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When Hell Freezes Over:: Black Metal—Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism or Egoistic Protectionism?
... Before going on to discuss manipulation as a tool or vehicle in music education, I will take an empirical detour to exemplify how artists deliberately manipulate as a part of their musicianship. In an ongoing research process (Thorgersen & von Wachenfeldt, 2018;Thorgersen & von Wachenfeldt, 2019) a colleague and I have been studying musical learning amongst young musicians in the genre Black Metal. Black Metal is an extreme sub-genre of Heavy Metal characterised sonically by high pitched screaming, heavily distorted guitars, rapid drumming and long compositions filled with disharmony. ...
... All of the senses are involved. The musicians wear black clothes, which are often filthy and even foul-smelling due to stains from blood or other corporal fluids, paint their faces in order to appear scary, and fill the stage with occult symbols and remains or representations of dead bodies (Thorgersen & von Wachenfeldt, 2018;Thorgersen & von Wachenfeldt, 2019). We argue that this combination can be seen as a Gesamtkunstwerk, where all of the senses are stimulated in a multimodal attempt to inflict a sense of terror and evil into the listener (and performers). ...
An important feature of music is its ability to affect people in unpredictable and deep ways. Music has therefore been used to oppress and (mis)lead people by dictatorships, religious leaders and supermarkets amongst others, and to help lure people into acting in ways that are beneficial for the manipulators. Such forms of ethically dubious musical manipulation happen because of the sublime potential of music to do something to people, and in such a way that they have few ways to defend themselves against it. Thus, the power of music is also the reason people seek out the unforeseen affects and effects in their encounters with the arts. Building on a theory of aesthetic communication, and seeking support from Deleuze and Guattari (1994), Dewey (2005) and Spinoza (Spinoza & Lagerberg, 2001), the aim of this article is to propose the term manipulation as a tool in music education or as a vehicle for teachers and researchers to help frame activities in music education as meaningful for aesthetic communication. I argue that manipulation is a necessary component of all art and aesthetic communication, that, despite its usual negative connotations, manipulation is an act that can be used for good or bad purposes, and that music education has a duty to educate pupils in artistic manipulation. Manipulation is considered action, and as such, it is argued that it can take on any value from good to bad depending on the intentions and effects it causes. This article invites a discussion of possible ways of designing music education that revolve around tinkering with aesthetic communication, and wherein desirable manipulation plays a vital role, and outcomes-based curricula are replaced with an alternative more compatible with the arts.
From Devil's Music to Artistic Expression. The Korpela Movement, Black Metal, and Cultural PolicyThis text explores Korpelarörelsen, a Black Metal band that presents an audiovisual performance depicting a religious movement in Tornedalen during the early 20th century. In 2020 they received prolific funding from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee to conceive, rehearse and tour with the band. The article describes the band's unique portrayal of local history through the use of black metal music, while also discussing the boundaries between art and music, its implications for arts funding and the Black Metal genre's position in cultural hierarchies. The study draws on interviews, concert observations, and analysis of applications and documents outlining the funding decision from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. The historic religious Korpela movement has been described as a doomsday cult, which believed that practicing music and dance, extrovert “childlike behavior” and even nudity and free sex, was the path to salvation. The band Korpelarörelsen depicts this through raw Black Metal, atmospheric elements, spoken word passages, and peculiar onstage-rituals. Visual aesthetics, including black robes, corpse paint, and blood-like smears, contributed to the atmosphere of mystique, darkness, and death. Korpelarörelsen’s application for cultural funding strategically positioned the project as a collaboration between various art forms and emphasized the interaction between Black Metal aesthetics and music industry methods. Korpelarörelsen's innovative approach and funding success might offer possibilities for extreme music within culturally funded systems. This case study demonstrates how a Black Metal band from Tornedalen could potentially have cultural and political impact and pave the way for other extreme music groups seeking recognition and support.
Although teachers and researchers frequently acknowledge that music education can benefit pupils’ academic achievement, health and wellbeing, and social development, classroom music-making can also have long-lasting, detrimental impacts. Individuals’ experiences of failure, disappointment, and exclusion in the music classroom highlight an urgent need for music education to be reframed by an understanding of ‘musical vulnerability’: individuals’ inherent and situational openness to being affected—positively or negatively—by the semantic and somatic properties of music-making. Drawing on existing vulnerability studies, in this article I evaluate how classroom music-making can foster both positive receptivity and negative susceptibility, depending on its delineation of identity and physical embodiment. I then present reductive analyses of phenomenologically-informed interviews, in which 12 secondary music teachers described their past experiences of being pupils, and their present experiences of teaching pupils, in music classrooms in the United Kingdom. Using excerpts from their observations of teaching pupils, I describe how interactions between individuals’ interpersonal and personal vulnerabilities—including personality, musical, and neurological differences—affected occasions of musical receptivity and susceptibility. As individuals negotiated conflicting musical expectations, they sometimes fostered fruitful resilience but sometimes encountered profound resignation. I draw on these findings to construct a preliminary typology of musical vulnerability and emphasise the need for future research into proactive differentiation in the music classroom.
This paper addresses the extent to which the inclusion of vernacular musics in the classroom has the potential to improve pupil access to the music curriculum in Key Stages 3 and 4. Current political discourse equates music education inclusivity to having access to musical instruments. Rather than consider economic solutions, this paper follows on from educational research suggesting that improved access to music education requires consulting the pupil voice, pupil engagement, and inclusion of 'vernacular' and 'popular' musics. To address a gap in research on pupil voice, this study seeks the opinions of socioeconomically disaffected pupils on the relationship between vernacular music provision and access. To address the research questions in context, a pupil consultation was undertaken at a London-based, state-funded secondary school within the framework of a qualitative case study. Observational studies of music lessons were followed by semi-structured focus group discussions and individual interviews with pupils selected to represent the socioeconomic diversity of the school. The pupils discussed aspects of the curriculum that they were engaged or disengaged with and offered suggestions for improvement. Using qualitative coding of the data collected, this paper considers pedagogical approaches to the inclusion of vernacular musics in the National Curriculum.
In the face of globalization, speed communication, and the mashing up of once clearly drawn borders, it seems both pertinent and constructive that music education philosophers make use of comparative frameworks to make sense—and make new sense—of educational and musical events, products, and interactions. However, comparison that is merely analytical, self-centered, and attempts to valuate, categorize, and create hierarchy or contradistinction, might be not only scholastically inept but also politically irresponsible. Philosophical investigation based upon “comparative cosmopolitanism” is interested in “difference that remains different” as a positive element and attentive to the ways in which we come to understand said differences. Therefore, this view is committed to philosophic enterprises that consider creativity, risk, and difference to articulate “forms of fundamental critical self-reflection that extend to the ‘scaffolding of our own thought.’” The goal of this article is to present an introductory reasoning for placing a comparative approach side-by-side a cosmopolitan framework, exemplifying its usefulness to philosophical work in and for music education.
Conservative Evangelical polemics against popular culture has often argued that it is a recruiting ground for Satanism. Popular culture, especially horror film and horror-inspired heavy metal music, has often been singled out as being the most explicit expressions of this recruiting strategy. Although the premises (and most of the conclusions) of the argument are untenable, they are not all wrong. Popular culture does play a role in how satanic identities are constructed. The cultural marketplace constitutes a “scene” that religious networks may draw on more heavily when traditional arenas for socialization are absent, thus making these networks stronger. This is an important point that applies to many kinds of late modern, privatized religion. The article addresses these broader issues by way of Satanism as a more specific example. It takes a look at which elements of and how popular culture plays a role in satanic socialization through a focus on the strategies for guiding consumption and production.
According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan’s advice to eat of the forbidden fruit. The notion of woman as the Devil’s accomplice is prominent throughout the history of Christianity and has been used to legitimate the subordination of wives and daughters. During the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Hereby, Lucifer was reconceptualized as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests. The book delineates how such Satanic feminism is expressed in a number of nineteenth-century esoteric works, literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets and journals, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures, and even artefacts of consumer culture such as jewellery. The analysis focuses on interfaces between esotericism, literature, art, and the political realm. New light is thus shed on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism, and revisionary mythmaking. The scope of the study makes it valuable not only for historians of religion but also for those with a general interest in cultural history (or specific aspects of it like gender history, romanticism, or decadent-symbolist art and literature).
Heavy metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, heavy metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concept albums and rewritings of classical poems. In other words, heavy metal tried from the beginning to locate itself in a liminal space between pedestrian mass culture and a rather elitist adherence to complexity and musical craftsmanship, speaking from a subaltern position against the hegemonic discourse. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British heavy metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British heavy metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analyses of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances. Rather than focus on individual bands or songs, the essays collected here argue with the larger system of heavy metal music in mind, providing comprehensive analyses that relate directly to the larger context of British life and culture. The wide range of approaches should provide readers from various disciplines with new and original ideas about the study of this phenomenon of popular culture.
This book is not available through ChesterRep. This book discusses alternative spiritual milieu in the contemporary Western world. It focuses upon wellbeing, eco-enchantment, psychedelics, cyberspirituality, the extraterrestrial,and contemporary Western demonology.
Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism. This signals a post-universalistic kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not merely a condition of diversity but is articulated in cultural models of world openness through which societies undergo transformation. The cosmopolitan imagination is articulated in framing processes and cultural models by which the social world is constituted; it is therefore not reducible to concrete identities, but should be understood as a form of cultural contestation in which the logic of translation plays a central role. The cosmopolitan imagination can arise in any kind of society and at any time but it is integral to modernity, in so far as this is a condition of self-problematization, incompleteness and the awareness that certainty can never be established once and for all. As a methodologically grounded approach, critical cosmopolitan sociology has a very specific task: to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities.
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