Raising the horns: Black metal in concert. Photo Credit: Matthew P. Unger
Matthew P. Unger
Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia
May 1 2021
Sound has a normative imperative that we understand viscerally and almost naturally, as seemingly pre-verbal experiences that affect and transform our social, emotional, and mental worlds. As a normative sensory aspect of our social world, sound is also a contested site of political and moral frameworks, and a significant marker of identity and social patterns.
People have always understood that music and sounds are significant expressions of meaning and symbols. Yet, sound tends to feel more visceral and immediate than words and images can. At the same time however, sound and music have also gone through those same periods of symbolic transformations, deconstructions, rationalizations, and formalizations that words, ideas, and the visual arts have. Max Weber (1978) recognized that music reflects the material and ideal relations of a society and believed that the kind of rationalization process that the West experienced led to polyphony and harmony. These developments are specific, though not unique to the West. It bears noting that in other geographic and cultural areas, such as Africa, polyrhythmicity has been elaborated to a high degree. As John Miller Chernoff (1981) has shown in African Rhythm and African Sensibility, polyrhythmicity both shapes and is shaped by a specific sociality.
Sound is just as much about ideas, ethics, and aesthetics, then, as any of these other disciplines, yet we contemporaries experience sound and music as something immediate, normative, yet inexplicable. Jacques Attali (1975), the professional French economist, famously argued that the organization of noise into music reflects and heralds the normative constitution of our social relations—something that annunciates the social relations to come while at the same time figuring as a threat to the prevailing order. Attali argues that music, beginning with an economy of sacrifice of which it was an integral part, has always been subject to social control because it has always elicited both the ideals and the challenges to the hegemonic order of the time. Other more recent texts, such as Steve Goodman’s (2009) Sonic Warfare, have also shown the extent to which governments and militaries have used sound, music, and noise as forms of coercive force and even of weaponry, from the deployment of metal music in interrogation and torture rooms, to “sonic bombs” to terrorize the inhabitants of the Gaza strip. What these texts show is that noise is capable of both altering affective social landscapes and at the same time making apparent the meaningful, normative, and intellectual limits and boundaries of society.
At the same time, sound is a profoundly controlled medium used to mark or reinforce group boundaries and as a mode of regulation, social control, and even exclusion. For instance, popular music has been appropriated by moral entrepreneurs as they proffer music’s influence in young people’s lives and have been key instigators of moral panics around the world. Extreme musics are a particularly interesting and powerful example to examine how sound is a meaningful medium that is reflective of culture, symbols, and social patterns. Musical genres that exist at the edges of normativity disclose important meaning frameworks that the music often attempts to play with, transgress, and undermine. As an extreme form of organized sound that uses often abrasive, distorted, compressed, and even destructed noises, extreme forms of heavy metal exist at the boundaries not just of behavior and appearances, but also in the sonic constitution of our normative world. Around the world, extreme metal has been deemed to be offensive, implicitly carrying the possibility of negatively affecting or even corrupting the people listening to it, leading to the judicial control of the music and its creators (Christe 2004).
Extreme metal, in particular, has been at the center of social and political debates surrounding censorship since the “satanic panic” of the 1980s. These debates typically posit causal correlations of influence and corruption that give rise to extreme youth violence and an individual’s interest in certain counter-culture musical genres, lifestyles, and predilections (for discussions on the prevalent censorship debates and major figures, see Christe 2004, 290–303; Dunn 2005; Moynihan and Søderlind 2003; Purcell 2003, 83–93; Walser 1993, 137–172). Media critics aligned the influence of extreme metal music with actual violent and brutal acts such as school shootings and adolescent violence, ignoring the broader social contexts of both these tragic events as well as the music and its listeners. For instance, the September 13, 2006, shooting in Montréal that killed two and injured many others is one of a long and familiar list of violent youth crimes that have evoked widespread discussions regarding the role of music in the lives of individuals and communities (CBC 2006). Additionally, a series of articles published in April 2000 in the Albuquerque Journal exemplify how popular media responses drum up concern about people who listen to this music (Cole 2000). These articles are marked with a distinct pathologization of the music and its grotesque imagery and lyrics. These conceptions of corruption and infection could be why groups such as the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) act to prohibit the music’s ubiquity and why popular media sources often attempt to explain intense youth violence with affiliations to this music. For the PMRC, mere contact with music is enough to shape young people’s behavior and impel them to do things they would not otherwise do, justifying juridical responses, including banning, prohibition, and related court trials.
While these articles and similar debates have derided extreme metal for the grotesque, abrasive, and transgressive elements in its sonic, visual, and lyrical material, most of the empirical sociological studies of extreme metal show no direct correlation between lyrics, youth identification with extreme metal, antisocial tendencies, and violence. Rather, as Natalie J. Purcell (2003) writes, studies show that the ostensible correlation between extreme metal music and teen violence is entirely spurious. According to Purcell, these studies bring out how many factors correlate with extreme youth violence, which defies simple causal explanations. From Purcell’s perspective, even though certain psychological and social predictors are coincidentally linked to certain lifestyles and musical preferences, this coincidence does not mean that youth who listen to this music are necessarily violent or criminal.
Thankfully, since the 1990’s the assumption that extreme music reflects youth alienation has waned with the development of a rich body of literature devoted to understanding the social significances of this music and the meaning frameworks within which scene members circulate and create such music. Recent qualitative scholarship has attempted to come to an understanding of this music and its fans without normative judgment (Kahn-Harris 2007, Mudrian 2004; Spracklen et el. 2014, Walser 1993; Weinstein 2000, Philipov 2011, Hjelm et al. 2011, Podoshen et al. 2017, Venkatesh et al. 2015, etc.). Rather than attempting to determine or disprove causal correlations between extreme metal and youth violence, these studies seek to understand extreme metal and the extreme metal community as a distinctive subculture with unique values and beliefs. Purcell alerts us to these values when she states that, “by its very nature, metal permits individualism by discouraging judgment and declaring acceptance of the socially unacceptable” and that its fans engage in this music for a sense of belonging based on an ethic of subjectivism and individualism (Purcell 2003, 159).
Summing up, extreme musics, and especially extreme metal music, reflect a complex of social, economic, and cultural processes (Unger 2016). More than reflecting ethical and normative frameworks of meaning, music also heralds explanatory frameworks, conceptions of causal relations and contemporary discourses of identification and affiliation. In fact, psychological terminology such as influence and corruption, and legalistic terminology of transgression of normative social frameworks of meaning is what makes, for instance, extreme metal such an interesting example to explore.
References
CBCNews “Montreal gunman called himself ‘angel of death’” September 13, 2006. Web.
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