Metal has often been derided for a supposed lack of sophistication, with such criticism frequently betraying undercurrents of snobbery at music perceived to be by and for young, working-class, white men. Metal musicians, audiences and researchers in the 1980s and 1990s responded by comparing metal’s complex structures and musical virtuosity to the more culturally prestigious baroque music.¹ More recently, the extreme subgenre of drone metal, characterised by extremes of slowness, repetition and amplified distortion, has also attracted classical connotations from minimalism, twentieth-century avant-gardes and non-Western art musics. This chapter examines how drone metal and its experimentalism grounded in metal tradition has influenced external perceptions, not just about that subgenre but about metal in general. Evidence for this transformation can be found in the monthly music magazine The Wire, a publication based in the UK and with global coverage and audience. First published in 1982, it covered jazz and improvisation, expanding to consider experimental and global avant-garde music in a serious critical and intellectual manner. Since 2013, largely complete archives have been available online to subscribers.

This chapter traces the magazine’s changing attitude to metal, influenced by its coverage of drone metal, through the straightforward method of searching for and analysing all mentions of the term ‘metal’ in 437 issues from 1982 until July 2020. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, The Wire frequently and explicitly denigrated metal as stupid, this disdain often seeming to relate to prejudices about class and education. Any positive discussions of metal were legitimated through association with more acceptable jazz or experimental musicians or by appeals to exotic and even racialised difference. From the early 2000s, however, drone metal musicians such as Earth, Boris, and especially SunnO))), garnered more approving responses. While sometimes The Wire still painstakingly distanced drone metal from the rest of metal, gradually the overall tone towards metal shifted. After drone metal had been judged worthy of coverage as avant-garde music, metal itself could be retrospectively recognised as having always been experimental. Drone metal, via its links to classical and experimental musics, thereby influenced the perception and treatment of metal more broadly, even prompting revisionist rewriting of historical bias against it in this particular publication. This case study therefore shows how marginal subgenres can affect how the broader genre and its cultural status and value are perceived beyond metal.

Drone Metal

Music that would become known as drone metal emerged in the 1990s, with the 1993 album 2: Special Low Frequency Version by Earth widely regarded as the landmark early recording of what would develop into a loosely defined subgenre featuring extremes of extension, slow repetition and distortion. Drone metal extends beyond the atmospheric slow riffs of doom metal to present more radical abstractions of genre tropes while still grounded in metal’s heavily amplified noise.

Contrasting with other extreme metal subgenres, drone metal did not develop in a local scene but through isolated bands influenced by recordings of other similarly unusual bands. Versions of Boris’ 1996 debut album Absolutego, for example, bore the same subtitle ‘Special Low Frequency Version’ and showed a clear influence from Earth in the extended repetition of extremely slow, distorted metal riffs. Sleep’s Jerusalem (1996, later rereleased as Dopesmoker in 2003) extended their earlier Black Sabbath worship to a single hour-long dirge. When Sleep split, the rhythm section formed the band Om to explore sparse doomy meditations on bass riffs and mysticism. The band SunnO))) emphasised their commitment to amplification by taking their name from amplifier manufacturer the Sunn Musical Equipment Company, even reproducing typographically the company logo, which itself visually signifies sound waves. SunnO))) began playing smoke-filled shows in black cowls in the late 1990s and have continued to develop their massively amplified droning sound. Less well-known drone metal bands lurk at the edges of metal and experimental scenes: Bong’s weird-literature-inspired heavy drones sometimes feature Indian instrumentation; Corrupted alternate between short sludgy hardcore pieces and vastly extended drone doom tracks embellished with piano or harp; Nadja and Black Boned Angel build slow swirls of harsh ambience towards abrasive, cutting riffs; Menace Ruine combine haunting vocals with odd folk-infused distortion. Drone metal musicians claim influence from both metal tradition and experimental avant-gardes: guitarist Dylan Carlson named his band Earth after an early incarnation of Black Sabbath and wore a Morbid Angel t-shirt in the back cover photograph on their best-known record, while in interviews mentioned the minimalism of Terry Riley and La Monte Young as conceptual inspirations.² As the most critically and commercially successful drone metal band, SunnO))) perform at both metal festivals and prestigious classical concert venues; they pay tribute to metal in collaborations with black metal vocalists Attila Csihar, Wrest and Xasthur, while also working with contemporary artists Banks Violette and Richard Serra, and experimental musicians beyond metal.

Finding Metal in The Wire

Having previously enjoyed occasional issues, I subscribed to The Wire in April 2013. Reading every monthly issue since then, I became familiar with the music covered, the writing style, the magazine’s values, and, as with any such publication, the implied projection of those values onto its readership. I noticed a distinctly ambivalent attitude to metal music, even in positive treatments of examples of what I considered to be metal. Some writers were and are more generously disposed to metal, but in the editorial voice and across the magazine in general, metal stood out, needing to be excused or justified in ways that other genres did not. A searchable online archive of past issues provided an opportunity to historically examine The Wire’s discussions of metal. My approach was simply to search this archive for all instances of the term ‘metal’ and, where it referred to the music genre, analyse how metal was presented.³ As expected, the search garnered many false positives, for example, where ‘metal’ described the material, as in ‘direct metal mastering’ in advertisements for recordings, or regarding instruments such as saxophones or the unusual creations of industrial musicians Test Dept, Z’ev or Einstürzende Neubauten. The word ‘metal’ also appeared in song or album titles rather than referring to the music genre; though interestingly, several were examples that influenced drone metal: Coil’s occultist drone Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders); PiL’s atmospheric post-punk Metal Box; and especially, the relentless distortion of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. It is likely that some remarks about metal music in the magazine were not discovered by this method if band names like Black Sabbath or Slayer or subgenres like thrash, grindcore or doom were mentioned without using the word ‘metal’. Some of the scanned magazine pages had been damaged or obscured, and automated text processing sometimes rendered text incorrectly, so some mentions of metal may have been lost. However, the method found many examples over nearly four decades of publication, revealing historical changes in metal music’s presentation in the magazine.

Extraction

Metal’s first mention sets the tone for its early treatment in The Wire. A 1982 review reports that free jazz band Catalogue ‘ape the stereotyped postures of Western rock music (the heavy-metal axe-hero, the screaming banshee, etc.). Yet their stance is perhaps more serious’.⁴ Here, metal represents a rock cliché, which can, among other tropes, be mastered by experimental musicians for loftier goals. Bobby Previte is described in 1992 as possessing ‘accumulated wisdom of almost a century of jazz with influences as diverse as Gamelan, minimalism, heavy metal and King Sunny Ade’,⁵ while Branford Marsalis in 1994 plays a ‘mix of everything from jazz with dancehall rhythms, Heavy Metal riffs with blues improvisations to country twang over HipHop beats’.⁶ Metal is one among many options available to the masters of an umbrella music, jazz or an unnamed ‘everything’. In the 1980s and 1990s, some metal-related music is appraised positively, but only if noted jazz or experimental musicians are involved. Projects involving John Zorn and Bill Laswell are mentioned favourably,⁷ though metal is presented as a part-time foray by musicians whose credentials are guaranteed by their contributions to proper jazz and experimental music elsewhere. In one review, Laswell and Zorn are literally ‘traffic cops’ overseeing collisions between metal and other styles.⁸ Musicians who just play metal, or worse, identify with it, are ignored or scorned.

As early as 1992, there appears an article arguing that ‘heavy metal is at last ready for credibility’ and that it ‘essentially experiments with the outer limits of sound’.⁹ But the article cannot resist distancing itself from metal’s ‘inherently reactionary nature’, its ‘endemic sexism’ and the ‘presumed chauvinism of its audience’.¹⁰ Metallica, Iron Maiden, Deep Purple and Diamond Head are mocked, and the only group pictured is, incongruously, grunge band Nirvana. Metal is commended for providing samples for use in rap, for (again) the involvement of Laswell and Zorn, and for production techniques used outside metal: Rick Rubin ‘shouldn’t be forgiven for Slayer’ but is praised for his work with The Beastie Boys.¹¹ Metal is valued only for aspects that have been extracted for use elsewhere.

Reclaimed Metal

Music that resembles metal must be rescued by associations with more prestigious music. Any worth in the Stooges’ classic 1970 proto-punk album Fun House derives from its ‘trans-spectrum overblow of free jazz’, because ‘without that, it would have indeed been the “fast heavy metal” its detractors deplored’.¹² The magazine’s writers criticise what they think metal is trying to achieve, positioning experimental musicians as having casually mastered not only the musical style but its entire aims as well. Peter Brötzmann’s aggressive 1985 saxophone-led free jazz album reportedly out-muscles guitar music: ‘Rock’s supposed “threats” – for example, Heavy Metal or Punk – were just so much fairy cake for Machine Gun people’.¹³ Also trumping metal’s apparent goals is Brötzmann’s son Caspar in 1992, whose music is able to ‘wade through dense gastric sludge to emerge into the implacable clarity of The Riff. Well, if only heavy metal was really like that’.¹⁴ Experimental rock group Zeni Geva are commended with a comparison to the latter musician for doing metal better than metal bands, as their ‘improvisational, Brötzmann-esque guitar fills’ lift them ‘out of the death metal swamp’.¹⁵ Whatever metal tries to do, jazz musicians – especially ones called Brötzmann and ones who play like them – can do better, and they can do more besides.

Metal’s audiences need saving from metal. Describing a noisy 1994 guitar record by Ascension, the reviewer (after yet another reference to a Brötzmann) benevolently hopes for metal (and indie) fans to be saved from the music that is somehow misleading them: ‘This guitar noise desperately needs to reach all those currently being fobbed off with indie jangle and “Heavy Metal”’.¹⁶ Conversely, readers of The Wire can listen to metal sounds if protected from metal audiences. A 2004 review of Kayo Dot approves of the band’s transcendence of everything that is wrong with metal culture:

Disdain for audiences is evident, but there is relief that the metal sounds can be safely removed from them. Zeni Geva reportedly ‘recycled the power and density of death metal as it should have been played, and rebroadcast it to audiences who wouldn’t have listened to a group such as Death’.¹⁸ That review implicitly approves of those who do not listen to death metal since they are able to hear that style played properly by musicians not defined by metal. The text does suggest that the writer has listened to or is at least aware of the metal band Death, showing a similar mastery in listening or critical writing that the jazz musicians are purported to have in playing.

Claims to mastery in listening are, however, betrayed by obvious errors. At first, Napalm Death are from Norwich;¹⁹ then they are from Ipswich;²⁰ before a reader’s letter correctly points out they are ‘Birmingham born-and-bred’.²¹ The nationalities of two notorious Nordic black metal entities are mistakenly reversed: Abruptum described as from Norway²² and Euronymous of Mayhem as from Sweden.²³ In 2008, the magazine describes ‘Leicester’s outlandish Black magic rock group Coven, the nearly men of heavy metal’, mistaking the Californian proto-doom group Coven for the British band Black Widow.²⁴ The magazine portrays itself as knowledgeable, but carelessness about details suggests it wishes only to show that it knows enough about metal to dismiss it.

Stupid Reactions

The problem with metal is openly stated: it is stupid. A 1992 review of a metal compilation makes a striking comparison to the music that was then the magazine’s more usual territory: ‘Metal – stupid jazz, jazz for intimidated teens – shelters unwitting Coltrane’s countless unwitting children’.²⁵ The musicians do not ‘know how or when to end a solo’, they ‘indulge themselves’, the music is ‘clueless’, ‘histrionic’ and ‘insane’, but in the end is described, with benign condescension, as ‘not as totally brainless as all the speed and weight would imply’.²⁶ Elsewhere, metal is fundamentally young and dumb: it is rock’s ‘aesthetically-challenged baby brother’.²⁷ A reviewer observes that ‘[m]etal short-circuits informed opinion-makers and sells directly to unformed kids’.²⁸ Young people are problematically ignoring cultured, educated gatekeepers like The Wire. Instead, in the same piece, a ‘working class-ish’ audience is depicted as attracted to the ‘macho vocal preening’ and ‘arrogant, slag-fluid virtuoso guitar’ of Deep Purple’s ‘idiot pretensions’.²⁹ Here stupidity, as lack of education, is really about class. An article in a themed issue titled ‘In Praise of the Riff’ bemoans that

Hard rock is bad enough; music for halfwits which actually makes you stupid. But metal’s dead-end associations with manual labour (evoked especially by the mention of denim) make it even worse.

Inverse Others

Some metal is treated positively. One of the first examples of an encouraging review mentioning metal is in 1991 for the band Oxbow: ‘mogadon metal submerged in volcanic lava … a bizarre fusion of psychotic flamenco and thrash’.³¹ Managing to be complimentary despite referencing mental instability and a sedative drug, the review again situates the music as a mixture rather than just metal. Other than John Zorn or Bill Laswell projects, the earliest band with multiple approving mentions tied to the term ‘metal’ is Body Count, described in positive write-ups as speed metal in 1993,³² thrash metal in 1994,³³ and rap/metal in 1996;³⁴ the first metal band awarded a full feature article were Living Colour in March 1993.³⁵ The song ‘Super Stupid’ by Funkadelic is described as akin to Black Sabbath;³⁶ as featuring one of the greatest riffs of all time,³⁷ and as ‘the greatest Heavy Metal song ever’.³⁸ It is fitting that The Wire considers the best example of metal to be a song with the word ‘stupid’ in the name. Even Michael Jackson’s songs ‘Black or White’ and ‘Beat It’ are ‘disco-metal’.³⁹ The common factor is striking: the most prominent musicians praised in The Wire for playing metal are Black. It is commendable that these musicians received positive coverage, particularly since, as Kevin Fellezs has observed, musicians of colour are often subject to racist exclusion from metal and hard rock institutions.⁴⁰ However, given The Wire’s open disdain for metal, valuing these specific metal musicians and almost no others remains troubling. In a short review contrasting two bands who combine elements of metal and hip hop, when readers are told that ‘New York’s Biohazard, work from within metal [and] LA’s Rage Against the Machine work from without’,⁴¹ it is difficult to avoid the implication that this is because the former band features all white members, while the latter comprises mixed race Black Latino and white musicians. Rage Against the Machine’s album is described as ‘absolutely flawless’,⁴² yet this recognition is tempered by the magazine’s inability to accept them as primarily a metal band. While the term ‘metal’ is mentioned, the review aligns them more with rap, funk and Flavor Flav; ‘their funk discipline is even more honed than their hardcore chops’.⁴³ In a kind of inverse othering, The Wire in the 1990s covers musicians of colour who play metal, but disassociates them, and itself, from metal. In doing so, it colludes from the outside in constructing metal as an essentially white space by rhetorically undermining the ‘metalness’ of non-white musicians in order to situate them as acceptable for discussion in the magazine.

Metal can therefore be commended if distanced from an imagined white working class. A 1999 editorial is intrigued by ‘Maghreb Metal’, thinking that a ‘collision of speed Metal and Berber culture sounds like a real headfuck’.⁴⁴ The same piece expresses curiosity about ‘death Metal units from Cuba and Colombia’ before yet again mentioning Bill Laswell and Funkadelic’s ‘Super Stupid’.⁴⁵ A 1995 feature discussing ‘Malaysian speed metal kids’ and ‘the Black Rock Coalition’ displays its exoticising nature in the article title ‘Lost in Translation’.⁴⁶ Zeni Geva, mentioned earlier in relation to death metal, are categorised in 1994 as ‘Japcore’, reducing them to a juxtaposition of heaviness with national/ethnic identity, and further stereotyped as ‘turning the old Japanese trick of replicating an American model better than its original makers’.⁴⁷ A 1993 article about Islam and metal even highlights how both Muslims and metalheads are stigmatised as exotic.⁴⁸ The Wire in the 1990s fetishizes otherness, rejecting metal that is implicitly white, working class, young and stupid, and considering metal only if it displays non-white or non-Western signifiers.

Enter Drone Metal

Drone metal, as experimental music and then as metal, gradually gains acceptance in The Wire over the two decades since its first mentions in the early 2000s. Initially, drone metal is treated according to the pattern established by The Wire’s previous treatment of metal, where heavy music is worthwhile if it can be rhetorically distanced from metal. By the mid to late 2010s, drone metal becomes accepted as a form of metal music and prompts retrospective revisionism where the magazine, despite its earlier denigration of metal, acknowledges that metal has always been an experimental tradition.

In the early 2000s, qualifications still need to be attached to anything metal-related for it to be presented to The Wire’s readers. SunnO))) and Earth are called ‘Metal method actors’, suggesting that their connection with metal must be role-play rather than sincere.⁴⁹ A 2003 editorial disapprovingly states that metal ‘has remained hidebound by subcultural constraints’,⁵⁰ but views ‘the “meta-Metal” of artists like SunnO)))’ as palatable because it is apparently ‘Metal played by people who aren’t Heavy Metal people, who have no investment in satisfying that audience’.⁵¹ Metal sounds are acceptable if removed from unacceptable metal people. The claim that SunnO))) and others are not ‘Heavy Metal people’ is obviously ideological because it is obviously wrong: SunnO))) members have played in multiple metal bands, performed at metal gigs and metal festivals, run metal fanzines and metal record labels, collaborated with metal musicians and consistently expressed commitment to metal scenes.

An early feature on SunnO))) from 2002 begins with a quote from the band’s guitarist: ‘“I’m a headbanger, what can I say?” announces an unapologetic Stephen O’Malley’,⁵² the interviewer’s added adjective hinting at an unspoken convention that metal should be apologised for, and that refusing to do so is daring. The article describes

an ironic statement, given The Wire’s stern policing of exactly that border from the other side. The initial quote joins a long tradition: in 1987, musician Nigel Manning was evidently conscious of the expectation that shame should be attached to metal: ‘I’ve never lost my heavy metal roots. I still listen to Black Sabbath albums – and you can print that’.⁵⁴ In a 2005 interview, Cambell Kneale of drone metal projects Black Boned Angel and Birchville Cat Motel is treated similarly, his enthusiastic words about metal editorially framed with disdain:

The reporting verb ‘insists’ works in a similar underhanded way to the description of O’Malley as ‘unapologetic’; these terms are used to describe the musicians’ words, but it is the writer who is smuggling in hints that perseverance with metal is somehow contrarian. Then, when Kneale reports a tentative solidarity between metal fans known in antipodean slang as ‘bogans’, the author or editor interjects a translation of this colloquialism, introducing aggressive class prejudice which is not present in Kneale’s use of the term (see, for example, Dave Snell’s work on this term).⁵⁶ Three years later, as if returning to a nagging, unresolved concern, a review of one of Kneale’s projects refers back to this same piece incredulously:

Even by 2008, the magazine seems unwilling to take at face value the words of a musician who straightforwardly professes that metal is important. Nevertheless, the last sentence of the quote suggests the route to metal’s rehabilitation.

Alchemical Transformation

Anti-metal sentiment still appears in The Wire, but acceptance of metal through drone metal reaches a turning point in 2005. An eight-page ‘guide to the core recordings’ of metal features far more drone metal examples than might be expected from its marginal status in the metal world. Of thirty-six featured albums, the first three are by Earth, ten are by SunnO))) or directly related projects, with another four by Boris, two by Corrupted and two by Sleep; the remainder are by black metal musicians, two of whom have since collaborated with SunnO))), or by industrial metal/noise artists.⁵⁸ Drone metal’s centrality to The Wire’s view of metal is consolidated further in 2009 when SunnO))) became the first metal band to feature on the cover.⁵⁹ To date, the only metal bands ever pictured on the front of the magazine are SunnO))), Earth⁶⁰ and Boris,⁶¹ all of whom played drone metal for at least significant parts of their careers. SunnO)))’s cover story coincided with the release of their 2009 album Monoliths & Dimensions, perhaps their most self-consciously avant-garde recording, with a song named after Alice Coltrane, horn players with jazz and experimental histories, and cover artwork by contemporary artist Richard Serra. On this record, The Wire considered SunnO))) to ‘have provided the catalyst for Metal’s recent emergence as a credible avant garde strategy’, after Earth had laid the groundwork in taking their sound ‘some distance from the lewd phantasmagoria of mainstream Metal’.⁶²

Metal now can appear as always having been experimental. By 2013, ‘[m]etal has long been a testing lab for vocal techniques’ for Ronnie James Dio, Bruce Dickinson and Rob Halford,⁶³ vocalists from an era when metal was routinely described by the same magazine as stupid. Two years later, The Wire has completely reversed its previously scornful position: ‘It’s not so much that there is a rich tradition of experimentalism in heavy metal; more that heavy metal is, at its core, an experimental form’.⁶⁴ In 2020, there is room for serious discussion of a ‘death metal avant garde’;⁶⁵ and in 2018, Celtic Frost’s Into the Pandemonium from 1987 is recognised as having ‘helped carve out a space in metal for the kind of avant garde experimentation that is now taken for granted’.⁶⁶ There is even a complaint printed in the letters page, also in 2018, that in the magazine now ‘only metal is appreciated as a proper avant rock form’.⁶⁷ Denigration of metal does still appear, and some writers were already more open-minded towards metal. But drone metal, and specifically SunnO)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions, changed perceptions and prompted a reappraisal of metal in the magazine.

Metal thus emerged from waste to become something of value. It is no surprise, then, to find that writers have often reached for the metaphor of alchemical transmutation. Movement from disdain to qualified acceptance to revisionist approval can be traced through these magical reference points. Godflesh in 2001 are ‘working with superheavy base Metal’,⁶⁸ implying a lumpen material requiring transformation. Such work is successful in 2008 for drone metal band Nadja whose ‘alchemical process transforms ponderous Metal into abstract grandeur’.⁶⁹ By 2009, sludge/drone metal band Gore can also be found ‘transforming leaden Metal into heavy instrumental gold’.⁷⁰ Again it is SunnO))), who are awarded the most extravagant praise in esoteric terms, for their ‘extraordinary alchemical feat of turning base Metal into an open, richly resonating musical platform incorporating spectralist, cosmic jazz and heavy drone influences’.⁷¹ When in 2014 Earth guitarist Dylan Carlson released a solo album entitled Gold, the trope was impossible to avoid, with The Wire even referring in a passive-tense generalisation to the kind of prejudice that had previously been common in its own pages:

Drone metal’s experiments thus initiated a magical, revisionist transformation of perspective for The Wire. The precious value of metal finally dawned on learned gatekeepers of the experimental avant-garde. Metal audiences – the aesthetically-challenged kids, the stupid intimidated teens, the denim-clad halfwits – had known that secret all along.