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ECS0010.1177/1367549413515257European Journal of Cultural StudiesMorris

european journal of

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Negative dialectics in music: Adorno and heavy metal

European Journal of Cultural Studies 2014, Vol. 17(5) 549­–566 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1367549413515257 ecs.sagepub.com

Martin Morris

Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Abstract Theodor Adorno argues that music contains an indelible collective undercurrent that can be revealed in its negative dialectic with Culture Industry music. This phenomenon of the communicative power of the ‘negative dialectic’ in popular music is the concern of this study. Charles Taylor observes that the rock concert embodies the expression of a continuing desire throughout secular modernity for a spiritual fulfillment that the reality or facticity of contemporary life cannot adequately deliver. In sympathy with Taylor’s interest in the rock concert as a fusion in common action/feeling that generates the powerful phenomenological sense that we are in contact with ‘something greater’, I draw on Adorno’s critical theory in order to offer an explanation of this continuing communicative power of music. It is possible to historicize Adorno’s controversial critique of popular music without rejecting his negative dialectical approach. In order to demonstrate the ‘actuality’ of Adorno’s negative dialectical approach, I use it to analyze – quite scandalously – heavy metal music.

Keywords Communicative power, critical theory, heavy metal music, cultural resistance, Theodor Adorno

Music seeks to constitute a community that relies on aesthetic and affective response combined with interpretive context – a communicative practical achievement common to most art. The reception of music must unfold over time through a physical, bodily experience that is co-determinant with its comprehension by the mind. Yet the necessary Corresponding author: Martin Morris, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L3C5, Canada. Email: [email protected]

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performance of music – live or recorded – seems to accord a unique condition to the appreciation of music and the immanently related art of dance. The wordless communication of sonority and gesture in music involves vibrations in the ear, those in the cranium, neck, chest cavity and sometimes the abdomen, all the way to the entrainment of the entire body from toe-tapping to dance. The bodily involvement of music has a corresponding emotional resonance that is, accordingly, constitutive of music’s power to establish a connection with others and thus to bring forth the experience of community in its event. The experience of community in music listening along with its entrainment of the body is amplified in collective musical events, which, for Charles Taylor, extends beyond the empirical occurrence of the event itself by reaching toward something that resembles the religious or the spiritual. In his recent study of the history, development and meaning of religious experience, Taylor notes an important affinity between religious festivals and events of a clearly ‘nonreligious’ festive character. He cites rock concerts and raves as examples of such nonreligious festivals that nevertheless have an affinity with religious festivals and their experience. One may readily see the community-affirming nature of the religious festival reflected in the rock concert’s like-minded souls united in the ecstatic experience of the music and spectacle. Taylor, however, goes further than this and observes that these kinds of experiences transcend the everyday and bring participants into contact with ‘something beyond’ – namely, the awareness of an unperceived presence that cannot be fully derived from nor subsumed under the concrete, empirically observable relations of solidarity that the festival enacts. ‘Fusions in common action/ feeling … often generate the powerful phenomenological sense that we are in contact with something greater, however we ultimately want to explain or understand this’ (Taylor, 2007: 517–518). For Taylor, the rock concert embodies the expression of a continuing desire throughout the ‘Age of Authenticity’ or secular modernity for a spiritual fulfillment that the reality or facticity of contemporary life cannot adequately deliver. One of Taylor’s central arguments is contained here: the fact that, in what is popularly but not properly called a secular age, a significant desire for spiritual experience and fulfillment continues across modern populations and indeed resurges, but it is highly fragmented today and can take many nonreligious forms. Taylor thinks we need a theory that explains the continuing power of this kind of experience and gestures toward Durkheim, Freud and Bataille, all of whom have devised such theories, but goes no further (Taylor, 2007: p. 518). He also neglects to consider Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectic of music as well as the political economy of postFordism that I emphasize for understanding this musical phenomenon today. In this article, I would like to offer the beginnings of an explanation of this continuing communicative power of music listening and the rock concert to connect with what Taylor calls ‘something greater’, but I will approach the issue differently, utilizing Adorno’s negative dialectical approach to analyze – scandalously – heavy metal music as a ‘post-secular’ performance of resistance in critical theory’s sense.

Adorno’s negative dialectics and music Adorno critically privileges music’s communicative power and constitution of communities of listeners in order to distinguish ideological, commodified music from music that

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expresses resistance to such instrumental manipulation. For Adorno, this communicative power of music is to be understood within the context of the dominant social requirements of capitalism, which always seek to assimilate music to capital accumulation and which marginalise music that, for whatever reason, cannot be assimilated to these needs. The ‘Culture Industry’ of mass society develops music according to such nonmusical social demands and this has decisive and extensive effects on the form, content, reception and function of music (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002). Against this, for Adorno (1999), the ‘compositional subject is no individual thing, but a collective one. All music, however individual or particular it may be stylistically, possesses an inalienable collective substance: every sound says “we”’ (p. 9). Such collective substance may be exploited in the Culture Industry, yet this ‘we-ness’ in music nevertheless holds critical possibilities for contemporary society precisely because it gestures toward a collective possibility that is beyond the mere exploitation of we-ness for nonmusical goals. This collective substance in music is not, however, to be associated with a particular social class or group. It would be a mistake to explain this we-ness of music simply by its historically specific social origins. The composer’s life history or the music’s social importance for a particular class or group, for example, does not express Adorno’s idea. This collective substance has no social or conceptual identity beyond its sheer expression of sociality and exists only as long as the music is experienced. As such, it transcends all particular musical forms; its bonding power cannot be named, for Adorno, except insofar as to acknowledge its affective achievement of sociality. This indelible sociality of music, for Adorno – even as it is exploited by the Culture Industry – renews the possibility of critique for the alienated individual. Adorno’s critical alternative to popular music – what he calls ‘serious music’ – expresses resistance to such ideological needs and as a result is not generally ‘popular’ in the sense that the music composed does not present a mere musical compensation for the alienated experience of spiritual and material lack under capitalism. However, Adorno does not view serious music culturally – that is, he does not treat serious music merely as ‘high’ art that is then to be contrasted with the ‘low’ art of mass culture (although there are moments when one may very well suspect this). There is no music that simply presents itself as an ontological given to theory, either positively or negatively, because all music is historically produced and historically interpreted. ‘Serious music’, therefore, always has a relationship to the (contradictory) social conditions of its production and consumption. To make this last point decisively, Adorno’s (1977) well-known view on the antagonism of mass culture and art applies just as much to music: mass culture music and serious music each bear ‘the stigmata of capitalism’ since they ‘are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up’ (p. 123). Adorno’s dialectical approach requires us to see the dynamism and tension in the relation between these constitutively incomplete and mutually antagonistic social forms, which means that they each hold or encapsulate moments of a conflictual, socially structured relationship that cannot be practically resolved under current sociopolitical conditions. This social antagonism is what drives the philosophical account and is that which yields the negative nature of the critical theory that apprehends it. Music that expresses the kind of resistance valued by Adorno, which is contrasted with conformist Culture Industry music, each generate one

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another within the contradictory totality of late capitalist society. Neither element can be regarded as some positively valued identity or simply given to us to affirm or reject, for Adorno sees behind every identity the historical processes that simultaneously constitute it and undermine it. That is, the object of study is always an unstable historical ‘assemblage’ (to use a contemporary term) that belies the fact that it is always in motion, always transforming into something else due to the dynamic of human history itself. However, we may still recognize musical events that express such social contradictions – this is music that Adorno considers valuable precisely for its critical expression of the relationships and contradictions between its identity and its nonidentical (historical) constitution and context. Subotnik (1991) has demonstrated such critical dialectical relationships in her analyses of Adorno’s work on Western art music. For example, following Adorno’s analysis of Beethoven’s late style, we find a reaction in the late style against the second period style, which affirmed the belief in ‘possible human wholeness’. By the time of the third period style, the ‘predominant characteristic of external reality … had become precisely the irreconcilability of subject and object, and above all, of individual freedom and social order’ (Subotnik, 1991: 17, 22). If human freedom had appeared possible given the historical conditions corresponding to Beethoven’s second period style, then this historical possibility had been significantly diminished by the time of his third period style, and Beethoven registers this historical change in his music. ‘By exposing some irreconcilable dichotomy within itself, Beethoven’s late music could call attention to the concurrent external disintegration of human integrity, to the enslaving, dehumanizing compartmentalization … forced upon humans by society’ (Subotnik, 1991: 25). My method parallels Subotnik’s: I argue that such Adorno-inspired analysis can be extended to contemporary popular music – in the present case, heavy metal – precisely because of the kind of relationship between music and its social constitution that critical theory seeks to illuminate. Subotnik (1991) explains Adorno’s negative dialectical approach to music in this way: Adorno’s musical essays, like all of his works, were written as passionate criticism of a society and world he considered inhuman. Yet, his ultimate understanding of this inhumanity seems to have been based not on political, sociological, or even psychological grounds but on something very like a theory of reality itself. This theory emphasizes the negative tendency of dialectics: that the essence of reality is historical change, that synthesis is a fixed condition that contradicts this essence, and that the governing principle of reality is the endless and irreversible negation of syntheses into the tension of dialectical contradictions. (p. 35)

If my claim has merit – namely, that Adorno’s negative dialectics can continue to illuminate the analysis of contemporary popular music – then this always historically manifested ‘tension of dialectical contradictions’ must be found in the music itself, the practices of the participants in the music and in relation to the significantly different historical context of popular music today. This claim must also be assessed by paying attention to contemporary sociology of music. The need to administer directly the coordination of mass production and mass consumption under Fordism largely explains Adorno’s concern with the ‘total administration’ of society and his critique of mass culture as ‘predigested’. The political–economic

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context of vast production runs that require the constant generation of desire for mass products via the social mechanisms of mass culture produces pressures of cultural standardization – ‘mass culture’ in the pejorative sense. This relationship is expressed in Adorno’s (1976) view that ideological domination is achieved through the direct stimulation and manipulation of people’s needs such that these needs become those of the system itself: ‘Ideology is replaced by instructions for behavior … It is into this trend that music today fits its function: it trains the unconscious for conditioned reflexes’ (p. 53). When Adorno (2002) observes ‘a preestablished harmony between production and consumption of popular music’ (p. 459), he registers the systematic coordination requirements of monopoly capitalism. And if music in his time had become ‘largely social cement’ (Adorno, 2002: 460), it is because of this exercise of social power to administer instrumentally every aspect of life. Of course, monopoly capitalism itself was never so monolithic and standardized – Adorno’s theory of mass culture involves ‘ideal types’ in Max Weber’s sense. However, Adorno’s analysis of the authoritarian nature of mass culture has little purchase once the political–economic coordination requirements that stand behind the constitution of this nature themselves break down and are transformed. In Harvey’s (1989) influential account, it was precisely the crisis precipitated by the unsustainable coordination requirements of Fordism that opened up the possibilities for a more ‘flexible accumulation’ that is mediated by new information technologies and that has decisively shifted to a global level the whole organization of the financial system (for earlier formulations, see Jameson, 1984; Mandel, 1980). As a result of the extraordinary expansion of the use of electronic communication technologies, production and consumption can be coordinated far more closely than they could be under Fordism. Despite such vastly improved tools for communication and coordination, this overall development did not simply continue to intensify the administrative instrumental control of mass culture, as might be expected from an Adornoian perspective. Instead, electronic communication has facilitated a widespread diffusion of power as well as a concomitant transformation of corporate control and influence of culture. For example, electronic communication has allowed more selective investment in order to carve out market share, which has encouraged the differentiation and fragmentation of mass culture as it became possible to map smaller niche markets accurately (which have proliferated) and to coordinate marketing with much shorter production runs to address these niches. No doubt this differentiation and fragmentation was also helped along by the cultural politics of resistance against the one-dimensional society of monopoly capitalism and a subsequent popular cynicism over the last decades concerning not just traditional consumer culture but also the conventional politics that supports it (Bewes, 1997; Chaloupka, 1999; Corner and Pels, 2003; Goldman and Papson, 1996; Marcuse, 1964, 1969; Sloterdijk, 1987). The field of popular music is vastly differentiated today compared with Adorno’s time (and was, in his time, far more differentiated than he acknowledged). The production of popular music and the musicians themselves have today taken on different roles as a result of new technologies of production and consumption that have become available. For example, the practices of multitrack recording, turntablism and digital musical production have all generated new productive possibilities and new consumption opportunities. Contemporary commercial music now often involves computer programming of

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digital musical instruments and the digital production techniques themselves, which has elevated nonmusical contributors to key positions – recording engineers along with those who are called ‘producers’ are brought into the center of musical recording and performance (Goodwin, 2006). Performers themselves may be partly or entirely electronic or ‘informatized’. For example, Deadmau5, a contemporary electronic popular music performer, manipulates consoles, modules and computers to produce dance music, but he plays no actual conventional musical instrument in his shows. Such musical ‘producers’ have changed the meaning of the production and performance of music and the concept of the musician today. Music technologies have also changed the reception and consumption of music. The possibilities for mobile personal listening have vastly increased since transistor radios first made it available. Music today may be encountered or consumed in almost any sphere of everyday life. A new emphasis on the study of audience reception and communication has emerged – for example, attention to the ‘uses’ people have for music in their everyday lives (Lull, 1987a, 1987b). DeNora has developed a new approach to Adorno’s analysis of popular music by treating music as a ‘resource’ that people use in various ways to structure and organize their everyday life. In her investigation of people’s uses of music, she argues that music should be seen as a ‘technology of the self’, a ‘form of self-affirmation’ that contributes to the construction of the self (DeNora, 2000, 2003). DeNora also draws methodologically on Small (1980, 1987, 1998), who recognizes the importance of understanding music in its social, intersubjective context. For Small, music is not a ‘thing’ to be studied objectively, nor can its ‘meaning’ be derived from the effects music has on an individual. Music is, for Small, always a performance that involves, as participants, not just the composer, musicians and audience, but also all those who contribute to the ‘nature of the event that is a musical performance’ (an intentionally very broad categorization of the ‘musical performance’). As such, Small (1998) contends that ‘music’ should always be understood as a verb – ‘to music’ – he proposes the term ‘musicking’ in order to capture this comprehensive performative nature (p. 9). The participants of musicking may capitulate to the commercial interests of the Culture Industry, but ‘there are many more who engage in constant negotiation with those interests, and try to regain control of their own performances’ (Small, 1987: 393, especially, 395–423). This emphasis by DeNora and Small on the complexity of political–economic power in musicking and the entwinement of accommodation and resistance that participants may adopt or in which they may engage is certainly a useful corrective to Adorno’s notion of producers and consumers as passive dupes of the Culture Industry. Small (1998) argues that ‘musical works exist in order to give performers something to perform’ (p. 8, emphasis in original). Small is critical of Adorno in the few instances he considers him – he refers to Adorno as the exemplar of ‘Marxist’ critics of music, a group Small dismisses without much engagement. Yet Small in this quoted passage confirms Adorno’s basic view that ‘every sound says “we”’, for if all composition of musical works exists for performance, then music is always already an intersubjective activity. As a result, even music that is divisive or isolating still involves a necessary intersubjective moment no matter what historical uses people may have for the particular music.

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This is because there must always be reasons for rejecting any music or even for experiencing it as isolating. Frith (2004) argues that music ‘only becomes bad music in an evaluative context, as part of an argument’, even though ‘bad music’ evokes initially ‘an emotional not an ideological response’ (p. 19, 30). Frith’s point applies just as much to divisive or isolating music as it does to ‘bad music’, which become identified as such only on the basis of an evaluation or an argument. A certain bonding is achieved because any evaluation or argument requires the relation of intersubjectivity. Arguments involve claims to validity that bond and bind the subjects through the intersubjective engagement required to conduct an argument – there is a ‘pragmatics’ to linguistic communication (this argument is drawn from Habermas, 1984). Evaluations of music may not always involve claims to validity like arguments do, for one’s emotional reactions toward a particular music cannot always be explained. But since the music was composed for performance, one’s emotional response involves an intersubjective communicative relation irrespective of whether the outcome of this encounter is affirmation or rejection. The presentation of the music for listening by the other is therefore an irreducible intersubjective moment. An engagement with the other necessarily produces the evaluation, which means that even rejection requires a priori the mutual recognition of something that is presented. If we interpret the bonding power of musicking as an expression of intersubjective interpretive activity, then we may see that this communicative power serves as a resource that may be exploited for nonmusical goals (Culture Industry music) or it may sustain communities of music production and consumption that make experience of and participation in the musical scene itself primary goals. Adorno’s critical approach turns on its ability to make such a distinction. Relatively autonomous communities of music production and consumption can still be distinguished from those dominated by the music culture of the Culture Industry, I argue, but this requires close attention to the ideological and sociohistorical relationships between music participants and their music – that is, to the nature of their musicking community. In order to demonstrate that Adorno’s theory can still shed a critical light on popular music in this way, I offer a consideration of heavy metal.

‘In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times’.1 Notwithstanding its exploitation by the Culture Industry and precisely because of its nonlinguistic nature, music may evoke an alternative, a sociality not imposed by the instrumental rationality of the Culture Industry and the demands of capitalist society. As ‘a reminder of what cannot be said’ (Fuente, 1999: 75), music seems to connect people with one another in ways that linguistic communication is incapable of achieving. Yet any utopian deportment is quite absent from and generally rejected by heavy metal – not simply because of its denial of Christian messages of salvation and redemption but because of its general apolitical stance. Despite this, metal music and its scene, I argue, register the crisis of the absence of political fulfillment that Adorno associated with music expressive of this crisis. As a result, metal may be considered as a negative dialectical challenge to the politics of Culture Industry music.

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Instead of the possibility of reconciliation, metal embraces demonic, destructive and apocalyptic themes and an apolitical stance regarding social change.2 Neither is there much in the various metal scenes that can be categorized as political advocacy, compared with, say, the history of political advocacy associated with the folk music scene. Indeed, Kahn-Harris (2007) documents a widespread antipolitical attitude in heavy metal. The occasional expressions of fascism, racism or sexism and their associated images in some extreme metal indicate either playful encounters or, if they are serious, are limited to small, self-enclosed scenes (Kahn-Harris, 2004, 2007; Walser, 1993). Heavy metal’s aesthetic and its musical and lyrical content are instead almost entirely oriented toward registering extant and seemingly unavoidable suffering in the world as well as the various threats – imaginary or real – to individual or collective human existence itself. Metal lyrics may include political themes such as the criticism of war, the hypocrisy of politicians or environmental threat, yet there is little that could be interpreted as hope for the future. Most lyrics are typically anguished laments and admonitions rather than incitements to action or anticipations of progressive change. Metal takes one important idea from Christianity (and before it, from Judaism and Zoroastrianism): the idea of impending and devastating doom, the apocalyptic conflagration of hell-on-earth. Only for metal, in stark contrast to major world religions, no one will be saved. Heavy metal registers ‘evil’ in the world, courts death and explores as themes oblivion, along with all sorts of devastations, but it does not thereby simply celebrate these depictions of death, destruction or suffering. The dystopian and apocalyptic images in metal instead serve ‘as a warning for the future’ (Till, 2012: 96). They do not simply encourage violence, nihilism, apathy or suicide; instead, the music invigorates and stimulates fans in mutually confirming ways that extend far beyond the concert or the moment of music listening experience themselves. Consider the music of the contemporary French heavy metal band, Gojira, whose songs are performed in English. Gojira falls into the categories of ‘progressive metal’ and ‘death metal’ (i.e. ‘extreme metal’; Kahn-Harris, 2007), which are denominations originating in the mid-1980s and that have grown in popularity within the metal scene since the 2000s. This kind of heavy metal features heavily distorted guitars, barrages of double-kick drumming, ‘blast beat’ drumming and low, growled, hoarsely screamed vocals. Formed in 1996, Gojira currently enjoys significant popular and critical success and has released five albums to date. The opening track from The Way of All Flesh (Gojira, 2008) (Figure 1) is ‘Oroborus’, the first stanzas of which are as follows: Serpent of light, movement of the soul Crawling stately along the spine Mighty phoenix, from the ashes arises Firebird cycle, life, regenerate the cell Life burns fierce, reduced to ashes Resurrection from the flame, ageless process Quest for absolution, out of bounds introspect Self-consuming womb, ever-present, meet no end

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Figure 1. Gojira, The Way of All Flesh (2008) album cover.

Oroborus is a symbol of a snake with its tail in its jaws, and this imagery occurs in the lyrics, which seem to have to do with self-consumption along with mystical rebirth – the theme of eternal life.3 The lyrics end with ‘Mankind has forgotten the gateways; By the mouth of the serpent regenerate’. However, these lyrics, like those in the whole song, are enigmatic – it is entirely unclear what one should make of the references to ‘flying over the valleys and plains’, to the ‘truth’ that is ‘On the peaks of radiant mountains’, or even to the references to the serpent or the rebirth themselves. There seems to be a ‘message’, but it is quite obscure. The second track, ‘Toxic Garbage Island’, appears clearer in its message since it refers explicitly to ‘The great pacific garbage patch’ – the documented accumulation of floating refuse in a particular spot in the ocean. The lyric is a lament on environmental threat: ‘Cities are burning, the trees are dying … Take this pestilent destruction out of my way’. Certainly it is apocalyptic: ‘the world is sliding away in a vortex of floating refuse’. Gojira’s official Web site also contains an ‘action’ tab under which are listed several exhortations to contribute in order to help Paul Watson and his Sea Shepherd fleet, a nonprofit, marine wildlife conservation organization (retrieved December 2012). Gojira professes a

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commitment to environmental protection and action – political advocacy that is unusual in heavy metal until recently.4 Other songs on the album explore apocalyptic or death-related themes with similarly enigmatic lyrics such as those describing the protagonist’s torture by demons (‘Yama’s Messengers’), ‘The Art of Dying’ and ‘Wolf Down the Earth’ (‘First of all you will eat all the bodies …’). At the same time, there are moments within all of this death and destruction that the lyrics gesture toward individual power, autonomy and even hope: The ground is dry like rock without any hope left; But now I decide to grab my life with my hands; Crave for freedom, build my own life. (‘Adoration For None’) You have the power to heal yourself; All illness can be healed … Release the pain. (‘Esoteric Surgery’) The sickness of this world is destroying all the dreams; The fools are kings, tearing apart the soul … Follow, I enter my dimensions, awakened heart of life; Enforce my senses, I’m understanding, I find the will to live straight. (‘Vacuity’)

The enigmatic death metal lyrics of Gojira do not merely indicate an obscure nature that diminishes or marginalizes the lyrics within the music as a whole. These lyrics and their death-oriented, yet occasionally hopeful, gestures remain important for fans – for example, metalheads constantly upload lyrics to fan sites, correcting them and maintaining vast repositories of song lyrics (see, for example, http://www. darklyrics.com). There is also a special sound to death metal ‘singing’ performance that deserves comment because it is so important for the fans’ reception – the demonic growling, hoarsely screamed delivery. The sound and style of Gojira’s vocalist, Joe Duplantier, is very similar to the vocalists in other death metal bands such as Lamb of God, Death, Possessed, Morbid Angel, Carcass and Cannibal Corpse – even the performance of Angela Gossow, the female singer of Arch Enemy, is delivered in the similarly low growl and scream of the male vocalists. However, the lack of much distinction between vocalists in death metal is not considered important in their musical appreciation because it is the delivery style that is paramount, along with the lyrical content. I suggest that death metal lyrics and their delivery are significant to the musical structure because they parallel – in shocking, outrageous and negative form – liturgy. That is, death metal lyrics and their delivery negatively evoke the recitation tone of religious liturgy and, just as important, the mystery of the world and of existence itself – mystery being central to Christian sacraments such as the Eucharist. Consider again the lyrics of Oroborus cited above: their structure and content imitates liturgical form and they invoke the mysteriousness that is central to liturgy. They evoke pagan images, but they also mention ‘resurrection’, ‘absolution’ and ‘inner light everlasting’, which are appropriations of Christian ideas. This distorted evocation of liturgy in death metal is why a musical distinction between vocalists in different bands is unimportant – the delivery style is what fans respond to, along with the lyrics, which parallels in religious liturgy the expectations of the priest’s performance as well as that of the congregation.

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As in traditional liturgy, the ‘congregation’ of metal fans at the concert is expected to respond appropriately to the leadership of the singer and the band. In death metal, the audience members need only scream or chant the lyrics along with the band and often instead respond with other gestures – one does not need to try to sing in order to participate fully. Of course, death metal lyrics do not seriously claim a supernatural, higher source as inspiration, as religious liturgies do claim, and metal lyrics are not expressing the praise, thanksgiving, repentance or supplication of traditional liturgy. Metal music is instead post-secular, for it expresses mysterious ideas and images that seem to have an important spiritual resonance with its fans – yet without any promise of salvation. Metal music and lyrics produce an affective response in fans that is similar to the affective response to religious liturgy in believers – for example, a certain ecstatic experience is induced through the ritualistic ‘head-banging’ of metal fans that can be compared to musical and nonmusical practices that induce religious ecstasy (Till, 2012). If my interpretation is accurate, then contemporary heavy metal shares far more with Christianity than Christianity’s practitioners or heavy metal fans would prefer to admit (an observation equally scandalous to adherents of each). Gojira’s music is also ‘dark’, like its lyrical content and vocal delivery, which may be documented in its musical form. There is a great deal of musical virtuosity in contemporary heavy metal, which Gojira displays in its arrangements and in the technical skill of the drummer and guitarists. The opening riff of ‘Oroborus’, for example, features a virtuosic display of a rolling, syncopated drum rhythm behind frenetic guitar hammering that pursues a disjunctive, alternating pattern. The guitars are detuned one full step from concert pitch in order to give the D chord around which the song revolves a low, more menacing sound (such detuning is common in heavy metal). The notes of the riff follow the minor thirds and sevenths of the D chord, but it is dominated by returns to B-flat, which is hammered in location with the A, G, F-natural and E (see Figure 2). The B-flat is the flat sixth of the D Aeolian key of the song, which is a very dissonant note to feature as the dominant return of the riff. Naturally, this is no coincidence. The use of such dissonant notes in motifs is quite common in heavy metal. The flat sixth, along with the flat fifth (the latter is the so-called ‘devil’s interval’), is often used in metal as an important note in riffs. Classical, jazz and popular music also use such notes, but the central use of these dissonant notes in metal is quite unlike their use in other genres. It is also perhaps no coincidence that the repeated guitar riff of Oroborus is 13 bars long rather than the conventional 12, which again disrupts normal expectations (a gesture toward popular superstition regarding the ‘unlucky’ number, with its Christian genealogy?). The sung verse begins after the riff’s transition that is accompanied by a blast of double-kick drumming. The verse is based on the lower D chord, with periodic emphases of the B-flat chord. Again, this is a dissonant sound that could not be further from conventional Culture Industry musical form and structure. The affect produced by this sound is full of power and energy – the fans experiencing this music live are clearly energized and many are whipped into emotional frenzies of head-banging and mosh-pit action. Walser argues that heavy metal ought to be understood as ‘immanently social and historical, as action engaged with the deepest of contemporary desires and tensions’ and not as some sort of deviant, immoral and dangerous subculture. The dark images of horror, madness and violence in heavy metal are ‘intimately related to the dark side of the

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Figure 2.  First half of the opening guitar riff, ‘Oroborus’, from Gojira, The Way of All Flesh (2008).

modern capitalist security state: war, greed, patriarchy, surveillance, and control’ (Walser, 1993: 162–163, 170). Considering Iron Maiden’s eclectic use during the 1980s of imagery from Christianity, alchemy, myth, astrology, vanished Egyptian dynasties, fallen angels and witchcraft in their songs and visual representations, Walser (1993) argues that the band draws on the mystique of precapitalist cultures in order to construct ‘spectacles of empowerment’ that offer fans the experience of community and ‘feelings of contact with mystical meaningfulness’ in the face of their general powerlessness in everyday life (p. 153–154). As a result, Walser (1993) goes so far as to categorize metal as clearly religious in nature: If religion functions both to explain the world – providing models for how to live, tenets of faith and empowerment, and comfort for when they don’t work – and to offer a sense of contact with something greater than oneself, then heavy metal surely qualifies as a religious phenomenon. (p. 154)

In the concluding section, I would like to assess this idea of metal as a religious phenomenon, as music that seeks to connect with what Taylor calls ‘something greater’.

The negative dialectics of heavy metal The precarity of young adult employment under post-Fordism, along with the lack of power metal fans experience within the family, at school or at work, makes the images and themes of metal attractive because they allow for very different interpretations of the

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world than those imposed by these ‘normal’ institutions. They provide the opportunity for fans to belong autonomously to an alternative community free from the demands and expectations placed upon them in their life outside the scene. The set of sociopolitical conditions that impose the exclusions and limit the opportunities of young adult employment extend to the global level (Berger, 1999; Moore, 2009). Metal is a global phenomenon, with international festivals and scenes documented on a global scale (see Wallach et al., 2011). In his analysis of the religious dimensions of heavy metal, Sylvan (2002) draws on ethnographic evidence to reveal the transformative experience that the heavy metal concert provides for its fans. Metalheads themselves do not usually describe their experiences as explicitly religious – as Weinstein (2000) points out, very few metalheads are actually Satanists, even though satanic and demonic imagery are common in metal. Religion itself (that is, Christianity) is generally dismissed and derided as a false hope even as its symbols are consistently appropriated. Indeed, for Weinstein (2000), the devil is common in metal as ‘a principle of chaos’ and not as a religious statement, for metal is not a counter-religion: ‘It appropriates religious symbols for its own Dionysian and rebellious uses’ (p. 260–261). However, Sylvan documents significant testimony from fans concerning the transformative experience of the metal concert, which he compares to that of religious conversion. Consider the following statement from a metalhead: I let it shift me … My life did shift, I would say, to the positive. Because, I mean, if I had kept going the way I was, I would either go and kill people or I would kill myself or both, at that point, because I was so angry … I found a release when I went to concerts. The feeling was an arrangement of excitement, self-love. Being myself means I love myself. Being involved in the music brought me to other people who like that style of music, so there’s my social life, my family. I found a love … It made me a stronger person. It made the depression go away. I would have to say it’s a positive religion, what I believe in … I live a pretty positive life. (Sylvan, 2002: 167)

For Sylvan, we observe here a testimony to the inspiration and comfort that the metal scene is capable of offering, which parallels that provided by commitment to a religious community. This view supports my argument that heavy metal – even death metal – addresses bonding needs among its fans that normal, everyday capitalist society cannot deliver except in the false, perpetually ‘broken promise’ of the Culture Industry that metal fans explicitly reject along with the false promise of redemption from sin that Christianity offers (the broken promise of the Culture Industry being ‘that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu’; Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 111). Many events may also be documented in which fans congregate, communicate and evoke a quasi-religious ecstasy in their actual participation. Metalheads’ regular festivals – which may reach a worldwide audience and involve international pilgrimage and participation – exhibit the kind of congregation observed by Taylor (2007) in the Taizé and other global religious festivals. Such a comparison is noted in the European context by Bobineau (2005), who explicitly associates the heavy metal concert with elements of religious experience and practice – whether this involves Satan, demons or other supernatural beings. The fans’ sense of connection with something beyond, an autre chose, is clearly observed:

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Through concerts, metal offers imaginaries, narratives and mises en scène that meet both fictionality and reality. The shifts, contrasts and provocations indeed participate in a collective ritual; one that is sometimes excessively spectacular. While fueling a general sense of excitement, these fictitious behaviors remain primarily unfinished, provisional acts. … Metalheads (musicians, listeners) mobilize ‘charisms’ – references to supernatural beings and powers in their texts, at rallies and in iconography. A process then emerges of the situational construction of the supernatural being, implementing human and superhuman co-presences … At the end of shows, metalheads allege physical, musical and collective experiences above and beyond them; they describe the event as an out-of-their-reach moment and when this is not the case, they consider that the ‘mass’ was not delivered. Taken seriously or not, and whether it triumphed or not, the concert acts as a rite that must authentically generate a trance among its participants, a communion of some sort for the fans with ‘something else’. (Bobineau, 2005: 99)5

The conclusions we should draw should not focus on where the ‘truth’ is regarding the messages of metal, for metal instead offers a ‘cognitive map’ (Jameson, 2000) for fans’ to understand their contemporary social experiences. At once metal registers the lack of available satisfaction of desire as well as the threats that contemporary capitalism presents to the prospects of an acceptable future for the practitioners and fans. Moral condemnation of heavy metal music is hence quite inappropriate, despite metal’s ‘immoral’ images and destructive themes, because these immoral images and themes express resistance to the dominant, conventional and hypocritical morality that would condemn it. Metal registers music’s collective undercurrent decisively and today it constitutes a network of communicative action that resists and opposes the deceptive life of the postmodern Culture Industry. Metal does not so much present an alternative vision, but this does not diminish its significance as political music, for its images and gestures are negations that seem to unite significant numbers of fans globally. There may be in heavy metal comfort, community and tenets for living in a fallen world, and in those things metal may resemble religion and its experience, as Walser argues. But metal is not properly conceived as a religion or even a counter-religion because it is irredeemably negative. Heavy metal promises not salvation nor happiness as a result of devotion to the love of a sacred redeemer, much less the remote hope of the ‘weak messianic power’ that Walter Benjamin (1986) saw inherited from the past in each new generation. Instead, metal observes and chronicles the manifestations of existing and ‘eternal’ suffering without the glimpse of much hope at all. If heavy metal is not properly conceived as a religion or a counter-religion, then it has an affinity with an ‘inverse theology’ along Adornoian lines. Brittain (2010) interprets Adorno’s critical theory as an ‘inverse theology’ because it rejects both the objectifying, naturalistic worldview of positivism as well as the supernatural causation of God’s absolute truth that is found in traditional religions: An inverse theology is attuned to the suffering and incompleteness of what lies before it. It is alert to the reality of a hidden possibility, of an unknown truth, of the incompleteness of understanding, but it cannot articulate what these are fully or clearly … An inverse theology has no revelatory scripture; it is merely aware of its need for one, and feels the pain of its absence. (p. 101)

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Adorno’s negative dialectics does approach what Brittain conceives as an inverse theology. Moreover, Brittain’s account in this passage also seems quite apt for a description of heavy metal music in the way I have been analyzing it here. The key difference is that heavy metal does not feel the need for a revelatory scripture in the way that the believer possesses a desire for belief in his or her scripture – Brittain’s notion of the pain of the absence of revelatory scripture in inverse theology requires such a desire. Metal does not seem to feel this need because participation in the music scene itself provides the scripts if not the scriptures. No texts in metal are intended or expected to be revelatory of anything like religious truth. The pain of heavy metal is not the pain of the perceived and needed yet always absent truth but is more properly conceived as the social pain of exclusion. Metal registers its social pain dialectically and negatively, yet neither in its music nor in its broader scenes does it seek to see this pain addressed practically. Metal fans themselves may very well have critical attitudes toward their situation – heavy metal is by no means anti-intellectual as a whole – but these critical attitudes do not translate into a desire for more ‘political’ metal or for using metal politically (Berger, 1999: 251–294, especially 276–289). Metal music has an affinity with critical theory because of its form as well as its communicative power that offers a negative alternative to the Culture Industry musical deceptions in fantastic and shocking forms. For heavy metal, like critical theory, the world and its social relations are not at all as they seem. Yet the dark ‘otherness’ that metal perceives as a devastating force is gestured toward in anguish … helplessly. The helplessness of this gesture, however, should not be seen as a flaw – the powerlessness of the souls dominated and devastated in metal lyrics combined with the style of the music make the gesture significant and valuable as a negative dialectical expression. Metal’s rejection of the ‘false’ hope of religious faith (as well as generally any utopian thought) entails no possible redemption of suffering, which biases metal culture against critical theory and against the progressive politics that would aim to change the predicaments of the fans. The only pragmatic–political response to domination and its unjustified suffering is collective social action. Heavy metal music performs its collective resistance culturally and socially, but it is in general apolitical, and the scene does not have aspirations toward anything like social movement formation. Heavy metal is thus a musical – better, a musicking – exemplar for critical theory’s concern with the analysis of the dialectic of culture and political–economic power under post-Fordist conditions. Continued interest in understanding metal and its culture is hence justified, for the ongoing complex dynamics of its development will require continued mapping in more detail. Heavy metal’s communicative power is quite evident, but whether the scene emerges beyond itself politically remains an open question. As such, metal can be said to ask negative dialectical questions of contemporary society, yet it offers no practical answers to them beyond the experience of its music scene. Acknowledgements I am most grateful to the editor and the reviewers of this journal. Their criticisms and comments on my submission assisted me significantly due to their rigor and their fine attention to my arguments. To my metal-Head of Department, Andrew Herman, thanks for your advice on listening, our discussions and for our ongoing experiences of metal.

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Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’. 2. It is primarily American and European extreme metal since the 1990s that exhibit the ‘ideal type’ characteristics discussed here. Metal varies significantly in its dynamics globally, as is argued and documented by Berger (1999), Avelar (2003), Wallach (2008) and Wallach et al. (2011). While apocalyptic themes are most characteristic of ‘crust punk’ and ‘apocalyptic crust’, they do feature prominently in the death metal that is the primary object of this study. 3. Ancient peoples associated the snake with eternal life because they observed the snake shedding its skin and assumed it had the power to regenerate itself. 4. The ‘uses’ of heavy metal by bands and their fans can, however, have important political implications and effects on political culture. For example, Avelar (2003) argues that the evolution of the Brazilian heavy metal band, Sepultura, traces a development in which an initial musical treatment of the nation as ‘a hostile territory’ that excluded heavy metal is, over the course of their development as a band (1985–2003), transformed into a new vision of the nation that incorporates indigenous music and redefines what is ‘Brazilian music’ (emphasis in the original). For Sepultura, ‘the nation progressively becomes a source for musical and cultural lines of flight, unexpected experiments and collaborations. They continually redefine the genre’s very boundaries at the same time as they refine what one had hitherto understood as Brazilian music’ (Avelar, 2003: 338). 5. Le metal offre des imaginaires, des récits et des mises en scène lors de concerts relevant à la fois de la fictionnalité et de la réalité. Les décalages, les contrastes et les provocations participent en effet au rituel collectif qui prend parfois une certaine démesure, spectaculaire. Les comportements fictifs aboutissent à une excitation générale, mais ils demeurent avant tout des actes non achevés, provisoires qui, s’ils étaient effectivement achevés, arrêteraient aussitôt le concert (invocation de démons, de puissances, de Dieu) … Les métalleux (musiciens, auditeurs) mobilisent des charismes, des références à des êtres ou à des puissances surnaturelles dans les textes, lors de rassemblements ou dans les iconographies. Un processus de construction situationnelle de l’être surnaturel émerge et met en oeuvre des co-présences humaines et suprahumaines, ou du moins revendiquées comme telles. À cet égard, les métalleux font état à la sortie de concerts d’expériences physiques, mu, icales et collectives les dépassant; ils décrivent l’événement concert comme un moment leur échappant profondément et, si ce n’est pas le cas, le concert, la messe n’a pas été donnée. Pris au sérieux ou non, spectacle réussi ou pas, le concert fonctionne comme un rite qui en toute authenticité doit provoquer une transe chez ceux qui y participent, une communion avec « autre chose » pour les fans.

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Biographical note Martin Morris teaches communications thought, social philosophy and media history. He researches issues in critical theory, cultural studies and philosophy. At present, he is working on a book project on communicative power and music; next, he is planning a book project on communicative action, communicative power and digital media. He is the author of Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Habermas, Adorno and the Problem of Communicative Freedom, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001.