Heavy Metal Music in Argentina

In Black We Are Seen

Emiliano Scaricaciottoli, Nelson Varas-Díaz, Daniel Nevárez Araujo

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781789382990
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789383010
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

An in-depth regional discussion of heavy metal music, Heavy Metal Music in Argentina explores metal music as a catalyst for social change and site for engaging political reflection. Originally published in Spanish and sold locally in Argentina, this is the first time the work has been available in English.  

Edited by leading researchers, this collection addresses the music's rituals, circulations, cultural products, lyrics and allows readers to rethink the place of heavy metal within Argentinean politics and economics. Exclusively written by members of the Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal (GIIHMA) in a communal approach to scholarship, the book echoes the working-class voices that marked early post-dictatorship metal music in Argentina.

This is the first collection of essays on Argentine metal music. It has opened up research channels between different universities in the country while also engaging a non-academic audience, and widening the potential market for the book.

The book makes an interdisciplinary examination of a complex and fascinating object: it allows for the examination, discussion and analysis of its nationalist postulates, relationship with the Creole culture (for example, with nineteenth-century 'gauchesca' literature), indigenism, and with the political processes of contemporary Argentina.

Metal Music Studies, as an academic area of inquiry, has focused mostly on the music's cultural components in Europe and the United States. The few books that have addressed metal music as a global phenomenon, have severely neglected the inclusion of Latin American countries. Argentina, with the largest and oldest metal scene in the region, has also been neglected in the existing literature. There is a growing interest in this area, as demonstrated by the emergence of documentary film on metal music in Latin America.

The book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology, cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology and Latin American studies.  It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.

1

Heavy Metal as a Subculture in Argentina: Identity and Resistance

Gustavo Torreiro

Heavy metal appeared suddenly in Argentina at the beginning of the 1980s, within a particular political and historical climate during which the nation found itself under the rule of a military dictatorship that had begun in 1976. Despite lacking the strength of its earlier years, the dictatorship continued to dominate the Argentinean political and social scene of the time.

The incursion of heavy metal as a cultural¹ phenomenon into Argentina does not seem to be a random event. The following chapter seeks to respond to the many questions surrounding the irruption of this cultural movement into the country and the ways in which it has manifested itself. To begin, we will analyze whether it is possible to approach heavy metal in Argentina as a subculture² while also considering the type of identity such a genre assumes within the nation. Second, we will consider whether there are elements that allow for the consideration of heavy metal as a movement that originates from the poor and working classes, emerging as a way for these classes to resist the dominant class ideology. This chapter will also look at how heavy metal opposed the dominant ideology of a period that spanned from its origins in the 1980s – with the rise of the first noteworthy bands (Riff and V8) – to the end of the 1990s. With this final objective in mind, we will develop and delineate a timeline of this period. The first period to be analyzed takes place during the military dictatorship (1976–83). Here, we will take a closer look at the content within and the reasoning behind many of the heavy metal lyrics that openly confront the dictatorship. Following this analysis, we will look at the period when democracy returns to Argentina (1983–89). Finally, we will consider the era of resistance born during the 1990s. In this period the neoliberal politics, partially implemented during the dictatorship, fully mature under the presidency of Carlos Menem.

The issue of class will not take a secondary position in this analysis. Taking this into account, and following Louis Althusser’s work and his analyses of society as a structure defined by class struggle, this chapter will consider the position this cultural movement occupies in Argentina as it pertains to said struggle. Althusser asserts that culture forms part of what he calls the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). ISAs are intricately related to those classes that possess the means of production and which, consequently, control state institutions. However, precisely because they are marked by their connection to ideology, it is possible to understand

their capacity to not only be objects of the class struggle, but spaces where said class struggle takes place, often in highly contentious ways. The powerful upper classes (or class alliances) cannot enforce their laws on the ISAs as easily as they do when it comes to the (repressive) state apparatus.

(Althusser 2005: 28)

It is the possibility of a contentious class struggle³ within the ISAs that gives the exploited classes the means to resist the dominant ideology.

Subculture and Identity

If we can think of heavy metal in Argentina as a subculture, it is because it originates as a subset of a ‘parent culture’⁴ defined by its class composition. A central argument of this chapter is that the social subject to whom heavy metal lyrics allude to, specifically in Argentina, and which enables us to consider this movement as a subculture that arises from the subordinate classes is characterized by one of two identities. Either this subject is a member of a working class that is suffering and resisting the onslaughts of neoliberal policies which were first enforced during the Military Dictatorship of 1976/83,⁵ or the subject belongs to a lower class that has already lost the ‘privileges’ of belonging to the working class as a consequence of the disintegration of the labor world, a disintegration precipitated by the imposition of neoliberalism in 1976: ‘Poor people clamor for a crust of bread/The rich have become their executioners’ (‘La Mano Maldita’, Un Paso más en la Batalla, V8 1985).

The lyrics of Hermética’s song ‘Gil Trabajador’, a song that offers a working-class critique against the vision of a society increasingly dominated by a neoliberal culture that undervalues hard work, will be taken as emblematic of this subculture’s relationship with the working class: ‘With my meager salary/I cannot avoid/the bitter taste of this bad moment/while the world, the police and a thief/dub me, in mockery, the simpleton⁶ worker’ (‘Gil Trabajador’, Ácido Argentino, Hermética 1991). The lyrics enact, through their criticism of society, a reclaiming of the traditional values of the working class, which, in the specific context being analyzed, have been disputed by the dominant ideology the subculture is challenging.

It is worth mentioning the analysis made by Maristella Svampa (2000) who, in studying the identity of metal workers, introduces as a sample case the testimony of Roque, a worker from the metal industry who identifies himself as a metalhead. Svampa states that Roque ‘is excluded from the middle class by a position and a function in the social structure (“I get up at four in the morning to go to work”) but also by the recreational spaces he frequents (“I don’t visit nightclubs as they do, those that have a little more money than me”) and the clothing he wears, among others’. On the other hand, Roque still voices the pride he feels at being a metal worker: ‘I always loved the sight of scrap and sheet metal bundles’⁷ (2000: 131). We would argue that the convergent identities of metalhead and lower-class laborer found in Roque can also be found to coexist in the heavy metal subculture of Argentina. The heavy metal subculture is formed around the subordinate classes; as a result, the subculture distinguishes itself from the rest of society through the position occupied by its members within the social structure as well as through the subjectivity or identification markers the movement acquires.

In order to closely analyze the identity that forms around the genre in Argentina, we will deploy Stuart Hall’s definition of identity. Hall affirms that

identities are born from difference, not at the margins of that difference. This implies the radically disturbing acknowledgment that the ‘positive’ meaning of any given term – and with it its ‘identity’ – can only be discovered through its relationship with the Other, the relationship with that which it is not, with that which it precisely lacks, with that which it has denominated as its constitutive exterior.

(2010: 18)

From this perspective, we can think of the metalhead identity in Argentina as an opposition or as a limit to dominant culture, as that which the latter is not. Thus, we can account for a constitutive exterior that draws a line between what it is to be a metalhead and what it is not. And that exterior is not defined solely by the sound of the music those belonging to the subculture listen to or the common traits shared by those found within the subculture; the identity is also determined, in great measure, by the limit, the rejection, the resistance to the dominant culture. We can see this opposition to dominant culture in the work of a band like Riff, who voice their rejection of the modernity that was drawing near; ‘consequently, Riff’s metal style – with its aggressively gothic and futurist horror components – proposes a subjectivity which implies a contrarian identity, an identity that rails against what it sees as an imposed system, the new modern city’ (Blanco and Scaricaciottoli 2014: 105).

In its lyrics, Riff attacks modern values and trends that invade and modify the city. An opposition between modernity and the values that characterize the heavy metal subculture can be traced in different songs, as is the case in a song titled ‘Maquinación’: ‘Today we decide to reclaim/a trace of our identity/on the road lies/your uneventful modernity’ (‘Maquinación’, Contenidos, Riff 1982). We can think of this opposition to modernity as functioning in two distinct manners: on the one hand, it offers itself as a resistance against the rise of a new way of producing and consuming promoted by neoliberal policies that invade, not just the cities, but society at large; on the other hand, it is an attack on modern groups and bands that appeared on the Argentinean rock and pop scene during the 1980s. Returning to the oppositions expressed during the identification processes, it can be argued that the values of modernity stand as an important antithetical element. In other words, and to be as clear as possible: it is not possible to be modern and belong to the heavy metal subculture at the same time.

Whereas the values of modernity represent a fundamental antagonist in the music of Riff, in the music of a band like V8, the position of the antagonist is taken up by the pacifism found in the figure of the hippie: ‘Those sick of withstanding/the weeping of the peacemongers/those fed up with seeing/the faces that recall yesteryears/join us, there is a place/in this metal brigade/deranged people who are not like/our inland hippiedom’ (‘Brigadas Metálicas’, Luchando por el Metal, V8 1983). The metal brigades, the metalheads, cannot be subjects who, recalling the repression suffered by the lower classes under the civic–military dictatorship, willingly accept some form of complacent pacifism. Violent struggle surfaces as a response to a system and a political context that has historically attacked the subordinate classes. To allude to ‘our inland hippiedom’ is to draw ‘a line dividing what came to be known as national rock from the heavy metal output of bands like V8 who, tapping into the furor and the anger of the moment, reclaimed what had been abandoned in rock, that is, its imperative to protest’ (Blanco and Scaricaciottoli 2014: 111).

While an extended analysis of this aspect is beyond the purview of this chapter, it is important to mention that a fundamental aspect defining a subculture’s identity is its style (clothing, hairstyle, etc.). This style functions, on the one hand, as an identifier that marks off boundaries of belonging, and which, at the same time, ties the subculture to prior subcultures. It also links them to the parent culture, given that it takes elements from both and resignifies them.

Metal’s Resistance

When we talk about resisting, we are talking about resisting the dominant ideology from a specific position: that is, from the subordinate or lower classes. As stated earlier, heavy metal in Argentina arises from these classes, and it is from them that a resistance will be developed against the dominant ideology developed within the different historical periods analyzed in this text. Resistance will manifest itself in several ways: first, as a resistance to the dominant culture and the values of the dominant ideology; but also as a resistance to the social and economic policies that the dominant classes, as embodied by current governments, impose and that directly impact the popular classes.

Resistance during the Last Dictatorship

The last civic-military dictatorship, which operated from 1976 to 1983, had a crystal clear objective: to impose a deindustrializing economic plan based on neoliberal policies that specifically harmed the working and lower classes. It must be noted that the implementatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Foreword
• Translator’s Note
• Introduction: A Window into Heavy Metal Scholarship in the Global South
• 1. Heavy Metal as a Subculture in Argentina: Identity and Resistance
• 2. Genre Violence: Argentinean Heavy Metal in the Music Market
• 3. Heavenly Hosts and Other Demons: Reflections Concerning a Difficult and Transversal Relationship in the History of Our Heavy Music
• 4. Walkabout, Just Walking about for the Sake of Walking: The Journey as an Ethos in the Poetics of Ricardo Iorio
• 5. Passion and Ethics: A Space for Voice and Tradition in Iorio’s Lyrics
• 6. The Reason Behind My Writing: Another Day of Being
• 7. Piedra Libre: Referential Tensions in Argentinean Heavy Metal Lyrics Since the Political Crisis of 2001/2002
• Notes on Contributors
• Index