The burgeoning academic sub-discipline of metal studies tackles an “unpopular” popular music inhabited by insider communities of social “outsiders”—inherent dichotomies that make it a fascinating, fecund area for inquiry. Nelson Varas-Díaz and Niall Scott’s anthology, Heavy Metal Music and the Communal Experience, gathers ten articles by a coterie of like-minded scholar-fans that all address, in some fashion, issues of communality. Not a primer or overview of the music, the volume explores themes of identity (ethnicity, race), gender/sexuality, social politics, religiosity/spirituality, and globalism, and so is best suited as a supplemental text for undergraduate classes on popular music and social studies, or for a graduate seminar. Loosely organized into five chapters about the conceptualization, strengthening, contextualization, conflicts, and expansion of metal communities, respectively, the book presents a series of case studies by a geographically diverse authorship. Although the topics are fascinating and considerably enlivened by the authors’ patent enthusiasm for the music, the writing styles are inconsistent, even awkward in places, the handling of theoretical perspectives uneven, and, in several cases, author enthusiasm competes with academic “objectivity,” sounding a tone of boosterism—not only for the metal communities described but also for the community of metal scholars represented by the book.
Deena Weinstein’s article, one of the strongest, opens the chapter on conceptualization by unpacking the concept of community, dividing metal participants into artists, mediators, and audiences; characterizing such communities by their various degrees of shared values, mutual identification, interaction, solidarity, and boundaries; and segregating them into ideal (following Max Weber), diminished (less than ideal), and mythic/imagined. A productive discussion, her article raises questions about the very nature and slippery categorization of such communities: Are metal communities transactional? Anti-authoritarian? Aren’t ideal communities also imaginary? How do we know when/if all criteria for an ideal community have been met? How can groups rightly be considered communities (or scenes, subcultures, or neo-tribes) if they coalesce only around short-lived liminal events? How does one know that he/she belongs to a community? Niall Scott’s chapter invokes the ideas of Aristotle and Kant to point out the fragile juxtaposition of metal and community, drawing polarities between autonomy and conformity, community-building and self-destructiveness within the scene(s).
In the section on interaction, Esther Clinton and Jeremy Wallach adopt a highly reflexive, (Alfred) Schutzian phenomenological framework to describe nongkrong, or hanging out, by Indonesian metal fans, arguing that they achieve a kind of “sociality for its own sake” (49), construed here as non-competitive, semi-Utopian, exemplifying how global metal praxes have been adopted/adapted within a specific cultural context. In spite of their admirable enthusiasm, however, the authors, in statements like, “[I]t becomes possible to appreciate not only what the dominant occidental cultural order loses with its fixation on individual achievement at the expense of communal solidarity” (49), or “We follow most English-language sources…in omitting the umlaut, though admittedly it’s not very metal to do so” (51), reveal their (too close?) proximity to the subject and the contingent danger of “going native” in a formal environment. It’s fine when you’re preaching to a choir, but not everyone is going to have the same “faiths,” even in academia.
To examine how metal participants bond, or fail to bond, Toni-Matti Karjalainen conducted qualitative email ethnography on fan “tribe” responses to the Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish’s Imaginaerum album, film and concert tour, showing that their experiences are both personal and universal—communal meetings with an anchoring effect. Here again, the scholar-fan competes with the fan-scholar, as when she states: “After seeing over one thousand gigs in my life, I have to admit that the ones of Nightwish [italics in original] truly involve a unique atmosphere, magic that resonates with the symbolism and narrative of the band.” Reading the culled fan quotes one wonders: How do these statements support her conclusions? How are concert experiences “anchoring” for attendees? How do they strengthen tribal identification? Paula Rowe conducted a five-year longitudinal study of twenty-eight subjects who commented on their transition from high school to early adulthood. She suggests that adolescent “outsiders”—don’t most teenagers identify as such? —find succor (protection from teasing, bullying, et al.) in imagined metal communities, those digitally linked bedroom cultures of “insiders” who, often only later in life, begin to form face-to-face relationships with like-minded fans (chiefly identifiable by their t-shirts).
Nelson Varas-Días, Sigrid Mendoza, and Eric Morales explore the contextual interaction of metal communities in the Caribbean, glossing twenty-one South American countries, honing in on the influence of Puerto Rican folktales and artwork on lyrics and band promotional materials and the use indigenous Cuban instruments to blur genre borders. The complex issue(s) of Caribbean racism is/are opened but not unpacked.
Conflicts within metal communities are examined in a ten-author chapter (Venkatesh et al.) in the context of online hate speech in the black metal community. The article provides background, then applies statistical analysis algorithms to describe how key words like racist, nationalism, war, Nazi, Islam, or religion co-occur in reddit, Facebook, and other internet threads. The raised issues are fascinating: Is racist and/or misanthropic ideology somehow more tolerable when it’s “merely reflective of the genre” (144), expressed primarily for shock value? How free is (hate) speech? Can anarchic art be commodified/appropriated into its antithesis? Karl Spracklen writes about the so-called second wave of Norwegian Black Metal, borrowing pieces of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s linguistic theories to characterize the movement as a form of ancient modernism, a living mythology bonding disparate participants. Unfortunately, as elsewhere in the volume, his critical voice is compromised by his political ideology, as in the following passage: “The British and Americans love the story of the second-wave because the right-wing, neoliberal, individualist politicians that have fractured these countries need to show their downtrodden lower classes that liberalism ends in murder and sacrilege” (160). That belongs in an op-ed column, not a juried publication. Ironically, Spracklen, a professor at Leeds, later complains that “academic hipsters” have appropriated black metal, stripping it of agency through “clever word play and knowing references” (161-2). Keith Kahn-Harris compares/contrasts care for the aging and terminally ill in UK death metal and Jewish communities, suggesting that freedoms accompanying “a metal way of life” (183) are costly to individuals in need. In the final chapter, Brian Hickam looks at the growth, diversification, and fragmentation of musicians, scholars, and fans who comprise the expanding “metal community,” calling for a common (or at least transferrable) language and methodology, raising further questions of identity and ownership. Can metaphors, as Hickam proposes, serve as a global lingua franca for the metal community at large? Won’t a universalist paradigm compromise the relativist representation of niche communities within “all things metal” (198)?
A fascinating, if flawed, volume, Heavy Metal Music and the Communal Experience asks as many questions as it answers. Its persistent self-conscious focus on metal scholarship suggests that the authors and their kin are, themselves, a significant neo-tribe within the global nexuses of metal-making, a reminder that our definitions of community are always broader than we first imagine. The book’s cover, an onstage, behind-the-mic view of an empty auditorium—just after sound-check, just before the show—invites a response: Who’s coming to the concert? Who’ll be the audience? Who is/are our community?
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[Review length: 1194 words • Review posted on September 19, 2017]