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

Stephen S. Hudson

Music Theory Spectrum, Volume 44, Issue 1, Spring 2022, Pages 121–140, https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtab014

Published: 28 November 2021

Abstract

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.

Here’s a link to this article on my Academia.edu page.

Standard access link: https://academic.oup.com/mts/article-abstract/44/1/121/6445145

Access for free, for personal research use only [unfortunately the link has been taken down]

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:

https://link.growkudos.com/1rzir0c8su8

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.

Here’s the video:

Here’s the handout: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-KA8FHqIXOrr8THEBwjXoXwEGP0dSHCP/view?usp=sharing

In my article “Compound AABA Form and Style Distinction in Heavy Metal,” which was just published in Music Theory Online 27.1, I make the argument that metal music has a normative, default song form, that is used in the overwhelming majority of songs in the genre’s historical core styles.

This form is called “compound AABA.” “Compound” means that each A has several sections, usually including Verse and Chorus. After two As (or two Verse-Chorus cycles, if you want to think about it that way), there is usually a contrasting “B” section, which in metal and hard rock often has a guitar solo.

While many people (see the article) argue that what separates metal from pop music is that metal doesn’t have any formulaic conventions, that simply isn’t true. That isn’t to say that metal bands aren’t highly creative with their song forms; but many of them do creative things while clearly still participating in this convention of compound AABA form.

One song that draws on this convention in a unique way is Iron Maiden’s “Transylvania,” from their debut album Iron Maiden (1980). Iron Maiden wrote some of the most variable and creative song forms of any metal artist from the early 1980s. But this one song in particular features a compound AABA form that hardly departs from the convention at all. The twist? There are no vocals, so you might have missed the “Verse” and “Chorus” structure.

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My first academic article was just published! It’s been years in the making and I’m quite proud of it. 🙂

This article is meant to be a theory of form for metal music (and most kinds of heavy rock) that represents the norms in the genre, to enable other scholars can make more clearly-grounded evidence-based statements about the innovations of individual bands, or the unique properties of specific songs.

It’s been published at the open-access music theory journal Music Theory Online. Here’s the abstract and Example 1, which is a “map” of compound AABA form; the two of these are hopefully a good summary of the article.

https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.1/mto.21.27.1.hudson.html

Here’s a link to this article on my Academia.edu page.

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“How Much Math is in Math Rock? Riffs, Progressive Rhythm, and Embodied Music Theory” is a paper I presented at the Society for Music Theory conference in November 2020. SMT happened to be an online-only conference because of COVID-19, so I had to record a video version of my talk to post online. Normally I wouldn’t bother posting about a conference paper, but since I already have a video recording and everything, I thought I might as well put it up here!

You can view the 20-minute video here. Also, here’s a copy of the slides if you want to scrutinize the examples.

I’ll be presenting the next stage of this project at the PROGECT 2021 conference, which is also scheduled to be online. Feel free to email me if you’re interested in a copy of that talk. s s hudson at u dot northwestern dot edu.

Abstract:

This paper explores embodied experiences of “metrical constructedness” (Macan 1997), using a new theoretical tool called “motional conceptual models” to analyze the motion experienced in progressive rock’s riffs. Prog rock/metal is often associated with “mathematical” complexity of odd time signatures and polyrhythms. But this complexity rhetoric leaves some mysteries, including: the use of such rhythms by non-prog bands; or Meshuggah’s claim that “there is no mathematical approach” in their music; or online arguments about whether Metallica’s …And Justice For All (AJFA, 1988) is “prog-influenced,” when the album is mostly in duple meter and contains few polyrhythms.

Riffs are not just sequences of notes, but motions experienced by performers and listeners (Fast 2001). My “motional conceptual models” represent one experience of a riff’s motion, framing that shape as a prototype category to explain how it can be recognized despite variations (see “conceptual models,” Zbikowski 2002). These “motional conceptual models” show how manipulations of riffs can lead to manipulated perceived motion—providing a unified theory for “ABAC Additive Metrical Process” in Dream Theater (McCandless 2013), truncated riffs by Meshuggah (Pieslak 2007), Meshuggah riffs that begin “in media res” (Lucas 2018), and riff fragmentations I observe in Metallica’s AJFA. Changes in riff shape can thus be perceived as interrupting the normal looping of meter, and this impression of artificial intervention is one possible explanation for Macan’s “constructedness.” This embodied cognition approach to riffs also demonstrates how it is possible to write rhythmically “progressive” rock and metal rhythms by feel, with no math required.

Slipknot is not a safe pick for a blog about metal. Lots of aging Gen X metalheads have hated Slipknot since the day it was created and refused to accept it into the fold. Why? mumble mumble “it doesn’t sound like metal” mumble mumble “the masks are a gimmick.” Well, you got me on the second one. The masks sure are a gimmick—but metal has always been full of gimmicks. Kiss’s make-up and secrete identities were a gimmick. Twisted Sister’s cross-dressing getup was a gimmick. Yngwie Malmsteen’s gorgeous curls and bundles of bangles and self-comparison to virtuoso violinist Niccolo Paganini is a gimmick. GWAR’s insane latex alien costumes are DEFINITELY a gimmick. And if you want to get really meta about it, Metallica’s no-makeup denim-‘n’-leather longhair image is also a gimmick, in a way.

But the first one isn’t true: Slipknot sounds like metal. Or at least, for listeners who don’t throw a fit and refuse to listen, Slipknot’s music does all the same things that metal does for you, and does them in spades.

If Slipknot were just another metal/metal-adjacent band, there wouldn’t be much of a story. Some think it’s metal, some don’t; you say tomayto, I say tomahto. We’ve all heard that before, a hundred or a thousand times.

But there’s something more to it than just a squabble over genre boundaries: Slipknot’s best songs are true neck-wreckers. Simply put, Slipknot is one of the heaviest bands of the late twentieth century, whether you like them or not. So why are Slipknot songs such bangers?

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Part of a series “Metal Monoliths” about epically long metal songs.

As I’ve written in an article forthcoming in the journal Music Theory Online (( This article will be published at the end March 2021. Portions of this blog post appear in that article. )), metal songs often follow a pretty simple formula—as James Hetfield once said, “verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight and then out.” (( Kitts, Jeff.  “Cover Story,” Guitar World, December 1998, 54-62, 98-104. Cited by Raymond Aglugub in his 2007 Master’s Thesis. )) John Covach calls this “compound AABA form” (( Covach, John. 2005. “Form in Rock Music: A Primer.” Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis. Oxford University Press, pp. 65-76.)), where each of the As is a verse/chorus pair, and the B is some kind of contrasting section like the “middle eight.” This form is usually pretty easy to follow—you can find it on almost every track from any classic 80s album, like the most famous albums by Metallica, AC/DC, or Judas Priest.

But what happens when you stretch this formula out over a much longer time scale? Aaron Van Valkenburg wrote in his Master’s Thesis from 2010 about how Metallica expands this verse/chorus-based form by stuffing it with extra riffs in unexpected places, pushing towards longer and longer songs over their first four albums. Van Valkenburg says about perceiving large-scale AABA:

Metallica’s song structures are much more elaborate than most pop songs primarily because of their use of extended introductions, transitions, and instrumental solos (lead breaks). Nevertheless, Metallica’s music strives to subordinate these elaborations within a hierarchical system that highlights the verse-chorus rotation. This allows the listener to trace in his or her mind the large-scale progression inherent in the AABA structure.

(Van Valkenburg 2010, p. 30)

I found one even longer AABA song but it’s a bit harder to follow: “Suite Sister Mary” by Queensrÿche. And arguably, the AABA structure here is harder to keep in mind here—partly because of the evolving and shifting and progressive way in which Queensrÿche uses this form, and partly because it’s just so damn long.

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If you run any kind of internet website related to metal, you occasionally get cool emails from folks around the world. Recently I heard from a guy named Brian Straight, who in the early 1990s formed a death metal band called “Witch-Hunt” based out of Richmond, VA. A small label called Lost Apparitions Records has just published a retrospective of their underground recordings. The same week as I heard from Brian, I had just moved to Richmond, VA to start a job teaching music theory at the University of Richmond. Too good of a coincidence to pass up!

Witch-Hunt’s songs have a unique brand of melancholic aggression. The band’s guitar and vocal tone could be compared to demos and early albums by Nihilist/Entombed or Mayhem, but they have a somber restrained utterly beyond either of these. This gives the songs a sort of timeless feel that is reinforced by the lyrics and some of the synthesizer intros. I don’t know how this eternal quality was received when Witch-Hunt’s recordings were first made 20 or more years ago—but listening to this release in the present is an awesome experience. It’s a bit like picking up some gruesome obsolete weapon in a forgotten corner, blowing off the dust, and finding out that it’s still finger-splitting sharp.

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