place in such marginal locations. Heavy metal is perhaps the single most successful and enduring musical genre of the past thirty years; yet it is in such dank cellars that many of its future stars serve their apprenticeships. This noisy basement is a good analogy for the position heavy metal occupies in the edifice of cultural prestige.
When I began writing about heavy metal in 1986, it seemed a strange thing for a cultural critic—let alone a musicologist—to do. Metal has been ignored or reviled, not only by academics of all stripes but even by most rock critics. Yet in the United States and many other countries, heavy metal was arguably the most important and influential musical genre of the 1980s; throughout the decade, it became increasingly clear that, between them, hip hop and heavy metal were redefining American popular music. Moreover, the debates surrounding heavy metal and the people who make it—over meaning, character, behavior, values, censorship, violence, alienation, and community—mark metal as an important site of cultural contestation. This is most obvious when attacks come from groups with overt moral missions, such as the Parents’ Music Resource Center, Christian fundamentalist groups, rock critics, or academics. But intense reactions to heavy metal are widespread: a recent marketing survey found that ten million people in the United States “like or strongly like” heavy metal—and that nineteen million strongly dislike it, the largest backlash of any music category.1 People care deeply about heavy metal, one way or another, which suggests that it engages with some fundamental social values and tensions.
Such strong reactions, along with heavy metal’s sheer popularity, might seem sufficient justification for the study of heavy metal, since the genre embraces such a significant portion of the musical activity of our time. However, I was initially drawn to writing about metal not because of such a sociological or political mandate. Rather, I became interested in exploring heavy metal because I found the music compelling. Already active as a professional musician on other instruments, I began playing guitar in the late 1970s. I moved among bands and musical styles for several years, learning on stage rather than in a practice room, from other musicians instead of from sheet music or recordings, and in 1980 I found myself playing heavy metal before I had actually listened to much of it. As a performer, metal granted me access to its power almost immediately—it doesn’t take long to learn to play power chords—yet its musical subtleties and technical demands continued to inspire and challenge me a decade later.
I once heard a prominent sociologist of popular music tell an audience that he actually had no interest in the music he had been studying for years. The reason he gave for having become involved with studying popular music, rather than some other “product,” was that all of the other industries were taken. He was not embarrassed by this admission; rather, he seemed to take it as a point of pride, perhaps because he thought such objectivity would enhance his scholarly rigor. It seemed appropriate to have no particular investment in the products of the industry he studied; he thought it no more important to discuss or discriminate among musical texts than it would be to analyze individual tires or refrigerators.
To be sure, scholars who interpret cultural texts should notice the commercial processes and power struggles that make those texts available to their attention, as well as the social structures and tensions that make them meaningful. But to analyze popular culture only in terms of the commercial structures that mediate it is to “imagine markets free of politics.”2 Economics becomes an autonomous abstraction from a conflicted society, and the hard-nosed study of institutions and monetary power is but a false veneer of political engagement, masking a refusal to confront the political dimension of economic choices. As Christopher Small asks those who discuss popular culture only in terms of production and consumption,
How do you “consume” music, when (a) music isn’t a thing and (b) it’s still there after you’ve used it—or you think you’ve used it. Just because the industry markets it as commodity doesn’t mean we have to accept their terms of reference. It’s time people stopped talking about “consuming” art and culture and so on and started thinking of art as an activity, something you do. Even buying and playing records are activities; the record is only the medium through which the activity takes place.3
Just as important, most scholars of popular music assume that recent mass-mediated music is somehow more “compromised” than earlier music by its involvement with commercial structures and interests. This is simply not true. Music has always been “commercial,” at least since the Renaissance; that is, music has always been supported by the interests and patronage of particular social groups and enmeshed in institutional politics, mechanisms of distribution, and strategies of promotion.4 If it makes sense to study specific operas as sites of the exchange and contestation of social meanings, rather than as interchangeable epiphenomena of a patronage structure, it makes equal sense to treat more recent popular texts with similar specificity and care.
As a musician, I cannot help but think that individual texts, and the social experiences they represent, are important. My apprenticeships as a performer—conservatory student and orchestral musician, ethnic outsider learning to play Polish polkas, jazz trumpeter, pop singer, and heavy metal guitarist—were periods spent learning musical discourses. That is, I had to acquire the ability to recognize, distinguish, and deploy the musical possibilities organized in styles or genres by various communities. Each song marshals the options available in a different way, and each musical occasion inflects a song’s social meanings. Becoming a musician in any of the styles I have mentioned is a process of learning to understand and manipulate the differences intrinsic to a style, which are manifested differently in each text and performance. Unlike many scholars, I think it is possible to analyze, historicize, and write about these processes.
Moreover, I find some songs powerfully meaningful and others not; so do all of the fans and musicians I know. Some of us are better than others at explaining why we care about this song and not that one, but for most people, music is intimately involved with crucial feelings of identity and notions of community. This is where sociological approaches to the study of popular music have so often failed. For while I do not suggest that either technical training or performing experience are necessary prerequisites for insightful writing about popular music, one must be able to experience—not just discern—differences among musical texts, in order to avoid imposing an interpretation of monotony and singularity of meaning that fans and musicians do not recognize.
Accordingly, I have integrated methods of musical analysis, ethnography, and cultural cricitism in this study. Following the example of scholars of popular culture such as Janice Radway and ethnomusicologists like Steven Feld, I have tried to find out what real listeners hear and how they think about their activities. Along with those working in cultural studies, like John Fiske and George Lipsitz, I want to situate the texts and practices I study within a forthrightly politicized context of cultural struggle over values, power, and legitimacy. And finally, I owe an important debt to the few musicologists, such as Susan McClary and Christopher Small, who have discussed musical structures as social texts imbued with political significance.5
My interest is less in explicating texts or defining the history of a style than in analyzing the musical activities that produce texts and styles and make them socially significant. I find Christopher Small’s notion of “musicking” helpful. Small revives the idea of music as a verb rather than a noun in order to challenge our common practice of analyzing and understanding music in terms of objects, which encourages abstract stylistic description and effaces the social activity that produces musical texts and experiences.6 “Musicking” embraces composition, performance, listening, dancing—all of the social practices of which musical scores and recordings are merely one-dimensional traces. To understand heavy metal as musicking, I studied it from many aspects. I attended concerts, studied recordings, interviewed fans and musicians, took heavy metal guitar lessons, and read fan magazines, industry reports, and denunciations.7 My goal was to find answers through a kind of cultural triangulation, using ethnography as a check on textual interpretation and developing ethnographic strategies out of my own and others’ cultural analyses.
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