Filed under: Heavy metal, horror literature, Is this where I came from?, social theory | Tags: Carmilla, In the shadows, Mercyful Fate, Return of the vampire, Sheridan Le Fanu, Vampires
In this, the 15th, instalment of the Is this where I came from? series of posts, I look at one of the very first stories about vampirism in western literature, and one of the very first masterpieces by one of the most important European metal bands of all time. In this instance of intertextuality, I hypothesise that the opening line of Mercyful Fate‘s Return of the vampire has been inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu‘s vampire novella Carmilla.
Sheridan Le Fanu – Carmilla (1872)
Carmilla is a fantastic novella about vampires, written by Sheridan Le Fanu. It constitutes one of the foundational texts that constructed the vampire myth for English readers, alongside Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Carmilla has also been transferred to the screen, and its ‘seductive lesbian vampire’ theme underpins various Hammer horror films released in the early 1970s. My favourite of those, and the most loyal adaptation, is The vampire lovers (1970), staring the inimitable Ingrid Pitt. As far as vampire horror goes, this novella has some of the most nightmarish moments I have ever read. The descriptions of Carmilla’s nightly visits to Laura’s bedroom can evoke spine-chilling images. At the end of the story, Le Fanu establishes a direct link between ‘suicide’ and ‘vampires’, which I found very interesting as both things are central signifiers of the goth and emo subcultures. On the last page of the novella, the narrator (i.e. Laura) ponders about, and reveals, the origins of vampires: “How does it begin, and how does it multiply itself? I will tell you. A person, more or less wicked, puts an end to himself (sic). A suicide, under certain circumstances, becomes a vampire“.
Mercyful Fate – Return of the vampire (1981)
“Return of the vampire” is a brilliant song off Mercyful Fate’s third demo. The first time I heard it was not in its original version, but rather the re-imagining of the song on their comeback album In the shadows, from 1993, with Lars Ulrich guesting on drums. The opening words of the song are “A suicide, the birth of a vampire“. This line stuck in my head, yet, it had always been elusive; what does suicide have to do with vampires? It wasn’t until I read Carmilla that I got an answer to this question, as well as a potential intimation of why ‘vampires’ and ‘suicide’ coexist in the goth and emo subcultures. The rest of the song lyrics, albeit full of traditional vampire imagery (i.e. the vampire’s lair, flying in the night, blood-sucking, stake through the heart), do not allude to the Carmilla story.
Filed under: Greece, internet and music, popular music, social theory | Tags: Kin, Printers, song-lyrics, vinyl records, web 2.0, Xentrix
Over the years, I have experienced many albums as incomplete cultural artifacts. In previous posts (read here and here) I have discussed how that was the result of missing bonus songs. Another grievance I had as a young music fan was about albums that did not include the song-lyrics in the booklet or inner sleeve. So, when my friends and I accessed the internet for the first time in the mid-1990s, before the days of YouTube or peer-to-peer music sharing, we used it primarily to complement our music-listening practices, and music artifacts themselves, by finding and printing out song-lyrics. Printouts like the one pictured below reside inside many of my vinyl records.
I printed out the lyrics for Xentrix’s Kin at home on 2/3/1997.
In the pre-internet days, I would sit with my friends listening to songs over and over again trying to make out lyrics that were omitted from the booklets of albums. I remember once spending hours trying to decipher the lyrics from various songs off Hypocrisy‘s The fourth dimension (and we did a pretty good job in the end). The arrival of the internet changed that. On the one hand we gained easy access to lyrics that we didn’t have to struggle to decipher; on the other hand we abandoned some of our rituals of music-listening. Just like the internet and the printer replaced endless hours of compulsive listening and comparing notes in an effort to decipher lyrics, web 2.0 and smart-phones replaced the printer. Although I still do not own a smart-phone it’s fair to assume that printing out song-lyrics, now that in many socioeconomic contexts the internet has become ubiquitous, must be a thing of the past. Additionally, websites like Encyclopaedia Metallum, a massive database that is user-produced, has changed how I search for lyrics, not simply by making it easier, but also enriching it with other information about albums and artists.
What I describe above should not be read as a lament for the sacrifice of a more “authentic” music-based sociality on the altar of technology. Instead, these different periods represent different techno-social eras characterised by different actors (both human and non-human) interacting within different networks of social relations. Every new technology that replaces a ritual, introduces in turn new rituals which involve, to use Bruno Latour’s terms, delegations (tasks with which we endow the technology) and prescriptions (skills and knowledge that the technology requires from us). For each loss of a face-to-face social interaction we gain interaction (albeit a more opaque and reified one) with unseen millions on the internet. To quote Xentrix, “each phase of life, a new scenario”.
Filed under: Heavy metal, internet and music, people, social theory | Tags: Abuse, Blabbermouth, Castrator, Decapitated, Lita Ford, misogyny, no victim, terror managment theory, Tony Iommi
Whenever I read the comments section on Blabbermouth I increasingly find myself being terrified. Lately I’ve been following the news on Decapitated‘s trial (they’ve been accused of gang-raping a woman during their USA tour), and every time I end up being shocked by commenters who utterly discard the accounts of the woman who pressed charges. I would expect that given that none of the commenters were present in the situation, they would acknowledge that they cannot know what happened for sure. Moreover, given that male aggression is a trait widely encouraged in western societies, an aspiration, a status symbol for both boys and men, and a performance played out in metal concerts, football stadiums, and out in the streets, and violence against women is acknowledged not only in the reports of women’s organisations or feminist writers, but in wider popular culture (e.g. literature, film, music, porn), the news of a group of men who play a hyper-masculine type of music possibly raping a woman does not come as a shock. Maybe she is lying, but if I had to give someone the benefit of the doubt that would be her. Still, I would understand someone keeping a skeptical perspective given that we were not present in the situation.
Collage of comments by men making fun of Ford being beaten up.
I was reading a news item on Blabbermouth about Lita Ford’s autobiography and the accusations that she was physically abused by Tony Iommi in the 1980s. Apparently Ford informed Iommi in advance that she would make these claims in her book, and Iommi apparently attributed his actions to taking drugs during that period. Given that Iommi has not denied these charges I would consider it an open-and-shut case of physical abuse against Lita Ford. What one comes across on Blabbermouth’s comment section, however, is a frightening tirade of misogynistic comments. The themes emerging from these comments range from men making fun of the fact she got beaten up (see image above), saying that she got what she deserved, to attacking her credibility and her book (see image below).
Collage of comments regarding Ford’s book
What we read in the comments section of the Blabbermouth article are not necessarily representative of the views of the metal community, but the views of the conservative segment of this community which is over-represented in such forums. Conservative people tend to be more vocal than others. Being conservative by definition means that one’s views are in line with the dominant discourses in a specific societal context. In that sense, the person holding conservative views is more likely to think that their views are the right ones. Moreover, and for the same reason, this person is more likely to think that these views will most likely go unchallenged if expressed publicly because they are shared by most people. Even if the conservative speaker, lets call this speaker a “he”, thinks that someone might challenge his views, he will still feel that the majority of people will back him up.
Do misogynists feel that their views are widely accepted?
The views expressed by this conservative segment of the metal community might reflect an attempt to manage the terror experienced in its ranks from living in times where their dominant views are increasingly challenged. I was recently reading an article on the Black Lives Matter movement (Hoffman et al. 2016) where the authors used Terror Management Theory to explain the polarisation around the issue on social media. According to terror management theory people who take their point of view for granted and are used to not having this view challenged experience existential terror when their views are eventually challenged. The men in Blabbermouth’s comment section who make misogynistic comments and try to relegate the issue at hand to the realm of “fun” and “piss-taking”, are terrified because views they have held for a long time are now being challenged. Most importantly they are scared because they know that they could also be accused of similar deeds (i.e. abuse and rape) in the future. Their comments collectively contribute towards an environment hostile to accusations such as the ones made by Lita Ford. In other words, they are sending a message to all those women who might consider making similar accusations, hoping that they will preempt such actions. The message is, “you will be publicly ridiculed and verbally abused”.
Comments more sympathetic to Ford exist but they are few and far between, and they don’t have the same “success” as misogynistic comments. The fact that there are some non-misogynistic voices out there who are not scared of making themselves heard is hopeful, but it is clear that we have entered a period where more and more of men’s privileges and hurtful practices are challenged on a daily basis and increasingly in popular discourse. Men should see this as an opportunity rather than a threat. It is an opportunity to make themselves better people, able to create better relationships and lead better lives. If that happens they will be able to understand that the song that follows is not about them, but about women’s experiences of living in a misogynistic world.
Reference
Filed under: internet and music, music video, popular music, punk, social theory | Tags: Barthes, Fiske, Francis the pig, intertextuality, Lars Frederiksen, Potemkin city limits, Propagandhi, readerly texts, Rock for sustainable capitalism, writerly texts
Propagandhi is one of my all-time favourite hardcore-punk bands, a band that constantly develops its style instead of resting on its laurels. They have proved themselves time and time again over their 25 years-long career. One of the things I really like about Propagandhi is that lyrically their songs are quite obscure. In some cases I find their lyrics relatively straightforward, but mostly I experience them as labyrinths of signifiers very difficult to navigate.
A classification I like, although I do find problematic at the same time, is the distinction between “readerly” and “writerly” texts. Barthes (1990) defines readerly texts as those that are there for passive consumption, whilst writerly texts are those meant for active consumption. The reason I am critical of the concept is because I am aware that lyrics I unproblematically decode are not “objectively” more straightforward, reactive, but rather deal with issues with which I happen to be familiar.
Nevertheless, I still think that the distinction between readerly and writerly texts is valuable. To the extent that there are forms and traditions that can be considered mainstream or hegemonic, and others that are counter-hegemonic, those two concepts have heuristic value. It could be argued that most of Propagandhi’s songs are writerly texts; their meanings are not immediately and unproblematically decipherable because they often deal with counter-hegemonic or non-mainstream topics. For this reason, they require dedication and cultural labour on behalf of the listener.
Indeed, I was recently reading the lyrics of “Rock for sustainable Capitalism” off their masterpiece titled Potemkin city limits (2005). It is clearly a song about the appropriation of underground protest music by the Capitalist music industry. The beginning of the song, however, eluded me completely; I had no idea what it was referring to. The same goes for another awesome song whose lyrics I happened to be reading one day, the song “Potemkin city limits” off Supporting caste (2009). The lyrics tell a story of oppression, escape, capture, and death, but the specifics of the story always eluded me.
Recently I found myself listening to “Rock for sustainable Capitalism” on YouTube. At some point I hovered over the comments section, and I came across a discussion that focused on the beginning of the song. Through this discussion I discovered that the song actually refers to Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards‘ song “To have and have not“. This discovery allowed me to appreciate the Propagandhi song even more, although I’ve been listening to it for 12 years. For the first time I appreciated the comedic element of Chris’s lyrics, and even now I find it hard to listen to the song without cracking up. I then looked for “Potemkin city limits” on YouTube. In this case, too, the mystery of the lyrics was quickly solved by reading the comments. The sad story of oppression and murder was about a pig that briefly escaped death in the abattoir and roamed free for months in the countryside, before it was eventually captured.
The YouTube user Tommy Lindberget informed the audience about Francis the pig.
“Rock for sustainable Capitalism” and “Potemkin city limits” are intertextual; they refer to other texts, and knowing those other texts reveals hidden meanings. One of the texts the former references is the Lars Frederiksen video clip. One of the texts “Potemkin city limits” references is a real-life text/urban legend of animal liberation, torture and murder. YouTube and music fans, in this case, work in unison forming an intertextual enabler (Fiske, 1991); YouTube gives the platform to music fans to produce commentary that reveals those hidden meanings that, in my case, were lying dormant in the song lyrics, waiting to be discovered.
References
Barthes, R. (1990) S/Z. London: Blackwell.
Fiske, J. (1991) ‘Moments of television: neither the text nor the audience’, in: Seiter, E. et al. (eds) Remote control: television, audiences and cultural power, London: Routledge, pp.56-78.
Filed under: brutal memoirs, death metal, internet and music, social theory | Tags: Agonia Records, auto-ethnography, Deranged, Struck by a murderous siege, vinyl
In the early 21st century vinyl has been making a comeback (Savage, 2017). After more than a decade, between the late 1980s and early 2000s, during which the music industry put its faith on CDs, and in the midst of the digital revolution, the few remaining record stores left are full of vinyl records once again. Overpriced vinyl issues of new releases, reissues of old albums, vinyl pressings of albums never released on vinyl before, vinyl pressings of bands’ obscure demo tapes, limited editions, limited editions that are more limited than the previous limited edition of the same album (but less limited than the one yet to come), and so on. Enough cultural commodities for vinyl junkies and trend-followers that would make king Solomon blush.
Behind the resurgence of the vinyl market are many factors, including the music industry’s imperative to survive, opportunism, but also pure fan passion. The music industry sees in vinyl an opportunity to impose artificial scarcity (Hesmondhalgh, 2007); it is a medium for music dissemination that does not lend itself to expropriation by fans. The reason behind this is not some kind of “objective” quality linked to the medium; it is rather that “vinyl” has been situated in a discourse appropriated and actively reproduced by the music industry that fetishises (not in the Marxist sense) the physical object (i.e. manufactured paper and plastic) rather than the immaterial content (i.e. songs). In other words, the fan buys a vinyl record because they believe that there is inherent and exclusive value in the physical artefact itself. The value might be exactly that not everyone can own one, as opposed to mp3s, so it gives the fan a sense of distinctiveness. The value might be that the vinyl collector is a category that has been invested (partially by the music industry itself) with the meaning of the expert, or the “true fan”, or that listening to vinyl is seen as the “proper way” to consume music. This is a slightly different discourse to the one produced by the music industry in the 1990s whereby CDs derived their value from being on the cutting edge of technology, as well as the effectiveness (better sound) and efficiency (more space) associated with digitisation.
Of course, the activity of vinyl consumption cannot be reduced to the record industry’s imperative for profit and audience exploitation. Consuming vinyl means different things to each different person. Nobody can deny that music fans are at the mercy of the music industry. Almost every single aspect of our music consumption – from the existence of bands, the mass production of music so we can access it around the world, production values, to the existence of genres – is contingent on the existence of the music industry. Nevertheless, as Michel De Certeau (1984) or John Fiske (1989) would say, as consumers we make do and we make with those primary materials provided to us by the music industry. This post is about what I make with those cultural commodities.
I have talked in more detail about my history with vinyl consumption in a previous post. Here I will focus more on my rituals of vinyl consumption, using as an example the most recent album I bought, Deranged‘s Struck by a murderous siege (2016). This post is based on an article I have written and will be published in early 2018 in the Metal Music Studies journal (Zenerian, 2018).
I listened to Deranged’s new album a couple of months before I bought a physical copy of it. I first listened to a song that the record company (Agonia Records) released in the form of a YouTube lyric video to promote the album. After the album was officially released I downloaded it for free and listened to it on my computer and mp3 player. I then decided that I liked it enough to buy a physical copy of it. The purchase took place online. This is a process that involves very different thoughts and feelings to the pre-online shopping record purchasing experience. Entering a shop and searching the record stalls involves an element of excitement that cannot be replicated online. Buying a physical copy from a physical record store means that I own it from the moment I have paid for it. There is a sense of finality that in the case of online shopping is postponed until the moment the record is delivered, which can be several weeks after the purchase. Hence, buying online is always stressful for me.
When the album arrived, the first thing I did was to examine the jacket and vinyl to make sure they are not damaged. I was happy to find it in perfect condition. I spent some time investigating the cover art. Struck by a murderous siege has an awesome albeit cheesy cover. It is awesome because it is pretty detailed, so there is a lot to be discovered. I try to work out if the cover tells a story. The album title works as a caption, the linguistic message that offers guidance on how the image should be read (Barthes, 1984). In this case, the iconic message stands in a relation of complementarity to the linguistic message. The title of the album works as a relay. There is a murderer loose wreaking havoc in a big city. His threatening figure looming over the city connotes that the city is under siege. The police are after him, and they also look for his victims, which we can seen dumped in the sea by the city. I pay attention to all the details; the rotting corpses in the sea, the crow preying on one of the victims, I am looking for signs on the city buildings that could give me information of the identity of the city. I spend quite some time gazing at Deranged’s logo, and I think that it is one of the best logos ever designed.
I then remove the lyric sheet from the album. I am happy to see that all the lyrics are printed therein, there is information on writing credits, and photos of the band members. Sadly, there is no Thanx List. I look at the band members photos and then I go to the writing credits of each song to see who wrote what. I discover that all the music is composed by Thomas Ahlgren, who has been with the band for almost a decade. Rikard Wermen (the only original member) was involved in all the arrangements, keeping the trademark “Deranged sound” alive. Lyric credits are shared between Wermen and the bassist, Anders Johansson, and there are also lyrics based on letters by various serial killers such as the Son of Sam, the B.T.K killer, and the Toy-box killer. The band has also allocated vocal patterns credits (shared between Wermen and Johansson), in the style of Cannibal Corpse (see Gallery of suicide, 1998).
I then remove the vinyl from its sleeve. I smell the inside of the jacket, a habit I have had since high-school, searching for the distinct musty odor of cardboard that old records have to no avail. I look at the grooves and investigate the label. I then check to see if there are any interesting engravings around the label. There is none other than mundane pressing-related information. Back in the day I loved when I would discover messages such as “WATCH OUT FOR TERRORIZER” (Morbid Angel, Altars of madness, 1989), or “IS NICK HOLMES THE NEW ANDREW ELDRITCH?” (Paradise Lost, Gothic, 1991).
I put the album on the turntable, position the stylus and sit comfortably on my chair with the lyric-sheet in my hands. The opener “The frail illusion of osteology” is one of my favourite songs on the album. While I am listening to the second song, whose lyrics are based on the Son of Sam, I start thinking that no band will ever be able to write a better song than Benediction on this topic (“Jumping at shadows”, 1991). I then wonder whether the murdered figure on the album cover was inspired by the Son of Sam. I put the lyrics on the side and go on Wikipedia and read a bit about the Son of Sam, the B.T.K. killer, and the Toy-box killer. The lyric-sheet has pictures of all three of them. I then go back to the album cover and try to see if the figure resembles any of the murderers addressed in the songs. I notice no apparent resemblance.
I then go back to the lyrics and keep listening and reading. During the third song – one of the very best on the album – I begin to evaluate Johansson’s lyrics next to Wermen’s lyrics, and I think that Wermen’s are much weirder and chaotic, while Johansson’s are more structured and catchier. The first song on side B is another great song, about the B.T.K. killer. B.T.K. stands for “Bind, Torture, Kill”, which reminds me of the Suffocation song of the same title. The song inspired by the Toy-box killer (“Toy-box torture chamber”) has the most disturbing lyrics, matching the disturbing nature of the crimes. The song is sung in the first person which makes the depraved and misogynistic character of the lyrics even more disturbing to read (I won’t be reading the lyrics of this song again). I continue listening to the album, occasionally air-drumming and playing air-guitar, until it is over.
What I described is an experience of vinyl consumption that cannot be reduced to commodity fetishism, following music industry trends, or seeking to improve fan credentials. Listening to an album can be an auditory, visual, olfactic, and tactile experience, that brings people in connection with their personal biography (past experiences, old habits, childhood memories) and the broader culture (links with other bands, cultural events, the transformation of culture).
References
Barthes, R. (1984) Image, music, text. London: Fontana Press.
De Certeau, M. (1984) The practice of everyday life. Berkley: University of California Press.
Fiske, J. (1989) Understanding popular culture. London: Unwin Hyman.
Savage, M. (2017) “UK vinyl sales reach 25-year high”, (Online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38487837)
Zenerian, E. (2018) “‘Doing-Listening with Deranged’s ‘Struck by a murderous siege’: An auto-ethnography of death metal vinyl consumption”, Metal Music Studies, 4:1 [Forthcoming]
Filed under: Heavy metal, internet and music, social theory | Tags: advertising, audience commodity, Blabbermouth, journalism, MetalSucks, News websites, press releases
A similar question to the one in the title of this post, is one I used to ask myself quite often when I first started reading Blabbermouth many years ago. Why are news-feeds full of news stories about completely irrelevant bands? Why do hasbeens from the 1980s still populate Heavy metal news? The aim of this post is to reflect critically upon the character of mainstream Heavy metal journalism as exemplified by news websites such as Blabbermouth and MetalSucks.
In my opinion, there are three factors that need to be taken into account when thinking about the content of Heavy metal news websites: First, the imperative of profit in journalism, second, the effects of digitisation on journalism, and, third, the relative power of bands and record companies to act as news sources.
Mainstream Heavy metal websites such as Blabbermouth and MetalSucks aim to generate revenue through selling audiences to brands. Blabbermouth commands the attention of a wide audience around the world, and that is its selling point. The text that follows is taken from Blabbermouth’s “ADVERTISE” page:
Get backstage access to millions of hard rock & heavy metal fans from around the world via a broad range of campaign options; display, video, social, custom executions, and more.
Request the Blabbermouth.net Media Kit to learn more about available campaign bundles, demographics, and pricing. Or simply touch base directly to receive a customized proposal based on your objectives, budget, and timeline. (Source: Advertise – Blabbermouth)
A similar text can be found in the “Advertising” page of MetalSucks (see below). A further enquiry into Blastbeat, the company that manages – among others – MetalSucks’s advertising strategy, provides further information on the variety of brands to which heavy metal fan audiences are sold as commodities (these brands include 20th Century Fox, Orange, Peavy, Epic, Nuclear Blast, Relapse, and many more).
MetalSucks is represented for advertising by the Blast Beat Network of heavy metal sites, which also includes Metal Injection, Lambgoat, The PRP, Decibel and several other of the world’s top metal properties and reaches 14 million unique viewers monthly.
Blast Beat has worked with both Fortune 500 companies and unsigned bands; no advertising request is too big or too small. We have a variety of ad placements available to suit your needs, whatever they may be. (Source: Advertise on MetalSucks)
Heavy metal fans who read Blabbermouth and MetalSucks are exposed to various music and non-music related products that advertisers pay Blabbermouth to promote. Of course, the brands that are most likely to benefit from appearing on a music news website are bands. So, it would not be far-fetched to hypothesise that the readers of Blabbermouth are also packaged as an audience commodity (Fuchs 2014) and sold to the bands themselves. Because of Blabbermouth’s imperative to make profit, it treats its audience (the heavy metal fans) as a commodity that is sold to brands and bands from around the world.
The second factor I want to explore is the effects of digitisation on heavy metal journalism. News websites differ from traditional news media in that they are not static. Websites are dynamic, news are constantly updated, and new stories can be reported in almost real-time. This affordance of web 2.0 (see, Flew 2002) defines the rules of competition in online journalism, which can be summarised in the expression “you snooze, you lose”. If a news website wants to maintain the attention of its audience it has to generate news constantly, or else the audience will switch to a competing website. If a news website loses its audience it also loses its source of revenue, because it no longer has something to offer to advertisers (various brands, as well as record companies). Blabbermouth and MetalSucks need to churn out news stories constantly. This creates the following problem: how do we keep the flow of content (almost) uninterrupted? This problem can be addressed in two ways. First, the website could employ many journalists that investigate and produce new stories. This option is costly. Second, the website could rely primarily on stories generated by others. Which brings me to my next point.
If Heavy metal news websites depend on existing stories to populate their news-feed, then the relative power of bands and record companies to act as news sources should also be considered. Record companies act as news sources by publishing press releases (on the relationship between news and public relations, see Cottle 2003; McCullagh 2002; Reich 2010) or arranging interviews with bands. A press release is a very convenient source of news for a website like Blabbermouth or MetalSucks, because it is written by someone else, it is easily accessible, and it is easily reproducible. It is a practice that serves the record company (which advertises its bands indirectly without having to pay proper advertising fees) and the news website alike (which has access to content for “free”). It follows that the record companies and musicians that are more capable of constantly generating press releases, are those more likely to end up dominating attention on websites like Blabbermouth and MetalSucks.
Sensational news on Blabbermouth and MetalSucks.
A final point I want to make, related to attracting audiences, is the journalistic practice of creating sensational news stories. If a news story is sensational it is expected to attract more attention. To understand why “the sensational” sells, we should consider the sad reality of alienation in capitalist societies and people’s fascination with idle talk (Gunkel and Taylor 2014, p. 39). Sites like Blabbermouth and MetalSucks excel in constructing sensational stories. Even if a news story is not essentially sensational, these websites often deploy practices in order to give stories a scandalous appearance. One practice is the generation of misleading and evasive titles known as clickbait. Another practice is the framing of stories through selecting and emphasising aspects of a story that are more sensational than others (De Vreese 2005).
So, maybe the reason why we are constantly exposed to news stories about bands like Skid Row, and Ratt, and Motley Crue, and a bunch of other hasbeens and their embarrassing intrigues and sad lives, is that websites like Blabbermouth and MetalSucks need to link audiences to advertisers, and in order to do that they need to attract and maintain the attention of audiences by providing a constant stream of news stories. Bands that are more likely to afford constantly generating (sensational) news stories are those posers that became millionaires during the 1980s as well as contemporary posers and hipsters who are already famous, or whose record companies and themselves aspire to become famous.
In any case I think it would be interesting if the hypotheses I put forward in this post were tested more rigorously. It would be interesting to measure, for example, the presence on Blabbermouth of successful record companies like Nuclear Blast compared to that of smaller companies. Maybe I’ll do that when I find the time. For the time being enjoy a song dedicated to all those posers that dominate our attention on Heavy metal news-sites.
References
Cottle, S. (ed) (2003) News, public relations and power. London: Sage.
De Vreese, C.H. (2005) ‘News framing: theory and typology’, Information design journal and document design, 13 (1) pp. 51-62.
Flew, T. (2002) New media: an introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fuchs, C. (2014) Social media: a critical introduction. London: Sage.
Gunkel, D.J. and Taylor, P.A. (2014) Heidegger and the media. UK: Polity.
McCullagh, C. (2002) Media power: a sociological introduction. London: Palgrave.
Reich, Z. (2010) ‘Measuring the impact of PR on published news in increasingly fragmented news environment: a multifaceted approach’, Journalism Studies, 11(6) pp. 799-816.
Filed under: Guilty pleasures, Heavy metal, popular music, social theory | Tags: distastes, emperor, guilty displeasures, guilty omissions, in the nightside eclipse, megadeth, peace sells...but who's buying
There are bands and albums that are widely considered embarrassing in specific subcultural fields, making the music fan of such bands and albums inherit their embarrassing quality within those fields. I would imagine that the more senior one gets in any given fan-subculture and, accordingly, more confident in their fan-credentials, the easier it gets to admit those guilty pleasures. For example, it would be quite hard for a young metalhead to openly admit among his or her peers that he or she likes St Anger by Metallica, or Illud divinum insanus by Morbid Angel. Similarly, it would be hard for a young death-metal fan participating in a Facebook Old-School Death Metal group to express his or her admiration of Children of Bodom or Insomnium.
In a similar fashion, there are bands and albums that have achieved legendary status, to such an extent that is embarrassing for fans to admit that they haven’t listened to them (guilty omissions), or that they dislike them. The latter are guilty displeasures; distastes that would be embarrassing to admit within a specific subcultural field. In this post I will talk about two of my guilty displeasures; records considered legendary that I don’t like, and whose extraordinary status has pushed me to make an extra effort to try to like them, to no avail.
1. Emperor – In the Nightside Eclipse (1994)
An album I wouldn’t easily admit in public that I disliked – in the past – was Emperor’s debut. I listened to it back in the late 1990s and I have tried to listen to it again a few times since. I have always had the same reaction after listening to it: what is the big deal?! I have always found it long-winded, boring, and the vocals pissed me off. With the exception of some riffs and arrangements in the beginning of each song, I found the rest of the music unexciting. I still think that the vocal patterns are completely boring. I do get that it probably was an innovative album whose majestic and symphonic character influenced the genre a lot, but I cannot for the life of me listen to it back to back. An album that I did love and still like today by Emperor was their final one.
2. Megadeth – Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying (1986)
Megadeth’s second album is an album that have always eluded me. I bought it back in 1995, right after I bought Megadeth’s absolute masterpiece titled Rust in peace (1990). After a few listens, however, I got rid of it. That was difficult to do, because I loved the album cover. I listened to it again after a few years and I again failed to be impressed by it. I thought that Mustaine’s voice was annoying, and that the songs were boring. A few years ago I listened to it again and I did discover some things that I like. Some of the arrangements are pretty cool, and I can appreciate that they were probably quite impressive at the time the album was released, and I like a few songs, like “My last words” and “Black Friday”. I still think that it lacks the catchy riffs, hooks, choruses, and melodies that make RIP such an important album, and the intensity and riffs of their debut. Moreover, did Megadeth really take the genre much farther musically than Mercyful Fate and Satan had by that time? I doubt it. So, even today I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I particularly like it.
overground scene 