Sikes, L. (2017). In the Groove: American Rock Criticism, 1966-1978. Ph.D. thesis, University of Rochester, Ann Arbor.
Abstract: Rock and roll music was a national youth obsession for more than ten years before the first rock critics began writing seriously about the form. Rock was dismissed by adult cultural authorities as empty, degraded, and even dangerous. However, to its fans, rock was an important form of personal expression, a source of group identity, and a mode of political discourse. Rock critics understood its cultural and political power. In their work, they explained its importance to the American public.
In 1966, the first rock critic, Richard Goldstein, began writing about rock and roll in a weekly column in the Village Voice called “Pop Eye.” In it, he asserted that rock and roll was an art that deserved the same recognition and protections afforded to other art forms. By 1967, The New Yorker hired Ellen Willis to write about rock in a regular column called “Rock, Etc.” She brought an intellectual sophistication to the genre that would resound long after her career as a rock critic ended. Later in 1967, Rolling Stone debuted; it would become the most visible and influential source of rock criticism for the next fifty years. Editor Jann Wenner’s tastes and approach would affect the way rock was perceived in his own time and for decades after. Finally, in 1968, Lester Bangs debuted onto the scene, writing artful reviews for publications like Creem and Rolling Stone, explaining the changes that were taking place as rock music splintered into subgenres like punk and heavy metal.
The quality of these rock critics’ thought and the influence of their writing makes rock criticism an important and under-studied branch of Sixties literature. Each of the rock critics addressed in this dissertation explained to the public what rock music meant and why it mattered. By placing rock in its social, political, and cultural context, they demonstrated that it was far from the empty form cultural authorities thought it was. Their work permanently changed perceptions of popular music, proving that it was substantial enough to stand up to the same kind of critical treatment as other art forms.
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Silva Arratia, M. A. (2024). Brebaje y Transilvania: Dinámicas de diferenciación en la escena underground de 1985 a 1987. In La fuerza, influencia y tensiones de las mujeres del underground/metal boliviano (pp. 51–72). Special Issue of Perspectivas y Resistencias Musicales 2 (2).
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Simms, B. (2019). Foreverdark: For Amplified Cello Soloist and Chamber Orchestra. Doctoral thesis, University of Toronto (Canada), Ann Arbor.
Abstract: Foreverdark is a single movement, ten-minute concertino (short concerto) for amplified cello soloist with live electronic processing and chamber orchestra. The exact instrumentation consists of violoncello solo, flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, trumpet in Bb, horn in F, tenor trombone, percussion, piano, harp, violin 1, violin 2, viola, violoncello, and double bass; each part is played by a single player. The compositional style is a continuation and deeper exploration of the composer’s current compositional interests, namely the integration of quotation and popular music style signals within more broadly art music formats. By amplifying and separating the cello soloist from the ensemble, the player’s position alludes to that of a “lead guitarist;” subsequently, much of their melodic material (and that of the orchestra around them) is sourced from a variety of heavy metal riffs, most of them from bands the composer listened to as a teenager. The piece’s title, “Foreverdark,” both references the song with a similar name (Foreverdark Woods) by Viking metal artist Bathory as well as the composer’s long and somewhat nostalgic relationship to the metal genre itself. In addition to heavy metal-sourced melodic and rhythmic motifs, “Foreverdark” also contains some material bordering on a folk music aesthetic. Surprisingly, metal-turned-folk is a common stylistic shift in for some of the bands quoted within the work.
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Skeech, M. (2022). The Biology of Heavy Metal. Evolutionary Links Between Science and Culture. Doctoral thesis, University of Salford, Salford.
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Tapia, R., & Mendoza, B. (Eds.). (2022). El Tejido de las cuerdas disonantes del metal en Bolivia: Análisis descriptivo e histórico del under boliviano. La Paz: Ediciones Jichha.
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Uribe Álvarez, J. J. (2022). DEL ROCK AL METAL EXTREMO EN COLOMBIA. DISCURSOS COMO FORMA DE INTERVENCIÓN, VISIBILIZACIÓN Y DENUNCIA A PARTIR DE UNA GUERRA INTERMINABLE. Metal de Habla Hispana, 1, 93–99.
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Varas-Díaz, N., Hickam, B., González-Martínez, S., Castañeda, M., Galicia Poblet, F., Nieves Molina, A., et al. (2022). “Toda la sangre formando un río”. Contributions to the histories of metal music studies from the Spanish-speaking world. Metal Music Studies, 8(1), 47–68.
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Walch, F. (2023). Extreme Metal Across the Digital Divide: Music, Technology, Genre. Ph.D. thesis, The University of Texas at San Antoniohicago, Chicago, Illinois.
Abstract: This dissertation examines how the analog-digital transition influenced the development of extreme metal, interpreting its present obsession with fine sub-generic distinctions and “old-school” revivals of analog aesthetics as a means of coping with an uneasy dependence on digital media. While extreme metal’s values developed in analog networks, its transcendence of aural and bodily limits required digital prostheses. The digital divide in accessing these contested technologies structured extreme metal’s system of subgenres, which—like the remembered inconveniences of the past—memorialize now-lost resistances.
This dissertation’s arc is conceptual and chronological. Its introduction and conclusion frame its inquiry with present concerns, while the inner chapters are case studies that progress from undifferentiated analog beginnings in the 1980s to sub-generic crystallization up to the arrival of the digital audio workstation in the mid-1990s. Using archival materials, newly conducted interviews, and close readings of musical records, these case studies put vernacular theories into dialog with discourses drawn from the musicology of record production, music theory, and critical theory. Ultimately, these constellations aim to articulate a constitutive relationship between what it means to analyze, make, and enjoy popular music. This dissertation’s contributions are twofold. First, it provides models for the analysis of popular music grounded in the historically conditioned values of an aesthetic community—and how these values are adapted to disruptions. Second, this dissertation argues that (sub-)genre, as the promise of being able to repeat (increasingly narrow) aesthetic experiences, requires technologies that make this repetition possible—at least in fantasy. The Introduction uses ethnographic vignettes to establish the contemporary importance of sub-genre and nostalgia.
Chapter 1 asks why pioneering musicians can claim to have heard extreme metal before it existed, by manipulating the time-axis of existing records on tape or vinyl players. This fetish-like objectification of creativity reflects a disavowal of subjective creativity. Chapter 2 analyzes death metal drumming’s labor theory of value, demonstrating why digital drum sample replacement was both essential and intolerable for the development of the prized blast beat, which was valued as concrete time, but measured as abstract time.
An Interlude examines how moral panics around backmasking let horror-inspired album introductions transmit different messages to insiders and outsiders. Chapter 3 reconstructs the digital-analog assemblage Morrisound Studios used to create the signature hyper-real performance associated with death metal and explores how its aural trace made the digital divide audible. Chapter 4 argues that the death metal production aesthetic undermined the groove-based forms of grindcore, examining how former grindcore bands re-record their own songs in a death metal idiom. Chapter 5 contests the notion that black metal was only a return to an imagined analog past, analyzing it as a post-digital style that used the devaluation of human performance it critiqued in death metal to incorporate influences from electronic dance music. The Postlude returns to the present and considers what is at stake when resistances are lost to remediation. (source: Uchicago.edu)
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