Heavy metal

Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience by Harris M.BergerReview by: Mikel J. KovenThe Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 116, No. 459, Creolization (Winter, 2003), pp. 120-121Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of American Folklore SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4137949 .Accessed: 12/02/2015 04:02

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Illinois Press and American Folklore Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to The Journal of American Folklore.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 155.54.92.31 on Thu, 12 Feb 2015 04:02:17 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

120 Journal of American Folklore 116 (2003)

of many mythological animals (griffins, cen- taurs, giants, cyclopes, and so forth) was influenced by the ancients' attempts to explain the large fossilized bones that littered their landscape. Mayor argues, for example, that griffins are derived from the bones of Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus in ancient Scythia (chapter 1); that the monster on a Corinthian vase (fig. 4.2) is an effective repre- sentation of a fossil skull weathering out of a cliff; and that the bones identified by the ancients as those of giants and mythical heroes were in fact fossil bones (chapter 3). Mayor writes entertainingly, and this book has almost more of the tone of a voyage of discovery than a scholarly work. In some places, this is rather frustrating; in particular, I found references to both ancient works and modern scholarship sometimes lacking in the footnotes (e.g., who is the "Roman poet" on p. 141; and try match- ing the research on pp. 165-66 with the sources in n. 4. Surely more than one endnote per page is permissible!). Given the patchy nature of her ancient sources, much of the book is necessarily speculative, perhaps rather more so than Mayor indicates in her text. But her research is intensive, her evidence strong, and her conclusions (by and large) persuasive.

The book is significantly flawed, I think, by Mayor's failure to take into account the differ- ence in date and genre between her texts. Mayor's sources range over a thousand years; the evidence, which appears strong and obvious when gathered together, is in fact disparate and scattered. Greeks and Romans belonged to very different cultures, each one of which embraced a number of shifting ideologies; the "ancient Greco-Romans" (p. 224) are as much (and as unlikely) a hybrid as many of the monsters Mayor discusses. The advances in understanding made in the ancient world (summarized on pp. 226-27) did not occur to any one individual in the ancient world, but were scattered insights. Moreover, as she herself points out, ancient scientific texts by and large tended to ignore fossil finds, as they were far more concerned with sorting and dealing with what there is than discussing what might have been. Most of her sources are authors who dealt in the fabulous or in travelers' tales, and who, in many cases, should not be taken at face value, as Mayor

tends to do. They themselves were often aware that they were recording marvels, not scientific fact. Mayor's paraphrases sometimes obscure this distinction. For example, Phlegon's account of "the triple head of a human body [which] had two sets of teeth" (Book of Marvels 11.1) becomes in Mayor's appendix "large bones with three skulls and two jawbones with teeth" (p. 271)-the human origin of the skulls is lost, and they become "large" (Phlegon said nothing about their size). Similarly, since pho- tos are given of fossil bones, why not of the Greek pots that she refers to, rather than her own drawings? And in some places she is sim- ply not critical enough; for example, her sug- gestion that the bulls in Bronze Age bull-leaping frescoes represent the aurochs (p. 102) assumes that the artists are depicting the animals in proportion and ignores the entire debate over whether bull-leaping took place at all.

Despite these criticisms, there is much in this book that is valuable and interesting. In bring- ing together into one place all the sources dealing with the ancient understanding of fossils, Mayor has shed light on an almost unnoticed source of ancient mythmaking. The final chapter, on hoaxes or "palaeontological fictions," as Mayor terms them, offers some intriguing par- allels between the ancient and modern worlds regarding the interaction of imagination, myth, and science. In spite of the reservations above, I found her conclusions interesting and fre- quently persuasive. This is a stimulating book and I hope that it will provoke the interdiscipli- nary debate that its author seeks.

Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phe- nomenology of Musical Experience. By Harris M. Berger. (Hanover, N.H., and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. Pp. 334, introduction, notes, glossary, index, 16 photo- graphs.)

MIKEL J. KOVEN University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Harris Berger's Metal, Rock, and Jazz is a lengthy and philosophical account of how ethnomusi- cology can be informed by phenomenological discourse. Through his fieldwork in the metal,


Book Reviews 121

rock, and jazz scenes of Cleveland and Akron, Berger's project is to understand the shared ex- periences of the players in musical formation within each musical tradition and within their respective socioeconomic and geographical contexts.

The book begins with an ethnographic con- sideration of each of the three, mutually exclu- sive musical contexts-three separate clubs, bands, and forms of popular music. Immedi- ately one problem with the project emerges: Berger's choice of contrasts and comparisons is neither linked nor really justified. Clearly he is most interested in talking about one particular form of "heavy metal" rock music-so-called death metal; in these sections and chapters, the pace of the writing, the ethnographic detail, and the depth of interaction with his informants, particularly Dann Saladin, all pick up. In con- trast, his other discussions of the Cleveland "hard rock" scene with the local band Max Panic and his comparison of two jazz contexts elsewhere in Ohio (one white and one African American jazz ensemble) are less successful and function awkwardly. In fact, one wonders why, in this era of "publish or perish," Berger did not break this work down into three separate books that could reference each other.

The sections on death metal are strong enough to warrant their own volume. What particularly fascinated me in these discussions was Berger's ethnographically informed exploration of the concept of "heaviness" in music. "Any el- ement of the musical sound can be heavy," he states, "if it evokes power or any of the grimmer emotions, and the history of metal is commonly understood as the pursuit of greater and greater heaviness" (p. 59). Thus contextualizing the lan- guage of rock fans through its vernacular taxono- mies, Berger gives insight into their world. He also gives perhaps the most intelligent analysis of "moshing" I've read (pp. 72-73).

On the other hand, Berger's ethnographic descriptions of the bars where he observed the live musical performances are much less successful and are written as if by rote. Here is one example:

Entering the mall's wide corridor, you see an array of darkened shops and hear music from speakers inset in the ceiling. Stepping inside

Rizzi's, you are greeted by a hostess wearing black pants, a white shirt and a bow tie. On most nights the wait for a table is short. Imme- diately before you is a large rectangular space divided in half; tables for two and four fill the dining section, and a low wall and two small steps up mark the edge of the lounge. (p. 101)

Although there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach to ethnography, it is, to use a loaded phrase, boring. The uninspired inclu- sion of details like these is automatic and never queried. And in this case it should be.

Much of the book is given over to defending the author's position, of justifying his study, and these dimensions interrupt the work un- necessarily. It appears that Berger is trying to justify his study repeatedly: how is this ethnography? Why study death metal, when it is so ob- viously an unimportant fringe form of popular music? How is popular music a worthy/legiti- mate focus for our discipline? These repeated attempts to justify what he is doing bog the reader down. Berger needs to recognize that he is already preaching to the choir (who recognize the legitimacy of the ethnographic study of popular music, death metal, and the experience of going to nightclubs), and that his arguments are unlikely to make any new converts unless they are already on their own roads to Dam- ascus.

Berger's real contribution to ethnomusi- cology in the book is not the subject studied, but his theoretical orientation and methodol- ogy, his phenomenology. However, he does not distinguish between the orthodox phenomenology of the early twentieth century (Bergson and Husserl), and its development, problems, changes, and reworkings over the past hundred years. Nor does he mention the distinctions between orthodox Husserlian phenomenology and more recent developments such as Reader- Response Theory or Reception Theory. Finally, although so much ethnomusicological work is artist-based, I hoped to see more consumer- based discourse in this book. Berger's empha- sis is so heavy on the position of the culture producer that those readers who do not make music themselves are often at a loss and prob- ably miss out on some important phenomenological points for debate.


Article Contentsp. 120p. 121

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 116, No. 459, Creolization (Winter, 2003), pp. 1-126Front Matter [pp. 1-2]From the Editor [p. 3]Introduction: Creolization and Folklore: Cultural Creativity in Process [pp. 4-8]Metaphors of Incommensurability [pp. 9-18]Techniques of Creolization [pp. 19-35]The Poetics of Creole Talk: Toward an Aesthetic of Argentine Verbal Art [pp. 36-56]Monde Crole: The Cultural World of French Louisiana Creoles and the Creolization of World Cultures [pp. 57-72]Questions of Criolian Contagion [pp. 73-87]Amalgams and Mosaics, Syncretisms and Reinterpretations: Reading Herskovits and Contemporary Creolists for Metaphors of Creolization [pp. 88-115]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 116-117]Review: untitled [pp. 117-118]Review: untitled [pp. 118-119]Review: untitled [pp. 119-120]Review: untitled [pp. 120-121]Review: untitled [pp. 122-123]Review: untitled [pp. 123-124]Review: untitled [pp. 124-125]Review: untitled [pp. 125-126]

Back Matter

Documents

Heavy metal