The free access to this article was made possible by support from readers like you. Please consider donating any amount to help defray the cost of our operation.
Practicing Screaming: Aesthetic Explanations, Aesthetic Value, and the Screamed Vocals Problem
Emmie Malone
Abstract
There are many paradoxes of aversive or painful art. We enjoy being disgusted, scared, sad, and stressed in engaging with art in a way that we don’t, for example, while on the train to work. A similar problem arises in extreme music such as metal, hardcore punk, and their various offshoots. In this case, the puzzle is explaining why we enjoy listening to screaming in extreme music but not in our workaday lives. Here, I argue that there is not one, but many answers to the screamed vocals problem. Particular kinds of musical screaming take on their character and value according to the function they play in different genre practices and in order to support the values and activities of those communities. Accordingly, we ought to be pragmatic pluralists about musical screaming. Beyond attempting to make sense of this one particular problem from the philosophy of popular music, I also argue that thinking carefully about the screamed vocals problem can help us clarify some merits of a good aesthetic explanation and, perhaps, give us a pragmatic argument for adopting an explanatory model within aesthetics.
Key Words
aesthetic explanations; aesthetic practices; aesthetic value; genre; hardcore; metal; metaphilosophy; musical screaming; screamo
1. Introduction
Paradoxes abound in art, especially when that art centers on the aversive and unpleasant. For instance, many people love being made to feel afraid when watching the latest horror film on Saturday night, but those same people don’t tend to love being made to feel afraid while riding the train to work Monday morning. The same problem arises in the case of our enjoyment of sad songs, disgusting art, tragedy, cringe comedy, or suspense films.[1] We often enjoy the aversive in art even as we find it repelling. A similar paradox is apparent within extreme music, that is, metal and hardcore punk, but so far it has received less philosophical attention. In this case, people don’t normally like listening to screaming in their day-to-day lives, on the train on the way to work, but they do enjoy listening to extreme music, and extreme music is often characterized by screamed vocals. Further, extreme music fans like the music in part because of the screaming, not in spite of it. Thus, just as we have a paradox of horror in film, we may also have a screamed vocals problem in extreme music.[2]
One strategy for addressing this problem might be to provide an aesthetic analysis of musical screaming. In this case, reconciling our enjoyment of extreme music with our otherwise aversion to human screaming is a matter of capturing the aesthetic qualities of musical screaming that are absent in nonmusical screaming. This difference, in turn, is reflected in our relative appreciation of the two. Here, I argue that this is not the right strategy for resolving the apparent paradox of extreme music, but also that recognizing the aesthetic value of musical screaming requires that we adopt pluralism about it. Musical screaming is not valuable because of some intrinsic aesthetic features that it has at that level of generality but because of its role within the aesthetic practices of various musical communities. Differences in the musical features of different kinds of screaming track differences in the aesthetic concerns of genre communities. This applies both to what it means to scream and to the value of screaming; the answers to these questions are determined through a process of negotiation within those communities. The result of this is that musical screaming does different work for different fans and artists. As such, no single aesthetic analysis will capture the appeal of musical screaming or resolve the paradox of extreme music.
In this paper, I analyze the different roles and styles of screaming in various forms of metal and hardcore, argue that a complete account of the aesthetics of screaming will recognize these differences, and explain how this has implications for work on aesthetic properties and aesthetic theorizing outside of extreme music. The upshot of this discussion is that what is true of screaming may be true more generally. The value and nature of artistic features and aesthetic properties is often mediated by genre. As such, aesthetic theorizing ought to be sensitive to the function of those properties and features within the practices of genre communities. This opens up the question of what the right level of explanation is when it comes to questions of aesthetic value. Here, I outline some pragmatic merits of a good aesthetic explanation that we can learn from closely looking at the screamed vocals problem.
Section 2 will survey aversive art paradoxes generally and explore the screamed vocals problem specifically. Section 3 will more closely examine the particular styles of screaming popular in screamo, metal, and hardcore, respectively, and how they follow from and reinforce the values associated with those communities. The fourth section will argue that the differences described in section 3 give us reason to adopt pluralism about musical screaming. Beyond this, I argue that the lesson of screaming pluralism is that we ought to adopt a position I call ‘hardcore Kivyism’ within the philosophy of art. This gets us to section 5, in which I broaden these considerations to the metaphilosophical, proposing that we have pragmatic reasons to adopt a form of pluralism about aesthetic explanations and aesthetic value more generally.
2. Aversive art and the screamed vocals problem
As mentioned, there are a number of aversive aesthetic paradoxes. While others, ranging from Aristotle to Schopenhauer, have discussed tragedy at length, it is Hume that perhaps first puts his finger on the problem that tragedy raises. Here, he tells us that “it seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-wrote tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, which are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy.”[3] In the case of tragedy, the problem primarily is one of sorrow. Without loading the dice in favor of a particular theory of aesthetic value or eventual solution, we can at least say that many of us enjoy works that make us feel sorrow—that is, tragedies. This, in turn, is hard to reconcile with the fact that we don’t enjoy being made to feel sorrow in our everyday lives. A similar problem is raised about horror by Noël Carroll. Hume’s paradox of tragedy is met with Carroll’s paradox of horror: “how people can be attracted by what is repulsive?”[4] In terms more closely matching Hume’s formulation, the problem is usually put something like this: “(1) Some of us enjoy horror fictions. (2) Horror fictions characteristically produce fear and disgust in their audience. (3) Fear and disgust are intrinsically unpleasant emotions.”[5] Similarly, the problem also arises with sad songs, as when Stephen Davies argues that “If we enjoy the sadness that we claim to feel, then it is not plainly sadness that we are talking of, because sadness is not an enjoyable experience. On the other hand, if the sadness is unpleasant, we would not seek out, as we do, artworks leading us to feel sad.”[6] Finally, the problem has also been pointed out in the context of disgusting art, such as in our enjoyment of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, which depicts the skin being removed from a satyr.[7]
I would certainly not be the first person to point out that these aversive art paradoxes follow a common structure.[8] Aaron Smuts, referring to it as the paradox of painful art, lays it out as follows:
1. People avoid things that provide painful experiences and only pursue things that provide pleasurable experiences.
2. People have painful experiences in response to putatively painful art (e.g., tragedies, melodramas, religious works, sad songs, and horror).
3. People pursue putatively painful art.[9]
Yet, the problem is actually more general than that. While I have framed the preceding and subsequent discussion as Smuts does, around the ways in which these issues arise in our enjoyment of artworks, the same or similar problems emerge in thinking about the fact that people, for instance, drink very bitter drinks like Campari, eat deeply funky cheeses, consume durian despite its smell, or consume certain kinds of pu’er tea that fans, myself included, can only describe as tasting the way a barnyard smells. So, the paradox at its most general is actually a matter of aversive aesthetics experiences, only some of which involve art.
The screamed vocals problem largely follows the same structure. However, as originally raised by Sean Murphy, there appear to be two screamed vocals problems, one aesthetic and one ethical. The moral problem, which I will set aside here, is that we delight in the screamed agony of the artist at all. In this case, Murphy points out that insofar as we take the agony that they are screaming out to be their own, we enjoy their pain. Outside of an artistic context, we find it morally objectionable to delight in the pain of others, so we are left with a parallel problem of why it is apparently uniquely okay to enjoy the agony of the artist when it comes to screamed vocals. While it does mirror the aesthetic version in some ways, it is clearly a different problem and one that less easily maps on to the other aversive aesthetic puzzles. Now, with the aesthetic screamed vocals problem fully in view and in context, we can turn to an answer, or rather, some answers to the problem. These answers, I argue, will come from looking closely at various genres of extreme music. In particular, screamo, metal, and hardcore.
3. Screaming pluralism and Kivy-core
It is important to note that while Murphy raises the screamed vocals problem at the level of musical screaming, he takes screaming within screamo as his paradigm case. Screamo emerged out of the emo (or emotional hardcore) scene in the 1990s particularly around San Diego and, later, on the East Coast of the United States. This initial wave of screamo bands (for example, Heroin, Antioch Arrow, and Swing Kids) was more closely related musically to their hardcore and first-wave emo predecessors like Rites of Spring. The music is often characterized by driving power chords and yelled vocals (as heard in Antioch Arrow’s 1993 release, The Lady is a Cat). However, already at that time there was more experimentation with dynamics, that is, the relative loudness and softness of the music. These would become characteristic of the genre later, as it came into its own, offering a harsher, more abrasive version of the second-wave, or so-called Midwest, emo sound: arrangements that allowed for more “space” in the mix along with “noodley” guitar that moved away from heavily distorted power chords towards dissonant, loosely played, almost improvisational runs. Likewise, a 2003 New York Times article on the genre described screamo as involving “frequent shifts in tempo and dynamics and by tension-and-release catharses—as aggressive, in other words, as its lyrics are contemplative.”[10] In being downstream of emo, screamo is already going to feature more personal and self-reflective lyrics than other kinds of hardcore, in which lyrics are often more socially oriented and polemical. As the quoted passage suggests, screamo worked to heighten the cathartic quality of lyrics through dissonance and larger dynamic and tempo shifts than the more consistent and driving music of first-wave emo and hardcore.
In this way, screamo became a much more expressive and personal genre. Indeed, the screaming practices of the genre reflect that. In his book, Scream, Michael J. Seidlinger describes screamo’s screaming style as “a combination of emo (highly emotional and shrill vocals) and post-hardcore, with its higher-pitched and more deliberately raspy screams.”[11] Take, for example, the song “Such Small Hands” (2018) by La Dispute. The song uses a mixture of spoken word and more naturalistic screams that rise up from a spoken word to a shout to a scream in the way that a person might in a particularly emotional argument; matching the almost improvisational dissonant guitar playing discussed. This effect is tied to the lyrics, with the screams used to emphasize the naturalistic anguish of a line being delivered. The band’s vocalist, Jordan Dreyer is known for using these kinds of screams, with Arielle Gordon’s Pitchfork review of the album that the song appeared on noting that “Dreyer’s tortured howls have come to personify anguished disinhibition, a death rattle for the unbearably lonely.”[12] These screams also allow Dreyer to follow the explosive dynamic transitions of the music while retaining a naturalistic delivery, rather than switching between a spoken and screamed mode. The use of spoken word also has a confessional quality. This plays especially well when paired with corresponding content, like in the 2011 song, “I See Everything,” in which the lyrics are written as if they were a diary entry. This is all just to say that screamo is built around personal and contemplative lyrics about pain and anguish, the musical features are expressive of that, and the screaming style is too. Accordingly, it is not surprising that Murphy’s account of the aesthetic value of musical screaming, taking screamo as his paradigm case, focuses on its cathartic quality.[13] In this case, screaming takes on the form that it does because that allows it to better fulfill the expressive and cathartic function the music plays in a practice prioritizing emotional vulnerability and intimacy. However, my claim is that we should not take this to be the answer to the screamed vocals problem generally. Screaming is valuable here because of the role that it plays in a genre practice, but genre practices differ with the values and priorities of that community. Accordingly, we should expect musical screaming to fulfill different functions, and for the style of screaming characteristic of a genre to follow the practices and values of that genre.
The character of musical screaming in metal also seems to issue from the values of that genre as well. Where screamo artists tend to limit themselves to more naturalistic kinds of screaming, metal screaming practices are as diverse as its many subgenres. Harsh vocal techniques within metal include styles of screaming fans and artists refer to as lows, mids, highs, gutterals, and pig-squeals, along with shrieks, snarls, fries, falsies (or false chords), and growls.[14] These various techniques allow metal vocalists to capture a range of sounds across an entire frequency spectrum, slotting themselves into the mix wherever they need to be. They also offer a number of different timbres, and certain types are voiced while others are not: “false chord screams and growls involve a completely open windpipe, the vocal folds never touching. When using the false chord technique, the vocalist lets air pass with most of the roughness and distortion created in the soft palate and sinuses.”[15]
By contrast, growls offer a more guttural sound, distinctive for its softer resonance, a result of engaging the diaphragm and lowering the larynx while widening the mouth to lower the eigenfrequency of the vocal tract:
…they require a distinct change in the rate and rapidity of the air being pushed out from the diaphragm. Growls rest below the mouth yet above the vocal folds. The air gestates in one’s upper chest, creating the recognizable hollowness and depth of a growl. Changing the pitch of the scream is done by altering the shape of one’s mouth.[16]
Importantly, many of these are not at all natural sounds of anguish. Far from imitating the kinds of screaming that might happen in a particularly bad break-up, these are kinds of metal screams that are distinctly inhuman sounding altogether. The pig-squeal not only sounds, as its name would suggest, like the squealing of a pig, but it is also voiceless and does not articulate lyrics but instead a pig-like “breee!” sound. Clearly, something different is happening here than in the screamo case. If, on Murphy’s account, we enjoy the screaming in screamo because it is expressive of human pain that we, as listeners, share with the artist, only the pigs can share in the pain of pig-squealer. Metal screams are often deeply unnatural, far outside of the vocalization of our workaday lives.
Indeed, the distance between what fans think humans are capable of and what they find out is possible at a Lorna Shore show, for instance, is part of the delight. As we might expect, mastering safely using the full range of metal screaming techniques (or even one) is something that takes considerable practice and control. Being able to do this kind of vocalization well, do a number of styles, and to develop new techniques altogether are accomplishments that fans look to appreciate. In his book, Seidlinger describes watching a live performance of Phil Bozeman, lead vocalist for the metal band Whitechapel: “The depth of the vocalization is so rich it receives shock and awe, and clear admiration from the audience. A master of his instrument, Bozeman demonstrates the perfect utilization of the false chord scream technique.”[17] Metal vocalization is seen as a place where innovation is always happening. Rather than trying to capture something fixed, like the screaming regular people do in pain, metal vocalists dedicate themselves to pushing at the boundaries of what is possible. Metal artists talk about spending hours learning new techniques, practicing in a way that preserves their vocal health, and exploring with their own voice. As vocalist Karina Utomo recounts in an interview:
The aesthetic of certain genres can sometimes compel me to try and learn to sing a certain way. Which is how I started – I got enthusiastic about certain music types. And also the challenge, especially in extreme metal music genres, where you do need to work on your voice to be able to make it abrasive and distorted whilst not destroying it![18]
Across all of this discussion, we see that metal artists and fans value (among other things) mastery, power, and virtuosity. The force of Bozeman’s vocalization was enough to elicit shock and awe, a testament to his power as a vocalist, and Utomo’s desire to master more kinds and more difficult kinds of vocalization demonstrates a concern for mastery and virtuosity. Indeed, work on the ethnography of metal has also revealed these as primary concerns for fans and artists.[19] The theatrical quality of much of metal lends itself to showing off. Guitarists are known to do intricate high-tempo runs and solos (“shredding”), and metal drummers also play in highly technical styles. These drummers tend to have kits with more component drums and cymbals than, say, punk. They also tend to play faster. While songs are played very fast in both cases, punk drummers most frequently use eighth or sixteenth notes at a tempo ranging from 130 to 180 beats per minute (bpm). By contrast, metal’s “blast beats” often involve playing consistent sixteenth notes on the hi-hat or ride, snare, and kick drums simultaneously, at tempos pushing or over 300bpm.[20] Across the board, technical prowess is prioritized, whether that is in the speed and intricacy of drumming and guitar playing or in the vocal range, both in frequency and timbre, of the vocalist. In this way, just as there was a fitness between screamo’s screaming style, musical character, and values, we find the same for metal.
Finally, we arrive at hardcore. We have already said, in contrasting it with screamo and emo, that hardcore is a very social genre, interested in building communities of mutual aid and motivating engagement with political and social issues. Indeed, Ross Haenfler, sociologist of punk and hardcore music communities, has described three most persistent values of hardcore as the D-I-Y ethos, anti-authoritarianism, and political engagement.[21] Hardcore emerged as a kind of back-to-basics movement within punk, with participants feeling that the then dominant strains were too individualistic, which led to the failure to bring about real political change, too focused on the punk aesthetic (ala Vivienne Westwood) rather than the political, and too vulnerable to being co-opted by the music industry without a decentralized and democratized infrastructure. The music, in turn, serves this project. Hardcore music consists of very simple, minimal arrangements. A few (mostly power) chords and very straight-forward, unadorned drumming. The music is, as a matter of principle, easy to pick up. This is in stark contrast to most of metal, where individual virtuosity is prized and displayed. There is also very little of the showing off you find in metal; guitarists virtually never solo, and technical skill is less prized than the urgency and clarity of the message and the music. This issues from a skepticism about authority, including the authority of the artist, and individualism:
The barrier to entry in hardcore punk, at least in terms of technical musical skill, was low. In fact, audiences were suspicious of technical proficiency outside of the ability to play quickly, like Bad Brains. To this day, hardcore shows sonically resemble staging grounds for the communal aspects of the genre—slam dancing, gang vocals, the elimination of barriers or borders between audience and performer. Hardcore shows often have the air of ritual and the music is compared to traditional folk music forms in the sense that it is easy to play; immediate; and organically expressive of social concerns shared by a subcultural community.[22]
Hardcore vocal techniques also follow this pattern, consisting largely of a combination of shouts, yells, and spoken word. Importantly, these are all things that can be done together easily by a large number of people, even those who have not spent anywhere close to the countless hours it takes to master metal screams. This is strongly encouraged by the artists, where not only are fans told to shout along but also to participate in doing gang vocals, “a hardcore technique in which a group (usually of males) shouts a moment of the lyrics, usually to serve the purpose of punktuation.”[23] If there is no crowd participation, then there are no gang vocals and the performance fails. The result is that audience vocal participation actually helps to constitute the performance rather than supplement it.
The basic concept is that anyone can play, the tempo is always very fast, approaching a hectic, monotonous pounding with little variation, and most importantly, the lyrics are not sung, but normally shouted, groaned or spoken—often by the audience in a concert setting as much as by the singer of a group. There exists, then none of the smooth vocal harmonies apparent in mainstream rock. The positioning of the hardcore vocalist is that of the leader of a mob…[24]
In this way, hardcore screaming functions to bring the audience and artists together on an equal footing, as a unified sharing of a common message. This is in line with both the musical features of hardcore that are, in turn, in line with the genre’s values. Accordingly, what it means to produce a valuable scream looks different across screamo, metal, and hardcore and for different reasons. The upshot of all of this discussion is that we have reason to be pluralists about the value of musical screaming. Different kinds of screaming are valuable within different genres because the features of that kind of scream are conducive to the aesthetic practices those genre communities are engaged in.[25] That is, their value is often functional and their nature is set in reference to the values of that community and the practices that issue from them. In this way, musical screaming provides us with reason to think that genres are more than just sets of works fixed by sets of common features; it provides evidence for the practice view of genre.[26] Hardcore, screamo, and metal are communities of art-centered aesthetic practice. They are unified by their common values, and that ethos provides participants with reasons to engage in certain kinds of activities. To find something valuable—that is, to value something—is to take it as reason-giving and especially to take those reasons as reason enough to structure our own behavior or decision making. When hardcore bands and fans value anti-authoritarianism, they take the anti-authoritarian ideal to give them reason to structure their behavior accordingly, in this case, to adopt more egalitarian vocal practices.
In this way, musical screaming gives us reasons to adopt a particularly hardcore (if you will permit the pun) form of Kivyism. Here, I am referring to Peter Kivy’s claim that thinking about aesthetic concepts at the level of art (in general) can mislead us into overgeneralizing.[27] Kivy famously argues that we should do philosophy of the arts rather than philosophy of art for this reason. In support of this claim, he offered the example of the problem of audience emotion, as it relates to absolute music, arguing that the problem takes on a fundamentally different shape within a different artform and will require a fundamentally different answer:
The pernicious assumption that the modern system of the arts is a monolith, with common problems and necessarily common solutions, has served to impede progress by making us look in vain for sameness, while blindly overlooking differences. It is time now to put aside this assumption, at least for the present, and tend to the differences: to the problems of the arts as they uniquely arise in their various manifestations.[28]
Hardcore Kivyism, the Kivy-core position, goes further than Kivy’s own. While we recommend moving down a level of generality from talking about art in general to talking about artforms in particular, the screamed vocals problem gives us reason to think we can move a level further down still. Music, as an artform, appears to be too general of a level for a complete and proper explanation of the aesthetic value of screaming, but genre can give us a more robust answer. Yet, we should not merely adopt a version of Kivy’s project and become philosophers of the genres. Genre explanations are not the “right” level because of any ontological fact or aesthetic law but because they often give us reason enough and a good explanation will provide us with reasons. This seems to raise the question of what a good aesthetic explanation is and why. Beyond this, it seems to open a problem of how we figure out in any given case that we have arrived at the right level of explanation. These are the questions I turn to now.
4. Aesthetic value, practices, and levels of explanation
The discussion above seems to raise a concern about when we can be sure that we have arrived at the right level of explanation. We can call this the ‘level problem.’ For instance, in order of increasing specificity, we might try to explain why people enjoy 1) aversive aesthetic experiences generally, 2) aversive art generally, 3) aversive music generally, 4) musical screaming generally, 5) particular kinds of musical screaming, or 6) particular instances of musical screaming. I don’t take this list to be exhaustive of all of the levels at which this problem might occur, or take it to be representative of many levels of explanation there might be in every case. Indeed, I suspect that we could offer aesthetic explanations at every level of abstraction that corresponds to a set of works in which the phenomenon occurs. Accordingly, we might expect that genres with more nested subgenres and sub-subgenres will offer more opportunities for explanation. For instance, if 1) blackened doom metal and technical doom metal are both subgenres of doom metal and 2) doom metal and power metal are both subgenres of metal, then any aesthetic phenomenon common to blackened doom metal, technical doom metal, and power metal could be explained at the level of 1) sub-subgenre (why is screaming valuable in blackened doom metal), 2) subgenre (why is screaming valuable in doom metal), or 3) genre (why is screaming valuable in metal). By contrast, genres with fewer sub-subgenres will offer fewer levels of explanation. Metal is often thought of as being particularly fond of increasingly particular classifications, so other genres might have fewer levels of classification. Levels may also be added over time as new sub-subgenres are invented. All of this should give us reason to think that there is no definite general answer to how many possible levels of explanation there are within aesthetics. It is enough to say that there are often plenty.
Nevertheless, even if we can’t give a general answer to how many levels there are, we still might wonder, in any given case, what the right level of explanation is. In the case of musical screaming, it is likely that all or at least some of these levels admit a possible satisfactory explanation for these aesthetic practices. We might seek out aversive aesthetic experiences in life because they can challenge our socially conditioned associations of the moral and aesthetic.[29] This might also explain the appeal of aversive art, generally. These objects are purpose-built, at least in part, to allow this kind of contemplation and growth, if that is what we get out of aversive aesthetic experiences. However, this cannot be a complete explanation. After all, musical screaming presumably offers us particular goods that we don’t get from sad songs. While both share in goods at the level above, there is surely some reason why two independent aesthetic practices emerged as ways of doing aversive music. It seems reasonable enough to assume that there was a value-add in developing a second aversive music practice and that this value persists now, at least until we are presented with good reason why it would not. A complete explanation will tell us something about the unique value of these distinct practices as well. Yet, the same problem persists at a level down. We were seemingly able to give satisfactory explanations for why different screaming styles emerged just as aversive music practices did. These distinct styles fulfill some role in their respective practices that artists and fans find valuable. Beyond this, there are probably reasons underlying why an artist chose to scream a particular line and do so in the way that they did, and there are probably reasons why fans especially enjoy particular instances more than others.
My claim is that the most obvious answer is probably correct. That is, there is no one right level of explanation. My assumption is that what is true of musical screaming in this case is also true generally. Most aesthetic practices and art objects we deem valuable are likely valuable for more than one reason at more than one level. As such, if a good aesthetic explanation will capture something about why these things have the value they do, it is important to recognize that the value, in any given case, likely is overdetermined. The lesson, in my view, is that this should motivate us to be pluralists about aesthetic value and therefore aesthetic explanations. We value artistic objects and aesthetic practices for a number of overlapping but distinct reasons (for example, because they help us grow and flourish, because they give us sensory pleasure, because they bring us together in communal experiences, because they stimulate us intellectually, and so on). To borrow an analogy from Wittgenstein, there need not be a “downtown of value.” That is, there is not a privileged or core fact or set of concerns that represent the “real” or “” or “right” source of value.[30] In this way, no single explanation is likely to be complete in most cases, but together a number of explanations could capture everything that provides us, fans and artists alike, with reasons to engage in the practice. The goal of the philosopher of art, all things considered, should be to exhaust or at least uncover as many of these reasons as possible, not to find the right one. I will call this quality, the extent to which an explanation is exhaustive in capturing the reasons we value the aesthetic phenomenon being explained, ‘completeness,’ and it seems that the more complete an account is, the better an explanation it is—again, all things considered. This is to say that completeness is a pro tanto good for aesthetic explanations.
More still, the screamed vocals problem seems to have shown us that a complete aesthetic explanation will not just explain what we do but often why we do it in this way. I follow Jerry Fodor and Christy Mag Uidhir in arguing that aesthetic life and artistic appreciation are often and usually quite strongly about the manner in which we do things.[31] Here, Mag Uidhir tells us that art is manner specific: “for a purpose to be manner specific is for a purpose to be essentially constituted both by an action (or state of affairs) and a manner, such that the purpose is to perform that action (or bring about that state of affairs) in that particular manner.”[32] While Mag Uidhir and Fodor take this to be a necessary feature of art, my claim is both weaker and broader. Instead of limiting my account to art, I take it that aesthetic life and its practices are often manner specific. We take the values and practice of metal, hardcore, and screamo as not only reason to scream (or to enjoy it) but also to do it in the appropriate way; but the same is also true of other aesthetic practices. For instance, we may have reason to enjoy the bitter barnyard taste of ripe pu’er tea, but fans also tend to and especially enjoy it through a gong-fu tea ceremony. The adventurer wants to see the beautiful scenic vistas earned by climbing a mountain, but they often want to experience this, for instance, at sunrise and while sharing a cup of coffee or smoking a pipe. When food tourists try new restaurants from cultures where they are unfamiliar with the food customs, they don’t just try the food but ask the waiter “how am I supposed to eat this?” At the same time, my argument doesn’t need this to be a necessary feature of aesthetic experience. It is enough to say that it is characteristic of aesthetic experience. The point being that, to the degree that a given aesthetic explanans is manner specific, capturing that manner specificity is important in capturing all of the aesthetic reasons present. While a theory of musical screaming can tell us why we scream, it is not complete until it captures the manner specific decision-making process that fans and artists deploy in engaging in the practice in the way they do and in the way they enjoy. Here, we are left with a second pro tanto explanatory good: manner specificity.
However, careful readers might have noticed another feature operating as a background assumption for what I take to be a good aesthetic explanation that we should now make explicit. Namely, that it is descriptive of our reasons for enjoying and engaging in and with the aesthetic goods we do. If I am to put my cards on the table, I believe that a good aesthetic explanation is descriptive. More than this, good aesthetic explanations describe the aesthetic phenomena (the explanans) in terms of our reasons for doing and enjoying it in the way that we do (the explanandum). I would call this third pro tanto good, the degree to which an explanation reflects our reasons, ‘descriptiveness.’ In this case, the degree to which an explanation reflects actual participants’ attitudes and motivations, drawing on what participants and experts say about the practice, is the degree to which we can reasonably expect our explanations to give us what we are ultimately after: a reason which is reason enough to participate.
This brings me to the second major lesson of this case: our pluralism about aesthetic explanations should also be pragmatic. That is, some of the merits of a good aesthetic explanation are pragmatic, not straight-forwardly epistemic or normative. Completeness, manner specificity, and descriptiveness are explanatory goods because of their “cash value” within our aesthetic lives.[33] A theory, even true, of why we like aversive aesthetic experiences in general offers us no guidance on how we ought to scream as a burgeoning metal band or why hardcore fans might be confused by a band doing pig-squeals at a hardcore show. However, a complete manner-specific description of the reasons underlying the practice of hardcore and metal screaming (that is, why participants value it) will not only render the practice intelligible to us but also, if we share in the underlying values, to play along. An aesthetic explanation should not be about things for the sake of the truth but about us, about what we love to do; and good aesthetic explanations are also for us, so that we can join in and get the most out of the practices they explain. They are invitations and toolkits for us to enter into ongoing practices and enjoy ourselves the way that others already do. They give us the aesthetic reasons of others so that we may take them as our own. This is to say that the right levels of explanation are whatever and as many as capture the reasons actually in the mind of participants to an aesthetic practice.
5. Conclusion
Since we have spent so much time talking about levels of explanation, it is only natural to continue to do so. On one level, I have argued that there is no right answer to the screamed vocals problem, but a number of answers that jointly make up a good answer. In this case, while there are likely reasons that we enjoy aversive aesthetic experiences (including those of aversive art) in general, there are also reasons why we enjoy musical screaming as a particular path towards achieving these goods. Namely, different kinds of screaming support different kinds of genre practices, which in turn issue from and reinforce the value commitments of those communities. The more naturalistic and expressive screaming of screamo offers us the opportunity for a kind of shared emotional catharsis, the various false chords, fries, pig squeals, and death growls of metal offer metal fans new and varied forms of heaviness and artists a number of different timbres to demonstrate virtuosity and control over, and, finally, hardcore’s gang vocals offer a democratized, egalitarian, shared aesthetic experience for community building. Genres practices like this draw participants together into a community with a shared identity, whether that is as punks or goths or metalheads, and so on. In this way and on another more general level, I think what is true of musical screaming is true of other kinds of aesthetic concepts and practices, such as authenticity and groove.[34] That is, we should adopt hardcore Kivyism about aesthetic concepts and be careful not to be misled into overgeneralizing our analyses by inquiring at too general a level. Just as we should not assume that the same concepts and practices do the same work across all of art, the example of musical screaming suggests we should not assume that the same concepts and practices do the same work across the full range of an artform.
However, this raises a level problem for aesthetic explanations. Here, instead of thinking that there is one right answer to the level problem and that that level is the level of genres, we should conclude that aesthetic value is often overdetermined by a number of different kinds of features and at various levels of generalization. In this way, we need not commit ourselves to a particular position (for example, hedonism, communitarianism, and so on) on the nature of aesthetic value. Instead of looking for the right explanation, we should aim for explanations that are complete, manner specific, and descriptive, because these kinds of explanations have greater cash value for our aesthetic lives. Our artistic appreciation and practice often involve doing and appreciating not just the thing in question but also a specific manner in which we think it ought to be done. Likewise, our aesthetic and artistic lives are multifaceted. Art and aesthetic experiences often appeal to us for a number of reasons, both communal and personal, that they may or may not share in common with one another. These commonalities often overdetermine the reasons to do and care about what we do. Finally, by attempting to capture something like an exhaustive list of the manner specific reasons people actually do value an aesthetic phenomenon, we ensure that our reasons are not merely hypothetical, with hypothetical normative force, but reflect all of the reasons that give others reason enough. This best sets us up to enjoy in the way that they do.
Emmie Malone
emmie.malone@sjsu.edu
Emmie Malone is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University, Immediate Past-President of the Rocky Mountain Division of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), and co-chair of the ASA’s Feminist Caucus Committee. Her most recent book, edited alongside Elizabeth Scarbrough, is An Introduction to Contemporary Aesthetics: Art, Community, and Experience (Routledge, 2025).
Published on May 29, 2026.
Cite this paper: Emmie Malone, “Practicing Screaming: Aesthetic Explanations, Aesthetic Value, and the Screamed Vocals Problem,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 24 (2026), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Mario Attie-Picker, Tara Ventkatesan, George E. Newman, and Joshua Knobe, “On the Value of Sad Music,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 58, no. 1 (2024): 46-65; Carolyn Korsmeyer. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2011); Eva M. Dadlez, “Pleased and Afflicted: Hume on the Paradox of Tragic Pleasure,” Hume Studies 30, no. 2 (2004): 216-236; Christy Mag Uidhir, “An Eliminativist Theory of Suspense,” Philosophy and Literature 35, no. 1 (2011): 121-133.
[2] Sean Murphy, “Why Delight in Screamed Vocals? Emotional Hardcore and the Case Against Beautifying Pain,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 4 (2024): 625-645.
[3] David Hume, Four Dissertations (A. Millar, 1757), 187.
[4] Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or, Paradoxes of the Heart (Routledge, 1990), 160.
[5] Berys Gaut, “The Paradox of Horror,” British Journal of Aesthetics 33, no. 4 (1993): 333.
[6] Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell University Press, 1994), 307.
[7] Korsmeyer, 2011.
[8] Korsmeyer, 2011; Aaron Smuts, “Art and Negative Affect,” Philosophy Compass 4, no. 1 (2009): 39-55; Matthew Strohl, “Art and Painful Emotion,” Philosophy Compass 14, no. 1 (2018): 1-12; Laura Sizer, “Sad Songs Say So Much: The Paradoxical Pleasures of Sad Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77, no. 3 (2019): 255-266.
[9] Smuts, 42.
[10] Jonathan Dee, “The Summer of Screamo,” New York Times, June 29, 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/magazine/the-summer-of-screamo.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all.
[11] Michael J. Seidlinger, Scream (Bloomsbury, 2023), 28.
[12] Arielle Gordon, “No One Was Driving the Car,” Pitchfork, September 12, 2025. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/la-dispute-no-one-was-driving-the-car/.
[13] Murphy, 2024.
[14] Matt Mullen, “‘Take Your Pig Squeals to the Next Level’: ABlaze’s Screamer is a Vocal Production Plugin ‘Crafted for Metalheads by Metalheads,’” Music Radar, August 14, 2025. https://www.musicradar.com/music-tech/take-your-pig-squeals-to-the-next-level-ablazes-screamer-is-a-vocal-production-plugin-crafted-for-metalheads-by-metalheads; Seidlinger 2023.
[15] Seidlinger, 33.
[16] Seidlinger, 33.
[17] Seidlinger, 32.
[18] Karina Utomo and Cat Hope, “‘Rrrrreaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrghhhhh!!!!’: Evolving Vocal Virtuosity in Extreme Metal,” in Contemporary Musical Virtuosities, edited by Louise Devenish and Cat Hope (Routledge, 2019), 168.
[19] Robert Walser, “Eruptions: Heavy Metal Appropriations of Classical Virtuosity,” Popular Music 11, no. 3 (1992): 263-308; Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. (Wesleyan University Press, 1993).
[20] See Cryptopsy’s None So Vile (1996) for a characteristic example of this style of drumming.
[21] Ross Haenfler, Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change (Rutgers University Press, 2006); Ross Haenfler, “Punk Rock, Hardcore, and Globalization,” in The Sage Handbook of Popular Music, edited by Andy Beckett and Steve Waksman 9SAGE, 2015), 278-296.
[22] Shaun Cullen, “‘Survival of the Streets’: Krishna Consciousness and Religion at the End of the Cold War,” in Hardcore Research: Punk, Practice, Politics, edited by Konstantin Butz and Robert A. Winkler (transcript, 2023), 97.
[23] David Pearson, “The Musical Aesthetics of Hardcore: Straightforward, Strident, and Antagonistic,” in Hardcore Research: Punk, Practice, Politics, edited by Konstantin Butz and Robert A. Winkler (transcript, 2023), 195.
[24] James R. McDonald, ‘Suicidal Rage: An Analysis of Hardcore Punk Lyrics,” Popular Music and Society 11, no. 3 (1987): 96.
[25] Evan Malone, “The Problem of Genre Explosion,” Inquiry (2022): 1–17. doi:10.1080/0020174X.2022.2131623; Evan Malone, “The Ontology and Aesthetics of Genre,” Philosophy Compass 19, no. 1 (2024): 1-9.
[26] Malone, 2024.
[27] Peter Kivy, “Differences,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (1993): 123-132.
[28] Kivy, 129.
[29] Bryce Huebner, “Existential Aesthetics: Self-understanding in a Messy World,” in An Introduction to Contemporary Aesthetics: Art, Community, and Experience, edited by Emmie Malone and Elizabeth A. Scarbrough (Routledge, 2025). 251-266.
[30] This is a play on Wittgenstein’s claim that there is “no downtown of language.”
[31] Jerry A. Fodor, “Deja vu All Over Again: How Danto’s Aesthetics Recapitulates the Philosophy of Mind,” in Danto and his Critics, Second Edition, edited by Mark Rollins (Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), 55-68; Christy Mag Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t Be Art,” Philosophy and Literature 33, no. 1 (2009): 194.
[32] Mag Uidhir, 2009.
[33] William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Longmans, Green and Co., 1922).
[34] Evan Malone, “Two Concepts of Groove: Musical Nuances, Rhythm, and Genre,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80, no. 3 (2022b): 345-354; Evan Malone, “Country Music and the Problem of Authenticity,” British Journal of Aesthetics 63, no. 1 (2023): 75-90; Emmie Malone, “Authenticity: What is it, Does it Matter, and Why?” in An Introduction to Contemporary Aesthetics: Art, Community, and Experience, edited by Emmie Malone and Elizabeth A. Scarbrough (Routledge 2025), 100-116.