music, while Priest’s fans chose classical music as the runner-up to metal. One section of the questionnaire (which many fans told me was their favorite part) invited fans to indicate whether or not they considered various bands to be “heavy metal.” Judas Priest fans clustered around other hard metal bands, like Iron Maiden and Metallica, while Poison’s fans extended the genre label to Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe as well.
There was much overall agreement about why heavy metal was important. To avoid asking fans to compose brief explanations of complex feelings at the drop of a hat, I developed a list of plausible statements about metal from my study of fans, magazines, and music. I included a wide range of possibilities, including some that were mutually contradictory; fans were asked to check those with which they most agreed:
______It’s the most: powerful kind of music; it makes me feel powerful.
______It’s intense; it helps me work off my frustrations.
______The guitar solos are amazing; it takes a great musician to play metal.
______I can relate to the lyrics.
______It’s music for people like me; I fit in with a heavy metal crowd.
______It’s pissed-off music, and I’m pissed off.
______It deals with things nobody else will talk about.
______It’s imaginative music; I would never have thought of some of those things.
______It’s true to life; it’s music about real important issues.
______It’s not true to life; it’s fantasy, better than life.
There was solid concurrence that the intensity and power of the music, its impressive guitar solos, the relevance of its lyrics, and its truth value were crucial. Surprisingly, fans overwhelmingly rejected the categories of the pissed-off and the fantastic. The most common grounds for dismissal of heavy metal—that it embodies nothing more than adolescent rebellion and escapism—were the qualities least often chosen by fans as representative of their feelings.54 Megadeth’s video for “Peace Sells … But Who’s Buying?” makes this point explicitly. A young headbanger is watching metal videos when his father interrupts: “What is this garbage you’re watching? I want to watch the news.” The dad brusquely changes the channel but his son switches it back, explaining: “This is the news.”
While the responses to my questionnaire cannot be taken as transparent explanations of heavy metal’s social functions, they are revealing of the ways in which fans make sense of their own responses, as are the collective understandings developed by fans through their involvement with magazines, friendships, and fan clubs. Besides the separate fan clubs surrounding each band (which are usually not clubs as much as marketing lists) there exist social clubs for particular groups of metal fans, from the Gay Metal Society in Chicago to the Headbanger Special Interest Group of American Mensa. Clubs usually publish their own newsletters (GMA puts out The Headbanger, and the Mensa group calls theirs Vox Metallum); they also sponsor social events and promote discussion of metal and related issues. Such internal analyses of heavy metal culture contrast sharply with most discussions by outsiders.
“Nasty, Brutish, and Short”? Rock Critics and Academics Evaluate Metal
Heavy metal: pimply, prole, putrid, unchic, unsophisticated, antiintellectual (but impossibly pretentious), dismal, abysmal, terrible, horrible, and stupid music, barely music at all… music made by slack-jawed, alpaca-haired, bulbous-inseamed imbeciles in jackboots and leather and chrome for slack-jawed, alpaca-haired, downy-mustachioed imbeciles in cheap, too-large T-shirts with pictures of comic-book Armageddon ironed on the front…. Heavy metal, mon amour, where do I start? —Robert Duncan55
Heavy metal has rarely been taken seriously, either as music or as cultural activity of any complexity or importance. At best it is controversial; the enthusiasm of metal fan magazines is paralleled by the hysterical denunciation of the mainstream press and smug dismissals of most rock journalism. And like country music, metal is a genre that rarely inspires uncertainty in its critics; though few commentators lay claim to much knowledge or understanding of the music or its fans, such ignorance is seldom allowed to hinder confident judgment of both as simple and brutal. Even critics and academics who are scrupulous in distinguishing among the details of other genres display unabashed prejudice when it comes to heavy metal.
For example, the only reference to metal in a recent book on the rock music industry is this casual summation: “Today’s ‘hot’ rock is heavy metal, this generation’s disco, an apolitical sound more concerned with the conquest of women than the triumph of the spirit.”56 Another new book on rock music offers nothing but heavy metal’s bottom line, apparently so obvious as to require neither evidence nor even argument: “This is not a music of hope, and in no way is it a music of real freedom, because it firmly rejects the possibility of actual change…. the rules of the form have been established … they cannot be violated.” Moreover, the author assumes that the credibility of this judgment will be unaffected by his nonchalant admission: “I don’t know anything about heavy metal.”57 Articles on heavy metal in news magazines, like the infamous Newsweek conflation of metal and rap as “the culture of attitude,” usually replicate the same combination of derogatory stereotypes and blithe ignorance. In an advertisement for their special issue on teenagers, Newsweek located them in “the age of AIDS, crack, and heavy metal.”58
Those rock critics who actually do know the music have rarely written anything about it that its enemies haven’t already said. Robert Duncan’s vivid description of heavy metal, quoted above, defiantly celebrates an outsider’s fearful view of metal. But his defense is superficial, never really taking the metal seriously as music or politics; he ends up muttering about “draining of hope,” “deadening of passion,” metal as “anaesthetic.”59 Chuck Eddy’s guide to the five hundred best metal albums is filled with virtuosic style analysis; ultimately, though, Eddy seems envious of a nihilism he thinks he sees in heavy metal but that he could never quite dare to embrace.60 Charles M. Young says fondly: “Heavy metal is transitional music, infusing dirtbags and worthless puds with the courage to grow up and be a dickhead.”61 Young makes some good comments about how metal creates feelings of equality and worth, but lacking analysis of musical and social tensions, his article is much better at asking questions than answering them. Other than Philip Bashe’s useful history and some fine analytical and historical articles in guitar players’ magazines, rock journalists have published relatively few insights about heavy metal.62
Academics have achieved much less. The academic study of popular music is in transition; scholarship of recent popular music has until recently been dominated by sociological approaches that totally neglect the music of popular music, reducing the meaning of a song to the literal meaning of its lyrics. This is called “content” analysis, and it assumes that an outside reader will interpret lyrics just as an insider would; it also assumes a linear communication model, where artists encode meanings that are transmitted to listeners, who then decipher them, rather than a dialectical environment in which meanings are multiple, fluid, and negotiated. Parallel to this, it presumes a Parsonian view of society, wherein social systems tend toward a natural equilibrium, instead of seeing society in permanent flux, as various groups strive for equality or dominance. Most writing about popular music also suffers from a lack of history; with little sense of how music has functioned in other times and places, writers often mistake transformations of ongoing features of popular music for unprecedented signs of innovation or decay. Also, most sociological studies offer no integration of ethnographic and textual analytic strategies. Mass mediation is typically assumed to be a barrier, standing between artist and audience with the power to corrupt both. But while it is crucial to acknowledge that mass mediation
