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Title: | From Stereotyped Postures to Credible Avant-Garde Strategies: The Alchemical Transformation of Drone Metal |
Authors: | Coggins, O |
Keywords: | drone metal;stereotypes;magazines;class;race;avant-garde;experimental music;revisionism;metaphor;music writing |
Issue Date: | 31-Aug-2023 |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Citation: | Coggins, O. (2023) 'From Stereotyped Postures to Credible Avant-Garde Strategies: The Alchemical Transformation of Drone Metal', in Herbst, J.P. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 251 - 264. doi: 10.1017/9781108991162. |
Abstract: | Drone metal is an extremely slow and extended subgenre of metal, developing since the 1990s at the margins of metal and experimental music scenes. Influences include minimalist composers, Indian ragas and contemporary artists alongside Black Sabbath. This echoed earlier metal musicians’ appeals to the elevated cultural status of baroque musicians in response to stereotypes of metal culture as stupid and unskilled, which often revealed class snobbery about metal’s perceived audiences. This chapter examines drone metal as a metal avant-garde, analysing how it has been received outside metal culture, and how coverage of this marginal subgenre might affect perceptions of metal music overall. Taking jazz and experimental music magazine The Wire as a case study, the chapter describes that magazine’s reproduction of stereotypes about metal until the 2000s, when it began to cover drone metal. Thereafter the magazine became more positive about metal in general, even describing it as always having been experimental. This revisionism is particularly evident in The Wire’s repeated use of an alchemical metaphor to describe drone metal as turning ‘base metal’ into avant-garde gold. |
URI: | https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/28643 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108991162 |
ISBN: | 978-1-108-99116-2 |
Other Identifiers: | ORCiD: Owen Coggins https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8322-1583 18 |
Appears in Collections: | Dept of Social and Political Sciences Research Papers |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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FullText.pdf | This material has been published in revised form in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music edited by Jan-Peter Herbst, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108991162.018. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © Owen Coggins, author / Jan-Peter Herbst, editor (see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/open-access-policies/open-access-books/green-open-access-policy-for-books).. | 239 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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