Breakdance, red eyed
penguins, Vikings, grunge and straight rock’n’roll :
The construction of place
in musical discourse in Rudenga, east side Oslo
Viggo
Vestel
...and
the princess and the prince discuss what’s real and what is not
it
doesn’t matter inside the gates of Eden (Bob Dylan, ‘The Gates of Eden’ from the album
Subterranean Homesick Blues)
In his
celebrated book about the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea,
anthropologist Steven Feld showed how music, sound and the sense of
place were closely interlinked (Feld, 1990). Here relations to
‘place’ in one way or another, as mirrored through various
musical practices, reflected important concerns and positions in the
lifeworlds of the actors. Such relations, as well as a concern for
music, are of course also important parts of the lives of people
living in far more modernized corners of the world (see also Stokes
(ed), 1994).
The
purpose of this paper is to explore the construction of place in
musical discourses and how these processes are related and embedded
in the contexts in which they occur. More specifically, basing my
discussion on recent fieldwork in a youth club in a suburb outside
Oslo, I will focus on how local representatives of different musical
genres there are constructing, referring and relating to ‘place’
in this context - whether ‘real’, imagined, or imaginary.
The exact
difference between these ‘modes’ of place is of course not easy
to point out, and to underline the difficulties concerning further
attempts to decide what is ‘really’ real, and what is not, I
prefer to put the term ‘real’ in quotation marks. And although,
as Dylan sings, such differences might have minimal importance for
such utopian and mythological places as the garden of Eden, the
whole point of that song is that they certainly do matter outside of
it, where most of us, and not least the youth in this fieldwork,
spend our lives.
So my
suggestions for the content of these terms are as follows: the ‘real’
place is where the physical bodies of the people involved are, have
been or can be situated. When people think about such a place, I
call it ‘imagined’. When it is reasonable to believe that
a place is not capable of carrying a physical presence, according to
what might loosely be called ‘rational’ knowledge, I ascribe it
the status of being ‘imaginary’. All these modes of place
can interfere, nourish or contest with each other. And it is exactly
some of the social practices through which these things can happen
that I wish to explore here - or more specifically - practices
revolving round musical discourses that concern and construct
‘place’ in one way or another. (The interplay between some
related ‘modes’ of place has also been noticed by David Harvey
in Bird et al., 1993:17). I will further argue that such practices
also play a paramount role in the processes through which
‘space’ becomes ‘place’, as these terms will be further
discussed later on. But although only a few of the versions of
locality presented here point explicitly to the ‘real’ place
where this discourse is going on, they are all ‘taking place’
under the same roof – that is within the youth club. Moreover,
several of the representatives of the different genres have actually
been involved in making music with each other on various occasions
during a time span of a few years. In line with this, I will also
attempt to convey a glimpse of some of the multitude of connections
between, within, across and against various genres, portrayed
through these different versions of locality.
But
first, a short description of the ‘real’ place where these
discourses actually are going on.
Rudenga: a ‘real’
place…
The
site for the musical discourses presented here is a suburb I have
called ‘Rudenga’, which is situated 15 minutes eastward on
public transport from the centre of Oslo. Around 20,000 people live
in the area of which Rudenga is a small part. Around 20 percent of
the inhabitants have immigrant backgrounds. Compared to the average
figures for Oslo, the area has 28 percent more children between
7-17, 5 percent more single parent households, 5 percent more
unemployed between 20-66 years, 28 percent fewer inhabitants with an
income higher than 250,000 Norwegian kroner, and 55 percent fewer
inhabitants aged 20-36 years with education on university level (all
figures from 1992). The inhabitants consist mostly of working class
and immigrant families. In Rudenga itself, these tendencies are even
sharper. Here huge residential blocks built in the early seventies
are flanked by the red tubes running up and down the valley on the
one side and by a motorway on the other. Not far from the cluster of
blocks lie some fields of detached and semi-detached houses. In the
environment of the small shopping centre of Rudenga one notices
several traces of old and faded grafitti that give the first hint of
our topic: music and place. Some of the social processes behind
these material reminders will serve as the starting points for the
following pages.
Some 7-8
years before the fieldwork period Rudenga was heavily stigmatized in
various ways, according to my informants. The youth-club placed at
the outskirts of the centre had serious problems with drug-addicts
and crime, and many of the sons and daughters from the surrounding,
more ‘respectable’ areas, tell me that their parents did not
allow them to go to the centre - and to the youth club in particular
- because of this. (How it ‘really’ was, is of course difficult
to know today, but as informants in quite different positions seem
to agree on this, one can at least assume that these characteristics
are somehow real to the inhabitants.) Several informants tell me
that Rudenga itself was labeled the ‘slum’ by representatives
from the outside world and this negative labeling was of course also
very present amongst the Rudenga residents themselves. But this
stigma also carried an ambivalence, as is probably the case for many
similar areas; on the one hand the place and its inhabitants were
looked down upon, on the other hand they were also ‘the tough
guys’.
Breakdance: transforming
the local...
Around
1986 the film named ‘Beat Street’ was tremendously popular at
Rudenga. It is widely regarded as a cult movie for the breakdance
and hip hop culture, as it portrays a group of American coloured
youth, for whom grafitti and breakdancing are central activities
(Fernando Jr., 1994). Jens (23, unemployed) told us more about how
he reacted to the film:
I think it
really struck here in the east end because the environment in the
film resembles the environment here, the large, grey blocks, the
red tube that rolled through the valley - it was like the Bronx,
you could recognize it... (...) The reason why I liked it so much
the first time was because I felt it was a realistic film... where
I could identify on several levels. The only problem was that the
persons in the film were blacks, or Puerto Ricans or something,
but we looked at ourselves like blacks too, a little bit like in
Ingvar Ambjørnsens book White Niggers...
Ambjørnsen
is a popular writer among Norwegian youth and the book, to which
Jens refers deals with a group of young social outcasts in urban
Norway. The romanticism around being outcasts on the fringe of
society, or for example in the form of hobos, gypsies, drifters etc.
is of course in line with a long tradition in rock’n’roll as
noted by Berkaak (1993) and Walser (1993) among others. While Jens
might romanticize this ‘White nigger’ concept, and is probably
more explicit in his identification than others, there is no doubt
that this film and the whole breakdance wave really hit the young
inhabitants here (see also Rose, 1994). According to informants, the
dancing, the clothes, the music and the general style were something
almost ‘everyone’ at a certain age were involved in at the time.
The film
seemed to work like a mirror, offering practices that the youth of
Rudenga could explore and use, especially because the place and
milieu in the film resembled - and therefore in a way could be
perceived as - ‘pointing’ to the environment at Rudenga,
resonating with the experiences of the young inhabitants. This does
of course not exclude the possibility for other areas that in no way
resemble the places in the film to be inspired by it. But these very
resemblances probably made Rudenga particularly receptive to it, and
constituted the ‘pores’, so to speak, that helped to channel the
processes through which the images and the ‘aura’ of the film
could be drawn into the place and grounded into the concrete
life-world of the young dwellers. In this way Rudenga can be said to
be perceived as ‘impregnated’ with the images of the film.
Having made this connection, stimulated by the breakdance wave in
general (for example on Sky channel shows of that time), the
recognition of these resemblances supplied the young inhabitants of
the place with a repertoire of possible practices to develop
further. Picking up a commodity and using it as vehicle for
exploring identity is of course, not a passive act, and in this
‘empowered’ use of a sign, as Fiske would have termed it, lies
also the possibility of re-constructing the place in different
directions, for example as we shall see, by the practice of dancing
(Fiske, 1990).
The youth
club where the fieldwork was carried out is part of a larger unit
commonly called ‘the House’ which is supposed to offer various
activities for every age group in Rudenga. There is a café run by
pensioners, various courses are held (for example language courses
for foreigners), a club for children aged 7-13 is offered, concerts
are arranged, localities are hired out to local organisations etc.
The House is also an important arena where local youth can get
various types of work for a very modest wage financed by the welfare
budget introduced by the government as a way of coping with
unemployment. Per (17) has one of the most common types of these
jobs, in Norwegian called ‘praksis plass’ (literally: a place
for practice) in the House. He was one of the most active and
successful dancers in those days, only 8 years old when he started
his breakdance career. When I ask him if there is some special
incident he remember from this period, he describes the following
episode from one of the earliest competitions he and his young
breakdance trio participated in:
We came
from Rudenga, we came from the ‘slum’ and we lived in the
blocks. Everyone looked down at us. In the beginning we had only
simple training clothes and everyone else was dancing with the
same dresses and shoes and everything. We were meeting them; we
were only tiny kids - I was youngest. We were standing there and
everyone looked at us laughing. Then we started to dance and soon
everyone was completely shocked, you see, they thought we simply
were the best. That was great, that was really great.
This is
of course also an example of nostalgia for the ‘golden age’, the
times ‘when we were really kings’ as Per himself put it later in
the interview. But if one accepts some truth in it, it is also
possible to see that for Per and his breakdance trio, getting
approval for their dancing was a way of getting prestige for the
boys from ‘the slum’, showing their skills to the outside world
and in this way gaining respect both for themselves, and for the
place they came from. The practice centered around a musical genre,
in other words, challenged the stigma and thereby had a potential to
contribute to a re-constructed and in some degrees changed public
picture and values attributed to the place and its inhabitants. A
place is a social space, loaded with memories and with association
chains that are triggered when you are exposed to it. Being from a
bad place and being good at something, can in some instances be one
step towards charging that place with a new ‘aura’ that
is prestigious, or at least, carries the satisfaction of surprise,
as in Per’s case.
Another
member of this dancing trio, was Ahmed of Iraqi origins. As the hip
hop tradition has grown from similar multicultural areas in the
larger cities in the US, this of course, made it even more suitable
as a ‘meeting point’ for youth with a variety of cultural
backgrounds including immigrants of quite distant geographic origin.
And when Ahmed tells me he also listens to Iraqi music when relaxing
at home, this also exemplifies how music may point quite directly to
the geographic origin, the place, of his immigrant family.
Yet it seems easier for these boys to meet around the syncopated
beats of hip hop than to insist on their identities as strictly
‘Norwegians’ and ‘Iraqis’, in line with the birth places of
their parents. Through hip hop as a concrete expression of
‘transnational connections’, it is far easier to relate to each
other, dancing against, so to speak, the stigmatization of their own
home as promoted by the surrounding areas (see Hannerz, 1996; for
more about the centrality of place in American hip hop culture, see
Rose, 1994).
In these
examples, Rudenga, as the very ‘real’ home of these youngsters,
was transformed and reconstructed through the use of images,
clothing, bodily practices and general style derived from the
boys’ interpretation of the imagined places of black American
youth (like the Bronx), as these were presented through the film
‘Beat Street’, the radio, television, magazines and so on. Thus
the ‘real’ place was here fused with the ‘imagined’ places
powerfully associated with a particular musical genre, as conveyed
by the media. The ‘real’ place of Rudenga was thus through these
practices nourished and modified by the attributes of an imagined
place. The places in the film are, of course, also constructions
based on ‘real’, imagined and imaginary places, put together and
modified through the media, by the imagination of the intermediators
(actors, artists, filmmakers, music directors and so on), that in
turn are transformed and merged with Per’s own imagination in the
story he tells about Rudenga in the golden age. In such ways these
different modes of place are also modified by each other, in an
(theoretically) endless interplay between the ‘bricolage’ of
cognition, and ‘resonating’ impulses from the external world in
the concrete practices of their users.
Dreaming of America:
escaping the local…
After
what informants call ‘the breakdance period’ came to an end, Per
formed a band for a couple of years with, among others, Grim (now
18), who also has a ‘praksis plass’ at the House. The band’s
music centered around covers by Kiss and Metallica. Later on Per
played in several more unpretentious and often quite humor-oriented
bands, even though his musical taste also developed in the direction
of death metal and black metal, genres we shall deal with later.
These musical forms were also explored more deeply by Grim.
Grim has
now one year ‘leave’ from high school. He said he had to take a
break from school because his involvement in music was taking too
much attention from his schoolwork. He says he’d rather play music
intensively while having the job at the House for one year, than
doing half-hearted work in school and getting bad results. He plans
to work hard for his exams next year, then do his military service
and then he plans to ‘try his luck’ in America as a musician. In
this way, he sees music as the thing to do ‘to get out of the
local’, so to speak; here music and musical skills provide a way
to transgress the local, to realize the dream of going to the States
and eventually to get famous. In this case music represents the
possibility of carrying him to the imagined center for many
rock’n’rollers as America is.
While Per
and Jens ‘expropriated’ the imagined places derived from the
presentation of the early breakdance culture, and stuck them in
effect onto the ‘real’ place of their home. Grim tries to
realize the imagined in another way - by bringing himself to his
version of the ‘promised land’. As opposed to trying to bring
the imagined to the ‘real’, as in Jens and Per’s versions,
Grim is hoping to bring the ‘real’ (his body) to the imagined -
in the shape of the US.
In
contrast to these ways of handling place, the concern for the
‘real’ can probably be said to have somehow faded in our next
cases. Here the characteristic quest for transgression is manifested
in more introvert versions of place connected to musical discourse,
that is, to the fantastic, the terrifying and the unknown.
Red-eyed penguins: into
the imaginary...
Some
years earlier Grim quit the band he had with Per after having met
Helge (now 18) in high school. Helge was interested in what they
term ‘a harder kind of music’ - more specifically, death metal.
As both
Berkaak and Walser have pointed out, the theme of transgression has,
of course, had many different expressions in rock music, and in some
relatively recent genres within heavy metal, this theme has
developed into quite strange forms. One of these is the genre that
Grim and Helge at this point of their musical history were involved
in. Grim states:
Death metal
is about death...which is exciting because it's something I have
never understood...something unresolved, a mystery in a way. This
is my interpretation, I don't know what others may think. It is
something you don't know about. It has a special power in it, I
mean, it takes everything from you, it's powerful. People are
afraid of death, no one enjoys saying death is cool. Death metal
is an attempt to touch that feeling...crossing a border in a
way...
Helge
elaborates:
Death is
attractive because you don't know what happens after you have left
the earth...your soul is roaming (flickering) and is finding a new
dwelling place... many people look at death as something
frightening. I don't. I think death is birth, in a way, not into
new life on earth, but rather into a new dimension, a new state of
being.
According
to these statements, death metal is a way of touching the feeling of
the uncertainty of death, getting you closer to what is across that
border, to the new dwelling place of the soul, into a dimension that
cannot be specified, as death represents the ultimate transgression
and uncertainty. Death romanticized as a journey across the border
to a place of the unknown may be seen as connected with a long
tradition in rock’n’roll, and especially in heavy metal, which
flirts with these themes. In this tradition, horror aesthetics have
been cultivated, often in combination with the fantastic and
fantasy-places, that is places that, according to our definitions
can be termed imaginary. While Grim was planning to use music to get
to the imagined place, the US, this kind of music was a way of
travelling on a more introvert journey so to speak, to the fantastic
places of the unknown. In the interview, elaborating on the feelings
and atmosphere that Helge is after in his recent, now black metal
band, he refers to a novel by one of his favourite writers, H.P.
Lovecraft, called ‘At the mountains of madness’ (Lovecraft,
1993):
It’s
about an expedition to the Antarctic where, once before mankind
had been on earth, there was a time when ‘something’ lived...
everything is so strange... you see works of art from a time which
one couldn't think were possible...you see buildings, animals, you
enter a new dimension which at the same time is earthbound, you
enter a place where you find wholly white penguins with red eyes
because they have never seen the sun...in a way it’s things like
that that fascinate me...the atmosphere, the mood, the unknown...
This
wholly imaginary and fantasy-ridden place, where the white, red-eyed
penguins live sums up what Helge and his version of metal are after:
to evoke the feelings that such places represent, using the power of
music to transport the listener to what might be called the early
nineties black metal version of the ‘Dark side of the moon’.
Vikings: the past, the
imaginary...
The
theme of horror, like the theme of transgression has many
expressions in heavy metal and it seems to have reached a peak in
the black metal scene of Norway in the first half of the 90s, where
two black metal musicians were sentenced to 14 and 21 years in jail
for murder, and several others were jailed for burning down
churches. Several churches have been burnt down in Norway in the
first half of the nineties, and attempts have been made on many
others (see Aftenposten 5/6 1994; Dagbladet 5/6 1994).
While quoting the Birmingham band Venom as one of the founding
groups of the black metal genre, the mainstream of Norwegian black
metal have combined the so-called satanism
that was introduced more explicitly by Venom, with references to
Nordic folklore and especially, to the Vikings.
According to my informants the Norwegian band Darkthrone, in their
LP from 1990 - ‘A blaze in the northern sky’, was the first to
make this connection explicit on the black metal scene.
The popular cliché of the Vikings as strong, plundering and raping
villains spreading terror and fear around the countries they
visited, are referred to as an explanation for this fusion. Just
like the scenario of the film Beat Street to some extent
‘fit’ the scenario of Rudenga, so the however rudimentary
knowledge of the Vikings fit in with the themes of horror, evil and
terrifying monsters already existing in the mythology of heavy metal
and of black metal in particular. In this way, by focusing on this
kinship Norwegian black metal has connected the tradition to a more
specific locality: to the mythical past and heathen Norway.
Black metal suddenly infused with a strange kind of nationalism
that, for example, is reflected in the fans of the band called
Satyricon wearing T-shirts with ‘Norway’ written on their backs
in types that hark to prehistoric runes. As a consequence of this
nationalistic ideology, many fans in this period expressed racist
views, saying they wanted Norway to be for true Norwegians, that is
white, strong and Aryan - and of course non-Christian.
It is
against the background of these developments that the now convicted
murderer, Kristian Vikernes, changed his name to ‘Varg’
(literally ‘wolf’ in Norwegian), and declared himself ‘the son
of Odin’ as well of Satan, and as soon would be ‘King of
Hordaland’ - the area of Norway of which Bergen, the town he lives
in, is the centre. This romanticizing of a mythical past (combined
with history) into a sub-cultural re-construction of the country of
Norway as the land of the Vikings, now in the guise of black metal
fans (!!), might be seen as a development of the well-known tendency
in heavy metal to romanticize the past, especially the gothic
scenarios of classic horror tales - like for example, remote
Transylvania in the vampire tales, but this version was located in
the ‘land of the Vikings’ in ways realized in the various
practices of the black metal groups. They have explained the burning
of the churches as a way of spreading fear and cleansing the country
of Christian influence in a cult of the ‘strong’ versus the
weak. Similar attitudes deliberately expressing contempt for
weakness are also well known from the writings of Anton LaVey,
founder of the so called ‘Church of Satan’, from which several
of the Norwegian black metallers were inspired (see also Moynihan
& Søderlind, 1998).
Through
this use of the assumed attributes of the historical (or
prehistorical) place of the Vikings, the connection to the
‘real’ is loosened by time, allowing this construction of
‘Norway’ to become a more or less (?) an imaginary place, where
distance to the ‘real’ might be about proportional to the amount
of time that has passed. The power of such imaginary places to
arouse strong sentiments in their would-be inhabitants is at times
very strong, be it the ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ of the Christian
tradition, or ‘heathen Norway’, as these latest practices of the
Norwegian black metallers exemplify. When these strange products of
imagination and fantasy are used to legitimize real acts of killing
and of burning down old churches, this power of place is of course
even more emphasized.
These
stories of black metal, widely spread by the media, are of course
also commented upon in Rudenga. And in Helge’s version of black
metal, he is almost ironically distancing himself from this
‘Viking thing’, as he calls it, finding it silly to combine
elements that in his words ‘don’t have anything to do with each
other’. Even though he admits that such combinations are a part of
most creative acts, he says he does not like this kind of
‘cloning’ and labels the increasing numbers of black metal bands
that flirt with the ‘Viking-thing’ just ‘clones’, not able
to think for themselves and thus devoid of originality. He also
distances himself from the murders, the church burning and the
racism, but admits understanding the fascination around some of
these quite real acts of horror.
Vikernes
is also reported to have said that by burning down, old churches
especially, the power of the building accumulated by age would be
transmitted to him. In this way church burning is used as a magical
act of taking the power from the building and the place, and thus
transmitting it to the destroyer, as if the destruction made this
power available to the one who executed the act. In this way he
magically sucks the power out of the place by the act of
destruction, so to speak (Arbeiderbladet 6/5 1994). This is
not a theme I have discussed with my informants, but such practices
as well as other ‘ritualistic’ acts are a part of the wider
discourse of black metal that Helge and Grim also participate in or
have been relating to.
The forest: evil demons of
nature...
The
last version of place within the black metal discourse that I will
deal with here can be regarded as a further summing up of many of
the tendencies and themes concerning this genre that have been
touched upon so far. In a newspaper interview, the 18 year old front
figure of the previously mentioned band Satyricon, explained that
the band, whose new LP with the descriptive title Dark, Medieval
Times has a medieval concept influenced by Norwegian nature,
mythology and moods, is fascinated by the Vikings, death and the
black plague. He mentions specifically the Norwegian romantic artist
Theodore Kittelsen (1857-1914) as a great source of inspiration.
Kittelsen is something of a ‘national treasure’ in Norway and
most Norwegian children are familiar with his detailed and fantastic
drawings and paintings of trolls, the lake demon ‘nøkken’,
unicorns and so on. This interest in folklore - expressed in the
name he has chosen for himself, Satyr - relates to the
presentation of Norway during the opening and ending ceremonies of
the Olympic Games at Lillehammer in 1994, where both trolls and
‘vetter’ (supernatural beings that are connected with certain
places, and types of landscape) were presented. He comments:
I got sick
when I saw how they were showing vetter and nøkker.
Evil beings became children jumping up and down in costumes to
impress tourists. We export something that is not true. Kittelsen
would have turned in his grave. (Arbeiderbladet 26/3-94)
For
Satyr, these beings are primarily evil and he seems to find
it almost blasphemous when they are associated with children
(hardcore black metallists - from this period at least - do not like
children). At the end of the interview he points out that his
favourite place in fact is the forest, and of course,
Satyricon is the name of the Greek god of the forest. It is exactly
Kittelsen’s ability to portray and give life to the various
supernatural beings of the Norwegian forest that is his special
hallmark. In Norwegian black metal discourse, however, the forest
represents evil, and as a kind of location, it is the most
attractive place in the imagery of the genre. On most of the
Norwegian record covers in this genre the band members are portrayed
in some forest during nightime. A recent genre strongly associated
with Norwegian black metal is also called ‘Forest metal’,
‘Fairytale metal’ or even ‘Troll metal’ (in Norwegian
‘Trolsk metal’, that can also mean ‘magical’ metal) - all
pointing further to the forest as a place of special importance. I
asked Grim why this is so:
I don't
know exactly. It's probably the solitude or the abandoned...the
‘untouched’ [quality] of the forest. (...) And all the tales
and myths about vettene and the supernaturals... you have
to be in the forest or in the mountains to get closer to them. The
forest is the untamed...untamed animals are living there. Everyone
is free there, not civilized. That's important.
The
forest, in other words, encompasses many of the various themes and
longings in the genre; it is the location of the supernatural beings
of folklore, representing the free, untamed, authentic and
untouched, outside culture, the place of the dark forces of the
world, of evil and danger, and it is ‘raw nature’ - the soul of
Norway, so to speak, that the Vikings lived closer to and which has
been supressed by Christianity.
The
curious thing about this view of the forest, at least for a
Norwegian, is to look at it as an evil place. Since the
nation-building during the latter part of the last century, the
forest especially and nature in general has had a very positive aura
in Norwegian public life and has in many ways functioned as national
emblems. So what kind of ‘hell’ are these young black metallers
making out of the place where many Norwegians enjoy spending their
sunday-trip seeking beauty and recreation?
From Calvinistic to
romantic horrors: transforming Bakthinian carnevalesque
Black
metal, like many other cultural phenomena among youth from
post-industrialized Western societies, can also be understood as
expressions of a reaction against what Max Weber called ‘the
disenchantment of the world’ (Weber, 1991). But according to the
British sociologist, Colin Campbell, the disenchanting
rationalization and utilitarianism described by Weber was only one
of two quite different ethics that developed out of the protestant
currents rooted in calvinism. Parallell to this rational
objectivism, Campbell describes in very Weber-like detail the
development of what he terms a romantic ethic where emotions,
pleasure, satisfaction and self-centeredness are the foremost
characteristics. According to Campbell the phenomenon of horror has
played a special role in this development. Post-Calvinistic puritans
for example, encouraged their followers to contemplate:
...corpses,
tombs, graveyards, charnelhouses and everything associated with
dying and death, while suffering, pain and even disease were also
to be welcomed (Campbell, 1990: 125).
Such a
scenario could of course be recognized on most record covers of the
more gothic-oriented death metal bands of recent heavy rock (for
example Obituary, Morbid Angel, Death, etc.) According to Campbell
these horror images of the original puritans were gradually detached
from their connection to religious and ascetic practices and began
to be cultivated for their own sake - that is, for the pleasure of
horror itself, especially in the form of what is termed the
‘gothic novel’ which had its popular heyday between 1765-1840.
(The story of Dracula, for example, is a ‘neo-gothic’ novel
dating from 1897.) For Campbell the horror aesthetics was a
bridge from the ascetic and puritan practices on one side, to
quite the opposite on the other, in the form of the romantic cult of
emotions, pleasure and self-centeredness that later developed into
what many theorists now label narcissism. With the severing of
horror images from religious practices, emotions in general soon
gained more approval, and combined with the Calvinist attention to
the self (though originally in the form of asceticism), the
‘romantic ethic’ was born.
According
to the Russian literary theorist Michael Bakhtin,
the characteristics of what he term the ‘grotesque’ elements of
the carnival tradition were transformed during the romantic period
along the following lines that were manifested especially in the
gothic horror novel:
1)The juxtaposition of high and low, mind and matter, life and death is
dissolved and death and the monstrous now tends to exist alone.
2) Instead of the old carnivalistic ritual victory over fear, the
romantic cultivates fear without overcoming it.
3) Madness that originally was cheerful and gay is now acquiring a dark,
threatening character often combined with themes of individual
isolation.
4) In the old carnivals the devil and hell were often portrayed as gay,
comic monsters, which in their romantic version are terrible,
melancholic and tragic.
(Bakhtin 1984:37-45)
These
characteristics are, in other words, very much in line with the
ethos of both death metal and black metal. One of the most striking
features of mainstream Norwegian black metal of the early nineties
is the absence of humour: according to my informants showing
laughter and joy is not considered appropriate behavior for black
metallers. Together with the fascination with death, evil, fear,
pain, satanism and various types of self mutilations in the most
extreme cases (such as using cigarettes to burn satanic crosses into
the forearms), this is, in Bakhtinian terms, a triumph of the dark,
in contrast to the old carnivals that were regarded as festivals of
light, spring, sunrise and morning and thus as able to overcome
fear. One might say that this version of black metal can be
described as flavoured by a quite ascetic, unpleasant, disciplined
and Calvinistic/romantic seriousness.
In the
Norwegian fairytales as well as in Kittelsen’s illustrations, the
forest is portrayed mostly as a place where obstacles and demons are
overcome, for example by the hero called ‘Askeladden’ ( a
trickster-like figure whose name literally means ‘the man of
ashes’), and not in any way as one-sidedly evil. (The fact that
the Greek satyrs from whom Satyricon got its name were associated
with nature in form of primitive lust, sexuality and fertility in
the company of Dionysos, points in the same direction.) In other
words, to the black metallers what many Norwegians held as a
positive place for recreation and a little ‘mysterious’ beauty
reminiscent of the fairytales of childhood, is here transformed into
a place of evil and fear, very much in accordance with the
characteristics Bakhtin has outlined as the romantic version of the
grotesque.
The
romantic period with all its sentimentality and fascination with
horror and the occult that ended around the end of the century, and
soon after transformed into modern sentimentalism, has been
explained as a reaction against the utilitarian dryness of the
enlightenment. Today, social scientists write about post-modernity
as a state where faith in science, the future and the large
narratives is declining (see for example Bauman, 1993; Featherstone,
1992). Black metal can, among other things, be seen both as an
expression of the fear connected with this state, and as a reaction
against the disenchanted world of the perhaps declining modernity
that had very little room for the mysterious and the existential
dimensions, except in the sphere of leisure, which is where
the horror-aesthetics has survived after the liberation from the
religious domain, now cultivated as entertainment (the fate
of many forms of ‘enchanted’ practices). From this sphere the
Norwegian black metaller has brought it closer to reality, making
aesthetics of horror into a style and ideology that is to be lieved
(as is the case for many youth based sub-cultural lifestyles) - too
close in most people’s opinion, as it has somehow culminated in
the previously-mentioned murders and the practice of burning
churches. Living this aesthetic originally exiled in the leisure
sphere represents a tendency in the direction of a breakdown of
modernity’s separation of work (as ‘reality’) and leisure, in
this way re-enchanting the world by drawing upon practices developed
from the leisure sphere. By synthesizing the ‘Norwegian’
fondness for nature with the horror tradition of heavy metal, the
forest, in this way is re-enchanted as evil. If Christianity to an
important degree can be said to have decided what is in our heads,
then black metal surely communicates the latest example in the
tradition of rock’n'roll of identifying with the ‘someone in my
head that is not me’, to quote Pink Floyd once more, from their
album ‘Dark side of the moon’. This theme is well described by
both Berkaak (1993) and Walser (1993).
... and straight
rock’n’roll:
From
this trip into the imaginary places of the mythical dark and evil
forests of black metal, let us return to the more prosaic place of
Rudenga. After playing for a while in a black metal band, Grim says
he has had enough of the demands for having the right opinions, the
right clothes, listening to the right music and so on. Even though
he likes the music, the demands of living like a ‘real’ black
metallist, and the imperatives of an ideology he did not agree with
(he never could accept the racism, for example), black metal became
too much of a straightjacket for him. The demands and content of
this homology were, in Grims words, ‘too narrow, too constraining
and after all not especially fun’ (in other words totally in line
with our analysis of black metal as somewhat Calvinistic). So he
broke up, and joined in what he and his mates call a ‘straight
rock’n’roll band’ with Roy (23) who also is working in the
House. Grim says:
Rock’n’roll
is more about not giving a damn, you can have short hair and long
hair and use almost any clothes you want. Its wider. More open.
You don’t have this pressure on you. It’s fun. And it’s the
music I’ve grown up with.
For
both Grim and Roy, the concept of rock’n’roll is in many ways
summed up by the (at least once ‘heavy’) metal group, Kiss.
Fronted by the bass player Paul Stanley and the vocalist Gene
Simmons, the band has existed for more than 20 years. Kiss was one
of the first rock bands to wear make up masks and for a long period
they were very popular for their spectacular stage shows. On videos
they play with much of the horror imagery of heavy metal, but often
in a quite humorous way and in most cases combined with sex.
‘Girls, girls and girls’ is the dominating theme often in
combination with Gene Simmon’s famous tongue which he often shows
on stage and on video in various situations - for example, in roles
like the sexually thirsty mad gothic king enjoying both virgins and
considerable amounts of health food (!) for breakfast in suitable
scenarios. He thus approaches many of the themes of the carnivals
described by Bakhtin, especially the so called ‘lower bodily
stratum’ theme (here as sex and food), in addition to exposing an
undeniable male chauvinism in different ways (see, for example, the
video Exposed). On several levels Kiss is more in touch with
what Bakthin would have labeled as joyful and carnivalesque, and
represents quite the opposite of the more constraining cult of fear
and the severity of black metal. It is therefore not surprising that
Grim finds a band cultivating an atmosphere along these lines as a
liberation, especially after his involvement with the black metal
scene.
The
rock’n’roll band is the latest combination of a series of bands,
more or less with Roy as a vocalist and front figure. Roy tells me
that the roots of the style of the band came from a 1½ year period
when he and some mates were unemployed and were out in town drinking
heavily and living in what he terms a rølpa style. Being
‘rølpa’ he explains as the equivalent of being a
‘rock'n’roller’ (‘rocka’) in his head, which for example
means being free to do things spontaneously, as when he and Grim
suddenly decided to go to Gothenburg to drink and party during a
holiday. Musically it means ‘not to give a damn and kjøre full
pupp (literally, giving a full breast of milk?) which can be
translated as playing with maximum output on all levels. You rølper
more when you are young, and his boss - the leader of the House is
characterized by Roy as ‘being young in his head’, although he
is 34, which is quite old in Roy’s opinion. He says:
Working in
a youth club is not so different from being in a band. You’re
quite free here. You can talk to the members and do a lot of
things without having a boss who’s after you all the time.
In ways like this, his
work at the House is characterized as ‘free’, his boss as
‘young and a little rocka in his head’ and so on. And
because arranging concerts, playing music and getting the
possibilities to rehearse in the band room of the House are
important ingredients of the life and work on the House, it is not
surprising that Roy also speaks of the House and the youth club in
same or similar terms as he talks about music and his band. In this
way he is using musical terms to characterize the place where he
works, an example of how terms, values and practices connected
to musical discourses are extended, related to or used to construct
a locality, in this case something as ‘real’ as a working place.
The place is then conceived in accordance with central elements in a
musical discourse, here in the shape of what Roy and Grim call
‘straight rock'n’roll’.
Grunge, class and gender:
contested versions…
But
this conception of the club as a place resonating so strongly with
Grim’s and Roy’s version of the ethos of rock’n’roll, with
Kiss as the ultimate reference, hardly reflects an approved and
unchallenged atmosphere Three girls forming the core of another of
the bands rehearsing in the club, repeatedly complain to the
anthropologist (the present author) that ‘this club is not the
place for our music’, while casting a frowningly dismissive
glance at Roy’s often very extrovert proclamations of Kiss as the
undisputable kings of rock’n’roll. While informing the
anthropologist that they have recently got rid of their no good male
drummer, they say enthusiastically that the nearly all-female
American ‘grunge’ groups, L7, Babes in Toyland and Hole are
their definite favourites, even though they also of course like
Nirvana, Faith No More, Rage Against the Machine as well as the more
experimental Sonic Youth. A male (!) journalist in the Norwegian
heavy metal magazine called Scream has written the following
about the L7 concert at the Reading Festival:
L7 is the
most rølpa female rockers in LA. At the Reading festival
one of their band members took out her tampon, waved it over her
head, and threw it out to the public. To meet such tough female
rockers is no longer a sensation, but to find purely female bands
that really have balls, is still rare.
(Scream No 21, 1994, translated by the author)
Even
though some respect is granted L7 for their rølpa attitude,
the quite explicit male chauvinist overtones in this quotation can
be seen as a suitable illustration of the contested gender positions
within different genres of rock’n’roll. Much can be said about
the attitude that this quotation reflects, but at least it expresses
approval for a female band that behaves totally different from the
‘nice and pretty’ stereotypes that still hold a certain sway for
female rock’n’rollers (replacing one stereotype with another is,
of course, another matter). And when the girls in the local grunge
band complain that the club is not the place for their music,
finding Roy and Grim and their heroes especially antagonistic, it
becomes obvious that the contest between musical tastes is also
being interwoven into the contest for dominance of this very
‘real’ place (the club), which in turn can also be seen as an
expression of the ever continuing contest between the two genders.
But there
is also another dimension here. In the process whereby Rudenga and
the club - at least to some extent - got rid of the stigma of being
‘dangerous’, ‘the slum’ and so on, some youth from the more
‘respectable’ surrounding areas of detached and semi-detached
houses started to visit the club. The members of the grunge band and
several of their circle of friends (albeit with some exceptions),
came from these areas. Some of them related stories about how their
(more middle class) parents told them to ‘speak proper’, when
their daughters absorbed some of the eastside/working-class slang
and modes of speaking that are strongly associated with Rudenga and
the valley of Grorud, in general. While it is probably wise to guard
against generalizing too widely about the connections between the
taste for different popular music genres and social class, there are
at least some indications of these links in the contrasts
represented by Roy and Grim on the one hand and the grungers on the
other. The heavy metal tradition, as carried forth by Kiss, is
usually characterized by being macho (in varying degrees),
horror-loving, W.A.S.P-oriented. The grunge girls see themselves as
associated more with ‘independant’ genres like sub pop, grunge,
and to some extent new, metal-influenced funk like Rage Against the
Machine and Faith No More, in addition to very explicitly stated
anti-sexist and anti-racist attitudes. In Norway at least, such
clustres of attitudes are mostly associated with groups within the
politically-correct (often a little leftist), humanist and
intellectual middle class. If this analysis is correct, then the
contests for dominance over the youth club through musical
preferences are also to some extent anchored in differences of
social class, appropriately adding one more aspect to the ever
present contending of tastes (see, of course, Bourdieu’s Distinction
1992).
Constructing place through
music
All
these examples have in one way or another pointed to places, to
locations, whether ‘real’, imagined, or imaginary.
Only a few of them have referred to the ‘real’ place
where this discourse is conducted. Yet all these versions of
locality are parts of a discourse that is going on within the same
location; they take place under the same and ‘real’ roof, so to
speak, of the House and the youth club at Rudenga.
The
project of changing the unmistakably ‘real’ place of Rudenga
through images, attributes, sounds and practices embedded in musical
discourse was our first example. We have travelled from this, very
concrete and ‘grounded’ kind of practice – challenging the
stigma of the ‘real’ place, with a short ‘transit’ in the
imagined ‘America’ - to the imaginary and fantastic places of
death, to a present version of a past and heathen Norway, to the
deep, dark contemporary forest-fantasy inspired by old Norwegian
folklore, and back again to the ‘real’, in the shape of the
working place of some otherwise unemployed Norwegian youth who fuse
it with the multifarious, seemingly ever returning and fascinating
ethos of rock’n’roll. In the last example, contest over place on
the basis of gender and possibly class was added to the picture.
These
stories also show that the very ability and inclination to twist and
distort the ‘real’ by the unpredictable power of imagination and
fantasy is not only a means to escape, transgress and even
eventually to forget the local, it is also the probably most
important prerequisite for changing that ‘reality’ (however one
chooses to flesh out this distinction) and the ‘real’ place that
one inhabits, through strategies and practices of empowered use.
At a
first glance, one is inclined to view ‘music’ and ‘place’ as
two seemingly disconnected phenomena (except, perhaps, for songs
where places are named or described more explicitly in words). But
this is of course not the case. Let me present one last example that
illustrates this in a rather concrete and tangible manner.
Per tells
me that when he and his mates painted one of their first graffiti
pieces many years ago, the caretaker in one of the blocks, in anger
over these unruly youngsters, tried to destroy the grafitti by
throwing a bucket of yellow paint on it:
It's still
there today. In the underpass under the motorway that begins at
the left of the kindergarten. You can still see some traces of the
yellow paint over the skyscraper silhouettes that we made at that
time. We wanted them to resemble the pieces in Beat Street, you
know.
This
hardly noticeable spot of yellow paint is for Per a material and
concrete reminder of a time that for him and his buddies was a
golden age. For all who know the story about it, it is also a sign
of the parts that they eventually played in the stories that they
participated in at that time. For someone who, for example, some
years later experienced their first kiss under this faded and
unreadable spot of paint, and noticed it and remembered it without
knowing any of the preceding stories, this place might have yet
another meaning. In other words, no sign is ‘pure’ and pointing
to only one referent; no music is pure, and no place is pure. Any
entity capable of carrying meaning is always carrying meaning for
someone, as Peirce (1958) has long since pointed out, in practices
where several dimensions of social life (for example play, power
relations, aesthetics, etc.) play significant parts. Thus both
‘place’ and ‘music’ are, like any other sign, potentially
associated (infused, impregnated, loaded) with stories they are
‘reminiscent of’, for example, through resemblance (iconicity)
or contact (metonymy), and these ‘meanings’ may at times be
completely different from the conventions that originally surrounded
them. This implies that signs (including music and places) cannot be
understood separately from the actors that use them, and the
collective and individual stories (contexts, practices) and concerns
they are integrated into.
For Per,
this spot of yellow paint ‘stands for’ a whole range of
experiences: dancing, being local heroes, the film, etc. and of
course all this being mixed with music (in many ways just like the
famous sip of tea that for the French writer Marcel Proust was the
very sense impression that gave him the access to the memory of the
village of his childhood, in seemingly ever increasing detail, see
Proust, 1968). And when Per hears some of the old tunes that
accompanied his favorite dancing team ‘the Rock Steady Crew’,
performed by Grandmaster Flash, or even James Brown, or whoever were
his heroes at that time, he is probably quite inclined to think of
Rudenga in the ‘breakdance period’, permeated with the images of
Beat Street. In this way, place represents music, and music
represents place. To transform a ‘real’ space, which before
being taken into use by an actor, in some sense is neutral, into
‘place’ that is invested with personal and/or collective
affection, you have to do something there, and in this way fuse it
with memories of these actions (or fantasies) that sometimes, in
fact, might be given quite material manifestations - as in our case
with this spot of paint. So this is a very obvious example of a
construction (and the necessarily corresponding modification) of
place, stemming from a musical practice, and in this case resulting
in a very concrete modification of that place. In this way,
‘space’ looses its neutrality at the very moment it is
incorporated and made relevant to the lifeworld of a particular
actor; it becomes ‘place’ in the process by which it is touched
by the very subjectivity of its users.
But does
this mean that physical modifications or changes are a necessary
prerequisite for a ‘real’ space to become a ‘real’ place?
And what about what I have termed the ‘imagined’ and the
‘imaginary’?
I suggest
that in all these modes of space, some modification, action, or use
is necessary for it to become a place: it has to become a part of an
ongoing practice in one way or another. When Per and the breakdance
fans invest the place where they live with attributes derived from
practices of this youth culture, they do this with highly affective
values and statements. When Grim is imagining America, he mixes it
with personal hopes and expectations, just as Helge projects his
fascination with death and the unknown to the place of the white,
red-eyed penguins in Lovecraft’s novel. The black metallers seek
to revive their version of the heathen Norway of the Vikings, the
forest of folkloric monsters, with their ‘opinions’ of what this
means, Roy combines what he held to be the ethos of rock’n’roll
with his working place, and our female grungers contest the previous
version with criticism founded on gender and probably also class.
All these versions of locality represent some sort of modification
and change in their different constructions of place; they are all
different metaphorical versions of the yellow paint. In this way,
the movement from space to place is always a process of active
construction, whether the process results in something as concrete
and material as a ‘real’ spot of yellow paint, or if the
modification is limited to something that ‘takes place’ only in
fantasy or imagination. (And as mentioned earlier, what is
‘really’ real and what is not, not to mention what happens in
the boundaries in between, is hardly possible to decide in any final
way.)
But to
grasp these points of construction in a more concrete manner, you
probably cannot avoid investigating people in flesh and blood (that
is, the actual ‘users’) in the continual flow of social
practices. And even though the more well-known black metal
‘stars’ referred to here have never been inside the building (to
my knowledge), the events, the music and the practices mentioned are
commented upon and related to at least by some of the youth using
the House for various purposes. In fact, only very few of the
members of the youth club were black metal fans, and all members I
have discussed these themes with strongly distance themselves from
most of the black metal ideology and practices. But events that are
written about in seemingly absolutely ‘non-local’ media, such as
for example the English heavy metal magazine Kerrang, are
also a part of the local discourse at Rudenga in the sense that
relevant articles are related to and commented upon by their
readers. In this sense, of course every discourse is somehow
‘local’ - that is, it is going on in concrete places by concrete
persons in concrete situations, there and then.
In other
words, Per played with Grim when they both liked Kiss and Metallica.
Grim then played with Helge in the death metal band. Helge then
split and started a black metal band where he now intends to
experiment in different ways, both in the direction of ‘serious’
contemporary music - for example, Arne Nordheim - and with elements
from Norwegian folk music. Grim is now playing with Roy who also
played with Per while Grim was playing in the death metal band. And
originally, both Per and Grim played with David, who for a short
period played drums with the girls in the grunge band. Per, who
still likes black metal music - if not the acts - has just quit his
recent humour-oriented band, which of course is very far from black
metal. He is now trying to get together a dance group with his old
friend the Iraqi Ahmed, his mate from the breakdance period, a
project that also contrasts with the sometimes expressed racism of
the black metal of that period. Per still likes the old breakdance,
but despises modern ‘machine-music’ as he terms it, like hip hop
and rap, which Ahmed actually likes and is involved with.
So we
find no simple ‘homology’ in, for example, Per’s case, but
rather some quite composite micro-politics, moving around in all
these genres (Vestel, 1995; see also Vestel et al., 1997 for a more
general outline of the landscape of spectacular youth cultures in
Norway in the first half of the 90s). And then you have the very odd
shadowland called ‘mainstream’, where a little bit of this and a
little bit of that makes the whole picture much too foggy for any
ideal academic clarity. Maybe the ghost of post-modernism can rescue
us from this ever present tendency to oversimplify.
All these
‘voices’ are taking part in this discourse around music at
Rudenga. From different positions, with different histories behind
them, in the continuing flow of situations, music, places, and a
whole lot of other things that develop and transform. In all these
cases I have presented, musical expressions have in a variety of
ways been closely connected to place, near or far away, in space,
time, fantasy, or in ways representing more introvert and
existencial dimensions.
As Martin
Stokes put it:
The musical
event, from collective dances to the act of putting a cassette or
CD into a machine, evokes and organizes collective memories and
present experiences of place with an intensity, power and
simplicity unmatched by any other social activity (Stokes in
Stokes (ed), 1994: 3).
If
changing a space into place can be understood as the process whereby
space is invested with both idiosyncratic and collective memory -
that is, with subjective associations of a concrete actor - then
this focusing on place, I hope to have shown, seems to be an
approach able to bring forth such associations in the shape of what
is held to be of importance in the lives and fantasies of these
actors. Since music especially - as the quotation from Stokes
indicates - seems to have a certain ability to absorb and carry a
very wide range of human experience, dreams and attitudes, acting as
what we could term ‘a projection board for life’, so to speak,
then focusing on the varieties of place, especially in musical
discourse, might be a fruitful approach to get a better grip on the
rupturing flows of social creativity.
Notes