Melancology

Author: Scott Wilson
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1780991908
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Melancology addresses the notorious musical genre black metal as a negative form of environmental writing that ‘blackens’ the cosmos. This book conjures a new word and concept that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction. Black metal resounds from the abyss and it is precisely only in relation to its sonic forces that the question of intervention in the environment arises in the articulation of melancology with ethics. That is, in deciding ‘which way out’ we should take, in deciding with what surpluses to dwell, with what waste, what detritus or decay in a process of unbinding with sonic forces that traverse an earth choking in wealth and death. The book thus provides a provocative and challenging contribution both to popular and intellectual debates on ecology.

Hideous Gnosis

Author: Nicola Masciandaro
Publisher: Glossator
ISBN: 1450572162
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
A collection of essays and documents presented at "Hideous Gnosis," a symposium on black metal theory held in Brooklyn, December 2009.

Black Metal Rainbows

Author: Daniel Lukes
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629639230
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
Black metal is a paradox. A noisy underground metal genre brimming with violence and virulence, it has captured the world’s imagination for its harsh yet flamboyant style and infamous history involving arson, blasphemy, and murder. Today black metal is nothing less than a cultural battleground between those who claim it for nationalist and racist ends, and those who say: Nazi black metal fvck off! Black Metal Rainbows is a radical collection of writers, artists, activists, and visionaries, including Drew Daniel, Kim Kelly, Laina Dawes, Espi Kvlt, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Svein Egil Hatlevik, Eugene S. Robinson, Margaret Killjoy, and many more. Across essays and theory-fictions, artworks and comics, we say out loud: Long live black metal’s trve rainbow! This unique volume envisions black metal as always already open, inclusive, and unlimited: a musical genre whose vital spirit of total antagonism rebels against the forces of political conservatism. Beyond its clichés of grimness, nihilism, reaction, and signature black/white corpse-paint sneer, black metal today is a vibrant and revolutionary paradigm. This book reveals its ludic, carnival worlds animated by spirits of joy and celebration, community and care, queerness and camp, LGBTQI+ identities and antifascist, antiracist, and left-wing politics, not to mention endless aesthetic experimentation and fabulousness. From the crypt to the cloud, Black Metal Rainbows unearths black metal’s sparkling core and illuminates its prismatic spectrum: deep within the black, far beyond grimness, and over a darkly glittering rainbow!

On Extremity

Author: Nelson Varas-Díaz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666905216
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
On Extremity: From Music to Images, Words, and Experiences brings together transdisciplinary scholarship on sounds, images, words, and experiences (human and non-human) to reflect on the polysemic and polymorphic characteristics of extremity and the category of the extreme. The editors and authors aim to contribute to a living, breathing, and expanding definition of extremity that helps us understand what we gain, or lose, when we interact with it, create it, and share it with, or force it upon, others. The volume calls for the emergence of “extremity studies” as an area of perusal to help us navigate our current global condition.

Perspectives on Ecocriticism

Author: Ingemar Haag
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527534294
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
This volume gathers together papers presented at the conference “Ecocriticism in the Nordic Countries; Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” held in Västerås, Sweden, in 2017, organized by the research group Ecocritical Forum at Mälardalen University. The conference, which was an attempt to survey local ecocritical activities, transcended Nordic boundaries, engaging scholars from Europe and the United States. This expansion from the local to the global mirrors the subject of the conference: ecocriticism, a cross-disciplinary field of research in the intersection of environmental issues and cultural expressions. The chapters here engage with topical issues such as the Anthropocene, sustainability in education, and civilizational critique, as well as schools of thought such as materialism, dark ecology and animal studies. The contributions discuss several types of cultural expressions, including film and other visual media, university course design and Nordic, and English language novels and poetry. This volume will attract the interest of readers from a number of different backgrounds, both in the Nordic countries and internationally.

Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory

Author: Edia Connole
Publisher: Mimesis
ISBN: 8869770362
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory is a collaborative collection of writings in black metal theory (BMT), an amorphous ‘metallectual’ movement initiated in 2009 with the symposium Hideous Gnosis. According to its earliest formulation, BMT seeks to creatively destroy the boundary between metal and theory, to make something new in the space of their shared negativity: ‘Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black metal. Not not theory. Black metal theory. Theoretical blackening of metal. Metallic blackening of theory. Mutual blackening. Nigredo in the intoxological crucible of symposia’. This volume gathers together previously published and new work on BMT focusing onmysticism, a domain of thought and experience with deep connections both to the black metal genre and to theory (theoria, vision, contemplation). More than a topic for BMT, the mystical is here explored in terms of the continuous intersection of black metal andtheory, the ‘floating tomb’ wherein metal is elevated into the intellectual and visionary experience that it already is.

Isn't it Ironic?

Author: Ian Kinane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000377016
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
This volume addresses the relationship between irony and popular culture and the role of the consumer in determining and disseminating meaning. Arguing that in a cultural climate largely characterised by fractious communications and perilous linguistic exchanges, the very role of irony in popular culture needs to come under greater scrutiny, it focuses on the many uses, abuses, and misunderstandings of irony in contemporary popular culture, and explores the troubling political populism at the heart of many supposedly satirical and (apparently) non-satirical texts. In an environment in which irony is frequently claimed as a defence for material and behaviour judged controversial, how do we, as a society entrenched in forms of popular culture and media, interpret work that is intended as satire but which reads as unironic? How do we accurately decode works of popular film, literature, television, music, and other cultural forms which sell themselves as bitingly ironic commentaries on current society, but which are also problematic celebrations of the very issues they purport to critique? And what happens when texts intended and received in one manner are themselves ironically recontextualised in another? Bringing together studies across a range of cultural texts including popular music, film and television, Isn’t it Ironic? will appeal to scholars of the social sciences and humanities with interests in cultural studies, media studies, popular culture, literary studies and sociology.

The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music

Author: Jan-Peter Herbst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110884586X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Book Description
Exploring the musical styles and cultures of metal, this Companion is an indispensable introduction to this popular and distinctive genre.

Heavy Metal Music, Texts, and Nationhood

Author: Catherine Hoad
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030676196
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
This book addresses how whiteness is represented in heavy metal scenes and practices, both as a site of academic inquiry and force of cultural significance. The author argues that whiteness, and more specifically white masculinity, has been given normative value which obscures the contributions of women and people of colour, and affirms the exclusory understandings of ‘belonging’ which have featured in the metal scenes of Norway, South Africa, and Australia. Utilizing critical discourse analysis and critical textual analysis of musical texts, promotional material, and participant-based observation ethnographies, it explores how the texts, discourses, and practices produced and articulated by metal scene members and scholars alike have presented heavy metal as a white, masculine pastime, yet also considers the vital work done by scene members to confront expressions of exclusory misogyny and racism when they emerge in metal scenes. The book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of metal music studies, leisure studies, sociology of culture and sociology of racism.

Global Metal Music and Culture

Author: Andy R. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317587243
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
This book defines the key ideas, scholarly debates, and research activities that have contributed to the formation of the international and interdisciplinary field of Metal Studies. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including popular music, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics, this volume offers new and innovative research on metal musicology, global/local scenes studies, fandom, gender and metal identity, metal media, and commerce. Offering a wide-ranging focus on bands, scenes, periods, and sounds, contributors explore topics such as the riff-based song writing of classic heavy metal bands and their modern equivalents, and the musical-aesthetics of Grindcore, Doom metal, Death metal, and Progressive metal. They interrogate production technologies, sound engineering, album artwork and band promotion, logos and merchandising, t-shirt and jewellery design, and fan communities that define the global metal music economy and subcultural scene. The volume explores how the new academic discipline of metal studies was formed, also looking forward to the future of metal music and its relationship to metal scholarship and fandom. With an international range of contributors, this volume will appeal to scholars of popular music, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as those interested in metal communities around the world.