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- Volume 2, Issue 3, 2016
Metal Music Studies - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2016
Volume 2, Issue 3, 2016
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‘Power has a penis’: Cost reduction, social exchange and sexism in metal – reviewing the work of Sonia Vasan
More LessAbstractIn this short article I review Sonia Vasan’s contribution to understandings of women’s negotiations of sexism within death metal. Women’s experiences and identities as metal fans has been a growing area of interest amongst metal scholars, and Vasan’s work makes a very useful contribution to this field. Her work on group behaviour from a social psychology perspective brings new insights about how the death metal scene remains fairly static in its male dominance.
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Methodological strategies and challenges in research with small heavy metal scenes: A reflection on entrance, evolution and permanence
More LessAbstractResearch on small heavy metal (HM) scenes throughout the world has mostly used ethnographic and qualitative approaches to richly describe the scene and its members. As these research efforts continue to grow around the world, methodological strategies have the opportunity to become more pluralistic and tailored to particular settings. In this article, we highlight and discuss the methodological strategies implemented by our team when engaging in research with small HM scenes in the Caribbean region and discuss the benefits and challenges of such an approach. We discuss the implementation of a mixed-methods design using ethnographic observation, qualitative interviews, surveys and documentary film-making as techniques for data gathering and sharing. We discuss this process through three stages: (1) entrance (implications for the initial incursion within these small scenes); (2) evolution (the expansion of research possibilities once communal involvement is achieved); and (3) permanence (giving back to the community via systematic sharing of study results). As research with small scenes throughout the world continues to expand, we understand that scholars will benefit from frequent discussions on the methodological components of their studies. We propose that this discussion should not aim to establish a static set of rules on how to engage in research in these scenarios but, on the contrary, foster the development of living guidelines that can be modified as research ventures expand throughout the world.
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‘Record store guy’s head explodes and the critic is speechless!’ Questions of genre in drone metal
By Owen CogginsAbstractThis article examines questions of genre in the translocal and marginal music culture of drone metal, a radically slow and extended form of metal founded on extremes of amplification, distortion and repetition. I examine the tentative formation of genre in connections forged between musicians and between recordings, establishing sonic and symbolic conventions. I note the deliberate associations with bands (notably Black Sabbath) that situated this music as metal. I then turn to the role of listener discourse in constituting genre, attending to listeners’ experience of and communication about the key terms ‘drone’ and ‘metal’. After noting the importance of vagueness and ambiguity in genre designations, particularly in drone metal’s translocal marginality, I show that relevant genre characteristics for listeners include not just musical sounds but also affective, experiential, embodied and conscious subjective states. Finally, I suggest that treating genre as a constellation of points, viewed in different but related ways from different standpoints, is particularly useful in understanding drone metal as a loosely constituted genre with fragmented, disparate and intermittently connected audiences.
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Swahili-tongued devils: Kenya’s heavy metal at the crossroads of identity
More LessAbstractWith an interested global audience noting the rise of rock and heavy metal throughout Africa, Internet-savvy Kenyan musicians have taken advantage of this attention by promoting their bands to audiences over the world. One aspect that separates Kenyan rock and metal musicians from their western contemporaries is the confrontation between tradition and modernity, which is a debate also being discussed in various metal communities throughout Africa. Fearful of being noted as a novelty, many acts throughout Kenya are reticent to infuse tradition into their music. As accommodating as heavy metal is to such infusions, many omit tradition out of respect for their influences, or, more so, to make a bold statement in their communities: one of rejection, and defiance of their cultural upbringing. But others feel the inclusion of musical traditions is imperative and the only way the world will ever know that African metal bands exist. Many also feel the infusion of tradition would allow for a broader interpretation of rock and metal in their own communities without ostracizing their newfound global identity as ‘rockers’, and metalheads’. From over twenty interviews conducted in the country, this article addresses these questions: Can heavy metal music be a connection to Kenyan culture for audiences both inside and outside of Africa? Is language perhaps a way into the culture of African metal musicians, and, if so, how is African language being used in Kenya’s metal communities? Furthermore, how has the cosmopolitan identity of Kenyan musicians survived the turmoil of the past and influenced their music?
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Five djentlemen and a girl walk into a metal bar: Thoughts on a ‘metal after metal’ metal studies
More LessAbstractAs a nascent academic field of study, it is an optimal time for metal music scholars to fashion a metal (music) studies focused on (heavy) metal’s status and development as genre, as tradition, as culture – in other words, as subject/object of broad scholarly enquiry – that productively resists orthodoxies not only by maintaining metal scholarship’s current multidisciplinarity, which I applaud, but also by expanding the notion of ‘metal musician’ and ‘metal music culture’. The first idea is a relatively noncontroversial position to assume; however, I want to push on the second idea through a discussion of two performances of the composition, ‘Aviator’, which demonstrate some of the limits within current metal studies. Before turning to ‘Aviator’, however, I will take some time to outline the broader discussion within metal studies around the issue of academic legitimation.
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Community at the extremes: The death metal underground as being-in-common
Authors: Nathan Snaza and Jason NethertonAbstractThis article asks what the early death metal underground teaches us about the relations between community and aesthetics. After tracing the emergence of death metal as a genre, the article examines the accounts of musicians, artists and recording engineers collected in Jason Netherton’s Extremity Retained (2014). Drawing on contemporary theories of non-human agency, research in animal studies, and Continental philosophies of community, the article focuses on ‘brutality’ as a crucial marker of death metal’s political significance, arguing that this involved experiments with new ways of embodiment that outstrip humanist presuppositions about what a body can do. Then, the article examines how international tape trading networks allowed for the emergence of forms of ‘being-in-common’ that cannot be understood in merely human terms. Finally, the article argues that the death metal underground’s particular importance lies in its linking of more-than-human practices of community with a focus on death and negativity.
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Metal militia behind the Iron Curtain: Scene formation in 1980s East Germany
More LessAbstractThe article offers results from a three-year Ph.D. research about the East German metal scene in the 1980s. Due to the political circumstances of a divided Germany, two separate German metal scenes arose. In focus will be aspects of politics and cultural transfer and flow as well as practices of the metal scene in socialist East Germany. The socialist state understood metal as a threatening western youth culture, though it quickly became one of the most popular youth cultures during the 1980s. The article explains how the scene developed partly unofficial and illegal ways of scene formation with domestic gigging bands, supra-regional trade-off networks and correspondence system, prospering black markets, and DIY practices. Therefore, the article further points out to the ambiguity of the 1980s East German socialism with the argument that simple concepts of confrontation and conflict between the state and youth culture are too simplistic.
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Let there be rock: ‘Western’ heavy metal in Soviet press and public opinion during the Soviet Union’s final decade
More LessAbstractIn recent years, heavy metal music and its fans have received heightened consideration from the academic community, not only from a cultural perspective but also from a social, psychological and cultural standpoint; yet metal’s role as a valid political force remains largely overlooked by academics and critics alike. As a counter-cultural movement, heavy metal was instrumental in altering the political world-view of an entire generation of Eastern European youngsters during the final decades of the Cold War, which reflected in the younger generation’s resistance to the domination of Communist ideology. As a first-hand witness and participant of these cultural, political and social transformations, I chose to explore the role of metal counter-culture’s depiction in – and its interaction with – the Soviet press during the final decade of the USSR’s existence, in an attempt to highlight the evolution of metal’s underground status behind the Iron Curtain.
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(Mis)representation of Burmese metal music in the western media
More LessAbstractHeavy metal music is performed in Burma (also known as Myanmar) by two distinct groups of musicians: generalists, who are part of the mainstream music industry, and underground bands, who differentiate themselves from the mainstream industry in a number of ways. Importantly, the underground performers insist on presenting nothing but their own original songs. Western-educated journalists have recently published a number of articles about these underground bands, equating their original creations with resistance against the military junta that controlled Burma for the past half-century. The author argues that the metanarrative revealed in such media reports does not accord with the nuanced reality on the ground in Burma. Resistance is not the sole province of underground musicians, and underground bands have a number of different priorities.
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Authenticity, artifice, ideology: Heavy metal video and MTV’s ‘Second Launch’, 1983–1985
By John MccombeAbstractMusic video scholars have identified a ‘second launch’ of MTV during 1983–1985, a period when, as Andrew Goodwin writes, ‘MTV programmed heavy metal with a vengeance’. My article expands on the research of Goodwin, Lisa Lewis, Carol Vernallis and others in exploring the question of why metal emerged during this particular MTV era in the wake of British-based new pop, which had dominated the ‘first launch’ of MTV since August 1981. Central to my research is a more nuanced analysis of the metal subgenres that dominated programming between 1983 and 1985 – videos that are quite distinct both from the non-realist British new pop of bands such as ABC, Ultravox and Duran Duran and from the ‘hair metal’ that proliferated in the late 1980s.
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