International Journal of Community Music - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2014

This article investigates how heavy metal music promotes the development of multiethnic community interactions by focusing on Penang Island, Malaysia as a case study, where individuals of different ethnic backgrounds have intermingled in the heavy metal music scene as a consequence of the dearth of spaces dedicated to the practice and performance of such music. Through the use of ethnographic participant observation over the course of two years (2011–2013), I demonstrate how the heavy metal music scene in early 2010s Penang had outgrown the country’s ethnic structure in which heavy metal music was used to build a community where musicians of different ethnic backgrounds interact in settings where ethnicity is of reduced salience. Fostered by the forced cohabitation of the scarce spaces dedicated to extreme music practices in the country, I argue that the case of Penang’s heavy metal music scene outlines how the localization of imported forms of western popular music in a fast developing South East Asian society have challenged and reconfigured ethnic boundaries that are frequently reified in and through public and political discourses.

This article sets out the case for a new framework within which to study hard rock and metal fans as a group. I argue that dominant frameworks in metal studies – subcultural theory and the concept of scene – are inadequate for understanding the experiences of women fans; the underlying gendered epistemology has resulted in a dismissal of women fans or, at best, a systematic reduction of their experiences. Utopic visions of hard rock and metal as a community (as proposed at the Heavy Metal and Popular Culture conference in April 2013), do little to change this understanding as they conceal the systematic discrimination that plays a crucial role in forming the specific experiences of women. I contend that a new framework is necessary that takes into account a wider spectrum of fandom and that addresses the feeling of togetherness that fans report, whilst also opening up the culture of the genre for a critique of its structures. I contend that my framework of imaginary community can bring new perspectives to studies of fans. The article is set within the context of debates about the inclusivity of metal, and in popular music studies about the usefulness of particular terms. I build upon the work of feminist popular music theorists, Cohen and McRobbie, to give a critique of masculine hegemony in stories about rock music; and upon the work of science fiction fan researchers and feminist critiques of community to argue that community is not a neutral term. I draw on Anderson’s theorization of the nation as an imagined community, extending it to develop the concept of ‘imaginary community’. This concept enables the consideration of how women fans imagine themselves as part of a community without eliding the difficulties imposed by structural sexism, and brings the focus back to the pleasure in the music.

The South African general election of 1994 installed a democratic system of government in a nation that had ruptured by violent segregation since 1948. While the ‘miracle’ of the Rainbow Nation aimed for a unified state, the redistribution of power heralded by the rise of ‘new’ South Africa left much of the white Afrikaner population with a sense of loss. The task of the post-apartheid Afrikaner cultural industry is now concerned with finding a place for the Afrikaner in modern South Africa. As such, this article explores how ‘Afrikaans metal’ has been compliant in fostering a sense of community and encourages sentiments of localized belonging. The passion and dynamism of heavy metal allows for the proliferation of a metal scene explicitly concerned with the promotion of an Afrikaner identity, performing in Afrikaans and creating Afrikaans metal for South African metal fans. However, just as the Afrikaner community at large struggles to find a white identity untarnished by apartheid, Afrikaans metal fans and bands face a similarly complex mission. Afrikaans metal represents a site within which this ‘lost’ Afrikaner identity can be both reclaimed and contested, and thus renegotiates the role of Africa’s ‘white tribe’ into the twenty-first century.

The relationship between adolescent mental health and their habits of music listening with regard to metal music has been consistently explored in academic research since the rise in popularity of heavy metal in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Correlational studies have been most prominent, but do not tend to explore this relationship in the depth required to garner a detailed understanding of the nature of this music engagement. The aim of this study was to investigate adolescent experiences of metal music from the perspective of adults reflecting on this time in their lives. Descriptions shared in e-mail interviews by seven men from different countries were analysed using phenomenological strategies. Fourteen different themes were deduced from the data, highlighting a variety of experiences. These ranged from engaging and validating difficult emotions to gaining positive energy, finding out about world issues and negotiating social networks. The results of this enquiry challenges the dualistic notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ music often interpreted from quantitative data.

This article centralizes changes within Leeds’ popular ‘musicscape’, i.e., the relations between popular music and urban landscape. Focusing on Leeds’ extreme heavy metal musicscape, we map sites of the Leeds metal scene (past and present) in order to understand the shifting social relationships, effects of city centre regeneration, and the ways in which heavy metal music scenes have the ability to adapt and respond to continual modifications within the urban city. To address these concerns, we draw upon scholarship from popular music and place, heavy metal and human geography. Heavy metal scenes are a significant, yet often invisible and under-acknowledged, part of the urban cultural landscape. Mapping the metal musicscape, then, becomes an important way to understand broader physical, social, political, and cultural changes that occur to, and within, the postmodern city.

Heavy metal music is simultaneously reflective of, and reactive to, the cultural underpinnings of the spaces in which it is created. Wallach et al. have emphasized the need to understand metal music outside of Anglo-American contexts and culture. Although the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico seems like an unlikely scenario for the emergence of a metal scene, it has in fact existed via underground means for the past 25 years. Due to the Island’s strong Hispanic and Catholic roots, stemming from Spanish colonialism in the fifteenth century, religion has played a central role in the development of the local metal scene. The first systematic organization of a metal scene was structured by Christian metal groups under the name of ‘Metal Mission’ and served as a meeting space for social interaction based on metal music and religion. The objective of this article is to document the role of Christian religion in the emergence and maintenance of a metal scene in Puerto Rico. We will present data from a larger study of the metal scene in Puerto Rico, which used a mixed methods approach including ethnographic observations (300 hours), qualitative interviews (n=50) and surveys (n=400) with members of Puerto Rico’s metal scene. Although metal music has roots in critical perspectives towards religion, our research shows how it has also helped shape the Island’s metal scene.

Heavy metal, a genre once considered a dangerous and transgressive force in popular culture, is now increasingly constructed as a light-hearted source of fun, comedy and entertainment in a growing number of popular cultural forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in the recent phenomenon of the heavy metal cookbook, whereby domestic cookery is (sometimes seriously, sometimes comically) reimagined as part of a metal identity. Such cookbooks reveal not only how transgressive cultural forms can become incorporated and domesticated by the ‘mainstream’, but also how transgression can be repurposed to suit the changing lives of music fans as they age.

Bogan is a uniquely Australasian term, which is used in New Zealand to describe working-class heavy metal and hard rock fans. As a community, they have developed from New Zealand’s colonial history, as they share many common features of this country’s national identity. Such features include an appreciation of hard work, an enjoyment of a perceived underdog status and a love of beer. However, they are kept at ‘arm’s length’ by non-Bogans due to their alternative appearance and love of heavy metal music. As such they can be defined as occupying a space on the fringes of mainstream society – referred to here as a border community. However, due to their origins they can also be celebrated by non-Bogans and used in the media for a variety of purposes due to easily recognizable imagery. This auto-ethnographic article is an exploratory one, which seeks to introduce the complexities of exclusion and inclusion through the experiences of 25 Bogan participants, highlighting the need for music-based research to further consider the complexities of everyday life.