the musical interval of a perfect fourth or fifth on a heavily amplified and distorted electric guitar, the power chord is used by all of the bands that are ever called heavy metal and, until heavy metal’s enormous influence on other musical genres in the late 1980s, by comparatively few musicians outside the genre. The power chord can be percussive and rhythmic or indefinitely sustained; it is used both to articulate and to suspend time. It is a complex sound, made up of resultant tones and overtones, constantly renewed and energized by feedback. It is at once the musical basis of heavy metal and an apt metaphor for it, for musical articulation of power is the most important single factor in the experience of heavy metal. The power chord seems simple and crude, but it is dependent upon sophisticated technology, precise tuning, and skillful control. Its cwerdriven sound evokes excess and transgression but also stability, permanance, and harmony.
But what is the nature of this power? Where does it come from, how is it generated, mobilized, circulated? How can heavy metal music articulate claims to power, and what social tensions are addressed or mediated by it? These are the issues that animate this book. In chapter 2, I will take up the problem of defining heavy metal structurally, as a musical discourse comprising a coherent system of signs such as power chords. In this one, I will be concerned with a more functional view of heavy metal as a genre, with the processes of definition and contestation that go on among those concerned with the music. In other words, I will be focusing here on how heavy metal gets construed—by fans, historians, academics, and critics.5 The essential characteristics of heavy metal not only vary according to these different perspectives, but the very existence of something called heavy metal depends upon the ongoing arguments of those involved. Heavy metal is, like all culture, a site of struggle over definitions, dreams, behaviors, and resources.
Genre and Commercial Mediation
Discursive practices are characterized by the delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories. Thus, each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that designate its exclusions and choices. —Michel Foucault6
I hate that term “heavy metal.” —Angus Young, AC/DC
Heavy metal began to attain stylistic identity in the late 1960s as a “harder” sort of hard rock, and a relatively small but fiercely loyal subculture formed around it during the 1970s. Because heavy metal threatened to antagonize demographically targeted audiences, metal bands received virtually no radio airplay, and they had to support their album releases by constant touring, playing to an audience that was mostly young, white, male, and working class.7 The 1980s was the decade of heavy metal’s emergence as a massively popular musical style, as it burgeoned in both commercial success and stylistic variety. The heavy metal audience became increasingly gender-balanced and middle-class, and its age range expanded to include significant numbers of preteens and people in their late twenties. By 1989, heavy metal accounted for as much as 40 percent of all sound recordings sold in the United States, and Rolling Stone announced that heavy metal now constituted “the mainstream of rock and roll.”8 By then, metal had diversified into a number of styles and influenced other musical discourses. The term “heavy metal” itself became an open site of contestation, as fans, musicians, and historians struggled with the prestige—and notoriety—of a genre name that seemed no longer able to contain disparate musical styles and agendas.
Thus, heavy metal is not monolithic; it embraces many different musical and visual styles, many kinds of lyrics and behaviors. “Heavy metal” is a term that is constantly debated and contested, primarily among fans but also in dialogue with musicians, commercial marketing strategists, and outside critics and censors. Debates over which bands, songs, sounds, and sights get to count as heavy metal provide occasions for contesting musical and social prestige. “That’s not heavy metal” is the most damning music criticism a fan can inflict, for that genre name has great prestige among fans. But genre boundaries are not solid or clear; they are conceptual sites of struggles over the meanings and prestige of social signs.
Fans care, often passionately, about difference; they find certain bands and songs meaningful and relevant to their lives, while others leave them indifferent or repulsed. But there are institutional pressures for a kind of generic coherence that effaces such distinctions. Fan magazines try to apply “heavy metal” very broadly, to attract as many readers as possible. But their editors must negotiate discursive boundaries cautiously. Magazines that define themselves as wholly or primarily about heavy metal strive to appear as inclusive as possible, in part to advise fans on new bands or even to market those new bands for the sake of record company sponsors, but also because every fan wants to read about (and look at pictures of) his or her favorites in every issue. On the other hand, to include bands that fans do not accept as metal would weaken the magazine’s credibility and the fans’ enjoyment of the heavy metal “world” portrayed.9
Record clubs (“Grab Ten Headbanging Flits for 1¢!”) and fan merchandisers work to produce a notion of heavy metal that is inclusive and indiscriminate, just as in classical music, where orchestra advertising, music appreciation books, and record promoters campaign to erase historical specificity in order to stimulate consumption. And just as the promoters of classical music offer encounters with unspecified “greatness,” those who market heavy metal present it vaguely, as participation in generalized rebellion and intensity.10 But in both cases the coherence of the genre and the prestige of its history are crucial concerns of the music industry. An executive for Polygram Records describes the company’s success in mobilizing a sense of heavy metal history as a marketing tool: “We used an in-store campaign for Deep Purple that emphasized peer pressure. Many of the potential buyers of DP records are too young to remember the band in its previous incarnation. So we had to instill in these young metal fans that they were not really hip, not dedicated headbangers until they knew about Deep Purple. The campaign was very successful.”11
Rigid genre boundaries are more useful to the music industry than to fans, and the commercial strategy of hyping cultural genres while striving to obliterate the differences that make individual choices meaningful often works very effectively to mobilize efficient consumption (nowhere more so than in classical music). But not always. The consequences of such a coarse view of heavy metal can be seen in the failure of the biggest metal concert tour of 1988. Touted as the heavy metal event of the decade, the Monsters of Rock tour during the summer of 1988 was a mammoth disappointment for fans and promoters alike. At the moment of heavy metal’s greatest popularity ever, several of the world’s most successful heavy metal bands were assembled for a U.S. tour: Van Halen, Scorpions, Metallica, Dokken, and Kingdom Come. These were some of the biggest names in metal, yet attendance throughout the tour was surprisingly light, and it became clear that the promoters who had assembled the tour suffered substantial losses because they had misunderstood the genre of heavy metal: they saw it as monolithic, failing to realize that heavy metal and its audience are not homogeneous, that fans’ allegiances are complex and specific. Many fans came to the Monsters of Rock concerts just to hear one or two bands; many Metallica fans, for example, despise bands like Scorpions and Kingdom Come. Waves of partisan arrivals and departures at the concert helped defuse the excitement normally generated in full arenas, and the fans’ selective attendance undercut the concession and souvenir sales that are so important to underwriting tour expenses and profits.12
The crude assumptions about genre that sank the Monsters of Rock tour are also endemic in writings about metal, from the rectitudinous denunciations of would-be censors to sociologists’ “objective” explanations—nearly everywhere, in fact, but in the magazines read by the fans themselves, where such totalizing errors could never be taken seriously. Outsiders’ representations of heavy metal as monolithic stand in stark contrast to the fans’ views, which prize difference and specificity. Because the magazines present heavy metal as exciting and prestigious at the same time that they apply the term more broadly than most fans can accept, the magazine itself becomes a site for contestation
