album, to invoke the scary thrills of horror films, Van Halen’s noisy, virtuosic solo fit well in a song about danger and transgression. As the 1980s went on, heavy metal guitar sounds became well enough known to be used in all sorts of contexts, to evoke danger, intensity, and excitement. Rappers Run-D.M.C. brought metal guitar into hip hop in 1986 with their remake of Aero-smith’s “Walk This Way,” and Tone Loc had a huge hit in 1989 with “Wild Thing,” a rap song built around guitar and drum licks digitally sampled from a song on Van Halen’s first album. Pop stars frequently used metal guitar sounds to construct affective intensity and control, as in Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible.” By the middle of the decade, metal sounds had begun appearing often in advertising jingles. Even ads for the U.S. Army (“Be All That You Can Be”) featured metal guitar in a kind of subliminal seduction: military service was semiotically presented as an exciting, oppositional, youth-oriented adventure. Rebel, escape, become powerful: join the army!
Like the boundaries of the genre, the history of heavy metal is widely contested. In October 1988, MTV conducted a survey of its viewers, asking the question “What was the first metal band?” The bands most often named were Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, and Metallica. The first of these is not a surprising choice; the others perhaps are. But Kiss and Alice Cooper did found that type of heavy metal that is heavily dependent on spectacle, while Black Sabbath initiated dark metal, oriented toward the occult. Even the choice of Metallica can be understood, as it was that band that brought speed metal to the attention of a wide audience.
The ancestors chosen by fans and musicians reflect the characteristics of metal they valorize. Some want to connect metal closely to the history of rock music, while others emphasize that metal is something new and original. Heavy metal vocalist Dee Snider stresses connections to rock’s roots and an “authenticity” grounded in protest: “Heavy metal is the only form of music that still retains the rebellious qualities of’50s rock and roll.”44 Responding to the common perception of technological mediation as artifice and commercial mediation as ideological compromise, critics sometimes minimize metal’s musical and technical complexity:
While modern musical technology continued to gather praise from the elite caught up in its spell, a special breed of musicians remained true to “the roots.” Instead of layering their sound with electronics, they chose to turn it up! Rock and Roil, they said, was raw and gritty; a means of escape; an uncomplicated element whose purpose was to entertain. Those groups, the survivors, upheld “the roots” in their original form, delivered at blistering volume, filled with urgency and fury. They earned the title Heavy Metal.45
Here metal fans are hailed as hardheaded realists, members of a grassroots community unswayed by the false hype that has lured “the elite” away from the clear purpose and simple means of early rock. Yet such explanations obscure aspects of metal that are equally important and collapse tensions that are mediated by metal, for much heavy metal places a great premium on virtuosity and innovation, on spectacle, on effects that can be created only with the help of very sophisticated technology. Heavy metal history, its genre distinctions, and the interpretation of its texts and practices all depend upon the ways in which metal is used and made meaningful by fans.
Headbangers
I Metallari di Salerno Salutano i Metallari di Firenze—Graffito scrawled on the Uffizi Museum in Florence, July 1989.46
Who is the audience for heavy metal? As recently as 1985, Billboard asserted that heavy metal fans were still most concentrated in “the blue-collar industrial cities of the continental U.S.”47 A different marketing study, conducted at about the same time, concluded that the metal audience lived in “upscale family suburbs.”48 Probably both are correct; class background correlates, to some extent, with preferences for different kinds of metal, but heavy metal in the 1980s claimed a huge audience that overruns these categories. And they are an active audience; the fans I surveyed claimed, on the average, to buy a new metal recording every week, even though many of them have little money.49 Heavy metal fans are loyal concertgoers, too; many metal bands, long denied radio airplay, have built their audiences through touring, and according to Billboard, metal “attracts a greater proportion of live audiences than any other contemporary music form.”50
Fans of heavy metal are also, overwhelmingly, white. Neither the lyrics nor the fans are noticeably more racist than is normal in the United States; in fact, the enthusiasm of many fans for black or racially mixed bands, like Living Colour and King’s X, and their reverence for Jimi Hendrix suggest the opposite. If few African-Americans have been attracted to heavy metal, it is probably due in part to the genre’s history. For heavy metal began as a white remake of urban blues that often ripped off black artists and their songs shamelessly. If the motive for much white music making has been the imperative of reproducing black culture without the black people in it, no comparable reason exists to draw black musicians and fans into traditionally white genres. Heavy metal has remained a white-dominated discourse, apparently offering little to those who have been comfortable with African-American musical traditions. Moreover, it has been transformed into something quite different from its blues origins. Metal’s relatively rigid sense of the body and concern with dominance reflect European-American transformation of African-American musical materials and cultural values. At the end of the 1980s, though, musical interactions among metal, rap, rock, and funk became increasingly popular, perhaps presaging at least a partial breakdown of the racial lines that often separate music audiences (hip hop has already accomplished this to a considerable extent).
To begin assembling some information about metal fans and to make contacts for later interviews, I distributed questionnaires to fans at several concerts and through a record store.51 The fans I surveyed ranged in age from eleven to thirty-one years, with an average age of nineteen. This reflects the specific demographics of concert audiences, rather than magazine readers or record buyers, for example; a survey done in 1984 found that two thirds of heavy metal fans were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four; one fifth were under fifteen.52 My sample, like the actual crowds I saw, was almost evenly balanced in gender. Their occupations ranged from car wash attendant to law school student, from computer programmer to construction worker. Their parents’ occupations covered the whole gamut of working- and middle-class jobs, with the exception of one sample, collected in a bar in Detroit, which was entirely industrial working class.
The questionnaire began with items intended to pique the curiosity of the fans, such as queries about how long they have listened to heavy metal and how many hours each day, on the average, they hear metal. Further questions concerned subcultural activities, such as watching MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball” or reading fan magazines. Eventually, I asked more personal questions about age, occupation, gender, and parents’ occupations. At the very end of the form, most fans indicated that they were willing to be interviewed and provided their names and phone numbers.
I am making no claims for the statistical precision of my sample—I used it as a source of guidance and contacts with fans—but I will summarize the responses I found clear and useful. Nearly all of the fans said that most of their friends were also metal fans, an indication of the centrality of heavy metal to fans’ social lives. More listen to metal from recordings than from radio programming, confirming the importance of the fan activities of owning, collecting, and being knowledgeable about the music (and the paucity of metal programming on the radio). Nearly all fans sing along with heavy metal lyrics, suggesting that, however unintelligible they may sound to outsiders, lyrics are comprehended by fans. Although this contradicts some academic studies, it agrees with Iron Maiden guitarist Steve Harris’s observation that in the United States, “about 90% of the fans know the words to every song.”53
There were substantial differences among the audiences I surveyed. Compared to the fans at a Poison concert, for example, Judas Priest fans were somewhat older and more likely to be male. While quite a few of the Poison crowd indicated that they play musical instruments, a clear majority of
