Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music

"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."