several influential denunciations of heavy metal—by Tipper Gore, Joe Stuessy, and others—and propose what I consider more sophisticated explanations of the violent aspects of some metal. My task throughout this book has been to work toward such explanations, and my method is to examine carefully the sounds and images of heavy metal, take seriously fans’ statements and activities, and situate metal as an integral part of a social context that is complex, conflicted, and inequitable. This chapter has explored the interests and tensions that have defined “heavy metal” as a genre with a history. In it, I have taken a functional approach to the study of metal, stressing the ways that genres are constituted through social contestation and transformation. The following chapter takes a more structural tack, investigating the specific musical characteristics that underpin heavy metal as a discourse.
CHAPTER TWO
Beyond the Vocals
Toward the Analysis of Popular Musical Discourses
*
Beyond the vocals, it’s the way a guitar makes you feel when someone hits a particular chord, the way a snare drum is cracked.
—Rob Halford of Judas Priest.1
When asked if he thought his mother would approve of his band’s lyrics, guitarist Eddie Van Halen replied that he had no idea of what the lyrics were.2 Many people talk about the “meaning” of a song when what they are really discussing is only the song’s lyrics. But verbal meanings are only a fraction of whatever it is that makes musicians and fans respond to and care about popular music. This chapter is a prelude to the musical aspects of the chapters that follow, where heavy metal songs will be analyzed within the context of social practices and ideologies. It is also meant as a contribution to an underdeveloped strain in academic work on popular culture: analysis of the music of popular music, in which discussion is grounded in the history and significance of actual musical details and structures, “beyond the vocals.” Specifically, it sketches a view of metal as a discourse by analyzing the signifying practices that constitute heavy metal music. But first a more general argument must be advanced: that musical details can be evaluated in relation to interlocked systems of changing practices and that shifting codes constitute the musical discourses that underpin genres.
This chapter has three parts: It begins with discussion of some theoretical bases for the analysis of musical meaning in popular music; then it proceeds to analyze certain generic features of heavy metal and related musical styles, with reference to a single example, a song by Van Halen; finally, a more integrated analysis of that same piece of music appears, as a way of connecting musical details with genetically organized social experience.
Genre and Discourse
Nowhere are genre boundaries more fluid than in popular music. Just as it is impossible to point to a perfectly exemplary Haydn symphony, one that fulfills the “norms” in every respect, pieces within a popular genre rarely correspond slavishly to generic criteria. Moreover, musicians are ceaselessly creating new fusions and extensions of popular genres. Yet musical structures and experiences are intelligible only with respect to these historically developing discursive systems. As Fredric Jameson argues,
pure textual exemplifications of a single genre do not exist; and this, not merely because pure manifestations of anything are rare, but … because texts always come into being at the intersection of several genres and emerge from the tensions in the latter’s multiple force fields. This discovery does not, however, mean the collapse of genre criticism but rather its renewal: we need the specification of the individual “genres” today more than ever, not in order to drop specimens into the box bearing those labels, but rather to map our coordinates on the basis of those fixed stars and to triangulate this specific given textual moment.3
Jameson reminds us that genre categories are fluid and that individual texts are never static fulfillments of conventional norms but rather are understood with reference to other texts.
Yet Jameson’s concept of genre seems to operate only at the level of texts. We can profitably add to his model Bakhtin’s idea of genre as a “horizon of expectations” brought to bear on texts by historically situated readers. Genres are never sui generis; they are developed, sustained, and reformed by people, who bring a variety of histories and interests to their encounters with generic texts. The texts themselves, as they are produced by such historically specific individuals, come to reflect the multiplicities of social existence: in Bakhtin’s view, language is irreducibly “heteroglot,” and dialogue takes place not only between genres, as Jameson points out, but also within them. Bakhtin contrasts formalistic genre categories with what he calls “speech genres,” relatively stable types of utterance. “Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication.”4 Thus, we might say that a C major chord has no intrinsic meaning; rather, it can signify in different ways in different discourses, where it is contextualized by other signifiers, its own history as a signifier, and the social activities in which the discourse participates.
Simon Frith has recently called for renewed genre analysis of popular music, at the same time that he has asserted that “we still do not know nearly enough about the musical language of pop and rock: rock critics still avoid technical analysis, while sympathetic musicologists, like Wilfrid Mellers, use tools that can only cope with pop’s nonintentional (and thus least significant) qualities.”5 These two needs are connected, for delineating musical parameters may be the best way to distinguish genres, and genre conventions, in turn, can help us to place the significance of musical details. The challenge is to analyze signification dialectically, working between the levels of specific details and generic categories toward social meanings.
Heavy metal seems particularly appropriate terrain for such methods. As it has gained in popularity, metal has grown in stylistic innovation and pluralism. The term “heavy metal” is now used to designate a great variety of musical practices and ideological stances. Moreover, metal has contributed to the development of many discursive “fusions”: metal-influenced pop, rock, rap, funk, and so on. But as Jameson argues, the proliferation of styles within a genre and the concomitant lessened capacity of the norms to explain divergent practices do not mean that genre is no longer a fruitful analytical category. On the contrary, the recent expansion and diversification of heavy metal musical practices and their audiences make it all the more imperative to map the norms that make such fusions and transformations intelligible.6
The analytical notion of discourse enables us to pursue an integrated investigation of musical and social aspects of popular music.7 By approaching musical genres as discourses, it is possible to specify not only certain formal characteristics of genres but also a range of understandings shared among musicians and fans concerning the interpretation of those characteristics. The concept of discourse enables us to theorize beyond the artificial division of “material reality” and consciousness. Discourses are constituted by conventions of practice and interpretation, and, as John Fiske puts it, “Conventions are the structural elements of genre that are shared between producers and audiences. They embody the crucial ideological concerns of the time in which they are popular and are central to the pleasures a genre offers its audience.” Genre, then, is “a means of constructing both the audience and the reading subject: its work in the economic domain is paralleled by its work in the domain of culture; that is, its work in influencing which meanings … are preferred by, or proffered to, which audiences.”8
Traditionally, only language has been thought to be discursive. But recent usage has opened up the concept of discourse to refer to any socially produced way of thinking or communicating. The literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has analyzed the relationship of genre and discourse in a way that helps clarify the relevance of these terms to music.9
