Communicative Power and Ideology in Popular Music

The Communicative Power of Musical Experience

Adorno believes that all music involves a collective experience that reaches beyond the individual. For Adorno, the “compositional subject is no individual thing, but a collective one. All music, however individual or particular it may be stylistically, possesses an inalienable collective substance: every sound says ‘we.’” (Adorno, 1999, p. 9). The we-ness in musical experience is not to be identified with a social class or group because it transcends historical form and, as such, it has no value orientation or identity in itself. Yet it is felt affectively in the experience of music and thus it nevertheless has social value—it is just not a value we can seemingly name directly beyond observing this interest in the particular sociality that music brings forth.

A key sociopolitical problem regarding the social value of music, for Adorno, is that this collective “source” or “font” of music evokes “preconscious reactions” in the subject, which can be easily put into the service of social domination. Music can present the illusion of (longed-for) sociality as cover and lure to induce the consumption of nonmusical goods: “the ‘We’ that is set in all polyphonous music as the a priori of its meaning, the collective objectivity of the thing itself, turns into customer bait” (Adorno, 1976, p. 45). Without fully reconstructing Adorno’s theory of the Culture Industry or discussing the vast literature on his approach, let us consider some of the key features of his theory that bear upon our topic of the communicative power of musical experience.

For Adorno, popular or “light” music, which is distinguished from “serious music,” is an ideological staple of the culturally mediated authoritarian monopoly capitalism of the 20th century. It is the analysis of popular songs’ form, structure, and modes of production and consumption that best displays their ideological function. The form and structure of popular music, according to Adorno, is overwhelmingly standardized in conformance with specific patterns of progression and development, tonal relationship, and rhythm that the audience is expected to recognize without effort. There is nothing spontaneous, Adorno argues, in the listener’s appreciation of a popular song, because the music is “predigested”—it is planned, prepared, and pre-listened-to so that it conforms to certain standard patterns that will promote the appropriate “conditioned reflexes” in the listener. It appeals to the listener’s (naïve) understanding of “the natural language of music” and seeks to reinforce this (Adorno, 2002, pp. 442-3). The listener’s active cognitive participation is required, but it is severely limited to standardized recognition while emotional responses are stressed instead. These senses, these perceptual faculties, are always already trained, disciplined, and, as a result, mutilated by the industrial workplace and by the corresponding cultural domination that capitalism requires. The psychological and somatic results of such discipline end up being more manipulable than ever. Ideology is sunk deep here, manifesting at the somatic level. The body-mind’s discipline in the work process is repeated or imitated in the structure and form of the body-mind’s reception of music.

A popular song must catch the listener’s attention by differentiating itself, yet it must not go beyond what audiences find familiar, lest it repel them. In an extraordinary formulation, Adorno succinctly lays out the key relation of the popular song to its audience: “The composition hears for the listener.” Musical recognition—the psychological and bodily process through which listening occurs—becomes the end rather than the means (Adorno, 1976, p. 31; 2002, p. 442). That is, little if any cognitive effort is required to understand a popular song, which robs the listener of his spontaneity of reception and the creative act of understanding that accompanies this. “The moment of recognition is that of effortless sensation” (Adorno, 2002, p. 459). It is hence not that musical forms are mundanely recognizable or even essentially repetitious that is the problem; instead it is the intentional reduction of musical recognition to enjoyable and familiar sensations that release the listener from interpretive work or that direct him or her away from it. The creation of a dynamic and reciprocal relationship of depletion and easy compensation between work and so-called leisure-time establishes a negative feedback loop that helps to stabilize the pattern of production and consumption most favorable to the capitalist mode. Willing participation and the concomitant docility of the mass population indicate the symptoms of an embraced pathology not the facts of a stable mass democracy.

Yet sheer musical duplication and mere repetition would not normally sustain human emotional and sensory fulfillment. A cognitive or interpretive moment remains necessary as part of such fulfillment if it is to be anything more than simple “gustatory” gratification. In order to provide the illusion that, despite its standardization, this particular popular song is in fact distinctive and therefore worthy of interpretive work (which, as a result of this worthiness, may then serve as the justification for a purchase), the supplement of “pseudo-individualization” is required. For example, the “hook” in a popular song is distinct, yet it is a hook just like all other hooks, or jazz improvisation—seemingly free to the ear, yet severely limited by the “walls of the harmonic and metric scheme” that ensure that “few possibilities for actual improvisation remain” (Adorno, 2002, p. 445).

Many commentators have pointed out that such sweeping characterizations miss so much that resists standardization and assimilation in popular music. The Culture Industry is methodologically an “ideal type” or “limit concept” in Max Weber’s sense (Weber, Shils, & Finch, 1949, p. 93) that is dialectically developed via Marxist categories within the social context of monopoly capitalism. As such, Adorno’s analysis is at a high level of abstraction and is historically determined, which leaves it open to criticisms of unjustified generalization. However, his ideal-typical conception of American popular music as a performative instance of the Culture Industry was foundational for the sociology of music. We may reject Adorno’s historically formed pessimism about the political potential of popular music as well as his musicological bias toward European avant-gardism without rejecting his theoretical analysis of the organization of the Culture Industry.

Adorno distinguished “light” or “easy” from “serious” or challenging music, which are categories that in principle can be applied internally to mass mediated music. An enormous amount of popular music during Adorno’s time all the way through to the present can be quite easily characterized as highly standardized as well as featuring obvious pseudoindividualizing elements. At the same time, one can observe in the currents of popular music during this entire period “serious” or aesthetically challenging avant-gardes: selections may include Gershwin in the 1920s, marginalized jazz in the 1930s and 1940s, bebop, experimental and fusion jazz through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, popular songs from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s (1967) and The Who’s Tommy (1969), through heavy metal and punk rock to Laurie Anderson and Radiohead. Alongside such popular avant-garde contributions has always stood a much vaster amount of utterly forgettable, formulaic music that nevertheless was and remains popular.

Informatization and Affective Labor

If Adorno’s critique presents an ideal type of Culture Industry music during the phase of Fordist monopoly capitalism, it is nevertheless one that has been significantly complicated by the “third phase” of capitalism (Jameson, 1991) along with its production and consumption developments—called variously post-Fordism, postmodernism, or globalization. Accumulation processes have not only become increasingly mediated by information technologies but also—and just as importantly—mediated by networks of “immaterial labor” integrated with and within this technology. The vastly increased speed of production facilitated by this “informatization” or “computerization” also best corresponds to a highly fragmented cultural market, contributing to the kind of product-mediated tribalism and branded self-making that is prevalent especially among youth (Arvidsson, 2006; Klein, 2000).

Computerization has extended into social life and has transformed work in globalized countries. Industrial employment tends to transfer to services, which are overwhelmingly dependent on information and communication mediated by computerization. Hardt and Negri (2000, pp. 284-300) call this the “informatization of production,” in which the assembly line and its vertical corporate integration—important for Adorno—is replaced by the network as its organizational model, which is integrated horizontally as well as globally via electronic communications. Increased instability in labor markets locally and globally results from the need constantly to adapt to this informational political economy of speed. An increasingly widespread “precarity” is consequently associated with the new informatized jobs as well as work in general under post-Fordism (Baker & Hesmondhalgh, 2008; Deranty, 2008, 2009; Gill & Pratt, 2008).

It is, however, by no means merely the vastly increased speed and access to financial and consumer data that distinguishes this informatized context of capitalism. Hardt and Negri (2000, pp. 284-294) argue that there is a new form of labor expressed through informatization, “immaterial labor,” which refers to the routine activity of symbolic manipulation via the computer as well as the much more highly valued “affective labor” of “human contact and interaction.” The entertainment industry centrally involves such affective labor since it relies on the manipulation of affect. Such labor produces the material values and structures of social networks, forms of community, and it constitutes biopower (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 293). Affective labor involves both intellectual and corporeal effort; it “engages the entire body and mind together.” Human “faculties, competences, and knowledges” that are acquired in such work—but also, importantly, that are acquired outside of work—are mobilized to be “directly productive of value” (Hardt & Negri, 2009, pp. 132-133). Web 2.0, in which user interactivity is central, exemplifies such affective labor. Practical activities of social integration are “enrolled” into networks of biopolitical production, to use actor-network theory’s felicitous term, which can extend throughout society without any overarching governing authority or mechanism.

The informal, minimally regulated and structured networks of affective labor created through computerized interactivity have proved to be highly lucrative sources of value creation. Prime examples of such networks are the activity complexes of Facebook and video gaming. Facebook is free to users, who upload personal information and develop a “friends” network through which they share personal and social information on an ongoing basis. Autonomous users produce the value of the data for free and Facebook commodifies it indirectly, apparently without the alienation of the user’s labor. Terranova’s (2004) emphasis on “free labor” as a key component of post-Fordist value production is relevant for this context.

Following Hardt and Negri’s analysis of multinational capitalism or “Empire” as “a mere apparatus of capture that lives off the vitality of the multitude” (2000, p. 62), Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter (2009) reveal the history of video gaming as a gradual, then sudden, subsumption of autonomous game designers and creators into a networked system of precarious affective labor that has enrolled the “playbor” of the game players alongside the labor of the game developers. For Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, gaming consoles are not mere neutral technological facilitators of game play, but are biopolitical tools that create a machinic subjectivity as part of a larger social machine—the reproduction of the dynamic “world” of the game in virtual reality that is supported and hosted by the developer and the valorization processes behind this that helps to secure the political domination of Empire (2009, Chapter 3).

Music Consumption and Informatization

We should not expect that music listening and the rock concert experience have escaped similar configurations of integration into Empire. Indeed, following Jameson’s account of postmodernity, music has been “spatialized” such that musical objects do not get presented simply for “contemplation and gustation,” but rather the context of reception is wired up and the space is made musical around the consumer (1991, pp. 299-300). Such a spatialization of music has certainly continued to extend and intensify since Jameson’s observation. Consider the transformation in musical experience brought about by new mobile media. Apple’s iPod enhances and expands the “mobile privatization” Williams (1974/2003) first associated with automobiles and transistor radios. Via computer interfaces, MP3 encoding enables the greatest user control over mobile sonic space compared with any previous mobile listening device. The sonic bubble of the iPod transforms the perceived “chill” of the urban environment and its dwellers by connecting the user to the community of listeners brought forth by the music and the interaction with the technology (Bull, 2007). Through the iTunes software of Apple’s iPod, users connect with the iTunes Store for music, movies, and other downloadable products. The “Genius” function in iTunes automatically produces playlists as well as suggestions for future purchases based on its ongoing compilation and analysis of the user’s pattern of purchasing and listening choices. There is no serendipity or surprise in such algorithmic suggestions; the user is merely encouraged to become the average of his or her existing tastes.

The informatization of music listening has not fundamentally changed the organizational relationship between the listener and the corporate production of popular music that Adorno identified, but it has transformed its structure significantly. The organizational relationship between the social technology of composition and the reception of music that Adorno observes in the Culture Industry is still found in Sterne’s (2006) analysis of the MP3 as a cultural artifact: MP3 encoding for iPods, and so forth, removes significant data from the CD file, but the listener does not notice the qualitative depletion because the listener’s active body is enrolled in compensating for this loss during the listening experience. He concludes that “The MP3 plays its listener” (Sterne, 2006, p. 835). This echoes Adorno’s view that the popular composition hears for the listener, but it introduces the dynamism of affective performance that I emphasize.

Contrary to sociological predictions of decline as a result of greatly expanding access to digital music, the live music economy has actually increased significantly since the 1990s despite—or rather, precisely because of—the informatization of music. The history of unregulated file sharing has undermined the economy of CD sales, which has prompted an industry adaptation to electronic sales (the iTunes store, etc.) and a much higher valuation of live music performance. As Frith (2007) points out, the live performance is the “last unique situation” left in the face of the proliferation of digital copies, and willing attendance as well as greatly inflated ticket prices testify to the centrality of live music performance for the musical economy. Examples of the importance of live musical performance are found in the now popular “secondary” live musical performance in which the authenticity of performers is actively evaluated by the audience and judges, as in American Idol, karaoke, and even tribute bands (Frith, 2007; Holt, 2010).

The Politics of Critique in Popular Music: Heavy Metal

For Adorno, the kind of music that is “serious” or resistant to Culture Industry music will negate the social contradictions, the antagonisms, and suffering attendant on the historical lack of reconciliation in class society. “Scars of damage and disruption are the modern’s seal of authenticity; by this means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same . . .” (Adorno, 1997, p. 23). It is precisely because most popular music isolates itself from social antagonism that it is popular—popularity is one of the payoffs for its successful deception of listeners. “Music is an ideology insofar as it asserts itself as an ontological being-in-itself beyond social tensions” (Adorno, 1973, p. 129). Besides the blandness of the pop lyric and its musical standardization, and so forth, something is nevertheless being said by the music. It appeals affectively by saying, “don’t worry, be happy,” and it reassures the listener that all is well in the world despite the fact that domination, crisis, and catastrophe prevail. Idealized situations and qualities represented in popular song offer a frustrated wish fulfillment, Scherzinger argues, which confirms that the promise of happiness in the music is always deferred, “making way for the next commodity. Such music, therefore, effectively reconciles [emphasis in original] the listener to his social dependence. Its erotic-emotional satisfaction is illusory, escapist” (Scherzinger, 2005, p. 55). The escape is, however, not from some consciously painful or bad reality, “but from the last thought of resisting that reality” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/2002, p. 116). The ideological mechanism is the papering over of the material social tensions and contradictions in the production and consumption of the musical commodity that provides a substitute satisfaction and allows for the (relatively) stable, ongoing, “normal” reproduction of the existing state of affairs. The cover is the prepared aesthetic enjoyment behind which hides the contradictory relations of the musical production and consumption and more decisively those of capitalism itself. Resistant music will resist “popularity” in this sense, but it may still be popular in actual following.

Music can, of course, be entertainment in a harmless, celebratory sense—simply enjoyable for its own sake without any of these political implications. Indeed, Adorno himself acknowledges this. Everyone needs to celebrate sometimes. The argument is instead that the entertainment industry is oriented toward manipulation and deception in its intent and logic and that this produces cognitive problems and aesthetic damage (which are unrecognized political problems) for those participating in this system. The best music, for Adorno, will therefore register or gesture disruptively toward these social contradictions. Negation, for Adorno, is the appropriate political expression in this musical context and it will tend toward the gestural rather than the literal.

The distinction an Adornoian critique has in mind is that between the experience of a music community driven by the autonomous participation of its members and that driven by the systematic manipulation of the affective relations inherent in music in the interests of the pursuit of nonmusical goals. “Easy” listening is imposed through the manufactured community of harmonious, cognitively unchallenging and emotionally reassuring music that reinforces and reproduces acceptance of existing social domination and the individual’s concomitant lack of power. Resistant listening will instead express a participatory constitution of the music—this describes a central element of its democratic nature compared with that of the authoritarian, regressive listening of the Culture Industry. In heavy metal music, I argue, listeners and producers participate in the opportunity to “cognitively map” their location in the contradictory totality of late capitalism. ¹ In this cognitive mapping and elsewhere, metal exhibits resistant listening in critical theory’s sense, even though Adorno himself would likely be horrified not only by my example but also by my emphasis on the importance of the immersion of fans in the metal concert and in communication technologies. It is just Adorno’s limited analysis of the reception of popular music and his inability to see mediatization as anything but an extension of instrumental rationality that are among the weakest elements of his theory.

Since its inception around 1970, heavy metal has been considered socially resistant or, more commonly, condemned as deviant, nihilistic, and socially and psychologically dangerous. Metal’s scene certainly sets itself apart from the mainstream in many ways, some of them quite extreme. The music is loud, with emphases on heavily distorted guitars, high volume vocals, and driving rhythms. Metal culture exhibits much religious or pagan iconography and highly stylized ritualistic gesture—often negatively, against Christianity, for example, and often against central aspects of modernity itself. Metal is sometimes described as politically resistant in the more general sense that Grossberg associates with rock ‘n’ roll: “an (at least potentially) oppositional politics against the larger hegemonic context within which it necessarily exists” (Grossberg, 1990, p. 117). Kelly draws from Grossberg to argue indeed that heavy metal music performance presents and invites resistance against the domination of the human by modern technological imperatives by “conjuring the body-of-resistance command” (Kelly, 2006, p. 160). The theme of human resistance to technology—specifically, industrial technology—is common to sociological analyses of metal, which highlights its working-class origins. Such a theme is enhanced by the origin myth of the “heavy metal” industrial accident that started it all. ² Kelly goes so far as to contend that metal (Iron Maiden in his case study) opened up a “radically plural democratic activity,” which may have remained latent as “a model for a future democratic community,” but which continues to contain significant political potential (Kelly, 2006, p. 161). Weinstein (1991) and Walser (1993) also each suggest that metal is politically significant in various ways and that it constitutes resistance to dominant consumer culture.

However, Kahn-Harris (2007) has argued persuasively that the metal scene contains a core antipolitical sentiment or value that would need to be overcome before any such practical-political possibility could be developed. This antipolitical sentiment, which Kahn-Harris documents especially in interviews, exists despite the occasional appearance of fascist symbols in extreme metal as well as the broader metal scene’s occasional expressions of discrimination. Prominent conservative and liberal political figures and their organizations have been consistent critics of metal as dangerous and deviant. However, metal’s internal antipolitical sentiment seems to suppress any desire to organize politically against such attacks, either inside or outside the scene. The expressions of prejudice and the theatrical use of offensive and banned symbolism require more complex explanations than mere attributions of advocacy, as Weinstein, Walser, and Kahn-Harris all contend.

The political nature of metal, I suggest, is instead to be found in its ideological achievements and in its particular mediation of participatory social bonds among fans. The sound of metal, along with its lyrics, disrupt Culture Industry musical convention and narrative—metal explores the “other” of hegemonic society, “the dark side of the daylit, enlightened adult world” (Walser, 1993, p. 162). Following Fiske (1989) and Ryan and Kellner (1988), Walser contends that it is the contradictions of (post)modern life under late capitalism that generate the need for heavy metal to “make sense of the world” in terms of horror, rage, madness, and violence. The “darkness” of metal is related to “the dark side of the modern capitalist security state: war, greed, patriarchy, surveillance, and control” against which metal’s “fantasies of empowerment” are arranged (Walser, 1993, pp. 160-165). To recall my earlier discussion of the context of post-Fordist social conditions, the lowered prospects and widespread precarity of youth employment under Empire give lie to the official ideologies of individualism and freedom and to the pacifying, escapist music of the Culture Industry. Heavy metal registers these contradictions negatively and fantastically; alienation from the mainstream is affirmed by communal bonds among metal fans in their affective labor, their personal and collective ritual gestures, and in the emphasis on live performance and festival gatherings.

This communicative power can be observed in heavy metal fan activity, in performance, and it can be decoded from the music itself. The American heavy metal band, Mastodon, which formed in 1999, has met with popular success and has developed a solid fan base through recorded albums and live shows. Fans are able to participate in the official Mastodon online forum, which has four message board themes and one “Photos” board. The top two boards, “General Discussion” and “Mastodon” have over 4,000 topics and over 100,000 replies dating back 6 years to 2006—the other boards account for many more thousands. In such venues, there will always be those members who post more often than others, but this collective communicative exchange indicates a substantial activity. A small sampling of recent posts indicate a wide variety of topics on Mastodon, on other bands about which the fans are enthused, and about metal culture in general. The posts generally appear sincere and the discussion is generous and “cordial.” There are of course plenty of expletives, vulgar language, and disturbing images to be found in the replies, but such language is not generally used to abuse other posters (the boards are moderated). The members’ avatars and the images they post reflect the weird, fantastical, and “horrible” images found in metal culture in general, with many individual quirks added by the members. Most images appear to be self-made or self-manipulated and they comprise an extraordinary diversity. The fans reproduce the Mastodon communication community in this online activity because of the imagined social bonds that are the product of this affective labor and its communication.

Critical Analysis of the Music of Mastodon

The fifth album by Mastodon, The Hunter (2011), exhibits several of the key heavy metal tropes and performance gestures that demonstrate these ideological and practical achievements. The album opens with “Black Tongue,” whose first lines describe self-mutilation and a lament for lost life, a lost “diamond,” and the buried “stars” and stolen “night.” Premodern references, which are common in metal, abound in the first four songs of the album: “silver,” “sea,” “forest,” and “sun” are references in “Black Tongue,” to which are added in the next three songs references to a “goat,” “sky,” “clouds,” “stars,” a “temple of bodies,” “souls,” “cosmos,” “horses,” “owl,” “solstice,” “faith,” and “altar.” These terms seem generally to connote quasireligious or rural images, which are then mixed with references to violence and insanity. The lyrics in each of the first four songs do not reveal any clear subjects or objects—protagonists and/or victims are not identified or described in any detail. Contexts are similarly obscure but almost always include explicit references to violence and “extreme” behavior—for example, it is screamed, “I want to drink some fucking blood; I want to break some fucking ass.” The first and last stanzas of “Black Tongue” are

I burned out my eyes

I cut off my tongue

I sealed them with all of the silver

And now I have none

You killed the life

You took the diamond

You killed the vine

Death of the sun

The song’s protagonist blames the apparent self-mutilation and world destruction on an addressee who owns “the darkness,” has “buried the stars,” and has “stolen the night”—besides doing the killing and taking in the last (and second) stanzas. There is also a challenge to the addressee, who is warned that running to the sea or the forest will not lead to escape and that the “lies” as well as the “time” has “run out.”

There is clearly not enough in such lyrics to decide on precise meaning. Indeed, metal lyrics that invoke premodern images can be seen as typical postmodern “pastiche” in which historical meaning is approached “through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image” (Jameson, 1991, p. 19) without any expectation of knowledge about the historical references. This would be unfair to those metal fans who have bought books on the historical references and researched the figures mentioned in metal songs. However, it is worth observing in Mastodon’s lyrics a common theme in metal songs: the madness of someone subjected to the domination of a mysterious “other” against whom he must nevertheless resist. In this case, the mysterious other has destroyed the world of the protagonist and is in a momentous struggle with this other. Similarly, the second song, “Curl of the Burl,” begins with the protagonist confessing to killing a man “’cause he killed my goat,” which is explained in the refrain as just the “curl of the burl” or the “way of the world.” The second verse speaks of “splinters in my skin” as the protagonist cuts through “the pine” while “running through the streets . . . cutting through the disease.” Again, madness and violence are suggested as the response to the mysterious “disease” of “the world.” In the final stanza of “Curl of the Burl,” the protagonist feels “powerless” and cries “Chew it up, spit the rest.” In these opening songs, the songs’ protagonist is evoking extreme violence (self- or other-directed) as a response to his complete domination by an obscure but powerful other. Elsewhere on the album, in similar song scenarios, the dominating other is called “the beast,” “the creature,” and “the Ruiner.”

This “other” in metal does not function merely as a metaphor for capitalism, since such an object is too complex to be represented in such a specific semantic relation. The mysterious, dominating other is instead an essential figurative element in the cognitive map constructed in metal that translates the experience of the real relations of capitalist class domination into the fantasy of a horrifying struggle between a deranged individual and a demonic, devastating other (all the lyrics on The Hunter are in the first person). The songs allow for the expression of rage at the socioeconomic powerlessness of the fans in the face of post-Fordist precarity by offering scenarios of madness and violence that are blamed on a virtually unnamable, dominating, and evil other. Following Jameson’s (1991) view that cognitive mapping is necessary for postmodern subjects faced with an inability to culturally represent the complexity of the global system or their place in it, we observe in heavy metal just such a struggle to cognitively map a contradictory reality in which neither the location of the self nor the system that threatens the self can be rendered aesthetically visible to the mind. I do not argue that the heavy metal musicians and their fans themselves understand these critical problems in this way. I argue instead that in metal culture, the dominating economic system and the experience of individual powerlessness in the face of this system are cognitively mapped in the imaginary relationship between a mysterious, violent, and destructive sentient being, usually personified in a demonic figure of some sort, and a mutilated, mad, violent individual who continues to struggle against his doomed fate. As such, metal’s cognitive mapping is culturally disruptive and resistant.

Mastodon’s accompanying music is equally definitive of such culturally disruptive and resistant achievements. “Black Tongue” opens with a guitar riff pattern of overdrive distortion. The song is built over relatively simple guitar riffs that are reinforced by the bass guitar and an even simpler vocal melody. The song is especially distinguished by the dynamism and virtuosity of the drumming that provides a barrage of double-kick bass drum rhythms and constant fills (the drumming is a virtuosic element throughout the album). There is a triplet rhythm played over the 4/4 time signature as well as other rhythm variations within the song, which provides for more dynamism in the drumming as well as a frantic feel to the piece as a whole. The guitars in this song are detuned two steps and the riffs are rooted on the 6th and 5th strings, which helps to provide the uncanny menace of this song (and that of metal in general). The lower D on the 6th is struck so as to ring longer at times through the riff, providing some harmonics, while the higher A moves down on the 5th string to the diminished fifth and then to the minor third before resolving down to the tonic at the end of the second bar or up to the diminished 5th at the end of the fourth bar (see Figure 1). This is not an unusual kind of progression in metal. The diminished or flat 5th is, of course, also used in jazz, blues, rock, and classical music, but in metal the flat 5th features as a dominant sound, which is evident in the “Black Tongue” riff.

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Figure 1.

“Black Tongue” main guitar riff.

Immediately following the introductory D and A notes, the flat 5th is anticipated as the A moves down to find it forcefully as the second bar of each pattern begins. The flat 5th notes fall in the tonal center of the two-bar pattern—the note toward which and away from which the riff moves. In the verses, the guitar remains on the 6th string, moving to the fourth note, while echoing the menacing motif of the main riff by again sounding the flat 5th and minor 3rd. The dominant use of the flat 5th—here usually combined with the minor 3rd—produces a sense of foreboding, its sustained dissonance disrupting the expectations of the “normal” major and minor harmonies that characterize Culture Industry music.

There is also the dimension of the disjunctive rhythm variation in “Black Tongue”—a significant change of meter that is used in heavy metal. In a bridge section soon after the halfway mark in the song, the meter significantly increases (from ♩ = 97 to ♩ = 140) and the rhythm switches to a straighter 4/4 without the earlier triplet dimension. This kind of change is highly disruptive to the existing rhythm—a disruption imitated by the guitar’s switch from single strings to first and fifth power chords and also the vocal distortion effects used exclusively in this section. The switch is then made back to the original pattern of 4/4 with triplets and then again switched back for an outro at the end of the song. The rhythmic dimension of “Black Tongue” amplifies the foreboding sense of its primary harmonic dimension. It also violently disrupts it with a racing bridge and outro that, among other things, create a sense of flight or fleeing (the lyric notion of “run” features several times in this section, which adds emphasis to this sense).

Conclusion: Critical Theory and Heavy Metal

It is thus difficult not to see the “scars of damage and disruption,” which Adorno associates with the authenticity of modern art, marking heavy metal most deeply. The key thrust of Adorno’s critique of music can be rescued from its historically determined pessimism, its bias, and its limited analysis of the reception of popular music by focusing on its emphasis on the communicative power of music, which I have highlighted in my analysis of metal by using Jameson’s cognitive mapping theory and the theory of affective labor. Metal is resistant in the logic of its antimodern, violent, and deranged gestures and scenarios. It is resistant in its musical structure and form: the disruptions to conventional musical structure, rhythm, and narrative and the use of the diminished 5th in riffs and chord formations. Metal also cognitively maps the common subject position of its fans in relation to the general political economic structures of post-Fordism by staging a horror of total domination in fantastic, quasireligious and spectacular forms. The emphasis on live performance and festivals offer metal fans many opportunities to affirm communal bonds through the music and its culture. The affective labor of the fans online and at festivals is constitutive of the overall experience of the music and its culture. It is not the technology of informatization that is itself constitutive, it is instead the dynamics of the practical interaction with the technology and that of the communicative interaction produced by it. The ideological artifacts that mediate the informatized and live interaction are essential (that is, they cannot be abstracted away) and need to be understood within the context of the communicative political economy of Empire.