The Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination

by Chris Anderton (Editor), Lori Burns (Editor)

Overview

This Handbook illustrates the many ways that progressive rock and metal music forge striking engagements with literary texts and themes.

The authors and their objects of analytic inquiry offer global and diverse perspectives on these genres and their literary connections: from ancient times to the modern world, from children’s literature to epic poetry, from mythology to science fiction, and from esoteric fantasy to harsh political criticism. The musical treatments of these literary materials span the continents from South and North America through Europe and Asia. The collection presents critical perspectives on the enduring and complex relationships between words and music as these are expressed in progressive rock and metal.

The book is aimed primarily at an academic market, valuable for second- through final-year students on undergraduate courses devoted to both popular music and to literary studies, and to postgraduate programs and researchers in a range of fields, including popular music studies, musicology, creative music performance and composition, songwriting, literary studies, narrative studies, folklore studies, science fiction studies, cultural studies, liberal studies, and sociology, and for media and history courses that have an interest in the intersection of narratives, music, and society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040297124
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	02/26/2025
Series:	Routledge Music Handbooks
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	472
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Chris Anderton is Associate Professor in Cultural Economy at Southampton Solent University, Southampton, U.K. He has written/edited five books and published numerous chapters and journal articles on music business, music festivals, music fandom, music genre, media narratives of music, and progressive rock. He guest-edited a special edition of Rock Music Studies that focused on progressive rock (2019), and is currently co-editing The Intellect Handbook of Global Music Industries. He is also the editor of The Anthem Impact in Music Business, Technology and Culture book series.

Lori Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, merges musical analysis and cultural theory to explore representations of gender and sexuality in the lyrical, musical, and visual texts of popular music. She has published articles in edited collections and leading journals. Her 2002 monograph, Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity, and Popular Music, won the Pauline Alderman Award in 2005. She is co-editor of The Pop Palimpsest with Serge Lacasse (2018), The Bloomsbury Handbook to Popular Music Video Analysis with Stan Hawkins (2019), and Analyzing Recorded Music with William Moylan and Mike Alleyne (2022). Two additional edited collections are forthcoming: The Routledge Handbook of Metal Music Composition with Ciro Scotto and The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song with Mike Alleyne.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reflections on The Literary Imagination in Progressive Rock and Metal

Chris Anderton and Lori Burns

Part I. Theoretical Frameworks

1. More Erudite than Your Average Rock Band: Progressive Rock and Literature
Andy Bennett

2. Cross-pollinations: Progressive Rock and Science Fiction
Chris Anderton

3. So Hard to Find in My Cosmic Mind: Hippie Spirituality and Jon Anderson’s Lyrics
John Covach

4. “Everything in the lower world has its root in higher worlds”: Rock and Religion in Jon Anderson’s Chagall Songs
Jonathan C. Friedman

5. Poets and Prophets: The Lyricists of Early Progressive Rock from Self-Creation to Parody
Leonardo Masi

6. The Origin of Progressive Metal Lyrics in Black Sabbath’s Music
Nolan Stolz

7. The Dystopian Impulse in Prog: Cross-cutting Thread/ts in Dystopian Concept Albums
Marcel Bouvrie

Part II. Literary Adaptations

8. Time Travel Through Tolkien
Sarah Hill and Jon Gower

9. Into the Storm – Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle Earth and the Tolkien Reception in German Metal music
Martin Ringsmut

10. Storytelling Strategies in Camel’s Music Inspired by The Snow Goose
Ryan Blakeley

11. Musical Evocations of the Uncanny in David Bedford’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Kevin Holm-Hudson

12. Royal Hunt’s Adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the Interplay Between Narrativity and Western Art Music
Aleksandar Golovin

13. Neo-progressive Rock and Children’s Literature: Stories of Innocence and Experience in Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood and Pendragon’s The Masquerade Overture
Marion Brachet

14. Kamelot’s Adaptation of Goethe’s Faust: Tragic Subjectivities in Power Metal
Lori Burns

Part III. Mythologies and Folklores

15. Singing Minstrels, Recorders, and The Carnivalesque: Gentle Giant’s Medievalist Imagination
Richard Worth

16. “We are The Varangian Guard”: Musical Rhetoric and Literary Reference in Turisas’s Varangian Way Albums
Milan K. Schaller

17. “Enuma Elish is Re-written”: A Quantitative Survey of Mesopotamian Mythology’s Reception in Metal Lyrics
János Fejes

18. Keeper of the Seven Keys: Fantastical Themes of Ironic Ambivalence at the Birth of Power Metal
Grigorios Mathioudakis

19. “Legend Never Dies”: Mythology and Canon of Literature in Symphony X’s Underworld
Andrzej Mądro

20. Recovery, Escape, and Consolation: Uriah Heep’s The Magician’s Birthday as Fairy-Story
Joshua B. Tuttle

21. “A Maze with Very Minimal Guiding Light, Thematically Slithering Between Worlds”: Black Metal, Progressive Rock, and Ambivalent Constellations of Imagination in Remmirath’s Shambhala Vril Saucers
Owen Coggins

Part IV. Storyworlds

22. Narrative Worldmaking as Social Commentary in Pink Floyd’s Animals
Alexander C. Harden

23. Invisible Nonsense: Zero the Hero’s Journey in Gong’s Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy
Jay Keister

24. The Edge of this Airfield: Ballardian Liminal Spaces in the Music of Trevor Horn
Jacob Holm-Lupo

25. Finding Progressive Rock in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
Ivan Tan

26. Dream Theater’s The Astonishing: The Unification of the Literary and the Musical
Ciro Scotto

27. Storytelling, Narrative, and Coherence in Avatar’s Feathers and Flesh – In His Own Words (2017)
Elise Girard-Despraulex

28. The Hauntology of Story, Gameplay, Images, and Music: Hajo Müller, Steven Wilson, Jess Cope, and Ovosonico’s Last Day of June
Patrick Armstrong and Lori Burns

Part V. Subjectivities and Identities

29. The New Jerusalem: Genesis and Englishness
David Pattie

30. Us & Them: Dystopias, Resistance, and Literary Influences in Roger Waters’ Work (1968–2019)
Philippe Gonin

31. Las Alturas de Machu Picchu: Los Jaivas, Progressive Rock, and the Unmooring of Latin American Identity
Israel Holas Allimant and Sergio Holas Véliz

32. “La Libre Creación”: Exploring Narrativity in the Progressive Rock of Northwest Spain during the Spanish Transition to Democracy
Eduardo Garcia Salueña

33. Resonating Authenticities: Chinese Progressive Rock Lyrics as Socio-Political Critique and Cultural Expression
Mengyao Jiang

34. Ambiguity, Identity, and Memory in Japanese Progressive Rock
Akitsugu Kawamoto

35. The Tool Album as Gesamtkunstwerk
Nicole Biamonte and Jerry Cain

Index

Editorial Reviews

This expansive and ambitious volume avoids the allusions and gaps often found in prior scholarship that spans the humanities and social sciences. Rather than vaguely allude to overlaps between progressive rock and metal, this volume’s contributors systematically investigate the notable overlaps that emerge as musicians (and fans) of both genres draw upon literature in deliberate and varied fashion. Thus, the contributors delve into the literary source materials used by prog and metal musicians; they interrogate the manner in which those sources are adapted; and they take seriously the reception and resonance of the elements that result from this interplay between music and literature. The contributors also fill a notable gap. They not only focus on the usual bands (e.g., Yes, Tool), nations (e.g., the UK and US), and literary sources (e.g., Tolkien, science fiction) found in progressive rock and metal, they also present in expert fashion the geographical sprawl (e.g., from bands and audiences in South America to those in Asia) and literary diversity (e.g., from Aristotle to anime) that mark both musical genres. This expansive volume offers much-needed correctives and illuminating advances, and hence, it will serve as an important resource for scholars in multiple disciplines.

Timothy J. Dowd
Emory University, USA

This an outstanding collection of chapters that explore the intersections between progressive rock, metal and the literary imagination. Each contribution here is a must-read and the editors have done an incredible job framing the
Handbook.

Karl Spracklen, PhD, AcSS
Leeds Beckett University, UK

Chris Anderton and Lori Burns have compiled an immense collection of chapters that are wide-ranging and far-reaching in their historical, geographical and disciplinary diversity. Exploring the myriad ways in which aspects of songs, albums, album art and live performances intersect with storytelling and storyworlds, Progressive Rock, Metal and the Literary Imagination offers scholars, listeners and fans a fresh perspective on these two titanic genres.

Nick Braae
Waikato Institute of Technology, New Zealand

There are many book-length studies of progressive rock and metal, but none have tackled directly how prog and metal musicians engage with storytelling and literary themes—an indispensable defining characteristic of both genres. For The Routledge Handbook on Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination, Chris Anderton and Lori Burns have assembled an impressive array of contributions from among the leading scholars in the field, providing a wealth of analytical frameworks and perspectives that shed new light on this rich and fascinating repertoire.

Mark Spicer
City University of New York, USA

From the Publisher