The field’s pioneering research came from British cultural studies, and the field’s characteristically Marxian interpretations of popular culture placed an emphasis on the capacity of popular culture to creatively resist hegemony on the part of the working classes. She describes the evolution of heavy metal from a once-popular mainstream rock genre into an array extreme subgenres and scenes she -zeros in on the formative period of death metal during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which is period analyzed in the second half of the book.ģChapter one, “The Rise of Political Criticism,” discusses why popular music studies became preoccupied political topics in popular culture. Death metal, with its fantasies of murder, bodily destruction, and gore, is particularly difficult for scholars to interpret politically by the standards that work well for punk rock. Her analysis of death metal came across as a mixed success, and left me with some reservations.ĢThe introduction of the book lays out Phillipov’s central problem: popular music studies has tended to privilege genres like punk, hip hop, and electronic dance music because they provide easy examples of progressive, populist politics in contrast, heavy metal has been studied less frequently, and is often criticized for its reputed conservatism or for taking “vacuous” apolitical stance. I found her critique of the field useful and illuminating.

In the second part of the book, Phillipov eschews a politicized perspective, and unpacks the pleasures and aesthetics of the genre of death metal with the intention of demonstrating that more nuanced and complex analysis can be carried out if political interpretations are not presumed most important. Phillipov is critical of this trajectory, seeing it as a perspective which limits the questions one can ask of music and popular culture. The first part surveys the general trajectory of popular music studies, pioneered as it was by the field of cultural studies, towards a politicized understanding of popular culture. 1 Michelle Phillipov provides two short books in one in Death Metal and Music Criticism.

Techno deathmetal