The cultural legitimacy of prog, metal and punk

rogerthat wrote: I am not sure I would consider doom accessible except maybe stoner rock bands like Kyuss.

Or bands like Pentagram, Saint Vitus, Witchfinder General etc. who aren't terribly removed from Black Sabbath themselves. In the case of Pentagram, it was more a series of bad business decisions and their singer's drug problems that kept them from getting popular.

I am not really as sure of that but for the second part of your comment I agree with Exitthelemming.  I don't think legitimacy needs to be conferred by academics or journalists.  What matters (if even that matters) is what the people like.

That's the classic is/ought problem: The kind of artistic importance that goes down in cultural history is the one that can be measured by academic recognition - like it or not. Notice that the Impressionist painters of the late 19th century weren't very popular back then, but they're the ones that are remembered today as emblematic of the period. The actually popular academic painters of the day, like William-Adolphe Bouguereau who stuck to more conventional styles and mythological motifs, have basically been forgotten by all except academic art historians.

I'm also more interested in the basic analysis of exactly how that happens without necessarily getting into the prescriptive part of the equation. Why have more subcultural-anthropological studies and respectful music analysis been written about Krautrock and the '77 punk explosion than about NWoBHM, and why are they more frequently brought up by cultural historians as landmark signs of the changes that happened in the society of their time? Also, why do outside observers seemingly care more about all this than most of the involved musicians themselves?

Of course, the last question is where it's hard not to get judgemental as ExitTheLemming's post pointed out. To quote the Demontage guy once again: You could possibly point to a number of books that have been written about punk, but you could just as easily argue that the fact that there are published books about the punk movement signifies the end of punk as a movement... and what do Arts and Culture sections of upscale newspapers know about punk? And is their writing about them a sign of success or failure?

Actually, the specific snob I had cited listens to more of 90s metal.  Don't forget that Brutal Death Metal took root in the 90s.

Well, that's kind of my point. If someone really stresses the disconnect between metal and rock they've usually gotten through the former through its more extreme incarnations.

It is not a question of genre chauvinism per se but the belief in a 'metal' way of life.  That makes metal snobbery more imposing - like if you don't wear long hair, you are not metal enough and all that.  It is kind of 'mandatory' to do all this to fit into the metal community.

I've definitely noticed the same, though with the caveat for the record Anglo-Saxon metallers seem to push that angle much harder than Continental European ones in addition to also being more hostile towards other alternative subcultures and musically unconventional metal artists for reasons I don't completely grasp. (not familiar enough with the metal scenes in the rest of the world to really analyze them the same way) That said, hip-hop, punk and goth/industrial have the same fixation on also being a cultural identity and lifestyle, not just a genre of music, that you have to follow if you want to be really into it. I actually think punks and rivetheads can be more puritanistic about it than metalheads but that of course depends on where and whom you ask.

Also, now that I've mentioned hip-hop I think it along with disco might be relevant to the discussion that both genres were at first seen as annoying fads at best threats to common moral virtue at worst. Now they've been rehabilitated by academic musicologists and other experts as legitimate artforms that were misunderstood at first.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - January 14 2014 at 04:43

rogerthat wrote: Maybe it is just a wrong impression that I have but a lot of writing on these genres seems to focus heavily on the sociological context without much of musical analysis.  One of the reasons may be that from a music-academic point of view, rock music is still not taken seriously and it's only classical and jazz that are regarded as academic music.  That being the case, it is possible the writing too hunts for a fertile sociological context to the music to be written about.  There's plenty of it in 60s rock a la Dylan/Beatles or punk and not much of it in prog or metal.  This may not necessarily say much about the enduring popularity of a given music genre or subgenre, though.  The particular context of the 60s may no longer be as relevant anymore and in this much more mass media driven age of music, music that loses relevance will probably get forgotten pretty quickly.

I think that depends on where you live, a friend of mine who is minoring in musicology is going through a couple courses on popular music. As for sociological study of progressive rock and heavy metal, the former did evolve out of the 1960s psychedelic scene developing an interest in "serious music" like jazz and classical which becomes clear if you notice Yes' career trajectory out of the ashes of Tomorrow up to their gradual development of their neoclassical signature style... or for that matter Pink Floyd's evolution from Syd Barrett's vision to Roger Waters'. You could tie that into the larger pattern on the 1960s' turning into the 1970s. Then there's my pet theory that progressive rock's mid-1970s decline and both punk and metal's coming into their own at that time had something to do with the increasingly pessimistic zeitgeist in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis and Watergate.

Which brings us to: Both the late-'70s/early-'80s punk explosion and the indie rock scene that followed have been analyzed as simultaneously a reaction against the bleak conformity of the Thatcher/Reagan era and embodying the era's entrepreneurial spirit in their "do it yourself" business ethos. You could make a similar point about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal which took off at the same time. The most interesting studies of the Scandinavian black/death metal scenes of the early 1990s, Daniel Ekeroth's Swedish Death Metal and Michael Moynihan's Lords of Chaos about Norwegian BM, characterize both as the result of above-average intelligence angry young men reacting against a comfortable but boring social-democratic welfare state society where mediocrity was basically forced upon you by going in the polar opposite cultural direction. It was also around the same time that it became fashionable to talk about the "end of history" (as Francis Fukuyama called it) and the death of the grand narratives driving them.

At the same time, if we're too insistent on seeing art as first and foremost a product of the surrounding zeitgeist's (or volksgeist's) context we just end up missing the forest for the trees in many cases. See my post about Kerouac earlier in the thread for a specific example.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - January 15 2014 at 06:44

Toaster Mantis wrote:   At the same time, if we're too insistent on seeing art as first and foremost a product of the surrounding zeitgeist's (or volksgeist's) context we just end up missing the forest for the trees in many cases. See my post about Kerouac earlier in the thread for a specific example.

Not to mention that on the other side of the pond punk has been going on since at least the 1960s with the MC5, New York Dolls and the Stooges. I also think its taking off really begun in the post-Watergate mid-1970s' cultural climate of pessimism, that was around the time that the NY protopunk artists ExitTheLemming mentioned made their names. Still, notice that punk's most extreme incarnations ("hardcore" as it's called today) and most outside-the-box-thinking styles ("post-punk") which didn't really take off until the end of the decade... the book in question is about how the latter turned into the beginning of the indie rock scene in the 1980s.

This excerpt from Death to Trad Rock reveals that many of the UK '80s indie groups did define their entire worldview and guiding virtues as opposed to the Thatcher administration's, even the less openly political ones. I guess some art forms really do lend themselves more easily to analysis as part of a greater context - be it biographical, cultural, historical or political - than others.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - January 15 2014 at 15:12

If there's anything my studies of the subject have taught me, it's that the difference between "high" and "low" culture is mostly a matter of which audiences embrace the art in question. What in turn decides that, though, comes up to different factors.

In the field of literature, I remember reading interviews with both Stephen King and Amy Tan that at book fairs the questions they were asked by fans revolved around characterization and plot structure whereas "high" authors like Don DeLillo and Cormac MacCarthy were more often asked about the prose style. I think there's some truth about how in literature "low" audiences are more concerned with plot and character, whereas "high" audiences are more concerned about prose style and abstract theme. Just notice which authors of crime fiction have been embraced by academic elite audiences, it' s usually ones like Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy who abandon traditional narrative structures and use very stylized prose. I also remember reading something somewhere about how the metal artists became popular among cultural elite audiences are often more concerned with exploring sonic textures than with identifiable riffing and traditional narrative song structure, but I can't find it now. (when it doesn't have to do with image, like Black Ivory Tower's article about blackgaze pointed out)

Then there's the stuff I mentioned earlier about art either actively or unintentionally evoking some external context of meaning, rooted in cultural tradition or autobiography or sociological/political circumstances, lends itself easier to academic analysis despite not having any bearing on its objective quality. This might explain why academics writing about popular music might take so easily to hip-hop, indie, psychedelia and punk, whereas most metal artists' influences from "high culture" is either second-hand through pulp/B-movie escapist genre fiction or filtered through that aesthetic, but of course this theory relies on much generalization and speculation about people's motivations that's hard to verify in particular if you go beyond specific examples.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - January 16 2014 at 05:32

Toaster Mantis wrote: If there's anything my studies of the subject have taught me, it's that the difference between "high" and "low" culture is mostly a matter of which audiences embrace the art in question. What in turn decides that, though, comes up to different factors. In the field of literature, I remember reading interviews with both Stephen King and Amy Tan that at book fairs the questions they were asked by fans revolved around characterization and plot structure whereas "high" authors like Don DeLillo and Cormac MacCarthy were more often asked about the prose style. I think there's some truth about how in literature "low" audiences are more concerned with plot and character, whereas "high" audiences are more concerned about prose style and abstract theme. Just notice which authors of crime fiction have been embraced by academic elite audiences, it' s usually ones like Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy who abandon traditional narrative structures and use very stylized prose. I also remember reading something somewhere about how the metal artists became popular among cultural elite audiences are often more concerned with exploring sonic textures than with identifiable riffing and traditional narrative song structure, but I can't find it now. (when it doesn't have to do with image, like Black Ivory Tower's article about blackgaze pointed out) Then there's the stuff I mentioned earlier about art either actively or unintentionally evoking some external context of meaning, rooted in cultural tradition or autobiography or sociological/political circumstances, lends itself easier to academic analysis despite not having any bearing on its objective quality. This might explain why academics writing about popular music might take so easily to hip-hop, indie, psychedelia and punk, whereas most metal artists' influences from "high culture" is either second-hand through pulp/B-movie escapist genre fiction or filtered through that aesthetic, but of course this theory relies on much generalization and speculation about people's motivations that's hard to verify in particular if you go beyond specific examples.

At the risk of coming across like a 'low culture' toerag, what the hell does that mean? ain't the foregoing just a very eloquent way of saying those outside the 'cultural elite audience' are incapable of appreciating the abstract in a work of art? You make the notion of 'traditional narrative structure' sound like a quaint nursery rhyme that only toddlers, the nil by mouth and mentally infirm continue to invest with any authenticity. Sorry to sound so blunt but this type of arcane speculation is all the confirmation bias the rest of us need to deduce that Prog,Metal or Punk require no retrospective cultural legitimacy conferred on it by academia to validate our tastes.


Edited by ExittheLemming - January 16 2014 at 07:56

ExittheLemming wrote: ... At the risk of coming across like a 'low culture' toerag, what the hell does that mean? ain't the foregoing just a very eloquent way of saying those outside the 'cultural elite audience' are incapable of appreciating the abstract in a work of art? ...

rogerthat wrote:  ... I think the problem people have with this notion is that high or low may come to be equated with the respective economic or social strata.  To extend this logic, as if only academics and such other highly degree-d individuals have the right to decide what is high and what is low art. ...

Dean wrote: ... no one goes running around shouting that The Kinks used an ostinato motif in You Really Got Me, it's a riff. Sorry Pedro, but it's just a Pop tune - a very good one of course, but a Pop tune none-the-less, and in this particular case I do not believe that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That's not to say that some Prog Rock couldn't be regarded as Art Music but it is never going to be "classical music".

Hey everyone, sorry I haven't replied to this thread for the last couple days... but I've been rather busy in real life and haven't had time to read your posts in depth let alone respond to them. Stay tuned for me to drop in later with some more in-depth commentary and clearing up some things I apparently didn't make comprehensible enough.