Literary Worlds and Storytelling Narratives in the Technical Death Metal of Nile: Western Subjectivities and Ancient Egyptian Historical Imagination

Description

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 2009), 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.

Period	11 Nov 2023
Event title	American Musicological Society/Society for Music Theory 2023 Joint Annual Meeting
Event type	Conference
Location	Denver, United States, ColoradoShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National