I grew up in the blisteringly hot summers of California’s central valley. I spent lots of those scorching summer days playing computer games and listening to the radio at a friend’s house, listening Sacramento’s “98 Rock” radio station back when a whole range of music from Disturbed, Metallica, and the Deftones, to all sorts of cool small-time punk bands, were snuck in between the Pearl Jam clones by a person called the “radio announcer” (explanation for the young kids: the announcer was a real live human being who would put CDs into slots, ramble about random stuff, tell some dumb joke that you’d repeat twenty times the next day at school, and then eventually say the names of the songs out loud. In the good old days, that was the only way anyone ever knew what a song was called).
I also had a super cool, open-minded cello teacher who taught me to play arrangements of songs by the Finnish cello-metal band Apocalyptica. When I was 13 I bought my first record, Toxicity by System of a Down, and in ninth grade a friend burned me a copy of (erm, “loaned”) Metallica’s Ride the Lightning, and I’ve been up to no good ever since.
One day a couple of years later, my father walked up with a copy of either the Sex Pistols’s Pretty Vacant or the Dead Kennedys’ Live at the Deaf Club (I can’t remember—maybe he did this twice), and he said “Hey kid, I was a punk before you were a punk” in a gravelly voice, then walked away laughing at the blank look on my face because at the tender age of 15 I had never heard of these bands. Dad was never a punk, that wasn’t the point. He was just being funny. But it got me thinking of authenticity and genre categories and posturing as things people created rather than absolute truths, thinking of bands as participants in a scene and history more than just an album cover or an awesome ruckus, and wondering about where it all comes from and where it’s all headed.
I went to study music at UC Davis, and kept writing term papers about metal music when the class was supposed to be about something else (like 19th-century music history). But my fate was really sealed when I was accepted to graduate school on the strength of a couple of papers about Scandinavian metal scenes. I got my PhD in Music Theory & Cognition from Northwestern University, taught for a few years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, and now I’m living in Los Angeles and teaching at Occidental College.
Metal In Theory is, in theory, a blog about music theory in metal. But as Steve Waksman has demonstrated powerfully in his book This Ain’t The Summer of Love, metal is interconnected with all kinds of heavy music — including hard rock, punk, blues, stadium rock, alternative, and grunge. Coming to terms with metal music means looking at it in relation to other kinds of heavy music, looking at the musical differences that separate out this whole range of guitar bands and the similarities that hold them all together, and the goal of this blog is to do exactly that.
Email me at sshudson@u.northwestern.edu.