Page 188 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

Heavy Metal
Andrew Goodwin
■ Robert Walser, Running With the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy
Metal Music (Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 222 pp.
ISBN 0819562602 $1 5.95 Pbk
At the heart of Robert Walser’s excellent and illuminating book on heavy metal
lies a tension about the relationship between pop culture and high culture which
has yet to be resolved. This tension, as old as cultural studies itself, is the conflict
between text analysis and political economy. For Walser’s account, superb in its
virtuoso displays on the fret-boards of several different instruments (musicology,
semiotics and audience analysis), ultimately argues a position which I find
absolutely convincing but also limited in one key respect.
For all the persuasive material here on gender, on video and on the politics of
heavy metal, the most riveting section deals with aesthetics. Cultural studies folks
are fond of announcing that pop culture is complex; here Walser uses music theory
(and his experience as a musician) to demonstrate just how complicated (musically
and politically) heavy metal truly is. And in his chapter on ‘Eruptions’ (named for
an Eddie Van Halen guitar piece), Walser makes a claim that is so astounding I
did not at first comprehend it. Without being glib, pleased with himself, or arch
(this being the manner now of too much pop cult studs) Walser demonstrates that
the influence of so-called classical music on heavy metal is so fundamental to the
form that we must re-think the development of, say, Bach or Vivaldi, so that the
traces of this music might be seen as culminating (for the time being, of course)
not in concert hall performances of the ‘Brandenburg’ Concerto, nor even in the
techniques of modernists such as Milton Babbitt; no, instead we should look at the
guitar solo on Deep Purple’s ‘Highway Star’, or at the development of the song
cycle in the work of Queensrÿche.
To anyone who has listened with open ears to Metallica, Led Zeppelin or Living
Colour, this assertion is transparently correct. Indeed, Walser’s experience as an
accomplished musician (this reviewer has heard him play the trumpet and can
vouch for Walser’s skills in that department), along with his background in music
theory, allow him to make his case for the aesthetic complexity of pop culture more
convincingly than anyone else in the field of pop music studies today. Sensibly
enough, Walser does not commit the bourgeois sin of claiming that metal can be
justified because it is like ‘classical’ music. His claim, more modest and more
radical, is that a relativist aesthetics would allow us to see the similarities between
these examples of high culture and pop culture, and in light of that fact begin
listening to Bach in a new way.
What is brilliant about this idea is also where its limits are to be found, in my
view. Having demonstrated that the myth of high culture is the myth of aesthetic
autonomy, and having shown that heavy metal shares many features with high
cultural musical forms, Walser then performs a reduction by omission (the missing
link being institutional analysis) when he implies that aesthetic form in pop can be