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Something takes a part of me Something lost and never seen Every time I start to believe Something's raped and taken from me --From "Freak on a Leash," by Korn We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning. --From Simulacra and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard Popular music, since it began to get rowdy in the 1950s, has reflected the concerns and anxieties of North America's younger generation. From the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up, Little Suzie" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, popular musicians have acted as a voice for the teenage generation, speaking their minds, addressing their joys and worries. Also, the younger generation is becoming increasingly sensitive to the state of the culture that surrounds them. Students around the world are known for their outrage at injustice, for their joy in celebration, and their general cultural perceptiveness. Recently, certain segments of music popularity charts have been occupied by some alarming music. Rap music, dominated by male African-Americans, has been hyper-excessively violent and misogynist, and is often admired by its fans simply for the audacity of its praise of criminal activity-although some praise it for depicting the grim reality of the lives of urban African-Americans. Rock music has also been making some alarming statements, which are not the same as in rap music. A new variety of popular music, which has fused elements of heavy metal and African-American hiphop music, has reached #1 ranking on popularity charts. This music-which I have chosen to term "new metal," although it eludes existing labels-is characterized by some unconventional and startling qualities. As North American culture has become more permeated with information and communication technology, the qualities and characteristics associated with postmodernism have become stronger and more common. As information-in forms that vary from street billboards and print media through radio and television to the internet and virtual reality-fills our environment, the relationship between culture and media seems to have reversed. Formerly, it can be argued, culture determined the content of communications media, and media reflected culture. In other words, real-life, actual activities, beliefs, and identities of North American individuals (culture, reality) were reflected and reproduced in information-replicas such as advertisements, news programs, and entertainment products like film and television (media, reproduction). This has gradually changed so that it seems increasingly that the vast amount of information present in our environment is determining the fabric of our culture. Real life and culture began to reflect what was being portrayed in communications media. People turned to media representations as a source of identity; the truth and reality of the world began to be determined by the way they were portrayed in media. The unsettling repercussions of this information-culture phenomenon were felt by the modernists in the middle of this century and have continued to grow stronger with time. Postmodernism reflected the growing intensity of the effects of our information saturation, and now it appears that we are entering a post-postmodernism which is continuing the trends set in motion by the growth of communication technology. Today's state of affairs is visibly a progression from the recent past because now it appears that the relation between culture and media has eroded. There no longer appears to be any distance, direction, or order of operations between real culture and the information contained in communications media. They have become intertwined and are so closely related that they are now inextricable from each other. We have entered what Jean Baudrillard calls "hyperreality," in his book entitled Simulacra and Simulation, where "the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable" (83). Baudrillard's concept of "simulacra"-reproduction without original-is the embodiment of this condition, a sign that is "never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference" (6). The existence of simulacra would not necessarily be threatening, were it not for the super-accelerated circulation of simulacra performed by information and communication technology. The pace of advertising has risen to the point that the sole referentiality it retains is to capital gain. All sense of value, truth, and identity has disappeared in the frantic circulation of the simulacra that advertising has become, which Baudrillard calls the "hypermarket," or "ground-zero advertising." In such a state of affairs "there is the sound track, the image track, just as in life there is the work track, the leisure track, the transport track, etc., all enveloped in the advertising track" (91). As Baudrillard illustrates, advertising, at its now maniacal rate, devours every sign and every image. Anything one could possibly want to think, do, or be is now always already taken up by advertising and made into a flat, pixelated sign that refers to nothing but itself, to other such signs, and to money. When one looks at Las Vegas, for instance, one sees that advertising is not what brightens or decorates the walls, it is what effaces the walls, effaces the streets, the facades, and all the architecture, effaces any support and any depth, and that it is this liquidation, this reabsorption of everything into the surface (whatever signs circulate there) that plunges us into this stupefied, hyperreal euphoria that we would not exchange for anything else, and that is the empty and inescapable form of seduction (Baudrillard 91-2)We have indeed become subject to this "stupefied, hyperreal euphoria," and as a response, we are given to "[p]anic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production" (7) which is great indeed. Consequently, as Baudrillard suggests, it seems that "all of society is irremediably contaminated by this mirror of madness that it has held up to itself" (9). Baudrillard has recognized and diagnosed the condition of today's culture and given words to the phenomenon; I intend to demonstrate that new metal has recognized this condition, experienced it, reacted to it, and given voice to the paradoxes inherent in the evocation of the hyperreal. New metal is extremely popular right now, and many devotees of heavy metal and hard rock music have welcomed it with joy as the return of heavy metal to its rightfully acclaimed position in our culture. Other followers of heavy and hard music have deplored it as a softening of heavy metal, as heavy metal watered down for the middle-class, video-watching, t-shirt-buying masses. No matter what one thinks about new metal, the fact is that it is loud, aggressive, profane, dissonant, chaotic, offensive, and generally contrary to hegemonic norms of popular music (those generally being qualities that are "easy" to listen to and acceptable to a wide range of audiences). What are even more striking are the qualities of the music that seem to reflect Baudrillard's diagnosis of today's hyperrreal culture. New metal lyrics are often about the experience of a fragmented identity unknowable to the self, about the inability to discern reality from illusion, about suspicion and distrust of almost everyone including oneself, about an uncertain and unknowable future, about the roles of money and fame in our culture, about satirizing past popular forms, and about issues of authenticity. Before continuing, it is vital for me to discuss several details regarding the ideas I will develop, the terms I will use, and the musicians I will study. "Authenticity" is an essential concept to new metal, and to my analysis. It should be clear that I do not believe or intend to illustrate that new metal artists are authentic; "authenticity" will merely be a value-free (i.e., good vs. bad) term used to designate certain aspects of popular music. This term has been plagued with definition problems for many years, and my use of the term will be arbitrarily limited to how it is understood in new metal and rock music. In my writing, "authenticity" will mean, generally, a form of honesty. An artist who is "in it for the money" is not authentic, for they are likely creating work using as a guiding principle what will sell, rather than giving primacy to creative urges, their life experiences, their emotions, and their personal and political beliefs. A musical group that is together because the members were the most marketable respondents to a newspaper advertisement is not authentic (such as The Spice Girls); a group that is together because their musical tastes, styles, and abilities are well-suited to each other (such as new metal groups) is authentic. This also means that they "act like themselves" and do not adopt particular poses for the sake of the music. Thus a performer who acts kind and amicable onstage, but who is "really" unkind and disrespectful offstage (in real life), or a performer who acts unhappy, dissatisfied, angry and/or disturbed, but who, offstage, is perfectly well-adjusted and content, is not authentic. Today there is a recognition and acceptance that in the performance of popular music the portrayal of emotion is not limited to the depiction of one's own experience. The term "authenticity," as I will use it, will also designate a certain originality-work that is different from all that came before it. Thus The Backstreet Boys are not authentic, for almost nothing differentiates them from The New Kids On The Block, except that their popularity occurred at different times, and not even that sets The Backstreet Boys apart from other "boy groups" aimed at the money available to the female pre-teen demographic group, such as 98° and 'NSync. While every new metal artist shares some qualities with past musical artists, each group/artist presents a quality that is novel and particular to them. The concept of authenticity has become extremely difficult for new metal artists to navigate because every image, sign, word, and action is either part of the past lexicon of profit-seeking media imagery, or becomes part of that lexicon almost instantaneously. Because of this process, sincerity is almost impossible for anyone to believe or take seriously; now even the artists themselves are skeptical about their own sincerity. In a culture where doubt reigns, authenticity is becoming increasingly elusive. It is important to note that, while musicians and fans may attach a value-judgement to this term/concept and claim it to be a good quality or a bad one, I will use it non-judgementally. According to my operative definition of "authenticity," new metal does have many authentic aspects, but is also blatantly inauthentic in several ways. Thus I am not attempting to demonstrate any inherent "goodness" or flaw in new metal, or any other type of music. It is impossible to tell whether any performer truly does not act differently onstage than offstage, for they could be acting differently in every interview, photograph, performance, and public appearance. This conundrum is similar to the cliché of the tree falling and making no sound because no one is present to hear it. Because I do not know any of the artists personally, I will not pretend to know anything of their "true" personalities and will take the statements in interviews and press releases of all artists to be true. Another concept central to my analysis is postmodernism. Since there has been little agreement on the nature and meaning of postmodernism, it is necessary for me to specify what I mean in using the term and others such as "the postmodern experience." In his book entitled Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism, Neil Nehring outlines aspects of postmodernism which overlap with what is expressed by new metal. In particular, two features discussed by Nehring serve as useful frames of reference to my analysis: - Philosophies such as antifoundationalism, denying any grounds for "truth," but especially French poststructuralist theory concerned with the frailty of the individual, now the "subject" in the sense of being ruled (or dispersed, or dispossessed, etc.) by the "structure" of language, and through it the structures of ideology and powerIn terms of the body of work that I will be examining, several points from Linda Hutcheon's piece on postmodernism in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory are also relevant. As I have pointed out with the help of Jean Baudrillard's "hypermarket," new metal appears to be informed by what Fredric Jameson calls "the cultural logic of late capitalism" (qtd. in Hutcheon 612), by what Jean-François Lyotard calls "the general condition of knowledge in times of informational technology" (Hutcheon 612), and by Baudrillard's own "substitution of the simulacrum for the real" (Hutcheon 612). More specifically, I will understand "postmodernism" to refer to discourses that "tend to use but also abuse, install but also subvert, conventions, and they usually negotiate these contradictions through irony ... and parody ... inscribing yet also subverting various aspects of a dominant culture: however critical the subversion, there is still a complicity that cannot be denied" (Hutcheon 612). Another facet of postmodernism to which I will be referring is that postmodern works "de-naturalize the things we take as natural or given," (Hutcheon 612). Thus I take the postmodern experience, in this analysis, to be the effects of those characteristics I have outlined: suspicion of everything and everybody because nothing and nobody is truly knowable; anxiety about an unknowable future; self-loathing, incomprehensible utterances; escapist recycling of pop culture images because of the perceived impossibility of uttering anything new; and a universal doubt which plagues everything. The musical terms I will use are a matter of convention. In my analysis, "rock" refers to any and all of the popular guitar-based, song-format music driven by a solid rhythm, from the early 1950s until today, and the term covers many different styles from The Beatles and The Beach Boys through Janis Joplin and Led Zeppelin to Nirvana and Guns And Roses. The definition of "heavy metal" is more difficult to pinpoint as it travels along the spectrum between rock and heavy metal, and as bands get "heavier." I use the term "heavy metal," or "metal" for short, to refer to a style of rock which began in the 1970s with Black Sabbath and is generally more abrasive, dissonant, louder, and masculine/macho. (Possible exceptions include bands of the 1980s like Poison, Twisted Sister, AC/DC, etc.) "Punk" began as a counter-cultural movement in England in the 1970s, based heavily on class-conflicts. It was characterized by musical simplicity, harsh, abrasive, and distorted sounds, and an angry indifference to anyone's opinion or judgment. Punks wore ripped clothing, elaborate and unconventional hairstyles, and harsh jewelry such as studs, spikes, and pins. Their lyrics were profane and anti-authoritarian. There is now a new form of punk in the United States which has almost no relation to the original movement other than the age of the fans and musicians involved and their desire to resist authority. I will not discuss this type of punk. "Grunge" was a short-lived "movement" of sorts in the early 1990s that fell somewhere between punk, rock, and metal. It centered around Seattle, Washington, and was focused on a desire to return to "good" guitar-rock. Grunge bands differed vastly: Nirvana played simple three-chord, pop-ish screeches. Screaming Trees wrote neo-psychedelia which hailed the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mudhoney seemed to fuse country and punk. Soundgarden wrote heavier, technically advanced songs which came the closest to metal out of all the grunge bands. Alice in Chains seemed to bear the least resemblance to anything ever recorded and made use of haunting, unconventional harmonies, heavy, crunching riffs (guitar parts played repeatedly), and metal techniques. Pearl Jam began with a Led Zeppelin-esque psychedelic classic rock sound and became increasingly experimental (they are the only remaining grunge band). One of grunge's unifying qualities was a return to authenticity after a decade of image- and pose-laden music. The grunge "look" registered precisely a lack of desire for a "look": jeans, t-shirts, sweaters, and everyday, casual clothing. The focus was on the music instead of an "image." Soon, though, mass culture labeled and packaged grunge with a look, a style, and an ideology, effectively making grunge musicians into what they had come to prominence for not being. Fashion magazines published grunge spreads, brand name stores "grunged up" their clothing, and plaid flannel became haute couture. This paradox destroyed grunge. "Riot grrrl" music was similar and cotemporaneous to grunge, but was dominated by women and had a punk-ish feminist quality. Riot grrrls sneered at conventions of femininity and rejoiced in being "bitchy." Like grunge and punk, their music was harsh, distorted, simple, angry, and loud. Riot grrrl bands included L7, Hole, Bikini Kill, 7 Year Bitch, Fifth Column, and Babes in Toyland. The riot grrrl sound is not as prominent as it was in the early 1990s (Hole's 1998 LP release, "Celebrity Skin," was a slick pop departure), but it continues to exist. "Techno" is a very vague term with many meanings and connotations. It can designate a type of popular music driven entirely by computerized implements and written solely for dancing. This kind of music generally lacks authenticity, is often sold blatantly on sex appeal, and devotes little energy to creativity, originality, or innovation (which is not to say it is "bad"; I am not writing to praise any certain music or to denounce another); it is simply music for dancing, usually in night clubs (which have, over the last two decades, become increasingly techno-oriented). This usage was common in the early 1990s and was anathema to rock enthusiasts in a period driven by an urge to be as "natural" as possible. But in the last few years it has come to designate a somewhat different scene and style of music. Today techno refers to a sub-genre of "rave" music, which lacks the sex-, lyric-, and persona-driven qualities of what is now referred to as "Euro dance" music. Rave music is "performed" by a dj who plays vinyl records on two turntables and who uses a mixer to combine the two records. The song-structure that Euro dance shared with rock and pop music is not present in today's rave music; today techno is an endless, seamless flow of very repetitive (virtually hypnotic) beats, samples (bits taken from other songs), loops, and tricks performed with the mixer and the equalizer. I will use the term "techno" most often to refer to the rave style of techno music, or to refer to elements within a certain music which were produced by computerized implements, generally (but not always) with an aim to enhance rhythmic qualities and "danceability." The artists I intend to examine are the groups Korn, Deftones, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson (which is the name of the band and of the frontman/singer), and the musician/performer Rob Zombie. Korn's first major release was a self-titled LP, released in 1994. It was followed by 1996's Life is Peachy and 1998's Follow the Leader. Korn is known for intensely personal, even disturbing lyrics about abuse and trauma as well as for fusing rhythmic hiphop dance qualities with the harsh, distorted, dissonance and the angry, angst-ridden vocal performance of metal. Limp Bizkit's sound is similar to Korn's on their first record entitled Three Dollar Bill, Y'all, released in 1997, but on 1999's Significant Other the songs' styles become more varied, and rap and dance become central. Deftones also resemble Korn for their dissonant guitar sounds and emotionally upset vocals and lyrics, but they are less rhythm/dance oriented than Korn, possessing a more rock-oriented sound, and more vague, abstract, poetic lyrics. Marilyn Manson is radically different from the aforementioned groups. They have been called a "shock rock" group and have devoted much energy to their visual imagery. Despite accusations of mimicking Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson has a distinct musical style characterized by a bizarre, undead-like vocal sound, unsettling instrumentalization, and a fusion of techno and metal influences and other sources such as gospel, blues, and pop. Marilyn Manson is known for their radical imagery and costumes, from cross-dressing ghouls and androgynous mutants to space-age runway models and decaying angel-corpses, consistently violating gender conventions of dress. Their first release, Portrait of an American Family (1994) garnered them an underground, cult fanbase. Their second release, Smells Like Children (1995) obtained mainstream attention with their cover of the Eurythmics' 1980s hit "Sweet Dreams." + Antichrist Superstar (1996) catapulted them into intense notoriety, possessing as it did obscene images of angels and plenty of lyrics attacking Christianity. Mechanical Animals (1998) alienated many of the fans the band had obtained with Antichrist Superstar because of its lack of sacrilegious elements. This record focuses on the sterilizing, dehumanizing effects of drug use and technology. Marilyn Manson's lyrics are consistently "over-the-top," and are met with a response divided between believing in the authenticity of the lyrics because of their countercultural quality and suspecting that the band is guided not by authentic expression, but by a desire to make money and sell records through offending the public. Rob Zombie was the driving force behind the hard rock/metal band White Zombie, and is now a solo artist. White Zombie's last three and most important releases are La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1 (1992), Astro-Creep: 2000 - songs of love, devotion, and other synthetic delusions of the Electric Head (1995), and Supersexy Swingin' Sounds (1996). Astro-Creep: 2000 brought the band much success and popularity, and Supersexy Swingin' Sounds is a compilation of remixes of the songs from Astro-Creep: 2000. At this point, Rob Zombie's solo releases are Hellbilly Deluxe (1998) and American Made Music to Strip By (1998, a compilation of remixes of the songs from Hellbilly Deluxe). Rob Zombie's defining characteristic is recycling, recombining, and recontextualizing past pop-cultural imagery. The liner of Hellbilly Deluxe is filled with cartoon monsters, comic book excerpts, children's halloween costumes, bikini pin-ups, bones, skulls, ancient scientific diagrams, old comic book-style collage advertisements, and photos of Rob Zombie and his musicians in full zombie costumes. White Zombie's albums have the same imagery, but, as Rob Zombie did not have full creative control, the emphasis is more (but not fully) on sex and the female figure than on monsters. Rob Zombie and White Zombie have also used pseudo-Satanic imagery which appears to mock past popular associations of rock music with Satan. The lyrics are almost all imagistic poetry about monsters, creatures, human freaks, mutants, apocalypse, sex, and Satan. In my analysis, I intend to use new metal to demonstrate that advertising and communication technology are affecting mass cultural expression in ways described by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation. In the realm of new metal, these effects are generally summarizable as a broad range of all-encompassing doubts about everything including oneself and doubt itself, resulting in unresolvable paradoxes in the belief systems and world views of the musicians and their audiences. I will focus on parody, satire, self-hatred, disintegration and abandoning of language, issues of confounded authenticity, recycling of cultural products, and aspects of rhythm and sound in new metal to develop and illustrate my argument. My reasons for choosing this particular subject are several. I am aware of no work written about new metal, and, while much has been written about other types of popular music, such as punk, "world music" (from outside of North America), hiphop, rap, folk, and nightclub music, there exists very little work about heavy metal in general. Histories of rock music tend to neglect heavy metal. In their book entitled The Role of Rock, Don J. Hibbard and Carol Kaleialoha, for instance, limit their discussion of metal to two brief paragraphs. Also, while Hibbard has taught university courses on rock, he is a historian of architecture, and Kaleialoha is involved in industrial sociology and psychology. Most of the extant material on metal and/or rock is written from a sociological or cultural studies point of view and devotes more attention to the fans and the "scene" than to the material itself. Examples of this include Peter Wicke's Rock Music: Culture, aesthetics, and sociology, David P. Szatmary's Rockin' in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll, and Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, edited by Martin Stokes. One of the most comprehensive books written about the subject of heavy metal is Jeffrey Jansen Arnett's Metalheads. Arnett closely examines the heavy metal subculture and its members from a sociological/anthropological perspective through interviews, content analysis, and some field research. Unfortunately, his book is written with the aim of proving that heavy metal has been a factor in the decay of the lives of American teenagers. An excellent print source of information about heavy metal is Martin Popoff's Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal, but this book is more descriptive than analytical in nature. Current, contemporary, and popular cultural forms have generally received less attention than older, more established material. It is my aim to contribute to the study of one particular form of popular expression and to generate further intellectual debates. I will approach the subject matter from a literary perspective, focussing on the music, lyrics, and imagery, rather than the lifestyles, subcultures, and behaviour of the artists and their audience. I will compile no statistics and will perform no content analysis-style research such as Arnett's counting of how many different works use certain words or allude to Satan. Instead, I will conduct a qualitative analysis of the works and the artists. I will consider what cultural conditions the material is reflecting and examine them in light of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Any departure from this approach will remain closer to the perspectives of cultural studies than those of sociology, psychology, or anthropology in that my focus will remain on the works and their "authors" (i.e., the speakers) rather than on the fans or the new metal scene and environment (i.e., the receivers). In my first chapter, I will begin by comparing new metal to the rock and roll music of 1950s U.S.A. By using Hibbard and Kaleialoha's The Role of Rock to simultaneously compare the qualities of the two styles of music and the cultural conditions surrounding them, I hope to achieve an understanding regarding the reasons for which music such as new metal is being created, and what this music is saying about our society and culture. The second chapter will consider new metal in the context of elements of contemporary postmodernist and feminist theory. I will discuss the conclusions regarding recent popular rock music drawn by Neil Nehring in his Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism and by Simon Reynolds and Joy Press in their The Sex Revolts. I will proceed to examine new metal in light of these analyses, highlighting certain elements of new metal such as anger, abjection, language, the body, rationality, and sex. I will conclude this chapter with a brief examination of some salient features of the primary materials. The third and final chapter will consist of a brief examination of the primary material itself, focussing on the lyrics, imagery, and musical qualities of new metal. |
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