studies, and for any group of researchers who see music as a discursive formation, is to continue listening to music as dialog—understanding how it fits into the lives of its participants, articulates their experiences, and speaks back to the larger social worlds in which they are embedded. But more than just listening to those dialogs, we scholars of metal, and those who study any form of expressive culture, must carry those dialogs forward in our own interventions, amplifying those voices, interpreting them with a sensitive but critical ear, and engaging in the struggles that gave those musics life and continue to make them meaningful.
Notes
1. Some musicologists and music theorists may be dismissive of the generic schemes constructed by the fans who have developed the Encyclopaedia Metallum or Wikipedia’s “Subgenres” article. It is true that, with the exception of those writers that release their work in the kind of specialist publications like Guitar Player and Guitar for the Practicing Musician that Walser discusses, fan and journalistic sources generally do not produce the explicit, systematic analyses of music structure that academic musicologists or music theorists prize. But, I would argue, such fan sources (and many journalistic writings) deserve careful attention from scholars because they offer crucial insights into insider views of the organization of musical discourse. In addition, they often reveal dimensions of structure that outsider perspectives fail to discover. In this context, their generic systems are a useful index of the breadth of musical diversity in contemporary metal and esoteric perspectives upon it.
2. Weinstein published a revised edition of this book under the new title Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (2000).
3. Walser’s writing was occasionally lighthearted as well. The title of the final section of Running’s last chapter, “Guns N’ Roses N’ Marx N’ Engels,” may be the best A-head that the field of popular music studies has yet produced.
4. On the role of neofascism in contemporary metal, see Hochhauser (2011).
Works Cited
AllMusic. 2014. Heavy metal | Significant albums, artists, and songs. http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/heavy-metal-ma0000002721, accessed March 10, 2014.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
———. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Baulch, Emma. 2007. Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Berger, Harris M. 1999. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Music/Culture series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
———. 2004. Horizons of melody and the problem of the self. In Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Music, Folklore, and Popular Culture, pp. 43–88. Music/Culture series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Blacking, John. 1973. How Musical Is Man? London: University of Washington Press.
Chernoff, John Miller. 1979. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives. 2014. Browse bands by genre. http://www.metal-archives.com/browse/genre, accessed March 10, 2014.
Fast, Susan. 2001. In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Feld, Steven. 1990. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 2nd edition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Fiske, John. 1987. Television Culture. New York: Methuen.
———. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: Pantheon.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Greene, Paul D., and David R. Henderson. 2003. At the crossroads of languages, musics, and emotions in Kathmandu. In Global Pop, Local Language, edited by Harris M. Berger and Michael Thomas Carroll, pp. 87–108. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1981. Notes on deconstructing “the popular.” In People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel, pp. 227–40. London: Routledge.
Hochhauser, Sharon. 2011. The marketing of Anglo-Identity in the North American hatecore metal industry. In Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World, edited by Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene, pp. 161–79. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kahn-Harris, Keith. 2007. Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford: Berg.
Leppert, Richard D., and Susan McClary. 1987. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LeVine, Mark. 2010. Headbanging against Repressive Regimes: Censorship of Heavy Metal in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and China. Copenhagen: Freemuse.
Mahon, Maureen. 2004. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books.
McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pillsbury, Glenn T. 2006. Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Production of Musical Identity. New York: Routledge.
Small, Christopher. 1980. Music, Society, Education. London: John Calder.
———. 1987. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music. New York: Riverrun Press.
Vasan, Sonia. 2011. The price of rebellion: Gender boundaries in the death metal scene. Journal for Cultural Research 15(3): 333–49.
Vološinov, V. N. 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wallach, Jeremy. 2008. Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
———. 2011. “Unleashed in the East”: Metal music, masculinity, and “Malayness” in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. In Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World,
