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)

This is the book that took metal’s sound seriously enough to analyze it. A musicologist with doctorates in both performance and scholarship, Walser read the genre the way his discipline read Beethoven — the distortion, the power chord, the modal riffs — and argued that “heavy metal often stages fantasies of masculine virtuosity and control. Musically heavy metal articulates a dialectic of controlling power and transcendent freedom.”¹ The signature move is the “Eruptions” chapter: a demonstration that the eighties’ guitar heroes systematically appropriated Baroque and classical models, which made the genre’s most-mocked feature (the flashy solo) evidence of real musical learning.² The Washington Post’s reviewer took the point, praising the book for “making surprising connections to classical forms and debunking stereotypes of metal’s musical crudity.”³

The gender analysis is the book’s second legacy. “Forging Masculinity” reads metal’s audience 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” — and treats masculinity itself as “social construction, not a set of abstract qualities but something defined through the actions and power relations of men and women.”⁴ Its lasting coinage is “exscription”: the genre’s habit of resolving its gender anxieties by simply writing women out of its sonic and visual world, one of four strategies the chapter anatomizes.⁵ The honors were immediate. The book won the Society for American Music’s Irving Lowens Award in 1994; Simon Frith called it “essential reading in all popular music (and cultural studies) courses,” and Wesleyan reissued it in 2014 with a new foreword.⁶

Three decades on, the field reads it as foundational and period-bound at once. Stephen Hudson’s 2025 retrospective in Metal Music Studies names the limits: thrash gets “only a brief mention” despite remaking the genre while Walser wrote, key working concepts like the riff never get defined, and the masculinity chapter overlooks women’s actual roles in the culture — later research on femininity and queerness went where he didn’t.⁷ The verdict is the useful kind: “subsequent metal research has often grown in complementary directions, emphasizing topics which Walser neglects while avoiding topics Walser discusses at length” — which is to say the book still marks the field’s center of gravity, now read as a study of mainstream eighties metal rather than of the whole family.⁸

Key contributions

• The founding musicology: metal’s sound treated as analyzable discourse — distortion, the power chord, mode, and timbre as carriers of meaning.
• The classical-virtuosity argument: the eighties guitar vocabulary traced to Baroque models, the genre’s flashiest feature recast as musical learning.
• “Exscription”: the coinage for writing women out — the starting point for every later gender analysis of metal.
• The scholarly ceiling: a Lowens Award and cross-disciplinary endorsements that made metal a legitimate academic subject.

See also

• Heavy Metal — the sociological twin, two years earlier: she mapped the culture’s codes while he scored its sounds
• Sound of the Beast — the narrative history the analysis presumes: the events this book interrogates
• What Are You Doing Here? — the corrective that answers exscription with the people it erased
• Metal — the family whose sonic anchor and gender debates run on this book

Footnotes

1. P. 108, as carried in a published close-reading of the “Forging Masculinity” chapter (accessed July 14, 2026); Wesleyan University Press, Music/Culture series, 1993. ↩

2. The chapter, “Eruptions: heavy metal appropriations of classical virtuosity,” per the book’s table of contents as carried in library records; the argument’s reception per the blurbs at Wesleyan’s edition page (accessed July 14, 2026). ↩

3. The Washington Post assessment as carried on Wesleyan’s edition page (accessed July 14, 2026). ↩

4. Pp. 109 and 135, same close-reading carrier as ¹ (accessed July 14, 2026). ↩

5. The section “No girls allowed: exscription in heavy metal,” per the book’s table of contents in library records. ↩

6. The 1994 Irving Lowens Book Award, the Frith and Sherry B. Ortner endorsements (“a model for how Cultural Studies work ought to be done”), and the 2014 reissue with Harris M. Berger’s foreword, all per Wesleyan’s edition page (accessed July 14, 2026). ↩

7. Stephen S. Hudson, “A retrospective of Running with the Devil by Robert Walser,” Metal Music Studies 11.1, March 2025 (accessed July 14, 2026). ↩

8. Same retrospective (accessed July 14, 2026). ↩