Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality

Interdisciplinary Approaches

Florian Heesch, Niall Scott, Florian Heesch, Niall Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317122975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality brings together a collection of original, interdisciplinary, critical essays exploring the negotiated place of gender and sexuality in heavy metal music and its culture. Scholars debate the current state of play concerning masculinities, femininities, queerness, identity aesthetics and monstrosities in an area of music that is sometimes mistakenly treated as exclusively sustaining a masculinist hegemony. The book combines a broad variety of perspectives on the main topic, regarding gender in connection to: the history of the genre; the range of metal subgenres; heavy metal's multidimensional scope (music, lyrics, performance, style, illustrations); men and women; sexualities and various local and global perspectives. Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality is a text that opens up the world of heavy metal to reveal that it is a very diverse and ground-breaking stage where gender play is at the centre of its theatricality and sustains its mass appeal.

Part I
Heavy metal culture – a case of limited diversity in gender and sexuality?

1 Playing with gender in the key of metal

Deena Weinstein

One of the most playful contemporary cultural formations is also one of the least likely to have been seen as such: heavy metal. Once a genre and now, at best, a composite meta-genre, playfulness has never been metal’s public image. Further, metal’s particular playfulness takes place in an implausible area, that of gender. It is doubtful that any contemporary cultural form has played with gender as lavishly as has heavy metal. Heavy metal’s various gender plays are initially made by particular bands. Other bands then adopt, with more or less variation, any of these strategies/practices which might coalesce, if there is a cluster of such bands doing likewise, into a new or existing subgenre.

Cultural play does not occur in a social vacuum. Metal musicians, like all musicians, are embedded in a web of social relations that includes them, their fans and institutional mediators such as record labels, radio stations, TV programs and concert promoters, among the multitude of actors. Indeed, it is not possible to imagine any cultural form existing without a network of social interaction that sustains and embodies it.

Although any specific form of gender play originates with a single band, it will not become widespread unless it finds a sufficient audience and is embraced by other bands. (Mediators will follow, for their own commercial reasons.) Whether these requisites will be satisfied is dependent on broader changes in the perception/construction of gender in society at large and/or some of its subgroups that influence musicians and audiences. In turn, deeper changes in economic structures and political situations condition the perception/construction of gender. Strategies of gender play in heavy metal change over time because the initiatives of some creative musicians are co-constituted by changes occurring in the wider society. This is the sociological part of cultural sociology in which postmodern free play with significations is limited in its scope by social interaction, social structure and climate of opinion.

Heavy metal’s postmodern gender play is lavish when seen from the perspective of the genre’s four-decade history (Table 1.1). Heavy metal began in the wake of the Sixties’ challenges to hegemonic culture. These challenges include, in the United States, the early civil rights movement and the small but incisive set of authors known as the Beats. By the mid-1960s, these challenges went mainstream throughout the western world, especially with the counterculture, and its heavy media coverage and commercial exploitation. One result was the weakening of hegemonic gender roles, partly a result, but also a cause of the women’s rights and gay rights movements.

Table 1.1 Gender-Power plays in key subgenres from 1970s to 2000s

Era		Key subgenre	Gender-Power plays
1970s	Mainstream Non-mainstream	Hard rock/heavy metal Heavy metal	Invidious masculinity Masculine exclusivity
1980s	Mainstream Non-mainstream	Glam (hair) metal Thrash metal Death metal	Deconstructed masculinity Hyper-masculine exclusivity
1990s	Mainstream Non-mainstream	Nü metal Death metal Black metal	Broken masculinity Hyper-masculine exclusivity
2000s	Mainstream Non-mainstream	Goth metal Symphonic metal Death metal Black metal	Romantic masculinity [Playful femininity] Hyper-masculine exclusivity [Playful masculinity]

From its origins, heavy metal’s gender play can be understood as a result of, and a response to, this weakening of hegemonic gender roles. From the genre’s beginnings in the early 1970s, heavy metal was seen as masculine and it was not understood as playing with gender. Looked at more closely, two forms of masculinity were being played out. One type, adopted by the more commercial rock and metal bands, is the heterosexual male model, much like the male models used on bodice-ripper romance novels: lascivious, and sexuality aroused and arousing. Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, Kiss’s Gene Simmons, and Van Halen’s David Lee Roth tend toward a hegemonic¹ or patriarchal masculinity (Carrigan et al., 1985; Connell, 1987; Kimmel, 1996; Connellan, 2001). A better term here would be invidious masculinity because it centres on the relationship with ‘the other’ (women) in which male desire and power are top-most.

During the same time period, another sort of heavy metal emerged that was more popular with subcultural audiences, typically young working-class males, especially in Western Europe. This form offered up a rather different sort of masculinity. Bands such as Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were not concerned with sex or romance. Their focus was on good and evil, especially evil. Unlike seductively attired frontmen of mainstream bands, these men were black-clad and stern visaged. They were men’s men in a medieval male-bonding mode, playing to a mainly male, mainly working-class audience. Unlike the commercial heavy metal bands whose focus was on pleasure, these masculinists focused on serious issues, issues of good and evil, life and death.

The youthful audience that was attracted to both the commercial and subcultural types of heavy metal in the genre’s first decade had not experienced the counterculture of the 1960s and did not share the hopefulness of that movement. Instead, they were sobered by the political repressions against 1960s protests. In particular, they were affected by major economic changes, such as the recession, spiraling inflation (stagflation) and especially the deindustrialization of work, in which workers in the industrialized West were replaced by automation and by outsourcing their work to developing countries (Brush, 1999; Fine et al., 1997; Weis, 1990; Ehrenreich, 1983). Industrial work had been dirty, rough and muscular work that had defined masculinity, at least in the working class. The recession challenged what Jesse Bernard (1981) termed ‘the male provider role’ through unemployment and through women entering the work force in large numbers, caused in part by the wide use of birth-control pills, legal changes in favor of equal rights and changes in the character of work.

The cultural and social marginalization of the male industrial working-class helps to explain the first generation of heavy metal’s main audience for both the commercial and subcultural styles, in which bands were playing with the male gender role by making it extreme, enacting two varieties of over-the-top masculinity. In a sense, the power of the music (including the portrayal of men) is on a symbolic level, a compensation for lost social power. David Collinson (1992: 78) argues that ‘working class masculinity is simultaneously a means by which workers seek to secure their subjectivities and generate a positive, meaningful, “heroic” world for themselves.’

The interaction between the cultural gender plays of heavy metal and its audience in the 1970s does not explain the whole audience. There were demographic misfits and many who fit the demographics of metal fans who eschewed heavy metal in favor of some other style of music, either similar styles, such as southern rock, or other radically different ones, like disco. That is, we need to recognize the ‘relative autonomy,’ in Althusser’s terms (1969), of the possibility of a measure of independence of cultural forms from social structure.

Toward the end of the 1970s, a major expansion of heavy metal began with the addition of new bands and geographically new fan bases and, most importantly, with a complex array of emerging subgenres and new ways of playing with gender. New subgenres were formed in a variety of ways – some took a feature of existing metal and emphasized it or made it more extreme,² whereas others combined metal with elements of some other genre of music.³ By the middle of the 1980s, heavy metal was so complex that it is best described as a composite meta-genre. Mainstream media and the fans that were loyal to it still used the term heavy metal; but subcultural adherents and their specialized mediators began to refer to the genre merely as metal.

The dominant metal subgenre of the 1980s, by album sales, was mainly identified as heavy metal, although it was also and is still known as hair metal or glam metal (Auslander, 2006; Blush, 2006; Darnielle, 2004). (Fans of non-mainstream metal often referred to it with a variety of denigrating sobriquets, such as poodle metal, poseur metal and false metal.) In an academic analysis, written when the subgenre was at its peak, it was called lite metal, to underscore its relative absence of heavy metal’s bottom sound (Weinstein, 1991). Hair metal’s gender play, the most blatant of any metal subgenre, comes straight out of Derrida’s playbook, although, of course, no one involved with that subgenre understood it as such. Deconstruction is the term used by Derrida and others to mark the invasion of the excluded; in the binary opposition of masculinity and femininity, hair metal certainly embraced that invasion.

Long hair on males was, when it became fashionable in the 1960s, seen by the older generation as inappropriately feminine – ‘is it a girl or is it a boy?’ they would chide. The Beatles’ initial coverage in the United States always mentioned their long hair, which until they had stopped touring in the mid-1960s, was not all that long. By the 1970s, long hair was an option for young men, especially those who played loud rock music and their long hair was no longer seen as a feminine affectation. However, the hair of hair metal band members was not merely long, it was obviously styled: curled, dyed, teased to gravity-defying heights and heavily sprayed. Hair metal is thus an apt name for the subgenre, especially as its major mediator, MTV, was primarily a visual medium.

The glam metal designation is no less fitting. Not only were their hair-dos glamorous, but so were their lipstick, eye liner, eye shadow and rouge. Their clothing was equally unsubtle and no less glamorous: pants were tight leather or spandex (the sort women had been wearing for gym workouts) with colourful tops or scarves. But they were also making loud music with electric guitars and big drum kits, signs of masculinity.

Hair metal’s gender play can be identified as a deconstructed masculinity. It was not an attempt to play at homosexuality; their binary was not straight-gay, but masculine-feminine. Their heterosexuality was constantly underscored. In videos, they were surrounded by sexily attired femme fatales. In interviews, they frequently mentioned their ever-present and willing groupies, their visits to strip clubs and having strippers as romantic partners. Some band names played with the deconstruction, such as Twisted Sister, Britny Fox, Cinderella, and Pretty Boy Floyd, but others, such as Poison, Mötley Crüe, Skid Row, Slaughter, Warrant, and Ratt, did not.

Significant for analyzing gender play, hair metal was the one subgenre in metal in which women musicians became popular. In 1988, Billboard (Ross, 1988) congratulated the style for opening hard rock to women. There weren’t many of them; the most famous included Lita Ford, Doro Pesch and the all-female band Vixen. Visually indistinguishable from their male counterparts (except for a few curves and bulges), their gender play was quite different. Whereas the male performers played with aspects of cultural femininity within a masculine context, female performers incorporated the excluded by invading a traditionally masculine cultural form. Thus, they were playing with masculinity whether or not they did so intentionally. Female race car drivers or a girl playing on the boy’s high school football team may reflect some women’s individual interests in the activity itself, yet a marker of masculinity still adheres to their activity.

The appearance of female hair metal performers, which was borrowed from their male colleagues who had borrowed their look from feminine visual signifiers, is neither traditionally feminine nor masculine. In a sense, the women in hair metal were indulging in a play form that Derrida would call ironic; but here it is doubly ironic. Further, performing in a traditionally masculine area might be seen as a type of deconstructed play. Here too, however, these women were not on an equivalent level with hair metal’s men. Hair metal ‘… may shift some outward signs of gender, but it leaves untouched the constructed core identity of binary sex, and unchallenged the asymmetrical dominant power relations of gender,’ conclude Denski and Scholl (1992: 55). Norma Coates (1997: 56) argues that male hair metal musicians ‘appropriate “feminine markers” … in order to assert power over them, and over the “feminine” of the female.’

The female performers were not one of the boys, were not merely playing with masculinity, as their adoption of the male playing with femininity markers shows. Their photographs displayed their biologically given endowments, culturally enhanced by push-up bras, low-cut tops and curvaceousness assisted by cosmetic surgery. They posed suggestively, whether it was for their own album covers and publicity shots, or for magazine layouts. Here they were playing with femininity by posing as over-sexualized vamps. Given the commercial interests of those in, and/or those controlling bands, what attracted media attention tended to be included or accentuated in performances. Foucault’s (1980: 127) understanding of gender as the effects of ‘a complex political technology’ would certainly include mass media within its scope.

Names adopted by female hair metal bands hybridize the masculine and feminine, like Vixen, Poison Dollies, and Cycle Sluts from Hell.⁴ Their status as ‘other’ was emphasized in the text of the media coverage of these women. They were frequently described as sexy (taking the heterosexual male gaze as the standard, whether or not the writer or reader was male). Their position as creative initiators was undermined by frequent mention of the men who helped them write their material. And their anomalous position was underscored by the recurrent use of the word ‘gimmick.’ In his analysis of their mainstream media coverage, Bradley Klypchak provides numerous magazine quotes demonstrating these points, such as: ‘Doro Pesch, Warlock’s 5-foot tall, blond, leather-clad “gimmick” is more than just something nice for the boys to look at;’ ‘Vixen is more than a gimmick; they can deliver the rock goods’ (2007: 198). He also cites the women’s attempts to redress this coverage: ‘Some people think that because I’m a woman, I’m somehow getting by on my looks or on some gimmick. Let me tell ‘em right now I’m not,’ Lita Ford stated (2007: 198). She is a fine guitarist who understands the issues of power and gender in metal; she once pointed to her breasts and said, ‘I wear my balls up here’ (2007: 207).

In many ways, heavy metal’s non-mainstream mode in the 1980s was the diametric opposite of hair metal, the dark to its light; an Ash Wednesday to its Mardi Gras.⁵ Similarly antithetical was its gender play, intensifying further the masculinist model of earlier subcultural metal rather than incorporating its opposite. This hyper-masculinist play was staged in a variety of ways that were embedded in a new subgenre: thrash metal. Like earlier metal, it employed a variety of displays of masculine power, some of which presented actual power, like volume and other symbolic representations, such as pictures of monsters (Weinstein, 2009). The magnification of masculinity can be heard in thrash’s more aggressive vocals. Lower pitch is also a marker of masculinity and thrash vocalists sang in a lower range in contrast to the hair metal tenors. Double-bass drums added to the overall lowered pitch and aggressiveness of the music.

Visually, thrash performers showed no artifice and no concessions to stage performance. Dressed in their everyday attire of jeans and heavy metal t-shirts, they and their audience were indistinguishable. Hair was still long, but it was straight, unstyled in any way. The look was of the street, especially when they wore their black leather jackets. Thrash album covers sported images touting toughness, menace and chaos, images that code masculine. The themes addressed were not those of ple...