Global Metal Music and Culture

Current Directions in Metal Studies

Andy R. Brown, Karl Spracklen, Keith Kahn-Harris, Niall Scott, Andy R. Brown, Karl Spracklen, Keith Kahn-Harris, Niall Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138822382
• eBook ISBN: 9781317587248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

This book defines the key ideas, scholarly debates, and research activities that have contributed to the formation of the international and interdisciplinary field of Metal Studies. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including popular music, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics, this volume offers new and innovative research on metal musicology, global/local scenes studies, fandom, gender and metal identity, metal media, and commerce. Offering a wide-ranging focus on bands, scenes, periods, and sounds, contributors explore topics such as the riff-based song writing of classic heavy metal bands and their modern equivalents, and the musical-aesthetics of Grindcore, Doom metal, Death metal, and Progressive metal. They interrogate production technologies, sound engineering, album artwork and band promotion, logos and merchandising, t-shirt and jewellery design, and fan communities that define the global metal music economy and subcultural scene. The volume explores how the new academic discipline of metal studies was formed, also looking forward to the future of metal music and its relationship to metal scholarship and fandom. With an international range of contributors, this volume will appeal to scholars of popular music, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as those interested in metal communities around the world.

1 Introduction

Global Metal Music and Culture and Metal Studies

Andy R. Brown, Karl Spracklen, Keith Kahn-Harris and Niall W. R. Scott

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742816-1

This volume brings together a range of chapters, written by new and established scholars, that present original research and analysis into the subjects and practices that constitute the phenomenon of global metal music and culture. But what exactly is global metal music and culture? When did it begin? Is it possible to define it? Study it? And by what range of means? Following on from this, what exactly is ‘metal studies’? How is it defined? Where did it come from? what is its connection to the subject it studies? This introductory chapter will explore the range of possible answers to these questions, beginning with the heavy metal music genre and its complex relationship to economic and media globalization processes, history, culture, and the academy.

Following on from this, it will outline how and why the contemporary study of this global music and cultural phenomenon ended up being called ‘metal studies’ and how this is itself tied up with an older history of academic neglect or conflict over the value or legitimacy of metal music and its culture(s) that has (have), in a number of ways, led to its emergence. We will then go on to set out for the reader the ways in which we have organized the book and the major themes it addresses, as well as provide an outline of each chapter and its contribution to the section theme and the wider study of global metal music and culture.

Global Metal: From Heavy Metal World Tours to the Extreme Metal Underground

A number of the chapters gathered here began life as research papers presented at the 2011 Heavy Metal and Place international academic conference. The conference was part of the Home of Metal project, originally a fan-initiative to create an archive of memorabilia, such as band merchandise, concert tickets, album covers, and the like, which was taken up and supported by West Midland’s Capsule arts media (Trilling, 2007). The Home of Metal project was laudable in its intentions to narrate and thereby legitimate the narratives and ‘stories’ of ordinary fans. But inevitably, such a project was at least in part driven by a desire to reclaim heavy metal music and culture as a reflection of a particular British regional identity. Or as the Birmingham Post put it, ‘For too long Birmingham and the West Midlands have failed to celebrate what is rightfully theirs, to claim the city and region as home of “heavy metal”’ (2008). While millions of heavy metal fans over the decades and around the globe have celebrated the bands Black Sabbath and Judas Priest¹ that emerged from this region as central to the formation of the genre style, this statement is not simply a belated endorsement of that fandom or a claim on the music’s origins as traceable to a regional ‘home’. Rather it echoes a recognizably contemporary discourse that surrounds the cultural politics and economics of globalization in an era of neo-liberalism, one that speaks of ‘regional music scenes’, of symbolic ‘spaces’ and ‘places’, national ‘heritage locations’, or even ‘music cities’ as part of a national policy of the ‘global-local’ (Lashua, Spracklen, and Wagg, 2014; Bennett, 2009).

According to the organizers, the HoM project was conceived as ‘celebration of the music that was born in the Black Country and Birmingham’ and was aimed at ‘a broad audience, from music fans, social history enthusiasts to cultural tourists’ (HoM, 2011).

Loved the world over, Heavy Metal in its many forms had its roots in Birmingham and the Black Country. But you wouldn’t know to visit it. Nary a plaque, tour or tea towel marked one of the region’s most prolific cultural exports […] Four decades since Heavy Metal was unleashed onto an unsuspecting world, Home of Metal honors a truly global musical phenomenon (ibid.).

Daniel Trilling, reporting in the New Statesman, makes a similar claim to the effect that ‘Heavy metal was born in the West Midlands, and has developed a global following matched only in hip-hop. It’s time to stop sneering and celebrate this proud cultural heritage’ (2007). But, as Gerd Bayer suggests, the globalization of metal marked a ‘turning point [after which] heavy metal somehow stopped being a particular British tradition’ (2009, p. 2). How are we to disentangle these apparently contradictory claims?

First, the origins of the heavy metal genre are contested, not only in respect to whether Black Sabbath is the originator of the genre but also whether the band’s regional location was the significant factor in the codification of heavy metal’s meta-genre characteristics.² While there is no shortage of claims that the urban, working class location of the band and the surrounding industrial milieu (Harrison, 2010; Phillipov, 2011, p. 55; Weinstein, 2014) gave rise to a musical style that was ‘steeped in rage’ (Cope, 2010, p. 97), this is a relatively recent view, one that is itself part of a retrospective re-evaluation of heavy metal. Or as Ewing put it, apparently on behalf of rock critics in general, ‘How wrong we were about Black Sabbath’ (2010). Reynolds, commenting on the re-release of Sabbath’s 70s albums, goes further: ‘Criticism always lags behind new art forms, appraising it using terminology and techniques appropriate to earlier genres [but] over the long haul Sabbath’s originality and fertility have been vindicated’ (2004, p. 90).

Second, and consistent with this perspective, the globalization of heavy metal has only recently been viewed as a culturally significant phenomenon. Prior to this, the international impact of the genre in territories beyond the British/North American and latterly European context was viewed unequivocally (when it was noted at all) by popular music, media, and cultural studies scholars as part of the cultural imperialism and hegemonic domination of Western media products over non-Western populations, as evidenced in the popularity of Western film, music, and television productions in international charts, cinema, and cable-television schedules (Tunstall, 1977). The subsequent shift in scholarly debates from the ‘top down’ cultural domination and consequent ‘homogenization’ (Ritzer, 1993) of local and regional cultures, to a more complex view of differentiated reception, regional variation, and evidence of local adaptation and even ‘resistance’ to Western hegemony (Lull, 1995; Robertson, 1995), largely ignored heavy metal in favor of studies of the global-local impact of hip-hop, punk, and electronic dance music subcultures, scenes, and neo-tribes (Mitchell, 2001; Bennett, 2000; 2015, pp. 223–225; St. John, 2009; cf. Phillipov, 2011).

Nevertheless, it is plausible to argue that the genre trajectory of heavy metal music and its global cultural impact more closely approximates the narratives of the cultural imperialism thesis and the media globalization and global-local theories that have largely replaced it than any other genre-style. For a start, heavy metal, along with ‘prog rock’ and singer-songwriter/folk Americana, was one of the most successful popular music genres of the 1970s—not just in terms of record sales but also in terms of North American and international touring revenues (Brown, 2015).

This pattern, if anything, accelerated in the 1980s with bands such as Iron Maiden, on the back of successful UK and North American album releases, embarking on ‘World Tours’. For example, their August 1984–July 1985 ‘World Slavery Tour’ included over 300 shows in 28 countries, including dates in East European cities ‘behind the Iron Curtain’, culminating in a concert in front of 250,000 at the first Rock in Rio festival in Brazil (Wall, 2001, p. 253). Indeed, Maiden’s tour of Poland was ‘greeted in the metal press as proof of the existence of an international metal community’ (Weinstein, 2000, p. 120). Weinstein’s description of the international advance in popularity of the genre—first emergent in Germany, then the Scandinavian countries, forming smaller enclaves within, Italy, France, and Spain, then Poland because of more liberal policies on culture, but by the late 1980s spreading throughout the former Soviet bloc countries; while in the global-South it strongly emerges in South America in the mid-1980s, including Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina (op cit, pp. 118–120)—does sometimes read like strategic markers on a cultural-imperialist map; while her statement to the effect that the genre is: ‘found in every part of the world where there is an industrial working class and is more ubiquitous than McDonald’s’ (Weinstein, 2011, p. 41), echoes but does not confirm Ritzer’s thesis (1993). Certainly by the mid-’90s heavy metal’s popularity was clearly to be found across the Pacific Rim countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, in particular) (Wallach, 2011), the Indian sub-continent, Turkey (Hecker, 2012), the Middle East (LeVine, 2008) and China (Wong, 2011).

So, has heavy metal music ‘conquered...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Global Metal Music and Culture and Metal Studies
• 2 Reflections on Metal Studies
• PART I Metal Musicology
• PART II Metal Music Scenes
• PART III Metal Demographics and Identity
• PART IV Metal Markets and Commerce
• PART V Metal and Gender Politics
• PART VI Metal and Cultural Studies
• PART VII Metal Futures
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Index