the resources with which new communities are built.63
Quite a few “content analyses” of heavy metal lyrics have been published. Usually, the researchers who conduct such studies evince an obliviousness to power relationships, which they regard as “objectivity.” They may interview fans at school, with no thought to the constraints on articulation that are already in place in that setting. Students have little motivation to admit to knowledge of lyrics of which their teachers or parents would not approve, and researchers are too willing to see teenagers as inarticulate. For example, Prinsky and Rosenbaum concluded that recent efforts at censorship of rock lyrics are misguided because fans are too dumb to know what the lyrics mean.64 Their study not only ignored the constraints imposed by the classroom environment and the estrangement caused by the researchers’ own “objectivity”; it also implicitly assumed that adults would do better, without considering that classical music audiences, for example, would probably be even less likely to be able to summarize song texts to their satisfaction. Many opera fans prefer not to know what the lyrics are, and the hermeneutic framework promoted by schools and concert halls emphasizes appreciation of sensuous beauty over understanding of meanings.
In another study, Hansen and Hansen assumed that the “themes” of heavy metal (sex, suicide, violence, and the occult, as they saw them) were obvious at the beginning of the experiment. Thus they chose songs they thought fit each category and had four undergraduate research assistants grade heavy metal fans’ understanding of the lyrics. For example, after reading two lines from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution”—“Evil thoughts and evil doings / Cold, alone you hang in ruins”—fans were asked “What does ‘hang in ruins’ mean?” The correct answer was “His life is a mess; every aspect of his world is in shambles.” Thus Hansen and Hansen reduced a haunting image to a platitude, made it sexist by inserting a male pronoun, and went on to generate an astonishing array of tables of data. Their study is framed by the assumptions that the music of heavy metal is irrelevant (they refer to “distractive influences produced by the music itself”); that images can be reduced to singular, literal meanings; that such meanings exist apart from the contexts of their reception; that sociologists and college students understand heavy metal better than metal fans do; that “correct comprehension” of lyrics is a measure of the seriousness and worth of a musical genre or a cultural activity. Hansen and Hansen were arrogantly “objective”; their study tells us nothing about heavy metal because their premises produced their results.65
The growing impact of British cultural studies and new approaches to musicology has so far had disappointingly little effect on the study of rock music, despite the appearance of several pieces on heavy metal that claim that influence. In one of the earliest academic articles about heavy metal, Will Straw argued in 1984 that metal fans do not comprise a subculture because fans don’t engage in subcultural activities, such as record collecting and magazine reading, and because there are no intermediate strata between fans and stars, which indicated little chance for participation. All of these assertions are contradicted by my research, although it is possible that Straw’s assessment may have been partially true of heavy metal at an earlier moment. It is difficult to know how much credence to give to his arguments, however, since Straw gives no evidence of ever having read a fan magazine, talked with a fan, attended a concert, or even listened to a record. The first published version of his paper “explained” heavy metal as an epiphenomenon of record industry shifts, thus removing politics and agency from the activities of everyone except record industry executives.66
Marcus Breen has offered an explanation of heavy metal that combines the worst characteristics of postmodern theorizing. For Breen, metal celebrates numbness and oblivion; it is “a joyride into the spirit of post-industrial alienation.”67 Such conclusions are possible because Breen’s analysis is equally unhampered by musical analysis and ethnography. In an amazing flight of fancy, he imagines that when Axl Rose sang, “I want to see you bleed” (in “Welcome to the Jungle”), he might have been referring to menstruation. Lacking any understanding of how heavy metal could be a vehicle for meaning, he concludes that its popularity is due to the “modern marketing and selling methods” of a show business cabal.
Late in 1991, the first book-length academic study of heavy metal was published, Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal.68 Weinstein is a sociologist, and her book has all of the virtues and faults of most strictly sociological studies of popular culture. It carefully summarizes the details of concert behavior, describing the icons and activities of metal fans and musicians. But Weinstein has nothing useful to say about the music of heavy metal, and her perspective is a familiar Parsonian one, grounded in “taste publics” and structural positions. “Music is the master emblem of the heavy metal subculture,” she asserts, a tribute that makes the latter static and trivializes the former. In fact, Weinstein regards the music as but a distraction from analysis; when she teaches about heavy metal, she no longer makes tapes available, giving her students only lyrics to work with.69
Though her book is nothing if not an impassioned defense of heavy metal, Weinstein, as a sociologist, must aspire to “objectivity,” and she even disingenuously claims not to be joining in debates over whether metal is good or bad.70 Weinstein’s attempt to efface her own participation in heavy metal (she has long been a fan) results in a particularly strange gap in the book’s coverage, for she virtually ignores women’s responses to heavy metal. Moreover, her objectivity fosters a peculiar sort of arrogance: she brags of having browbeaten one fan into admitting that his understanding of some metal lyrics was inadequate.71 Her stance hampers her social analysis seriously, for she rarely moves beyond descriptions of the pleasures of metal—musical ecstasy, pride in subcultural allegiance, male bonding—toward placing the activities of fans in the political contexts that make such pleasures possible.
It is not suprising that academics have ignored or misconstrued heavy metal, although it seems curious that few professional rock critics have found anything interesting to say about what was, in the 1980s, the most popular genre of rock music. For many academics, denigration of metal is a necessary part of the defense of “high” culture, while for rock critics it is as an easy route to hipness: their scorn is displayed as a badge of their superiority to the musicians and audiences of heavy metal. All see metal as a travesty of various dearly held myths: about authenticity, beauty, and culture, on the one hand, and authenticity, rebellion, and political critique on the other. If neither academics nor rock critics have had much impact on metal’s popularity with its fans, they have helped to shape the dominant stereotype of heavy metal as brutishly simple, debilitatingly negative and violent, and artistically monotonous and impoverished. Thus it is necessary to examine their views criticially in order to clear space for a different sort of account of heavy metal.
For both careless condemnations and flip celebrations can have serious effects: especially since the mid-1980s, heavy metal has been at the center of debates over censorship. Rock critics and academics have the power to sway public opinion on issues of real consequence, for their access to effective and prestigious channels of mass mediation makes their opinions more influential than the writings of fans and musicians. It is clear from the ongoing public furor that attends metal that this music matters: around it coalesce cultural crises in authority, threats of breakdowns in the reproduction of social relations and identities.72 Besides the sociological significance of heavy metal as a phenomenon that absorbs the time, energy, thoughts, and cash of millions of people, it is a site of explicit social contestation that can tell us much about contemporary American society. As with country music, such critical dismissals as I have cited are the product of a prejudicial view of metal as something monolithic and crude; many casual condemnations of heavy metal depend upon misunderstanding its complex status as a genre. But the significance of heavy metal, including the opportunities it creates for important debates over social values and policies, makes it imperative to sort out the social and commercial tensions negotiated by heavy metal musicians and fans.
Several recent attacks on heavy metal have made the import of these issues very clear; they will be discussed in greater detail in
