I wrote the words for this photo story on the Botswana metal scene in Vice online. It features fantastic pictures by Frank Marshall such as this one:
I have now moved this blog to a sub-section of my website kahn-harris.org Metaljew.org will now redirect to http://www.kahn-harris.org/tag/metaljew If you use it, please update your RSS feed accordingly.
As you'll see, Metal Jew will now consist of all posts tagged metaljew on my main website/blog. You can either view my Metal Jew posts in amongst my other posts or view them separately. The last couple of years on Metal Jew posts on typepad have been exported to the new site.
Why have I done this? Well I've been blogging at metaljew.org using typepad since early 2005. Recently I have become much more erratic in my posts. At the same time, I've been feeling that I need a proper blog and I wasn't happy with the fragmentation of my online presence between kahn-harris.org and metaljew.org So the new site is an attempt to integrate everything while ensuring that Metal Jew posts are separated out for those who aren't interested in my other stuff.
I'm keeping up my typepad site for at least the next year but I won't update it anymore.
See you at my new site!
My family and I hosted the family of one of my son's friends at school for tea today. Over scones and sandwiches, the father said that he had heard David Coverdale was Jewish. I've never heard that before and google doesn't appear to confirm it. Anyone know if this is true? Seems unlikely to me...
I'm impossible to please, really I am. I spent much of my life yearning for Jewish metal, but when it finally comes along I find I'm just as finicky, fussy and critical as I am about any other kind of music.
So Joel alerted me a couple of days ago to a piece in the Jerusalem Post about the Israeli musician Eliyahu Dali. Dali is making metal versions of 'classic' Jewish prayers and will at some point release an album called 'Metal Prayer'.
Listening to some of it online, it's clear that Dali is a decent musician in the prog/classic metal mode (not my favourite metal genre but not in and of itself to be deplored). I don't think though that the metal arrangements add anything to the liturgy - they just make them a little mushy.
I had this conversation at a conference in Finland last year when I metal a Lutheran pastor who runs a hugekly popular 'Metal mass'. I appreciate that some worshippers feel it adds a whole new spiritual dimension, but as I explained to the pastor, I like there to be a dividing line between synagogue music and everyday music. I love sections of the Jewish liturgy, but I'd never want to listen to it on my iPhone outside of synagogue. Conversely, I've no need for metal in services.
Still, I try and remain open minded to the possibility that sometime, someone will come up with a metal liturgy that I actually like. Till then, I'll stick with metal artists who have a looser connection to spirituality, such as Orphaned Land.
Here's Eliyahu Dali doing 'Mipi El'. I love the tune when it's sung in shul, but this version just doesn't work for me:
http://youtu.be/icOQq65QjfU
I haven't had time to do a big post recently, but here's a round up of some interesting stuff:
Meshuggah Beach Party do surf music covers of Jewish standards. They're pretty shticky (they play dressed as Haredim) but the music sounds great. Maybe everything sounds good surf-style? Check out black metal surf-style
Meads of Asphodel are visiting Auschwitz as part of their research for a new album. They are not Nazis but it's s not going to stop the accusations. They have form in this regard - remember this?
There's a partially innacurate post on NSBM at Who Makes the Nazis that mentions the Meads amongst others. Check out the debate in the comment thread. This piece on Italian NSBM is much better.
This compilation CD of underground music from Lebanon looks way cool.
Although I'm working on 3 other book projects at the moment, I've just started another. It's called 'The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg: Tales of Big Fish in Small Ponds' . The book will be witty but with a serious purpose. I will travel to a number of places to investigate experts and champions in small fields in small countries. As the title of the book suggests, I will start with a chapter on water skiing in Luxembourg. After which I aim to investigate:
The book is going to be funded through a new crowd-funding publishing platform called Unbound.
What this means is that writers take their book pitches directly to readers. If readers like the pitch they pledge to support the project and if enough people do so the book gets written. The link to my pitch and video is here.
'The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg' will initially be funded chapter by chapter. This means that the basic level of support is only £3 (those outside the UK can also support books). There are also other levels of support on offer with some unusual incentives - T-shirts, postcards and if you pledge enough you can even come with me!
If you're interested and like the idea, I would be extremely grateful if you could perhaps forward the link to anyone who would be interested, or perhaps to facebook/tweet/blog it.
Finally, I will be pitching my book in person at Unbound's first ever live event at 12 September at The Tabernacle, Notting Hill.
I appear co-hosting and being interviewed in the latest episode of The Governor's Ball metal podcast. It was a lot of fun as 'The Governor' did his Austrian thing and Sly Stallone gave me advice on my marriage. Plus I got to request two tracks (listen to the podcast to find out which).
I just got back from 2 weeks holiday to find that the West Memphis Three are free!Great news, tinged with sadness at the time they spent inside and that technically they are still marked as guilty. The case was a reminder that youth culture can still provoke horrific backlashes. The metal and alternative music communities mobilised in defence of the Three but how much that was crucial in freeing them I'm not sure.
The announcement a few weeks ago that the prominent Jewish record label JDub was shutting down after 9 years, attracted a lot of commentary in the Jewish blogosphere. JDub was unable to sustain financial viability despite attracting a lot of communal philanthropic support and despite being at the cutting edge of hipster Judaism. This has raised the question of whether developing institutions to create a hip, cool Jewishness are a good use of communal resources.
I'll ignore those questions here, but I want to make a point from a metal perspective. It's striking that in the extreme metal underground, which is definitely a fringe taste and which has been just as effected as JDub by the revolution in the music industry, there are hundreds of labels that continue year after year. I'm struck by how many of the labels that existed when I was doing my PhD research on the metal underground in the 1990s are still around. Yet if anything, the financial viability of extreme underground metal is even weaker than a Jewish label supported by charitable foundation and critical acclaim.
One of the reasons why the metal underground survives is that it emerged organically, with no policy papers or strategic vision. Most people involved in it never expect to earn anything from it and they do what they do for love alone. Further, there is a robust scene that supports it, made up of committed scene members who live for the music and will spend vast amounts of money on it.
None of that is to say that JDub wasn't set up by people with the right motives or that it didn't attract support or that it didn't unearth and support some great music. The problem was that the Jewish music scene surrounding it was and is relatively weak. It lacked and lacks the autonomy that can sustain it. JDub was too removed from those Jewish music 'undergrounds' that do exist - klezmer, haredi music.
Ultimately, if there is to be a sustainable and vital alternative Jewish music scene, it will need to emerge slowly, through the devotion and commitment of members. JDub is a reminder that you can't create a scene from the top down.
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 cartoon Metalocalypse, 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-code involving 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…
If you're a Rush fan and like the idea of hearing Geddy Lee singing in Yiddish, check out this this piece from Jewcy.
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 (the Botswanan 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 anthem Zog 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.
I wrote the words for this photo story on the Botswana metal scene in Vice online. It features fantastic pictures by Frank Marshall such as this one:
I also had a review of the new Burzum album published in a new webzine called Souciant.
Israel's Metalist website recently published this interview with Varg Vikernes. I think it's great that they secured the interview and more importantly, that the interviewer Alon Miasnikov did not shirk from answering the hard questions. These days Vikernes' interviews seem to be characterised by his charm and good humour rather than a desire to shock (and they can be all the more dangerous for that). He is also extremely evasive and sometimes downright misleading. When asked for his views on Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust he first of all talks about other massacres throughout history and the way the facts are distorted and then goes on to argue that:
My problem with all these massacres is that I really don't know if they happened as described by the victors. Nor do I trust the descriptions of the victims, as they tend to at least exaggerate. I say this because I see how even my unimportant and (to most) uninteresting story has been presented by the Norwegian system. They actually teach children in school today that I am a devil-worshipping satanist who burned churches, and they use me to prove the existence of a satanic presence in our midst. Everything they teach them is a lie, and what they teach is even easily unveiled as nonsense. You don't even need any sources to figure this out. The whole story falls apart on its own due to a complete lack of logic. When it comes to the Holocaust I have the same problem. I don't trust the official story, because I have no reason to trust those who tell me this story.
So is he a Holocaust denier or not? I guess he is, although he couches it in terms of suspicion of all mainstream historical narratives. He has never made denial a central part of his work and public statements though and it's good that the interview got this out of him. His proof of why official narratives can't be trusted is also hilariously weak. While he may never been a Satanist in the conventional sense of the word, he did indeed burned churches.
Vikernes is also asked in the interview about the notorious incident when he sent a letter bomb to Zeev Tannenboim of the Israeli metal band Salem. His response is as follows:
Well, I don't remember much of this. I was 18 years at the time and was «at war with the world», so to speak. All I remember was that I sent an electronic detonator to a guy in Salem and wrote to him that «Here is the device you needed to blow up that government building», as if he had asked for it. Then I wrote «cassette tape» on the customs note, knowing perfectly well that it did not look as if the package contained a cassette tape. It was a rotten joke intended to end our communication. As far as I know he was interviewed by the police and that was it, and I expected nothing more than that. It did, by the way, very efficiently end our comunication, as intended. «Big surprise».
Who knows whether this is true or not as Vikernes tends to manipulate his past continuously. It may be true though and in which case the conventional story only needs to be rewritten to the extent that the letter momb was only a detnonator and that it was couched as a joke designed to get Tannenboim into trouble. Whatever - Vikernes was clearly aiming to attack an Israeli musician for the simple reason that he was Israel and hence a Jew.
I was dissapointed with the interview to the extent that Vikernes could have been pushed more on his views on Jews. Still, kudos to Metalist for asking questions that other avoid.
Yiddish Metallers Gevolt have a new album out that you can download for free here.
Phil Tagg, an inspiring and innovative musicologist, has put another of his extraordinary teaching videos up online. This one is on motorbikes, hard rock guitars and er shaving commercials. Watch and enjoy here (sadly embedding is disabled so I can post it on this blog).
Yiddish Princess are promising - a fusion of hard rock/power pop and Yiddish song. Maybe a little shticky but none the worse for that.
One criticism sometimes levelled at Satanism and black metal is that anti-Christianity is an easy option in places like Norway and that if they'd have any guts they'd attack Islam. I am torn over this question as I believe Islamophobia to be a real problem and that western societies hardly need to have more abuse directed at Islamic minorities, but at the same time I cannot deny that blasphemy should never be ruled artistically out of bounds. More than that - blasphemy can, in certain contexts be a radical act. Such might (and I stress might) be the case with the Arabic Anti-Islamic Legion, a small grouping of black metal acts based in the Islamic world. Some of these may undoubtedly be brave (although they keep themselves anonymous), such as the woman behind the Iraqi solo act Janaza . I can't deny that such a project could be an act of resistance against fundamentalist domination. Yet my worry is that in a western context, anti-Islamic black metal may simply fuel racism and Islamophobia.
Yes I know, I am a confused lefty metal-lover trying to have my cake and eat it: I enjoy the thrill of transgression but abhore oppression, bigotry and racism; I respect Islam immensely (honestly) but also respect blasphemous art. Is such a position viable? Well in the sense that I manage to get up in the morning and live a fairly normal life I guess that it is. Of course, life is easy for me as a middle class Londoner. Where would I jump if I had to make hard choices? I don't know, but I guess I have lived my life so far with the aim of avoiding those choices. I am 39 now, if I can just manage to keep this ludicrous position going for another 40 or so years, then I guess I will have showed it's possible to have my cake and eat it too.
I'm very conscious of the fact that I am posting pretty rarely on this blog and when I do my posts are generally brief. This post won't change things - I'm still too busy with other stuff for now - but I'm glad to have the opportunity to recommend two excellent posts by Graeme on black metal and the extreme right: here and here.
Later this year I am planning to submit a couple of research grant applications looking at NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal).
There's a somewhat sarcastic post on Jamaican black metal here
A South African photographer called Frank Marshall has produced some very cool photos of the Botswanan metal scene. Visit his website here.
The latest issue of Terrorizer magazine has an intriguing interview with the delightfully bonkers Meads of Asphodel (not online unfortunately) which explains, pretty convincingly why their latest CD 'The Murder of Jesus the Jew' is not antisemitic.There's also an incredibly lengthy explanation of the song 'Jew Killer' by the Meads' Metatron here.
I'm currently reading a book called The Anniversary Man by R J Ellory. The story deals with the hunt for a New York serial killer who replicates the murders of other serial killers. Although the story is fictional, the crimes the serial killer copies are mostly real ones. I've been browsing wikipedia for details of the real serial killers and I found something peculiar:
Arthur Shawcross, known as the Genessee River Killer, killed at least 14 people in the 1980s. He was caught in 1990 and died in prison in 2008. Cannibal Corpse's song 'Addicted to Vaginal Skin' is preceeded by a recording of an interview with Shawcross.
Nasty stuff. But what interested me was a photos of Shawcross in a prison visit with his daughter and granddaughter. His daughter was apparently instrumental in Shawcross's conversion to Catholicism while in prison. In the photo, his granddaughter is wearing a Burzum 'Det Som Engang Var' T-Shirt:
There's a story here: how does the granddaughter of a serial killer come to be into black metal, enough to wear a T Shirt from the genre's most notorious protagonist and convicted killer? How does she relate to her grandfather's memory? How does she relate to her Catholic mother? There doesn't appear to be any info on this on the internet. I guess it's one of life's fascinating untold stories...
Like other lefties who love dodgy music, the politics of transgressive cultures is something of an obsession. Neo-folk, with its constant flirtation with totalitarian aesthetics is a particularly tricky customer in this regard. I'm no expert on neo-folk so I'm not going to say much about it here. What I've found interesting recently is a recent blogossphere-led attack on Pete Webb, a IASPM colleague of mine, and author of the book Exploring Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures.
One of the chapters of Pete Webb's book deals with neo-folk - the only academic treatment of the subject to my knowledge. Recently, Pete has come under withering criticism from the writer Stewart Home (here and here) and the blog Who Makes the Nazis (here and here), for treating neo-folk, and Tony Wakeford in particular, with kid gloves and essentially covering up for neo-facism. They don't quite accuse Pete of being a fascist but they do come close, even though Pete was involved in Anti-Fascist Action and the Anti-Nazi League.
Pete made a statement in response here. My instinctive sypathies are with him. The clash between him and the blogosphere is emblematic of the distance between the 'watchdog' approach to the far-right that traces and exposes the complex connections and influences between individuals, and the academic approach that takes a more nuanced position that concentrates on wider issues. The 2 approaches are both valid, but they can sit uncomfortably together, particularly given the uncivil language common in the blogosphere.