Bruce Dickinson sings the song “Senjutsu”

Abstract

This article is an attempt to interpret the Iron Maiden song “Senjutsu,” which is one of the most important on the album of the same title (2021). The thesis of the study is that in this work, the textual and musical persona – the performative subject of this text – tries to relate an extreme, borderline, liminal experience resulting from assuming the status of a war defender, forced to fight the invader. It can be said, paraphrasing the title of the classic book by Barbara Major (2013), that Dickinson sings the symbolic habitus of Athena in a Leather Jacket – Explosion of Metal Music Fury Affect. This metaphor for the fury of the Greek goddess of war is present in the work of Iron Maiden. The hypothesis to be verified is the degree of presence of this issue in the output of the English team; the research problem is, how was the subject of war dealt with in the texts of Steve Harris’s works?