metal – The Unoffical Convention Archive

From the Abstract Dickie Lee (University of Georgia) Interpreting the Music of (8-)Bit Brigade: Speed Runs and Speed Metal 8-bit Nintendo music, with its driving rhythms and readily identifiable thematic characters, lends itself nicely for adaptation into a metal musical milieu. And that borrowing, when paired with the visuals of the actual gaming experience, leads to a hermeneutics of video game music that is underexplored in theory and analysis- one that focuses on agency and subjectivity. I analyze the performances of Athens, Georgia metal band Bit Brigade as participating in nostalgic mode of intertextuality (loosely defined as the act of relating various texts to one another to release meaning), and that nostalgia is underscored by speed run-through visuals of classic games (such as Contra and Metroid) by a professional gamer accompanied by the band performing the soundtrack. To situate this analysis, I begin with a conceptualization of agency as the capacity for an interpreted being to interact with their virtual environment, and interpret how a venue can demonstrate an acoustemology of its space (an a priori association regarding that location and the culture/types of individuals that participate in it). I analyze how Bit Brigade accomplishes seamless transitions with the gaming scenery, ultimately reflecting a degree of agency within the ensemble and the gamer. An intertextual network of associations connect game-to-music and music-to-game in an ever-unfolding act of nostalgia and simulation. Bit Brigade at once teaches us about postmodern philosophy and why these games captured attention in the first place, all in the context of a metal unanticipated music experience. References Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Burns Lori and Alyssa Woods. “Authenticity, Appropriation, Signification: Tori Amos on Gender, Race, and Violence in Covers of Billie Holliday and Eminem.” Music Theory Online 10/2 (2004). Butler, Mark. “Taking it Seriously: Intertextuality and Authenticity in Two Covers by the Pet Shop Boys.” Popular Music 22/1 (2003): 1-19. D’Angelo, Frank J. “The Rhetoric of Intertextuality.” Rhetoric Review 29/1 (2010): 31-47. Guck, Marian A. “Analytical Fictions.”Music Theory Spectrum 16/2 (1994): 217-230. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke Klein, Michael L. Intertextuality in Western Art Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Kristeva, Julia. Séméiôtiké: recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1969. Monahan, Seth. “Action and Agency Revisied.” Journal of Music Theory 57/2 (2013): 321-71. Sakakeeny, Matt. “’Under the Bridge:’ An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans.” Ethnomusicology 54/1 (2010): 1-27. Schafer, R. Murray. The Turning of the World. New York: Knopf, 1977. Source: Bardic Knowledge