How Music Empowers

Listening to Modern Rap and Metal

Steven Gamble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000369397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

How Music Empowers argues that empowerment is the key to unlocking the long-standing mystery of how music moves us. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in embodied cognitive science, psychology, and cultural studies, the book provides a new way of understanding how music affects listeners. The argument develops from our latest conceptions of what it is to be human, investigating experiences of listening to popular music in everyday life. Through listening, individuals have the potential to redefine themselves, gain resilience, connect with other people, and make a difference in society.

Applying a groundbreaking theoretical framework to postmillennial rap and metal, the book uncovers why vast numbers of listeners engage with music typically regarded as 'social problems' or dismissed as 'extreme'. In the first ever comparative analytical treatment of rap and metal music, twenty songs are analysed as case studies that reveal the empowering potential of listening. The book details how individuals interact with rap and metal communities in a self-perpetuating process which keeps these thriving music cultures – and the listeners themselves – alive and well. Can music really change the world? How Music Empowers answers: yes, because it changes us.

How Music Empowers will interest scholars and researchers of popular music, ethnomusicology, music psychology, music therapy, and music education.

1 Introduction

Introduction

The bass drum thunders in your chest. Lightning follows, a flash of distorted guitar or crackling synth, charging its way through your body. An utterance strikes you: it is loud, imposing, uninhibited. Your mouth opens in reciprocation, to be met instantly by a vanguard voice. All around you – with you – allies seem to weather the storm, resilient raindrops in a squall of sonic power. Or maybe you face the gale alone at this moment, but you know you are part of something much bigger. This is your storm, after all: an ensemble of sounds swept up in a familiar environment where strength, survival, and solidarity prevail. This is empowerment. This is rap and this is metal.

This book is about the empowering potential of listening to rap and metal music. I approach empowerment as an experiential process, one which intersects with a number of key ideas: listening, the body, perception, cognition, the environment, identity, and community. In everyday discourse, countless people report feeling empowered by listening to music, verging on a cultural ubiquity that is worthy of focused attention. Still, we must proceed with caution. What it means to feel empowered by music is open to interpretation, and understood quite differently from person to person. It is undeniable, however, that music affects us in ways that feel, in some way, related to power. And no music is more commonly described as empowering than the dynamic, vibrant, contemporary genres of rap and metal beloved by fans worldwide.

They are loved, but by no means universally. Rap and metal are two of the most controversial and divisive kinds of popular music thriving today. Conservative media sources have labelled them “problem” or “deviant” music (that is, if they are not dismissed outright as “just noise”). Since the development of each genre – roughly concurrent in the 1970s – they have been consistently attacked, censored, and suppressed. Parents have worried about the corrupting influence of rap and metal on their children. Authorities have warned of the politicising potential of such music. Others simply cannot bear to hear even a single track of either genre.¹ I have long felt that besides cultural fears and anxieties, what initially puts many people off is how they sound. Indeed, the extreme antipathy that rap and metal sometimes provoke demonstrates the importance of style as a concept which determines musical experience, taste, and value (Green 2008: 51–59).

Disdain for rap and metal as music has encouraged critics to scapegoat their associated music cultures and blame them for a range of social ills. Well-known clashes between political institutions and metal include the censorship attempts of the Parents’ Music Resource Center (Chastagner 1999), court cases over teenage suicides (Brackett 2018), and media panics in the wake of violent incidents (Wright 2000; Brown 2013). Similarly, rap has been accused of causing violence (Rose 2008: 33–60), used as evidence of criminal behaviour in legal convictions (Dunbar 2018; Nielson and Dennis 2019), and received condemnation from African American cultural commentators, who argue that rap has harmful impacts upon black youth (Kilson 2003; McWhorter 2008). So, in suggesting that rap and metal can empower people, I am starting on the back foot.

Political rebukes have been substantiated by psychological research. The size of the literature on rap and metal in the empirical sciences rivals the body of work in popular music studies and its parent disciplines. There is a multitude of quantitative assessments of the damage that rap and metal apparently cause, which Rowe (2018: 12) characterises as “psychopathology”. Experiments tend to rely upon a “hypodermic model” of media consumption, as though music could inject ideas directly into members of the public (Croteau and Hoynes 2014: 235–236). In most of these studies, individuals attend to media which has been predetermined by the researchers as “violent” or “nonviolent”, “sexual” or “nonsexual”. The criteria used to make such categorisations are highly tenuous, if they are made explicit at all (which is extremely uncommon).² Moreover, the methodology employed by such work is based upon asking leading questions using essentialist and stereotypical definitions, thereby suggesting the answers being sought.³ The Hip Hop Archive (2020), which collects scholarly literature on hip-hop culture, notably omits psychological research of this nature, indicating that it does not meet their criteria for inclusion: “scholarship devoted to the knowledge, art, culture, materials, organizations, movements and institutions of Hiphop”. I stand by this position, and disregard studies that treat rap and metal as social problems requiring resolution.

Humanities research provides an important corrective, taking the hand that points the finger at rap or metal and turning it to face the poor social conditions or inequitable political economies that produce “problem music”. Instead, metal – at least, in its earliest form, heavy metal – is characterised as music mostly by and for white working-class youth, predominantly men, initially in Britain (Weinstein 2000; Bayer 2009). Since the 1970s, metal has proliferated into a vast metagenre, with scenes across the globe (Wallach et al. 2011). Rap has been studied as the music of black and Latinx (or otherwise Afrodiasporic) urban youth, originally developed in 1970s’ New York, before quickly spreading across the United States and then the world (Perry 2004; Chang 2005). Hip-hop culture is understood to constitute (at least) four elements or pillars: rap vocals (MCing), turntablism (DJing), breakdancing, and graffiti (Rose 1994). These four cultural practices can now be found internationally in urban spaces, evidence of the “global Hip Hop nation” (Mitchell 2001; Alim et al. 2009) or “hip hop generation” (Fernandes 2011). The academic fields of hip-hop studies and metal music studies offer a range of culturally informed, insider perspectives that contextualise thinking about empowerment.

Some notes on terminology and methodology will be instructive. My use of the term “rap” refers to the combination of the first two of hip-hop’s elements – rap vocals and DJ/producer-made beats – in commercially released, recorded popular music. The metal I discuss is also in recorded form. This is a practical limitation, for analyses of music benefit from a widely accessible, shared source. The approach to listening developed here could be applied, with little modification, to listening in a live context. To provide a central point of reference, however, recordings comprise the “primary text”, as emphasised by Allan Moore (Moore and Martin 2018), and so you are invited to listen along while you read.⁴ All of the tracks⁵ analysed in this book were commercially released between 2000 and 2020, which accounts for the “modern” in the subtitle. I am not making any particular arguments about modern rap and metal by contrast with earlier manifestations of the music. The millennium is, however, a useful starting point, given that Adam Krims (2000) and Keith Kahn-Harris (2007) cover rap and metal, respectively, up to this time. A second reason for addressing only this period is that it marks a transformation of popular music consumption into the digital domain (since, say, the Apple iPod launched in 2001). Third, it is the music I grew up listening to, and can therefore attest to some specialist knowledge in discussing it as an acafan (that is, as both academic and fan, putting my professional expertise and personal interests to work in productive dialogue).

Analysis

So, what does modern rap and metal sound like? It has been some time since Krims (2000: 3) argued that “the ‘musical poetics’ of rap must be taken seriously”, and Kahn-Harris (2011: 252) called for studies to remedy “the most critical weakness in metal studies as it stands: the relative paucity of detailed musicological analyses on metal”. The rate of change here is evidently slow, as long before that Simon Frith (1987: 145) proclaimed that “we still do not know nearly enough about the musical language of pop and rock”. This is the first book-length analytical study of rap and metal, so I will have to lay out some assumptions that underlie my methods of popular music analysis. The first is that pieces of rap and metal music are, by and large, popular songs.⁶ This might seem an unusual contention given that both genres often eschew singing, but the point stands that much of the musical interest and pleasure lies in the interaction between the voice and its accompaniment. As such, I employ Moore’s (2005, 2012, 2013) theoretical frame, the personic environment, for understanding how the perception of a voice allows listeners to imagine a persona, who is situated within a virtual environment.⁷ In describing a track’s personic environment as “supportive”, for example, I interpret the non-vocal music to reinforce the persona’s position and substantiate the persona’s claims. This is the normative role for the environment in rap, where we can distinguish between the persona’s flow (everything the vocal does) and the beat, which is not purely the percussive rhythm but “the entire complement to the rapper’s flow” (Williams 2013: 177).

There are several conventions concerning the production of modern rap and metal songs, which shape the spatial sonics of the soundbox (Moore and Dockwray 2008; Moore et al. 2009; Dockwray and Moore 2010; Moore 2012: 29–44). Focusing on analysis rather than interpretation, the soundbox addresses how sound sources are arranged in popular music mixes, with norms holding since 1970s rock productions. The lead vocal is typically louder than any other voice, compressed to have a consistent dynamic presence, and situated, immobile, in the centre of the stereo field. Rap plays with this convention, especially through an abundance of auxiliary voices (whether “hype men”, “ad-libs”, or “doubles”). Metal upholds rock’s diagonal mix (Moore and Dockwray 2008): drums mostly centred, but with toms and cymbals spread evenly across the stereo plane, bass more narrowly in the middle, and guitars positioned to the left and right (Mynett 2017: 203–207). The slight diagonal line through kick, bass, and snare seems completely vertical in some modern rap and metal mixes, however, giving a layout I refer to as the “mirror mix”, where equivalent spatial activity is mirrored on either side of the central axis (especially with modern metal’s fondness for double- or quad-tracked rhythm guitars hard-panned to each side). The soundbox is thus used to examine virtual recorded spaces as listeners perceive them – encompassing what they expect to hear and where – not as any objective environment “existing as physical space” (Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2013: 72).

I have mentioned conventions, norms, and expectations. How well listeners are versed in the sounds of rap and metal is a question of style competence. Music style is “the medium by virtue of which we experience music, and without which we could have no music at all” (Green 2008: 53)....