I had originally planned to post a review of Steve Waksman’s academic romp through the anals of Heavy Metal and Punk this week, entitled “This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk” (UC Press, 2008). However, after some of the responses I received both on Archinect and Twitter I thought perhaps that an expansion of last week’s post about SCI-Arc was in order as well. Thus torn between my two loves, architecture and music, and unable to dedicate the time both sets of commentary would require, I’ve opted to filter the former through the latter in hopes of not only clarifying my position about the work at SCI-Arc, but to also satisfy my original goal, which was to deliver a review of Waksman’s book.
In the 1979 and 1980 issues of Creem, a discussion erupted in the “Letters” section that was centered around both the classification and the status of Heavy Metal music and its assumed adversary, Punk Rock. For fans of Heavy Metal, a genre that had suffered greatly during the Seventies due to the greed of major labels and by a general lack of progression in the music, the article “Is Heavy Metal Dead?” by writer Rick Johnson seemed to be the catalyst for a vigorous discussion (one of the memorable fan letters being the heading for this post)that would last for years in both scholarly and fan-based music circles. For Waksman, the importance of this argument lay, not in it’s attempts to substantiate the dominance of either genre, but instead that the fan’s responses seemed to point to a much more complicated issue- that genre informs how audiences experience and synthesize popular music. Fan commentary in the wake of Johnson’s article produced some rather poetic commentary such as “I grew up listening to real Rock that is still being played by any respectable FM station in the country more than any of this New Wave bullshit, and by real performers who know what the hell they’re doing, and after 10 to 15 years, can still sell more records and tickets than any New Wave assholes alive”.
For those people who have ever gotten in a fight with a friend about music, this probably sounds familiar. However, it is these angry salvos, which ranged from ardent chest thumping to homophobic insults riding on the masculinity of Punk Rockers Johnny Rotten (Sex Pistols) and Iggy Pop (The Stooges). What interests Waksman and forms his thesis for the text are four criteria which he applies to the analysis and critique of Heavy Metal and Punk Rock music to show that they are in fact one complex hybrid which lies in juxtaposition with mainstream Rock n’ Roll.
These are: Aesthetic value, exposure, gender, and history.
With these criteria as his litmus, Waksman curates a trajectory of sub-cultures within both Heavy Metal and Punk in order to define how the two musical styles situate themselves within the trajectory of late 20th Century Post-Modern music culture. While fans of the two sounds believed themselves to be different, both socially and aesthetically from one another, the research in the book demonstrates otherwise. When one strips the visual stylings and commercial successes away from both camps, the music experience itself blends into a sound that rubs against the larger canon of Rock n’ Roll. In short, aesthetics and commercial exposure don’t really matter that much, but instead what defines the music and sets it apart from the mainstream is its sincerity and purpose-driven desire for experimentation and technical innovation, all of which draw on either a connection to or a resistance against the accepted rules of popular music. It is this action of response against the mainstream that both genres shared and cultivated throughout their early development, and one that was heavily reliant on external forces. Heavy Metal music mutated and transformed the traditional guitar structures of Rock n’ Roll technique from the 1960’s, while Punk rejected technique all-together in favor of socio-political commentary. However, without some kind of larger understanding of the cultural forces around them, both Heavy Metal and Punk would have never emerged from underneath the cloak of Rock n’ Roll. Instead, they would have become mere footnotes, rather than the transformative genres which now permeate and influence the mainstream itself.
Ā 
