Metal Music Studies

‘Auschwitz Awaits’ – Different Readings on Sabaton’s ‘The Final Solution’ (2010) and the Question of Irony

Reinhard Kopanski — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Swedish power metal band Sabaton can be referred to as an established act within the international metal scene. Though the band is known for the utilization of war in most of its songs, it is remarkable that Sabaton is one of the few bands in the metal ‘mainstream’ that also address the Holocaust in their output. In this article, I will trace Sabaton’s musical treatment of the Holocaust in the song ‘The Final Solution’, and subsequently question it critically. Using Linda Hutcheon’s model for the analysis of irony in aesthetic products as a frame for this investigation, a trans-medial music analysis of visual, auditive, and contextual aspects will be carried out. With the resulting observations on the phenomenon, I will broaden the focus to present four suggestions on how ‘The Final Solution’ can be read, taking into account both metal insider and outsider perspectives, as well as German and non-German points of view.

Embodying the Auschwitz Sonderkommando in Extreme Metal

Dominic Williams — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This article considers ways in which the Sonderkommando (SK) figure in extreme metal. Noting that while there are not many metal songs about the Sonderkommando, metal is in fact one of the few musical genres that have dared to address the troubling topic of the SK, it suggests why this group might be of interest to metal lyricists. It examines the approaches taken by bands to embodying the Sonderkommando, arguing that metal's embrace of intense feeling in the lyrics and vocal and musical styles can be interpreted as an exploration of embodiment and materiality, allowing a consideration of mediation, the matter through which the SK might be felt and understood. Representations of the Sonderkommando in metal, then, do not merely form an eccentric example of holocaust memory at work, but take on central issues of holocaust representation.

KISS: Jewishness, Hard Rock and the Holocaust

Jon Stratton — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

KISS were a hard rock group, one of the most successful during the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The group’s two founding members, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, were both Jewish. Indeed, both were the sons of Holocaust survivors. This article examines the impact of Simmons’s and Stanley’s Jewishness on KISS as a rock group and on its success. One of the most obvious impacts was the drive to succeed which Simmons and Stanley shared. Simmons writes about wanting power, Stanley that he wanted respect. As children of survivors they wanted safety. During much of the 1970s the Holocaust was not yet publicly acknowledged. However its trauma is evident in, for example, the stage characters that Simmons and Stanley adopted. First, and most obviously, the disguise which hid their Jewishness but, at the same time, Simmons’s creation of the Demon and Stanley’s Starchild both in different ways acting out their inherited Holocaust trauma. This article addresses the many ways that Simmons’s and Stanley’s Jewishness, as filtered through the inherited trauma of the Holocaust, impacted on the image and music of KISS.

Affirmation and Denial

Christoph Schulze, Martin Langebach — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores how the topos of Holocaust appears in far right Black Metal. First, we briefly show how the Holocaust has been addressed in the larger Metal culture. We argue that politics are understood very narrow in Metal, often attributing far right politics only to “National Socialist Black Metal”. Thus, we provide a working definition on what constitutes far right Metal that includes all relevant protagonists. Based on an extensive empirical basis, we identified songs, designs and fanzine interviews from protagonists with a far right Black Metal background that referenced the Holocaust. Those expressions stem from various countries and span over three decades, showing that far right Metal is an international phenomenon that has found ways to reproduce over a longer period of time. We found different patterns of Holocaust references in far right Black Metal, unified by the aggressive antisemitism of the protagonists. Far right Black Metal appears to be a cultural sphere in the western world, where some of the most extreme views on the Holocaust are expressed – following the aesthetic logics of extreme Metal but still not merely as subcultural hyperbole but as actual political statements. The Holocaust often times is presented as a brutal historical incident that is welcomed by the far right Black Metal protagonists excactly for its brutality – as a measure to enact revenge against Jews, who are portrayed as oppressive or as a measure to express the superiority of the own kind. This affirmation of genocidal murder can be accompanied by Holocaust denialism – which might not seem consistent logically but which reflects far right ideology.

From "the Fading" to "Scream with Me Never Again!"

Itay Jackson — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TBC

Engaging with absence: Why is the Holocaust a ‘problem’ for metal?

Keith Kahn-Harris — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While genocide, killing and transgressive acts of violence are common themes in metal, there is a relative absence of metal lyrics and other ways of engaging with the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews as a theme. This stands in contrast to pre-modern genocides which are often the subject of fascination. Even when the Holocaust is apparently ‘celebrated’ by neo-Nazi metal acts, some of the specificities of the genocide, together with its applicability to Jews today, may be elided and effaced. When the Holocaust is engaged with in non-neo-Nazi metal lyrics, it is usually with great care and the victims themselves are rarely mentioned. The Holocaust constitutes a ‘problem’ in metal that makes silence and absence a preferable option to engagement. The reasons for this lie in part in metal’s self-conscious avoidance of ‘politics’, the lack of salience of Jews and antisemitism, and the excessive nature of the Holocaust itself.

The Waffen-SS in heavy metal lyrics

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Martial lyrics about war and mass murder have been a key characteristic of heavy metal since the inception of the genre in the early 1970s. With the development of extreme metal a decade later, episodes of German history and the Second World War were added to the spectrum of content. The Waffen-SS, long viewed as an elite fighting force, features prominently in many songs, as do the Holocaust and genocide in general. The article discusses a number of heavy metal songs about the Waffen-SS and closely related topics. The content of the music will be viewed in connection with the current state of research, according to which SS military units not only were deployed in combat but also committed war crimes, participated in the Holocaust, and were strongly connected with the concentration camp system.