I was recently invited by the music department of UC Riverside to give a distinguished lecture as part of their Florence Bayz lecture/concert series. The talk I gave, on December 6, 2023, drew on two chapters of my ongoing book project, titled Heaviness in Metal Music, which is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. I’m posting the abstract below for anyone who is interested in getting a preview of what I’m working on!
The parts of this talk that were about headbanging are an expanded version of one of my first conference papers, and I’ve got an article version of this chapter in the works that I hope to be able to announce soon.
“Headbanging and Heaviness in Metal Music, and their Origins in ‘White Blues’ (Mis)Understandings of Blackness”
Abstract
Metal’s roots in the blues are often invoked at the beginning of genre histories, but this invocation often seems to isolate Blackness in a separated past. I argue, however, that heavy metal’s initial and present conditions are shaped by White (mis)understandings of Blackness, with continuing legacies including two central aesthetic practices, heaviness and headbanging.
I’m happy to announce that my latest article “Song Form and Storytelling in Mainstream Metal” has just been published by Metal Music Studies! I’m especially proud of this publication because I think it represents some of my most vivid and accessible writing to date. It’s also the first time I’ve contributed my original research to Metal Music Studies, although I’ve written one or two reviews there before.
I was listening to a Spotify-generated power metal playlist recently, and a song by the Italian band Temperance made me do a double take. And by double take, I mean, imagine me snorting my drink out of my nose, making the widest eyes I can make, and saying to myself, “Did that really just happen? Holy shit.”
What was it that caught my attention? Nothing less than the most audaciously prolonged riff turnaround I think I’ve ever heard in my two decades of listening to metal music.
Some of you might ask, what’s a riff turnaround? And what difference does it make if one is long or short?
Some others of you might ask, what were you drinking? Did you really snort it out your nose? Did that hurt? I’m not answering those questions, but I will tell you what a riff turnaround is.
“The Rumbling” by SiM is the latest opening/credits song to the shockingly bloody hit anime Attack on Titan, and judging by its Spotify streaming numbers (65 million, and the song’s only been out for 8 months) it’s one of the most-listened-to metal songs of 2022. It’s the most brutal metal song I’ve ever heard used as the theme for a Japanese anime, which makes sense because the show is so unrelentingly violent.
It also has a flattened tonic (Do-flat or De in movable solfege), a note which isn’t supposed to exist.
Why Do-Flat Doesn’t Exist in Traditional Music Theory…
I’ve got to take a step back to explain what I mean by “a note which isn’t supposed to exist.” This note doesn’t exist in a classical music theory system called “solfege.” Solfege is a system where you label each note with a special syllable to track what role it plays in a song’s key or scale. ((This is a system called “movable-do” solfege. There is also a system of “fixed-do” solfege, in which C is always Do, and D is always Re, no matter what key you’re in.)) The home note of a scale, the note that the scale or key is named after, is called “Do.” So if a song is in F major, F is Do; if a song is in G major, G is Do. In a regular major scale, the next note above Do is Re, and the next is Mi, and so on.
On a more personal note, I’ll be back in California where I grew up, and where my parents still live. Which is pretty cool! Although I grew up in Northern California so I’m in for lots of new adventures learning about the south end of the state.
I’ll have some research news to share soon too! And, maybe, I’ll get around to writing a normal blog post again some day. 😎
One of my favorite views of Occidental College so far, from the top of nearby Fiji Hill
I’m thrilled to share my latest publication, a review of the book Making Sense of Recordings: How Cognitive Processing of Recorded Sound Works by Mads Walther-Hansen (Oxford University Press, 2020). This review appears in the open-access music theory journal Intégral vol. 35 (2022).
Below is an excerpt from the review that is especially relevant to metal and heavy rock music. Please click the link above to view my review in full (for free!).
[…]
For example, the cognitive metaphor for “Heavy” overlaps considerably with “Dark,” “Hard,” and “Rough.” While these are not identical metaphors, most instances of “Heavy” arguably also draw on one or more of the other three metaphors. Additionally, in Walther-Hansen’s definitions, these four cognitive metaphors share many overlapping entailments, as I’ve mapped out in Figure 1. For example, “Heavy,” “Hard,” and “Rough” sounds all entail apparent force or effort; “Heavy” and “Dark” sounds are both low in pitch; etc.
Figure 1. Four cognitive metaphors with their overlapping entailments. Top row: cognitive metaphors for sound quality; Bottom row: entailments / characteristics from other domains of experience. Based on Walther-Hansen’s encyclopedia definitions (Chapter 4). Dotted lines represent two additional entailments I added: rough sounds are often literally loud or imply loudness, and heaviness is often associated with badness or evil.
Additionally, a single metaphor like HEAVY operates in the background for a large network of related sound qualities with distinct connotations and associations, which often are not entirely represented within a single definition or term. Figure 2 takes a few of the large number of senses for HEAVY used within the metal genre, grouped into two categories by speed. The Heavy & Fast category is also closely related to another background metaphor, HARD. The broad metaphor of HEAVY could be described as a kind of schema which passes on many entailments (like size, weight, impact, etc.) to each of the more specific senses (such as brutal, thunderous, adrenalized, etc.). But many of these individual senses resonate with other metaphors as well, and those other metaphors could be viewed as schematic for these individual terms. For example, “funereal” could be described as a finer sense of both HEAVY and DARK. This network represents a diverse and multidimensional space of interrelated senses, which cannot be reduced to a single definition for HEAVY; for example, “funereal” and “adrenalized” are practically opposite in meaning, but both are senses of HEAVY which apply this metaphor in divergent ways to create their distinct qualities of physical impact.
Figure 2. Network of senses of the cognitive metaphor HEAVY. Square boxes contain cognitive metaphors. Shaded circles provide two distinct senses of “heavy” categorized by the characteristic of speed. Individual descriptive terms are in normal text. Dotted lines show that a term draws on a specific metaphor. Double-dashed line indicates that HEAVY and HARD are closely related metaphors; both metaphors are activated by the sense “Heavy & Fast.”
[…]
…for the rest of the review, please navigate to Integral’s website at the link above.
I’m thrilled to announce that my article about headbanging has just been published in the journal Music Theory Spectrum! Here are the details. You can access the article for free at the link at the end of this post.
Bang your Head: Construing Beat through Familiar Drum Patterns in Metal Music
This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding headbanging to metal music as an embodied practice of perception and offers several analyses to demonstrate how specific patterns serve as a common core of rhythmic patterning in the genre. Listeners express metal’s flexible rhythmic style through headbanging, creating experiences of heaviness and community. This motion brings felt beats into existence, guided by what I call “metering constructions,” familiar rhythmic/motional patterns that are both schematic knowledge of music and embodied practices of perception. I define metering constructions through theories of embodied meter and cognitive linguistics. Two constructions, the backbeat and the phrase-ending 332, are used throughout rock, but distinguished in metal by characteristic drum patterns and motional qualities. Headbangers thus create and perform their own beat interpretation, what I call a “patchwork quilt of recognized rhythms” stitched together in various orders and combinations—sometimes resembling regular isochronous meter, sometimes not.
If you are part of a university or other research institution, please consider asking your institution to subscribe to Music Theory Spectrum to support their continuing publication of cutting-edge music theory research, instead of using the free link! 🙂
My latest metal-related research is a short review article about Metallica’s 1991 self-titled album (aka. the “Black Album”) which has been published in the latest issue of the journal Metal Music Studies, vol. 7 no. 3.
This piece examines the impact that the Black Album has had over the last 31 years. Specifically, I look at how the Black Album inspired and influenced alternative metal music, and how images and ideas from the Black Album made their way into American alt-right politics/culture after the millennium.
Click the link below to read more about it and get a link to the article:
My latest conference paper traces the use of the b2 scale degree (like Db in the key of C) through 1980s extreme metal and industrial music, 1990s nu metal, and millennial blockbuster films like Queen of the Damned and The Matrix, before this line of influence finally crossed into mainstream pop music through songs like Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction” and Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack.” This paper was presented at the American Musicological Society national conference. You can watch the video version here, in full and for free: https://www.academia.edu/video/k7BNYl
Abstract:
Topic theory has evolved as a framework for studying communication and meaning in European classical music. Some scholarship has extended beyond this repertoire (ex. Echard 2017), but many conventional topics in popular music remain understudied. The music theorist Eron Smith has identified a b2-1 “hotness” topic in post-millenial pop, and traced the topic to long-standing orientalist stereotypes associating b2 with non-Western music. Some of Smith’s examples clearly resonate with orientalism, by combining the b2 with sitars or other timbral markers of foreignness. But many examples of the b2 “hotness” topic do not contain orientalist timbral markers.
I argue for another source: the ubiquitous use of b2 in extreme metal, gothic/industrial/EBM, and other pre-millennial underground music subcultures. Some post-millenial pop examples of the hotness topic, such as Justin Timberlake’s “Sexyback” (2006), imitate the distorted timbres of EBM exactly, rather than the orientalist “foreign” timbres. I trace the transmission of b2 into mainstream pop through millennial films that romanticized these subcultures and brought them to mainstream attention, like Queen of the Damned (2002) and The Matrix (1999), as well as late-90s moments when these underground styles crossed over into the mainstream, like electro house (ex. Benny Benassi “Satisfaction,” 2003) and nu metal (ex. Korn, whose singer Jonathan Davis composed songs for Queen of the Damned). What began as a pre-millennial performative icon of transgressive anti-mainstream aesthetics and ideology was sublimated into an indexical sign for edgy cool, then coopted and commodified as post-millennial sexiness.
This trajectory certainly does not replace the b2’s orientalist resonances, nor is it the only route of transmission to post-millennial pop (b2 is also common in trap music, for example). b2 “hotness,” like all topics, is not a static analytical symbol, but carries contingent, plural meanings that evolve over time as the topic is used by different communities and for different purposes. This demonstrates a crucial role for historical research as topic theory expands to popular genres, to understand how pop topics change, what they have signified, and for whom.
As promised, this is the sequel to my paper at SMT 2020! This second half is part of the Progect 2021 conference organized by Lori Burns at the University of Ottawa, which will be happening online May 18-29, 2021.
In this paper I show how Meshuggah’s style evolved gradually from more mainstream thrash metal and groove metal from the 1980s and early 1990s. Their famously complex rhythms are not a completely radical new thing in metal, but are a recursive recombination of existing riff techniques including overlay, syncopation, 332 rhythms, and camoflauged alterations. I also argue that part of why their rhythms have such a powerful effect is that most of us hear their music with ears trained on mainstream metal’s riff techniques.
