I asked to review this book for reasons of nostalgia. I wanted to reconnect with the music of my youth and I wanted to relive my years of fieldwork in Turkey. I ended up enjoying this book, not just emotionally, but intellectually. It is a well-written study that sheds light on a little-explored aspect of contemporary culture. Turkish metal is folk in the sense that some bands do use Turkish traditional folk instruments and Turkish lyrics. But this is not the crux of the matter. Turkish metalheads form a folk group and the study of this group shows us a great deal about subcultures in a Muslim society.
The book begins with a short description of a sensational murder which caused a moral panic and was blamed on metal culture in Turkey. It then proceeds to an account of the author’s reasons for writing the book, his approach, and his methodology. A metalhead himself, Hecker was able to integrate into the metal culture of Istanbul. He attended concerts and went to the small bars where metal music was played. He traveled to cities in Anatolia where metalheads formed small, but tight-knit, groups. He interviewed his subjects in both Turkish and English. In presenting the material that he collected, he begins with a short description of metal on the world scene and its association with transgression. He then gives some information about Turkey and its music. After the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923, the reformists who followed the lead of Kemal Atatürk turned away from the Arabic and Persian music that had dominated high culture and took up Turkish folk music and the music of Europe. This led to the introduction of Turkish rock and, eventually, Turkish metal.
Early Turkish metal, as chapter 2 tells us, was characterized by the dedicated work of a small group of enthusiasts. Hampered by financial restrictions, they came up with creative ways of gaining access to recordings produced in Europe and also of publicizing and circulating their own work. People shared recordings, mailed tapes back and forth, and published small-run fanzines. A talented cartoonist helped bring attention to metal with his comic strip Grup Peri?an (roughly Wretched Company, based on the Turkish band Slayer) which ran in a prominent satirical magazine. Turkish metal bands were able to get their music played on radio in various ways, one of the most interesting being Police Radio, which fell outside the official broadcasting monopoly held by TRT (Turkish Radio and Television Corporation). A small bar under the Galata Bridge, formerly a favorite stopping point for fishermen, became an important rock bar. Groups from outside Turkey were brought in for concerts. Growing access to the internet made the circulation of music created by Turkish metal bands easier, but also destroyed some of the camaraderie of the earlier period.
A setback for Turkish metal came in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the murder described at the beginning of the book and several teenage suicides. The media blamed metal for all of these incidents and a moral panic ensued. Heckler defines moral panic and uses his analysis of the events to show how Turkish society is morally constituted and what effect metal may be having on Turkish norms. Metal in general is a subversive phenomenon, but Satanism and acts of violence, whether upon the self or on other beings, are not part of metal culture, except perhaps in its most extreme forms, forms generally found only outside Turkey. In the two chapters that cover the murder and suicides (chapters 3 and 4), Hecker examines media coverage and the debates about Satanism. He analyses the criminal cases themselves, showing the extent to which the young people in question were in fact involved with heavy metal. He also gives evidence of the many other problems in the lives of the victims and supposed perpetrators, problems which may have been the real cause of the incidents in question. The moral panics of the late 1980s and early 1990s impacted the lives of people in the metal folk group in many ways. Bars were closed. Some of Hecker’s respondents reported conflicts with parents. Some had to change their appearance. Many destroyed their music collections and hid or destroyed their fanzines and posters.
Metal has many manifestations and, as chapter 5 shows, black metal does approach some of the extremes that were attributed to all forms of metal during the Turkish moral panics. Turkish black metal, it turns out, often uses the Satanic imagery of Christianity, not Islam, and does so more in keeping with European metal conventions rather than as an expression of the beliefs of the performers themselves. This leads Hecker into an examination of the personal religious beliefs of his respondents. These vary and some do consider themselves Muslims.
Gender is closely related to morality and belief, and chapter 6 discusses Turkish attitudes toward male and female sexuality and relations between the sexes. Muslim society wants a guarantee of paternity and thus prizes female chastity. Women who participate in the metal scene, because they associate freely with men and wear what is considered provocative clothing, risk even greater censure than men. Female metal bands, one of which appears on the cover of the book, endure threats to their persons and vandalism of their rehearsal studios—and can expect little help from the police. As for the attitudes of male metalheads toward sex, most are quite liberal, but some do hold the view of mainstream society and want the women they marry to be virgins.
The final chapter is a testament to the importance of metal in the lives of Hecker’s respondents. Many state: “metal is my life.” For them, metal is not a casual interest. It is not a passing fancy as many of the parents of metalheads assume—and hope. Metal provides a way of going against a restrictive and homogenous moral code. Turkey is more liberal than other Muslim states and, in the more restrictive ones, metal could probably not exist at all. In Turkey, it does provide a means for forming community, for creating a folk group that provides an alternative to the mainstream. As a comic strip included in the last chapter shows, metal provides a way to expose the hypocrisy of the mainstream and to strive for a more genuine, more thoughtful, approach to life.
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[Review length: 1058 words • Review posted on March 6, 2013]