Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World is a groundbreaking work for the field of metal studies, demonstrating through a wide selection of case studies how metal fans and musicians make meaning and offer social critique in the loci of global/local tensions resulting from globalization. Crucially, these musicians and fans, as the editors argue, oftentimes criticize both globalization’s resulting uneven development and the local, traditional cultural modes which stand in opposition to globalizing forces. The book’s contributors go beyond a repetitious, descriptive demonstration of metal music’s global breadth, using ethnography, social, musical, and other analyses to discuss the complex ways in which metal fans participate in international musical networks while contributing to local discourses on issues such as gender, class, ethnicity, and the nation.

Metal Rules the Globe is organized to provide the reader with a cross-section of critical topics in metal studies. Editors Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene introduce the volume by reviewing what defines the genre and the scene globally. They argue that through metal music’s guitar and vocal distortion, speed, and atonal tendencies, participants explore “extremes of human expression, gesturing towards escape, empowerment, or transgression” (13). Veteran metal scholar Deena Weinstein maintains in her chapter focused on the globalization of metal that “extreme metal is a key music of the global proletariat” (16), highlighting metal’s resistance and socio-political currents. The following chapters provide examples of this Weinstein hypothesis (13).

In Part 2, Metal, Gender, Modernity, Cynthia P. Wong and Jeremy Wallach analyze how masculinity intersects with national culture and socio-economic disenfranchisement. In particular, Wong argues that the Chinese band Tang Dynasty invoked classical Chinese masculinity at a time when China was embracing aggressive, unrefined, Western masculine norms. In Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, writes Wallach, male youth do not long for a return to tradition in the face of Westernizing culture, but rather buck against religious conservatism while responding critically to capitalist mass-consumption. In both spaces, metal music is an avenue for finding alternatives to scripted masculinities and unquestioning acceptance to the changes wrought by global consumerism.

Part 3, Metal and the Nation, explores how metal music engages in transgressive reframing and redefining of local social and musical limitations, allowing metalheads to break free of restrictive forms and find empowerment and even cultural agency. Paul D. Greene argues in his ethnographic chapter on Nepalese metal that immediate contexts are critical to understanding “notions of rebellion and conformity” (111). In this case, metal as an international and transcultural form of music becomes a tool through which Nepalese youth find empowerment in the face of local frustrations such as traditional familial and religious obligations and national political uncertainties (111). Idelbar Avelar traces the history of the world-acclaimed Brazilian band, Sepultura. In particular, he focuses on the band’s evolving relationship to Brazil and that country’s normative national music forms. While initially bucking against accepted musical norms, Sepultura came to use the nation as “a source for musical and cultural lines of flight” (147), while tending toward themes of struggle and oppression that are pan-Brazilian.

Part 4, Metal and Extremist Ideologies, underscores the fluidity with which metal’s transgressive themes can become politically ambiguous, for example, as Keith Kahn-Harris explains, when humor is misread. Kahn-Harris also introduces the notion of transgressive capital in global metal inequality; this same notion is useful when distinguishing between real political intent, in Sharon Hochhauser’s chronicle of hate core and the infiltration of metal by hate groups, and the search for transgressive capital, glimpsed in Ross Hagen’s discussion of Norwegian black metal’s sound and thematic preoccupation with Odinnic tropes and Jungian myth.

In Part 5, Metal and the Music Industry, Steve Waksman examines the international and intercultural excursions of Kiss and Led Zeppelin in the 1970s, when the Western music industry was rapidly expanding internationally. Waksman argues that Kiss fulfilled two fantasies of consumption, sexual and racial, during their world tours (and in Japan in particular), while Led Zeppelin’s artistry was strengthened through encountering non-Western music. Kei Kawano and Shuhei Hosokawa focus on the metal industry in Japan, in an attempt to explain what they identify as a temporal and aesthetic gap in the consumption of world metal there. They demonstrate how record companies and the only leading metal magazine, Burrn!, decentralize “the global distribution of specific sounds and profits” (267).

Part 6, Small Nation/Small Scene Case Studies, includes three examples of the ways in which metal has been adopted and appropriated on the local level among relatively small populations. Rajko Murši?, in his chapter on metal in Slovenia, situates the genre’s history spatially at the crossroads of international music. Slovenia’s small town scenes, he argues, are more influenced by their size than by economic factors like deindustrialization. Albert Bell and Dan Bendrup contribute chapters about island scenes, which could contribute to further studies that focus on island metal scenes specifically. Bell outlines the development and key players in Malta’s metal scene, emphasizing the importance of local gigs as locations of reification through local album releases and consumption. Bendrup contrasts two generations of musicians on Easter Island who incorporated and reinterpreted metal sounds against a backdrop of perceived traditional music standards; in one way, Easter Island metal contradicts the Weinstein hypothesis in that there is no heavy industry on the island and no proletariat. However, Bendrup’s narrative culminates in one year’s incident at the annual Tapati festival, when the band Nako “tested the boundaries” of musical acceptance in their community and were criticized for being “anti-cultural” (328-329); the band found itself transgressing conservative norms, following one of the common trends of metal music in myriad communities across the globe.

Metal Rules the Globe succeeds in its aim “to register fully the complexities of the cultures and lives in which metal is meaningful, and to encourage a kind of scholarly dialogue that repatriates the findings of specialized studies as contributions to shared humanistic concerns” (336). The editors have synthesized decades’ worth of theory with a survey of the global field of metal studies today, thus making this volume a must-read for any scholar of metal.

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[Review length: 1012 words • Review posted on May 1, 2012]