my guest blog on Social Shutter re: Maryland Deathfest 2011

This week the visual urban sociology blog Social Shutter ran my photos and a new essay about Maryland Deathfest.  If you didn't see the post, I've reprinted it below.  And do check out Social Shutter, where Georgia State University sociologist Deirdre Oakley and her students offer some compelling and provocative photoessays.

Deathfest

Posted by Leonard Nevarez, BALTIMORE, MD -- The Maryland Deathfest (MDF) is the biggest festival for "extreme heavy metal" in the U.S. – and, so far as I know, the only urban festival in North America for heavy metal of any kind.  Since 2003, the event has drawn performers and fans from metal's most controversial sub-genres: death metal, grindcore, black metal, doom metal, crust punk, stoner rock, and their various hybrids.  These are the sounds that make parents around the world freak out if discovered in their kids' iPods.  On the whole, this music is bracing in its volume, speed, and discordance; the bands' names and lyrical content are intentionally blasphemous or stomach-churning; and vocalists' guttural growls and raspy screams convey the experience of eternal damnation and the despair at humanity's inevitable extinction. 

Needless to say, none of this music comes within miles of the music charts.  This is metal's deepest underground, historically overlooked by the corporate music industry. Yet it has become a significant industry of independent recording labels, music distributors, merchandise companies, music periodicals and blogs across the world.  While few of these bands could play to sizable crowds by themselves, MDF provides them a rare critical mass of consumers and media attention.  In turn, bands and listeners alike have lauded MDF for its discerning taste and global scan in selecting the most exciting and obscure bands in extreme metal.  This year the 63 bands on the festival schedule came from 17 nations across 4 continents.  Predictably, Scandinavia was well represented (Satanic black metal being almost synonymous with Norway), but even Greece and Saudi Arabia yielded excellent groups.

Admittedly, I'd lost touch with heavy metal's evolution since the 1980s and early 90s, the years when thrash metal (the first extreme sub-genre: Metallica, Slayer, etc.) flourished, and hardcore punk crossed over subculturally into the metal underground.  By that time, as cultural critics and sociologists of subculture have observed retrospectively, those musical developments contributed to the consolidation of the peculiarly omnivorous yet ironic cultural sensibility associated with the post-punk "neo-bohemia", captured so well in Richard Lloyd's Neo Bohemia and Ryan Moore's Sells Like Teen Spirit. Metal has since fallen largely under the pop-cultural radar, so I was eager for a quick submersion back into its underground.

As an urban sociologist, I was also interested in MDF’s social and geographic insertion into central-city Baltimore. Like so many other American rustbelt cities, Baltimore has continually lost population over the post-WWII era, having shrunk by almost a third since 1950.  Yet since 2000, according to the most recent American Community Survey, the 25-34 age group has increased, and now represents 16.7 percent of the city's total population. Evidence of a thriving bohemian enclave can be found around Baltimore, particularly the neighborhoods surrounding Johns Hopkins University. In these neighborhoods independently-owned coffeeshops flourish, along with renown record and zine stores; fashion boutiques and giftshops that incorporate with a wink the city's 1960s-era aesthetic (best captured by the films of local hero John Waters); and a small but celebrated local indie-rock scene (epitomized by Beach House, Dan Deacon, and Wye Oak).  Traditionally, heavy metal isn't associated with urban music scenes so much as state/national distinctions and the suburban landscapes of adolescent alienation.  However, I wondered if the elevated degree of musical/subcultural connoisseurship illustrated by MDF’s organizers and attendees reveals an emerging identification with the distressed-brick exteriors and haunted cityscapes favored by so many contemporary urban bohemians.

Three days in Baltimore at Deathfest provided much food for thought, if only speculative at this stage, as well as ringing ears.  Video footage from this year's MDF can be found all over the internet. Decibel Magazine's videos are a good place to start but watch the volume.

Leonard Nevarez is an associate professor of sociology at Vassar College.  He is the author of two books, Pursuing Quality of Life and New Money, Nice Town.  You can read more about Maryland Deathfest and view the rest of Leonard's photostream on his blog Musical Urbanism. He can be contacted at lenevarez@vassar.edu.

Maryland Deathfest 2011: my photos and a first take

Maryland Deathfest 2011, a set on Flickr.

So much to chew on from my weekend in Baltimore. Talked to a lot of folks, got a decent look at a few local areas, did some record shopping, and became acquainted with National Bohemian beer, a.k.a. Natty Bo, the cheap beer of choice in Baltimore. Plus, I woke up Saturday morning with a blood bruise in my eyeball that I have no idea how I got.

And Maryland Deathfest! I got a look at about 15 different bands over 3 days. The music was of inconsistent quality, but the scene was just great to soak up. Here are the photos I took on a cheap digital camera. View this as a slideshow and check out the descriptions ("Show info") for my commentary on the festival.

getting ready for Maryland Deathfest, part 1: statement of intent

Grades have been turned in, the school year is over, and now I turn to more important responsibilities — road trip! In eight days I'll be attending Maryland Deathfest to experience the state of the art in extreme heavy metal. As the event's website states, "With an emphasis on diversity, the festival brings together the very best death metal, grindcore, thrash, hardcore, black metal, and experimental bands from all around the world." 

 

Why am I, a 42-year-old family man and sociologist, going to Maryland Deathfest?  Well, first: BECAUSE I CAN, thanks to my sainted wife who's tolerating my absence for four days while she stays behind with the kids.  So this counts as my Father's Day present, my birthday present, my Christmas present this year... and maybe even next year...  But I'm also going to satisfy my curiosity about three issues:

1. The return of 80s-style thrash metal.  My years of metal obsession were most intense between 1987 and 1993—in a nutshell, from Slayer's South of Heaven to Sepultura's Chaos A.D.  As I remember it, those were the period when the heyday of thrash metal (or speed metal, as we called it; I never used the term thrash metal or, worse, power metal) originating out of California gave way to Florida-based death metal, British-driven grindcore, all manners of occult weirdness from Continental Europe (often involving facepaint), and the mookification of alternative rock.  As Francesco, my former student and guide to all things contemporary in metal, has shown me, the sounds of thrash metal have influenced a number of young bands who have pulled back from the speed of death metal or the commitment of black metal (for two excellent examples, listen to Skeletonwitch and Toxic Holocaust). 

Yet as with most revivals, this isn't your father's thrash metal, but a selective revision of the 80s genre.  Most notably, much of the really extreme metal today disposes of the guitar solos that could be heard in the middle of almost every 80s thrash metal song. What does this signify?  A postmodern decentering of the foundation in blues-based hard rock that their 80s predecessors felt obliged (by their guitar teachers, perhaps) to acknowledge?  How else has thrash metal been selectively revived today?  How will the presence of 80s legends like Voivod, Nuclear Assault, Corrosion of Conformity and Coroner on this bill be received?

2. What's the metal action like these days?  I've been led to believe that Maryland Deathfest isn't another Ozzfest-type event where "extreme metal" is simply a corn-fed American music to send young men into the armed forces.  The music here will be niche, particularly centered in the black metal domain, and surprisingly global in origin.  Who's the audience for this stuff?  The most discriminating and alienated of the male lumpenproletariat, for whom Slipknot and Avenged Sevenfold might as well be the Black Eyed Peas and Katy Perry?  An educated musical intelligenstia looking for a little more kick than the All Tomorrow's Parties festival can provide?  Will the general admission floor erupt into a bruising wall of death, or will the audience merely stand in silence the better to shoot video from their iPhones?  Will attendees wear monastic robes and cowls, adorn themselves in leather and chrome, or paint their faces in black-metal kabuki style?  (GOD I HOPE SO.)

3. Brand THIS, Baltimore!  As this blog illustrates, I try to critically engage the latest paradigms in the fields of city branding and economic development, which are very enthusiastic these days about attracting musically sophisticated creative-types seeking an authentic, interactive relationship to places.  The models here are South by Southwest or more likely your more garden-variety city street festivals, which (the thinking goes) heighten to a not-too-abrupt crescendo a city's year-round portfolio of local performance, creativity, and supporting "amenity infrastructure," the better to provide a musical calling card for residents and tourists who always have choices about where they could live or visit. 

Baltimore could be doing worse in terms of attracting the demographic profile that's usually connoted by these paradigms: the college-educated 20-somethings who form and follow indie rock bands.  It's a demographic quite distinct from the city's general population (almost two-thirds black, lower educational attainment compared to Maryland) and long-term trends (constant population decline since 1950).  Not as bad as Detroit is maybe one way to think about it: Baltimore has the cheap housing and distressed brick aesthetic that draws a stream of bohemians comfortable with a distanced, ironic relationship to the hotspots of the urban crisis. 

How does metal, with its historic stance of alienation, fit into this dynamic of place consumption?  Never mind the city's professional marketers, who we can expect want nothing to do with a festival like Maryland Deathfest—do Baltimore's kreators [sic] and consumers of music hold a place in their iPods and their hearts for extreme metal?  Maybe the city is the wrong scale, to talk about since even in its 80s heyday, thrash metal was a quintessentially suburban/metropolitan music (e.g., Northern California's East Bay, NYC's boroughs/Long Island).  Indeed, if we expand the radar, then iconoclastic metal groups like Maryland's Iron Man begin to pop up.  Given the global origins of MDF's bill, just how far away are the attendees for this festival coming from, and do they relate to the city as more than just an event destination?  Obviously, these are questions that point away from the festival venue and into the parking lots, hotels, and other settings for tourist concert-goers.  Will we see black metal fans in the Baltimore Aquarium?