Conference Agenda

With nine albums spanning twenty-one years, the American death metal band Nile has been widely celebrated within the metal scene for their devotion to themes of ancient Egypt. Their liner notes include lyrics on exclusively ancient-Egyptian themes as well as explanations for each song, sometimes with citations of ancient texts and Egyptological research. The scholarly literature on the band is modest in number (Russo 2010, Boyarin 2019) and largely celebratory. In recent years, however, informal conversations with metal scholars have raised questions of the extent to which Nile’s engagement with ancient Egypt qualifies as cultural appropriation (see also Boyarin et al. 2019, 76–77). What kind of stories are told by Nile?

To investigate this question, I first survey debates around the cultural appropriation of ancient Egypt from historians of antiquity (e.g. the scholarly blog Everyday Orientalism, Schneider 2003), contemporary activists (Winkle 2020, Bakry 2021, Bassel 2021), and musicians (e.g. Byrne 1999). From these discourses emerge the central themes of transformative use vs. cultural tourism (Byrne 1999) and questions of subject position: how directly an artist engages with a culture vs. how they rely on Eurocentric stereotypes (Blouin 2019). I proceed through semiotic analyses of Nile’s cinematic depictions of ancient Egypt—their diegetic vocal characters and Eastern instruments. Using interviews with the band’s main lyricist, and fan reviews of Nile’s albums, my presentation reveals the coexistence of both a culturally educational experience and a Eurocentric fantasy. One early reviewer learns of “two similar yet different snake demons of the Du’at [underworld]” from liner notes, yet still interprets vocal chanting on the album as “ancient Sumerian/Babylonian/whatever” and a spoken passage as “a crazed Islamic holy man” (“corviderrant” [pseud.] 2004). Has this reception changed? I compare reviews since and storytelling narratives across Nile’s discography to track how fans and the band adapt over time to increasing public sensitivity towards colonial stereotyping. By asking how Nile’s use of literary worlds and its fan reception relates to issues of cultural appropriation over time, my presentation contributes to broader investigations of how metal music is adapting to an increasingly reflective public consciousness.

In the mid 1950s, the American jazz musician Hermann Blount co-founded Thmei Research, a secret society of Black intellectuals whose members were drawn from Chicago’s South Side. Though Thmei’s inner activities remain mysterious, they were informed by many esoteric currents, including Edgar Cayce’s visions of Atlantean magic, Helena Blavatsky’s account of ancient Egyptian rituals, and Lewis de Claremont’s Hoodoo spells. Thmei members communicated with the public through open air preaching and the local distribution of homemade newsletters. Blount’s esoteric study informed his public transformation into Sun Ra, an ancient Egyptian sun god reincarnated as a Space Brother from the planet Saturn (Sites 2020, Szwed 1997).

Insight into Thmei’s magical practices may be gleaned through items held in the archive of the group’s co-founder, Alton Abraham. These objects include a crystal, a small metal ankh, a gris-gris bag, and herbal recipes recorded in Abraham’s notebooks. A hi hat cymbal, etched with symbols likely derived from Abraham’s copy of The Ancient’s Book of Magic (de Claremont 1940), links Thmei’s magical practice to the musical practice of the Arkestra, Sun Ra’s performing collective, which Abraham managed. Sun Ra originally conceived the Arkestra as an esoteric ensemble that would rehearse privately to develop a new “Astro-Black” style, but the band began their public performances almost immediately. In this paper, I show how Sun Ra’s unconventional approach to rehearsals, which combined esoteric discussion, thought experiments, movement, and the exploration of sound and time, prepared Arkestra musicians to transform musical performance into a public ritual, blurring the division between its esoteric and exoteric activities. The Arkestra’s musical medium allowed its esotericism to remain ineffable, while also inviting the audience to participate directly in a shared ecstatic spiritual experience.

Though best known as a rock artist, Frank Zappa saw himself primarily as a composer of “serious music” who was forced to work in popular music to get such pieces performed (Miles 2004). Zappa had been fascinated with how Western notation looked on paper since he was a child and he spent extensive amounts of time writing out scores over his career. Indeed, Zappa used notation as a means of demonstrating his legitimacy as a serious composer; he was proud to show his written compositions to key figures in the Western art music tradition, such as Nicolas Slonimsky and Pierre Boulez. Zappa spent enormous sums of money accumulated from his rock records to get professional orchestras to perform and record his classical music, a process he frequently deprecated because of the mistakes performers made in realizing his notoriously complex notation.

In this paper, I illustrate how Zappa was able to bridge an important gap between his elaborate classical music scores and the parts of his music that are further removed from the Western art tradition: lengthy improvised guitar solos. I focus primarily on the contributions of guitarist Steve Vai. Though known today as a three-time Grammy Award winner, Vai jumpstarted his career by mailing Zappa a transcription of his aptly-named composition “The Black Page,” something that impressed Zappa enough to hire him as his full-time amanuensis, a job that would later result in Vai becoming a member of Zappa’s touring band.

Through a rhythmic analysis of “The Black Page #1,” I illustrate how Zappa’s use of “first- and second-level complexities” of rhythmic subdivisions (Borders 2008) are remarkably similar to the polyrhythms found in his improvised guitar playing. This comparative analysis is made possible by Zappa’s publishing of Vai’s transcriptions in The Frank Zappa Guitar Book (1982). I conclude by examining Zappa’s place in the pantheon of twentieth-century classical composers: though his scored music frequently brings up comparisons to the New Complexity, I instead suggest that Zappa’s sense of rhythm stems from human speech, positioning him as a modernist following in the footsteps of Arnold Schoenberg.