Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics
10- 12 November 2009, Salzburg, Austria
What makes metal powerful? Is it the power of amplification, the brutality of the music, the violence of its discourse? Is power essential to the core of metal? Is metal a mechanism for the dissemination of power? The terms ‘heavy metal’ and power may be so strongly related as to suggest they are cultural synonyms. Power in heavy metal music extends well beyond the boundaries of performance, seeping into to other music genres and the cultures and subcultures that compose the scene. Metal power modification may be on plain display, but behind this, deep in the fabric of metal culture a plethora of debates can be surmised on what exactly power is and what can be understood by it, from the stage through to the politics, ideologies, culture and lifestyle in metal. This conference investigates the varied relationships between heavy metal music and sexual potency, social agency, coercion, bodily strength, ideological domination, and myriad other forms of social, psychological, and physical power in modern human existence. The second conference meeting of this project on heavy metal, music and politics aims to bring together papers on the theme of Metal and power. We hope to promote contributions from a range of disciplines, including the sciences.
Abstracts are invited for submission under, but not restricted to the following headings:
* Heavy Metal power (hegemony, commodification, globalization,sexualities)
* Intersectionalities of power and structural relationships (gender, race, nation, class)
* Intersectionalities of theories of identity issues of whiteness * Masculinity and politics
* Lack of power/absence of power
* Power and psychology
* Nietzsche, Foucault and power
* Knowledge production and power discourse
* Nationalism, racism and identity construction in pagan metal
* The power ballad
* Cock rock, poodle hair and power metal
* Battle metal and mythologies of war
* Power, sexuality and the subject
* Post-structural analysis of the construction of the subject
* Gender and Power in Metal
* Homosociality
* Homoeroticism
* Identity Construction
* Sado-masochism
* Scarring, piercing and fashion
* Psychology of the Self
* Self-loathing, self-destruction and violence
* Sublimation of aggression and the erotic in the music and scene
* Power and discharge
* Power in the metal music industry
* Musicology: the powerchord
Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300-word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 12th June 2009. If your paper is accepted for presentation at the conference, an 8-page draft paper should be submitted by 9 October 2009. 300-word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.
Organising Chairs
Niall Scott, Centre for Professional ethics University of Central Lancashire, Preston, Lancashire, UK.
Rob Fisher, Inter-Disciplinary.Net Priory House, Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR.
For further details about the project, see here. For further details about the conference, see here.
This is probably the most awesome and kick-ass conference I’ve ever read about! I only wish I had the money and time to attend it. At least I can count on The Mole providing all the details in November, right?
There’s nothing quite like doing some Nietzsche research while listening to the drone metal goodness of Sunn O))).
Metal is garbage, refuse elements of every kind are drawn to it; it is the music of ugly. Nietzsche would have liked it as much as he liked Wagner’s swamps, or the so called ‘Continental’ philosophy that is Wagner’s obvious torch bearer. Wagner was the Hegel of music; such wonderful moments, such terrible hours. Making shapes out of clouds then calling it ‘truth’. Idealism with no empirical points of contact. As for metal, they can pretend to oppose the Good by playing the devil, but the latter is only the fiction of the former which is a fiction itself. The art of decadence is no art of all. Music is still the art of lying, and of not lying well.