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In Defense of Textual Analysis:Resisting Methodological Hegemony inMedia and Cultural StudiesMichelle Phillipov
Version of record first published: 08 Mar 2012
To cite this article: Michelle Phillipov (2012): In Defense of Textual Analysis: ResistingMethodological Hegemony in Media and Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication,DOI:10.1080/15295036.2011.639380
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In Defense of Textual Analysis:Resisting Methodological Hegemonyin Media and Cultural Studies1
Michelle Phillipov
Media and cultural studies are currently experiencing a renewed and intensified
engagement with sociology and sociological methods, with studies of popular music
especially affected by attempts to make media and cultural research ‘‘more sociological.’’
This paper explores recent methodological debates in media and cultural studies by
critiquing the ‘‘ethnographic turn’’ in popular music studies, as well as the growing
antipathy toward textual analysis methods. It argues that while sociological popular
music studies may rhetorically privilege ‘‘real’’ experience over abstract textualism, its
methods are often limited to the dimensions of experience that can be readily observed
and verbalized, or resort to the kind of abstract theorizing its practitioners claim to reject.
Using examples from heavy and extreme metal music, this paper argues that while all
research methods are inevitably partial, textual analysis can offer creative ways to
articulate experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible to empirical research methods,
and that the use of text-based approaches can improve, rather than weaken, our
understanding of popular media and culture.
Keywords: Media studies; Cultural studies; Textual analysis; Methodology; Metal music
The disciplines of media studies, cultural studies, and sociology have been closely
connected throughout much of their respective histories, but the precise relationships
among the fields have been subject to long-standing*and sometimes heated*debate. Some have conceived media and cultural studies as profoundly challenging
sociology’s disciplinary and epistemological certainties (Seidman, 1997), while
others have argued that media and cultural studies are deficient in sociology’s
‘‘stable research agenda’’ (Rojek & Turner, 2000, p. 638). Others still have described
Michelle Phillipov is a Lecturer in Journalism, Media and Communications at the University of Tasmania.
Correspondence to: University of Tasmania, School of English, Journalism and European Languages, Private Bag
82, Hobart 7001, Australia. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1529-5036 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2012 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2011.639380
Critical Studies in Media Communication
2012, pp. 1�15, iFirst article
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media/cultural studies and sociology as ‘‘warring twins’’ that engage in a ‘‘ritualized
antagonism’’ that belies their striking underlying similarities (Inglis, 1997, p. 100).
While the disciplines are still subject to conflict and debate, in recent years, media
and cultural studies have sought a renewed and intensified engagement with
sociology and sociological methods. For example, publications such as McLennan’s
Sociological cultural studies (2006) repeat earlier arguments that media and cultural
studies ‘‘at its best is sociological’’ (Wolff, 1999, emphasis in original). Similarly,
Rojek’s Cultural studies implicitly privileges sociological approaches to media and
culture, arguing that the fields’ practices of ‘‘deconstruction, demythologization and
demystification’’ should be de-prioritized in favor of an approach that focuses on
‘‘on-location practice, embodiment and emplacement in the context of political
economy’’ (2007, pp. 152, 153, emphasis removed). This work echoes earlier
arguments that media and cultural research is dominated by a merely ‘‘decorative’’
sociology, and so requires the adoption of a more thoroughgoing sociological
approach to overcome its methodological and conceptual weaknesses (Rojek &
Turner, 2000, p. 640).
Perhaps more so than studies of other media forms, studies of popular music have
been especially affected by attempts to make media and cultural research ‘‘more
sociological.’’ In popular music studies, sociological research methods are becoming
increasingly dominant. Indicative of this trend, a recent article by Andy Bennett
(2008) argues that popular music studies’ adoption of analytical tools associated with
media and cultural studies, rather than sociology, has been a significant barrier to an
adequate understanding of popular music culture. In contrast to media and cultural
studies approaches which ‘‘explain . . . away’’ the relationship between popular music
and culture in a ‘‘largely abstract fashion,’’ or which take ‘‘musical texts and the
narratives they allegedly bespeak’’ as a ‘‘singularly rich source for the construction of
analytical discourses concerning the relationship between music and culture,’’
Bennett proposes the development of a thoroughgoing cultural sociology of popular
music as a necessary corrective to the dominance of textual analysis in the research
field (2008, pp. 420, 421, 424). Greater use of empirical research methods, such as
ethnography and interviews, he argues, would better account for individual agency
and experience in the participation in popular music culture, and offer a ‘‘real sense
of the actual ways in which musical life is acted out [on] an everyday level’’ (Bennett,
2008, p. 428, emphasis in original).
This paper explores methodological debates in popular music studies, with a
particular focus on the work of Bennett and on studies of heavy and extreme metal
music. These have not only been sites at which debates between sociology and media
and cultural studies have been particularly clearly articulated, but they also offer clear
case studies of the dangers of methodological hegemony for media and cultural
studies more generally. As I will argue below, sociological popular music studies may
privilege ‘‘real’’ experience over abstract textualism and the empirical over the
theoretical, but its methods are largely limited to the dimensions of experience that
can be readily observed and verbalized, or resort to the kind of abstract theorizing its
practitioners claim to reject. The insistence that empirical research methods access
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real dimensions of experience that textual approaches can only abstractly theorize
ignores the inevitable partiality of all academic studies. Indeed, some forms of media
and culture can be particularly resistant to empirical enquiry. Rather than a
‘‘problem’’ to be solved, then, I will argue that text-based methods can continue to
make (also partial) contributions to the understanding of media and culture. Because
they find creative ways to articulate experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible
to empirical research methods, the use of text-based approaches can improve, rather
than weaken, our understanding of popular media and culture.
Studying Popular Music
In media and cultural studies, the intellectual tradition most frequently associated
with textualism and ‘‘decorative’’ sociology is that of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, UK. Work from the CCCS has been
important to the development of the broad interdisciplinary fields of media studies
and cultural studies, but it has also been especially significant for the development of
popular music studies, where much contemporary work on music culture still arises
out of direct engagements with CCCS subculture theory and its criticisms (Bennett &
Kahn-Harris, 2004, p. 1). The history of CCCS work is well rehearsed in the media
and cultural studies literature (see During, 2005; Turner, 1996), with its central tenets
now familiar to most readers of this journal.
While criticisms of this work have been various (see Clarke, 1990; McRobbie &
Garber, 1980; Thornton, 1995), an important area of critique relevant to the central
concerns of this paper is the CCCS’s lack of empirical engagement with the
participants of music and youth culture. The ethnographic studies of Paul Willis
(1977, 1978) notwithstanding, much of this work has been described as exemplifying
the tradition of ‘‘textual analysis’’ with which media and cultural studies subsequently
became strongly associated (Rojek, 2007; Turner, 1996). That is, CCCS subculture
studies are understood as approaching music and youth cultures as ‘‘texts’’ to be
‘‘read,’’ rather than seeking to engage empirically with the everyday practices or
experiences of participants.
Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The meaning of style (1979) is often cited (and
critiqued) as a key example of this trend (see, for example, Rojek, 2007, pp. 53�54).
In Subculture, Hebdige employs concepts from structuralism and semiotics to
interpret the meaning and significance of the subculture’s spectacular visual style. For
instance, he reads punk’s trashy cut-up clothes, mohawks, safety pins, and bin liners
as both a real reflection of the material poverty of British working class youth and a
dramatization of the social conditions of its historical moment. That is, punks were
not only directly responding to increasing joblessness, poverty, and changing moral
standards, they were also dramatizing it using clothing to symbolize an experience of
crisis, apocalypse and anarchy (Hebdige, 1979, p. 87). Perhaps inviting the criticisms
that were to follow, Hebdige (1979, p. 139) admits of his study that ‘‘it is highly
unlikely that the members of any of the subcultures described in this book would
recognize themselves reflected here.’’ In one of the many critiques that ensued, Clarke
In Defense of Textual Analysis 3
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(1990, p. 73) describes this aspect of Hebdige’s work as ‘‘pathetic’’ and a reflection of
a thoroughgoing ‘‘failure to examine how subcultures make sense to the members
themselves.’’ Frith (1985, pp. 347, 349) also criticized such studies for their
‘‘remarkably limited empirical research,’’ suggesting that they reveal a significant
‘‘gap between the sociologist’s abstract account of youth cultures and the explanations
one would be likely to get from the sub-cultures themselves.’’ As a corrective to this
problem, Harris (1992, p. 134) has advocated for analyses grounded in the real lives
and experiences of popular audiences: ‘‘asking the actual audience . . . [is necessary to]
fix the floating signifiers and ground analysis, to check the dangers of endless elegant
but fanciful speculation about the significance of texts.’’
One of the fundamental criticisms of text-based approaches, then, is that they can
lead to meanings being ‘‘read off ’’ texts in ways that reflect the values and
assumptions of the researcher, rather than those of the audience. This position is
supported by some critics from within media and cultural studies who argue that in
many studies, popular audiences essentially function as ‘‘textually delegated,
allegorical emblem[s] of the critic’s own activity’’ rather as subjects in their own
right (Morris, 1996, p. 158, emphasis added). Bennett (2005, pp. 27�28) agrees that
any substitution of ‘‘textual analysis’’ for ‘‘actual engagement with those individuals
using the products of mass culture in the course of their everyday lives’’ inevitably
results in cultural meanings being imposed upon the actions of individuals by the
researcher.
Such critiques of textual analysis contributed to what has been termed the
‘‘ethnographic turn’’ in media and cultural studies, which rose to prominence in the
1990s and continues to hold sway within some areas of popular music studies
(Alasuutari, 1999; Ang, 1996; Jensen & Pauly, 1997). Ethnographic approaches
explore both the everyday practices of participation in popular culture and the
contexts in which meanings arise, prioritizing the perspectives and experiences of the
research subjects rather than those of the researcher. Although ethnographic methods
traditionally involve long-term participant observation in ‘‘the field,’’ what is often
called ‘‘ethnographic study’’ in cultural and media studies typically involves
qualitative, in-depth interviews (Alasuutari, 1999, p. 5). In contemporary popular
music studies, many studies now utilize such methods in order to foreground the
voices of participants in music culture. Ruth Finnegan’s (1989) and Sara Cohen’s
(1991) book-length studies are often cited as important early contributions to the
ethnographic turn in popular music studies, as both use fieldwork research to
overcome many of the perceived limitations of media and cultural studies work,
particularly those associated with the textual tradition of the CCCS.
Finnegans The hidden musicians (1989) adopts the research methods of social
anthropology to explore amateur music making in the English town of Milton
Keynes. She argues that this kind of ‘‘empirical investigation on the ground’’ is
needed to determine ‘‘what people actually do’’ as part of their musical engagement,
and how individuals and groups organize and perceive their activities at a local level;
‘‘formalistic’’ analyses (i.e. textual, musicological, or theoretical approaches) are
inadequate to a full understanding of musical practice and experience (Finnegan,
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1989, pp. 8�9, emphasis in original). Cohen’s Rock culture in Liverpool (1991) also
adopts the methods of social anthropology to delineate the ‘‘actual social practices,
processes, and interactions in musical creation and performance ‘on the ground’’’
(Cohen, 1991, p. 223). In contrast to the existing scholarship on rock culture, which
she presents as dominated by a focus on ‘‘ideological and theoretical issues,’’ Cohen
(1991, p. 6) suggests a need for ‘‘ethnographic data and microsociological detail’’ to
adequately understand locally situated music-making practices. She further expands
upon these points in an article for Popular Music, in which text-based work is
dismissed as ‘‘armchair theorizing’’:
Ethnographic research can bring the researcher in ‘‘the field’’ into contact withsocial reality in a way that no reading of secondary sources or ‘‘armchairtheorizing’’ could ever accomplish. Most importantly . . . ethnography takes theform of a direct encounter, a shift from strictly theoretical formulations to adomain that is concrete and material. (Cohen, 1993, p. 132)
She argues that this grounding in the ‘‘concrete and material’’ contributes to
a ‘‘considerably enhanced’’ understanding of popular music culture (Cohen, 1993,
p. 135).
Although studies adopting the rigorous anthropological methods of Cohen and
Finnegan are relatively rare in popular music studies, their impact is evident in the
current growth of work employing ethnographic-, interview, and fieldwork-based
methods (e.g. Hodkinson, 2002; Kahn-Harris, 2007; Malbon, 1999; Morgan, 2009;
Thornton, 1995). For example, in his book-length study of goth culture, Hodkinson
(2002, p. 4) is persuaded by Cohen’s argument that too many studies of music culture
have focused on textual analysis or isolated interviews, and so adopts a ‘‘multi-
method ethnographic approach’’ to ‘‘achieve maximum depth and quality of
information and understanding.’’ Malbon (1999, p. 180) presents his study of the
emotional, interactional, and stylistic complexity of clubbing as part of a corrective to
the lack of ethnographic research on club cultures. However, any notion that such
methods can grant access to a lived reality that textual methodologies can only
abstractly theorize neglects to acknowledge the systematic limitations of empirical
research.
The Limits of Empirical Research
Empirical research methods are useful for understanding some aspects popular
cultural practice and experience, but, with some exceptions, are often most
productive for understanding those aspects of practice and experience that can be
readily observed and articulated. Moreover, while textual analyses have been (rightly)
critiqued for assigning meanings to media products without adequately considering
participants’ contexts or experiences of consumption, empirical research methods
offer no guarantee that the researcher will also not impose his/her own meanings and
interpretations on the media or cultural form under examination. Bennett’s research
on hip hop culture offers indicative examples of the limitations of interview-based
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work, which is especially significant given that Bennett has been such a vocal defender
of the use of ethnographic methods instead of text-based ones.
Two of Bennett’s articles, published in Media, Culture & Society and The
Sociological Review in 1999, consider the various benefits of hip hop music and
culture for marginalized young people. His paper in Media, Culture & Society, ‘‘Hip
hop am main,’’ explores the ways in which young people from ethnic minority groups
in Germany use hip hop music and culture to express and explore local issues, such as
those concerning racism and national identity. The material presented in the article
derives largely from Bennett’s experiences working with the Frankfurter Rockmobil, a
mobile, youth-oriented music project that assists minority youth in gaining music
skills and experience. Much of the paper’s evidence that hip hop is reworked as a
specifically local cultural resource comes from anecdotes from Bennett’s in-the-field
experience and from material gleaned from interview data that foregrounds the
voices of participants. An example of the latter is his claim that:
Among certain groups of Frankfurt rappers and hip hop enthusiasts whom Iinterviewed, it was commonly agreed that only when local rappers began to writeand perform texts in the German language did their songs begin to work as aneffective form of communication with the audience. (Bennett, 1999a, p. 82)
This is then followed by a quote from Frankfurt rap group United Energy:
In the beginning people didn’t think that rapping would sound like it should if wetried to do it in German. But then people began to realize that it was too limitingrapping in English, because their knowledge of the language wasn’t good enough.So now a lot of rappers have begun to rap in German and it’s just better, moreeffective. (Quoted in Bennett, 1999a, p. 82)
While this sort of material might initially appear to be a straightforward reflection of
participants’ practices and experiences, it actually raises a number of questions that
remain unanswered in this paper: if only ‘‘certain groups’’ preferred rapping in the
German language, which groups are these? Is this a minority or dominant position
within the Frankfurt hip hop scene as a whole? How many is ‘‘a lot’’? Is this an
accurate characterization of the state of rap music in Frankfurt or is it just this
specific person’s perspective? What proportion of Frankfurt rappers and hip hop
enthusiasts participate in the Rockmobil project? Are the views and attitudes of these
participants indicative of those of a broader hip hop culture in Frankfurt?
Bennett’s second article on hip hop, published in The Sociological Review, is also
constrained in similar ways. ‘‘Rappin’ on the Tyne’’ explores the significance of hip
hop music and culture for white youth in north-east England. Like ‘‘Hip hop am
main,’’ the study is rich in interview data, and this data is used as evidence for
arguments made. For instance, Bennett’s (1999b, p. 15) claim that there is a
‘‘commonly held view among white hip hop enthusiasts that the essence of hip hop
culture relates to its easy translation into a medium which directly bespeaks the white
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British working class experience’’ is supported by a quote from a British hip hop artist
who says that:
Hip hop isn’t a black thing, it’s a street thing y’know, where people get so pissed offwith their environment that they have to do something about it. (Quoted inBennett, 1999b, p. 15)
Again, this evidence (and the conclusions it supports) raises similar questions to the
previous study: are the views of the white hip hop enthusiasts interviewed as part of
this study indicative of those of the wider white hip hop community in north-east
England? Does the focus on ‘‘key figures in the local hip hop scene’’ (Bennett, 1999b,
p. 7) provide an accurate representation of the attitudes of members of this broader
scene? Are these key figures more likely to view hip hop as a site for protest than those
on the periphery of the culture?
Of course, Bennett’s studies examine local and individual experiences and are not
intended to be generalizable to wider populations. His is an approach that, in the
words of Denzin and Lincoln (2005, p. 378) ‘‘takes each instance of a phenomenon as
an occurrence that evidences the operation of a set of cultural understandings
currently available for use by cultural members.’’ Indeed, the summary of this earlier
work provided in his 2008 article highlights Bennett’s desire to explore the multiple
meanings of hip hop:
The everyday meaning of hip hop . . . , as opposed to the more uniform meaningscreated in top-down analyses of the genre, is seen in the culmination of a range ofhighly subjective*and in many cases conflicting*values placed in musical textsand their attendant cultural artefacts by young hip hop fans. (2008, p. 429)
This is clearly legitimate and important work. But if empirical research is primarily
understood as a means to gain a ‘‘real sense of the actual ways in which musical life is
acted out’’ (Bennett, 2008, p. 428), then it does matter whether the views expressed
by the Frankfurt hip hop enthusiasts or the Newcastle upon Tyne rap artists are the
idiosyncratic views of a minority or the dominant views of the majority. After all, it
may be the case that hip hop aficionados from this scene who were not interviewed
may be just as unlikely as Hebdige’s punks to see their own experiences reflected in
such studies.
Bennett acknowledges this inevitable partiality of empirical work in his 2006 study
of ageing punk rock fans when he expresses disappointment that his inability to
secure any interviews with older female punks creates a significant gap in his
understanding of the experiences of ageing punks, particularly with respect to gender
(2006, p. 224). The partiality of any empirical study is not in itself a problem*and
would indeed be acknowledged by many who do this kind of work as an inevitable
part of ethnographic work*but if ethnographic methods are to be touted as those
which avoid ‘‘abstraction,’’ and develop a ‘‘real’’ understanding of cultural production
and participation in relation to music, as Bennett’s work seems to do, then this
necessarily implies conclusions more wide-reaching than simply a narrow focus on a
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small number of (potentially) idiosyncratic viewpoints. It is on these kinds of
grounds that qualitative research methods have been critiqued elsewhere*sometimes
quite scathingly (see Rosengren, 1993; Schrøder, 1999). However, it is important not
to discount the value of empirical research methods entirely, but simply to recognize
their limits (and, indeed, the limits of all available research methods). Interviews are
not neutral tools of data collection but are ‘‘active interactions between two (or more)
people leading to negotiated, contextually based results’’ (Fontana & Frey, 2005,
p. 698). Research is always a construction, rather than a representation, of the
interview encounter, involving a range of selective devices, such as highlighting,
editing, cutting, transcribing, and inflecting (McRobbie, 1991, p. 69).
Research is also inevitably limited by participants’ own discourses. In his study of
fan cultures, Hills (2002, p. 68) argues that ethnographic work often succumbs to
what he calls a ‘‘fallacy of internality’’*an assumption that fans can fully account
discursively for their cultural practices. Hills (2002, p. 66) suggests that while a
willingness to ‘‘ask the audience’’ is productive in many cases, it is also potentially
reductive insofar as it assumes that cultural activities can be adequately accounted for
in terms of language and discourse. Moreover, he argues, ‘‘the ethnographic version
of fan culture seems to have no inkling that discursive justifications of fandom might
be fragile constructions, albeit socially licensed and communal ones’’ (Hills, 2002,
p. 66). As he demonstrates in his later book The pleasures of horror, explanations of
media/cultural practice and experience are largely limited to the kinds of discourses
considered acceptable within the fan culture under consideration. For example, in the
case of horror fans, he argues, this involves emphasizing their ‘‘cool knowledge-
ability’’ of horror texts so as not to be perceived as displaying any appropriately
‘‘effeminate’’ or ‘‘irrational’’ affects, such as fear (Hills, 2005, pp. 84�85).
Pronouncements from fans about the pleasures of horror, then, are not simply a
reflection of real feelings and experiences but part of the way in which ‘‘subcultural
capital’’ (Thornton, 1995) is exercised in fan communities.
When considered from this perspective, it may also be the case that Bennett’s hip
hop fans are similarly constrained by the discursive norms of their respective scenes.
For example, the tendency of participants in the hip hop scene in Newcastle upon
Tyne to politicize hip hop as a ‘‘street’’ culture for ‘‘pissed off ’’ young people wanting
to improve their environment may not provide straightforward access to the reality of
their experiences and motivations, but may simply be one of the discursively licensed
means by which young people in this scene give meaning to their participation in hip
hop culture. Indeed, given the broader debates within hip hop culture surrounding
its appropriation by white fans and performers (see Allinson, 1994; Rose, 1994;
Samuels, 1991; Yousman, 2003), politicizing hip hop as an expression of white
working class experience may be an attempt by white artists to legitimize their
participation in hip hop culture, rather than simply reflect the realities of their
experience. In short, Bennett’s interview data may not be represent the ‘‘actual ways
in which musical life is acted out’’ (Bennett, 2008, p. 428), but be a part of what Hills
(2002, p. 67) calls a ‘‘defensive mechanism designed to render the fan’s affective
relationship meaningful in a rational sense.’’
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This creates a potential that the responses of participants who are reluctant to
render their affective relationship rationally meaningful, or who might be overly
constrained by the discursive norms of the culture of which they are a part, may not
be fully interrogated as such. There is a risk that interview studies may not only
privilege the voices of those participants who are essentially reflexive in their
understanding of their involvement in popular cultural practice, but also those who
are willing and able to explain to an academic researcher what their experiences,
values, and practices are. This is a problem not just because such approaches fail to
explore the constructed nature of participants’ discursive justifications (or their
absences), but because this kind of research is largely limited to discussing the sorts of
meanings and experiences that people are able and willing to explain to someone else.
While a consideration of the popular music text as a purely abstract theoretical
object may be rightly criticized by sociologists, arguments that favor ethnographic
and interview approaches as access points to the ‘‘real’’ (which, presumably, textual
approaches are only able to theorize) potentially run the risk of what Middleton
(2003, p. 10) calls ‘‘descriptivism,’’ the discussion only of what can be easily observed,
recorded, and verbalized. If part of the problem with earlier textual analysis
approaches was their failure to examine how music cultures are experienced and
understood by participants, the problem with ethnographic and interview-based
methods is their inability to access some dimensions of this experience and
understanding. Indeed, the argument that ethnographic approaches offer a ‘‘real
sense of the actual ways in which musical life is acted out’’ (Bennett, 2008, p. 428,
emphasis in original), while textual approaches can only impose meanings on the
actions of individuals (Bennett, 2005, pp. 27�28), neglects the possibility that some
dimensions of musical experience may ‘‘require to be uncovered and made to speak’’
(Middleton, 2003, p. 10, emphasis in original).
In Defense of Textual Aanalysis
The limits of ethnographic and interview-based methods are amplified in the case of
popular cultural forms that are especially resistant to empirical enquiry, such as heavy
and extreme metal. In popular music scholarship, there has been a greater number of
textual analyses of metal than of other popular genres. Many of these have combined
analyses of musical texts with interview study, highlighting the ways in which textual
analysis can complement ethnographic methods and access meanings that would be
unavailable by way of ethnographic methods alone.
This can be seen in studies that use mixed method approaches to explore
relationships between the structural properties of metal song texts and the structural
conditions of metal’s audience. For example, in Running with the devil, Walser’s
(1993) musical analysis offers insight into the class experience of heavy metal fans. He
presents deindustrialization as a key context for heavy metal, and the music as an
expression of blue-collar life in a declining economy. His interview data indicates that
metal fans value the music’s truth to life and seek out the music as a way to make
sense of the challenges they face in their lives (Walser, 1993, p. 19); however, his
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textual analysis suggests that the music reflects the social conditions of fans in
indirect and metaphorical ways. For instance, he presents thrash metal’s formal
complexity and abrupt changes of meter and tempo as metaphors for a turbulent and
disjointed world, while musicians’ accuracy and technical precision is theorised as a
means of offering listeners a sense of security and reassurance that such difficulties
can be successfully overcome (Walser, 1993, p. 157). As he explains:
[I]n their material enactments of control, of hanging on in the face of frighteningcomplexity, such heavy metal bands suggest to many that survival in the modernworld is possible, that disruptions, no matter how unsettling, can be ridden out andendured. (Walser, 1993, p. 159)
In this case, Walser’s textual analysis illuminates his interview data to show that
music does not simply reflect the social world in any straightforward or literal way,
but offers more complex understandings of the relationship between the musical and
the social. In this study, ethnographic and textual analyses work together to show
how meanings also reside in musical texts, and not just in the commentary that
surrounds them.
Berger’s (1999) musical analyses similarly amplify and illuminate his ethnographic
study. Drawing upon long one-on-one interviews conducted with death metal
musician Dann Saladin, Berger demonstrates how death metal’s subcultural milieu
fosters distinctive sets of listening practices that not only encourage fans to hear
harmonic tension as pleasurable, but also predisposes them to hear dissonance even
in musical structures that, outside the death metal scene, would ordinarily be
perceived as stable. He recounts how, from the perspective of traditional music
theory, the pitch collection of the guitar solo from the death metal song ‘‘The final
silencing’’ would normally be understood as a straightforward example of E minor.
However, he was surprised to learn that Saladin hears the line as wildly chromatic and
unpredictable (Berger, 1999, p. 167). He surmises that such listening practices are
ultimately connected to the structural position of the death metal audience. As he
explains:
Confronted with limited job opportunities, a collapsing industrial base and ever-shrinking representation in the workplace and the government, the metalhead’s lifeis one of profound frustration. That . . . the participant’s perceptual apparatusshould constitute sonic fragments whenever the givens of the musical sound allowit is easy to understand. (Berger, 1999, pp. 171�172).
For both Berger and Walser, textual analysis provides productive insight into musical
meanings and pleasure. These analyses tells us something about the specificity of
metal song texts, and the way that texts arise from and speak to socio-structural
experiences, in ways that ethnography alone would not. These studies, then, are not
examples of how the limitations of textual analysis can be ‘‘fixed’’ through interview
study, but of how the combination of textual analysis and ethnography can enhance
our understanding of musical forms and experiences.
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However, both Walser’s and Berger’s studies relied upon access to willing and
articulate interviewees; these have not been available to all researchers of heavy and
extreme metal. In his book-length study of extreme metal, Kahn-Harris (2007) found
that his analysis of the meanings and pleasures of extreme metal music was frequently
stymied by the fact that while there is a great deal of talk about music in the extreme
metal scene, many musicians and fans resist inquiry into how they feel about this
music. To demonstrate, he cites a response from an interview subject who, when
asked why he likes death metal, replied:
I don’t think there’s a reason it appeals to me it’s just I like it you know, it’s not thesort of thing you can say, I like it because . . . it’s just, it’s just there. (Quoted inKahn-Harris, 2007, p. 54)
Kahn-Harris (2007, p. 145) argues that this inarticulacy reflects the ways in which the
extreme metal scene is governed by a logic of ‘‘reflexive anti-reflexivity.’’ This is a term
he coined to explain the way that scene members are not merely being unreflexive,
but are instead choosing not to engage in reflexive practice in relation to the musical
texts that they produce and consume (Kahn-Harris, 2007, p. 145). He surmises that
reflexive anti-reflexivity is a source of important pleasures for members of the
extreme metal scene, as it provides them with the opportunity to explore
transgressive themes textually without their behavior or the scene itself ever
becoming unequivocally transgressive, and offers them a creative and empowering
means through which to survive a complex and ‘‘fraught’’ modernity (Kahn-Harris,
2007, pp. 156, 158).
Although the extreme metal scene is otherwise theorized in some interesting ways,
Kahn-Harris’s study offers a particularly clear example of how researchers’ under-
standing can be constrained by the discursive norms of the culture under
examination*in Kahn-Harris’s case, participants’ anti-reflexivity prevents him
from extracting the kind of interview data that would allow him to test out his
theories and explanations with the interview subjects and thereby check what Harris
(1992, p. 134) describes as the ‘‘dangers of endless elegant but fanciful speculation.’’
This is not intended as a criticism of Kahn-Harris’s work, but as a means of
highlighting how his work demonstrates that the experience of extreme metal music
and culture includes a dimension of inarticulacy that cannot always be fully
interrogated or understood through conventional interview-based approach. This
means that any such approaches can only partially capture, and in some cases only
gesture towards, the ‘‘real’’ experiences of participants.
While other studies combine textual and ethnographic analyses, Bogue’s (2004a,
2004b) theoretical and musicological work on extreme metal shows textual analysis
may be uniquely useful for uncovering otherwise inaccessible dimensions of musical
experience. Of course, as in all studies, his findings are inevitably partial, but his
discussion of the conventions of extreme metal music provides productive insight
into the apparent inarticulacy of extreme metal fans, and potentially overcomes the
impasse identified by Kahn-Harris. Bogue’s work on extreme metal combines
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musicological analysis with a Deleuzo-Guattarian theoretical framework to argue that
extreme metal’s ‘‘ascetic concentration on and intensification of certain possibilities
inherent in rock music’’ (such as timbre, frequency, tempo, and rhythm) radically
restructures customary experiences of listening to produce a music of ‘‘intensities, a
continuum of sensation (percepts/affects) that converts the lived body into a
dedifferentiated sonic body without organs’’ (Bogue, 2004a, pp. 88, 106). For
example, he describes ‘‘blast beats’’ (a drumming technique unique to extreme metal
which is achieved through the rapid, cut-time alternation of snare and bass drum) as
creating a ‘‘sensation of frenzied, manic acceleration’’ because, in the alternation of
downbeat kick drum and offbeat snare, the accent is heard on the offbeat but felt on
the downbeat; this works to ‘‘obliterate any sense of an organized pulse’’ and create a
feeling of temporal dissolution (Bogue, 2004a, p. 99). Bogue argues that such musical
techniques create a sense of disequilibrium that offers listeners access to an affective
realm of fluxes and flows. Because this is so different to conventional experiences and
expectations of listening, he argues, death metal listening ‘‘engages a dimension of
reality that is qualitatively different from ordinary experience’’ where time and meter
are temporarily suspended and actions and emotions are desubjectified and rendered
inoperative (Bogue, 2004b, pp. 97, 103�104). What is productive about Bogue’s work
is that it suggests the possibility of a textual basis for the practice of reflexive anti-
reflexivity identified by Kahn-Harris: that is, if extreme metal’s musical conventions
invite the engagement of affectivities not easily described in the everyday language of
participants, this could explain why participants are unwilling or unable to talk to
researchers about how death metal music affects them.
Bogue’s work, like any other example of textual analysis, does not offer an
unassailable representation of the way things ‘‘are,’’ but his work tells us something of
the pleasures and experiences that the music invites. While his work may be
dismissed as merely a case of ‘‘theoretical abstraction’’ that is too far removed from
the everyday understandings of participants, the musical conventions discussed by
Bogue nonetheless offer ways of exploring experiential dimensions of extreme metal
music in the absence of other alternatives. As Walser (1993, pp. 32, 33) argued in his
study of heavy metal, interpretations of sonic meanings are often shared within a
culture, and so it is possible to speak of musical discourses as relatively coherent
systems of signification. When studying musical cultures that resist the researcher’s
enquiries, these systems of signification may be a key point of access to (possible)
meanings that are inaccessible via other methods.
The ‘‘realities’’ of popular cultural experience can often be elusive to researchers;
this is because these experiences typically involve an affective dimension that always
evades capture in rational language to some extent (Walser & McClary, 1990, pp. 286,
289). In trying to understand experiences that are on some level ungraspable, all
methods of research are imperfect: whether textual or ethnographic, currently
available approaches are all inevitably abstractions from the ‘‘real’’ conditions of
existence and experience. While it is potentially amplified in the case of metal due to
the particularities of the scene’s discursive norms, this is a problem for all musical
genres (and potentially also for other popular cultural forms). In his study of musical
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taste and aesthetics, Hesmondhalgh argues that sonic pleasure is especially difficult to
capture in language, and so interview study is often structured by a tension between
the researcher seeking to access knowledge about people and their practices and
values, as well as recognizing that this understanding is necessarily limited by the
‘‘interpretive repertoires’’ that individuals draw upon (2007, pp. 508, 516). To posit
empirical research methods as the panacea to theoretical abstraction in media and
cultural studies not only ignores the significant limitations of empirical research
methods, but also misunderstands the value and uses of textual analysis for the study
of popular music and popular culture. Because it seeks to find a vocabulary to
describe the elusive, textual analysis can provide important and ongoing contribu-
tions to the study of popular music as well as to the study of media and culture more
broadly.
Note
[1] I would like to thank Catherine Strong for her helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this
paper.
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