Heavy metal revival: Professor melds genre, academia
By Erin Glass
Nov. 12, 2003 9:00 p.m.
It’s not hard to bring to mind the stereotype of a metal
head. Since heavy metal’s arrival on the music scene in the
early 1970s, it’s been accused of everything from Satanism to
plain old Beavis and Butthead idiocy. And it doesn’t help
much that the accusations are not often defended by its own
participants.
“Metal should be long-haired dudes drinking beer,”
said Keith Buckley, singer of heavy metal band Every Time I
Die.
But that doesn’t mean that all metal heads put their
pocket change into six packs rather than the local barber. In fact,
Professor Robert Walser, chair of the UCLA musicology department
and author of the book “Running With the Devil: Power, Gender
and Madness in Heavy Metal Music,” keeps his hair combed neat
and happens to sympathize with the genre from an academic
perspective.
In college, Walser became involved in heavy metal music through
playing guitar in a band. He wrote the book because he wanted to
investigate the stereotypes that heavy metal is crude, musically
simple, sexist and, quite simply, unintelligent.
“I was interested in it as something that grabbed me
personally but also as something that people were debating,”
Walser said. “Millions of people are building their lives
around metal and millions of other people think that they
shouldn’t.”
Walser interviewed numerous metal fans and musicians, and
analyzed the actual music from a musicologist’s perspective.
What he found probably isn’t surprising to anyone who has
really sat down without an upturned nose to listen an Eddie Van
Halen solo.
“They all had some kind of classical training because the
guitar solos we’re talking about drew from Vivaldian Bach. A
lot of that music was taking ideas, chord progressions and ways of
playing from that classical music that was supposed to be so far
away from what they were doing.”
The book was published back in 1993, but with the resurrection
of MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball 10 years later, it will be
interesting to see if virtuosic guitar playing will still stand as
the genre’s winning characteristic.
