Guest post from Dr. Chris Kennett. March 23rd, 2011
The idea of subcultures as homogeneous, internally consistent and spectacularly defined signifying practices has taken a knock over the last fifteen years or so. When Dick Hebdige and his Birmingham chums first mapped the socio-anthropological and ethnographic terrain of the spectacular subculture in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), a whole new area of research emerged at the junction-points of several disciplines (social psychology, semiotics, human geography, politics and ethnomusicology among them); and in those days, subcultures were defined by two opposite tropes: similarity of world-view within each subculture and defiant distance from hegemonic models of living in the wider world: you knew you were in a subculture because everyone outside the group was suspicious of you, and everyone inside realised that you and they were on the same wavelength, not least because of your similar taste patterns in clothes, private language, dance, political attitude and so on. However, by the time Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures book hit the common-rooms in 1995, the simple us/them dialectic was being challenged by something altogether more complex, more fluid and less overtly political in its habitus. Since then, the tendency in the literature is to assume that subcultures nowadays are far more self-aware, far more post-modern, far more problematic, all round. Andy Bennett’s ‘neo-tribes’ concept, dating from an article published in 1999, takes this fluidity further: no subculture is as certain of its spectacular distance and internal homogeneity as they were in the days of Hebdige’s Mods, Punk and Skins, surely?
Well, Dan Nelson’s gorgeous little book, consisting of little more than a comprehensive list of the names of all the heavy metal bands in the world at the time of his survey, is joyous proof positive that Hebdige’s ideas are still a key colour on our music sociologist’s palette.
Everything about the book (with one exception, of which more later) is just perfect: the size, landscape format layout, silver type on black pages, crowleyesque rich-toned morocco-bound cover, the long lists of incantable words and even the choice of font bespeaks of the world of the grimoire, of John Dee, of Aleister Crowley – or, perhaps more relevantly, of Vincent Price acting the role of either in a Hammer horror film. And of course, that’s the point: Death Metal remains the subcultural theorist’s wet dream, because of the consistency of its signifying practice; a dive into the lists proves this in a wonderfully gigglesome way.
For example, let’s look at bands beginning with the letter ‘N’. As one might expect of a subculture predicated upon the semblance of what recent reputation-makeovering terrible dancer-politician Ann Widdecombe called ‘Something of the Night’ (when used to describe her then Tory leader, Michael Howard), there are twenty-seven bands that include the word ‘Nacht’ in their name: Nachtblut, Nachthimmel, Nachthymnen, Nachtkult… eleven bands start with ‘Nameless’: Nameless, Nameless, Nameless, Nameless, Nameless, Nameless, Nameless Crime, Nameless Gathering, Nameless One… onwards and downwards to Narcolepsy… Nasferatu [sic]… Nations of Death… Nausea Gods… [the rather charming] Nauseating Tepid Whiff… Necessary Evil… Necro Holocaust… Necroblaspheme… Necrocannibalistic Vomitorium, and so on. Anyone sensing a pattern, here? The ‘Necro-‘ prefix as part of a portmanteau neologism offers a particularly rich source for band-names, from the rather erudite (Necronoclast) to the ‘haven’t-thought-it-through-properly’ (Necrosadistic Goat Torture – in Law, is it 'torture' to do nasty things to a goat that is already dead? One for the Lawyers of Hades, perhaps). And pick a letter – any letter – and the same spectrum of thought-processes behind the genesis of the band’s brand identity rears its multiple-head: twenty-five Oblivions (including a slightly malapropistic ‘Oblivious Abyss’ – ‘Oblivious’ means something else here, guys…); thirty-three Plague-prefixes, a humming of ‘Rotten’ bands from Rotten Agony, through Rotten Bowels, to Rotten Zombie Flesh, over eighty-five Shadow-incipitted bands, and so on.
I ask again: anyone sensing a pattern, here? It would be easy to concentrate on the juvenile predilection for épating bourgeois parents by concatenating anything nasty and evil-sounding, sometimes with powerful, sometimes with laughable effect – ‘Vomit Church’, anyone? – but that’s not what I’m trying to do here; this list is a testament to the demography of the bands’ personnel themselves. One can imagine a group of teenagers in a well-to-do suburb in any part of the industrialised world, debating furiously the relative merits of their proposed band-name, before the most charismatic of the as-yet-unnamed band shouts: “I’ve got it, lads! ‘Blameworthy Warlock!’” All these kids want to do is shock a little, frighten themselves a little, be feared a little, and shock and frighten their parents a lot until their hormones calm down a bit, and they go off to a decent redbrick university as a prelude to their careers in the professions; and everyone takes the piss… it’s so unfair!
More importantly, for us under the bloodsoaked aegis of music sociology: if ever you wanted to know why Hebdige’s work is still so important to us, the fact that no bands on this incantatory list are ever called ‘The Happiness Solution’, or ‘Fluffy and the Cuddlers’ – or, for that matter, ‘E.Z. Wry Duuhh’ or ‘The Power Girls’ reminds us that only this group of people – financially secure, middle-class, expensively-educated late-teen boys who read Discworld and Tolkien when not playing World of Warcraft – could ever generate the subcultural capital they do from a secure habitus. Such a habitus allows for music-instrumental lessons, financial security (if not always emotional) the head-space to imagine fantasy worlds and the as-yet inchoate spermatozoa-producing equipment to make them be drawn irresistibly to a safe, cartoon version of The Dark Side.
The only weak part of this otherwise glorious book is the two pages of explanation and rationale at the end. The music theorist Heinrich Schenker argued that his music-analytical graphs were so epistemologically complete that they should need no further verbal explication, and should stand for themselves. And for me, this list, and this book, is exactly the same: it tells you all you need to know about the human geography of Death Metal subcultures in a self-sufficient way. That apart, Nelson’s work should be required reading for anyone trying to understand why this group of people like this type of music, and that one doesn’t.
Chris Kennett (or should that be Ttennek Sirhc)
March 23rd, 2011
