Running with the Devil. Robert Walser

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       Introduction

      *

      In the catacombs of a nineteenth-century warehouse, hulking in a rundown riverfront district, passageways wind through rough stonework to connect small rooms, each fronted by a sturdy iron door. Behind these doors musicians compose and rehearse through all hours of the day and night. Wandering the crooked hallways, I hear waves of sound clashing and coalescing: powerful drums and bass, menacing and ecstatic vocals, the heavy crunch of distorted electric guitars. In some rooms, lone guitarists practice scales, arpeggios, heavy metal riffs, and Bach transcriptions. Occasionally, I pass an open door, and musicians who are taking a break consider my presence with cool curiosity.

      I am struck by the resemblance of these underground rehearsal spaces to the practice rooms of a conservatory. The decor is different, but the people are similar: musicians in their late teens and early twenties, assembled for long hours of rigorous practice. There is a parallel sense of isolation for the sake of musical craft and creativity, a kindred pursuit of technical development and group precision. And like conservatory students, many of these heavy metal musicians take private lessons, study music theory, and practice scales and exercises for hours every day. They also share the precarious economic future faced by classical musicians; in both cases, few will ever make enough money performing to compensate them for the thousands of hours they have practiced and rehearsed.

      There are important differences from the conservatory environment, too, not the least of which is the grungy setting itself, which underlines the fact that this music does not enjoy institutional prestige or receive governmental subsidy. The musicians must pool their funds to pay for rental of the rooms, and the long hair that marks them as members of a heavy metal subculture also ensures that they are not likely to have access to jobs that pay well. On the other hand, many of these people are actually working as musicians, at least part-time. Unlike most of their peers in the academy, they know a great deal about the commercial channels to which they hope to gain access. Some talk of not compromising their art for popular success, but there is little evidence of the music academy’s pretense that art can be pursued apart from commerce. This is in part because they are more closely connected with their potential audiences, through their own fan activities and those of their friends, while relatively few aspiring classical musicians actually belong to the moneyed class that underwrites the performance of classical music. Heavy metal musicians are, in fact, strongly influenced by the practices of the musical academy, but their activities also retain the priorities of collective creation and orality derived from traditions of popular music making.

      The noisy vaults of that warehouse and the musicians who haunt them evoke images and raise issues that will be central to my discussions of heavy metal. If metal could be said to have gotten started in any single place, it would be Birmingham, England, the industrial city whose working class spawned Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That heavy metal bands now labor in spaces abandoned by industry is particularly appropriate for a music that has flourished during the period of American deindustrialization. And just as the labor of industrial production is invisible in mass media representations of consumer products, СКАЧАТЬ