Dawid Kaszuba

Dawid Kaszuba is a student of Master degree in cultural studies (Faculty of Polish Philology) at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He wrote his Bachelor thesis on performances of sex in the work of glam metal artists. His particular research interests are performative, imaginary and audiovisual contexts of rock and heavy metal. He focuses on relations between masculinity and rock music and gender – genre connection, as well as autocritical aspects of heavy metal. He had his presentations on conferences around Poland, in Czech Republic  (Mainstream! Popular Culture in Central and Eastern Europe) and Finland (Modern Heavy Metal Conference, Nordic Metal Music Seminar). He likes going to theatre and travelling. Apart from studying, he works as a guide in museum.

Audiovisual context of progressive metal: Cultural analysis of Tool’s music videos

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David Kaszuba

Obvious point is that metal music videos are not only a part of promotion but also essential element of artistic strategy of the band. Accurate example of this fact is American band Tool, one of the most important and currently the most discussed metal bands, known for their extraordinary marketing strategy of intended disinformation and mystery videoclips.

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 I would like to present the way Tool videos as audiovisual media create an image of progressive metal band and have become coherent component of their work, supplying lyrics and intensifying musical experiences. To accomplish that, I’m going to analyse structure and focus on technique used by them to produce those clips (animation). My aim will be to explore cultural background and complexity of ideas behind them, showing how they construct narrations of various structures, but similar atmosphere, which is anti-narrative but still suggestive. I would like to place this videos in the context of visual theories, including works of Walter Ong and multimodal theory, analysing the way lyrics, videos and music are all connected, not only in the questions of atmosphere and mystery, but also in the case of structure, story and editing.

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 I’m going to focus especially on the creatures which appear in videos, considering emotions they provoke in spectators (using theory of „affective violence” by Luiza Nader), connected to exclusion, suffering and violence they struggle with and questions of various transformations; even though they seems to be human, their apparent humanity is deconstructed and converted into something halfway between human and non-human in the light of posthumanistic discourse and abject theory. I will also introduce transdisciplinary aspect of band’s music videos, analysing the way they are inspired by animation movies and conceptions mentioned above to show how music videos can construct a myth of what is, or could be, considered as „progressive”.

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Keywords: Tool, progressive metal, music videos, posthumanism, abject, Luiza Nader, Walter Ong, multimodal theory, animation.