“THAT’S NOT HEAVY METAL”: EGALITARIANISM, ELITISM, AND WINNING ARGUMENTS IN THREE METAL MUSIC STUDIES CANONS

Abstract

From the late 1980s to the 2000s, scholars in the academic discipline of metal music studies formed three canons in order to win scholarly arguments; I call these canons the Early Metal Studies Canon, “Serious” Extreme Metal Canon, and “Metal-as-Global-Culture” Canon. Scholars use these canons to defend metal music from its detractors, and they build their canons around the epistemological standards of the primary academic disciplines to which these scholars belong. The need for an academic defense of metal was established by scholars like Deena Weinstein and Robert Walser who created the Early Metal Studies Canon due to attacks on metal from other scholars, rock journalists, and political figures in the 1980s. Scholars who devised the latter two canons in the 2000s adopted this defensive stance as a convention, as there was no meaningful threat to metal at that time. The “Serious” Extreme Metal Canon, which draws from scholarship like Keith Kahn-Harris’s Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge, portrays metal music as complex art to defend it against those who would dismiss it as shocking noise. The “Metal-as-Global-Culture” Canon, an outgrowth of scholarship like that found in Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene’s Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World, portrays metal culture as resisting global forces that homogenize difference and suppress dissent. The two canons from the 2000s also had a secondary goal of promoting extreme metal, a collection of metal subgenres that feature complex music and transgressive viii lyrics and imagery. Non-scholar fans of extreme subgenres tend to promote their preferred music by marginalizing non-extreme subgenres. Further, some forms of extreme metal have adherents who are openly discriminatory toward marginalized identity groups, meaning that certain bands and fans of metal are excluded not only for their musical preferences but for their genetics or the circumstances of their birth. Scholars of the latter two canons almost exclusively reject discriminatory behavior, opting to take an ambivalent stance that praises the music while criticizing the objectionable politics. However, these scholars still overemphasize the importance of extreme metal and deemphasize non-extreme metal, either because they are fans of extreme metal or because they wish to produce scholarship that aligns with the stylistic preferences of metal studies for professional benefit. Due to the exclusionary nature of extreme metal and how it impacts arguments in metal studies, I propose that metal scholars should canonize bands that are musically significant and that model the egalitarian and inclusionary stance of the International Society for Metal Music Studies. In my conclusion I canonize Rage Against the Machine as an example of a band whose members are ethnically diverse and whose lyrics and imagery are anti-oppression.