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- Volume 8, Issue 2, 2022
Metal Music Studies - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2022
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2022
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Hardcore punk as an effort to Indigenize the underground scene in La Paz during the neo-liberal era of resistance 1993–2003
Authors: Reynaldo Tapia and Boris MendozaIn Bolivia, neo-liberalism did not only have social-economic and political effects, but it also created spaces that allowed for new discourses related to culture and national identity. This research focuses on the changes of the metal underground scene in La Paz that led to the formation of a hardcore punk scene that tried to incorporate Indigenous symbolism in their music and performances as a form of resistance against western-cultural hegemony but also to highlight the positive values of their ancestral cultural heritage. Scholars, journalists and activists have written extensively about the transformations in Bolivia during the age of neo-liberalism but there has not been much research that focused on youth movements specifically those that use music to inspire new forms of social dialogues concerning national identity. This research is self-ethnographic and it includes qualitative in-depth interviews of band members and media figures of that time. The La Paz hardcore punk scene grew as an effort from band members to Indigenize the metal underground scene based on their interpretation of what they believed was Indigenous since none of the band members themselves were considered Indigenous. The meaning of Indigenous symbolism in their music was a result of their daily experiences of the social-political contentious environment during the country’s neo-liberal era. Street protesters used Indigenous symbols to defy the western-led free-market economic policies of the Washington Consensus. Therefore, the need to distinguish themselves from a metal musical genre that was traditionally western gave rise to a hardcore punk scene that focused on Indigenous cultural pride intricately connected to a form of patriotism and national pride. This was fuelled by the emergence of a national collective consciousness to reclaim the Indigenous culture due to the failures of western economic policies and US interventions tied to the ‘War on Drugs’.
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Lost in the field: Lessons from metal music studies fieldwork in the Global South
Authors: Didier Goossens, Nelson Varas-Díaz and Edward BanchsEthnographic fieldwork is a core method of anthropological, sociological and cultural research, characterized by a lengthy stay in an area or among a social group that is being studied. In the best-case scenario, a researcher becomes an insider through fieldwork. This method, however, has experienced heavy criticism for its exploitative origins and traditions that, among others, maintain a strong focus on Global North gazes and give little back to studied communities, especially those located in the Global South. Metal music studies have seen fieldwork-based research in both the Global North and South; and although a productive method in this field of research, it has not yet been considered in emerging critical reflections on methodology in its body of publications. This article aims to make such a contribution by reflecting on lessons from metal research in the Global South. Building on experiences in Latin American and African countries, we seek to explore how fieldwork-based research on metal, in general, can be informed by situated experiences in these regions by means of four distinct elements: (1) the importance of multiple subjectivities and epistemologies, (2) the principles of positionality and communality, (3) the confrontation and dismantling of privilege and (4) the diversification of fieldwork methods in terms of data collection and sharing.
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Establishing a taxonomy of metal subgenres based on quantitative musical and thematic features
More LessMetal music emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s and progressively developed into a vast number of subgenres. Several dozens of subgenres have been described but their taxonomy appears inconsistent from one study to another. Existing taxonomies are mostly the results of subjective decision-making. The main purpose of this study was to establish an objective taxonomy of metal subgenres highlighting their degree of proximity by analysing quantitative features extracted from the website Encyclopaedia Metallum. We scraped the website data that contained at the moment 147,248 bands providing among others their musical subgenre and lyrical themes. We have extracted from these labels two musical features (hybridization between subgenres [HBS]; hybridization between subgenres and non-metal musical genres) and one thematic feature (lyrical themes inclination). These features were studied separately and combined in order to build a distance matrix between a selection of 27 widely recognized metal subgenres. A phylogenetic tree and a t-SNE plot were computed from this distance matrix displaying the degree of proximity between these 27 metal subgenres. Six clusters grouping together closely related subgenres were also defined. Despite its methodological differences, our taxonomy shows some common points with previous literature on the topic. The results could guide further metal music studies in order to enhance their reproducibility and interpretability. Further investigations are needed to refine and confirm the results especially by studying more features from different sources.
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Threat cues in metal’s visual code
More LessMetal music has a signifying visual aesthetic or so-called visual code. In this article, I examine the significance of four primitive visual properties that characterize the code. I propose that the propensity for visual artefacts of metal music to depict low luminance, low colourfulness, redness and angular shapes is because these properties can act as subtle threat cues. As metal music has a preoccupation with threatening themes and sounds, these four properties provide concordant visual information about the affective attributes of the genre. After reviewing the supporting psychological evidence, I conduct a quantitative test of this proposal by comparing album covers from extreme metal bands to those from children’s music, two genres that are opposed to one another in their embrace of a threatening atmosphere. The results indicate that extreme metal album covers are darker, less colourful, redder and feature more angular shapes compared with their children’s counterparts, which suggests that these properties are relied upon to communicate a clear threat signal.
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Black (metal) epics: Remediation of tradition in the case of Gavranovi from Serbia
Authors: Danka Lajić Mihajlović and Bojana RadovanovićPrompted by the emergence of Serbian black metal supergroup Gavranovi and their two singles released in 2020, this article offers an interdisciplinary and intertextual reading of this project. In this article, collaborative efforts of musicology and ethnomusicology are employed in interpreting the new readings of Serbian epic tradition in the context of extreme metal, as well as its positioning in the history of Serbian extreme metal scene in general. By using the gusle, a traditional instrument, as well as the postulates of Serbian epic poetry, Gavranovi participate in contemporary remediation of tradition, which will be examined through the lens of (inter)textual analysis.
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Against the devil’s metal: Christian public discursive strategies against metal concerts and festivals in Czechia and Slovakia
More LessIn the context of a process of return of religion to the public sphere, this article deals with Christian discursive strategies in public struggles against selected metal concerts and festivals since 2013 in highly secularized Czechia and in Slovakia with a close connection of religion (especially the Catholic Church) to the state. Membership categorization analysis identified three main categories used in the construction of metal as an enemy: ‘religious struggle’, ‘danger for society/state’ and ‘danger for morality and health of individuals’. Christian opponents of metal use in their discourse sets of rhetorical tactics with both religious (i.e. fight against Satan) and secular pieces (i.e. supposed extremism of some bands) to mobilize Christian community and also to attract politics and the public. In Czechia it was targeted mainly to the Christian minority and local politics, while in Slovakia religious actors were able to mobilize broader networks against metal concerts/festivals, including nation-wide politics.
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- Workshop Report
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‘Feminism and Metal’, Hosted by Rosemary Lucy Hill and Florian Heesch, online, 15 June 20211
Authors: Lea Jung, Daniel Suer, Franziska Kaufmann and Melissa ArkleyThe workshop ‘Feminism and Metal’, 15 June 2021, took place online and was hosted by Rosemary Lucy Hill (University of Huddersfield) and Florian Heesch (University of Siegen). The workshop consisted of seven presentations of research projects in different stages as well as a panel with the Chaos Rising collective, thereby extending beyond academic boundaries. The workshop report provides an insight into the projects presented and the subsequent discussions, and draws out central topics of the workshop.
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- Book Reviews
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Gear Acquisition Syndrome: Consumption of Instruments and Technology in Popular Music, Jan-Peter Herbst and Jonas Menze (2021)
More LessReview of: Gear Acquisition Syndrome: Consumption of Instruments and Technology in Popular Music, Jan-Peter Herbst and Jonas Menze (2021)
Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press, 282 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-86218-184-7, p/bk, £25.00
e-ISBN 978-1-86218-185-4, Open access (https://unipress.hud.ac.uk/plugins/books/27/)
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Into the Never: Nine Inch Nails and the Creation of The Downward Spiral, Adam Steiner (2020)
By Ross HagenReview of: Into the Never: Nine Inch Nails and the Creation of The Downward Spiral, Adam Steiner (2020)
Guilford: Backbeat Books, 296 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-61713-731-0, p/bk, $24.95
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