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Running with the Devil
Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music
Music / Culture
Sales Date: 2014-11-14
A comprehensive musical, social, and cultural analysis of heavy metal music, with a new foreword and afterword
Winner of the 1994 Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music
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.
Acknowledgements
Foreword, by Harris M. Berger
Introduction
METALLURGIES: GENRE, HISTORY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HEAVY METAL
Genre and Commercial Meditation
Casting Heavy Metal
Heavy Metal in the 80's
Headbangers
"Nasty, Brutish, and Short?" Rock Critics and Academics Evaluate Metal
BEYOND THE VOCALS: TOWARD THE ANALYSIS OF POPULAR MUSIC DISCOURSES
Genre and Discourse
Musicological Analysis
Writing about Music
Metal as Discourse
"Runnin' with the Devil"
Negotiation and Pleasure
ERUPTIONS: HEAVY METAL APPROPRIATIONS OF CLASSICAL VIRTUOSITY
Classical Prestiger and Popular Meanings
Ritchie Blackmore and the Classical Roots of Metal
Edward Van Halen and the New Virtuosity
Randy Rhoads: Metal Gets Serious
Yngwie Malmsteen: Metal Augmented and Diminished
Popular Music as Cultural Dialogue
FORGING MUSCULINITY: HEAVY METAL SOUNDS AND IMAGES OF GENDER
Behind the Screen: Listening to Gender
No Girls Allowed: Exscription in Heavy Metal
The Kiss of Death: Misogyny and the Male Victim
Living on a Prayer: Romance
Nothing but a Good Time? Androgyny as a Political Party
"Real Men Don't Wear Makeup"
CAN I PLAY WITH MADNESS? MYSTICISM, HORROR, AND POSTMODERN POLITICS
Professing Censorship: The PMRC and Its Academic Allies Attack
Suicide Solutions
Mysticism and Postmodernism in Heavy Metal
Horror and History
Guns N' Roses N' Marx N' Engels
AFTERWORD to the 2014 Edition
Appendix I: Heavy Metal Canons
Appendix 2: Heavy Metal Questionnaire
Notes
Select Discography
Select Bibliography
Index
ROBERT WALSER is a professor and director of the Center of Popular Music Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He has published extensively on popular music, including Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History. Walser has received NEH and ACLS fellowships and has twice won the Irving Lowens Award. HARRIS M. BERGER is professor of music and performance studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Stance and coeditor of Metal Rules the Globe.
"Walser belongs to a small but influential group of academics trying to reconcile 'high theory' with a streetwise sense of culture . . . an excellent book."
~Rolling Stone
"An eye-opening account of the world of heavy metal, as well as a model for how Cultural Studies work ought to be done. Walser lays bare the vision embodied in metal as a total cultural phenomenon—music and words, performers and fans, critics and devotees. The book is exemplary in its rich material, subtle positionings, and elegant writing.""
~Sherry B. Ortner, University of Michigan
"Essential reading in all popular music (and cultural studies) courses."
~Simon Frith
""Running with the Devil takes musicology where it has never gone before; I once saw the chapter on metal guitarists and the classical tradition performed live in a lecture hall, but even on paper it smokes.""
~SF Weekly
""Walser is truly gifted at doing what few critics before him have done: analyzing the music . . . In virtuoso readings of metal music that forge persuasive links between metal and particular classical music traditions, Walser reveals the ways that musical structures themselves are social texts.""
~The Nation
""Walser belongs to a small but influential group of academics trying to reconcile 'high theory' with a streetwise sense of culture . . . an excellent book.""
~Rolling Stone
""Making surprising connections to classical forms and debunking stereotypes of metal's musical crudity, Walser delves enthusiastically into guitar conventions and rituals.""
~Washington Post