Writings

The ‘Failure’ of Youth Culture: Music, Politics and Reflexivity in the Black Metal Scene

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(1), 95-111

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

The Aesthetics of Hate Music

Commissioned for the ‘Anti-semitism and xenophobia today’ website (no longer live)

Publication Date: June 1, 2003

Theme: Antisemitism, Racism, Hate, Metal Music and Culture, Music

Category: Journalism and essays

Death Metal and the Limits of Musical Expression

In Cloonan, M and Garofalo, R (ed), Policing Popular Music, Temple University Press, pp 81-99

Publication Date: January 1, 2003

Theme: Metal Music and Culture

Category: Book chapters

“I hate this fucking country”: Dealing with the Global and the Local in the Israeli Extreme Metal Scene

Critical Studies Volume 19: Music, Popular Culture, Identities, 133-151

Publication Date: January 1, 2002

Theme: Israel/Palestine, Jews and Metal, Metal Music and Culture

Category: Journal articles

Transgression and Mundanity: The Global Extreme Metal Music Scene

PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths College, University of London

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

The Jews Who Rock Around the Clock

Manna 69

Review of Rock and Roll Jews by Michael Billig

Publication Date: Autumn 2000

Theme: Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Music

Category: Book reviews

‘Roots’?: The Relationship Between the Global and the Local Within the Global Extreme Metal Scene [published under the author name Keith Harris]

Popular Music 19(1),13-30

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

An Orphaned Land?: Israel and the Global Extreme Metal Scene

New Voices in Jewish Thought Volume 2, 1-21

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

Exploring Jewish Space: A Critique of Limmud

In Rabinowitz R (ed), New Voices in Jewish Thought, Limmud Publications, London, pp 39-54

Publication Date: June 1, 1998

Theme: Jews, Judaism and Jewishness

Category: Book chapters

Music is My Life?: Discourse Analysis and the Interview Talk of Members of a Music-Based Subculture

Goldsmiths Sociology Papers, Goldsmiths College, London

Publication Date: June 1, 1997

Theme: Metal Music and Culture

Category: Academic articles & reports