Heavy Metal and Popular Culture Conference

traptunderice · **Posted:** Wed Sep 05, 2012 4:55 am

Yo academic-y types.

Quote:

Heavy Metal and Popular Culture
April 4-7, 2013
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio, USA

The Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, in collaboration with Heavy Fundametalisms: Metal, Music and Politics and the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS), announce the International Conference on Heavy Metal and Popular Culture. The Program Committee of the International Conference on Heavy Metal and Popular Culture invites proposals for papers, organized panels of 3-4 papers, and scholarly posters. The online submission deadline for all proposals is 1 December 2012. The conference will take place on the campus of Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, April 4-7, 2013.
We envision the International Conference on Heavy Metal and Popular Culture to be a highly selective conference featuring cutting-edge scholarship on heavy metal’s many facets and forms. Papers will be organized into a single track of programming over four days—there will be no overlapping sessions. Featured at the conference will be keynote lectures by Robert Walser, Laina Dawes, and Keith Kahn-Harris, a screening of the film Motörhead Matters, three roundtables featuring Niall Scott, Steve Waksman, Deena Weinstein and other international metal scholars to be announced, and a special exhibit on facepaint and masks.

We welcome proposals involving all facets of heavy metal musical life throughout the world, with a focus on the intersections, circuits, and mutual imbrications of heavy metal and popular culture, globally and locally. We especially welcome proposals addressing the following themes:

Heavy Metal Consumption: In what ways has mainstream popular culture changed, prefigured or reversed the consumption of heavy metal? How has heavy metal, as a subculture, sound or style, affected popular culture? Are there new forms of popular culture for which heavy metal has become an influence? Is the intersection of heavy metal, popular culture and consumption creating new questions about authenticity, aesthetics, and soundscape? (In other words, what does it mean when obscure 1980s thrash metal tracks wind up on Guitar Hero?)

Heavy Metal, Popular Culture and New Media: Given the rise of new media for heavy metal (social networking media, music and video systems online, gaming, music downloading technology), how has heavy metal further saturated the landscape of popular culture? Are the sounds of heavy metal changing with new technologies and popular media?

Heavy Metal Clothing Style: From the fantastic costumes of bands such as Gwar to the ubiquitous heavy metal t-shirt, the fashion of heavy metal is a vital part of its allure, its popularity, and its criticism. Why is heavy metal style both controversial and popular? Where and how has heavy metal style intersected with fashion locally and globally?

American Heavy Metal Popular Culture and Its Circuits: From films such as Heavy Metal Parking Lot to Kiss’ commercialism and the Osbourne family’s reality television programs, mainstream American popular culture has held a particular fascination for heavy metal, fomenting moral panics against it one day and celebrating its integrity and authenticity the next. How did American popular culture and heavy metal become so mutually imbricated? Are American popular culture’s heavy metal appropriations altering the scenes in other countries and cultures? Do local scenes, including those within the United States, seek to resist mainstream popular culture or embrace it?

Research Poster Sessions
The poster format provides an opportunity for conference attendees to meet informally with authors and discuss research. Each author attends her/his respective 60-minute session, distributes abstracts, and answers questions. Supporting sound and/or video examples (on personal computers and utilizing battery, rather than A/C power) will be coordinated with other presenters once the Program Committee has formed sessions.

General Guidelines
Accepted presenters will not be required to pay conference attendance registration fees. The committee encourages proposals from graduate students and independent scholars. An individual may submit only one proposal. All proposals must be submitted through the online electronic submission process.
Proposals must specify whether the proposal is for 1) paper, 2) poster, or 3) either presentation format, the latter to be determined by the Program Committee as it builds sessions. Individual or joint papers should be no longer than twenty minutes. Posters will be organized in block sessions. For complete session proposals, the organizer must include an initial statement of 100 words explaining the rationale for the session, in addition to proposals and abstract files for each paper.
Include the following for all submissions:

Proposer’s name, e-mail address, and institutional affiliation or city of residence
250-word proposal
100-word version of your proposal suitable for publication in the conference program (.doc, .docx, .txt, or .rtf format). Include proposer's name and email, and the proposal title in this file.
Audio and visual needs: CD player, DVD player, digital projector. Please also specify IBM or Mac platforms, and any special needs. Request of special audio and visual needs does not guarantee their availability, but presenters will be notified if their requests cannot be met.
Specify whether you are a student.

All materials must be electronically date-stamped by December 1, 2012 at midnight CST and emailed to Clifford@ucmo.edu with “HMPC Submission” in the subject line and required documents attached. For further information regarding the submission process: Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, Chair, HM&PC 2013 Program Committee, Wood 136B, Department of History and Anthropology, University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO 64093, USA, Clifford@ucmo.edu.

For further information about the conference, please contact the BGSU conference organizers:

Esther Clinton estherc@bgsu.edu
Matt Donahue mattdon@bgsu.edu
Jeremy Wallach jeremyw@bgsu.edu

Department of Popular Culture, School of Cultural and Critical Studies, 228 Shatzel Hall
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403-0190, USA

If you're interested I can forward the email with better formatting. Just PM me. I'm totally submitting to this thing.

Thrashtildeth · **Posted:** Wed Sep 05, 2012 5:15 am

What will you write about?

traptunderice · **Posted:** Wed Sep 05, 2012 5:34 am

I'm currently working on an essay that I present in two weeks here in Virginia about Panopticon. Adorno, a Marxist theorist and musicologist from the 40s, did a lot of criticizing of music and ultimately the only music he found to be free of capitalism's influence was Arnold Schoenberg, the weird atonal composer. Adorno had this whole theory of aesthetics thought up, but hated everything. I'm arguing that the Panopticon's music fulfills Adorno's criterion of music that could be aesthetically political. It reflects an alternative to current society while expressing the ugliness of industrial capitalism. It doesn't reduce itself to obnoxious Soviet realism, beating a political message into your head like Rage Against the Machine or Immortal Technique. Instead, Panopticon's music enables a moment of reflection that opens up a political space.

In order to make this argument, I have to throw a bunch of metal under the bus, according to Adorno's critique of popular music, but I think it's right to a degree. That moment of whether theory correlates to actual music listening is always irksome, but Adorno tries to tell us that doesn't matter. The music gives philosophy the possibility to examine it, the music isn't supposed to contain philosophy.

Thrashtildeth · **Posted:** Wed Sep 05, 2012 6:06 am

traptunderice wrote:

In order to make this argument, I have to throw a bunch of metal under the bus, according to Adorno's critique of popular music, but I think it's right to a degree.

Really interesting stuff, trapt.

I'm just curious about this little bit that I've quoted above. If you have to support your argument with evidence which you only think is right to a degree in order to reach a specific conclusion, can I assume that you do see some misgivings about your theory when applied in a real-world context? If that is the case, do you plan to make reference to these misgivings or simply argue whatever is necessary to support your contention?

traptunderice · **Posted:** Wed Sep 05, 2012 6:41 am

Thrashtildeth wrote:

traptunderice wrote:

In order to make this argument, I have to throw a bunch of metal under the bus, according to Adorno's critique of popular music, but I think it's right to a degree.

Really interesting stuff, trapt.

I'm just curious about this little bit that I've quoted above. If you have to support your argument with evidence which you only think is right to a degree in order to reach a specific conclusion, can I assume that you do see some misgivings about your theory when applied in a real-world context? If that is the case, do you plan to make reference to these misgivings or simply argue whatever is necessary to support your contention?

The hesitancy I have is if I accept Adorno's critique wholesale then a lot of metal caters to a regressive form of listening. If I'm getting my musical terms correct he criticizes how whole compositions are ignored for the more simplistic sonata contained within (I don't have the quote on hand). The emphasis on riffs or choruses as being little snippets that you can take with you, that you can recall on demand that is very much an approach to music as a commodity. It's something that you can own in a way.

I was listening to Scorpions recently because my new friend from Lebanon loves 'em. We're driving to school and Hurricane comes on my mp3 player. Instantly, we were both doing it din-nih-nih din din din-nih-nih and we just started laughing. We knew that riff. The chorus hits and we were just yelling it out the windows. For Adorno, and he is critiqued for being an elitist but I also think there is something problematic here, music shouldn't be about call and responses. It should be about art. Is it that any longer? No. Are there possibilities that aesthetical criterion can be met that can point towards artistic spontaneity? I sure hope so or my Panopticon argument is fucked.

Where I might want to be not as pessimistic as Adorno is in that very commodifiable element such as a riff or chorus, maybe something can be gained from it. I haven't dwelled on this, but it'll be something in the future for me to think about it: can a form of solidarity be found in the consumption of a commodity? Like in the mosh pit perhaps. Can metal lead to something productive even has it is wholly bent over by capitalism? Here I don't think Adorno can do me any good and I am interested in looking at working class lit, like EP Thompson or Paul Willis.

Thrashtildeth · **Posted:** Wed Sep 05, 2012 7:45 am

traptunderice wrote:

It should be about art. Is it that any longer? No. Are there possibilities that aesthetical criterion can be met that can point towards artistic spontaneity? I sure hope so or my Panopticon argument is fucked.

I definitely believe it can, so even though I'm not familiar with them, I'm sure your Panopticon argument will hold up. I say this because I can think of a pretty vast amount of prog bands whose work could support this sort of contention. And actually, the "genre" of prog as a whole would make an interesting sort of case study on this topic. It's the first thing that popped into my head when I read the above. Think about it - it's a genre that began as an endevour to see how far the boundaries of rock music could be pushed, by a bunch of bands utilising techniques which were completely experimental. Unfortunately, today, what we have is (aside from a few inventive bands) a prog scene where the key characteristics that happened to emerge from that experimental music have been turned into a template for copycat bands, of which there are a million who all sound like Yes, a miilion who all sound like Pink Floyd, etc. It's now the exact opposite of "progressive". It has gone from music that embodied the very nature of art, to music that is most definitely a commodity.

trapt wrote:

I haven't dwelled on this, but it'll be something in the future for me to think about it: can a form of solidarity be found in the consumption of a commodity? Like in the mosh pit perhaps. Can metal lead to something productive even has it is wholly bent over by capitalism? Here I don't think Adorno can do me any good and I am interested in looking at working class lit, like EP Thompson or Paul Willis.

I think there is most definitely value in music which can otherwise be seen as a commodity. Just because a song with a 40 year old riff structure fails to qualify as art from a conceptual development point of view doesn't mean its worthless. The key factor here, I think, is that it still has an ability to make you feel emotions. Anything which is created by one person and inspires emotions in another, especially if that emotion is the desired one, makes a pretty strong argument for having artistic merit.

noodles · **Posted:** Thu Sep 06, 2012 6:59 pm

aww this is a cute idea.

(I read an Adorno article about serious vs popular music because of this thread. Had issues about his point on a couple levels. First, these days it's pretty hard to question jazz's position as serious music. Second, he claims that popular music is standardized, yet serious music is not, but his examples of serious music [eg. Beethoven, or even Schoenberg] are just as standardized as his examples of popular music [eg. Benny Goodman]. Third, even if his argument about standardization held, I don't see why serious = unstandardized.

That said it was a clever way to try to draw a high vs low culture divide.)

article: http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DAT ... ic_1.shtml

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