f ‘Severed Reality’: Representations of reality in Salvadoran tribal metal

As a musical discourse, heavy metal often asserts its own view of reality that is antagonistic to the ‘popular’ world-view of society. This dominant framework that is at work in the world, at large, is the Modern/Western framework of reality, which is highly dependent on the discourses of Christianity, capitalism and democracy and which has mainly been spread through imperialism. What has allowed this framed reality to succeed at such a large scale is what William Egginton calls ‘theatricality’, the foundation of our modern understanding of the world. However, no matter how strong the dominant frame may be, separate frames always exist simultaneous and exterior to it. By applying Heidegger’s understanding of the ‘world as picture’, I can demonstrate that heavy metal music not only creates a separate frame with which its listeners and producers experience reality but also how this particular frame, which relies on theatrics and the macabre, tries to intentionally crack or shatter the dominant frame. This process is manifested clearly in the Salvadoran heavy metal community and in Salvadoran ‘tribal metal’. In this setting, Western ideologies have systematically been pushed onto a community that continues to resist them and to create their own meaningful reality. As a part of this study, I have engaged in ethnographic observation and carried out 30 in-depth qualitative interviews during a three-year period. Results evidence how the local heavy metal community exists within Salvadoran society while simultaneously being antagonistic to most of its values and attempting to ‘rewrite’ the popular framework with which Salvadoran ‘reality’ is generally articulated. This is done through an invocation of its own indigenous past in the tribal metal genre.