’t contain us”,
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but the impetus for his assault. Rather than find fuel in fury, he looks to an interpersonal connection: “so I can lie here on the f loor beside you”. Content with the “calm before the storm”, the community has a reason to relaunch its attack. From 2’52”, the personas make tumultuous preparation, trading screamed vocals over busy drum semiquaver drum strokes. The lyrics appeal to environmental politics, related to concerns about private ownership and fracking: “no one owns the oceans, no one owns the mountains”. Instead, they call for responsibility, since “we’ve all inherited this world”. Finally, Rou screams “we need to fucking erupt”, and the collective responds through a gang vocal – sounding altogether for the first (and only) time in the track to reclaim the Earth – “cause this world is ours”. This time, with their motivation crystal clear, they cannot be stopped. The subsequent breakdown gives a call-and-response pattern of galloping chugs and biting synth attacks. The instrumental synchrony emulates a tightly knit force in collective protest, successful in realising their intentions. Every crotchet, the choked cymbals decay halfway between each onset, creating a galvanising forward motion. In this moment, I am persuaded of this imagined community’s ability to bring about change. Mirroring and mentalising their preparation, build-up, and (this time) achievement of social action, I now hear what this community can do, and want to be a part of it. The track gives a final chorus, supplemented by additional vocals, before a brief play-out which reiterates the bridge’s ref lective calm. It ends, therefore, by reminding us that the victory we have gained all depended upon this preparation: through cooperation and clear motivation, we can bring about change. By resonating to the music in communal dance, listeners corporeally enact physical motion, imaginatively partaking in social action to create the change they want to see in the world. I would know: I recall a vividly empowering experience of listening to “Destabilise”. It took place during one of those rare opportunities when teenagers are offered the sudden domestic freedom and independence of parental absence. My close group of friends and I filled the living room, making use of the otherwise empty house by enjoying our latest musical discoveries together. When I spun “Destabilise”, we mock-moshed, rapped, and sang along in unison. Many of us were budding metal instrumentalists and, with mirror neurons apparently firing, we embodied the performative gestures that we instinctively felt. As the breakdown dropped at 3’06”, we collectively performed the “Shikari Shuff le”.5 I do not enjoy dancing publicly, but something about this was different. The track allowed me to attune to its organised motion, and sympathetically embody resistance to the pressures of school, work, parental expectation, and neoliberal class ideology. I remember feeling as though we, the near-powerless adolescents in that room, somehow had the potential to destabilise systems of oppression. We used the track to experience solidarity and gain a critical awareness of pressing issues, learning that working together is the only successful route to social change.6 Mentalising and mirroring the self-assurance, resilience, and communal effort afforded by the track, interpreting the personas’ high
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personal senses of power, and imitating their approach-oriented behaviour, we undoubtedly experienced empowerment. When the breakdown drops in “Destabilise”, I still feel it today.7 Such is the capacity of music to empower its listeners. Tobe Nwigwe (2020): “I NEED YOU TO (BREONNA TAYLOR)” This final analysis takes the opposite approach: instead of spotlighting individual, personal experiences of empowerment, I apply the model to a song of extreme social significance (albeit one which is deeply personal for many people). It is 2020, and the world is ending ( just as “Cthulhu Dawn” foresaw). I exaggerate, of course, and won’t further dwell on (or trivialise) the events of global significance that have radically transformed the typical workings of everyday life for most people, not least the operations of popular culture, music economies, and digitally networked interactions. Moreover, my focus is not the novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-19) pandemic, but a recent chapter in the international movement against racially motivated police violence, Black Lives Matter, galvanised by the May 2020 killing of George Floyd into a wave of antiracist activism worldwide (Samayeen et al. 2020). This analysis considers the empowering potential of one brief musical response, a miniature protest song that captures the collective motivation for change against a backdrop of traumatic injustice. I cannot pretend to know the visceral grief of black Americans witnessing such racialised brutality, but write sensitively as a horrified and well-intentioned ally to consider how music contributes to social movements by way of the people it affects. Furthermore, this analysis gestures towards potential extensions of the empowerment model in its discussions of music video and meme culture. I refer primarily to the YouTube video, as well as discourse on Twitter and Instagram, to examine multimediated and politicised affordances of empowerment. The song starts sweetly. A Hammond organ lays out a D chord, then fans out to D 7/9 alongside sprinkles and swells of ride cymbal. We are zoomed in squarely on Tobe’s face, from hairline to chin, so his entire facial expression sits at the centre of the frame. His features are relaxed, and remain so when he begins to sing in a soft, higher register, drenched in reverb, around the tonic note: “I need you to…”. Clear, capitalised white text captions the lyric in the letterbox at the bottom of the frame (or, in the “portrait” version on Instagram, superimposed on his beard). The organ’s sustained chord fades, and the cymbals ring out. The mind wanders as to what follows: “…love me?”. Tobe’s face is intimately close to the viewer, and the smooth organ backing would certainly make an appropriate fit for a romantic confession. Or, perhaps, “… leave me alone?”. Tobe does not smile, so perhaps this close proximity provides the context for a difficult personal conversation, but he does not frown either. He is expressionless, despite the delicate delivery of the vocal. The
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pale, mint green walls some way behind him provide few clues. But, make no mistake, you are implicated in this persona’s demand. Then the beat drops (and, to use a British idiom, the penny drops too). This is a completely different sonic arrangement, one much more fitting of Tobe’s impassive stare. A low D is sustained in a distorted bass tone as dry kick drums, clicky snares, and echoing claps map out a sparse, slow backbeat. The voice is monotonous too, deep in Tobe’s register, stating his message clearly: “arrest … the killers … of Breonna … Taylor”.8 These words are spaced out like a protest chant, with prosodic accents structured around each beat of the bar (“rest”, “kill”, “on”, “Tay”). His facial and vocal expressions, it turns out, are not intimate, nor lazy, but stoic and forbearing – exhausted, even, yet quietly determined. It is mostly the left side of his face that lifts up as he articulates the words, giving an impression of contempt as he decries sceptics of the events of the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor. The bass slides up a little while more rapid kick drums mark the end of the phrase, then we are back at the start of the loop. By now, the frame has zoomed out to show Tobe f lanked by two people (his wife Fat and the track’s producer Nell, recognisable from other digital content which prominently features his creative team). The three of them are seated in a line facing the viewer, performing simple choreography in unison to the repeated lyric: with “arrest”, they cross their arms as if with handcuffs and, most notably, “killers” is accompanied by a twist to the left and a lowering of the arms as if holding a gun with both hands. This embodied motion visually highlights the urgency of arrest: if the killers’ arms were crossed and restrained, they would not be free to wield weapons. The actors’ positioning and unified motion afford a significant sense of solidarity despite Tobe’s ostensible sonic loneliness. He cites the killing of Elijah McClain while the kick drum thumps eight times in quick succession. The frame reaches its furthest distance from Tobe and his collaborators, then immediately begins zooming back in. This is the halfway point, and we are visually drawn back in to the core issue at stake. Only the fourth line introduces new material: the vocal gives “You catch the vibe”, with just the slightest hint of a question in Tobe’s intonation, although it is more stated than genuinely queried. Surely you understand by now. Could he be any clearer? Finally, a call to action: “now get off my page”. The beat dissipates quickly after. His tone is imperative throughout, and eschews rhyme. This is noteworthy, implying that the seriousness of the topic means omitting some typical rap conventions. Similarly, the ascetic beat lacks any harmonic or melodic material. The track is a straightforward message, delivered vocally, with a rhythm to propel it through time. Like other rap tracks I have discussed, consistency affords confidence, clarity, and communicative power in general. The fixity of the bass pitch provides a firm basis, a platform for projecting the politically charged lyric, and the low-pitched rap emphasises the bass qualities of the voice, contributing to affordances of authoritative and assured exhortation. Visually surrounded by coordinated allies, Tobe is the voice of a
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movement synchronised in approach-oriented behaviour. His personal sense of power cannot be interpreted as simply as some of the obvious high-power personas discussed in this book, but the overwhelming affordance for me is that his resolve seems battered but not broken. After all, he continues to demand justice, plain and simple. In educating the listener on an urgent cause, he is empowered by hip-hop’s crucial element of knowledge, like a community leader motivating his audience to act. Moreover, the rhythmic phrasing of “arrest the killers of Breonna Taylor” provides a readymade chant for use at marches and protests. However, it is not (entirely) original, and has a complex origin. Some may hear the track as being in support of the #SayHerName campaign, which aims to increase the public visibility of women affected by acts of antiblack violence. The song might engage a particular listening individual by powerfully articulating the words that they wish more people would say, with that individual mirroring the persona’s assertive, active state of being. In this way, they would personally undergo a change that could impel them towards certain actions: choosing to attend a political event, for instance, or simply repeating (by recalling from musical memory) the key lyrical phrase in a conversation that would otherwise overlook the injustice of Breonna Taylor’s death. In this case, the song has motivated them to make a social impact: the song has empowered them. Another possibility, though, is that “I NEED YOU TO (BREONNA TAYLOR)” falls entirely on deaf ears, as a perceiver lacks awareness of the song’s political affordances: what of the non-Anglophone listener, for instance? In such a case, we might hope the choreography (not to mention Taylor’s name) informs them of the subject matter. Moreover, the dry, sombre musical environment will put off less style-competent listeners of modern rap, even those that might appreciate the lyrics. In such cases, the song is less likely to empower. Yet another experience of the track gives critical attention to the central message. Although calls for justice for Breonna Taylor mean well, they have become memefied and arguably undermined in digital fora. Following repeated demands for police accountability and the arrests of those involved in Taylor’s shooting, particularly on Twitter and TikTok (and especially following Beyoncé’s public letter to Attorney General Daniel Cameron), users soon became more creative. Trying to employ classic bait-and-switch humour, many images, videos, and text posts accessible online give an innocuous set-up – the simplest is “it’s a great day…” – before abruptly switching to the unexpectedly serious “…to arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor”.9 There have been several variations on this theme: all but one letter of the punchline revealed in Wheel of Fortune’s Hangman board, or ending up as the final line of a rewritten “roses are red” poem.10 Many have disdained the close association of Taylor’s death with humour, arguing that the meme situates Taylor’s killing merely as the punchline used in service of the original poster’s comedic expression (Andrews 2020; Arceneaux 2020). Such attempts are seen as frivolous gimmicks that dilute serious demands for justice rather
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than means of coping with tragedy or utilising the trend’s viral potential to foster genuine support. Tobe Nwigwe’s musical iteration of the meme, juxtaposing its sweet introduction with the hard-hitting beat and rap vocal, is surely open to the same critique.11 Allissa Richardson (2020: 80–82) sees the trend not as satire but as part of a conscious tactic to manipulate the popular feeds of digital platforms like Twitter. Drawing upon bell hooks’ work on white supremacist control over the black gaze, Richardson describes how memes and hashtags like those focused on the Breonna Taylor case are a form of black witnessing, activism that maintains attention on critical issues after the mainstream media stops reporting on them. This aligns with Tobe Nwigwe’s stated goal, to keep the cause “at the forefront of people’s mind on a regular basis” (Rosenblatt 2020). In this light, the song can be seen as its own viral-ready, digital-native protest, drawing a line from individual engagement to social and collective action through the power of the track’s musical form. It surprises, disrupts, and transforms, emphasising public visibility to raise political support for legal action against the police officers. It can empower those already aligned with the cause, rallying them to sustained action such as contacting the attorney’s office as well as those hearing of Taylor’s case for the first time, no matter what ends to which they put that empowerment.12 I am writing on day 90 of the Louisville protests. The September episode of Vanity Fair, guest edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, features a portrait of Breonna Taylor (painted by Amy Sherald) on its cover. Daniel Cameron’s decision whether to prosecute the officers is yet to be announced. Tobe Nwigwe’s musical intervention has reached millions. In the act of listening (and watching), individuals have had their expectations subverted and their attention focused on the cause. They have mentalised and mirrored the current state of the track’s persona, insistent in his demand, and adopted a different state of mind and bodily activity themselves. Their personal sense of power changes by relative self-evaluation, and the associated neuropsychological systems switch towards approach-oriented behaviours as they are reminded of the necessity of them taking social action (and the ways they can do so). For, as the track has it, justice depends on each and every “you” listening. This may not be the reality: as Chapter 6 showed, making individuals feel responsible for social and systemic factors is profoundly disempowering. However, there is a quality of self-belief that rap and metal teaches us, and this has far-reaching effects. You can start by moving your body. You can realise what is within your power, even if it didn’t feel that way before. You can say her name.
Revisiting the storm Perhaps you now think differently about why individuals interact with seemingly loud, abrasive, tumultuous environments. They may be experiencing fantasies – and realities – of improved self hood, resilience, community, and social change. They may feel knocked down and picked back
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up by some tracks, and reminded of their personal abilities by others. The beats still shake the ground. The vanguard voice continues to sound. From the outside, the storm seems only to offer danger. In the eye of the storm, however, listeners can experience the peace, purgation, or pleasures of empowerment. Individuals, in turn, seek out further experiences of this nature, developing a relationship with – perhaps a loyalty to – this music and its blustery soundworlds. Some learn to tame the wind themselves. Others will harness its energy to help them create lasting change. People come together to brave the storm time and time again, fuelled on by its energising potential. In many cases, it keeps them going: rap and metal roar on into the present day because their listeners do. I hope that this book has provided a little lightning to illuminate the empowering potential of listening to modern rap and metal.
Notes 1 And it is principally in lyrics that rap and metal exhibit their contrasting tendencies towards realism and fantasy. 2 I describe some disempowering affordances in the discussions of “Here To Stay” and “Afterlife” in Chapter 4, and “Hard In Da Paint” in Chapter 5. 3 Dale (2012) has developed such a study using principally Marxist and Derridean theories. He, too, indicates the potential for empowerment in listening, suggesting that “punk’s political desires, its politics of empowerment, are to some extent uncoverable ‘in’ the music” (Dale 2012: 222). 4 See Gamble (2019) for analysis of the norms of modern metal breakdowns. 5 This dance involves placing the feet together and jumping left to right over the same spot, keeping the upper body relatively straight. We had learned it from watching the band members perform the gesture when playing the song live. It can also be seen (albeit brief ly) at 3’09” in the official music video for the track (Enter Shikari 2010b). 6 Another refrain on the same album, the track “Pack of Thieves” (Enter Shikari 2012) pleads, “don’t be fooled into thinking that a small group of friends cannot change the world”. Hearing this, ostensibly through the voices of young working- and middle-class Brits like us, further cemented our belief in the collective power of social justice. 7 And if you are not yet convinced of the potential of listener empowerment to have real-life consequences, know that part of the reason this book exists is because I was so fascinated by what was going on in the living room that evening. 8 Breonna Taylor, a black emergency health technician, was killed by police officers while in bed in her Louisville, Kentucky, home. The three white male plainclothes officers, Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove, used a battering ram to enter her apartment on a drug investigation with different suspects (and at the wrong address). Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, believing the officers to be burglars, shot his licensed firearm. The officers then let loose, firing more than twenty rounds “with total disregard for the value of human life”, so states the Taylor family’s lawsuit (Brito 2020). Taylor was struck eight times and pronounced dead at the scene. 9 The precise wording is not always the same, but this is the most common. The use of “cops” deserves further examination, particularly as it may ring either as
Conclusion 169 more innocent (think “buddy cop movies”) or more degrading (“all cops are bastards”) than something like “police”. Either way, it is certainly more ambiguous than Tobe Nwigwe’s “killers”. Other posts have emphasised the importance of naming the officers, on the grounds that they should not live comfortably in anonymity while Taylor’s name is publicised worldwide. 10 Following similar non sequitur logic, the “arrest the cops” idea bears close resemblance to the viral meme “Epstein didn’t kill himself ”. 11 There are now tens of millions of views on TikTok posts with an unrelated, attention-grabbing opening (e.g., “finally revealing my hair”, “top 5 places to kiss your crush”) that use Nwigwe’s song to the same effect. The song’s to-thepoint misdirect and short total running time is a perfect fit for this format of digital cultural production. 12 Consider, for instance, the song’s position at the top of Spotify’s “Power Gaming” playlist, made to accompany video gaming, in August 2020.
References Anderson, J. D. and Anderson, B. F. (2007) Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Andrews, T. M. (2020) ‘The Debate around Breonna Taylor Memes: Do They Bring Attention to the Cause or Trivialize Her Death?’, Washington Post. Available at: https:// www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/03/breonna-taylor-memes/ (Accessed: 27 August 2020). Arceneaux, M. (2020) Breonna Taylor Is Not a Meme, Medium. Available at: https:// level.medium.com/breonna-taylor-is-not-a-meme-e59848f b02a8 (Accessed: 27 August 2020). Biamonte, N. (2014) ‘Formal Functions of Metric Dissonance in Rock Music’, Music Theory Online, 20(2). Available at: https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.14.20.2/ mto.14.20.2.biamonte.html (Accessed: 25 February 2020). Brito, C. (2020) ‘Family Sues after 26-Year-Old EMT Is Shot and Killed by Police in Her Own Home’, CBS News. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ breonna-taylor-family-sues-wrongful-death-killed-police-louisville/ (Accessed: 27 August 2020). Brown, A. R. et al. (eds) (2016) Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies. New York: Routledge. Burton, J. A. (2017) Posthuman Rap. New York: Oxford University Press. Dale, P. (2012) Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground. Farnham: Ashgate. DeNora, T. (2013) Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life. Farnham: Ashgate. Enter Shikari (2010a) Destabilise. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/ 5HsBelQClIA77DPgxQr3tM (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Enter Shikari (2010b) ‘Enter Shikari—Destabilise (Official Music Video)’, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSjaM9E2gr4 (Accessed: 8 August 2017). Enter Shikari (2012) ‘Pack of Thieves’, A Flash Flood of Colour. Available at: https:// open.spotify.com/track/5t9f9TeL5EIeYuD8pKv6FE (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Fahlenbrach, K. (2015) Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games: Cognitive Approaches. New York: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315724522.
170 Conclusion Gabrielsson, A. (2011) Strong Experiences with Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gamble, S. (2019) ‘Breaking Down the Breakdown in Twenty-First-Century Metal’, Metal Music Studies, 5(3), pp. 337–354. doi: 10.1386/mms.5.3.337_1. Green, L. (2008) Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology, and Education. 2nd edn. Bury St Edmunds: Arima Publishing. Jeffries, M. P. (2011) Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Kahn-Harris, K. (2007) Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford and New York: Berg. Kerman, J. (1985) Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keyes, C. L. (2002) Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Kuzmičová, A. (2014) ‘Literary Narrative and Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition’, Style, 48(3), pp. 275–293. Leman, M. (2016) The Expressive Moment: How Interaction (with Music) Shapes Human Empowerment. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Moore, A. F. (2012) Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Surrey: Ashgate. Oware, M. (2018) I Got Something to Say: Gender, Race, and Social Consciousness in Rap Music. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-90454-2. Perry, I. (2004) Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Phillipov, M. (2012) Death Metal and Music Criticism: Analysis at the Limits. Lanham: Lexington Books. Ribaldini, P. (2019) ‘Terminology Issues with the Poïetic Aspect of Vocals in Heavy Metal Studies: A Suggestion for a Multidisciplinary Approach’, Metal Music Studies, 5(3), pp. 315–335. doi: 10.1386/mms.5.3.315_1. Richardson, A. V. (2020) Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Rollefson, J. G. (2017) Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Available at: https://www. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo26955610.html (Accessed: 25 February 2020). Rose, T. (1994) Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Rosenblatt, K. (2020) ‘Artist Tobe Nwigwe hopes Viral Song will Reinvigorate Calls for Justice for Breonna Taylor’, NBC News. Available at: https://www. nbcnews.com/pop-culture/music/rapper-tobe-nwigwe-hopes-viral-song-willreinvigorate-calls-justice-n1233879 (Accessed: 27 August 2020). Samayeen, N., Wong, A. and McCarthy, C. (2020) ‘Space to Breathe: George Floyd, BLM Plaza and the Monumentalization of Divided American Urban Landscapes’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, pp. 1–11. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1795980. Small, C. (1998) Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Sora, A. (2019) ‘Carpenter Brut and the Instrumental Synthwave Persona’, in Braae, N. and Hansen, K. A. (eds) Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 143–163. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_8.
Conclusion 171 Taylor Swift (2014) ‘Shake It Off ’, 1989. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/ track/0cqRj7pUJDkTCEsJkx8snD (Accessed: 7 March 2020). Tobe Nwigwe (2020) ‘TOBE NWIGWE | I NEED YOU TO (BREONNA TAYLOR)’, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCzxWZVrtDc (Accessed: 12 August 2020). Travis, R. (2016) The Healing Power of Hip Hop. Santa Barbara and Denver: Praeger. Varas-Díaz, N. and Scott, N. (eds) (2016) Heavy Metal Music and the Communal Experience. Lanham: Lexington Books. Von Appen, R. (2017) ‘A Re-encounter with the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change”: Why I Couldn’t Stand It Then—What I Learn from Analysing It Now’, in Ahlers, M. and Jacke, C. (eds) Perspectives on German Popular Music. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 88–93. Von Appen, R. et al. (eds) (2015) Song Interpretation in 21st-Century Pop Music. Surrey: Ashgate. Weinstein, D. (2000) Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. Revised edn. Chicago: Da Capo Press.
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics and bold refer to refer to figures and tables; and Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. Adams, R. 141 ad-libs 4, 54, 97, 106, 107, 118 Adorno, T. 68 affordance 10–12, 23, 25, 30–35, 44, 45, 49, 53, 57, 81, 87, 96, 99, 105, 107, 110, 114, 116–118, 120n18, 134, 137, 139, 140, 145, 147, 150, 156, 159, 164, 165, 166, 168n2 Aiyer, S. M. 103 Alim, H. S. 96 All That Remains:“Indictment” 134–137, 135, 157 Ambrose, J. 96 analysis of music 3, 10, 42, 158, 160 Anderson, B. 95 Anderson, C. 50 Animals As Leaders 112, 120n15 Ansdell, G. 9 Anthrax:“I’m The Man” 86 Apple iPod 3 approach/inhibition theory 12, 42–44, 46, 49, 50, 52, 57, 144, 156 approach-oriented behaviour 47, 52, 67, 71, 73, 74, 79, 96, 97, 135, 138, 144, 145, 149, 158, 161, 164, 166, 167 artist visibility 6 asylum 68 audience 6, 14n2, 20, 60n8, 69, 84, 86, 93, 110, 113, 114, 116, 117, 146, 166 Auslander, P. 60n3 authenticity 45, 114, 138 Avenged Sevenfold 6;“Afterlife” 79–82, 168n2 The Axis of Awesome:“Four Chords” 119n5
backmasking 7, 15n14, 109 Barthes, R. 20 Batliwala, S. 129, 131 Bauman, Z. 93 Baym, N. 115 behavioral inhibition system 43 behaviour 2, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 21, 53, 56, 60n2, 72, 79, 80, 84, 98, 109, 112, 134, 147, 156, 157, 160; approachinhibition 44, 46, 57, 150; approachoriented 47, 52, 67, 71, 73, 74, 79, 96, 97, 135, 138, 144, 145, 149, 158, 161, 164, 166, 167; goal-directed 161; power and 42–44; reward 42; safety 88n3; threat 42 Bell, B. G. 35n4 Bennett, A. 110–111 Bennett, L. 119n10, 119n11 Berger, H. M. 15n20, 69, 94–95, 119n11 Bergh,A. 7, 9 Berry, P.A. 41 Billboard: Hot 100 chart 11 black feminist theory 140, 141 Bloomfield, B. P. 35n4 boasting 41 body 1, 20–23, 25, 26, 28, 42, 46, 68, 72, 73, 76, 84, 85, 87, 97, 99, 102, 103, 113, 118, 128, 134, 145, 150, 156, 167, 168n5; embodiment 26–28, 30, 32, 34, 36n10; as pressurized container 70 Bogazianos, D.A. 119n9 Bombari, D. 49 Bones: “BringMeToLife” 60n11 Bonnette, L. M. 11, 60n8, 68 Bowman, S.W. 105, 119n7
174 Index Braae, N. 15n17 braggadocio 41 Bramwell, R. 5, 68–69, 119n11 breakdancing 3 Britney Spears “…Baby One More Time” 14n2 Brockhampton: “ALASKA” 116; American Boyband 115; “BOOGIE” 114; “CANNON” 120n18; GINGER 117; “GOLD” 120n20; “GUMMY” 116, 117;“HEAT” 60n11; iridescence 117;“JUNKY” 120n20; online fandom of 113–117; SATURATION I 113; SATURATION II 113; SATURATION III 113, 114; Saturation Season 114–115;“STAR” 120n20 Brown,A. R. 88n4 Bulb 111; see also Mansoor, M. Burton, J. 106 Byrne, D. 67 Calvès,A.-E. 129, 130 Cavicchi, D. 115 CCCS see Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) censorship 2, 14n4, 133 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 93 Chance the Rapper 6, 150, 151n6; “Angels (Feat. Saba)” 137–140, 159 Chapman, D. 98 Chemero,A. 26, 29–30 Chimp Spanner 120n12 Clarke, E. F. 10, 22, 24, 25, 30, 46 Clegg, J. 35n4 Cloonan, M. 8, 69 Cobb,W. J. 82 cognition: embodied 21, 26–32, 35n6, 36n10, 36n11, 50, 105, 156, 158; imitative 53; power and 12, 49–52 cognitive mapping 145 cognitive science 8, 21, 25, 26, 28–30, 35 cognitive unconscious 28, 29, 36n9, 50 Coldplay:“Clocks” 60n6 Collins, P. H. 132, 141, 142 community 13, 93; and empowerment 93–117; fandom and 109–117; imagined 95–97, 163; interestbased 95; online, of djent 111–113; psychologists 101, 102; psychology 13, 101–106, 103, 118, 138, 140, 142–144, 156; see also individual entries Community Music Therapy (Pavlicevic and Ansdell) 9
conceptual blending 27 conceptual metaphor 13, 26–28, 35, 35n7, 35n8, 56, 67, 70, 73, 83, 101, 106 Connell, J. 145 “conscientisation” approach 141 consumer 93, 130, 131 Cotte, J. 115 Cox, A. 53 Cradle of Filth:“Cthulhu Dawn” 147–149, 159 cross-domain mapping 27, 161 Dale, P. 168n3 Damasio, A. 29 A Day to Remember:“The Downfall of Us All” 99–101, 100, 118, 159 “Death of the Author” (Barthes) 20 DeCelles, K.A. 50 Deepak, A. 104, 104, 119n7 DeNora,T. 9, 21, 68, 160 digital 3, 6, 13, 24, 59n1, 75, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 120n21, 165–167, 169n11 DJ Khaled 41 djent, online music community of 111–113, 117, 120n14, 120n15 Djupvik, M. B. 98 Dokumaci, A. 35n4 Dolly Parton 34 Download Festival 113 Drake 6, 89n5;“Worst Behavior” 74–77, 76, 79, 85, 105, 159 Duckworth, A. 143 Dweck, C. 143 ecological awareness 104 ecological-embodied framework of listening to music 29–32, 46 ecological perception 21–26, 29–32, 35n4–6, 36n11, 156, 158 ecological psychology 10, 22, 23, 30, 102 ecological theory of musical meaning 30 effectivities 23 electronic dance music 5, 159, 160 Elligan, D.: Rap Therapy 68 Eluveitie:“Meet the Enemy” 107–109, 118 embodied cognition 21, 26–32, 35n6, 36n10, 36n11, 50, 105, 156, 158 embodied theory of language 29 empowerment 7–12, 15n11, 158–167; change 140–149; definitions, in community psychology 102, 103; as experiential process 1; liberating 131, 151n9; listening and 41–59, 96–99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109–111,
Index 115–118, 119n1, 119n10, 132–140; neoliberalisation of 133; politics of 128–132; of popular music communities 93–118; power and 141–143, 156; in rap and metal music listening, individual empowerment in 41–59; theory of 12; women’s 13, 129, 130, 132, 151n1 enactive perception 30 Ensiferum:“One Man Army” 51–52, 57, 105, 118, 157 Enter Shikari:“Destabilise” 160–164; “Pack of Thieves” 168n6 environment 1, 4, 5, 21–25, 30, 31, 35n10, 48–55, 59, 67, 70–73, 76, 80–82, 85, 87, 98, 99, 105, 106, 108, 115, 129, 131, 140, 144, 146, 149, 151n8, 151n11, 156, 161, 162, 166; communal 97; ecological 22; personic 4, 12, 14n10, 45–47, 57, 60n3, 74, 97, 104, 134, 135, 139, 148, 156–159; political 159; social 78, 83, 84, 95, 114, 141, 145; sociocultural 79; sociopolitical 103, 104, 138, 145; virtual 4, 45, 46, 55, 58, 70, 84, 97, 136, 138, 148, 157 ethnography 21, 29; digital 6 Euroblast 113 Everything Is Noise 120n15 experientialism, theory of 31 “experientialist” or “embodied realist” theory 28 exterospecific information 35n3 fandom 13, 156; of Brockhampton 113–117; and music communities 109–117 fantasy 13, 167; and resilience 77–84 Fauconnier, G. 27 Feldman, J.A. 29 Fellezs, K. 120n17 feminism 128, 131, 132, 151n3 Final Fantasy 111 Flores-González, N. 119n11 Ford, C. 34 Forman, M. 60n8 Frankfurt School 8 Freire, P. 141 Freud, S. 36n9 Frith, S. 3, 5, 46, 60n3, 120n13 Gabrielsson, A. 160 Galinsky,A. D. 50 Gamble, S. 15n17, 15n22, 119n4, 168n4 Genius 136
175
genre 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 13, 15n12, 44, 58, 67, 71, 78, 84, 86, 95, 96, 106, 110, 115, 120n15, 156, 158, 159 Gibson, C. 145 Gibson, E. J. 22, 31–32, 35n10 Gibsonian psychology 30–32 Gibsonian theory 22, 36n10 Gibson, J. J. 22 Gjerdingen, R. O. 34 goal-directed behaviour 161 Good Charlotte:“Hold On” 66 Gosa,T. L. 60n8 graffiti 3 Gramsci, A. 129 Green, L. 34 grit 143 growth mindset 143 Guinote, A. 49–50 Guthrie Govan 111 Gutiérrez, L. M. 103 Hacktivist:“Elevate” 86–88, 111 Halnon, K. B. 69, 73, 145 Hardcastle,V. G. 30 Hassan, N. 117 Hebdige, D. 93 Hesmondhalgh, D. 8, 94 Hill, R. 9, 79–80 hip-hop 2, 5, 41–42, 68–69, 82, 159; authenticity 138; communities 68, 95; elements of 3; empowerment in 95, 96, 98, 103–106, 114, 118, 119n9 Hip Hop Archive 2 Hodgetts, D. 119n11 Horesh, T. 68 Huq, R. 93, 119n11 Huron, D. 67 “hype man” 4, 161 Ice Cube:“It Was a Good Day” 14n2 ICE see Individual and Community Empowerment (ICE) framework identity 11, 15n18, 20, 29, 46, 84, 94–96, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 117, 119n2, 120n19, 128, 139, 143 image schemata 27–28, 31 imagined communities 95–97, 163 Individual and Community Empowerment (ICE) framework 13, 104, 110, 119n7, 119n8, 156 individualism 120n18, 131 Ingold, T. 35n8 International Phonetic Association 14n9 International Union for Conservation of Nature 151n1
176 Index interpretation 1, 4, 5, 10, 12, 24, 26, 29, 31, 33, 42, 44–46, 49, 52, 53, 55, 57, 69, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 84, 88, 89n8, 99–101, 104, 106, 110, 115, 119n9, 136–139, 141, 145, 146, 149, 156–159, 161, 163, 166 interrogative hermeneutics 10 interventionist 45 Iscoe, I. 101 Issues 113 Jared Dines 113 Jarman-Ivens, J. 120n18 Jay-Z 6;“Dirt Off Your Shoulder” 54–55, 54, 57, 58, 79, 157 Jeffries, M. P. 60n8, 159 Johnson, B. 8, 32, 69 Johnson, M. L. 26, 28, 30, 31, 36n9, 50 Kahn-Harris, K. 3, 94, 151n10 Kanye West 82, 116 Keltner, D. 43 Kendrick Lamar 6, 15n22;“HiiiPoWeR” 146–147, 150;“i” 46; To Pimp A Butterfly 46; “u” 46 Kevin Abstract 114–116 Kim, J. 50 King, J. 98–99 The Kinks:“You Really Got Me” 60n10 Kitwana, B. 151n7 KoЯn 6;“Here to Stay” 70–74, 72, 77, 85, 168n2 Krims,A. 3, 15n12, 78, 96 Kundu, A. 143 Lakoff, G. 26, 28, 31, 36n9, 36n10, 50 Larson, S. 30 Lee, M. R. 14n2 Leman, M. 157 LeVan, M. 134 Lex Luger 106 liberating empowerment 131, 151n9 listening to music 4, 8, 9, 13, 20–35, 128, 156; ecological-embodied framework of 29–32; ecological perception of 22–25; embodied cognition and 26–29; and empowerment 41–59, 96–99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109–111, 115–118, 119n1, 119n10, 132–140; regression of 68; resilience and 66–88; style of 32–34 Little Simz:“Bars Simzson” 47–49, 48, 54, 57, 89n6, 157 Lizzo 110
Lucas, C. 119n11 Ludacris: “Move Bitch (Feat. Mystikal and I-20)” 11 Lui, N. 110 McGee, R. 133–134 McRobbie,A. 131, 151n3 Maffesoli, M. 93 Mansoor, M. 111, 112; see also Bulb Marrington, M. 120n14 Martin, R. 120n14, 151n4 Mattias Eklundh 111 mentalising 12, 42, 52, 53, 60n7, 74, 75, 79, 98, 110, 116, 150, 156, 163 Merleau-Ponty, M. 36n11 Meshuggah 111, 112: Destroy, Erase, Improve 111 metal music 1–7, 11, 12, 20, 160; and cognitive mapping 145; and empowerment 41–59, 93–118; as a lifeline 66–88; presumption of authenticity 45; style of 33; see also individual entries Michaels, C. F. 23, 30 Mikael de Médici 113 mirroring 12, 42, 52, 53, 72, 74, 75, 79, 98, 110, 116, 138, 144, 150, 156, 163 mirror mix 4 Missy Elliott. 6, 118;“Get Ur Freak On” 97–99, 118 Mondros, J. B. 140–141 Monuments 113 Moore,A. F. 3, 4, 7, 10, 14n5, 14n10, 25, 29, 30, 32, 45, 53, 77, 78, 120n14, 151n4 Morris, M. 145 Motley Crüe 41 music: communities (see community); as a lifeline 66–88; experience of 21, 30–35; psychology 26; and resilience 67–77; style 4, 32–34, 94, 151n8, 156; see also individual entries musical mimesis 53 Necro:“Push It to the Limit (feat. Jamey Jasta)” 58–59 Neocleous, M. 133 neoliberalisation of empowerment 133 neo-tribes 93 neurodiversity 60n7 neuromania 29 neuropsychology 12, 43, 52, 53, 167 Nickelodeon 117 Nielson, E. 60n8
Index Noë, A. 30 The Notorious B.I.G.:“Mo Money Mo Problems (Feat. Puff Daddy and Mase)” 75 Obama, B. 60n8 Orford, J. 102 Ossei-Owusu, S. 60n8 otherness 84, 97, 114, 115, 117 Overell, R. 79, 119n11 Palatinus, Z. 30 Parents’ Music Resource Center 2 Patterson, J. 145 Pavlicevic, M. 9 perception 4, 9–11, 20, 33–35, 36n10, 42, 44, 45, 53, 105; ecological 21–26, 29–32, 35n4–6, 36n11, 156, 158; enactive 30; self-perception 12, 50, 55, 74, 104, 141, 144 perceptual learning 23; theory of 31–32 Periphery 113, 120n12, 120n15; Periphery 111; “Zyglrox” 112; see also Bulb; Mansoor, M. Perkins, D. D. 103, 142 Perrott, D. 34 persona 4, 5, 42, 45, 46, 49, 53, 54, 73, 75, 77–78, 80–82, 85, 89n5, 98, 116, 156– 158, 167; instrumental 112; multiply constructed 45; non-vocal 106–107; performance 60n3; vocal 60n3, 108 personal sense of power 12, 42, 50–53, 55–58, 67, 71, 72, 81, 93, 97, 98, 104, 112, 116, 138, 140, 141, 144–146, 148–150, 156, 158, 166, 167; theory of 12 personic environment 4, 12, 14n10, 45–47, 57, 60n3, 74, 97, 104, 134, 135, 139, 148, 156–159 Pettit, J. 133–134 Philip Labonte 137, 151n5 Phillipov, M. 15n19, 151n10 Pick,A. D. 32 Pieslak, J. 105 Pillsbury, G. 151n10 P.O.D. 79;“Alive” 55–58, 56, 157 politics of empowerment 128–132 Polyphia 113 popular music harmony, theory of 5 post-feminism 131, 132 post-subcultural 93 power 6–8; and behaviour 42–44; and cognition 12, 49–52; and empowerment 141–143, 156; material
177
conditions of 51; personal sense of 12, 42, 50–53, 55–58, 67, 71, 72, 81, 93, 97, 98, 104, 112, 116, 138, 140, 141, 144–146, 148–150, 156, 158, 166, 167; psychology and 7; transfer of 52–56 Prior, N. 10 “production of culture” approach 8 protagonist 45–49, 51, 52, 54, 56–59, 60n3, 72–75, 77–85, 87, 88, 96–98, 100, 101, 106–109, 118, 135, 136, 138–140, 147–149, 156–158, 160–162 pseudo-individualism 68 psychology: community 13, 101–106, 118, 138, 140, 142–144, 156; ecological 10, 22, 23, 30, 102; Gibsonian 30; music 26; neuropsychology 12, 43, 52, 53, 167; and power 7; social 35, 101 psychopathology 2 Purcell, N. J. 95 Puri, S. 79 Rage Against the Machine 86, 89n10, 134 rap music 1–7, 11, 12, 20, 157, 160; and empowerment 93–118; as a lifeline 66–88; listening, individual empowerment in 41–59; presumption of authenticity 45; style of 33; and violence 2; see also individual entries Rappaport, J. 101–102, 103, 119n6 rappers 4, 12, 41, 45, 47, 48, 76, 84–85, 87, 139, 159 rap vocals (MCing) 3 RCA Records 116 realism 13; and resilience 77–84 realness 45; see also authenticity Red Seas Fire 120n12 Reed, E. 35n3 R.E.M. 119n10 resilience 13, 96, 99, 104, 105, 114, 133, 143, 150, 156, 158, 159, 163, 167; and fantasy 77–84; listening for 66–88; music and 67–77; and realism 77–84 rhyme 14n9, 47, 54, 75, 76, 87, 139, 157, 161, 165 Richardson, A. 167 Riches, G. 96 Rob Scallion 113 Rogalski, J. 114 Rojek, C. 115, 119n1 Rollefson, J. G. 160 Rose,T. 7, 11–12, 95 Rudman, L.A. 14n2
178 Index Run-DMC:“Walk This Way (Feat. Aerosmith)” 86
subculture 13, 93, 94 subgenre 79
safety behaviour 88n3 Scarlxrd: “Heart Attack” 60n11 scene 93–95; definition of 94 scene 2, 6, 13, 68, 82, 92–95, 101, 106, 106, 109–113, 117, 119n11, 138, 144, 145, 156, 160 Schubert, T. W. 53 Scott, N. 160 self-advancement 131 self-esteem 44, 46, 49, 57, 58, 72, 80, 88, 89n11, 105, 128, 144, 150, 158 self-perception 12, 50, 55, 74, 104, 141, 144 semiotics 25 sense-making process 28, 32, 34 sevenstring.org 120n12 Sheets-Johnstone, M. 32 Shelvock, M. 120n14 SiKth 111 Sloboda, J. 9 Smith, P. K. 50 Snell, D. 96, 119n11 social awareness 13, 84, 140, 144, 145, 147, 156, 158 social change 7, 11, 13, 104, 128, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 156, 158, 163, 167 social justice 88, 95, 102, 129, 131, 132, 141, 142, 150, 168n6 social psychology 35, 101 SongMeanings 136, 137 Songs That Saved My Life 88n1 Sora,A. 120n13, 157 SoundClick 111 Spike Jonze 117 Spotify 169n12 Spracklen, K. 79 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 29 state of mind 42, 51, 52, 67, 73, 77, 82, 131, 134, 141, 142, 144, 150, 156, 167 Steve Vai 112 St-Laurent, M.-R. 119n11 Straw, W. 94 style: competence 4, 15n18, 34, 36n15, 71, 72, 82, 87, 96, 97, 148, 156, 158; familiarity 36n11; listening in 32–34; literacy 36n11; music 4, 33, 94, 151n8, 156
Tagg, P. 60n3 Talib Kweli:“Get By” 82–84, 83, 105, 146, 150, 159 Tallis, R. 29 Taylor Swift:“Shake It Off ” 159 Tesseract 120n15 Timbaland 98 Thomson, J. 111 threat behaviour 42 Tobe Nwigwe:“I NEED YOU TO (BREONNA TAYLOR)” 164–167, 169n11 Tolentino, J. 132 transfer of power 52–56 Travis, R. 13, 103–105, 103, 104, 119n7, 119n8, 145, 156 Turner, M. 27 turntablism (DJing) 3 UK Tech-Fest 113 Uskul,A. K. 50 Varas-Díaz, N. 119n11, 160 Varela, F. J. 30 virtual environment 4, 45, 46, 55, 58, 70, 84, 97, 136, 138, 148, 157 Waka Flocka Flame 118, 119n9;“Hard in Da Paint” 106–107, 168n2 Wallach, J. 95 Walser, R. 7, 12, 86, 105–106, 145, 151n10 Ways of Listening (Clarke) 22 Webb, P. 119n11 Weber, M. 129 Weinstein, D. 66 Widdows, H. 132, 142; Perfect Me 132 Williams, J. 9 Wilson, S. M. 140–141 Windsor, L. 25 women’s empowerment 13, 129, 130, 132, 151n1 youth 2, 66, 68, 69, 103, 105, 114 Yngwie Malmsteen 112 Zagorski-Thomas, S. 31 Zbikowski, L. M. 27, 30 Zimmerman, M. A. 103, 142