Great Satan's rage

American negativity and rap/metal in the age of supercapitalism

By (author) Scott Wilson

Publication date:

31 March 2008

Length of book:

208 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

234x156mm

ISBN-13: 9780719074639

This book looks at how rap and metal, the two most pervasive popular music forms of the 1990s, have been highly engaged with America’s role in the world, supercapitalism and their own role within it. This has especially been the case when genres – hitherto clearly identified as indelibly ‘black’ or ‘white’ forms of music – have crossed over as an effect of cross-racial forms of identification and desire, marketing strategy, political engagement, opportunism and experimentation. It is how examples of these forms have negotiated, contested, raged against, survived, exploited, simulated and performed 'Satan’s rage' that is the subject of this book.

The book offers a highly original approach in relating rap/metal to critical theories of economy and culture, introducing a new method of cultural analysis based on theories of negativity and expenditure that will be of great interest to students in media and cultural studies, American studies, critical and cultural theory, advertising and marketing, and sociology and politics.

Great Satan's Rage is a cogently argued and meticulously researched book that authoritatively weaves a dazzling array of ideas and theorists. As such, it makes an important contribution to the study of popular music within a social, political and economic context, and suggests that extreme music still has much to rage against., Lee Barron, The French Journal of Popular Music Studies Volume ! no 9-2