Define Infinity wrote:
Hey Kyle, could you expand on what your writing about?
It's for an edited collection of essays on non-mainstream music. It has kinda mutated as submissions were accepted and publishers got a hold of it. Essays on ICP, Finnish folk metal, martial industrial, Russian NSBM (written by Grim Kim Kelly I might add), Bad Brains, tons more and my essay on Left-leaning USBM.
I'm doing a basic compare and contrast of Norwegian BM and USBM. It's limited to 5000 words, but I want to center on the construction of place that plays out in the music and how Norwegian emphasis on frosty, cold bitterness constructs an image of Norway post-Christianity constituted full of Nietzschean individuals while bands like Skagos and Panopticon and WITTR emphasizing spring time, growth, collapse are trying to imagine a new world purified through environmentalism. Everyone who writes about USBM mentions Thoreau and Emerson and that might be where these folks get their ideas, but I find that incredibly uninteresting.
I just submitted another chapter proposal to a book about metal studies in particular yesterday. Basically in two pages I made the claim that metal oscillates between or struggles with reification and de-reifying images. You have Satan for Black Sabbath as being a reification of broader social and economic issues as industrial production hit a downturn. You have Carcass, Berzerker, Cattle Decapitation, Impaled de-reifying death metal in order to establish grindcore via taking medical terminology or industry standards and using that cold detailed brutality to counter the horror film style violence of death metal. And then as a final vignette for the paper arguing how WITTR and Panopticon de-reify black metal's Satan or Christianity as the culprit for our problems and actually pointing to the coal industry or de-forestation practices. WITTR's mysticism might even be a reification of material practices into their weird spritualism.
