Keith Kahn Harris » Metal Jew

Metal Beyond Metal

Keith — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:31:37 +0000

Souciant webzine has published a series of my essays on metal. The overall theme is what I call ‘Metal Beyond Metal’ – the future of metal in a time of chronic abundance. Here are the seven installments:

1 Too Much Metal 29 November

2 Invisible Metal 6 December

3 Music At A Standstill 12 December

4 The Metal Future 20 December

5 Slow Metal 27 December

6 Breaking Metal’s Boundaries 10 January

7 Metal Beyond Metal 17 January

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Quote from Boston’s metallic rabbi

Keith — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 16:34:21 +0000

“I found in heavy metal a music and a culture that supported individuality and rejection of the social norm. I found a culture that said, ‘you don’t have to be like that. You’re not. It’s OK to be different, it’s OK to be you. And guess what? There’s a whole army of metal heads out here like you, that are “freaks” and don’t fit into normal society.’ And the celebration of that and the outlet for anger and frustration as a teenage adolescent male just totally resonated with me.”

via Concord rabbi listens with his soul – West – The Boston Globe.

Unlike him though, I never ‘found God in the moshpit’

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Miscellaneous Metal Jewish Meshuggas

Keith — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 16:54:05 +0000

I haven’t done a metaljew post for a while now, in part because of pressure of work and in part because of website problems. To get me into the mood of posting more regularly, here’s a brief update on some recent items of metal Jewish concern:

Deveykus are a self-described ‘Hassidic doon metal’ band. Their new album ‘Pillar Without Mercy’ is available via John Zorn’s Tzadik label. It’s a really great recording. The combination of achingly slow doom riffs and mournful klezmerish trombone works very well. Here’s a video to whet your appetite:

The British (non-Jewish) band Meads of Asphodel released their new album ‘Sonderkommando’ earlier this year. A concept album dealing with Auschwitz and in particular the experience of the sonderkommando who disposed of the gassed bodies of Jews, it’s pretty strong meat. It’s one of those albums that could be appropriated by the far right. However the extensive ‘codex’ published on the band’s website suggests that the album comes not from a place of lurid fascination (as in Slayer’s ‘Angel of Death’) but from a genuine sense of horror and a struggle to understand the Holocaust. Musically it’s a bizarre mix of black metal, progressive rock and all kinds of other stuff – hard to grapple with but worth sustained listening.

Israel’s Orphaned Land go from strength to strength. They are graduating to the top league of metal bands, with a huge amount of press coverage for their new album ‘All Is One’ and an extensive tour to follow. All Is One continues their desire to create religious unity, both musically and in spiritual terms. It’s more accessible than previous albums and, even if their quasi-messianic symbolism does sometimes grate a little, it’s probably the best thing they’ve ever done. Here’s the title track:

Finally, Heeb magazine has an amusing piece about a deaf rabbi metal-fan who has signed onstage for Twisted Sister.

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New edited collection: Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures (co-edited with Titus Hjelm and Mark Levine)

Keith — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 16:31:53 +0000

Publishers webpage

Heavy metal is now over forty years old and has developed into a diverse and multi-faceted genre. Wherever it is found and however it is played, metal’s fascination with transgression has often meant it has been embroiled in controversy. Controversies surrounding the alleged connection between heavy metal and, variously, sexual promiscuity, occultism and Satanism, subliminal messages, suicide and violence have made heavy metal a target of moral panics over popular culture. Metal has variously embraced, rejected, played with and tried to ignore this controversy and it remains irrevocably marked by its controversial, transgressive tendencies.

This anthology provides a thorough investigation of how and why metal becomes controversial, how metal ‘scenes’ are formed. It examines the relationship between metal and society, including how fans, musicians and the media create the culture of heavy metal.

Contents
1. Introduction: Heavy Metal as Controversy and Counterculture
Titus Hjelm, Keith Kahn-Harris and Mark LeVine

Part I: Controversies

2. Suicide Solutions? Or how the Emo Class of 2008 were Able to Contest their Media Demonization, whereas the Headbangers, Burnouts or ‘Children of ZoZo’ Generation were not
Andy R. Brown, Bath Spa University

3. ‘How You Gonna See Me Now’: Recontextualizing Metal Artists and Moral Panics
Brad Klypchak, Texas A & M University – Commerce

4. Triumph of the Maggots? Valorization of Metal in the Rock Press
Hélène Laurin

5. Dworkin’s Nightmare: Porn Grind as the Sound of Feminist Fears
Lee Barron, Northumbria University

6. The ’Double Controversy’ of Christian Metal
Marcus Moberg, Åbo Akademi University, Finland

7. Hellfest: The Thing that Should not be? Local Perceptions and Catholic Discourses on Metal Culture in France
Gérôme Guibert, University Paris III, and Jedediah Sklower, independent scholar

Part II: Countercultures

8. Malang, Indonesia and Toledo, USA: A Theory of Metal Scene Formation
Jeremy Wallach, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and Alexandra Levine

9. Voice of Our Blood: National Socialist Discourses in Black Metal
Benjamin Hedge Olson

10. Extreme Music for Extreme People? Norwegian Black Metal and Transcendent Violence
Michelle Phillipov, University of Tasmania

11. The Extreme Metal ‘Connoisseur’
Nicola Allett, Louchborough University

12. Black Metal Soul Music: Stone Vengeance and the Aesthetics of Race in Heavy Metal
Kevin Fellezs, Columbia University

13. (I) Hate Girls and Emo(tion)s: Negotiating Masculinity in Grindcore Music
Rosemary Overell

14. Heavy Metal and the Deafening Threat of the Apolitical
Niall Scott, University of Central Lancashire

Reviews
‘A powerful addition to the metal studies literature, this book is overflowing with insights into the cultural politics of heavy metal music. With lively writing, interdisciplinary approaches, and a global perspective, these chapters offer ideas that have broad implications for the study of popular music scenes and their dynamics, media scandals, the relationship between music and affect, and the role of culture in social life.’
Professor Harris M. Berger, Texas A & M University

‘From Christian metal to African American metal artists to the pleasures of feeling ‘brutal,’ Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures explores a wide array of topics too often neglected in the critical study of the genre. The book is global in both the range of contributors and of its subject matter, and so joins the recent Metal Rules the Globe as proof that the field of global metal studies is in full bloom.’
Steve Waksman, author of This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk

Review in PopMatters

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More on the metal and popular culture conference

Keith — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:06:05 +0000

So the Heavy Metal and Popular Culture conference at Bowling Green State University has now been and gone. It was a great experience with a consistently high standard of papers and some really interesting discussions. My keynote lecture, ‘Metal After Metal Studies: What Comes Next?’ was well received I think. I will be publishing it as a pamphlet or e-book sometime in the next few months.

The Wall Street Journal did a piece on the conference. It’s slightly sensationalist but broadly accurate. There’s an accompanying video that I’m featured in:

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Another yeshiva metal band

Keith — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:58:14 +0000

Last year I posted on a death metal band called Skarthia, whose members are orthodox Jews attending yeshiva in Israel. Today I received an e-mail about another yeshiva metal band:

Hey my name is Benyamin Smith and I am currently attending yeshiva in Bet Shemesh (the same one as Avichai Myers) and wanted to let you know that I am in all Orthodox Jewish death metal/deathcore/metalcore (one of those) band called October Crisis. We currently have 2 albums out that you can download for free on our bandcamp page!

www.octobercrisis.bandcamp.com

www.facebook.com/octobercrisis

Hope you dig the tunes! we are for fans of Lamb of God, Threat Signal and August Burns Red. Enjoy!

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New interview

Keith — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:44:51 +0000

There’s a new interview with me published on the Heavy Metal Artwork website

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Heavy Metal and Popular Culture Conference

Keith — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:40:57 +0000

I’m really excited to be giving a keynote lecture at the Heavy Metal and Popular Culture conference at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, at the start of April. My lecture will be titled ‘Metal After Metal Studies: What Comes Next?’ which will and take a provocative look at the future of metal.

There is no conference website but you can view the conference poster here:

Heavy metal conference 2013 poster

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The Zion Sky Compilation

Keith — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:45:57 +0000

I don’t think I ever blogged before about the Zion Sky compilation. It’s an extraordinary piece of work in which a variety of neo-folk and noise artists reappropriate Zionist aesthetics in a Laibachian manner.

The project is described better than I could on the blog of the Industrialised Culture Research Network, featuring an essay from the curator Avi Pitchon. Here’s an extract:

The Zion Sky compilation album was produced as part of the ‘Where to?‘ art exhibition, which opened in the Israeli Center For Digital Art in April 2012, and was released by the Israeli industrial label Tophet Prophet. The exhibition’s theme was hidden/forgotten/neglected currents in Zionism.  The compilation was commissioned and assembled by Avi Pitchon, aiming to appropriate Laibach’s approach and tactic (without any limitation on musical direction besides perhaps a general desire for the sound, as well as content, to express a certain utopian awe) and apply it to Zionist history, thinking, texts and aesthetics. As opposed to the historical/research/archival approach of the majority of the exhibiting artists, ‘Zion Sky’ follows the intently a-historical clash of motifs demonstrated by NSK, as well as the revisiting of Zionism’s aesthetic arsenal evident in the work of prominent Israeli artists like Yael Bartana and the Public Movement performance group. The intention was to speculate on utopian vectors whose trajectory never completed, to ask a ‘what if?’ about Zionism in particular and utopian ideas and movements in general.

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Documentaries on metal in Angola and Mozambique

Keith — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:14:39 +0000

Interest in African metal appears to be growing. There’s a documentary film out now called Death Metal Angola that will have its European premiere at the end of January 2013 in Rotterdam. Another documentary, Terra Pesada, currently in production, will chronicle metal in Mozambique. Angola and Mozambique have intriguing similarities – they are both ex-Portuguese colonies, currently recovering after decades of civil war. It’s also interesting that both countries, together with Botswana and Namibia, border South Africa. It appears that metal in Africa is largely confined to the north and south of the continent, with South Africa acting as the hub for the smaller neighbouring scenes.

Here’s the trailer for Death Metal Angola:

And here’s the trailer for Terra Pesada:

TERRA PESADA from Wiley Flo Productions on Vimeo.

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