Devil Is Fine, Devil Is Kind: Slave Spirituals, Satanic Black Metal, and Cultural Appropriation in the Music of Zeal & Ardor

This article explores the relationship between cultural appropriation, musical protest, and African American history, as foregrounded in the music of avant-garde metal band Zeal & Ardor. Under the leadership of mixed-race Swiss-American multi-instrumentalist Manuel Gagneux, the band gained promi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Comparative American studies 2021-07, Vol.18 (3), p.337-354
Main Author:	Clough, Edward
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	African American music African Americans American history Appropriation Bands Black history black metal Black white relations Christianity Cristianismo Cultural appropriation Devil Diablo Esclavitud Heavy metal music Individualism Leadership Multiracial people Music Nazism protest Race relations Racismo Satanism Self determination Slavery Socialism Traditions Violencia White supremacy Worldview Zeal & Ardor
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Summary:	This article explores the relationship between cultural appropriation, musical protest, and African American history, as foregrounded in the music of avant-garde metal band Zeal & Ardor. Under the leadership of mixed-race Swiss-American multi-instrumentalist Manuel Gagneux, the band gained prominence in 2016 for combining the influences of Satanism and Scandinavian black metal with African American spirituals and blues. Such a combination has allowed Zeal & Ardor to creatively engage the violence of African American historical experience and sonically and conceptually explore the possibilities of an alternative account of African American experience under the influence of individualism and self-determination as promoted in Satanic philosophies. This proposition becomes complicated, however, when the Satanic worldview espoused in Scandinavian black metal articulates not only an aggressive critique of Christianity, but also, in a number of instances, the promotion of white supremacist and national socialist worldviews. The resultant combination of these clashing influences is a complex interlinking of musical traditions and ideological positions through which Zeal & Ardor explores cultural appropriation as a form of protest, and ultimately embraces jarring juxtapositions and messy fusion as a necessary mode of artistic expression amid the racial tensions and culture wars of the early twenty-first century.
ISSN:	1477-5700 1741-2676