Metal: Diabolus in musica exhibition, open 5 April to 29 September 2024, Philharmonie de Paris

Owen Coggins

Metal at the Philharmonie de Paris

At the beginning of April 2024 I attended the opening of easily the biggest and most impressive museum exhibition on heavy metal in the world to date. Metal, as a subculture of ‘proud pariahs’ (Weinstein 1991) has always had an uneasy relationship with high culture and its institutional establishments. But recent years have seen a tentative acceptance of metal into classical concert halls, museums and galleries (I’ve argued that drone metal has prompted at least one experimental music publication to revise their previous classist disdain and suddenly claim that metal has always been avant-garde; Coggins 2023). There’s currently an exhibit in Berlin about Heavy Metal in the DDR which looks great (https://www.hdg.de/museum-in-der-kulturbrauerei/ausstellungen/heavy-metal-in-der-ddr), while the most prominent example up until now was the 2020 Home of Metal exhibition Black Sabbath: 50 Years at the Birmingham Museum in the UK (https://homeofmetal.com/event/black-sabbath-50-years/). Metal: Diabolus in Musica is a significant step further, a monumental tribute to all of metal in all its complexity, at the Philharmonie de Paris, the prestigious centrepiece of the Cité de la Musique, and open until the end of September 2024.

Institutionalised Metal

For a music culture that has attracted plenty of moral panics and sneering contempt over the decades, there’s naturally a question about its appearance in such an institution: should we be satisfied at metal getting due recognition, or suspicious of what the establishment wants with metal now? Questions also asked of metal in the academy… In situations like this I’m highly averse to any patronising condescension, and am glad to say there was none to be found: crucially, curators Corentin Charbonnier and Milan Garcin are metalheads and know metal. In the colloquium accompanying the opening of the exhibition (available to stream in French or English translation, at Symposium : Metal and metalheads : Myth and Rite – Philharmonie à la demande), they insisted that this was not an ‘official history’ of metal but simply an overdue opportunity for its expression in the cultural spaces of the French capital.

As metal studies pioneer Professor Deena Weinstein pointed out at the same event, ‘metal studies’ had already started before she arrived on the scene, as people who loved metal tried to articulate to themselves what it was about this music that resonated with them so strongly. One of the commentators at the event also noted that metal already has a kind of museum, with branches around the world: the Hard Rock Café, from which the Philharmonie has borrowed a number of artefacts for this exhibition. Even in the sourcing of some of the objects on display there’s an interesting combination of elite and popular cultures: of course metal’s existing museums are also bars.

Sound

First, sound: for me important questions about any exhibition about music are, what does the exhibition itself sound like, and how is a primarily sonic culture is represented through objects and images? Pleasingly noisy is the first answer, with constant blasts of different subgenres throughout, and the opportunity to hear metal from France and around the world in specific rooms. Anticipation is raised before you get through the entrance, as a giant screen shows a festival crowd filmed from onstage behind the drum riser: tens of thousands of metalheads await the beginning of a set. Then once you’re in, the first thing to catch the attention is another screen, showing three clips of early metal. Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple are present, but most fitting is footage from Black Sabbath’s brilliant Paris 1970 concert, an early highwater mark of metal’s live energy in this city.

Later on there’s a loud and visceral room with screens on three sides showing a daytime festival crowd which moshes, headbangs, and even the infamous Amon Amarth ‘rowing pit.’ The space is a great attempt at doing the impossible: communicating what it’s like to be at the front of a large metal show, perhaps for those who haven’t had that experience. The wall at the back was covered in giant festival posters which, I realised after noticing the one for Fortress Festival in Scarborough this summer, were all yet to happen: a nice touch in that it might prompt neophytes or old hands alike to get stuck in at one of these or similar events in the near future.

Scope

Metal’s range is presented by a kind of chapel, featuring intricately detailed ‘stained glass window’ images for several metal subgenres, each window design topped with a departed representative of that style—Chester Bennington, Chuck Schuldiner, Dead, and so on—in tribute to the saints of the various traditions. Though speaking of religion, I was slightly surprised to see a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible (1969) included in the black metal section, as this seems to simplify that subgenre’s relationship with religion given that LaVeyan satanism was vociferously denounced by many black metallers from the late 1980s and onwards. Nevertheless the chapel design is a striking and entertaining way to illustrate metal’s diverse unity or its united diversity, each alcove under each ‘window’ displaying objects and images relating to power and symphonic metal, nu metal, hardcore, hard rock and heavy metal, death metal, speed and thrash, and black metal, though the absence of doom metal is a bit surprising in retrospect.

There’s a room dedicated to French metal. There aren’t many artefacts here, the centrepiece being a screen where French bands are represented on gig tickets that, when touched, blast their music appropriately loudly, a great showcase albeit missing my personal favourite, France’s greatest extreme doom band Monarch! And metal’s global spread is represented by Paul Shiakallis’ famous and eye-catching photos of metalheads in Botswana and Morocco, and another interactive display, this time with headphones. This features metal examples from around the globe, where the bands represented all overtly combine metal with local musical and cultural signifiers. While it’s true and certainly worth celebrating that metal is used creatively all over the world in combination with various musical and cultural traditions, and while all the bands featured are great and original, it was somewhat predictable that the Mexican example would be Cemican, Central Asia would be represented by The Hu, Alien Weaponry would be the ones from Aotearoa/New Zealand. No surprise I suppose that tokenism and exoticism are thorny issues to navigate in the representation of local cultures in international popular culture under capitalism. Odd but somehow also unsurprising was the inclusion of Heilung and Wardruna’s pagan music reconstructions alongside Dutch folk metal band Eluveitie in representing Europe. But despite connections with metal musicians and audiences, Heilung and Wardruna don’t play metal music. If metal’s global culture is celebrated when non-European bands add regional cultural elements, how is this equivalent to European bands subtracting the metal from folk metal? Amid the celebration of metal from the Global South, then, might this actually subtly reinforce the idea that Europe (and perhaps whiteness) has a special relationship with metal beyond the historical circumstances of its emergence?

Things

A major part of the exhibition is, of course, objects from metal’s history, largely instruments, costumes, and pieces of stage sets. I can’t say I was that excited by the instruments, inert and silent on the walls, but it makes sense that there are some, and they are well-chosen and distinctive (John Bonham’s drumkit, Gene Simmons’ axe bass, a Flying V or three). Actually I thought the clothes were more interesting, perhaps surprisingly: Tony Iommi’s fringed, beaded and shelled jacket looking very much in continuity with the hippie aesthetic that Black Sabbath are supposed to have drastically departed from; a combat-pants and mirror-chestpiece outfit that from a mile away is absolutely unmistakably Sabaton; a trademark clownish-but-obscene suit from Marilyn Manson; clothes from Vision of Atlantis and Therion that show the starkly gendered outfitting of symphonic metal musicians; a black metal patched vest; and a well-worn studded bracelet from Rob Halford. For different visitors there will of course be different items that spark awed reverence, but the presence of that small piece caught me off-guard, as so much of metal’s costume aesthetic (see black metal’s exaggerated nail gauntlets!) can be traced back to the Judas Priest frontman’s combination of metal and leather (see Clifford-Napoleone 2017).

There’s also a great collection of masks from all kinds of musicians, drawing connection between Buckethead, Slipknot and others (though maybe some corpse paint could have been included here too). The variety is great beyond the clothes and guitars, showing so much about metal’s aesthetic from Nikki Sixx’s motorbike to Alice Cooper’s guillotine. Less exciting for me was the merchandise aspect- a wall of t-shirts, for example, which gave prominent place to Slayer’s idiotic ‘Kill the Kardashians’ design, though more importantly, also to the shirt from the Nantes ISMMS conference! A recreation of a metalhead’s bedroom with posters and albums was meticulously constructed but didn’t tell me much. Just outside this room though is a wall of zines that developed into magazines, tracking how the developing scene in France was documented and communicated about.

Classical Art

There isn’t really a specific focus to the whole show other than to try and cover metal’s history, subgenres, and aspects of metal in France and in the world- not much indication of metal’s impact, social position, or effect on the world. But there is an implicit thread about metal in relation to the history of art. A wall of records doesn’t sound like anything impressive but I spent a long time with it, the collection showing how metal has drawn heavily on classic artworks in its visual aesthetic, neatly completing a loop where it’s the album covers that are on the wall in the gallery rather than the originals they borrowed from. Bosch, Brueghel and Blake feature several times, and I enjoyed finding out that a John Martin painting The Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium (c1841) that I’d seen in the Tate gallery in London and thought, ‘why isn’t that a metal album cover?’ had in fact already been used by Angel Witch on their 1980 debut album. Another amusing revelation came seeing the Rodin sculpture L’Idol eternelle (c1880-1890) next to Black Sabbath’s album Eternal Idol (1987): I hadn’t made the connection despite the title and the record literally sticking the sculpture on the cover.

Contemporary Art

Another original piece that’s been used for an album cover is H.R. Giger’s Satan I (1977), famous in its own right and also for adorning Celtic Frost’s 1985 album To Mega Therion (and, as real ones know, the 1995 cover of German underground metal zine Witchcraft #4). There’s also a giant Giger alien sculpture- on the opening night this felt like a focus of a lot of excitement, which is fitting as Giger was both a renowned artist but also one of our own, a properly metal artist who worked closely with metal musicians. Equally fitting is the inclusion of artwork where the brilliant, visionary originals were not consecrated by the art establishment, such Michael Whelan’s 1981 Nightmare in Red, the beautifully strange piece that decorates Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains (1989), but which was initially produced for a as initially a science fiction book cover.

Metal’s intersection with contemporary art is represented in pieces by Wim Delvoye, who plays with symbols such as a DNA-barbed wire-crucifix combination, and by Elodie Lesourd, who experiments on notorious black metal iconography. One of her works included is the 2011 piece You can Lick Mother Mary’s Asshole in Eternity, which reproduces the notorious ‘Norsk Arisk’ [Norwegian Aryan] phrase from Darkthrone’s 1994 Transilvanian Hunger, but reverses it and thereby projects it on the floor for people to look at but also trample underfoot. The importance and creativity of photography in presenting metal aesthetics is also emphasised by a number of pieces that draw on historical, and especially religious, artworks in presenting metal musicians. Aside from this, the best photograph is the iconic photo by Esther Segarra of Abbath and band in full masks and corpse paint crossing Abbey Road, a double nod to previous pop music history, the Beatles’ 1969 album cover obviously but also Kiss having done a similar ‘day out in London’ photoshoot in 1976. It should be said that all these categories bleed into one another across the whole show: promotional images have their own art history, memorabilia becomes historical artefact, a device for shooting fireworks from the stage at a Rammstein gig is a strange futuristic art object, riffs on famous paintings become artworks themselves, all part of metal’s irreverent reverence for art and but more importantly for its own traditions.

Outside

At the colloquium we heard that there were a few things not possible to include: Sabaton offered a tank but it wouldn’t fit through the doors, so they briefly considered having it outside but felt it might not go down too well with Paris hosting the Olympics over the summer. A black metal band offered to provide some pig heads, though that was considered a bit practically tricky (and having been to a black metal gig which featured such ‘authentic’ props, I can attest that the smell would take over the entire space quickly). Other absences were because bands didn’t want to be associated with the exhibition, or wanted too much money for their items to be included, neatly summarising a range of responses to metal in the museum!

Access all areas

The setting is all black drapes and metal posts, that make you feel like you’re in a magical backstage zone full of secret treasures. The curators specifically wished to design a space that wasn’t too prescriptive in dictating flow through the exhibits, and that allowed people to pick their own routes which works well while nodding to metal myths of individual freedom. There’s a question for me about who this is for, in presenting this material both to metal devotees and to people who know nothing about the music and culture metal, perhaps even bringing negative preconceptions… will the otherwise uninitiated come because it’s at the Philharmonie? Another note for non-Francophone visitors, the larger introductory texts are in French and English, but the smaller explanations for particular pieces are in French only, somewhat frustratingly as I was less interested in the broad-brush descriptions of metal’s history and aesthetics, but definitely wanted more details on particular pieces. But overall there’s no doubt it’s an impressive experience for the visitor and an important achievement for the curators and wider team. For any metalhead attending, there will be parts from metal’s history seen in a new light, parts that represent music you think is terrible but grudgingly admit has a place in the story, and, of course, parts from your own history in metal, objects and images that remind you of what’s important about the music we love.

References

Coggins, Owen (2023) ‘From Stereotyped Postures to Credible Avant-Garde Strategies: The Alchemical Transformation of Drone Metal in The Wire Magazine’ in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music, ed. Jan-Peter Herbst. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp.251-64.

Clifford-Napoleone (2017) Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent. London: Routledge.

LaVey, Anton Szandor (1969) The Satanic Bible. New York: Avon Books.

Weinstein, Deena (1991) Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology. Boston: Da Capo Press.