Part II: Analyzing Musical Texts synthesizes large corpus studies of musical recordings with close readings of individual songs. Part I concludes with a thick description of death metal and black metal that shows how its lyrics, album reviews, album artwork, band logos, and font styles collectively provide messages about the semantics of genre, most notably by drawing upon archetypes of the sublime and, in the case of raw black metal, the dystopian imagery of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century woodcut engravings. This leads to an investigation of boundary discourses that reveals how fans define extreme metal negatively according to those subgenres and categories of identity that they treat as abject Others: nu metal, screamo, and deathcore as well as their associations with blackness, femininity, and adolescence. Part I: Interconnected Contexts and Paratexts begins with a critical survey of genre taxonomies, showing how their implicit logic masks value judgments and overlooks aspects of genre that are counterintuitive. Using an interdisciplinary mixture of literary genre theory, semiotics, music theory and analysis, acoustics, and linguistics, this dissertation presents a broad overview of extreme metal’s musical, verbal, and visual-symbolic systems of meaning. As the first book-length musicological study of extreme metal, this dissertation responds to this critical gap by outlining, in previously unattempted detail, a wide range of genre conventions and semiotic codes that form the basis of aesthetic expression in extreme metal. This blind spot in the literature is so pervasive that Sheila Whiteley began her preface to Andrew Cope’s Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music with the exclamation, “At last! A book about heavy metal as music” (Cope 2010, xi). Despite this growth, the field is still characterized by what sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris has called “undoubtedly the most critical weakness in metal studies as it stands: the relative paucity of detailed musicological analyses on metal” (Kahn-Harris 2011, 252). With the rise of metal studies as an emerging field of scholarship, the scholarly literature on extreme metal has increased exponentially within the past seven years supported by annual conferences, the establishment of the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS), and a specialized journal (Metal Music Studies). Scholarship on extreme metal now boasts a similar diversity as well as its own history spanning nearly two decades. Its individual subgenres represent a range of diverse aesthetics, some with histories spanning over thirty years. In a sense, American Football's marriage of Math-Rock and Emo is a literal marriage the majority of bands in the new wave of Math-Rock make heavy use of certain aesthetics from Emo.Įxtreme metal music, a conglomeration of metal subgenres unified by a common interest in transgressive sounds and imagery, is now a global phenomenon with thriving scenes in every inhabited continent. For instance, similar features are present in the music of bands such as empire! empire! (i was a lonely estate), The Speed of Sound in Seawater, This Town Needs Guns just to name a few. And although this analysis can serve as an insight into the style of American Football, I find it more useful as a specimen against which other, later Math-Rock and Emo bands can be compared. Many of the issues covered in this analysis are present in other tracks from the 1999 album, suggesting a thoughtful homogeneity. The asymmetrical groupings, lead-line ostinatos, interlocking guitar parts, and odd hypermeters of Math-Rock coexist with the intimate vocal cooing, thematic content, harmonic simplicity, rhythmic flow, and clean guitar tone of mid-90's Emo. Aesthetically and stylistically, American Football represents a marriage of Math-Rock and Emo.
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