Table Of ContentWith a new afterword
Foreword by Harris M. Berger
wesleyan university press
Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
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www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2014 and 1993 by Robert Walser
Foreword © 2014 by Harris M. Berger
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their
minimum requirement for recycled paper.
isbn for this edition: 978-0-8195-7514-2
The Library of Congress cataloged the previous edition as:
Walser, Robert
Running with the Devil: power, gender, and madness
in heavy metal music / Robert Walser.
p. cm.—(Music culture)
Includes bibliographical references, discography, and index.
isbn 0-8195-5252-6 (cl).—isbn 0-8195-6260-2
1. Heavy metal (Music)—History and criticism.
I. Title. II. Series.
ml3534.w29 1993
781.66—dc20 92-56911
5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments for song lyrics quoted:
“Electric Eye”: Words and music by Glenn Tipton, Rob Halford, and K. K.
Downing, © 1982 emi april music, inc./crewglen ltd./ebonytree ltd./
geargate ltd. All rights controlled and administered by emi april music,
inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“Suicide Solution”: Words and music by John Osbourne, Robert Daisley, and
Randy Rhoads, tro—© Copyright 1981 Essex Music International, Inc. and
Kord Music Publishers, New York, N.Y. Used by permission.
Cover photograph of Van Halen by Chris Walter/Photo features.
Foreword to the 2014 Edition vii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction xix
Afterword to the 2014 Edition 173
Appendix 1: Heavy Metal Canons 181
Appendix 2: Heavy Metal Questionnaire 183
Notes 187
Select Discography 213
Select Bibliography 217
Index 223
Photographs follow page 107
Foreword to the 2014 Edition
Harris M. Berger
✲
Toward the end of Running with the Devil, Robert Walser engaged
ideas from Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982)
to understand the ways in which the musicians and fans of heavy metal
use their music to come to term with the dynamism and dislocations
of modernity. Exploring the imperative for relentless transformation
in contemporary society, Berman was an apt touchstone for Walser,
who argued that Guns N’ Roses’s explosive musical energy chronicled
how late capitalism’s turbulent and oppressive qualities are experienced
by American youth in everyday life, even as that music recapitulated
capitalism’s strident individualism. Rereading Walser’s now classic
study over twenty years after its initial publication, I am struck by how
much things have changed in the world of metal and in popular music
studies—how much the solid has melted into air—but also how con-
temporary Running feels, how many of its interpretations continue to
capture the affective character of social life in the second decade of the
twenty-first century.
At first glance, it is the transformations within metal that capture
one’s attention. It has been widely and rightly observed that innova-
tions from African American popular musics (ragtime, jazz, rhythm
and blues, hip hop) have long been co-opted by an American music
industry dominated by white artists and white executives. What is less
widely acknowledged are the ways in which musical innovations from
heavy metal—a music that is often understood as “white” but which
has, from its inception, been produced by artists from a wide range
of racial and ethnic groups—have been incorporated into mainstream
styles and contexts. The distinctive timbral qualities of metal’s heavi-
Foreword / vii
est guitar players, the rhythmic textures and styles of ornamentation
of its most aggressive drummers, and the harmonic ideas of its most
creative composers, musical elements that were once auditory icons of
unredeemable transgression, are now common in the music of tele-
vision, movies, and advertising, and even appear occasionally in the
soundtracks of the most unobjectionably G-rated children’s series,
from My Little Pony to Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse. Within metal
itself, the musical vocabulary has expanded dramatically, with a vast
proliferation of subgenres and a wide array of metal styles hybridizing
with other musics. While music genres are best conceptualized as his-
torically emergent bundles of expressive resources and social features
that participants use to guide the production and reception of music,
the shear variety of genre categories that have emerged in metal’s dis-
courses indicates at least some of the musical scope here: English lan-
guage, fan or journalistic sources such as the Encyclopaedia Metallum
(2014), Wikipedia (2014), and AllMusic (2014) typically list from ten
to twenty-five metal subgenres, while the finer-grained divisions within
these subgenres extend out into a distant sociomusical horizon.1
If the music style of metal has expanded, its social base has grown
and changed dramatically as well. From its inception in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, heavy metal has always been a transnational music, but
the 1980s and 1990s saw a vast globalization of the genre. The con-
temporary world of metal is a multipolar one, with influential scenes
stretching from its original source countries in North America, West-
ern Europe, and Australia to Eastern Europe, Latin America, South
Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa, with new scenes
developing today in sub-Saharan Africa as well. But perhaps the great-
est changes to the music have come in its class associations. It is widely
agreed that metal emerged from the declining industrial heartland of
the United States and the UK, and while many of its audiences still
hail from working-class backgrounds—Deena Weinstein has recently
argued that metal should be viewed as the music of the global proletar-
iat (2011)—the relationship between the music and its social base has
become more complex. As Paul D. Greene and David R. Henderson
have observed (2003), the metal of 1990s Nepal was the music of that
country’s young technical elite, not its working classes, while in the
contemporary US, both the black and the death metal styles have been
incorporated into avant-garde postrock genres whose class associations
are far from blue collar. Indeed, many years after my initial fieldwork
in the working-class death metal scene of Akron, Ohio, I have heard
young scholars casually contrast the contemporary subcultural forma-
Foreword / viii
tions that they study with “old school, blue collar death metal scenes,”
social worlds so traditional and well understood that they serve as a
reference point for music participants and scholars alike.
While it is clear that the world of metal has undergone enormous
transformations, Running with the Devil has not been shamed by the
passage of time. Far from it. Grounded in a nuanced reading of Marx’s
cultural politics (1977) and notions of polyvocality from Mikhail
Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Valentin Vološinov (1986), Walser chose
to interpret metal, not as an expression of working-class culture but as
a distinctive musical and social discourse framed by the larger ideologi-
cal imperatives and structural constraints of late capitalism, imperatives
and constraints operating on those from a broad range of class back-
grounds. Read in this light, metal’s themes of heroic individualism and
transcendence speak equally to the alienation of working-class youth
in the deindustrialized cities of the 1980s and early 1990s as it does
to the experiences of middle-class youth in late 1990s South Asia or
the Brooklyn of the 2010s. Likewise, while Walser’s study is grounded
in North America, he acknowledges the transatlantic roots and newly
widening transnational dimensions of metal, and his discussion of met-
al’s complex relationship with hard rock and the Western art music
tradition certainly leaves room for understanding the incorporation of
metal techniques into the standard musical vocabulary of soundtrack
composers worldwide.
The interpretations of metal in Running are powerful ones, but
they did not exhaust the cultural significance of metal or examine the
breadth of its musical and social phenomena. Ranging widely across
scenic and generic boundaries within metal that later scholars and fans
would find to be more sharply drawn, Walser analyzes the appropria-
tions (perhaps he would prefer merely to say “uses”) of rhetorical ges-
tures from the Western art music canon by Eddie Van Halen and neo-
classical virtuosi such as Yngwie Malmsteen, the gender dynamics of
metal’s glam tradition, and the musical, narrative, and visual evocations
of horror and insanity by thrash musicians and other performers from
metal’s heavier strains. In the last twenty years, studies of individual
artists (for example, Fast 2001; Pillsbury 2006), particular scenes and
styles (Berger 1999, 2004; Wallach 2008; Baulch 2007), the social
dynamics of metal’s global spread (Kahn-Harris 2007; Wallach, Berger,
and Greene 2011), gender (Wallach 2011; Wong 2011; Vasan 2011),
and race/ethnicity (Mahon 2004) have greatly expanded our under-
standing of the music. The last six years in particular have seen a series
of international scholarly conferences on heavy metal, a burgeoning of
Foreword / ix
