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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017
Metal Music Studies - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017
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Slashing through the boundaries: Heavy metal fandom, fan fiction and girl cultures
More LessAbstractThis article explores the creation and circulation of online fan fiction about heavy metal performers. Heavy metal fan fiction, which is overwhelmingly created and consumed by young women, allows girls not only to actively assert themselves within this form of music fandom, but also to renegotiate hegemonic codes of hyper-heterosexual masculinity within heavy metal discourses. The queering of metal masculinity through slash (male/male) fiction further demonstrates how such practices deconstruct heavy metal’s gender norms and actually slash the rigid strictures of metal masculinity in the process. These constellations of sexuality, gender and metal fandom have thus enabled girls to redefine their own resistant spaces within a masculinist subculture.
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Historical development, sound aesthetics and production techniques of the distorted electric guitar in metal music
More LessAbstractThe sound of the distorted electric guitar is particularly important for many metal music genres. It contributes to the music’s perception of heaviness, serves as a distinguishing marker, and is crucial for the power of productions. This article aims at extending the research on the distorted metal guitar and on metal music production by combining both fields of interest. By the means of isolated guitar tracks of original metal recordings, ten tracks in each of the last five decades served as sample for a historical analysis of metal guitar aesthetics including the aspects tuning, loudness, layering and spectral composition. Building upon this insight, an experimental analysis of 287 guitar recordings explored the effectiveness and effect of metal guitar production techniques. The article attempts to provide an empirical ground of the acoustics of metal guitar production in order to extend the still rare practice-based research and metal-oriented production manuals.
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Within the perpetual pentagram: Religious discourse in the Hawai‘i metal scene
More LessAbstractThis article explores the religious dimensions of the metal scene in the Hawaiian Islands. While most scenes are large enough or have enough access to external scenes to segregate overtly Christian metal from metal that is hostile to Christianity, the metal scene in Hawai‘i must accommodate a wide range of religious perspectives as a result of its small size and geographic isolation. Bands that glorify Satanism or are deeply critical of Christianity must share stages with aggressively evangelical bands, creating significant discursive tension within the scene. As in metal scenes across the globe, the metal scene in Hawai‘i is preoccupied with religion in a variety of ways. How this religious preoccupation play itself out reflects local tension, hostilities and anxieties within the scene in question.
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Rime of a metal mariner
More LessAbstractHeavy metal has drawn inspiration from literature almost from the genre’s inception. Iron Maiden has fully embraced literary allusion and adaptation in its songwriting approach. This article examines one of the band’s most ambitious adaptations, ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1984) and the unique ways the band adapts Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem. Lyrically, songwriter Steve Harris conflates both Coleridge’s poem and subsequent glossing, joining the two elements to present the tale. Additionally, the members of Iron Maiden compose a lengthy song with numerous movements, the different musical themes working with the tale’s textual themes to deepen and complicate the adaptation, interpreting not just the words but also the underlying moods and philosophical and narrative themes of Coleridge’s texts in the song.
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Black Sabbath’s pioneering lyrical rhetoric: Tragic structure and cathartic potential in song narratives
More LessAbstractWidely credited with establishing heavy metal, Black Sabbath released their first two albums in 1970, Black Sabbath and Paranoid, and those albums’ success signalled a paradigm shift in rock, garnering the band international fame. Although having a self-perception of being a ‘heavy underground’ band, Black Sabbath would go on to sell more than 75 million albums worldwide. With Black Sabbath having their final tour in 2017, this article examines lyrics contained in a sample of hit songs appearing on Black Sabbath and Paranoid to better understand why the band’s songs struck such a responsive chord with listeners. In examining lyrics from Black Sabbath’s earliest hits, this article provides a perspective from which the band’s songs can be shown as frequently containing the basic elements of Greek tragedy – tragic situation, tragic result, tragic hero and nemesis – a recurring pattern that may have served a cathartic function for listeners. Like Greek tragedies, Black Sabbath’s songs involve stories of extreme human suffering, often under extraordinary circumstances, having the ability to elicit emotional responses from audiences. By hearing narratives about the extreme suffering experienced by persons not unlike themselves, listeners are able to participate vicariously in the heroes’ fear, pain and grief. Thus, just as Aristotle believed Greek tragedies induced a catharsis – a purging of negative emotions – in viewers, the author argues that Black Sabbath’s lyrical narratives could serve a therapeutic function for listeners.
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The power of the imagination of historical distance: Melechesh’ ‘Mesopotamian Metal’ as a musical attempt of solving cultural conflicts in the twenty-first century
More LessAbstractAs an interdisciplinary but distinct field of cultural research, metal music studies is, as a research discourse, structurally interwoven with post-modern and post-colonial cultural history. In this article, the author examines the ways the music of the Middle Eastern extreme metal band Melechesh, called ‘Mesopotamian Metal’ by the artists themselves, constructs a hybrid cultural pattern that could help us solving cultural conflicts in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. Mesopotamian Metal constructs an innovative cultural discourse, hybridizing fragments of different ‘Western’, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Oriental’ streams of culture. Its main power lies in its way of historical storytelling: it uses the logic of hybridization, via the imagination of historical distance, to provide us with an innovative historical narrative, fashioned in the globally understood cultural outfit of extreme metal music. Explaining this empirical case by post-colonial hybridization theory adds new aspects to current research debates on the interconnections between global extreme metal discourse and regional/local cultures in metal music studies.
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Global metal in local contexts: Questions of class among heavy metal youth and the structuring of early metal identity formations
By Paula RoweAbstractThe globalization of metal music and culture has broadened the accessibility of metal for more young people than ever before. But in this article, I argue that access to participating in the global metal subculture is not equal for all youth, which, in turn, can shape early metal identity formations in local contexts. Drawing on narrative research with metal youth in South Australia, I will highlight ways that participants’ metal identity ‘choices’ were constrained or augmented by the resources they had at their disposal, and further, I will show how this came to bear on their ‘choice’ of metal subgenre affiliations. Of particular interest was finding how some of the more socio-economically advantaged metal youth narratively constructed the constrained ‘choices’ of poorer participants as inauthentic metal identity formations. Through this, I will argue that notions of authenticity can manifest as displacements of class distinctions on to individuals arising from the resources they are able to invest in ‘becoming’ metal, and the consequent approval, or disapproval, by their metal peers.
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After the apocalypse: Identity and legitimacy in the postdigital heavy metal subculture
More LessAbstractUsing the metaphor of apocalypse, this piece considers what is lost in the digital age. The power of major labels has certainly been diminished, access to global distribution has been widened exponentially and the tangible products produced by artists have been replaced by digital information. The changes are immeasurable, but many people still dedicate time to finding new music. What overwhelmingly defines their choice though is still the music they grew up with, from before the apocalypse. Major festivals rely perpetually on the before for their legitimacy. In the last decade for instance, there has not been a year in which either Metallica or Iron Maiden has not headlined a major UK festival. Needing to look backwards for meaning, as James Berger suggests, is to look before nothingness; this is the apocalypse that music is faced with. Where heavy metal as a genre attracts specific scrutiny is due to a number of factors, including a propensity to embrace nostalgia as a component of counterculture, an allure towards grandeur, and also sporadic mainstream success. The apocalypse narrative in itself represents a beginning and an end, highlighting the paradoxical questions of identity and legitimacy faced by heavy metal. Metal and its followers are neither mainstream nor subversive, both looking backwards in order to survive and ultimately enforcing its unsustainability as a result.
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Decoding cultural signifiers of Brazilian identity and the African diaspora from the music of Sepultura
Authors: Duncan Williams and Marcio Alves Da RochaAbstractThe notion of Brazilian identity, or Brazilian-ness, can be understood from the representations of identity that are encoded in Belo Horizonte’s Sepultura, Brazil’s most successful heavy metal act, now 30 years old. In this article, we consider it interesting to look not only at the music produced historically by a region but also at how the region influences and refracts itself in the production of new music. Sepultura’s distinct flavour of heavy metal offers a unique way of examining this process in the context of Brazilian identity.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Stefano Barone, Amanda DiGioia and Jordan MusserAbstractIslam and Popular Culture, Karin Van Nieuwkerk, Mark Levine and Martin Stokes (Eds) (2016)
Austin: University of Texas Press, 404 pp.,
ISBN: 978-1-4773-0887-5, h/bk, $63.65, ISBN: 978-1-4773-0904-9, p/bk, $23.42
Heavy Metal Music Studies and Popular Culture, Brenda Gardenour Walter, Gabby Riches, Dave Snell and Bryan Bardine (Eds) (2016)
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 214 pp., ISBN: 978-1-137-45667-0, h/bk, £68
Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies, Andy R. Brown, Karl Spracklen, Keith Kahn-Harris and Niall W. R. Scott (Eds) (2016)
London: Routledge, 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-1388-2238-2, h/bk, $119
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