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Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music
by Robert Walser
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"A solid, scholarly analysis of the power, meaning, musical structure, and sociopolitical contexts of the most popular examples of heavy metal." — Library Journal Dismissed by critics and academics, condemned by parents and politicians, and fervently embraced by legions of fans, heavy metal music continues to attract and embody cultural conflicts that are central to society. In Running with the Devil, Robert Walser explores how and why heavy metal works, both musically and socially, and at the same time uses metal to investigate contemporary formations of identity, community, gender, and power. This edition includes a new foreword by Harris M. Berger contextualizing the work and a new afterword by the author. Ebook Edition Note: all photographs (sixteen) have been redacted.…
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"Robert Walser is a fairly eminent musicologist who has also looked at other popular genres. When this came out in 1993, it kickstarted academic research on metal. The book challenges a lot of misconceptions about what metal is, particularly in musicological terms, tracing some of the musical antecedents to classic metal to the use of guitar solos. Walser discovers the similarity between a certain kind of metal guitar, particularly the work of Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, and looks at the similarities to classic rock music, as well as to other classical genres as well. There’s a guitar-only track by Van Halen called ‘Eruption’ which he analyses very closely. It’s a really fascinating and a very smart piece of work. “Metal is constantly pushing at musical boundaries” The other thing Walser talks about is that is central to metal music is what he calls the “dialectic of freedom and control”. To me that nails down a major aspect of metal aesthetics, which is very constrained, tight riffing punctuated by outbreaks of wild, free soloing. But in fact, as Walser shows, it is not entirely free and is based a lot on classic music models. Walser is still very influential in metal studies, and it is still a book that I return to that is worth reading by people who aren’t academics."