![]() It isn’t enough to point out that heavy metal represents more than just music, but a set of social and cultural practices. It is that bad.įirst of all, if you’re going to write about the relationship between heavy metal and Christianity, you should be able to talk about the music qua music. It might have been rescued had Lief not said so little, said it over and over again, until I found myself having to wait a day or two between chapters. Now, these are just the physical flaws in the presentation. The least you can do is write like someone with an education. It needed to go through at least one more rewrite with a polishing of proofs, judging just by the run-on sentences alone. While I applaud Jason Lief for the attempt, the execution was awful. Rarely have I read a book so poorly written, even more poorly printed (my copy is so filled with errata it became frustrating at times to read), that said so little about something that deserves a far better treatment than it received here. ![]() I must admit I was excited to read this book. Could it be someone had written the book I keep telling myself I’m going to write someday, a book that explores the complex, ambiguous, and contradictory relationship between heavy metal and Christianity, a book that takes both metal and Christianity seriously?Īfter hemming and hawing over the price – it was listed at $90, not unusual for an academic monograph on a specialized topic from a small publisher – I ordered it. What happened a few weeks ago was this book. Up until a few weeks ago, all I saw were the usual, nonsensical “evangelical” books talking about how evil heavy metal is. As I told my daughter when she told me they’re scary, “They’re supposed to be.”Įvery once in a while, when on Amazon, I will type the words “heavy metal” and “Christianity” into the Books search bar. Polish Black Metal band Behemoth in concert. That the devil lives inside – “In A Garden Made Of Stones”, Dead Soul Tribe, lyrics by Devon Graves – Jason Lief, Christianity and Heavy Metal as Impure Sacred Within The Secular West: Trangressing The Sacred, p.73 This interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a supernatural guarantee of a particular way of life, it is primarily an event that both demythologizes and remythologizes, rupturing the status quo to make possible a new way of being in the world. heavy metal is related to an interpretation of the death and resurrection of Christ that sees the crucifixion and resurrection as a social and political rupture stemming from te inbreaking of an “event” – a manifestation of an unnamable and unmappable force that relativizes every social, institutional, and cultural form of ideology. This is not the pure sacred that appeals to a transcendent divine power as the guarantee of the status quo, and it is also no a religious attempt to escape from material existence into some higher, abstract, spiritual world. Rather than a stereotypical understanding of heavy metal as an oppositional form of cultural discourse, the subversive function of metal is deeply connected with a subversive interpretation of the Christ event.
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