Playing with Madness in the Forest of Shadows: Dissonance, Deviance and Non-Comformity in the Black Metal Scene
In: Can I Play with Madness? Metal, Dissonance, Madness and AlienationSearch for other papers by Karl Spracklen in
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Pino has argued that music is the site of a struggle over the meaning of deviancy in what Urban calls metaculture: the culture of culture. This struggle might be described as a Foucauldian struggle over what constitutes deviance, as well as what constitutes acceptable, (high) cultural taste. Sandlin and Callahan have noted the importance of deviance and dissonance in the counter-hegemonic scene of culture jamming. In this chapter, I use these frameworks of deviance in music and dissonance in counter-culture to explore the intentionality of playing with madness in the black metal scene. Methodologically, the chapter will follow the discourse tracing approach used in my previous research on black metal. Specifically, I will examine the discussions of fans on an internet forum about madness and bands that deliberately play with madness, deviance and dissonance over a period of twelve months. Material produced by those bands in the form of records and websites, and interviews with those bands in fanzines and magazines, will be also utilised. In the chapter I will argue that the concept of madness is utilised in a communicative way to suggest dissonance, deviance and resistance against the instrumentality of what Rojek, borrowing from Sennett, calls the new capitalism of leisure.