Metal Music And The Re Imagining Of Masculinity Place Race And Nation

Metal is a form of popular music. Popular music is a form of leisure. In the modern age, popular music has become part of popular culture, a heavily contested collection of practices and industries that construct place, belonging and power.

Since its beginnings over fifty years ago, metal music has grown in popularity worldwide, not only as a musical culture but as a recognised field of study. This Companion, grounded in recent research, explores the various musical styles and cultures of metal, providing a reliable resource for students and researchers.

This book addresses how whiteness is represented in heavy metal scenes and practices, both as a site of academic inquiry and force of cultural significance. The author argues that whiteness, and more specifically white masculinity, has been given normative value which obscures the contributions of women and people of colour, and affirms the exclusory understandings of ‘belonging’ which have featured in the metal scenes of Norway, South Africa, and Australia. Utilizing critical discourse analysis and critical textual analysis of musical texts, promotional material, and participant-based observation ethnographies, it explores how the texts, discourses, and practices produced and articulated by metal scene members and scholars alike have presented heavy metal as a white, masculine pastime, yet also considers the vital work done by scene members to confront expressions of exclusory misogyny and racism when they emerge in metal scenes. The book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of metal music studies, leisure studies, sociology of culture and sociology of racism.

Many metal songs incorporate poetry into their lyrics using a broad array of techniques, both textual and musical. This book develops a novel adaptation, appropriation, and quotation taxonomy that both expands our knowledge of how poetry is used in metal music and is useful for scholars across adaptation studies broadly. The text follows both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. It identifies 384 metal songs by 224 bands with intertextual ties to 146 poems written by fifty-one different poets, with a special focus on Edgar Allan Poe, John Milton's Paradise Lost and the work of WWI's War Poets. This analysis of transformational mechanisms allows poetry to find an afterlife in the form of metal songs and sheds light on both the adaptation and appropriation process and on the semantic shifts occasioned by the recontextualisation of the poems into the metal music culture. Some musicians reuse – and sometimes amplify – old verses related to politics and religion in our present times; others engage in criticism or simple contradiction. In some cases, the bands turn the abstract feelings evoked by the poems into concrete personal experiences. The most adventurous recraft the original verses by changing the point of view of either the poetic voice or the addressed actors, altering the vocaliser of the narrative or the gender of the protagonists. These mechanisms help metal musicians make the poems their own and adjust them to their artistic needs so that the resulting product is consistent with the expectations of the metal music culture.

This multi-disciplinary book explores the textual analysis of heavy metal lyrics written in languages other than English including Japanese, Yiddish, Latin, Russian, Hungarian, Austrian German, and Norwegian. Topics covered include national and minority identity, politics, wordplay, parody, local/global, intertextuality, and adaptation.

This book explores heavy metal music in Australia, engaging with the nuanced ways in which metal music, scenes and cultures are experienced. Leading metal scholars and active scene members examine the diversity of practices, histories and identities within Australian metal music, and question what it means to be Australian in the context of metal.

This edited collection investigates metal music’s enduring fascination with the medieval period from a variety of critical perspectives, exploring how metal musicians and fans use the medieval period as a fount for creativity and critique.

There is growing recognition and understanding of music’s fundamentally spatial natures, with significances of space found both in the immediacy of musical practices and in connection to broader identities and ideas around music. Whereas previous publications have looked at connections between music and space through singular lenses (such as how they are linked to ethnic identities or how musical images of a city are constructed), this book sets out to explore intersections between multiple scales and kinds of musical spaces. It complements the investigation of broader power structures and place-based identities by a detailed focus on the moments of music-making and musical environments, revealing the mutual shaping of these levels. The book overcomes a Eurocentric focus on a typically narrow range of musics (especially European and North American classical and popular forms) with case studies on a diverse set of genres and global contexts, inspiring a range of ethnographic, text-based, historical, and practice-based approaches.