Heavy Metal Youth Identities

Researching the Musical Empowerment of Youth Transitions and Psychosocial Wellbeing

Paula Rowe

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781787568501
• eBook ISBN: 9781787568518
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Heavy Metal Youth Identities critically examines the significance of heavy metal music and culture in the everyday lives of metal youth. Historically, young metal fans have been portrayed in popular and academic literature as delinquent, mentally unwell, demotivated, and destined for low-achieving futures and poor educational outcomes. So why would young people sign up for this? What's the specific appeal of metal, and why start embodying a metal identity that others can see and know? And is metal really such a problem for youth development, as some have speculated?  

To explore these questions, this book draws on narrative research with metal youth that invited them to reflect, in their own words, on the role of metal in their everyday lives. They share their early memories of forming a metal identity during high school years and ways that metal helped them cope with things like bullying, bereavement and challenging family circumstances. They also give us rare insight into ways that metal influenced (and even assisted) their transitions through education and career paths post-school. 

This book highlights ways that youth workers, educators and parents can work positively to support young people forming subcultural identities and capitalise on their unique strengths and skill-sets. As the globalisation of youth cultures continues to expand against the backdrop of a changing workforce, it is crucial that we learn how to better facilitate the preferred pathways of young people with interests that might be considered 'against the grain' by normative standards. This book takes us a step forward in that direction.

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 The Accidental Metal Scholar

Writing a book about heavy metal fans has pretty much blind-sided me in terms of where I thought my research career was heading. If anything, I was on track for writing a book about housing inequality and youth homelessness, which is a very long way from a study of heavy metal youth.

Writing this book also finds me a very long way from ‘dropping out’ out of high school; perhaps more accurately, being ‘pushed out’. I’d been a bright student in primary school; I had many friends; I played a lot of sport; and I always had some kind of entrepreneurial scheme on the go. And, I loved music. I grew up in South Australia as an only child, and would spend hours upon hours entertaining myself with my records and making scrap books of my favourite bands out of music magazines. In the mid-1970s at around age 10, I remember The Sweet and Thin Lizzy having a huge impact on my musical tastes – looking back, it feels as though I turned absolutely riff-crazy overnight because I seem to recall dumping the Bay City Rollers in a heartbeat for Budgie and Black Sabbath (sorry Woody, we just weren’t meant to be). By 1977, Kiss had become a game changer for me and fast became my biggest early musical influence. (I can see the track-listing for Love Gun floating through my mind right now, only a drop in the bucket really in terms of some of the tensions that feminist metal fans have to make peace with.)

In 1978, something else that was life changing happened. I was about to start high school and my parents received a letter stating that the residential location of our house had been re-zoned and I was now zoned to the brand new ‘super’ school being built to accommodate a huge wave of British migration into the region. My friends were all going to one of two existing high schools (as I’d also expected); however, this proper awful news meant I’d be going off to a huge new school with 1,500 students whom I didn’t know. And, what a wretched experience it was. I’d never seen a Harrington jacket before; I didn’t know what Doc Martens were; and I quietly wondered why on earth you’d roll your pants up in the winter time (to show off your red socks, as it turned out). And, what was this music they were listening to?

Kiss wore black; so, I wore black, simple. Little did I know I was signalling an ‘Otherness’ at school that was about to get me noticed for all the wrong reasons. Skins (short for skinheads), Rockers and Surfies were the dominant youth cultural groups in those days; and there, I was wearing black, having very few friends and unknowingly aligning with an almost non-existent cohort of Rockers in a school full of Skins. And, even worse, I had the Kiss and Van Halen logos emblazoned across all my belongings – not just metal, but US metal bands, and I was at school with 1,000+ UK immigrants. Therefore, it began: the name-calling, rumour-spreading, physical threats, shoe and bag stealing, lunch-taking and general humiliation. The more it hurt, the more I resisted against everything they stood for: their look, their music and their ways of being. They were bright and social and raucous and flamboyant, singing Madness songs all around the yard like soccer chants – whereas, I didn’t speak much and only wore black, and started getting tattoos to commemorate my difference (fittingly, Paul Stanley’s rose was my first tattoo).

The mere thought of going to school each day made me physically sick. I’d been such a bright student but I lost all drive to do any school work, preferring to put the headphones on and get lost in the music. I’d go to school in the mornings, get my name checked off and then jump the school fence and get out of there at the first opportunity. But, I couldn’t get away with truanting every day; and at times, I contemplated suicide as a way out of my situation. By the second year of high school, at about 14, I started running away from home and staying in the city. My parents would find me and bring me home but then I’d be gone again at the first chance. By 15, I was officially out of school and a huge burden was lifted; but by this stage, I’d developed networks in the city and I enjoyed the underground life ‘on the street’ so much that I was also officially out of home not long after. Early on, I discovered the Bloor Court jam rooms when I’d needed somewhere to sleep in the city and get out of the winter weather. The old jam rooms have long since been demolished and replaced with a multi-level parking structure that belies the historical significance of the site for local metal pioneers.

I studied music briefly at school; but in 1982 at Bloor Court, I got to really play the drums with a band, for the first time, and it was pure bliss – until a better drummer came along and I was relegated to singing, purely because I was good at writing lyrics and we wanted to write and play original songs. I was completely enamoured with the ambiguity and phrasing of writing and singing death metal lyrics, and had every ambition of making my fame and fortune as a death metal vocalist. Then, in 1985, plans changed again, I fell pregnant. The good news was that I qualified for public housing as a teen mother; so, I was lucky to finally have a home of my ‘own’. But, the bad news was that motherhood squelched all plans for a musical career at that time.

Another baby followed two years later. Raising two small children as a sole parent put the brakes on my scene participation for a few years, but I continued to write songs and buy records and watch Rage and Headbanger’s Ball on television to help me still feel in touch. To say my mother was extremely helpful is a massive understatement (both mum and dad really); she used to watch the babies a lot. By 1989, she was having them stay at her place most weekends just so I could go to gigs. I re-connected with the scene and had a few more attempts at establishing a musical career, but found myself transitioning into management and promotion and trying to change the culture and expectation of playing ‘covers’ in the local scene at that time. (In hindsight, I can see this was an early calling to advocacy and effecting social change.)

When the babies started school, I spent my days working in a factory and spent my nights planning gigs and promoting the scene. Sometimes, I’d have to line up for hours at the only telephone box in a street full of state-housed sole mothers just to make calls and book gigs (anyone else remember life before cell phones?), and I’d walk down to the local video-rental store and use their copying machine to make gig flyers with the babies in tow – they loved getting an Icy Pole for compliant behaviour while my mummy photocopied pictures of blood-soaked corpses to make flyers.

The ‘original’ scene had finally taken hold locally in the early 1990s and it was really going off. Then in 1996, I began managing a band that would end up being another life-changing move. I really enjoyed working with this particular band: personally, creatively and professionally; such good friendships and such good times. We were enjoying a wave of success that included playing to capacity crowds at local venues most weekends, alternative festivals, international support slots, three records and interest from international labels. Then, I took a shot at starting my own label. I was getting good press and a lot of interest; so, I scaled down my management activities but remained the best of friends and social allies with this band.

Then, two unthinkable things happened. In September 2002, three of the four band members decided together (and without warning) to replace the drummer. And, less than four months later, he took his own life.

After he died, I was utterly heartbroken because his beautiful heart, mind and talent were lost to the world and his loved ones forever; and because I had not seen the signs or been able to help. One of the first things he said to me after his sacking (which neither of us could really account for) was: ‘They’ve taken my dream away from me’ – so, my version of ‘helping’ was to leap into busy mode and try and ‘fix’ his pain by forming a new band around him and planning a record to start the process of rebuilding his musical dream. After he died, I blamed myself for being too consumed with forming the new band at the expense of just being still with him during the intense period of grief and loss he was experiencing. I also regretted not showing stronger leadership overall because I lost the friendship of the other band members and their partners throughout the ordeal as well. I didn’t handle things with any skill at all, and I let others and myself down in the process. Even my marriage fell apart as a direct result of my grief and (self-described) poor handling of the situation.

I stopped going to gigs; I didn’t want to face anyone in the scene; and I just worked in the factory by day and drank more than I should at night. This went on for about 18 months until I absolutely knew things had to change.

Some years earlier, my departed friend was watching me in action at a gig sorting out a whole bunch of different people and issues (like police cars blocking access to load-in bays, equipment and merchandise that had gone missing, over-zealous security personnel, squabbles between sound engineers and so it went on). I remember him laughing and saying, ‘Dude, you’re like a white Oprah, you should be a social worker’. Sometime after his death, when the fog started lifting, I recalled him saying this and half-seriously thought about pursuing it, but social work was a university gig (and therefore out of my league); so, I started thinking about something more realistic, like a Certificate III in Youth Work at TAFE.¹ I’d been volunteering at a local youth drop-in centre some nights after work to keep myself busy and I thought, ‘Yeah, I can see myself umpiring basketball and breaking up fights for a living’. So, I made the big decision and applied to go to TAFE, only to get a rejection letter stating that my ‘education levels did not suggest I could manage the assessment requirements’ (I remember it verbatim and will never forget). I applied a second time and attached an indignant letter pointing out that my ‘straight A’ record from primary school suggested I could manage the assessment requirements. A second rejection letter followed.

I spent the second half of 2004 researching my options and discovered I could sit a Special Tertiary Admissions Test to gain entry to university. I took the test and I smashed it with a really high score; so, I enrolled in a Bachelor of Social Work (at age 38) and I tailored every single assessment around researching and writing on youth issues, framing the social work degree as an opportunity to make my own damn youth work qualification (given the TAFE Certificate in Youth Work was well out of reach). My special interests were around youth transitions in high poverty contexts; thus, when I finished with a Grade Point Average of 6.7/7 and was invited to join the Honours programme (reading this TAFE assessors?), I designed and undertook a qualitative study around the effects of housing tenure on school engagement. I smashed that too, achieving a first-class result and being awarded an Australian Postgraduate Award to undertake doctoral studies.

The examiners’ reports on my Honours thesis commended the innovation in my work and applauded my ‘discovery’ of such an important research focus that wasn’t being addressed elsewhere, so it made perfect sense that I would expand the pilot Honours study and undertake doctoral research at the intersection of housing and youth transitions. I had the ideas, the encouragement, the scholarship, the methodology, the research questions, industry support and access to a sample. I was all set to go.

After an early academic supervision session to discuss my ideas, I jumped in my car to leave the university, hit ‘play’ on the sound system and headed for home (I remember The Blackening by Machine Head was playing). But then, I remember sitting at the traffic lights, still thinking about youth transitions (fresh from my supervision session), when I fatefully wondered (in daydream mode) how young metalheads might be getting on in the world today – at home, at school, finding work and so on. What could have been a fleeting thought rapidly developed obsessive properties until there was no escaping the call. As much as I didn’t want to be the clichéd ageing metalhead undertaking metal research (and well before I knew anything about the field of metal studies emerging around that time), I was being hounded by research questions that I couldn’t ignore. I was fast realising that I was in a privileged position to be able to investigate these questions. In a matter of days, my research focus changed completely and I knew I was going ‘home’ to do my doctoral research.

I think it’s worth mentioning my rather abrupt segue from housing research to metal research upfront because Bennett (2002) has argued that ‘insider research’, that is, the research conducted by those inhabiting the same cultural space as the researched, can be characteristic of novice researchers who perhaps feel more comfortable and passionate about investigating things they are familiar with (and he goes on to point out some methodological concerns with this that I revisit and address in the final section of this chapter). On face value, I might well fit Bennett’s mould of a metalhead undertaking doctoral research in a metal comfort zone; but, it was never on my radar to do so until I realised that there were important questions to ask metal youth that had much bigger implications for the field of youth studies if we were to learn something new about the interplay between subculture² and developmental trajectories.

It all feels a bit weird to be introducing this book with my own personal journey, but others have pointed out to me that it’s an important part of the story that I ought to share with readers. I certainly didn’t have my own story in mind when I began the research, but I started to learn a lot more about myself (and my motivations in life) from the metal youth I worked with over the course of the study. I was recognising parts of my own story in theirs, good and bad and maybe other metal readers will too.

Positioning My Research Approach

As I mentioned, the first thoughts that brought me to this research were a set of general wonderings about how young metalheads were faring at home, at school, finding work and more. I also stated that my research training and interests were in the field of youth transitions, a term often used interchangeably in the youth literature as social transitions, or simply shortened to transitions:

In simple terms, youth transitions can be understood as the pathways that young people make as they leave school and encounter different labour market, housing and family-related experiences as they progress toward adulthood. (MacDonald & Marsh, 2005, p. 31)

The backbone of transitions studies has long been a focus on school-to-work transitions with obvious implications for economic participation and an ability to live a good life. But, the idea that some sort of linear pathway from school-to-work exists has come under fire for overlooking the more ‘round-a-bout’ nature of contemporary youth transitions. Now, we more commonly see young people transitioning in-and-out of education and work, in-and-out of the family home, in-and-out of optimal health, in-and-out of social and intimate relationships and so on. There is an extensive body of youth studies literature that examines the complex and protracted nature of contemporary transitions, and I get to see first-hand how all of this is playing out when I’m working directly with young people.

What I’m also privy to is an awful lot of self-talk (and self-labelling) from young people about where to ‘set the bar’ in life in terms of what they think they can achieve, or who they can become. Because of this, I’ve become interested in looking at youth transitions through a lens of identity self-talk. I’m always keen to know more about how young people form certain beliefs about themselves; how social dynamics, structures and relationships can shape their self-talk; and how the quality (or factual basis) of their self-talk can either help or hinder their decision making at critical transition po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Part 1: Becoming Metal
• Part 2: Being Metal
• Reference
• Index