Here you can find a record of almost all my publications – from scholarly journal articles to newspaper articles – listed with the most recent first. In most cases there is either a downloadable pdf or a link to the publication itself. You can search by publication type (academic, non-academic, book reviews etc), by theme and by keyword. Enjoy!
Who holds the power in the extreme metal scene? Why does extreme metal produce so many contradictions and how can such a radical artform retain such earthiness? Jonathan Selzer got the answers to these questions and more from Keith Kahn-Harris, author of the far-reaching examination of the metal scene, 'Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge'
Publication Date: May 1, 2007
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Interviews
Publication Date: 2007
Theme: Culture, Music
Category: Book reviews
My collaboration with Steven M. Cohen occurred some years before the public revelations of his repeated sexual harassment of female colleagues. Despite not knowing of his behaviour at the time, I also acknowledge that in a broader sense, abusers make others complicit precisely through their ignorance.
Publication Date: January 1, 2007
Theme: Jews, Judaism and Jewishness
Category: Book chapters
Publication Date: 2006
Theme: Antisemitism, Racism, Hate
Category: Journalism and essays
This first attempt at a metal studies bibliography has long ago been superseded by subsequent publications!
Publication Date: May 1, 2006
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
Publication Date: 2006
Theme: Religion
Category: Book reviews
Publication Date: November 1, 2005
Theme: Israel/Palestine
Category: Journalism and essays
My collaboration with Steven M. Cohen occurred some years before the public revelations of his repeated sexual harassment of female colleagues. Despite not knowing of his behaviour at the time, I also acknowledge that in a broader sense, abusers make others complicit precisely through their ignorance.
Publication Date: September 1, 2004
Theme: Jews, Judaism and Jewishness
Category: Reports and policy papers
See also Hungarian translation: ‘Nem látványos szubkultúra? Határátlépés és hétköznapiság a globális extrém metal színtéren’ in Replika 19: 65, pp165–175, December 2009
Publication Date: May 5, 2004
Theme: Community, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
Publication Date: Spring 2004
Theme: Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Music
Category: Journalism and essays
This article examines an enduring question raised by subcultural studies: how youth culture can be challenging and transgressive, yet ‘fail’ to produce wider social change. This question is addressed through a case study of the black metal music scene. The black metal scene flirts with violent racism, yet has resisted embracing outright fascism. The article argues that this is due to the way in which music is ‘reflexively antireflexively’ constructed as a depoliticizing category. It is argued that an investigation of such forms of reflexivity might explain the enduring ‘failure’ of youth cultures to change more than their immediate surroundings.
Publication Date: February 1, 2004
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
Publication Date: June 1, 2003
Theme: Antisemitism, Racism, Hate, Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Journalism and essays
Publication Date: January 1, 2003
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
Publication Date: January 1, 2002
Theme: Israel/Palestine, Jews and Metal, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
Metal musical genres have challenged conventional notions of ‘music’ by developing an impenetrable sound that verges on formless noise. Extreme Metal music is produced, disseminated and consumed by musicians and fans who shun publicity within a set of obscure institutions that ensure the music’s global ‘underground’ circulation. Within the confines of obscurity, musicians and fans explore in a highly ‘transgressive’ manner such themes as death, war and the occult, sometimes flirting with neo-fascist and racist discourses.
This thesis develops the concept of ‘scene’ as a method of investigating Extreme Metal music and practice. The concept is theorised through an engagement with a wide variety of literatures, notably subcultural theory, theories of community and critical theories of space. The concept is developed so as to provide an ‘holistic’ method of drawing on a wide variety of incommensurate literatures and conceptual frameworks.
Through the concept of scene, this thesis examines how the Extreme Metal scene is ‘experienced’ by its members. Detailed ethnographic, interview and other data are presented from case studies in Israel, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It is argued that scene members explore transgressive experiences that constantly threaten to exceed the confines of the scene. Yet the scene is also a ‘safe’ space, within which members experience the communal pleasures of ‘mundanity’. Members orient their practices so as to experience the pleasures of both transgression and mundanity. They manage the resulting tensions by the practice of ‘reflexive anti-reflexivity’ – the wilful refusal by members to explore the contradictory consequences of their practices. Reflexive anti-reflexivity also ensures that scene members never attend to power relations within the scene, leading to the marginalisation of women and those from certain ethnic backgrounds. The thesis concludes with some reflections about the problematic role of the Extreme Metal and other music scenes in providing means of experiential ‘survival’ within a fraught modernity.
Publication Date: January 2001
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Academic articles & reports
Review of Rock and Roll Jews by Michael Billig
Publication Date: Autumn 2000
Theme: Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Music
Category: Book reviews
Music's ‘malleability’ (Taylor 1997) has always facilitated its export and import from one location to another. Indeed, such processes are central to the creation and dissemination of new musical forms. Yet in our contemporary globalised world, such processes occur ever more extensively and rapidly giving rise to new forms of appropriation and syncretism. Record companies from the developed world find new audiences in the developing world (Laing 1986). Musicians from the West appropriate non-Western music, sometimes collaboratively (Feld 1994; Taylor 1997). Non-Western musicians and musicians from subaltern groups within the West create new syncretic forms drawing on both Western and non-Western music (Mitchell 1996; Lipsitz 1994, Slobin 1993). The resulting ‘global ecumene’ produces considerable ‘cultural disorder’ (Featherstone 1990, p. 6) whose results cannot easily be summarised.
An edited version of this paper also appeared in A. Bennett, B. Shank and J. Toynbee (eds) The Popular Music Studies Reader, Routledge, 2005 pp128-136
Publication Date: January 1, 2000
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
German translation: ‘Ein Verwaistes Land? Israel und die Extreme Metal-Szene’ in Testcard 9, 2001
Publication Date: November 1, 1999
Theme: Israel/Palestine, Jews and Metal, Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
