Robert McParland - Myth and Magic in Heavy Metal Music

Also by ROBERT MCPARLAND

Science Fiction in Classic Rock: Musical Explorations of Space, Technology and the Imagination, 19671982 (McFarland, 2017)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3298-8

2018 Robert McParland. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: Venom guitarist Conrad Cronos Lant during the Party.San Metal Open Air music festival on August 8, 2013, at the Obermehler-Schlotheim airfield in Germany (photograph by Jonas Rogowski)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

A book like this that focuses on the enduring power of myth is only possible because artists and creators, devoted music fans, and a dedicated publishing team value imagination and recognize that it plays a significant role in human experience. The author would like to thank the many critics of heavy metal upon whose work this volume rests. Thanks also go to Donald Palumbo for his helpful feedback for an earlier book, Science Fiction and Classic Rock: Musical Explorations of Space, Technology and the Human Imagination, 19671982 (2017). Inspiration has come from a thoughtful network of rock music enthusiasts who meet each year at the American Popular Culture Conference. Among this network of talented individuals are Tom Kitts and Gary Burns, who edit Popular Music and Society and Rock Music Studies, Nick Baxter-Moore, Alex Di Blasi, Steve Hamelman, Scott Henderson, Lawrence Pitilli, and the Maine poet Jim Mello. Their support and their insights into rock music are much appreciated.

Rock has made its own myths and created heroes. Legends and tales have been transcribed in rock criticism for more than half a century. Heavy metal asserts power and sings about our situation now. Yet, its creativity relies upon the recasting of human experience in symbols, myths, and dreams. This is a book about those heavy metal dreams.

Heavy metal is in dialogue with our contemporary world. When in its discourse of power and imagination it appeals to ancient mythology heavy metal offers us fresh perspectives on our current situation. Today rationalism is global, computer compatible everywhere. It is the international style of the minds architecture, writes James Hillman (152). This book argues for balance. It calls for recognition of our human need for entertainment, fantasy, and mythical imagination. To embrace such imagination is to don wings like Icarus, to set sail with Charon on a journey across the border of the sacred and the scared. Mythic imagination attempts to make visible the invisible, to assert that intuition and imagination are necessary. Power, fantasy, wonder, and excess are the stuff of metal, as some critics have said. It takes us to fantastic sites, the decks of haunted ships, the cobblestones of ancient cities, the gates of hell.

Heavy metal is a voice in the modern world that recognizes the power of myth. Its expression of those myths is crucial to heavy metals ongoing creativity and its longevity in a music business in which it has been appropriated and commercialized. The future of heavy metal depends upon its creators desire to create powerful and authentic music alongside compelling imagery that rests upon archetypes. Such music speaks to human emotion and imagination.

When Christopher Booker gives us his archetypal analysis of the seven plots that underpin most literature he reminds us that plotlines like overcoming the monster, the quest myth, or voyage and return have been present in stories from time immemorial. It follows that whenever an ambitious heavy metal song involves a narrative there is often a mythical impulse and an archetypal monomyth at work in it. Manowars extended treatment of Achilles and Iron Maidens Rime of the Ancient Mariner are examples of this. (Booker, who worked for more than thirty years on his book, identifies the major plots as Overcoming the Monster, The Quest, Rags to Riches, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth.)

Myths seek to take us beyond ordinary perception. Mythic stories, however fantastic, connect with human experience. They are revised and retold across generations and these revisions bring the myths alive within each new cultural context. Myths, legends, and folk tales may be recited or sung for the delight of audiences. They are entertaining and also can be told for a serious purpose. Rock song lyrics are a form of popular literature that suggest attitudes or tell stories and continue myths involvement in creating meaning.

In the old days, rock music was a distraction from your studies; now it may well be what you are studying, Terry Eagleton points out (3). The literary critic Louis Menand, in a review essay in The New Yorker (July 31, 2017), recognized the trend of academics who are producing what he called advanced pop. Commenting on Michael Robbinss book Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music (2017), he wrote that this form of criticism is premised on the belief that you can talk about cultural goods loved uncritically by millions in terms originally developed to talk about cultural goods known mainly to an overeducated few (64). This book applies some of that approach, arguing for something that listeners to heavy metal may feel viscerally: that myth, metaphor, imagination, entertainment, and passion remain crucial in our contemporary society. The best way to approach this mythological framework is to locate the lyrics and to listen to the recordings.

This study of myth and metal is an attempt to approach heavy metal primarily from a mythological and literary perspective. Previous book-length studies have tended to investigate heavy metal from the perspectives of sociology, musicology, or cultural studies. There has also been much work in psychology on the impact of heavy metal on youth. The reader is encouraged to turn to the ever-developing scholarship about heavy metal. The study of this field was opened by Deena Weinstein (1991) and Robert Walser (1993). Their pivotal studies were followed by books by Harris M. Berger (1999), Steve Waksman (1999, 2009), Susan Fast (2001), Natalie Purcell (2003), Glenn Pillsbury (2006), Chris McDonald (2007), and Keith Kahn-Harris (2007). In recent years essays have been gathered into collections such as Gerd Bayers Heavy Metal Music in Britain (2009), Donna Weston and Andy Bennetts Pagan Metal (2014), and Scott A. Wilsons Music at the Extremes (2015). Heavy metal is looked at in a global context in the essays gathered in Metal Rules the Globe (2011) from Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene and in Global Metal Music (2016), edited by Andy Brown, Karl Spracklen, Keith Kahn-Harris, and Niall W.R. Scott. In The Wall Street Journal (2016) Neil Shah pointed to what he called The Weird Appeal of Heavy Metal as world music, or as the post about this on the Web put it: Heavy Metal Becomes the Unlikely Soundtrack of Globalization. In that article Brian Hickam, a librarian/archivist at Wilmington College since 2015, reported that 224 academic articles on heavy metal were published between 2000 to 2011 and 63 more were published in the following year. The International Society for Metal Music Studies and their journal