Most past scholars in the fields of sociology and musicology have, in their writing on rock music, neglected the textual nature of the music. These scholars are divided in their conception of rock's role in the lives of its listeners. Some, like Jeffrey Jansen Arnett, treat the listeners as fanatical devotees who build their lives and personal environments around and with the stuff of rock, as if it were the sole source of meaning for them, like a type of cult. Others, like Peter Wicke, treat rock like a "scene," or a series of scenes, which provides the basis for social events and interactions, and which is part of a general atmosphere. Both of these approaches are fertile ground for volumes of scholarship. Nonetheless, there is another dimension which has not been addressed: the "literary" function of music. By approaching rock music as text and cultural product, instead of as a lifestyle, activity, or behaviour, rock music scholarship can achieve new understandings of its subject matter. One function of popular music is that which literature used to play, and which film plays today. That function is analogous to a social barometer of sorts. Popular music depicts things that are relevant to its own period and setting. Like great literature, popular rock music paints pictures of its environment. Painting and literature are both the subjects of disciplines which examine them seriously and critically. The scholars who come closest to accomplishing this task in popular rock music are rock historians. They examine the meaning of rock texts and their connection to their society, considering the listeners to the extent that they are the source of the reflected image that is the rock music text. But rock historians work for the most part diachronically, and thus do not achieve the depth of examination found in many literary studies.

Still, no cultural phenomena can be completely understood without examining it in a historical context. Of course, new metal is not purely "new." It has very distinct affinities with past forms of popular music. It has tangible roots in earlier musical styles and texts. Being what Korn's vocalist, Jonathan Davis, calls "pretty heavy music," (DiMartino http://www.launch.com) new metal has roots in early heavy metal music which also dealt with themes such as psychological fragmentation and loss of identity. But new metal is not heavy metal, which is why it requires a different descriptor. Jonathan Davis, Korn's singer, has stated in an interview, "I don't like being labeled a metal band. We all hate it. But we're lumped in that category because we're heavy and we could only get tours like Ozzy, Danzig" (DiMartino http://www.launch.com). In another interview he points out: ."..they've always called us heavy metal and it fuckin' pisses me off because that's just fucked up. They put us in that category, but I don't know what to call it. No one has come up with a really good fuckin' name to call this... there's been emo-core, heavy-hop, post-metal and nü metal. None of those really ring a bell" (http://www.korn.com). New metal's inventive quality causes it to elude definition according to previously established labels. For that reason it has a purity about it reminiscent of another radically inventive era in popular music history: the 1950s. Rock and roll music was born in the 1950s because of a climax in capitalist social control. The similarities between the birth of rock and roll and the birth of new metal are many and equal in number to the contrasts. The play between these similarities and contrasts is what, historically, sheds the most light on the "raison d'être" and meaning of new metal.

As rock historians Don Hibbard and Carol Kaleialoha write in their book entitled The Role of Rock, "Rock, like they [the generation that grew up with it], was a product of, and a reaction to, a prosperous, urban, beaurocratic/computerized corporate state, whose heritage stressed, 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'" (1). The same is true of new metal. There are some social similarities between the 1950s and the 1990s, although I will not be analyzing these in depth. The 1950s were filled with promise resulting from material affluence, immediately following several decades of war. Yet that time was extremely repressive; the expectation of rampant, unrestrained capitalism to provide happiness and fulfillment was so intense that it almost functioned like hooks pulling the corners of the mouths of North Americans into tight, forced, delirious smiles. Of course everyone should have been happy, it seemed, for everyone had access to nice cars, houses, clothes, appliances, and other unnecessarily luxurious commodities. Advertising became bold, creating a very tangible atmosphere with a single, unified, unqualified message: consume. This absolute imperative to travel the road of freedom to happiness became oppressive in its singularity. This is the same state of affairs as in the 1990s in North America. Following the Cold War the spread of clean and luxurious technology, epitomized in the household commonness of personal computers and the internet, has once again made the state of the world appear free of the large scale worries and problems of the past. The radical surge forward in communications technology has caused the same univocal message to abound more cohesively than ever before. Communications technology has even tamed and appropriated war elsewhere in the world, and the capitalist discourse now uses communications technology to its own advantage, pointing to the unhappy consequences for countries who have not subscribed to the idea of "absolute freedom". Brand name fever is at a high; popular music sings about material commodity and is material commodity. Everything, it seems, is about the free market system. We must be happy; to be happy we must be proper and fit in; to fit in we must buy expensive things. But, as Doestoevsky has observed, happiness always comes at the expense of freedom—"Dostoevsky does not believe that humanity can achieve freedom and happiness at the same time," (Wellek and Lawall 2367)—and yet when one realizes that one is not free, one starts to become unhappy. In both decades happy propriety became religion. But, inevitably, more and more critically aware people began to keenly feel that, while they were maximally affluent, there was no way for them not to be happy. In other words, doors were being closed to them. No matter that those who might want to keep these doors open were considered perverse and antisocial; what mattered is that people were being robbed of the freedom to choose whether to be happy or not. Human beings will bite off their own tongues to assert their right to choose to do so, and the bottom line has been proven once again to be freedom. The pop hits which rock and roll displaced were nice, smooth, controlled, and obedient. The music was consonant and clean, the lyrics were safe and acceptable. These qualities are not inherently bad, wrong, or suspicious, but they came to be decreasingly reflective of the reality of the lives of North American youth and increasingly representative of the oppressive social order which was forcing youth to be dishonest with itself.

It is thus that 1950s rock and new metal rose as loud, frantic, distorted voices to shake loose this propriety-obsession/oppression. Although they are very real, I will not delve too deeply into the musical similarities between 1950s rock and roll and new metal. Both are loud, guitar-driven, rhythmic, intended for dancing, relatively simple (compared to other rock movements and other forms of popular music), distorted, intense, and simultaneously happy and unhappy. The important difference is the simple and obvious fact that from a 1990s perspective, this has already been done. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis could boogie their worries away, thumbing their noses at propriety and capitalist control by chaotically letting loose bodily energy. But, as with all musical counter-movements, this nose-thumbing, raucous guitar- and piano-playing, and kick-your-feet-up dancing ceased to function as a resistance strategy when capitalism incorporated the idea in the form of Chuck, Jerry, and Elvis copy acts which were more bland, tame, sober, and safe. New metal is letting loose the same bodily energy, but without the faith in the meaning, consequences, and future of the action. New metal's generation, while perhaps being unfamiliar with 1950s rock and rock social history, has a feeling of knowing that this has been done before and obviously did not bring about any permanent change. In the face of glossy, saccharine, formulaic, carbon-copied pop hits and of oppressive hyper-capitalist urges towards mind control, new metal is screaming unintelligibly and dancing away the energy the listeners and musicians have built up against the constraint of consumer-propriety, all the while knowing that this is likely leading nowhere and that their message is already a part of the capitalist system. This results in a paradoxical act of rebellion executed in the knowledge that the act will not ultimately lead to any place outside of the repressive system targeted and that it is already within the set of codes set out by the system. Consequently, this paradoxical act of rebellion is very frustrated.

Hibbard and Kaleialoha write that 1950s rock and roll "music defied the traditional middle-class standards of taste, and was associated with anti-social values, and with time it came to embody a way of confronting the 'system' on a day-to-day basis" (1). The first two of these points are true of new metal, but the third is not. Whereas early rock "beckoned to those floundering on the stagnant sea of middle-class complacency," (4) new metal now itself flounders. After several phases of evolution, rock became

an accepted part of American civilization, as much in tune with daily life as Barbie dolls, Budweisers, Ban Roll-On, and Big Macs. Assimilated into the ebb and flow of middle-class society, stripped of its antagonist role, rock has evolved into a respectable, albeit superficial, element within the larger matrix that is America. Divested of any social meaning, it is now an end in itself..." (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 5)

This insight is integral to an understanding of new metal, which is, in fact, a battleground on which the conflict is playing itself out between an adherence to and a loss of the faith in rock's power to provide relief from a repressive hegemony. New metal artists continue to believe that music can have some kind of power or effect, even if they are unsure what that effect is, yet they are also unable to happily turn a blind eye to the fact that the promises of satisfaction, happiness, and contentment of this late-capitalist democracy have not been fulfilled. They crave honesty, sincerity, and authenticity in a society which has all but forgotten what those concepts are, and thus make music which is driven by this contradiction. Bought and sold in the virtual marketplace of cultural commodity, bands like Korn want to drive up record sales—Korn guitarist, James "Munky" Shaffer, speaking about Korn's third album, has said in an interview, "Of course we wanna sell as many albums or more than the first two. I think that would be one of the band's goals," (http://www.korn.com) and Korn vocalist Jonathan Davis told Dave DiMartino that "Money will always be a priority," (DiMartino http://www.launch.com)—and yet, in the words of Jonathan Davis, they also "just want to be remembered as a band that brought back rock and roll" (Pecorelli http://www.calendarlive.com). Indeed, the rhetoric used by the members of Korn is blatantly reminiscent of rock and roll at its conception; Jonathan Davis says "I think that Korn is contributing to [the current state of music] by creating a new style of music bringing heavy music back, putting the 'rock' back in 'rock and roll'" (http://www.korn.com).

Rock and roll has been characterized as a combination of European ballad with irregular Afro-American rhythm. This has never been as true of North American chart-topping popular music as it is with new metal, especially Korn and Limp Bizkit. Jonathan Davis states that "In Paris, they call us 'fusion.' That's kind of cool" (DiMartino http://www.launch.com). Without getting too involved in an analysis of the "fusion" nature of new metal, it is necessary to point out the Afro-European blend which characterizes much new metal in order to highlight this similarity between new metal and early rock and roll. These two popular music "movements" are not the only ones which have involved such a fusion. Disco, funk, and rap are also all characterized by this quality, but early rock and roll and new metal are the two movements of such a "fused" nature which best bring together social rebellion and radical popularity.

New metal leans more towards African-American influence than has past popular music, although I will focus here on the dance-orientation of new metal. Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the other originators of rock and roll created a very unique atmosphere and mood. Their music was hard, heavy, frenetic, and chaotic, but it was also structured and was meant for dancing and having fun. This special, specific approach has not been reproduced until now. All music meant for dancing has been on the lighter side of the popular music spectrum—even guitar music like funk, disco, and psychedelic, the latter being favoured for a less rhythmic and more abstract sort of dance which is now often mocked by young people—and hard, heavy popular music has never been geared towards smiling, laughing, and bouncing. 1950s rock and roll shares this very special intent with new metal. Heavy metal has varied across the spectrum from scowling and stomping one foot to laughing and cheering, but has never been designed to, as Jonathan Davis sings, "get your boogie on." + On the other side of the same coin, music which has been written for dance has never since had the visceral, loud, aggressive, frenetic, distorted qualities of early rock and roll. This combination seems to be naturally linked to a need to shake off the bonds of enforced happiness. Fighting an insidious social phenomenon that is at once happy and unhappy, the musics of these two periods have internalized that very contradiction. One important difference between the two periods is the structure of the music. Indeed, early rock and roll blatantly defied the songwriting structure of the current pop tunes. Much of the music's structure was taken from blues music, which has always been rhythmic, but not always dance-oriented. This entails (not that it is tangibly important to this study), among other things, twelve-bar progressions which most often used I-IV-V chords. But, whereas rock and pop used the same system differently, some new metal discards the system entirely, having no solos or established rules of phrasing, chording, or beat structure. Describing Korn's music, Jonathan Davis says "I think it just creates a cool musical cocktail or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, it's putting chaos into music. Because all the sounds are all dissonant and just fucked up. It's not really all in key. It all melts together into something that's got melody" (http://www.korn.com). Asked for advice for aspiring musicians, Korn guitarist Brian "Head" Welch replied "...play from your heart and there are no rules. ... We do some stuff out of key that totally works and people would tell me it's not right. Works fine for me" (http://www.korn.com).

In contrast to early rock and roll, much new metal combines a very "white" European metal guitar sound with not only hip hop rhythms, but with a hip hop approach and philosophy—Korn's bassist, Reg "Fieldy" Arvizu, says "I don't even listen to anything heavy at all. I don't even own a CD that has a guitar in it" (DiMartino http://www.launch.com). The result is beat-driven, rhythm-oriented music for dancing. While metal has never before even given credit to the idea of dancing, the origins of rock are in dance music. Even new metal bands that are not outside the classical notation system or informed by a hip hop philosophy are dance-driven. Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson have both released very dance-oriented songs and use "techno" components—which include beat-boxes, programming, synthesizers, and sampling—to enhance danceability. Korn, Limp Bizkit, Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, and Nine Inch Nails are all played in dance clubs on the same night as house music, '80s pop, '70s funk and disco, and '90s ska-punk. Indeed, "Rock 'n' roll drew heavily upon the rhythm and blues for its substance" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 8).

At this point it is worthwhile to quote a magazine writer, writing near the end of early rock and roll's period of purity and power (before corporate capitalist interests neutered the music). In 1964, Jeremy Larner wrote the following in an article entitled "What do they get from Rock 'n' Roll?":

...though the lyrics portray the familiar broken heart who cannot go on living without his True Love, the bouncing rhythm of the song conveys another emotion altogether; the desire to thump straight on through all heartbreaks and difficulties. This ostensible lament is really steering-wheel pounding music. The crybaby lyrics are countered by pure psychopathy, nor is there any resolution of these conflicting feelings. The image presented is that of an extremely tender individual ready to strike out or give up if his dreams don't come true. The protest against the clichés of American adulthood is carried by the music rather than the words, so that the teen-ager can pay lip service to the feelings from which the music proclaims his alienation. It is as if his mind did not know what his body was doing. At the same time he expresses his distress with the conventional life and sex attitudes, he prepares to make his peace with them. (46)

This description is uncannily appropriate for new metal. New metal is now thumping straight on through emptiness, falsity, self-doubt, uncertainty, and a general void of meaning in the world; thumping for the sake of doing something, creating something to hold onto, speaking to create a constant reminder that the speaker still exists. The psychopathy is even purer in new metal, as will be demonstrated later—a content analysis would reveal a very high rate of occurrence of the word "psycho" in the lyrics of Deftones and Limp Bizkit, as well as other more explicit descriptions of psychoses in the lyrics of Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, and the music of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, and Rob Zombie all engage in some form of disconcerting fragmented fraying. Some of the vocalists are more "tender" than others, for example Jonathan Davis and Deftones' Chino Moreno. Where they differ from 1950s rock and roll is that they all know that dreams do not come true, and, in this society, dreams are all that is left for youth to adhere to, so the death of dreams is the death of meta-structure, of grand narrative, of God, so to speak, and thus the world is left without an organizing principle. The clichés of American adulthood which surround new metal are not chastity and heartbreak, but are rather capitalist prosperity and hyper-celebrity, and lip service is not paid through the lyrics, but through literal engagement with those clichés by the musicians. New metal records are selling extremely well, and all of the artists have very large fan bases. Disillusionment has already been "done" by grunge and appropriated as another false, fashionable money-making scheme by hypermarket industries like fashion, Hollywood film, and music. New metal musicians thus have no faith in the grunge route, which so obviously failed. Since popular music is now what Jonathan Davis calls a "fickle fuckin' industry" (http://www.latimes.com), new metal is cynical, lost, confused, and consequently enraged, sarcastic, or purely escapist. Still, the dichotomy described by Larner is not only present, but has been intensified to a soul-rending degree. A quotation from an interview between Teri VanHorn of L.A. Times and Jonathan Davis and Reg "Fieldy" Arvizu sums up the comparison with Larner's scenario:

"You don't sit down and get depressed when you listen to Korn," agrees Fieldy. "You wanna get up and bob your head." "Well, those guys' grooves are energy and up," says Davis of his rhythm section. "And what I'm singing about is fuckin' depressing. It's a perfect mixture, like yin and yang. All uppity phat grooves, and the depressing stuff that balances it out." (Van Horn http://www.latimes.com)

In the wake of grunge's death, new metal, consciously or not, has reached back to the source of rock and roll to retrieve its very basic rebellious element, and it has heightened that element to a new intensity. And yet new metal is possessed by an anxiety unknown to 1950s rock and roll: that the rebellious popular culture products being created today have been tried already and have not worked. The point here is that reflecting on the conditions which caused the birth of rock music can shed light on the bizarre, frenetic, "panic-stricken" (in the words of Jean Baudrillard), schizoid nature of new metal music, and the reason for its current popularity. As the cliché goes, "history repeats itself."

In the 1950s, "American teenagers were growing up in a rapidly changing society. America's value system, especially its attitudes toward love and sex, was visibly in transition. Old words remained in vogue, although certain people recognized these to be inoperative, and even restrictive, approaches to life" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 19). Rock history descriptions of the 1950s paint a picture which is strikingly similar to the present situation and to new metal. Right now North American society is undergoing transition the rate of which is unprecedented. Despite the early rock and roll of the 1950s, the hippie movement of the 1960s, and the grunge attitude of the early 1990s, materialism continues to be the strongest, most ubiquitous, and most insidious driving force in society. Despite their broad range of potential uses, communications technologies are used almost exclusively for entertainment and profit. New metal artists are surrounded and permeated by a consistent atmosphere of profit-seeking which homogenizes cultural products into the most widely saleable objects possible, but they feel an inner need for individuality, for self-fulfillment, and for self-expression. Just as early rock and roll was responding to the presence of a dichotomy between restrictive social codes and the increasing autonomy of young people, new metal is the fruit of an unresolvable tension in the lives of young people between the cultural validation of material success/excess and their own praise of independent thought and self-expression. Despite the frenetic pace of change in today's culture, Jonathan Davis sings "Nothing changes, just rearranges." A frightening level of disillusionment, discouragement, and loss of innocence is apparent in new metal lyrics (from Korn's "Children of the Korn": "Generation triple-x," "All I wanna do is live!"). Chuck Berry's invocation in his song, "School Days," now sounds glib: "Hail, hail rock 'n' roll, deliver me from days of old." The music and image today's rockers reflect suggests that no matter how pristine, pure, innocent, and good a style of music is when it is created, it will not bring about any permanent change in the lives, freedom, and authority structures of mass culture, as it is inevitably captured, retooled, and deflated by capitalism.

North American youth is undergoing a loss of innocence similar to the loss experienced by the youth of 1950s North America, for "[t]he [American] teenager of the 1950s dated and went steady at a younger age than any generation in recent history up to that time, and was too aware, experienced and optimistic to believe in the eternal broken heart" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 18). I have seen a twelve-year-old singer/songwriter/guitarist on a local open stage singing (I paraphrase closely, as I did not have a notepad with me) "Sitting on my ass, bored, waiting for the pizza / Watching my movie on my big screen T.V." In the 1950s rock and roll voiced a desire for movement, activity, and kinetic release; now new metal is giving a less optimistic voice to a sense of futility, boredom, and disillusionment. Material affluence does not appear to have fulfilled the 1950s teen generation, and today's new metal shows no faith in the virtue of acquisitiveness, nor in becoming debilitated by grunge's innocent, morose, depressive anger and resentment. Both new metal and 1950s rock and roll styles were/are an explosion of kinetic energy, and the distorted, raucous, driven guitar lines of Chuck Berry and Korn are accompanied by lyrics such as "The beat of the drum is loud and bold" and "Get your boogie on ... Come dance with me." The difference is that today's rock appears to reflect a sentiment that no matter what the music says or drives people to do, the world is a corrupt place that requires images to be bought and sold, principles to be compromised, and lines to be walked. Thus Jonathan Davis sings "You want me to be something I could never be" and Marilyn Manson sings "Rock is deader than dead, shock is all in your head, your sex and your drugs is all that we're fed, so fuck all your protests and put them to bed." + It is apparent here that the loss of innocence expressed by the music of today's youth, while perhaps similar in nature to that of youth's music in the 1950s, is enormously different in degree. The songs of 1950s rock "envelop the listener in a world of cars, school, adolescence, and rock 'n' roll" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 15); this sort of happy atmosphere is the opposite of the torment-filled environment depicted by Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Deftones. This (among other things such as negative self-reflexivity, excess shock value, sarcasm, crying, violent imagery, rampant profanity, confusion, and lack of faith) shows the massive loss of innocence which characterizes new metal, the intensity of which sets it apart from its early rock counterpart. While "[t]he sense of freedom, of total unrestraint and physical expression, lay at the core of rock 'n' roll" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 16), in the 1950s, what drives new metal today is the desire for freedom, lack of restraint, and physical expression. New metal's expression of urges for freedom comes to prominence, as is evident from a historical perspective, in times when individual social and semantic freedom is felt to be in short supply.

Marilyn Manson represents absolute freedom to do what one wants to do, regardless of how others may respond; excessively cerebral at the same time as being excessively visceral, corporeal, and abject, Marilyn Manson embodies doubt, questioning, and critical thought. They force deep-rooted inquiries into the legitimacy of current sources of authority such as "nature," religion, patriarchy, media, and gender. Thus they suggest that today's individuals do not realize the extent of their inherent freedom. Not only are we free to be atheist and to refuse popular trends of fashion and music, but we are also free to ignore nature's authority over our bodies. Thus Marilyn Manson's imagery is a hyper-extension of the "total unrestraint and physical expression" of early rock and roll, consisting, on Smells like Children, of hideous make-up and cross-dressing to which was added, with Antichrist Superstar undead imagery of death, disease, and decay (undeath has been for ages an ultimate mythical symbol of violation of the laws of nature, and has now been injected back into popular culture), and which moved to, in Mechanical Animals, futuristic, space-age costumes depicting mutation and bodies which are simultaneously female and male. The freedom Marilyn Manson expresses in their imagery and music is the most political of the new metal bands I am analyzing.

Like Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie devotes a lot of energy to elaborate sets, costumes, props, and visual aspects in his live performances. But Rob Zombie revels in a similar yet less political freedom to create actual, physical worlds onstage to the extent that he makes almost no money from his shows due to his expensive stages. This freedom is related inextricably to "authenticity" (recall my definition in the introduction), as can be seen in this excerpt of an interview between Rob Zombie and CDNOW's Greg Kot:

CDNOW: Your stage is amazingly elaborate (a futuristic castle infested with drum-playing druids, video screens, go-go dancers). It's like Dungeons and Dragons come to life. What kind of a sick mind would make something like that? ROB ZOMBIE: [Laughs] I designed it and then had a lot of my friends, special effects guys who are in movies, build it. The latest addition is an 18-foot robot that just towers over everything. It's absurd. The whole set cost about $200,000 to build. CDNOW: Can you break even on a tour with those kinds of expenses? ROB ZMOBIE: I don't know. That's what I'm hoping for. But it's very likely not to break even. CDNOW: So why do it? ROB ZOMBIE: It's a weird thing. I started with this idea I had as a kid, to do this giant crazy show. And when I finally got to the level where I finally could do it ... you really almost can't do it. But I have to! I won't make the money, but this is always the thing I wanted to do. (Kot http://www.cdnow.com)

While it is different from rock and roll's simpler desire for autonomy and control over one's own body and personal choices, Rob Zombie's freedom is the freedom to re-create one's entire world. While elaborate sets and costumes are not new to rock and roll, Rob Zombie's almost cinematographic focus causes his work to hover between pop/rock/dance music and "what are essentially imaginary soundtracks for a sci-fi slasher movie" (Kot http://www.cdnow.com). Indeed, "Zombie prowls a skull-infested stage like a postmodern Fagin in top hat, flying braids, tattered threads and Big Foot snow boots" (Kot http://www.cdnow.com). He exceeds even Marilyn Manson in his insistence on freeing himself and his audience from the bonds of the real world. Limp Bizkit represent a very different quality of freedom: generic freedom to sample from a range of musical styles. As vocalist Fred Durst says of the band's varied musical sources: "Everybody likes different music. Some shit we like's the same. Sam's a grunge kid, Wes is a metal, industrial kid, Lethal's a hip-hop kid, I'm a hard-core, hip-hop, 80's pop, Glam-rock, fuckin kid, John's a fuckin' little metal, grunge, jazz kid" (Wurm http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/6239/Bizkit.html). Ed Condran adds that

[Guitarist Wes] Borland, who, along with Scott, hails from Nashville, is an enthusiastic fan of everything, from industrial (Ministry) and glam (Bowie) to death metal (Carcass, and Testament). DJ Lethal, formerly the turntable man for [rap group] House of Pain, was weaned on hip hop and classic rock and his father is a guitarist with a wide record collection. [Bassist Sam] Rivers was very keen on grunge and metal. And of course, Grandmaster Durst's range of influences include Kiss, hard-core, rap and modern rock. (Condran http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Boulevard/4569/lbau.html)

After the demise of 1990s grunge music, happiness became almost an obligation for anyone engaged in popular music in what seemed like a compulsive desire to rinse popular music of the chaotic emotional and musical detritus of grunge, to sterilize it beyond any capacity for fertility, and to polish it to a blinding shine. It was as if popular music's populace has awoken from a bad dream and needed to free itself of any reminder of the previous night's perverse misery. Just like the music which was popular before and after the rock and roll revolution of the 1950s, this monovocal, obsessively happy state did not last long before the suspicious unrest which caused 1950s rock and roll, 1960s folk music, 1970s classic rock, and grunge music set in and fertilized the ground of popular music to grow new metal. Limp Bizkit revels in the now familiar blending of influences in order to transcend the straitjacket of familiar, happy, everything's-fine pop music. To highlight this facet of Limp Bizkit's music, it is worthwhile to quote the first hidden track from their second album, Significant Other. The track is an angry, lucid, eloquent spoken-word rant by the unidentified "bald man" (named Matt Pinfield in the album liner notes), over ambient background music:

Hey, it's the bald man, and I'm here to tell you why the new Limp Bizkit album is so important. That's because cds like this one spare you from all the chart-topping, teeny-bopping, disposable happy horseshit that brings up the bile from the back of my neck. I have no time or tolerance for those shitty, whack acts like that. I wouldn't piss on their cds to put out a fire. And I'm tired of those lame-ass, tame-ass, pre-fabricated, sorry excuses for singers and musicians who don't even write their own songs. What the world needs now is a musical revolution. We need some rock, we need something that has balls! We need something with substance, depth, something with soul, some edge, some passion, some power. Shit, if it's gonna be mellow, fuck, man, it better have something, it better mean something. I'll tell you, you gotta hit 'em with something hard, you gotta stick 'em with something limp, like Limp Bizkit. I'm so fuckin' tired of the shit that I'm hearing on the radio. Radio sucks! The same fuckin' songs over and over again. All the weak ones, all the disposable crap that isn't gonna matter in three months. It's just shit! It's crap, Fred! Fred, I'm telling you, there's so much shit going on and we need some new music! [...] +

This earnest monologue shows how seriously new metal artists feel the need for authenticity and freedom which I have been outlining and which were felt perhaps slightly less consciously in the 1950s.

Korn pursue the liberation of the body's kinetic energy which according Hibbard and Kaleialoha is typical of 1950s rock and roll. Especially with their third record, to experience Korn is to dance, move, and feel the corporeal quality of the music. The music is made to feel like the body's rhythms, and there are many points in the songs where the structure is reduced to very simple, slow, rhythmic repetitions, like an overwhelming drone. This represents a "victory" of the body over the mind, a refuting of the Cartesian rational-primacy which has led the members of Korn and their fans into the discursive darkness they feel currently. New metal music expresses a frustration with and a desire to escape from the sexual repression, the fashion limitation, and the tangled, inescapable web of meaningless images and ideas brought about by "the form of advertising ... in which all particular contents are annulled at the very moment when they can be transcribed into each other" (Baudrillard 87). New metal seems permeated by the idea that "[a]dvertising, [is] like information: destroyer of intensities, accelerator of inertia" (Baudrillard 92), and now the thing least likely to let them down is their own emotion and experience. All the new metal musicians I am examining question the reliability of "reality," and Korn reacts to that paranoid, ubiquitous doubt by investing in corporeality, emotion, movement, and feeling. Like drugs, Korn's music, at certain peak points, feels like it "switches off" the mind, drowning it in waves of sound which feel almost "fleshy" in the way that they elicit response from the body (examples include "B.B.K.," "My Gift to You," "Dead Bodies Everywhere," "A.D.I.D.A.S.," "Ass Itch," "Kill You," and "Freak on a Leash"). Literally, at these points almost all nuance and complexity drops away, taking with them rational thought and action, until all that is left is a rhythm and a loud, insistent, pulsing drone. This is also true of Jonathan Davis' vocals, like in the song "Twist," in which Jonathan Davis comments on the state of utterance and authority today. The sixty-second song consists of frantic, psychotic, feral*, gibberish including whining, groaning, and breathing, interrupted by abrupt breaks in which he simply says "twist... twist," indicating that no matter what he says, one authority or another will "twist" his words until they're unrecognizable gibberish, so the only way to retain one's self-mastery today is to utter gibberish at the outset. Corporeal and semantic freedom takes a different form on "Seed," where Davis' fleshy "tonguespeak" is modulated even further to transcend its own voice and language by being "scratched" on a turntable, or at least sounding that way. Here his own vocal production is made even more psychotic by this hysterical modulation. This part of the song resembles the fusion of racial-cultural practices which informed the rock and roll of the 1950s: Davis' patented babble is reminiscent of jazz music's scat, but has been remade into a very hard metal-ish style, and is now being fused with record-scratching, which was originated by African-Americans and which later became popular with white djs. The point is that while the physical freedom celebrated by 1950s rock and roll was a direct rebellion against a physically and socially repressive society, the physical freedom evoked by Korn's music is only a futile attempt, or even a wish, to rebel against such repression. Repressive social codes took a blow in the '60s with the popular sexual and physical liberation of that period, but they defused that threat by appropriating, incorporating, and castrating the processes used to achieve physical freedom. Finally sexual and physical repression was reinstated. Thus the avenue of rock's physically unleashing quality is no longer available as a method of refuting the repressive order's dominance over our bodies. No matter how hard we dance (and Korn dances hard), new metal musicians appear to know that we will still be surrounded by the need to cover our bodies, and to cover them with the right brand-name clothing. We cannot, it seems, shake off the obligation to once again make love behind closed doors, to touch ourselves only when we are alone, to go alone to web pornography sites as the only place for bodies which do not fit strict advertising standards. The excessive, demanding quality of Korn's physical emphasis results from the knowledge—and feeling—of its ineffectualness, of being sucked into a meaningless, motionless void. Now Jonathan Davis sings "So come dance with me" not because dancing represents freedom, but because there is nothing else visible to try as an assertion of freedom. There is no freedom, but new metal appears to insist that we stay alive and active, even if the action cannot find a coherent direction.

Another facet of new metal which reflects issues faced by previous popular music counter-movements is sexuality. In the late 1950s and early 1960s,

a number of 'cutesie' songs, such as the Royal Teens' 'Short Shorts' (1958), the Playmates' 'What is Love' (1959), and 'Little Miss Stuck Up' (1961), and Brian Hyland's 'Itsy, Bitsy Teensie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini' (1960) ... carried rather positive sexual messages in their simple lyrics. These songs emphasized the wearing of abbreviated and tight attire, swaying with a wiggle when one walked, and advocated more sexually open behaviour for teenage girls. (Who wore short shorts? They wore short shorts!)" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 19).

Also, the music of the late 1960s and the early 1970s was an integral part of the American sexual revolution. As America still possessed a modicum of innocence, "[t]o hear Jim Morrison sing 'Come on baby, light my fire' on AM radio indicated to certain people that America was loosening up. The glorification of sex in song, and its acceptance by AM radio served as an indication of America's amenability to change. Another taboo had been removed, another barrier destroyed, and people felt a little freer" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 72). The sexual liberation of the late 1960s was pure and innocent in its honesty and sincerity, and thus considered a victory for freedom. Just as "[t]he sound of teenage defiance, absorbed and remodeled by the spirit of American pluralism, became safe teenage entertainment" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 23), liberal sexuality became tamed and coopted. Now after the spread of sexual liberation, sexuality is no longer liberal; for the new metal generation—as Jean Baudrillard writes about commodity—"there is only its obscene and empty form" (Baudrillard 93). Images of sexuality are widespread in the media, but, paradoxically, sexual lifestyles and popular social codes are very conservative. New metal expresses a bitter, jaded nostalgia regarding sexuality, at the same time ironically reveling in an empty promiscuity and cursing a lost innocence. The chorus of Korn's "A.D.I.D.A.S." is "All day I dream about sex / All day I dream about fucking," and, in the verse, Jonathan Davis sings "I don't know your fucking name, so what, let's fuck." In "Children of the Korn," guest rapper Ice Cube says "Generation triple x / We're all about the weed smoke and kinky sex." The lyrics of Korn's "Faget" express Jonathan Davis' anger, rage, and sadness at being called the song's title; he sings "All my life / who am I?" and "I'm just a faget! / You can suck my dick and fucking like it!" Marilyn Manson sings, in "User Friendly," "I'm not in love but I'm gonna fuck you / till someone better comes along." The liners of White Zombie's Supersexy Swingin' Sounds and Rob Zombie's Hellbilly Deluxe have 1960's style pinup photos of nude and bikini-clad women. All of these features suggest simultaneously a nostalgia for a lost innocence and a sarcastic anger at the meaninglessness of sex. There are also some bizarre, deviant aspects to the approach to sexuality taken by some new metal artists. Jonathan Davis calls "My Gift to You" a "sick love song"; the lyrics are about asphyxiating his lover as they make love. The imagery in Marilyn Manson's liners, which I discussed earlier, features some evidently deviant aspects, such as coprophagia and androgyny. In the liner of White Zombie's album entitled "Astro-creep 2000," Rob Zombie drew bizarre cartoons of nude, sexually available women with strange, clownish lovers. These aspects could suggest a desire to shock and to draw attention to the emptiness of sexual imagery in the media, or a desire to occupy terrain of sexual imagery previously unused and to do something that hasn't been done, or an indifference to current social sexual codes caused by dissatisfaction with their emptiness and restrictiveness. In any case, new metal artists reflect strange, schizophrenic, contradictory, nonchalant yet frightened attitudes towards personal and public sexuality which support Jean Baudrillard's statement that "the balance of terror is never anything but the spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the cracks of daily life" (Baudrillard 32).

Despite their countercultural qualities, rock and metal have crossed through the state of "fully developed counterculture" into full-blown hegemony. Thanks to mass media, "Americans began to become aware of a fully developed counterculture in their midst," and that "the young were reshaping and redefining their world, and the primary evidence of such a change was the presence of rock music with its socially relevant sounds" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 40). This is the unresolvable paradox of rock: a rock performer is an artist and a musician. Thus he or she wishes to remain honest, authentic, sincere, and artistically respectable, but he or she also wishes to reach many people with his or her music and achieve critical and popular acclaim. This paradox was in pointed relief with grunge: the music's very name indicates its defining characteristic and the reason for its popularity. Grunge became popular because it was not written or performed with the intention of impressing anyone or being popular. There was a purity and an innocence about the entire "movement" (although grunge had become disillusioned with the idea of coherent, effective "movements" in popular music) which bordered on the naïve. Unable to reconcile the paradoxical requirements inherent in authenticity and success, grunge was too innocent to survive the machinations of capitalism, and it thus perished with its biggest figurehead: Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. New metal's sentiment towards the naïveté of grunge ranges from sighing acceptance of its non-viability to outright disdain. Jonathan Davis showed his reluctance to nod in the direction of grunge when he said, about the music his band makes: "No one has come up with a really good fuckin' name to call this. Nirvana had grunge, and I guess that's cool" (http://www.korn.com), and Rob Zombie revealed his sentiments in the following interview excerpt:

CDNOW: You succeeded even though it wasn't cool to be a rock star in the early '90s, with the rise of all those earnest, my-life-sucks bands. ROB ZOMBIE: To me that was just a bunch of bullshit. Their pose as rock stars was to act like they're not rock stars. But what does being a "rock star" mean, and why is it always bad? Does a baseball player walk on a field and say, "Whatever you do, don't call me a baseball player?" It's what you do. It doesn't have to be thought of negatively or egotistically. All those bands were so bent on convincing the world they were sincere and unhappy; I think they sucked the life out of the music. (Kot http://www.cdnow.com)

New metal artists agree that music must stop being mopey and downcast. They have infused their music with rhythm, dance, techno, visual spectacle, and irony. But despite their increased sales and popularity, they are concerned with issues of authenticity. Rob Zombie makes almost no money because he insists that his shows be "good"; he thus resists selling out by refusing to "profiteer" and by putting all he can into elaborate spectacles which conform as much as possible with his vision of a good stage show. Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Deftones all focus more energy on the music and less on the use of visual images. Their lyrics are intensely personal, introspective, and brutally honest. They apologize to no one and avoid any type of media-conscious "construction" in their work. Marilyn Manson is more like Rob Zombie; their image is totally constructed. They have become very successful by being "shocking," but their authenticity lies, like Rob Zombie, in their urge to create work that they like. Their lyrics lash out at concepts which have important roles in our society, and the musicians even undermine themselves by sarcastically insulting the ideal "rock star" image—consider the lyrics to Marilyn Manson's song "Mister Superstar":

Hey Mr. Superstar, I'll do anything for you
Hey Mr. Superstar, I'm your number one fan
Hey Mr. Porno Star, I,I,I,I want you
Hey Mr. Sickly Star, I want to get sick from you
Hey Mr. Fallen Star, don't you know I worship you
Hey Mr. Big Rock Star, I wanna grow up just like you
I know that I can turn you on
I wish I could just turn you off
I never wanted this
Hey Mr. Superhate, I just want to love you
Hey Mr. Superfuck, I wanna go down on you
Hey Mr. Supergod, will you answer my prayers
Hey, Hey, Hey Mr. Superman I wanna be your little girl
Hey Mr. Superstar, I'll kill myself for you
Hey Mr. Superstar, I'll kill you if I can't have you
Superstar, Superfuck baby +

Also, after achieving hyper-success with their "Antichrist Superstar" image, Marilyn Manson shifted radically and surprisingly to a David Bowie-esque androgynous, futuristic, glamourous, mechanical image. In other words, while these bands have all achieved astounding success, they all hold on to a desire for authenticity, and thus experience, to varying degrees, a dividing contradiction. The optimism of early rock lies primarily in its confidence in, as Hibbard and Kaleialoha write, "reshaping and redefining their world" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 40). But that idea is no longer viable to new metal musicians, and thus they are unable to resolve the rock music paradox as effectively as past rock musicians. New metal artists appear to believe that virtues like soul, passion, meaning, and substance cannot survive in a state of purity—like 1950s rock and roll musicians thought they could and 1990s grunge musicians thought they couldn't—without being savvy and engaging with the corrupt, capitalist world and essentially falling from innocence. But sheer disillusionment was the job of grunge. New metal artists are now raging not against the machine (for rage is the machine now), but they are raging against not raging. Each new metal artist I have chosen to examine deals with this problem with his own approach.

Rob Zombie ignores the problem altogether, chooses one segment of pop-culture imagery he particularly likes, and re-shapes it into a metal mold, as is visible in his song "Return of the Phantom Stranger":

Shape shifting high and a haunted eye
Falling plastic and paper demons
No trace of time, I'm branded sly
I am your ghostmaster baby free me.
All you know is alone, you see a phantom stranger
Down you go all alone, you love a phantom stranger. +

Marilyn Manson satirizes the shape of the world by profanely interbreeding its images (from the song "Angel with the Scabbed Wings": "He's the angel with the scabbed wings / Hard drug face want to powder his nose") and by mocking its lack of concrete foundation ("God is in the TV," from the song "Rock is Dead"). Bands like Korn and Deftones celebrate and cling to what they feel is left of their perception of human soul—as defined by the dominant norms of popular culture—by shrieking out its very shapeless essence, emptiness, and worry, like in Deftones' song "7 Words": "I've been humming too many words / got a weak self-esteem / that's been stomped away from every single dream." Thus, the consciousness of the inability to reshape and redefine the world—lacked by previous rock movements—is a primary factor in new metal. Rock historians write that "both the sounds of protest and utopian glory provide insights into the perceptions, motivations, and aspirations of the discontented young" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 40); it can be said that new metal's sounds of confusion, resignation, celebration, and dystopic perversion provide insights into the perceptions and anxieties of today's young. That new metal, with all its paradoxical panic-attacks and fun raging, is so popular signals its connection to the young people who are listening, watching, and buying.

The seeds of today's image-driven culture were growing even in the '60s, when the decline of 'intermediate associations', such as the church, family, and small community; the decreasing amount of 'meaningful work'; ... and the populace's increased awareness of living in a world of images created by the mass media and advertising, were viewed as explanations for the growing social unrest, .... The lives of these young people constituted a day-to-day reaction to an 'unreal' world which was all too 'real'." (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 41)

But now the world of images is so all-inclusive that people risk losing awareness of being inside it, for one can be aware of being "inside" something only if one can perceive its borders, its edges. Social unrest is at a popularity low, for few people perceive anything that needs to change. Now pop culture allows room only for benign unrest, because

[e]verywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is under-exposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, ... even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed at all the interstices of the social—just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing... (Baudrillard 80)

Thanks to the omnipresence of socialization, any real attempt at change is looked upon as "rocking the boat" and is not "cool." Thus, in order to be accepted by pop culture and by themselves, new metal artists must rage benignly—they must have fun.

"By the late 1960s an increasing number of young people felt caught in a time when two ages, two cultures overlapped; they had 'no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence'. ... For them the dominant culture had overextended itself and become divorced from life" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 77). Today new metal sounds like it is not caught between two ages, but is, instead, on the edge of limbo, unable to see any reality, contradictory or not. Whether the dominant culture is or is not divorced from life is no longer an issue for new metal, and today's young people are responding to statements that life itself is difficult to define in contrast to a dominant culture of images so intertwined with life that the two have become inextricable from each other. The new metal generation is now too experienced to revolt against dominant popular culture paradigms. Because we know that such a revolt has already been tried and has failed, even if today's savvy youth feel that they are unhappy with the state of culture today, to revolt against it now would simply end in mockery, so instead they are screaming, dancing, buying, and selling.

Before, in 1970, it was thought that "[a]ny possibilities for change lay in a more distant future, and the best the people could hope for was the maintenance of their own values within their own lives" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 98). We are now in that distant future, and youth still appear to be fighting for balance within their own lives. David Crosby summarized the death of pop culture mass movement at the moment it died: "I'm really sick of the talk and I'm really sick of the kids I see at rallies and stuff. Hey, they're jokes. Fuckin' revolution, man. They forget that they already ate revolution alive. That's not happening, man" (qtd. in Hibbard and Kaleialoha 99). New metal artists are sick of the "fuckin' revolution" in the wake of Crosby's moment of disillusionment, and new metal music reflects a generation trying to figure out what to do with their discontent, since they cannot revolt. Crosby had announced that "The dream was over. Reality time had arrived" (qtd. in Hibbard and Kaleialoha 99). New metal has announced that it is past reality time, and that no one is sure what reality is. The music is expressing a desire to "recognize the need to establish an operative individual-society relationship" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 99), as well as being resigned to the possibility that this cannot be achieved, because individual and society have become inseparable. In 1969 it was recognized that "rock was 'a product created, distributed, and controlled for the profit of American (and international) business.' Such a relationship ultimately doomed rock 'to a bitter impotence' as the music remained subservient to those whom it attacked, turning a profit for corporate America" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 135). This was one of the reasons for "the evaporation of the rock revolution" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 134). It is by examining this situation in rock's past that we can understand why new metal is so incredibly angry, volatile, and kinetic, while being at the same directionless, inarticulate, unmotivated, de-politicized, and introspective. The music is not apathetic; it reflects a confused pathos. In response to an interviewer's question, "Why aren't you guys political?," Limp Bizkit vocalist Fred Durst replied,

Because I don't have any...I sing about what's happening in my life and what's going on in my life. I don't know a fucking thing about politics, I don't watch the news. You watch the news, there's too many murders, too much shit. I hate violence, you know, but I'm all into expressing your anger, fear, and frustration, and like, getting it out of you. You know, everything on my record is, every song is about a particular person, a particular something that's happened to me with a girl or a guy or a bad experience, you know. That's what's locked up inside of me. (Wurm http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/ Towers/6239/Bizkit.html)

Clearly, new metal musicians continue to feel dissatisfaction with the state of their world. But there is an illuminating difference between this dissatisfaction and the focused, political, sit-in, rallying dissatisfaction of earlier rock. In addition to knowing of the failure of past sincerity in rock, today's generation is expressing a recognition of the image-saturated techno-culture that Baudrillard has identified, as well as a confusion regarding what is noble, what is realistic, how the two differ, and which is better. The new metal sound is permeated with what Jean Baudrillard identifies as absolute-advertising, by a sense of the problem of how to go about pursuing what the artists choose when they know that anything they choose to believe in will become either an over-played radio-single, an annoying (yet probably perplexingly successful) advertising slogan, or a mind-controlling news update. One example of this is Marilyn Manson's lyric "Norm life baby / We're quitters and we're sober / our confessions will be televised" from the song "I Don't Like the Drugs but the Drugs Like Me." New metal artists share Jean Baudrillard's view of a "sociality everywhere present, an absolute sociality finally realized in absolute advertising—that is to say, also totally dissolved, a vestige of sociality hallucinated on all the walls in the simplified form of a demand of the social that is immediately met by the echo of advertising" (Baudrillard 88).

One of the most prominent qualities of new metal is the degree to which they are media-savvy, alluding to television and film in their music and using new communications technology—such as the internet—to their maximal advantage. Their awareness of the fact that hegemonic popular culture has acquired so much conceptual ground and has learned how to acquire new territory at such a speed has made it impossible for them to believe that anything can stay "pure" and unsold for any reasonable length of time. The 1970s brought "the assimilation of countercultural forms and styles into the commercial sphere both as products and sales aids ... and the definition of deviant behaviour" as "harmless, trivial, or a part of the mainstream" (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 144). To understand new metal, we must recognize today's capitalism as demanding and insisting that youth continually seek out the new, fresh, and exotic while capitalism continually dismisses the new as "passé" in order to persuade impressionable, wealthy young people to continually buy new things which will be made old almost instantaneously. This paradoxical situation has inevitably fostered the confused frustration of new metal. The hysterical, unfocused rage, flippant, ironic sarcasm, and glib parody of new metal appear as natural reactions to an unsuppressable need to act which is thwarted by a conceptual wall that reads "Already been done" in every direction chosen. This situation started to take shape in the 1970s. It was during this time that the relation between dominant popular culture and real life became seriously confused, and that the pure and simple "rock and roll vs. the system" paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s began to fall apart. Media images and external social behaviour of the 1970s proposed to indicate a change in the cultural atmosphere: sexuality and profanity became more commonplace, "shock value" was seen as a marketable quality, and heavy metal came into being with such shocking acts as Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath, and, later, Alice Cooper, KISS, W.A.S.P., etc. Individual freedom had passed from the realm of the sublimated internal fantasy of the 1950s, through the domain of real life in the 1960s, and into the realm of hyperbolic external fantasy in the 1970s, out of reach of average, everyday youth. Repressive cultural authority may have been shaken, but that simply strengthened its roots and caused it to become even more insidious and ubiquitous. Thus cartoons such as "Heavy Metal" came into prominence, featuring sex, profanity, and obscenity, but real life for the average North American citizen remained repressed, with sex being as dirty and shameful as it was it the 1950s. The difference is that the heirs to the rock and roll thrones of Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley could not simply fight against the repression anymore. Such action had come to be treated as passé, naïve, "old news," stale, and not worth doing, because, according to all appearances, dominant popular culture had paved the way for freedom from such repression—after all, the media was saturated with sexy and obscene images. But those images were only images. Already they were not reflecting any similar reality. People were not enjoying free love anymore. Sex was relegated to open displays on billboards and movie and television screens, or to hidden motel trysts after a night of night-clubbing. This frustrating cultural condition has become more intense with time.

In this chapter I have attempted to show that looking at certain aspects of, and moments in, rock and roll's past is integral to understanding the creation of the unique brand of heavy music currently receiving much popular, but almost no critical, attention. In my next chapter I will analyze the paradoxical nature of new metal and place it in a postmodern context. By comparing it to the angry popular music which was still being produced when new metal began to become popular, I will illustrate how new metal has flowed from that music and how new metal is engaged with and is a product of today's popular culture. I will also apply to an understanding of new metal certain concepts and ideas used by rock musicologists Neil Nehring, Simon Reynolds, and Joy Press concerning rebellion, abjection, and postmodernism.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Endnote:

* In my thesis, I will use this term only to mean "savage", "wild", and "untamed", ignoring its connotation of "fatal" or "funereal".

preivous section - next section

title - abstract - intro - chapter i - chapter ii - chapter iii - conclusion - works cited - works consulted

what is babe - other writing - lyrics - music - links - e-mail - guestbook - thesis contents - index