This is a cross-post with Souciant webzine:

In a (post-) postmodern age, no collision of phenomena should surprise us. I don’t know if Latvian-Portuguese fusion food exists, but it certainly could. So it is that heavy metal has been impacted by all manner of cultures and things. It’s worth highlighting such collisions, as the image of metal as a musical and social monoculture remains persistent.

Such stereotypes of heavy metal makes its hybridity a source of delight. Having tracked its collision with one small aspect of the world – Jewishness – on my blog, Metal Jew, since 2005, I haven’t tired of finding new examples of its ability to surprise.

If metal can do it, perhaps anything can. Celebrating strange hybrids in metal should perhaps remind us that seemingly homogeneous spaces can be leavened by surprising encounters with incongruous others. Here are ten iconographic examples:

1. Power Metal and Curling: In 2006, the popular Swedish power metal band Hammerfall made a video of their song ‘Hearts On Fire’ (whose lyrics celebrate the Templars’ second coming) in support of their country’s women’s Olympic curling team. In the video, the curlers try their hand at metal and the metallers try curling in a moving demonstration of togetherness.

2. Christian Metal and Coffee: The Christian metal band Tourniquet have their own brand of coffee. Why is not entirely clear.

3. Christian Black Metal: Christian musicians love to take the most unlikely genres and turn them towards the so-called light. Thus, it was inevitable that Christian black metal would emerge. Now an established sub-genre, in 1994 there was shock in the black metal scene when the Nuclear Blast label released Horde’s ‘Hellig Usvart’album, a slab of lo-fi Darkthrone-style Christian noir, with song titles like ‘Release and Clothe the Virgin Sacrifice’ and ‘Invert the Inverted Cross’.

Credited to ‘Anonymous’ Horde was actually a project of Jayson Sherlock, an ex-member of Australian Christian death metallers Mortification. Many black metallers were furious at Horde’s betrayal of black metal. Others saw the album as a hilarious parody. Strange though it seems, the album was apparently meant in earnest.

4. Metal and Plants: Phyte Club is a truly wonderous blog that caters for ‘people who want to geek out on botany and bang their heads to brutal music, who get the same sort of rush from interacting with the natural world that they do from rocking out to heavy riffs, who catch themselves playing air guitar in botanical gardens’. How many metallers actually fall into this category is unknown.

5. Black Metal and Veganism: Vegan Black Metal Chef makes Youtube vegan cookery instructional videos, dressed in corpse paint, all to a black metal soundtrack. Sample instruction: ‘Now crush the potatoes – show them no mercy’.

6. Metal and Cruising: 70,000 Tons of Metal is a metal festival at sea, on a Caribbean cruiseliner. Nothing more needs to be said.

7. Roger Scruton loves Metallica: The British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton is known for his elegies to the ordered, deferential Britain we have lost. He is also known for his fierce critiques of popular music and popular culture. Yet apparently he loves Metallica. But maybe that’s not surprising, given the neo-classicism and virtuosity of much of metal and its frequent reactionary politics.

8. Comedy Metal: Given that metal is often thought to be irony-free and po-faced, the crossover between metal and comedy is much more extensive than some would imagine. From metal comedian Andrew O’Neil, to cult cartoonMetalocalypse, to the inevitable Youtube Hitler and Benny Hill videos, metal likes to laughs at itself just as much as its detractors laugh at it.

9. African Cowboy-Biker Metal Chic: Botswana is the only African country to have a majority black metal scene. They’ve developed a unique metal dress-codeinvolving cowboy hats, biker-gear and a lot of homoerotic posing.

10. Jews Who Love Burzum: The notorious Varg Vikernes, of black metal pioneers Burzum, sent a letter bomb to a leading Israeli metal scene member in 1991. Despite this, and Vikernes’ overt anti-Semitism, I have seen Israeli metallers sporting Burzum T-Shirts – but I have no photo to prove it, sadly.

I’m not an Israeli. However, I am one of those contradictory metal Jews who despise Vikernes, but finds Burzum’s music strangely beautiful. Is loving the art of those who despise you a case of postmodern hybridity, or simply a case of lack of moral fibre? I lie awake at night and worry about that question…

 

I wrote the following for Souciant magazine - cross-posted with permission:

Heavy Metal is often seen as a quintessentially white, Western, music. That is indeed the case much of the time. Metal emerged out of white, blue collar mutilations of the blues in working class heartlands such as the English West Midlands. Metal imagery is often festooned with such ur-symbols of whiteness such as Viking warriors and corpse-painted pagans amid the snowy forests of Scandinavia. In its over four decades of development, metal has largely eschewed references to its blues roots and black metal musicians and fans remain rare (theBotswanan metal scene being one of the very few exceptions to the rule.)

However, over the last two decades a counter-trend has emerged that has seen metal embrace a more complicated relationship to ethnicity and nation. Spurred on by pioneers such as Brazil’s Sepultura, it has become increasingly common for metal bands to explore local identities within a global scene. Indeed, a whole sub-genre – ‘folk metal’ has developed, mixing metal with a host of traditional musics. Although much of this has taken place in Scandinavia and northern Europe, more exotic – and much less ‘white’ – fusions have also taken place, as with Chthonic’s Taiwanese metal and Orphaned Land’s Israeli-based Middle Eastern metal.

As a scholar I’ve tracked these developments since the mid-1990s. But there is one type of folk metal that I have longed for and that has been stubbornly slow to be born – Jewish metal. In my blog Metal Jew, I’ve highlighted those isolated examples of Jewish metal, such as Jamie Saft’s Black Shabbis project. What has been striking by its absence has been a fusion of metal the most well-known form of Jewish music, klezmer.

You would think that, given klezmer’s similarity to other forms of Northern European folk musics, that a klezmer-metal fusion would not be difficult to achieve. But it is only recently that we have seen a systematic move in this direction.

Dibbukim hail from Sweden, one of the most productive metal scenes in the world, and half the band are Jewish Yiddish speakers. Their new album As a Foygl un a Goylem Tantsn (‘As a Bird and a Golem Dances’) represents a whole-hearted attempt to combine Yiddish music and metal. Some of their songs are originals and they also cover Yiddish standards such as ‘Yidl Mitn Fidl’. The instrumentation is far from traditional though – a standard metal bass/drums/guitar set up with male and female vocals.

The lack of violin, accordion or clarinet means that Dibbukim’s music lacks some of the distinctive klezmer sound – that uncanny mix of melancholy and joy. The rhythms and vocals though are are more familiarly klezmerish. That isn’t to say that Dibbukim’s music stands or falls on how ‘authentic’ it is (klezmer is itself such a hybrid genre as to make such judgements anachronistic), but it is clearly based on a serious and well-meaning attempt to combine the two genres.

Dibbukim is most reminiscent of Scandinavian folk metal acts, sharing for example its frenetic two-in-a-bar rhythms with Finnish ‘humpaa-metal’ act Finntroll.  In my opinion, Dibbukim need to work more on making the klezmer-metal fusion sound more seamless and less clunky – perhaps what is missing is a violin to leaven the power chords.  Israel’s Gevolt are perhaps a more substantial proposition that Dibbukim.

Their new album Alef Base – which is free to download from their site – is their second and the experience shows. They  cover Yiddish standards such as ‘Tum Balalaika’, but their music is far from an uncomfortable  pastiche. What’s interesting is that while Gevolt’s use of violin and Anatoly Bonder’s heartfelt Yiddish diction tick those authenticity boxes more than Dibbukim, their music offers a much more interesting and unique kind of hybrid. The closest musical reference point is not folk metal but Rammstein and the Neue Deutsche Härte.

Bonder’s dramatic vocal stylings recall Till Lindemann,  their Yiddish cadences offering an implicit commentary on Germanic hardness. It is this counterpoint between Germanic hardness and lilting Yiddishisms that make Gevolt so interesting. Their version of the famous World War Two Jewish partisan anthemZog Nit Keyn Mol throws up a host of fascinating  issues: is Gevolt’s Yiddish metal a celebration of Jewish – non-Zionist – hardness? Or is it a more nuanced and ironic exploration of Jewish hard masculinity? As with Rammstein, you never really know. There lies Gevolt’s interest.

Whatever the relationship between Gevolt and Dibbukim with Jewishness may or may not be, there is no mistaking their metalness. Pitom are a much more complex proposition; an act whose Jewishness and metalness are constantly in motion, avoiding pre-determined meanings. Their new album Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes is out on John Zorn’s Tzadik label – the home of the finest ambiguously Jewish music. Led by guitarist Yoshie Fruchter, this US-based group are a lean and vocal-less four-piece based around nimble, dueling guitars and violin, backed up by busy drumming and a fuzzed-out bass guitar.

Pitom’s music is always in motion, refusing to come to rest on any own genre or identity. Sometimes Pitom will alight on a meaty metal or punk riff only to move off somewhere less constricting. Sometimes they introduce an unmistakably klezmer-ish melody, only to fly away into free-form improvisation. Blasphemy and Other Serious Crimes is a frustrating delight which may be ‘heavy’ at times, but – unlike Dibbukim or Gevolt – its musical playfulness makes it as light as a feather.

Pitom’s model of Jewish metal – if it can be called a model at all – is perhaps a more productive one. Although I enjoyed Gevolt and Dibbukim’s albums, I am also aware that one has to be careful what one wishes for. I may have yearned for Jewish metal for years, but ultimately it may be a more exciting Jewish practice to refuse the kind of closure that a fully fledged genre would produce. Maybe Jewish metal is ideally elusive, just as Jewishness itself should be.

 

In the last couple of months I have had a number of pieces published, including: Why we are all worth a mix of self-love and self-hate in The Guardian, 11 June 2011 United States of Invisibility: Unseeing Israel/Palestine in Souciant, 8 June 2011 A War of Rhetoric: The Israel-Palestine Vortex in Open Democracy, 23 May 2011 New Public Thinking and how not to do it: the death of Osama Bin Laden in New Public Thinking, 2 May 2011