{"title":"Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, Nelson Varas-Díaz, Daniel Nevárez Araújo and Eliut Rivera-Segarra (2020)","authors":"Edward Banchs","doi":"10.1386/mms_00089_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00089_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, Nelson Varas-Díaz, Daniel Nevárez Araújo and Eliut Rivera-Segarra (2020)\u0000 Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 352 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-1-79360-751-5, h/bk, $120.00","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48249640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Heavy metal made for children? Interrogating the adult/child divide in Heavysaurus’s heavy metal humour","authors":"Ruth Barratt-Peacock","doi":"10.1386/mms_00082_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00082_1","url":null,"abstract":"Heavysaurus (a German act founded in 2017, from a concept that originated in Finland in 2009) is marketed as metal music made for children. As with most children’s media, Heavysaurus’s music utilizes a dual address, entertaining both parents and children, particularly through its comedic value. The following article examines the implications of combining metal aesthetics with children’s media, and the resulting music’s relationship to humour. Although humour in metal music has been brought into connection with the Bakhtinian carnival, this article argues that Heavysaurus’s use of the carnivalesque and other elements of heavy metal humour does not represent a Bakhtinian upheaval of power structures (by challenging dominant constructions of childhood for instance) but instead challenges and makes visible the constructed nature of adulthood itself.","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46461548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Robert Walser ([1993] 2014)","authors":"Andrew R. Brown","doi":"10.1386/mms_00088_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00088_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Robert Walser ([1993] 2014)\u0000 Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 230 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-0-81957-514-2, p/bk, £18.50","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43995861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Red Metal: Die Heavy-Metal-Subkultur der DDR, Nikolai Okunew (2021)","authors":"P. Pichler","doi":"10.1386/mms_00090_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00090_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Red Metal: Die Heavy-Metal-Subkultur der DDR, Nikolai Okunew (2021)\u0000 Berlin: Christoph Links, 334 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-3-96289-138-1, p/bk, €25.00","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46504595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Wolves of the Krypteia’: Lycanthropy and right-wing extremism in metal’s reception of ancient Greece and Rome","authors":"Jeremy J. Swist","doi":"10.1386/mms_00083_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00083_1","url":null,"abstract":"Metal’s pervasive (were)wolf motifs are key hermeneutics for the reception of classical antiquity by right-wing bands. Continuities of lupine themes and romanticization of Sparta and Rome exist between fascist Germany and Italy, contemporary far-right political and pagan organizations, and bands that combine these two subjects in a unique but consistent way. Also inspired by Nietzsche, Evola and social Darwinists, bands such as Der Stürmer, Kataxu and Spearhead trace their biological and spiritual ancestry to Sparta, emulating their lycanthropic militarism and racial terrorism. Bands such as Hesperia, Diocletian and Deströyer 666 utilize Roman wolf iconography to promote the destruction of civilization and return to ‘natural’ hierarchies. Like their fascist predecessors, these artists perpetuate patriarchal and racist distortions of both lupine behaviour and ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Such constructions nevertheless extend from the resonance of both wolves and classical antiquity with metal’s common themes of transgression, hypermasculinity, elitism and nostalgia for premodernity.","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43221906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The didactic role of feminist art in metal music: Coven bands as a relational device for personal improvement and social justice","authors":"Susana González-Martínez","doi":"10.1386/mms_00087_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00087_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents an analysis of the feminist artistic practices that some bands are adopting through metal music to show how their approaches are linked to a tradition in the history of feminist art. For this purpose, I addressed these feminist metal bands to demonstrate how their practices align with feminist and artistic pedagogies that evolved during the 1970s women’s liberation movement. I examine how artists, like second-wave feminist art groups, create an integrating framework that transcends the scope of art, managing to simultaneously convene and attend to various personal and social processes, based on a reflection substantiated on social group theory, feminist art, feminist pedagogies and ritual studies. Similarly, I highlight and differentiate their specific strategies by analysing their practices in order to understand, on the one hand, these feminist bands as a powerful relational device, which I have termed ‘coven bands’, and, on the other hand, the set of their practices as a didactic action of feminist resistance for personal improvement and social justice. Therefore, I will show how coven bands – whose name is a metaphor that evokes a gathering or circle of witches – are both a collective critical conscience and a multifunctional platform where several of life’s processes can be conjured up, such as relational learning, mutual help, psycho-emotional healing, creativity, empowerment and social action simultaneously.","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41690296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MaryLena Bleile, Bianca Luedeker, Charles B. Patterson
{"title":"A Bayesian analysis of national heavy metal subgenre prevalence in northern Europe and the West","authors":"MaryLena Bleile, Bianca Luedeker, Charles B. Patterson","doi":"10.1386/mms_00084_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00084_1","url":null,"abstract":"Heavy metal ethnography and historiography has been extensively explored from a qualitative perspective. However, quantitative methods of analysis have not been developed. We conduct a Bayesian geographical analysis of heavy metal subgenres, investigating the relative prevalence of each subgenre in nations (for 86 countries in northern Europe and the West), and the overall popularity, according to the selected countries. Data from two different websites, MetalStorm and Encyclopaedia Metallum, were harvested via web ‘scraping’ and used for analysis. Results for Norway and Sweden in particular clearly agree with the qualitative historical documentation, while Germany surprisingly favoured black metal above Gothic.","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47548707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metallica the state/Metallica the war machine: A Deleuzoguattarian analysis of the world’s biggest metal band","authors":"A. Thomson, A. M. Thomson","doi":"10.1386/mms_00086_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00086_1","url":null,"abstract":"Metallica has offered a diverse catalogue of music and breadth of performance over their careers. As a band occupying an integral cultural placement as measured by both level of fame and influential import, many academic inroads have been opened to their work, career and music. These lines of inquiry, along with more general lines of inquiry into the genre of heavy metal itself, frequently position Metallica as the unofficial ambassadors of the music. However, despite the depth and breadth of research devoted to these areas, an underdeveloped opening exists when it comes to the potential parallels and connections between the music and actions of Metallica and the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically their notions of the state and the nomadic war machine. These theories serve as the basis of exploration in this research and provide new considerations and perspectives of both the career of Metallica and the larger implications to the study of popular music. The relations between Deleuze and Guattari and popular music offer many connections and examples, but the work of Metallica was selected as a representation of all of these connections as they are the ideal band from which to launch and develop these notions. Metallica is a group with clear distinctive phases to their career that fall within the concepts of the war machine (1981–91) and the state (1991–2008). While Metallica is not the only example of a band that falls into these dichotomous categorizations, they offer the best opportunity to define and clarify the connections to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari. This can then be applied to other bands, genres of music and aspects of popular culture. Metallica is symbolic of this undertheorized connection to the works of Deleuze and Guattari. While these theoretical connections to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari may not serve as the final piece to a full comprehension of the complexities of Metallica’s controversial career, they offer insights and open nascent pathways towards further analysis of the band. This is important because they have existed both on the fringes of marginalization and as a significant part of the discourse of popular culture.","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47843079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dissonance in metal music: Musical and sociocultural reasons for metal’s appreciation of dissonance","authors":"Reuben Swallow, Jan Herbst","doi":"10.1386/mms_00085_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00085_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores reasons for the proliferation of dissonance in metal music. It asks why metal musicians compose dissonant songs and what sociocultural functions dissonance may have for metal as a community. The findings suggest that exploring ways to further utilize dissonance is crucial to the genre’s development and continued transgression, especially in progressive and extreme subgenres, and that fans derive pleasure and meaning from dissonance in the music. Dissonance is not only present in many metal compositions, but its prominence suggests that dissonance is one of the genre’s central aesthetic features, at least in its more extreme subgenres. This is a subversion of the typical values in mainstream popular music, where dissonant features are fleeting points of tension. The article argues that dissonance is valued for its congruence with an aesthetic that transcends the genre through its overall transgressive traits. Such an aesthetic is appealing because it facilitates the exploration of negative emotions and ideas in safety, both individually and communally.","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43115911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hardcore punk as an effort to Indigenize the underground scene in La Paz during the neo-liberal era of resistance 1993‐2003","authors":"Reynaldo Tapia, Boris Mendoza","doi":"10.1386/mms_00072_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/mms_00072_1","url":null,"abstract":"In Bolivia, neo-liberalism did not only have social-economic and political effects, but it also created spaces that allowed for new discourses related to culture and national identity. This research focuses on the changes of the metal underground scene in La Paz that led to the formation\u0000 of a hardcore punk scene that tried to incorporate Indigenous symbolism in their music and performances as a form of resistance against western-cultural hegemony but also to highlight the positive values of their ancestral cultural heritage. Scholars, journalists and activists have written\u0000 extensively about the transformations in Bolivia during the age of neo-liberalism but there has not been much research that focused on youth movements specifically those that use music to inspire new forms of social dialogues concerning national identity. This research is self-ethnographic\u0000 and it includes qualitative in-depth interviews of band members and media figures of that time. The La Paz hardcore punk scene grew as an effort from band members to Indigenize the metal underground scene based on their interpretation of what they believed was Indigenous since none of the\u0000 band members themselves were considered Indigenous. The meaning of Indigenous symbolism in their music was a result of their daily experiences of the social-political contentious environment during the country’s neo-liberal era. Street protesters used Indigenous symbols to defy the western-led\u0000 free-market economic policies of the Washington Consensus. Therefore, the need to distinguish themselves from a metal musical genre that was traditionally western gave rise to a hardcore punk scene that focused on Indigenous cultural pride intricately connected to a form of patriotism and\u0000 national pride. This was fuelled by the emergence of a national collective consciousness to reclaim the Indigenous culture due to the failures of western economic policies and US interventions tied to the ‘War on Drugs’.","PeriodicalId":36868,"journal":{"name":"Metal Music Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42416262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}