VLVL II: Schwermetall

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 * with bands from cali it's sometimes hard to tell which genre they wanna  
 nourish but here, in "vineland" (p. 20), we're told that the combo isaiah 2:4  
 ("and he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they 
 shall beat their swords into plowshares, and the spears into prunninghooks: 
 nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war 
 anymore") plays in, Billy Barf and the Vomitones, is a "heavy-metal band". one 
 can assume that this also goes for "Holocaust Pixels" (384), mentioned on the  
 novel's last page but one. zoyd feels uneasy about the 'glorification of  
 violence' many observers tend to attribute to heavy-metal music. myself i  
 actually don't know much about this genre but i read large parts of robert  
 walser's "Running with the Devil. power, gender, and madness in heavy metal  
 music" (hanover, new england 1993: wesleyan university press) and want to share 
 some passages (pp. 144f, 161f) with you:

 "all of these critics share the notion that heavy metal is bad because it is 
 perverse deviance in the midst of a successfully functioning society. they 
 ascribe much too much importance to a transhistorical notion of 'adolescence', 
 which allows them to overlook the specific forms that culture takes in 
 particular circumstances of power and pain. they believe that insisting that 
 'healthy minds don't think negative thoughts' will make people overlook the 
 devastation caused by deindustrialization and disastrous social policies. they 
 imagine that fans are passive, unable to resist the pernicious messsages of 
 heavy metal, and thus they themselves commit the sort of dehumanization they 
 ascribe to popular culture. they make fans into dupes without agency or 
 subjectivity, without social experiences and perceptions that might inform 
 their interactions with mass-mediated texts. and they portray heavy metal 
 musicians as 'outside agitators', just as social authorities tried to blame 
 civil rights violence on communist troublemaking, as though poverty, 
 joblessness and police brutality weren't sufficient explanation. but heavy 
 metal exists not in a world that would be fine if it were not marred by 
 degraded culture, but in a world disjointed by inequity and injustice.

  in his 1987 movie, THE HIDDEN, director jack sholder satirized such portrayals 
 of the horrific effects of heavy metal. the back of the video-cassette release 
 summarizes the plot: 'a demonic extraterrestrial creature is invading the 
 bodies of innocent victims -- and transforming them into inhuman killers with 
 an unearthly fondness for heavy metal music, red ferraris and unspeakable 
 violence'. THE HIDDEN replicates precisely the understanding of heavy metal 
 promoted by its harshest critics, linking metal with violence, and depicting it 
 as a threat coming from elsewhere, with no connection to this world, working 
 its evils on helpless, innocent victims. the arguments of critics like gore, 
 stuessy, and raschke depend upon denying fans subjectivity or social agency so 
 that they can be cast as victims who can be protected through censorship. by 
 depicting fans as 'youth', an ideological category that lifts them out of 
 society and history, these critics manage to avoid having to provide any 
 explanation of why fans are attracted to the specific sounds, images, and 
 lyrics of heavy metal."  (...)

 "the heavy metal audience is part of the first american generation that will be 
 worth off economically than its parents. many young people have accepted 
 relative affluence as normative, yet society has no real role for its young, 
 and their chances of attaining affluence in the future are fading (...) much of 
 the blame is rightly placed on the disastrous social policies of reaganism, but 
 the 1960s had already seen the greatest wave of mergers, conglomeration, and 
 transnationalization ever, and the first effects of the domination of the 
 economy by large corporations were felt in the 1970s. from their peak in 1973, 
 overall real wages had fallen more than 16 percent by 1990. the 1980s were the 
 first time that 'a middle-level income no longer guranteed what we have come to 
 think of as a middle-class lifestyle'.

  heavy metal is, among other things, a way of articulating and sustaining 
 individual and communal identities that can survive such strains. critics and 
 outsiders like 'u.s news and world report' continue to prattle that the 
 'primary theme' of metal is nihilism, but heavy metal is rarely nihilistic. 
 nihilism is frightening because it undermines the myths that sustain social 
 order and struggle alike; it may serve to invite or justify authoritarian 
 repression by making the world seem irrational. heavy metal, on the contrary, 
 is nearly always concerned with making sense of the world. if it offers 
 opportunities for expressing individual rage, it is largely devoted to creating 
 communal bonds that will help fans weather the strains of modernity. fans rely 
 on an alignment with that which is 'other' but powerful as a way of making 
 sense of their own situation and compensating for it. heavy metal explores the 
 'other', everything that hegemonic society does not want to acknowledge, the 
 dark side of the daylit, enlightened adult world. by doing so it finds 
 distinction in scandalous transgression and appropriates sources of communal 
 empowerment. heavy metal cannot be simply dismissed as alien and aberrant; the 
 meaningsfulness of images of horror, madness, and violence in heavy metal is 
 intimately related to the fundamental contradictions of its historical moment."


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