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 death metal band Nile has been widely celebrated within the metal scene for their devotion to ancient Egyptian themes. Their liner notes include lyrics on exclusively ancient Egyptian themes as well as extensive explanations behind each song, sometimes with citations of ancient texts and Egyptological research. To date, 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, my presentation first surveys key debates around the cultural appropriation of ancient Egypt from the points of view of 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). Using interviews with Karl Sanders, the band’s main lyricist, and fan reviews of Nile’s albums, my presentation investigates the degree to which Sanders’ engagements with Egyptian scholarship translate to a culturally educational experience for fans compared to a Eurocentric fantasy. To refine the investigation, I compare storytelling narratives across Nile’s discography to see whether the band’s approach has changed alongside increasing public sensitivity towards cultural appropriation. By asking how Nile’s use of literary worlds and storytelling narratives have related to issues of cultural appropriation over time, my presentation contributes to broader investigations of how metal adapts to an increasingly reflective public consciousness.

Period	20 May 2023
Event title	IASPM Canada Conference 2023: Dialogues — International Music Research Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Québec City, Canada, QuebecShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National