record sales and arena-filling concert tours, the bands named as exemplary by fan magazines and by the fans I consulted through questionnaires and interviews: Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Poison, Van Halen, Megadeth, Guns Ν’ Roses, etc. While much interesting work could be done on less popular, “underground” metal subcultures, this study concentrates on massively popular heavy metal because that focus enables engagement with important contemporary debates over music, mass mediation, morality, and censorship. Like Stuart Hall, I see “the popular” as an important site of social contestation and formation, and I find unconvincing the common assumption that culture that exists either at the margins of society or among a prestigious elite is necessarily more important, interesting, complex, or profound than the culture of a popular mainstream.8 Popular culture is important because that is where most people get their “entertainment” and information; it’s where they find dominant definitions of themselves as well as alternatives, options to try on for size.
I have elected to concentrate primarily on music of the 1980s, since that is the music both my informants and I know best, and because that is the decade of heavy metal’s greatest popularity and influence. I have not tried to write a full history of heavy metal, nor have I attempted a comprehensive study of its most important artists or works. Neither have I pursued a more tightly focused study of a particular style or performer. Rather, I have tried to begin establishing an analytic context within which such work could be undertaken by examining several aspects of heavy metal that I feel are crucial to its success and meaningfulness—to its power.
Most important, perhaps, I have tried to pay particular attention to the music of heavy metal, in ways that are both textually specific and culturally grounded. For like most musicians and fans, I respond more intensely to music than to words or pictures. Before I knew any lyrics, before I had even seen any of the major performers, I was attracted to heavy metal by specifically musical factors. Within the context of the other kinds of music I knew, I found the “language” of heavy metal—the coherent body of musical signs and conventions that distinguished it as a genre—powerful and persuasive. Much of this book will be concerned with what has been conspicuously absent from discussions of popular music, whether academic, journalistic, or moralistic: analysis of the specific musical choices embodied in individual songs and organized by genres. Musicians take such conventions and details seriously, and fans respond to them; critics and scholars cannot justify continuing to ignore them.9
Chapter 2 prepares for such discussions by sketching the terms of heavy metal as a discursive practice, as a coherent, though always changing, universe of significant sonic options. I examine heavy metal music as a social signifying system rather than an autonomous set of stylistic traits, employing an approach to musical analysis that construes musical details as significant gestural and syntactical units, organized by narrative and other formal conventions, and constituting a system for the social production of meaning—a discourse. This chapter dissects and discusses heavy metal music as a discourse, with reference to an example that is in many ways paradigmatic for the genre. Both this and the following chapter are fairly “guitarocentric,” since the point is to get “beyond the vocals,” and guitarists have been the primary composers and soloists of heavy metal music.
Chapter 3 focuses on the intersection of heavy metal and classical music, an example of what I call “discursive fusion.” Makers of popular culture have always thrived on borrowing, customizing, and reinterpreting other peoples’ cultural property; yet this aspect of popular music has received little analytical attention, for many critics remain influenced by ideologies of authenticity that accord a higher place to supposedly pure popular creations (e.g., “folk music”). Heavy metal musicians have appropriated musical materials from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concert music, reworking what is now the most prestigious of musical discourses to serve the interests of what is now the least prestigious of musical communities. Chapter 3 examines this appropriation of musical signs as a case study in cultural politics, comparing means and ends across the sacrosanct boundaries of classical/popular and high/low culture.
In comparing the techniques of heavy metal musicians to those of classical musicians, I am not simply making a bid for academic legitimacy on behalf of the former. The point of such comparisons is to pursue what Bakhtin called “interillumination,” his method of “de-privileging languages,” or what Marcus and Fischer characterize as “defamiliarization by cross-cultural juxtaposition,” part of their plan for remaking “anthropology as cultural critique.”10 It is to contribute to demystifying classical music’s aura of transcendent autonomy and to debunking stero-typical notions of heavy metal’s musical crudity. Arguing for the worth of popular music in the terms of valuation used for more prestigious music is not without risk: jazz has gained a certain amount of academic respectibility through such toil by its defenders, but at the cost of erasing much of the music’s historical significance, its politics, its basis in non-European modes of musical thinking and doing. (Indeed, this is precisely what has happened to the many different kinds of historical music making that have been collapsed into “classical music” by our century.) However strange it might seem to compare heavy metal and classical music, heavy metal musicians themselves have already accomplished this juxtaposition, and we must reach beyond accepted cultural categories to understand what they are doing. Such comparisons reveal much about both musics and challenge hegemonic assumptions about “trained” musicians and “serious” music.
Chapter 4 takes up issues of gender in heavy metal. Since the social contexts within which heavy metal circulates (primarily Western societies in the late twentieth century) are highly patriarchal, it is not surprising to find that an important concern of metal is to represent male power and female subordination. Music, lyrics, visual images, and behavior serve to construct gender identities, infusing them with power and implying that they are natural and desirable. These representations primarily serve the interests of the male musicians who dominate heavy metal performance and the male fans who until recently were their primary constituency. Through discussion of heavy metal songs and videos, I trace four strategies for dealing with the “threat” women embody to patriarchy. But as a genre that now boasts a gender-balanced audience, heavy metal depictions of gender identities and relationships must offer credible positions for women. In small part this is accomplished by female metal musicians, who search for a style that will articulate their contradictory position as women and performers. But women are more often offered heavy metal empowerment through adaptations of the ideology of romance, the ambiguous implications of androgyny, and their increasing ability to identify with constructions of power that had previously been understood as inherently male. This chapter, more than the others, explicitly analyzes music videos because of the connections that exist in contemporary Western cultures among music, gender, and spectacularity.11
Chapter 5 assesses the significance of violence and mysticism in heavy metal. I begin with recent critiques, controversies, and court cases involving heavy metal, including debates over suicide and censorship. Through discussions of selected songs, I argue that while it is clear that some heavy metal music does articulate struggle, madness, violence, and disorientation, metal does not invent or inject these affective states; instead, it mediates social tensions, working to provide its fans with a sense of spiritual depth and social integration. Many people who condemn heavy metal accept historically contingent formations of youth, socialization, and deviance as absolutes: “Heavy metal’s subject matter is simple and virtually universal. It celebrates teenagers’ newfound feelings of rebellion and sexuality. The bulk of the music is stylized and formulaic.” 12 But such characterizations essentialize the category of youth, removing it from history and depoliticizing it. Heavy metal fans do tend to be young, and this is surely relevant to any explanation of its appeal; but youth itself must be understood within a larger social framework, as a category constructed by ideological labor. And the
