Walser — Running with the Devil

Author: Robert Walser
Title: Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music
Year: 1993
Type: Academic book (Wesleyan University Press; reissued 2014)

Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music is a study of heavy metal by the musicologist Robert Walser, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1993. It argues that metal can be analyzed as music and as culture: that its sound and imagery are bound up with masculinity and power, that its virtuoso guitar style draws on classical models, and that its gender politics include writing women out of its fantasy worlds. Its evidence is metal’s songs and videos, read both as music and as culture. The notices its publisher quotes are favorable, among them Rolling Stone’s, and it won the Society for American Music’s Irving Lowens Book Award for 1994. In 2011 Andy R. Brown questioned its method of cultural reading, and in 2025 Stephen S. Hudson compared it with the metal research that followed.

Wesleyan University Press published the book in 1993. Its third chapter shares its title with an article Walser had published in Popular Music in 1992.^{1, 2} Wesleyan reissued the book in 2014 with a new foreword by Harris M. Berger and a new afterword by Walser.³ The publisher’s page describes Walser as a professor and director of the Center of Popular Music Studies at Case Western Reserve University.³

Walser argues that “heavy metal often stages fantasies of masculine virtuosity and control.” In musical terms, he writes, “heavy metal articulates a dialectic of controlling power and transcendent freedom.”¹ The third chapter, “Eruptions: Heavy Metal Appropriations of Classical Virtuosity,” traces metal’s virtuoso guitar style to the classical models its players drew on.¹

The fourth chapter, “Forging Masculinity: Heavy Metal Sounds and Images of Gender,” turns to metal’s audience, which Walser describes as “a group generally lacking in social, physical, and economic power but besieged by cultural messages promoting such forms of power, insisting on them as the vital attributes of an obligatory masculinity.” Masculinity, he writes, is “a social construction, not a set of abstract qualities but something defined through the actions and power relations of men and women.”¹ Reading metal’s songs and videos, he sets out what he calls “a loose list of strategies concerning gender and power”: “misogyny, exscription, androgyny, and romance.” “Exscription” is his word for “total denial of gender anxieties through the articulation of fantastic worlds without women.”¹

The quotations Wesleyan selected for its page are favorable. The Washington Post praised it for “making surprising connections to classical forms and debunking stereotypes of metal’s musical crudity,” Rolling Stone called it “an excellent book,” and Simon Frith called it “essential reading in all popular music (and cultural studies) courses.”³ It won the Society for American Music’s Irving Lowens Book Award for 1994.³ Charles Keil reviewed it in Popular Music in 1995, and Deborah Wong in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1998.² In 2011 Andy R. Brown questioned its method in an essay on “the problem of the cultural reading” in the book and in recent metal studies.² In a 2025 retrospective in Metal Music Studies, Stephen S. Hudson wrote that later research on metal “has often grown in complementary directions, emphasizing topics which Walser neglects.”⁴

Key contributions

• Metal analyzed as music, a “dialectic of controlling power and transcendent freedom.”
• Metal’s virtuoso guitar style traced to classical models.
• A reading of metal’s gender politics, with “exscription,” the writing of women out of its fantasy worlds.

See also

• Heavy Metal — Deena Weinstein’s 1991 sociology of metal culture
• Sound of the Beast — Ian Christe’s 2003 history of heavy metal
• What Are You Doing Here? — Laina Dawes’s 2012 book on Black women in metal, hardcore and punk