Metal Music Studies - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2022

Metal’s pervasive (were)wolf motifs are key hermeneutics for the reception of classical antiquity by right-wing bands. Continuities of lupine themes and romanticization of Sparta and Rome exist between fascist Germany and Italy, contemporary far-right political and pagan organizations, and bands that combine these two subjects in a unique but consistent way. Also inspired by Nietzsche, Evola and social Darwinists, bands such as Der Stürmer, Kataxu and Spearhead trace their biological and spiritual ancestry to Sparta, emulating their lycanthropic militarism and racial terrorism. Bands such as Hesperia, Diocletian and Deströyer 666 utilize Roman wolf iconography to promote the destruction of civilization and return to ‘natural’ hierarchies. Like their fascist predecessors, these artists perpetuate patriarchal and racist distortions of both lupine behaviour and ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Such constructions nevertheless extend from the resonance of both wolves and classical antiquity with metal’s common themes of transgression, hypermasculinity, elitism and nostalgia for premodernity.

Heavy metal ethnography and historiography has been extensively explored from a qualitative perspective. However, quantitative methods of analysis have not been developed. We conduct a Bayesian geographical analysis of heavy metal subgenres, investigating the relative prevalence of each subgenre in nations (for 86 countries in northern Europe and the West), and the overall popularity, according to the selected countries. Data from two different websites, MetalStorm and Encyclopaedia Metallum, were harvested via web ‘scraping’ and used for analysis. Results for Norway and Sweden in particular clearly agree with the qualitative historical documentation, while Germany surprisingly favoured black metal above Gothic.

This article explores reasons for the proliferation of dissonance in metal music. It asks why metal musicians compose dissonant songs and what sociocultural functions dissonance may have for metal as a community. The findings suggest that exploring ways to further utilize dissonance is crucial to the genre’s development and continued transgression, especially in progressive and extreme subgenres, and that fans derive pleasure and meaning from dissonance in the music. Dissonance is not only present in many metal compositions, but its prominence suggests that dissonance is one of the genre’s central aesthetic features, at least in its more extreme subgenres. This is a subversion of the typical values in mainstream popular music, where dissonant features are fleeting points of tension. The article argues that dissonance is valued for its congruence with an aesthetic that transcends the genre through its overall transgressive traits. Such an aesthetic is appealing because it facilitates the exploration of negative emotions and ideas in safety, both individually and communally.

Metallica has offered a diverse catalogue of music and breadth of performance over their careers. As a band occupying an integral cultural placement as measured by both level of fame and influential import, many academic inroads have been opened to their work, career and music. These lines of inquiry, along with more general lines of inquiry into the genre of heavy metal itself, frequently position Metallica as the unofficial ambassadors of the music. However, despite the depth and breadth of research devoted to these areas, an underdeveloped opening exists when it comes to the potential parallels and connections between the music and actions of Metallica and the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically their notions of the state and the nomadic war machine. These theories serve as the basis of exploration in this research and provide new considerations and perspectives of both the career of Metallica and the larger implications to the study of popular music. The relations between Deleuze and Guattari and popular music offer many connections and examples, but the work of Metallica was selected as a representation of all of these connections as they are the ideal band from which to launch and develop these notions. Metallica is a group with clear distinctive phases to their career that fall within the concepts of the war machine (1981–91) and the state (1991–2008). While Metallica is not the only example of a band that falls into these dichotomous categorizations, they offer the best opportunity to define and clarify the connections to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari. This can then be applied to other bands, genres of music and aspects of popular culture. Metallica is symbolic of this undertheorized connection to the works of Deleuze and Guattari. While these theoretical connections to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari may not serve as the final piece to a full comprehension of the complexities of Metallica’s controversial career, they offer insights and open nascent pathways towards further analysis of the band. This is important because they have existed both on the fringes of marginalization and as a significant part of the discourse of popular culture.

This article presents an analysis of the feminist artistic practices that some bands are adopting through metal music to show how their approaches are linked to a tradition in the history of feminist art. For this purpose, I addressed these feminist metal bands to demonstrate how their practices align with feminist and artistic pedagogies that evolved during the 1970s women’s liberation movement. I examine how artists, like second-wave feminist art groups, create an integrating framework that transcends the scope of art, managing to simultaneously convene and attend to various personal and social processes, based on a reflection substantiated on social group theory, feminist art, feminist pedagogies and ritual studies. Similarly, I highlight and differentiate their specific strategies by analysing their practices in order to understand, on the one hand, these feminist bands as a powerful relational device, which I have termed ‘coven bands’, and, on the other hand, the set of their practices as a didactic action of feminist resistance for personal improvement and social justice. Therefore, I will show how coven bands – whose name is a metaphor that evokes a gathering or circle of witches – are both a collective critical conscience and a multifunctional platform where several of life’s processes can be conjured up, such as relational learning, mutual help, psycho-emotional healing, creativity, empowerment and social action simultaneously.

Review of: Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, Nelson Varas-Díaz, Daniel Nevárez Araújo and Eliut Rivera-Segarra (2020)

Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 352 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-79360-751-5, h/bk, $120.00

Review of: Red Metal: Die Heavy-Metal-Subkultur der DDR, Nikolai Okunew (2021)

Berlin: Christoph Links, 334 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-96289-138-1, p/bk, €25.00