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Heavy metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, heavy metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concep...
Few forms of music elicit such strong reactions as does heavy metal. Embraced by millions of fans, it has also attracted a chorus of critics, who have denounced it as a corrupter of youth—even blamed it for tragedies like the murders at Columbine. Deena Weinstein argues that these fears stem from a deep misunderstanding of the energetic, rebellious culture of metal, which she analyzes, explains, and defends. She interprets all aspects of the metal world—the music and its makers, its fans, its dress code, its lyrics—and in the process unravels the myths, misconceptions, and truths about an irreverent subculture that has endured and evolved for twenty years.
“A solid, scholarly analysis of the power, meaning, musical structure, and sociopolitical contexts of the most popular examples of heavy metal.” —Library Journal Dismissed by critics and academics, condemned by parents and politicians, and fervently embraced by legions of fans, heavy metal music continues to attract and embody cultural conflicts that are central to society. In Running with the Devil, Robert Walser explores how and why heavy metal works, both musically and socially, and at the same time uses metal to investigate contemporary formations of identity, community, gender, and power. This edition includes a new foreword by Harris M. Berger contextualizing the work and a new a...
This book originates from the 2017 edition of the multidisciplinary Modern Heavy Metal Conference, organised in Helsinki, Finland. This collection of seven scholarly essays explores local scenes and identities within heavy metal music from multiple angles, covering a variety of different countries and metal sub-genres from Finland to Indonesia, and from black metal to metalcore. The essays here lay various theoretical perspectives and incorporate vivid examples with metal bands and scenes from all over the world. By exploring themes and discourses that are central to both research and practice, this book appeals to a versatile global readership. It serves the wide academic communities of metal music and popular music studies as well as of many other streams within cultural and social studies. This book also provides the large and active global community of heavy metal fans with a highly interesting package of genre information and country perspectives.
Heavy metal might not have been the most likely popular music genre to become global, but it has. This collection brings together cultural studies and pop music accounts of metal around the world, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, Brazil, Malta, Slovenia, China, Japan, Norway, Israel, Easter Island, and more.
While the growing field of scholarship on heavy metal music and its subcultures has produced excellent work on the sounds, scenes, and histories of heavy metal around the world, few works have included a study of gender and sexuality. This cutting-edge volume focuses on queer fans, performers, and spaces within the heavy metal sphere, and demonstrates the importance, pervasiveness, and subcultural significance of queerness to the heavy metal ethos. Heavy metal scholarship has until recently focused almost solely on the roles of heterosexual hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity in fans and performers. The dependence on that narrow dichotomy has limited heavy metal scholarship, resulting in po...
Elaborating on themes of resilience, memory, critique and metal beyond metal, this volume highlights how the development and future of metal music scholarship is predicated on the engagement with other forms of popular culture such as comics, documentaries, and popular music. Drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, Heavy Metal Studies and Popular Culture's transnational approach and rootedness in metal scholarship provides the collection with a breadth and depth that makes it a critical resource for academics and students interested in the theories and trends shaping the future of Metal Music Studies.
The definition of 'heavy metal' is often a contentious issue and in this lively and accessible text Andrew Cope presents a refreshing re-evaluation of the rules that define heavy metal as a musical genre. Cope begins with an interrogation of why, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Birmingham provided the ideal location for the evolution and early development of heavy metal and hard rock. The author considers how the influence of the London and Liverpool music scenes merged with the unique cultural climate, industry and often desolated sites of post-war Birmingham to contribute significantly to the development of two unique forms of music: heavy metal and hard rock. The author explores th...
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2010.
It has been reviled, dismissed, attacked, and occasionally been the subject of Congressional hearings, but still, the genre of music known as heavy metal maintains not only its market share in the recording and downloading industry, but also as a cultural force that has united millions of young and old fans across the globe. Characterized by blaring distorted guitars, drum solos, and dramatic vibrato, the heavy metal movement headbanged its way to the popular culture landscape with bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath the 1970s. Motley Crue and Metallica made metal a music phenomenon in the 1980s. Heavy metal continues to evolve today with bands like Mastodon and Lamb of God. Providing ...