Scott Wilson, Great Satan's Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism

Although Great Satan’s Rage begins in territory befitting a narrative concerning heavy metal music – a discussion of Satan as the wrath-filled, revenge-seeking enemy of God in the context of John Milton’s 1667 epic poem, Paradise Lost – from there it goes on a varied and unexpected journey. With metal and rap music as the reference points, Scott Wilson’s book explores major incidents in the post-Cold War period that range from the analysis of the USSR and its fall and the Gulf War, to the Columbine shootings, 9/11, and the War on Terror. To contextualise and explain this procession of late twentieth century historical moments is a cavalcade of philosophers and social and political thinkers as disparate as Allan Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Francis Fukuyama, Jean-Joseph Goux, G.W.F Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, and Alexandre Kojève: all underpinned by the consistent presence of Georges Bataille, the book’s philosophic lynchpin.
In terms of a thesis, Great Satan’s Rage is based upon a concept Wilson calls ‘supercapitalism’: a mode of American capitalist production that (especially from mid-1980s onwards) has increasingly fused economic production and business with the military and the waging of war. In Wilson’s view, there are two primary reasons for this synthesis: ‘First, business was conceived as a kind of war, having been successful in winning the cold war and in controlling populations. Second, war became a form of business in the sense that its aim was to create wealth as well as to fight and control populations’ (2008: 8)…