Metal Music Studies - Volume 9, Issue 3, 2023

The heavy metal subgenre of black metal has been a source of controversy and intrigue for the past couple of decades. From the realm of extreme metal, it has been seen as a peak that many subgenres have not reached in real-world violence, dedication and mystery. This article intervenes into this scene by examining how masculinity and whiteness are constructed through its music and subculture. By doing so, it expands the work being done not only in whiteness and gender studies, but also metal music studies. This is also an endeavour to turn to sonic rhetoric as I address the way that topics of race and gender are addressed lyrically and sonically. In this article, I uncover the intersections between how Norwegian black metal has constructed and pushed against the boundaries of race and gender through lyrics and sonic qualities in a search for freedom from hegemonic forces they were facing, and upholding.

Among the most frequent features of the Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah’s music, there is an omni-presence of minor-second intervals and distorted eight-string guitars, a remarkable amount of odd time signatures, aggressive vocals and an endless attempt to thwart the listener’s expectations. In this case study I analyse the many contradictions present in Meshuggah’s album Catch 33 (2005), which I interpret as a concept album about paradox or a long single song (constituted by thirteen individual tracks not separated by breaks) that seeks to balance the variety, complexity, ‘imperfection’ of its starting material – the chaos side of the album’s style – with elements that promote order, intelligibility and ‘perfection’ – its kosmos side. By which musical means does the band represent contradiction and paradox in this album, and their style in general? I argue that there are specific musical (but also conceptual, lyrical, structural and contextual) reasons that make the album representative of the band’s discography and style, to the point of being possibly considered their quintessential work (despite often being labelled as an experimental entry in the band’s output), and one of the most coherent incarnations of (proto-)djent stylistic features. The kosmos/chaos dialectic is the idea I choose to describe the ongoing struggle for stability at work in this music, capable of magnifying the beauty of imperfection and the paradoxical truth behind the sentiment, expressed in the lyrics, that we are ‘sentenced to a lifetime | a second of structured chaos’.

The article argues for doing away with master concepts such as ‘subculture’ and similar ancillary concepts and instead argues for the open-ended pursuit of the social. Instead of deploying a priori spatiotemporal concepts such as ‘subculture’, ‘scene’ or ‘tribe’ it argues that a more fruitful approach would be to interrogate the work that these concepts do. It is important to grasp how and if these concepts close down or open up the field. The article argues that these concepts are necessarily topological and scalar, i.e. they are concerned with fixing musical collectivities in space–time. Through two ethnographic vignettes from India – of metal gigs in Kolkata and Bengaluru set a decade apart – the article argues for a minor and open-ended approach to heavy metal. Against the master concepts, the article argues for a seepage of minor aesthetics into our theorizations which can challenge the totalizing impulse of theory. An open-ended pursuit of heavy metal allows comprehension of a range of human and non-human processes in the social which otherwise risk being obfuscated by a narrow concern of chasing a master concept. In the concluding section, the article ends with a brief methodological note on the black metal/punk/grindcore act from India, Heathen Beast and the difficulty of situating them through conventional concepts.

This article presents a discussion on how Chinese metal musicians situate the ‘subcultural’ of Chinese metal music in the ‘hermit’ concept in the Chinese context. Since it first appeared in mainland China in 1990, Chinese metal has been a subculture with a double marginality in relation to both Chinese society and the global metal scene. Accordingly, Chinese metal musicians have been trying to negotiate their marginal and subcultural identities through localized strategies, embodied notably as the appropriation of the concept of ‘hermit’. By examining recent symbolic material produced by Chinese metal musicians, this article provides a brief overview of how they translate the ‘subcultural’ of their metal music participation in relation to elitism, covert and passive resistance, and authentic national and individual identities through the ‘hermit’ concept.

In the mid-1990s, extreme metal music in Indonesia was defined as a threat to the authoritarian regime’s unquestioned values of harmony and social stability. Consequently, the music had to rely on the local communities in Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Bandung. After the downfall of the military-based authoritarian regime in 1998, the alliance between extreme metal subculture and the state changed moderately. Extreme metal is no longer considered as a ‘folk devil’, nonetheless as a marketable commodity relevant to the new agenda of creative economy policy. This article draws from stories of Indonesian extreme metal musicians to illustrate the relevance of subculture concept in extreme metal music in the contemporary neo-liberal era. Using the life biographies approach, we highlight how extreme metal musicians make and remake the actual and symbolic meanings of their involvement in music subcultures based upon the temporal and spatial situatedness of their lifeworld. We focus on the narratives of two informants who have been continuously devoted to their ways of life as metalheads, not only in relation to ‘musicking’ but also in respect to maintaining ‘subcultural values’ throughout their life biographies. Regarding this, we conducted interviews with Indonesian extreme metal musicians from two major ‘metal’ cities in Indonesia: Jakarta and Bandung. In this article, we argue that as rookies, the meaning of extreme metal subculture is as a space to embody the authenticity, autonomy and community as a manifestation of subcultural values. As aficionado, they reinterpreted the meaning of extreme metal subculture as a space to maintain the values of authenticity, autonomy and community. In short, extreme metal musicians incrementally made and remade the meaning of subculture centred on the particular temporal and spatial contexts in their life biographies.

Any discussion about whether metal is or ever was a subculture is always also a discussion about metalness as an identity construction. From the perspective of a cultural historian, the author would like to introduce some possibly clarifying arguments into the debate about metal and subculture. To this end, three topics will be discussed. The first step is to look at the term subculture and its use in metal research from the perspective of cultural history. This is followed by a second step in which the author suggests that from such a perspective we should always ask about metal as a subculture in the context of a fundamentally pluralistic understanding of ‘metal as cultures’. As the third topic, this proposed conceptual sharpening will be illustrated by an empirical example from the author’s research.